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 Austerlitz (2001)

  that I had left Prague at the age of four and a half, in the months just before the war broke out, on one of the so-called children’s transports departing from the city at the time, and I had therefore come to consult the archives in the hope that people of my surname living here between 1934 and 1939, who could not have been very numerous, might be found in the registers, with details of their addresses. I fell into such a panic as I offered these explanations, which suddenly struck me as not just far too cursory but positively absurd, that I began to stammer and could hardly bring out a word. All at once I felt the heat from the stout radiator, which was encrusted with several layers of lumpy oil paint and stood under the wide-open window; I heard nothing but the noise rising from the Karmelitska, the heavy rumble of the trams, the wailing sirens of police cars and ambulances somewhere in the distance, and I calmed down only when Tereza Ambrosova, whose deep-set violet eyes had been gazing at me with some concern, gave me a glass of water. As I took a few sips from this glass, which I had to hold in both hands, she said that the registers of those living in Prague at the time in question had been preserved complete, that Austerlitz was indeed one of the more unusual surnames, so she thought there could be no particular difficulty in finding me the entries I wanted by tomorrow afternoon.

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

  CHOICE The most original element in the Gregorian scheme for society was unique in Christian history, and has never been attempted by any other branch of the Christian Church before or since: to make the two major orders of clerical ministry (priests and bishops) entirely celibate. Consequently, this was an effort to identify together (or confuse) two separate Christian vocations, one to celibate life and the other to priesthood. It was a formidable task, since, outside monasteries, the vast majority of clergy in eleventh-century Europe were still married men with families, and indeed themselves likely to be the sons of clergy. The growth of the parish system was fanning them out across the continent, often alone in charge of a rural community, contrasting for instance with the community life of an Anglo-Saxon minster church. In the past, the general understanding had been that married clergy would go on living with their wives after they progressed from minor orders to become a priest, even though they now abstained from sex; in a minster the convention could be quietly policed by colleagueship. That was not so easy in rural isolation, in a village where the neighbours would take for granted marriage of whatever status. The centralizing Church bureaucracy was determined to change all this. [26] There was more than one level of ecclesiastical anxiety at work in the Gregorian move to ban clerical marriage. One practical motive was to defend clerical property: clerical marriage and the ties of paternal love expected of any family might disperse land and goods given to the Church. Reformers of monasteries in the Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian Churches had shown the same concern, tidying up tangles of family and monastic property that had resulted in much appropriation by the secular aristocracy (above, Chapter 11). Neurosis on this matter explains the extraordinary level of hostility to clerical children among the eleventh-century reformers. The Synod of Pavia convened by Pope Benedict VIII in 1022 started a long effort by the Church authorities to have these unfortunates declared as serfs belonging to the Church, which among other consequences meant that they could not be ordained. The programme took a crazy though logical step in the order of the Synod of Bourges in 1031 to ban clerical children from getting married at all. Although that particular proposal went nowhere, all this was an obvious hit at the ancient institution of clerical dynasties, and it was allied to a general prohibition on illegitimate men becoming priests that lasted in Roman Catholic canon law until the twentieth century; part of a general stigmatization of illegitimacy in Western Christianity that has rarely been equalled in intensity in any other culture. [27] A yet more potent fear was theological. In a pattern that will be familiar by now, the stimulus came particularly from Cluny, through exhortations of Abbot Odilo that united Augustine’s reservations about all sexual activity with Cluny’s promotion of a high theology of Eucharistic presence.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  It started mutedly, arising somewhere far away by the hippodrome, then became thunderous and, having held out for a few seconds, began to subside. ‘They’ve seen me,’ the procurator thought. The wave had not reached its lowest point before it started swelling again unexpectedly and, swaying, rose higher than the first, and as foam boils up on the billows of the sea, so a whistling boiled up on this second wave and, separate, distinguishable from the thunder, the wails of women. ‘They’ve been led on to the platform,’ thought Pilate, ‘and the wails mean that several women got crushed as the crowd surged forward.’ He waited for some time, knowing that no power could silence the crowd before it exhaled all that was pent up in it and fell silent of itself. And when this moment came, the procurator threw up his right arm, and the last noise was blown away from the crowd. Then Pilate drew into his breast as much of the hot air as he could and shouted, and his cracked voice carried over thousands of heads: ‘In the name of the emperor Caesar! . . .’ Here his ears were struck several times by a clipped iron shout: the cohorts of soldiers raised high their spears and standards and shouted out terribly: ‘Long live Caesar!’ Pilate lifted his face and thrust it straight into the sun. Green fire flared up behind his eyelids, his brain took flame from it, and hoarse Aramaic words went flying over the crowd: ‘Four criminals, arrested in Yershalaim for murder, incitement to rebellion, and outrages against the laws and the faith, have been sentenced to a shameful execution—by hanging on posts! And this execution will presently be carried out on Bald Mountain! The names of the criminals are Dysmas, Gestas, Bar-Rabban and Ha-Nozri. Here they stand before you!’ Pilate pointed to his right, not seeing any criminals, but knowing they were there, in place, where they ought to be. The crowd responded with a long rumble as if of surprise or relief. When it died down, Pilate continued: ‘But only three of them will be executed, for, in accordance with law and custom, in honour of the feast of Passover, to one of the condemned, as chosen by the Lesser Sanhedrin and confirmed by Roman authority, the magnanimous emperor Caesar will return his contemptible life!’ Pilate cried out the words and at the same time listened as the rumble was replaced by a great silence. Not a sigh, not a rustle reached his ears now, and there was even a moment when it seemed to Pilate that everything around him had vanished altogether.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Nikanor Ivanovich cried in the semi-dark front hall. ‘Grunya, or whatever your name is! . . . Are you here?’ No one responded. Then Nikanor Ivanovich took a folding ruler from his briefcase, removed the seal from the door to the study, and stepped in. Stepped in, yes, but halted in amazement in the doorway and even gave a start. At the deceased’s desk sat an unknown, skinny, long citizen in a little checkered jacket, a jockey’s cap, and a pince-nez . . . well, in short, that same one. ‘And who might you be, citizen?’ Nikanor Ivanovich asked fearfully. ‘Hah! Nikanor Ivanovich!’ the unexpected citizen yelled in a rattling tenor and, jumping up, greeted the chairman with a forced and sudden handshake. This greeting by no means gladdened Nikanor Ivanovich. ‘Excuse me,’ he said suspiciously, ‘but who might you be? Are you an official person?’ ‘Eh, Nikanor Ivanovich!’ the unknown man exclaimed soulfully. ‘What are official and unofficial persons? It all depends on your point of view on the subject. It’s all fluctuating and relative, Nikanor Ivanovich. Today I’m an unofficial person, and tomorrow, lo and behold, I’m an official one! And it also happens the other way round—oh, how it does!’ This argument in no way satisfied the chairman of the house management. Being a generally suspicious person by nature, he concluded that the man holding forth in front of him was precisely an unofficial person, and perhaps even an idle one. ‘Yes, but who might you be? What’s your name?’ the chairman inquired with increasing severity and even began to advance upon the unknown man. ‘My name,’ the citizen responded, not a bit put out by the severity, ‘well, let’s say it’s Koroviev. But wouldn’t you like a little snack, Nikanor Ivanovich? No formalities, eh?’ ‘Excuse me,’ Nikanor Ivanovich began, indignantly now, ‘what have snacks got to do with it!’ (We must confess, unpleasant as it is, that Nikanor Ivanovich was of a somewhat rude nature.) ‘Sitting in the deceased’s half is not permitted! What are you doing here?’ ‘Have a seat, Nikanor Ivanovich,’ the citizen went on yelling, not a bit at a loss, and began fussing about offering the chairman a seat. Utterly infuriated, Nikanor Ivanovich rejected the seat and screamed: ‘But who are you?’ ‘I, if you please, serve as interpreter for a foreign individual who has taken up residence in this apartment,’ the man calling himself Koroviev introduced himself and clicked the heels of his dirty reddish shoes. Nikanor Ivanovich opened his mouth. The presence of some foreigner in this apartment, with an interpreter to boot, came as a complete surprise to him, and he demanded explanations.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Having grown up in the politically and religiously polarised context of Northern Ireland, I came to doubt those with strident views, believing it was possible to have civilised conversations despite divergent beliefs. I forced myself to talk to people with whom I disagreed across disciplinary, religious and ideological frontiers. The aim wasn’t to achieve consensus, but to understand the issues more fully. A key question for me was how it was possible to maintain my own beliefs with integrity, when I could not prove them. Russell’s comments led me on a journey of discovery, in which I began to appreciate how it was possible to live meaningfully in a world of uncertainties. This is precisely what I hope to explore in this book. Somewhere along the way ‘belief’ became synonymous with ‘ religious belief’, thus unleashing a predictable torrent of anti-religious invective directed against ‘belief’ in general, rather than being attentive to the multiple specific forms that belief takes, and its important and legitimate place within humanity’s attempts to make sense of our world. Belief, as I shall argue in this work, is ordinary , a routine aspect of the business of living and reflecting. Ambivalence towards religious institutions or ‘organised religion’ has led many people in recent decades to identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’ or as ‘religious Nones’. In both cases, these groups tend to avoid labelling themselves as ‘religious’ or affiliating with religious organisations such as churches. However, scepticism about religion need not lead to the rejection of the category of ‘belief’. Many of the twenty-two per cent of Americans who identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’ turn out to have sophisticated personal belief systems. For example, eighty-eight per cent of this group believe that there is something spiritual beyond the natural world and fifty-five per cent believe that deceased individuals can provide assistance, protection or guidance to the living. The issue is not belief itself, but rather the type of beliefs considered acceptable. 8 As Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University, I have had time to reflect on the scientific study of beliefs, which calls into question the cultural oversimplifications of recent polemics. One of the most fruitful outcomes of recent scientific research in the field of belief is the clear indication that ‘belief’ is a generic category, which includes religious and secular forms. To draw on biological taxonomy, belief is the genus , and religious belief one of its many species . From an empirical point of view, the evidence suggests that it is the act of believing – rather than the substance of what is believed – that is of critical value for human existence. Despite their obvious differences, religious and secular beliefs both play similar psychological roles, and often lead to the same benefits – such as giving structure to life, providing reassurance, reducing anxiety and facilitating social integration. 9 This suggests that ‘any belief system that provides explanations of the world will afford comfort and assurance’.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Yet we now need to reflect on a question that many will see as essential to any discussion of beliefs, particularly religious beliefs – namely, how can these be evaluated? If a belief is something that cannot be proved to be true, what evidence can be set out in its support? We shall explore these questions further in the next chapter. Chapter 4Making Judgements: Belief, Explanation and InterpretationThe Oxford Dictionaries ‘Word of the Year’ for 2016 was a new arrival, symptomatic of yet another shift within the public rationality of western culture – ‘post-truth’, defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’ The iconic cover of the April 1966 number of Time magazine posed a question, highlighted in red against a stark black background, that cut to the heart of the cultural debates of that age: Is God dead? Its March 2017 counterpart mimicked this dramatic style in posing the new question lying at the core of American public life: Is Truth dead? Do we live in an age of aggressively asserted private beliefs, rather than evidenced public truths? Was the sociologist and cultural critic Philip Rieff right in characterising the history of human civilisation as a shift from ‘fate’ to ‘faith’ – and finally to ‘fiction’?1 Why are objective facts now less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to subjective emotion and personal belief? Is this just some transient form of generational narcissism, or is it the shape of the future? In such an environment, personal belief – that is, something that cannot be proved to be true but is believed to be reasonable – flourishes; the problem is that it is recategorised as ‘truth’. While some speak about a rejection of authority in western culture, we are really seeing a relocation of authority within individual private experience that leads to people becoming trapped in their own personal versions of reality, refusing to accept external referents that might call these into question. Many are alarmed at these developments, feeling that such an emphasis on context, discourse and history has led to a neglect of traditional concerns for truth and a responsible attempt to grasp a reality which ultimately lies beyond our control and to which we can be held accountable. We are caught up in a battle of ideas in which there is no criterion of adjudication accepted by both parties. Some claim that knowledge is independent of history, power and perspective, and others that knowledge is determined by history, power and perspective.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  the star-shaped town, and perhaps that was why, at the sight of the records room, a kind of idée fixe forced itself upon me that, all along, my true place of work should have been there in the little fortress of Terezin, where so many had perished in the cold, damp casemates, and it was my own fault that I had not taken it up. =" AS fe pie i , & in ; f, 4 7 PS fS FSS As I was tormenting myself with such thoughts, distinctly aware, so Austerlitz continued, that my face was being marked by the signs of that anguish which so often assails me, I was approached by one of the library staff called Henri Lemoine, who had recognized me from those early years of mine in Paris when I went daily to the rue Richelieu. Jacques Austerlitz, inquired Lemoine, stopping by my desk and leaning slightly down to me, and so, said Austerlitz, we began a long, whispered conversation in the Haut-de-jardin reading room, which was gradually emptying now, about the dissolution, in line with the inexorable spread of processed data, of our capacity to remember, and about the collapse, l’effondrement, as Lemoine put it, of the Bibliotheque Nationale which is already under way. The new library building, which in both its entire layout and its near-ludicrous internal regulation seeks to exclude the reader as a potential enemy, might be described, so Lemoine thought, said Austerlitz, as the official manifestation of the increasingly importunate urge to break with everything which still has some living connection to the past. At a certain point in our conversation, said Austerlitz, and in response to a casual request of mine,

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

  58 But by the end of the eighteenth century, traditional agrarian society was coming under increasing strain in Europe: more people were moving to the towns and working in nonagricultural trades and professions, literacy was more widespread, and there was unprecedented social mobility. In the spring of 1789, Louis XVI’s absolutist monarchy was in trouble. Profligate stewardship had plunged the French economy into crisis, and now the clergy and nobility (the First and Second Estates) were refusing a new regime of taxation by the crown. To break the deadlock, the king called the Estates General to meet at Versailles on May 2. 59 The king wanted the three estates—clergy, nobility, and commoners—to deliberate and vote separately, but the Third Estate refused to allow the aristocracy to dominate the proceedings and invited the clergy and nobility to join them in a new National Assembly. The first to defect to the Third Estate were 150 of the lower clergy, who came from the same background as the commoners, were weary of the bishops’ hauteur, and wanted a more collegial church. 60 There were also defections from the Second Estate: the rural gentry disdained by the Parisian aristocracy and the wealthy bourgeois who were impatient with the nobility’s conservatism. On June 17 members of the new National Assembly swore that they would not disperse until they had a new constitution. The Assembly had intended to conduct a reasoned, enlightened debate on the American model, but it had reckoned without the people. After a bad harvest, food supplies were dangerously low, the price of bread rocketed in the towns, and there was widespread unemployment. In April five thousand artisans had rioted in Paris, and revolutionary committees and citizen militias had formed across the country to contain the unrest. During the Assembly’s discussions, delegates were booed and heckled from the public galleries, and the distraught crowds took to the street, attacking any representative of the Old Regime who crossed their path. In a crucial development, some of the troops dispatched to quell these riots joined the rebels instead. On June 14 the mob stormed the Bastille in eastern Paris, released the prisoners, and hacked the jail’s governor to pieces. Other senior officials met the same fate. In the countryside, the famished peasantry were gripped by the “Great Fear,” convinced that the grain shortages had been engineered by the regime to starve them into submission. This suspicion was compounded by the arrival of impoverished laborers seeking work, who were thought to be the nobility’s advance troops. 61 Villagers raided the châteaux, attacked Jewish moneylenders, and refused to pay their tithes and taxes. As the country spun out of control, the Assembly became more radical. It produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen that vested sovereignty in the people rather than in the monarch and proclaimed that all men had natural rights of liberty of conscience, property, and free speech and must enjoy equality before the law, personal security, and equal opportunity.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And now Angela was speaking in her soft, Southern drawl: ‘So you’ve found your way here at last,’ she was saying. And then, after a pause: ‘I’m so glad, Miss Gordon, do you know that your coming has given me real pleasure?’ Stephen said: ‘Yes—oh, yes—’ Then fell silent again, apparently intent on the carpet. ‘Have I dropped my cigarette ash or something?’ inquired her hostess, whose mouth twitched a little. ‘I don’t think so,’ murmured Stephen, pretending to look, then glancing up sideways at the impudent bullfinch. The bullfinch was now being sentimental; he piped very low and with great expression. ‘O, Tannebaum, O, Tannebaum, wie grün sind Deine Blätter’ he piped, hopping rather heavily from perch to perch, with one beady black orb fixed on Stephen. Then Angela said: ‘It’s a curious thing, but I feel as though I’ve known you for ages. I don’t want to behave as though we were strangers—do you think that’s very American of me? Ought I to be formal and stand-offish and British? I will if you say so, but I don’t feel British.’ And her voice, although quite steady and grave, was somehow distinctly suggestive of laughter. Stephen lifted troubled eyes to her face: ‘I want very much to be your friend if you’ll have me,’ she said; and then she flushed deeply. Angela held out her undamaged hand which Stephen took, but in great trepidation. Barely had it lain in her own for a moment, when she clumsily gave it back to its owner. Then Angela looked at her hand. Stephen thought: ‘Have I done something rude or awkward?’ And her heart thumped thickly against her side. She wanted to retrieve the lost hand and stroke it, but unfortunately it was now stroking Tony. She sighed, and Angela, hearing that sigh, glanced up, as though in inquiry. The butler arrived bringing in the tea. ‘Sugar?’ asked Angela. ‘No, thanks,’ said Stephen; then she suddenly changed her mind, ‘three lumps, please,’ she had always detested tea without sugar. The tea was too hot; it burnt her mouth badly. She grew scarlet and her eyes began to water. To cover her confusion she swallowed more tea, while Angela looked tactfully out of the window. But when she considered it safe to turn round, her expression, although still faintly amused, had something about it that was tender.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Yet even in a world in which there is a widening fissure between public truth and private belief, most still agree that beliefs need to be examined and assessed. The New Testament’s advice that Christians should ‘test everything, and hold fast to what is good’ exemplifies the critical spirit that intelligent religious faith demands, deserves and regularly – though sadly not invariably – exhibits.12 Pope Francis speaks for the Christian tradition as a whole when he points out that faith must be grounded in truth; if it does not it is simply ‘a beautiful story, the projection of our deep yearning for happiness, something capable of satisfying us to the extent that we are willing to deceive ourselves.’13 As Plato suggested, an ‘unexamined life’ is not a meaningful form of existence. We need to think critically about what we believe – both in terms of what we affirm, and what we exclude. We cannot live authentically through affirming publicly what we know to be false privately. Yet as an educationalist, I have come to the reluctant conclusion that an alarming number of people don’t want to think about their core beliefs or values, whether secular or religious, fearing that these might be exposed as inadequate or delusional. I remember a conversation with a retired politician in Belfast many years ago, when I queried him on this point. How, I asked him, could he publicly defend an idea that was (at least in my view) ridiculous. His answer? ‘Practice, dear boy. Lots of practice.’ We need to have a serious conversation about these matters. The denial of reality may be a convenient political stratagem, but it is hardly a basis for a sustainable worldview. Can we live a meaningful life if we suspect that we may have based our identities on something false? A good place to start is the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s 1978 speech ‘How to build a universe that doesn’t fall apart two days later’, in which he reflected on the nature of reality, and our generally hopeless attempts to resist the lure of fake realities.14 We live in a society in which ‘spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups – and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener.’ But there is a problem here that goes right to the heart of human identity: ‘Fake realities will create fake humans.’ Human authenticity depends on experiencing and encountering reality which challenges and excites us, not some fake reality designed to advance someone’s agenda. We need a centre to our lives that will hold firm and shelter us.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  How can we, for example, achieve a workable synthesis of ethics and physics? In 1905, Albert Einstein published a seminal paper concerning the interchangeability of mass and energy, memorably expressed in the famous scientific equation, E = mc 2 . Forty years later, this scientific principle was put to destructive use in the two atom bombs that devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although Einstein played no role in this technological development, he was alarmed at the way in which science was being used to develop new and more deadly weapons of mass destruction, such as napalm (developed in the Harvard laboratories of Professor Louis Fieser in 1942) or nuclear weapons. Yet for Einstein, science by itself could not provide scientists with a viable moral framework: ‘science can only ascertain what is , not what should be , and outside of its domain value judgements of all kinds remain necessary.’ 36 David Hume, one of Einstein’s two favourite philosophers (the other being Baruch Spinoza), had exposed the intellectual problems of moving from an account of the way things are and the way things should be , and Einstein could see no way round this disjunction of fact and value. In their quest to be moral, scientists would have to draw on ethical values that originated from beyond their own specialist field of studies. Mary Midgley, perhaps the most significant public philosopher to deal with this question, highlighted the need to use all our ‘philosophical tools to bring these distinct kinds of thought together.’ 37 For Midgley, it was clear that ‘all explanation, and particularly the explanation of human action, quite properly uses many non-competing but convergent methods.’ 38 Difference in method does not entail incompatibility. Neither does difference in outcome , in that each could be seen as a particular perspective on a complex reality – such as the nature of universe or the meaning of human existence – which resists reduction to simplistic categories or single levels of explanation. We have to try and use our tools of knowing as best we can to align our ‘knowledge’ with something that we encounter but cannot control, and that demands progressing beyond monochrome surface readings of reality. Yet some insist that such a multidisciplinary approach is unnecessary and improper, in that the natural sciences can answer every significant question with a unique rational and cultural authority. This position is often known as ‘scientism’, which can be described as ‘a totalizing attitude that regards science as the ultimate standard and arbiter of all interesting questions.’ 39 I used to think this myself, so I can easily understand its appeal to anyone longing for certainty. For the philosopher of science Alex Rosenberg, science offers ‘irrefutably correct answers’ (hence eliminating any need for belief or any anxiety about uncertainty) to ‘persistent questions’ such as ‘What is the nature of reality?’

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  His wife looked at him like he was out of his mind. "Are you all right?" she asked, her eyes narrowing as she searched his expression for any signs of incipient insanity, stroke, or Tourette's. "Fine! Fine!" insisted Marvin, beads of sweat erupting on his brow. "Best meal I've had in ages . . . ho ho ho. Waiter!" he commanded. "Some dessert, please!" Of course, Alexandra adroitly rescued the situation, smiling warmly at the two women guests, patting one on the hand and confiding, "Actually tonight's a very good night to be here. A very special night. The chef is cooking everything himself. You know he can't do that very often anymore. Tonight is a very special night. You're in luck." She whisked them to a four-top in the center of the dining room and seated them with menus. Ricardo, the restaurant's best waiter, was at their elbows in a second, while Paul, in a moment of possibly divine inspiration, pretending to visit the service bar for a consultation, whispered an order to extinguish the lights out front and draw the curtains. "Lock the door," he said. "No more customers." There was a brief exchange with Ricardo. "Mr. Schutz," said Ricardo in hushed tones meant to convey solemn, yet breathlessly concealed, delight, "the chef has instructed me to close the restaurant to all other customers. It would be his honor and pleasure to prepare a special menu for the four of you. If it's all right with you he'd like you to just relax and enjoy. He has something really extraordinary in mind for your party. Would that be satisfactory to you and your guests?" The two girls, already thrilled that America's Sexiest Chef would be personally preparing their meals, were exuberant, particularly as the two of them had, until their recent move to New York, experienced nothing more extravagant than Shoney's and Olive Garden. Here they were now—with Roland Schutz! Being fed personally by Rob Holland. And look! Look at this! A magnum of champagne, gratis! Headed their way was Ricardo, at his most graceful with the white napkin as he peeled the foil, removed the wire stay, and gently released the cork with a muffled pop. Schutz, who at this early stage of the evening was concerned with nothing more substantial than getting the two girls to go tag- team in his heart-shaped bed later, was happy to go along. They were happy? He was happy. Fuck the food. He'd just as soon be sitting on his couch in his silk boxer shorts, eating his usual peanut butter and bacon sandwich (no crusts) and watching American Gladiators with his chin-strap on. But chicks didn't dig that. The girls looked pleased. They looked impressed. And that was what was important. Cleveland, his security guard, ate, as far as he could tell, only energy bars and Grape Nuts. "Yes, of course. That would be delightful," he said. "Please thank Rob for me."

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  So he go nuts and start screaming the Federals is after him and run down this alley and stick his head in the garbage can. And I said, 'What you think you are doing?' and he say, 'Get away or I shoot you. I got myself hid good.'" We are getting some C or RX at this time. Shoot it in the mainline, son. You can smell it going in, clean and cold in your nose and throat then a rush of pure pleasure right through the brain lighting up those C connections. Your head shatters in white explosions. Ten minutes later you want another shot... you will walk across town for another shot. But if you can't score for C you eat, sleep and forget about it. This is a yen of the brain alone, a need without feeling and without body, earthbound ghost need, rancid ectoplasm swept out by an old junky coughing and spitting in the sick morning. One morning you wake up and take a speed ball, and feel bugs under your skin. 1890 cops with black mustaches block the doors and lean in through the windows snarling their lips back from blue and bold embossed badges. Junkies march through the room singing the Moslem Funeral Song, bear the body of Bill Gains, stigmata of his needle wounds glow with a soft blue flame. Purposeful schizophrenic detectives sniff at your chamber pot. It's the coke horrors.... Sit back and play it cool and shoot in plenty of that GI M. Day of the Dead: I got the chucks and ate my little Willy's sugar skull. He cried and I had to go out for another. Walked past the cocktail lounge where they blasted the Jai Lai bookie. In Cuernavaca or was it Taxco? Jane meets a pimp trombone player and disappears in a cloud of tea smoke. The pimp is one of these vibration and dietary artists -- which is a means he degrades the female sex by forcing his chicks to swallow all this shit. He was continually enlarging his theories... he would quiz a chick and threaten to walk out if she hadn't memorized every nuance of his latest assault on logic and the human image. "Now, baby. I got it here to give. But if you won't receive it there's just nothing I can do." He was a ritual tea smoker and very puritanical about junk the way some tea heads are. He claimed tea put him in touch with supra blue gravitational fields. He had ideas on every subject: what kind of underwear was healthy, when to drink water, and how to wipe your ass.

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  I open my mouth to receive the gag, and then he secures the straps in place at the back of my head. Now he twists the tab off the lubricant and dribbles it onto his dick. His second sentence comes at me: “Get ready.” The head of his cock is already pressing against my asshole. When we talked about meeting in the alley, he said he wanted things to go quickly. But if he’s seriously thinking of fucking my ass with that big toy, this is going to take a while. Or so I think. He works it in with surprising speed. Behind the gag, I’m grunting and half screaming, but he knows I can take it, and I know he’s going to make me. The perverse thrill of submitting to this sadistic “forced” ass-fuck actually causes me to open a little more, which eases his way inside. He’s one step ahead of me, and pushes as I acquiesce. When his cock is completely in my ass, he pauses for a moment, to give me a chance to feel the extent to which he’s stretched me out, to confirm my own surrender. One moment, and then it’s over. That’s all I get. After that, it’s his turn. He pounds me hard, fucking me for all he’s worth. He’s determined to come and he knows how to use my ass for his own pleasure. My job is to endure. Gagged, held down, plowed, I am a thing to him. An object. A leather-clad fuck-hole. He slams into my ass, over and over, until he shoots his orgasm into me. It’s not liquid, of course; it’s an energy, and thus, twice as potent. I take every drop, deep into my ass, for him. And when he’s done, he pulls out gently, undoes my gag gently, slides me over onto my back gently, smoothes down my skirt gently, and gently, very gently, reaches under my skirt and flicks one slick finger against my clit. I explode. I come against his hand with a roar, violent waves of pleasure crashing onto me. He holds me as I come, body to body, gripping me tightly until my moans subside. Then, just as quickly as he entered, he puts his dick back in his pants, zips up, and leaves. THE WEEKEND Delilah Devlin I placed the grocery bag on the counter, set down my purse, then glanced around the airy living room of the cabin. It was early Friday evening—the first night of a lovers’ weekend I’d planned down to the last detail. The view through the large picture window was of the small lake, the water shining without a single ripple to mar the mirrorlike surface. A lone figure walked along the bank, hands thrust deep into pockets, while the rising wind tore at her pale hair. I swallowed hard and hesitated. Did she want company? Did she need more time to think about us, about whether we still “worked”?

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

  The writer reminds Timothy that having been taught by his mother Eunice and grandmother Lois, he has been acquainted ‘from childhood… with the sacred writings’ leading to ‘faith in Christ Jesus’. The writer might simply have been referring to teaching from the Hebrew Bible before Christian conversion, but otherwise, the rather prolonged chronology that this statement implies increases doubts that the letters are genuinely by Paul. [15] The writer of the Pastoral Epistles also adds a significant extra element on Christian marriage by telling women that their salvation will come from having children (1 Tim. 2.15). Thus procreation had arrived back at the centre of marriage where Judaism had placed it, despite Paul’s original silence on that issue. Children were not the only problem for the Haustafeln to regulate in Christian Churches. Equally in need of careful management were women who lacked the benefit of subordination to a husband, generally thanks to bereavement: widows. They presented a dual headache for developing Christian communities, either being dependent through poverty or age, or not being dependent enough. Some might enjoy financial resources and opinions of their own, not to mention the ability of grandmothers in most known human societies to intimidate the rest of their family, which an increasingly male clerical leadership might find difficult to control. A subsidiary issue, and a potential point of friction with surrounding society, was how to treat young widows: should they remarry or not? Crystallizing official Christianity was firmly of the opinion that they must remain faithful to one spouse, even if he were deceased; Roman legislation on marriage and procreation underlined imperial concern that they should remarry. The author of the Pastoral Epistles was torn between Christian theology, a desire for public respectability and a firm conviction that young widows were natural troublemakers: his eventual conclusion was that they should remarry, so as ‘to give the enemy no occasion to revile us’. That contradicted Paul’s earlier preference that all widows should stay unmarried, whatever their age. [16] As a result, an air of anxiety hangs over New Testament references to widows. The Acts of the Apostles indeed backdates trouble even to before the time of Paul’s ministry, when the surviving disciples of Jesus had to sort out accusations of preferential treatment between Greek- and Hebrew/Aramaic- speaking widows in the assembly in Jerusalem (Acts 6.1–7). After the Pastoral Epistles’ detailed regulations for their behaviour and the scope of their activities within the Church, Churches developed formal associations for eligible widows, mostly centred on confining them as much as possible to private life. The most restrictive view comes from a Syrian order for the running of a Church community, probably of third-century date, the Didascalia Apostolorum (‘Teaching of the Apostles’).

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  I haven't been there in five years but he looks up and makes me with one quick look and just nods and says: "Wait over at the counter...." So I sit down and drink a cup of coffee and after a while he comes and sits beside me and says, "What do you want?" "A quart of PG and a hundred nembies." He nods, "Come back in half an hour." So when I come back he hands me a package and says, "That's fifteen dollars.... Be careful." Shooting PG is a terrible hassle, you have to burn out the alcohol first, then freeze out the camphor and draw this brown liquid off with a dropper -- have to shoot it in the vein or you get an abscess, and usually end up with an abscess no matter where you shoot it. Best deal is to drink it with goof balls.... So we pour it in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past iridescent lakes and orange gas flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish.... New Orleans is a dead museum. We walk around Exchange Place breathing PG and find The Man right away. It's a small place and the fuzz always knows who is pushing so he figures what the hell does it matter and sells to anybody. We stock up on H and backtrack for Mexico. Back through Lake Charles and the dead slot-machine country, south end of Texas, niggerkilling sheriffs look us over and check the car papers. Something falls off you when you cross the border into Mexico, and suddenly the landscape hits you straight with nothing between you and it, desert and mountains and vultures; little wheeling specks and others so close you can hear wings cut the air (a dry husking sound), and when they spot something they pour out of the blue sky, that shattering bloody blue sky of Mexico, down in a black funnel.... Drove all night, came at dawn to a warm misty place, barking dogs and the sound of running water. "Thomas and Charlie," I said. "What?" "That's the name of this town. Sea level. We climb straight up from here ten thousand feet." I took a fix and went to sleep in the back seat. She was a good driver. You can tell as soon as someone touches the wheel. Mexico City where Lupita sits like an Aztec Earth Goddess doling out her little papers of lousy shit. "Selling is more of a habit than using," Lupita says. Nonusing pushers have a contact habit, and that's one you can't kick. Agents get it too. Take Bradley the Buyer. Best narcotics agent in the industry. Anyone would make him for junk. (Note: Make in the sense of dig or size up.) I mean he can walk up to a pusher and score direct.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Strictly from cough syrup... A thousand junkies storm the crystal spine clinics, cook down the Grey Ladies.... In the limestone cave met a man with Medusa's head in a hat box and said, "Be Careful," to the Customs Inspector.... Freezed forever hand an inch from the false bottom.... Window dressers scream through the station, beat the cashiers with the fairy hype.... (The Hype is a short change con.... Also known as The Bill....) "Multiple fracture," said the big physician.... "I'm very technical...." Conspicuous consumption is rampant in the porticos slippery with Koch spit.... The centipede nuzzles the iron door rusted to thin black paper by the urine of a million fairies.... This is no rich mother load, but vitiate dust, second run cottons trace the bones of a fix.... COKE BUGS The Sailor's grey felt hat and black overcoat hung twisted in atrophied yen-wait. Morning sun outlined The Sailor in the orange-yellow flame of junk. He had a paper napkin under his coffee cup - mark of those who do a lot of sitting over coffee in the plazas, restaurants, terminals and waiting rooms of the world. A junky, even at the Sailor's level, runs on junk Time and when he makes his importunate irruption into the Time of others, like all petitioners, he must wait. (How many coffees in an hour?) A boy came in and sat at the counter in broken lines of long, sick junk-wait. The Sailor shivered. His face fuzzed out of focus in a shuddering brown mist. His hands moved on the table, reading the boy's Braille. His eyes traced little dips and circles, following whorls of brown hair on the boy's neck in a slow, searching movement. The boy stirred and scratched the back of his neck: "Something bit me, Joe. What kinda creep joint you run here?" "Coke bugs, kid," Joe said, holding eggs up to the light. "I was travelling with Irene Kelly and her was a sporting woman. In Butte, state of Montany, her got the coke horrors and run through the hotel screaming Chinese coppers chase her with meat cleavers. I knew this cop in Chi sniff coke used to come in form of crystals, blue crystals. So her go nuts and start screaming the Federals is after him and run down this alley and stick his head in the garbage can. And I said, 'What you think you are doing? and her say, 'Get away or I shoot you! I got myself led good!' When the roll is called up yonder we'll be there, right?" Joe looked at the Sailor and spread his hands in the junky shrug. The Sailor spoke in his feeling voice that reassembles in your head, spelling out the words with cold fingers: "Your connection is broken, kid."

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  "That is to say reassurance when reassurance is necessary... and, of course, suitable outlets with other individuals of similar tendencies. No isolation is indicated... the condition is no more directly contagious than cancer. Cancer, my first love," the doctor's voice receded. He seemed actually to have gone away through an invisible door leaving his empty body sitting there at the desk. Suddenly he spoke again in a crisp voice. "And so you may well wonder why we concern ourselves with the matter at all?" He flashed a smile bright and cold as snow in sunlight. Carl shrugged: "That is not my business... what I am wondering is why you have asked me to come here and why you tell me all this... this..." "Nonsense?" Carl was annoyed to find himself blushing. The doctor leaned back and placed the ends of his fingers together: "The young," he said indulgently. "Always they are in a hurry. One day perhaps you will learn the meaning of patience. No, Carl... I may call you Carl'? I am not evading your question. In cases of suspected tuberculosis we -- that is the appropriate department -- may ask, even request , someone to appear for a fluoroscopic examination. This is routine, you understand. Most of such examinations turn up negative. So you have been asked to report here for, should I say a psychic fluoroscope? I may add that after talking with you I feel relatively sure that the result will be, for practical purposes, negative.... "But the whole thing is ridiculous. I have always interested myself only in girls. I have a steady girl now and we plan to marry." "Yes Carl, I know. And that is why you are here. A blood test prior to marriage, this is reasonable, no?" "Please doctor, speak directly." The doctor did not seem to hear. He drifted out of his chair and began walking around behind Carl, his voice languid and intermittent like music down a windy street. "I may tell you in strictest confidence that there is definite evidence of a hereditary factor. Social pressure. Many homosexuals latent and overt do, unfortunately, marry. Such marriages often result in... Factor of infantile environment." The doctor's voice went on and on. He was talking about schizophrenia, cancer, hereditary disfunction of the hypothalamus. Carl dozed off. He was opening a green door. A horrible smell grabbed his lungs and he woke up with a shock. The doctor's voice was strangely flat and lifeless, a whispering junky voice: "The Kleiberg-Stanislouski semen floculation test... a diagnostic tool... indicative at least in a negative sense. In certain cases useful -- taken as part of the whole picture.... Perhaps under the uh circumstances ." The doctor's voice shot up to a pathic scream. "The nurse will take your uh specimen ." "This way please...." The nurse opened the door into a bare white walled cubicle. She handed him a jar.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  of eternal life through a process of vitrification, by translating its so readily corruptible substance into a miracle of pure glass. In the weeks following my visit to the museum of veterinary science, Austerlitz continued his story, gazing now at the boulevard outside, I was unable to recall any of what I have just told you, for it was in the Métro on my way back from Maisons-Alfort that I had the first of the several fainting fits I was to suffer, causing temporary but complete loss of memory, a condition described in psychiatric textbooks, as far as I am aware, Austerlitz added, as hysterical epilepsy. Only when I developed the photographs I had taken that Sunday in September at Maisons-Alfort was I able, with their aid and guided by Marie’s patient questioning, to reconstruct my buried experiences. Then I remembered the courtyards of the veterinary school lying white in the afternoon heat as I left the museum, I recollected that as I walked along beside the wall I felt that I had reached steep and impassable terrain, and that I had wanted to sit down but nonetheless walked on, into the bright rays of the sun, until I came to the Métro station where I had to wait endlessly, as it seemed to me, in the brooding darkness of the tunnel for the next train to come in. The carriage in which I traveled towards the Bastille, said Austerlitz, was not very full. Later I remembered a Gypsy playing the accordion, and a very dark Indochinese woman with an alarmingly thin face and eyes sunk deep in their sockets. Of the few other passengers, I could recollect only that they were all looking out of the side windows of the train into the darkness, where there was nothing to be seen but a pallid reflection of the carriage where they sat. Gradually I also came to remember suddenly feeling unwell during the journey, with a phantom pain spreading through my chest, and thinking I was about to die of the weak heart I have inherited, from whom I do not know. I did not return to my senses until I was in the Salpétriére, to which I had been taken and where I was now lying in one of the men’s wards, containing perhaps forty patients or more, somewhere in that gigantic complex of buildings where the borders between hospital and penitentiary have always been blurred, and which seems to have grown and spread of its own volition over the centuries until it now forms a universe of its own between the Jardin des Plantes and the gare d’Austerlitz. I lay there in my semi-conscious condition for several days, and in that state I saw myself wandering around a maze of long passages, vaults, galleries and grottoes where the names of various Métro stations—Campo Formio, Crimée, Elysée, Iéna, Invalides, Oberkampf, Simplon, Solferino, Stalingrad—and certain discolorations and shadings in the air seemed to indicate that this was a place of exile for those who had fallen on the field of honor, or lost their lives in some other violent way. I saw armies of these unredeemed souls thronging over bridges to the opposite bank, or coming towards me down

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  He gave me an assuring look and returned with, “Don’t worry about the house rules; they know me up in here, luv . . . I got you. This is my treat.” I was nervous and reluctant. What the fuck he meant, I got you, I thought. But Tears was persistent and continued to tug at my thong. I was on my back when he pulled it off and dropped it next to me. I was now butt-ass naked onstage in nothing but some stilettos, and I heard the crowd of men around me go stir crazy. Tears ran his hand down my thighs and then pushed his middle and index finger deep into my pussy. I moaned as I glanced around nervously for the manager, and surprisingly I saw him looking on without barking or screaming on me. I guess Tears really did have connections in here, because usually if a girl flashed one pubic hair she got her ass chewed out later by Neo, the club manager. Men started to crowd around the stage, as all eyes were fixated on me and him, and they watched Tears lean forward between my thighs and sink his full beautiful lips and tongue into my wet and throbbing pussy. I cried out with passion as he consumed my pussy like crazy. I was sprawled out on my back, had my legs straddled around him with my arms outstretched behind me, clutching the pole tightly and forgetting about who was watching. “Ummmm . . . aaaaaahhh . . . ummm . . . ummm . . . shit, mutha-fucka . . . aaaaaahhh, eat that pussy, Tears,” I cried out. The DJ had turned the music off, and everyone heard my loud cries. Niggahs started to chant, “Tears. Tears. Tears. Tears. Tears. Tears. Tears.” That niggah went buck-wild between my legs, not missing a beat. He tore my ass up as he ate my pussy. He gripped both my thighs and pushed my legs back, and dug his tongue deeper into me. I felt his wet tongue swimming around in me, and I continued to clutch the pole. I just couldn’t let go. Money was raining down on me like crazy, but that was the last thing I was worried about. I think I fell in love with Tears that night. He was raw and just didn’t give a fuck. And I loved that about a niggah. After five minutes of putting a sistah in bliss, he finally stopped. He looked down at me with this content grin, and said, “Yo get dressed. We outta here.” He didn’t have to tell me twice. I collected my things and walked offstage butt naked. I didn’t bother to put my thong back on. I just strutted through the crowd not giving a fuck, clutching countless big bills in my hand.