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.

Page 144 of 501 · 20 per page

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I am not going mad , I tell myself. I’m ill. That is all . PART II 19 Extinction Falconers have a word for hawks in the mood to slay: they call the bird in yarak . The books say it comes from the Persian yaraki , meaning power, strength and boldness. Much later I was amused to find that in Turkish it means an archaic weapon and is also slang for penis: never doubt that falconry is a boys’ game. I’m back in Cambridge now, and as I carry Mabel up the stony track to the hill each day I watch her come into yarak. It is disturbingly like watching her slow possession by a demon. Her crest feathers rise, she leans back, tummy feathers fluffed, shoulders dropped, toes very tight on the glove. Her demeanour switches from everything scares me to I see it all; I own all this and more. In this state she’s a high-tension wire-strung hawk of murderous anticipation, wound so tight she bates at anything that moves – things she’s not a hope of catching: flocks of larks, distant racing pigeons, even a farmyard tomcat – and I hold her jesses tight and don’t let her go. But when a hen pheasant rockets up from my feet I do. She chases it fiercely but it has too much of a head start; after fifty yards she slows, turns in mid-air and comes back to me, planing over the top of a hedgerow ash to land gently upon my fist. On another day she bursts downhill in pursuit of a rabbit and is about to grab it when the rabbit stops dead in its tracks. She overshoots and crashes into the ground; the rabbit jinks, doubles back on itself and runs uphill to the safety of a hole. She leaps back into the air to resume her pursuit but the rabbit is gone. She alights, confused and crestfallen, on the grass. I’m crestfallen too. It’s not that I’m baying for blood. But I don’t want Mabel to get discouraged. In the wild, young goshawks will sit for hours hidden in trees waiting for an easy opportunity to present itself: a fledgling crow, a baby rabbit. But it is September now: nature’s easy pickings are grown. And while most goshawkers have a dog to help them find game, or a ferret to bolt rabbits for their hawk to chase, I do not. All I can do is walk with the hawk and hope we find something to catch. But I am a liability; her senses are far better than mine. We walk past a gully under a hedge where there are rabbits and rats and God knows what, all covered with brambles and briars and robins’ pincushions set on briar stems like exotic fruit, their vegetable hairs brushed green and rose and carmine. She dives from my fist towards the undergrowth. I don’t know she’s seen something – so I don’t let her go.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I wouldn’t like to have young fellers, coming in and out ...’ ‘There’s no young man,’ I said firmly. She smiled again; then seemed to hesitate. ‘Might I ask - might I - why you are leaving your present address?’ At that I hesitated - and her smile grew smaller. ‘To be truthful,’ I said, ‘there was a little bit of unpleasantness with my landlady ...’ ‘Ah.’ She stiffened a little, and I realised that in telling the truth I had blundered. ‘What I mean,’ I began - but I could see her mind working. What did she think? That my landlady had caught me kissing her husband, probably. ‘You see,’ she began again, regretfully, ‘my daughter ...’ This daughter must be a beauty and a half, I thought - or else a complete erotomaniac - if the mother is so eager to keep her safe and close, away from young men’s eyes. And yet, just as I had been drawn to that mispelt card in the shopkeeper’s window, so, now, there was something about the house and its owner that tugged at me, unaccountably. I took a chance. ‘Mrs Milne,’ I said, ‘the fact of it is I have a curious occupation - a theatrical occupation, you could call it - that obliges me sometimes to dress in gentlemen’s suits. My landlady caught me at it, and took against me. I know for certain that, if I live here, I shall never bring a chap over your threshold. You may wonder how I know that, but I can only say, I do. I shan’t ever get behind with my rent; I shall keep myself to myself and you won’t hardly know that I am here at all. If you and Miss Milne will only not object to the sight of a girl in a pair of bags and a neck-tie now and again - well, then I think I might be the lodger you are seeking.’ I had spoken in earnest - more or less - and now Mrs Milne looked thoughtful. ‘Gentlemen’s suits, you say,’ she said - not unkindly or incredulously, but with a rather interested air. I nodded, then pulled at the cord of my bag and drew out a jacket — it happened to be the top half of the guardsman’s uniform. I gave it a shake and held it up against myself, rather hopefully. ‘My eyes,’ she said, folding her arms, ‘he’s a beauty, in’ he? Now my little girl would like him.’ She gestured to the door. ‘If you’ll permit me ... ?’ She stepped out on to the landing and gave a shout: ‘Gracie!’ I heard the sound of footsteps below. Mrs Milne tilted her head. ‘Now, she’s a mote shy,’ she said in a low voice, ‘but don’t you pay no mind to her if she starts being silly on you. It’s just her way.’ I smiled, uncertainly.

• From Educated (2018)

  CHRISTMAS WAS SPARSE THAT YEAR. We weren’t poor—Mother’s business was doing well and Dad was still scrapping—but we’d spent everything on supplies. Before Christmas, we continued our preparations as if every action, every minor addition to our stores might make the difference between surviving, and not; after Christmas, we waited. “When the hour of need arises,” Dad said, “the time of preparation has passed.” The days dragged on, and then it was December 31. Dad was calm at breakfast but under his tranquillity I sensed excitement, and something like longing. He’d been waiting for so many years, burying guns and stockpiling food and warning others to do the same. Everyone at church had read the prophecies; they knew the Days of Abomination were coming. But still they’d teased Dad, they’d laughed at him. Tonight he would be vindicated. After dinner, Dad studied Isaiah for hours. At around ten he closed his Bible and turned on the TV. The television was new. Aunt Angie’s husband worked for a satellite-TV company, and he’d offered Dad a deal on a subscription. No one had believed it when Dad said yes, but in retrospect it was entirely characteristic for my father to move, in the space of a day, from no TV or radio to full-blown cable. I sometimes wondered if Dad allowed the television that year, specifically, because he knew it would all disappear on January 1. Perhaps he did it to give us a little taste of the world, before it was swept away. Dad’s favorite program was The Honeymooners, and that night there was a special, with episodes playing back to back. We watched, waiting for The End. I checked the clock every few minutes from ten until eleven, then every few seconds until midnight. Even Dad, who was rarely stirred by anything outside himself, glanced often at the clock. 11:59. I held my breath. One more minute, I thought, before everything is gone. Then it was 12:00. The TV was still buzzing, its lights dancing across the carpet. I wondered if our clock was fast. I went to the kitchen and turned on the tap. We had water. Dad stayed still, his eyes on the screen. I returned to the couch. 12:05.

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

  8 Such was their hatred of the tedium and triviality of settled life that only in their marauding did they feel fully alive. They were, so to speak, spiritually programmed: the constantly repeated ritual gestures imprinted in their bodies and minds an instinctive knowledge of how an alpha male should comport himself; and the emotive hymns implanted a deep-rooted sense of entitlement, an entrenched belief that Aryans were born to dominate. 9 All this gave them the courage, tenacity, and energy to traverse the vast distances of northwestern India, eliminating every obstacle in their path. 10 We know practically nothing about Aryan life during this period, yet because mythology is not wholly about the heavenly world but essentially about the here and now, in these Vedic texts we catch glimpses of a community fighting for its life. The mythical battles— between devas and asuras and Indra and his cosmic dragons—reflected the wars between Aryans and dasas. 11 The Aryans experienced the Punjab as confinement and the dasas as perverse adversaries who were preventing them from attaining the wealth and open spaces that were their due. 12 This emotion ran through many of their stories. They imagined Vritra as a huge snake, coiled around the cosmic mountain and squeezing it so tightly that the waters could not escape. 13 Another story spoke of the demon Vala, who had incarcerated the sun together with a herd of cows in a cave so that without light, warmth, or food, the world was unviable. But after chanting a hymn beside the sacred fire, Indra had smashed into the mountain, liberated the cows, and set the sun high in the sky. 14 The names Vritra and Vala both derived from the Indo-European root *vr, “to obstruct, enclose, encircle,” and one of Indra’s titles was Vrtrahan (“beating the resistance”). 15 It was for the Aryans to fight their way through their encircling enemies as Indra had done. Liberation (moksha) would be another symbol that later generations would reinterpret; its opposite was amhas (“captivity”), cognate with the English anxiety and the German Angst, evoking a claustrophobic distress. 16 Later sages would conclude that the path to moksha lay in the realization that less is more. By the tenth century, the Aryans had reached the Doab, between the Yamuna and the Ganges Rivers. There they established two small kingdoms, one founded by the confederation of the Kuru and Panchala clans, the other by the Yadava.

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

  [image file=image_rsrcDZB.jpg] The Arrival of “Religion”On January 2, 1492, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile celebrated their victory over the Muslim kingdom of Granada in southern Spain. Crowds watched the Christian banners unfurled on the city walls with deep emotion, and bells pealed triumphantly throughout Europe. Yet despite the triumph of that day, Europeans still felt threatened by Islam. In 1453 the Ottoman Turks had obliterated the Byzantine Empire, which for centuries had protected Europe from Muslim encroachment. In 1480, the year after the monarchs’ accession, the Ottomans had begun a naval offensive in the Mediterranean, and Abu al-Hassan, sultan of Granada, had made a surprise attack on the port of Zahara in Castile. Spain therefore was on the front line of the war with the Muslim world, and many believed that Ferdinand was the mythical emperor who was expected to unite Christendom, defeat the Ottomans, and usher in the Age of the Holy Spirit in which Christianity would spread to the ends of the earth.1 Western Europe was indeed about to achieve global dominance, but in 1492 it still lagged far behind Islamdom. The Ottoman Empire was the strongest and most powerful state in the world, ruling Anatolia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Arabia. But the Safavids in Iran and the Moghuls in India had also established absolute monarchies in which almost every facet of public life was run with systematic and bureaucratic precision. Each had a strong Islamic ideology that permeated every aspect of their rule: the Ottomans were staunchly Sunni; the Safavids Shii; and the Mughals leaned toward Falsafah and Sufism. Far more efficient and powerful than any European kingdom at this time, they marked the culmination of the agrarian state, and were the last magnificent expression of the “conservative spirit” that was the hallmark of premodern society.2 As we have seen, all agrarian societies eventually outran their intrinsically limited resources, which put a brake on innovation. Only fully industrialized societies could afford the constant replication of the infrastructure that unlimited progress required. Premodern education could not encourage originality, because it lacked the resources to implement many new ideas. If people were encouraged to think innovatively, but nothing ever came of it, the ensuing frustration could lead to social unrest. In a conservative society, stability and order were far more important than freedom of expression. In any traditional empire, the purpose of government was not to guide or provide services for the population but to tax them. It did not usually attempt to interfere with the social customs or religious beliefs of its subjects. Rather, a government was set up to take whatever it could from its peasants and prevent other aristocrats from getting their surplus, so warfare—to conquer, expand, or maintain the tax base—was essential to these states. Indeed, between 1450 and 1700, there were only eight years when the Ottomans were not involved in warfare.3 An Ottoman treatise expressed succinctly the agrarian state’s dependence on organized violence:

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Carriage is what falconers call walking with a hawk to tame it, and all my books insisted it was the key to a well-trained gos. ‘ The key to her management is to carry, carry, carry,’ wrote Gilbert Blaine. It was ‘ the grand secret of discipline’ to Edward Michell. Back in the seventeenth century Edward Bert had explained that when you walk with a hawk ‘ her eye doth still behold change of objects’, which is why carriage works – and why you can’t tame a hawk by keeping her indoors. Such a hawk ‘will endure nothing, because shee hath not beene made acquainted with any thing’, he says. Oh, Edmund Bert , I think. I wish it was still the seventeenth century. There’d have been fewer things out there to frighten my hawk . But I knew that wasn’t true. There’d have been carts and horses and crowds and dogs and they’d have been just as frightening for a half-manned goshawk as buses and mopeds and students on bikes. The difference was that in 1615 no one would have paid me the slightest attention. Hawks on the streets of Cambridge would have been as unremarkable a sight as dogs on leads today. Walking with my hawk will be an open invitation for everyone to come up and stare, and enquire, and quiz me about the hawk, and what she is, and who I am, and why. And beneath my disinclination to engage in conversation there is a much simpler terror: people. Just people. I don’t want to see people at all. After the door is closed I look at it for a long while, rubbing my cheek where the cushion had left a deep, indented scar. Later that afternoon I take Mabel into the walled garden of my college house. Above us is a deep field of fast-moving cumulus. Branches lift in the breeze; leaves shift with a collapsing, papery flicker. The air is thick with sun and dust and dandelion seeds. There’s too much light, too much contrast. Too much noise and movement. I flinch at the hurry of it all. But the hawk? The hawk is unperturbed. She tips her head sideways to look up at the moving clouds – in daylight her irises are flat and shiny and slightly burred, with pupils that dilate and contract like a camera lens as she focuses – zip-zip-zip – up to track a passing Cessna – and then she turns her head upside down to watch a fly , and then tracks another fly , and pulls abstractedly at the meat I hold in the glove, and watches other things way, way beyond my poor human vision. The world she lives in is not mine. Life is faster for her; time runs slower.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  But something was wrong with me. It wasn’t just a hawk-inflicted injury. I was becoming vastly anxious. I jumped in panic when the postman knocked on the door; recoiled from the ringing phone. I stopped seeing people. Cancelled my gallery talk. Deadlocked the front door. Out on the hill I fled from walkers, dodged behind hedges when farm vehicles drove up the track. Some days I lay in bed in so much mysterious pain I began to believe the only explanation was a terminal disease. You could explain what it was like by running to books and papers. You could read Freud, you could read Klein. You could read any number of theories about attachment and loss and grief. But those kinds of explanations come from a world the hawk wasn’t in. They aren’t any help. They are like explaining how it feels to be in love by waving an MRI scan of a lovestruck brain. You have to look in different places. The anthropologist Rane Willerslev once lived for a year in a Yukaghir community in north-eastern Siberia and became fascinated by how their hunters saw the relationship between humans and animals. The hunters, he wrote, think ‘ humans and animals can turn into each other by temporarily taking on one another’s bodies’. If you want to hunt elk, you dress in elkskins, walk like an elk, take on an elk’s alien consciousness. If you do this, elk will recognise you as one of their own and walk towards you. But, Willerslev explained, Yukaghir hunters consider these transformations very dangerous, because they can make you lose sight of your ‘original species identity and undergo an invisible metamorphosis’. Turning into an animal can imperil the human soul. Willerslev included the story of a hunter who’d been tracking reindeer for many hours and ended up in an unfamiliar camp, where women he did not know gave him lichen to eat and he started forgetting things. He remembered his wife but could not remember her name. Confused, he fell asleep, and it was only when he dreamed he was surrounded by reindeer urging him to leave that he saw what he had done. That story made me shiver when I read it, because that was what it was like. I’d turned myself into a hawk – taken all the traits of goshawks in the books and made them my own. I was nervous, highly strung, paranoid, prone to fits of terror and rage; I ate greedily or didn’t eat at all; I fled from society, hid from everything; found myself drifting into strange states where I wasn’t certain who or what I was.

• From Educated (2018)

  My first meeting with Professor Steinberg took place a few days later. I waited at the porter’s lodge until a thin man appeared and, producing a set of heavy keys, unlocked a wooden door set into the stone. I followed him up a spiral staircase and into the clock tower itself, where there was a well-lit room with simple furnishings: two chairs and a wooden table. I could hear the blood pounding behind my ears as I sat down. Professor Steinberg was in his seventies but I would not have described him as an old man. He was lithe, and his eyes moved about the room with probing energy. His speech was measured and fluid. “I am Professor Steinberg,” he said. “What would you like to read?” I mumbled something about historiography. I had decided to study not history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I’d felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement—since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others. I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected—a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world. Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality. I thought if I could accept that what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision, maybe I could reconcile myself with the fact that the history most people agreed upon was not the history I had been taught. Dad could be wrong, and the great historians Carlyle and Macaulay and Trevelyan could be wrong, but from the ashes of their dispute I could construct a world to live in. In knowing the ground was not ground at all, I hoped I could stand on it. I doubt I managed to communicate any of this. When I finished talking, Professor Steinberg eyed me for a moment, then said, “Tell me about your education. Where did you attend school?” The air was immediately sucked from the room. “I grew up in Idaho,” I said. “And you attended school there?” It occurs to me in retrospect that someone might have told Professor Steinberg about me, perhaps Dr. Kerry. Or perhaps he perceived that I was avoiding his question, and that made him curious. Whatever the reason, he wasn’t satisfied until I had admitted that I’d never been to

• From Educated (2018)

  wasn’t wrong: Mother had warned them. But then she made a mistake. After I left Buck’s Peak, she panicked. She was afraid I might contact Tyler, and that if I did, he might sympathize with me. She decided to get to Tyler first, to deny anything I might tell him, but she miscalculated. She didn’t stop to think how the denials would sound, coming from nowhere like that. “Of course Shawn didn’t stab Diego and threaten Tara with the knife,” Mother reassured Tyler, but to Tyler, who had never heard any part of this story, not from me or anyone else, this was somewhat less than reassuring. A moment after he said goodbye to Mother, Tyler called me, demanding to know what had happened and why I hadn’t come to him. I thought he’d say I was lying but he didn’t. He accepted almost immediately the reality I’d spent a year denying. I didn’t understand why he was trusting me, but then he told me his own stories and I remembered: Shawn had been his older brother, too. In the weeks that followed, Tyler began to test my parents in the subtle, nonconfrontational way that was uniquely his. He suggested that perhaps the situation had been mishandled, that perhaps I was not possessed. Perhaps I was not evil at all. I might have taken comfort in Tyler’s trying to help me, but the memory of my sister was too raw, and I didn’t trust him. I knew that if Tyler confronted my parents—really confronted them—they would force him to choose between me and them, between me and the rest of the family. And from Audrey I had learned: he would not choose me. — MY FELLOWSHIP AT HARVARD finished in the spring. I flew to the Middle East, where Drew was completing a Fulbright. It took some effort, but I managed to hide from Drew how poorly I was doing, or at least I thought I did. I probably didn’t. He was, after all, the one chasing me through his flat when I awoke in the middle of the night, screaming and sprinting, with no idea where I was but a desperate need to escape it. We left Amman and drove south. We were in a Bedouin camp in the Jordanian desert on the day the navy SEALs killed bin Laden. Drew spoke Arabic, and when the news broke he spent hours in conversation

• From Educated (2018)

  Dad tonight, but I can tell just by looking at you that I’ve hurt you. And I’m sorry.” We hugged. We laughed like we always did after a fight. I smiled at him like I’d always done, like she would have. But she wasn’t there, and the smile was a fake. — I WENT TO MY ROOM and shut the door, quietly sliding the bolt, and called Drew. I was nearly incoherent with panic but eventually he understood. He said I should leave, right now, and he’d meet me halfway. I can’t, I said. At this moment things are calm. If I try to run off in the middle of the night, I don’t know what will happen. I went to bed but not to sleep. I waited until six in the morning, then I found Mother in the kitchen. I’d borrowed the car I was driving from Drew, so I told Mother something had come up unexpectedly, that Drew needed his car in Salt Lake. I said I’d be back in a day or two. A few minutes later I was driving down the hill. The highway was in sight when I saw something and stopped. It was the trailer where Shawn lived with Emily and Peter. A few feet from the trailer, near the door, the snow was stained with blood. Something had died there. From Mother I would later learn it was Diego, a German shepherd Shawn had purchased a few years before. The dog had been a pet, much beloved by Peter. After Dad had called, Shawn had stepped outside and slashed the dog to death, while his young son, only feet away, listened to the dog scream. Mother said the execution had nothing to do with me, that it had to be done because Diego was killing Luke’s chickens. It was a coincidence, she said. I wanted to believe her but didn’t. Diego had been killing Luke’s chickens for more than a year. Besides, Diego was a purebred. Shawn had paid five hundred dollars for him. He could have been sold. But the real reason I didn’t believe her was the knife. I’d seen my father and brothers put down dozens of dogs over the years—strays mostly, that wouldn’t stay out of the chicken coop. I’d never seen anyone use a knife on a dog. We shot them, in the head or the heart, so it was quick. But Shawn chose a knife, and a knife whose blade was barely bigger than his

• From Educated (2018)

  speech had a lilting cadence that made me think of singing more than speaking. To my ears they sounded refined, educated; I had a tendency to mumble, and when nervous, to stutter. I chose a seat around the large square table and listened as the two students nearest me discussed the lecture topic, which was Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of liberty. The student next to me said he’d studied Isaiah Berlin at Oxford; the other said he’d already heard this lecturer’s remarks on Berlin when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge. I had never heard of Isaiah Berlin. The lecturer began his presentation. He spoke calmly but moved through the material quickly, as if he assumed we were already familiar with it. This was confirmed by the other students, most of whom were not taking notes. I scribbled down every word. “So what are Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts?” the lecturer asked. Nearly everyone raised a hand. The lecturer called on the student who had studied at Oxford. “Negative liberty,” he said, “is the freedom from external obstacles or constraints. An individual is free in this sense if they are not physically prevented from taking action.” I was reminded for a moment of Richard, who had always seemed able to recite with exactness anything he’d ever read. “Very good,” the lecturer said. “And the second?” “Positive liberty,” another student said, “is freedom from internal constraints.” I wrote this definition in my notes, but I didn’t understand it. The lecturer tried to clarify. He said positive liberty is self-mastery—the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self- coercion. I had no idea what it meant to self-coerce. I looked around the room. No one else seemed confused. I was one of the few students taking notes. I wanted to ask for further explanation, but something stopped me—the certainty that to do so would be to shout to the room that I didn’t belong there. After the lecture, I returned to my room, where I stared out my window at the stone gate with its medieval battlements. I thought of positive

• From Educated (2018)

  On Sunday, a week later, a man at church asked me to dinner. I said no. It happened a second time a few days later with a different man. Again I said no. I couldn’t say yes. I didn’t want either of them anywhere near me. Word reached the bishop that there was a woman in his flock who was set against marriage. His assistant approached me after the Sunday service and said I was wanted in the bishop’s office. My wrist was still tender when I shook the bishop’s hand. He was a middle-aged man with a round face and dark, neatly parted hair. His voice was soft like satin. He seemed to know me before I even opened my mouth. (In a way he did; Robin had told him plenty.) He said I should enroll in the university counseling service so that one day I might enjoy an eternal marriage to a righteous man. He talked and I sat, wordless as a brick. He asked about my family. I didn’t answer. I had already betrayed them by failing to love them as I should; the least I could do was stay silent. “Marriage is God’s plan,” the bishop said, then he stood. The meeting was over. He asked me to return the following Sunday. I said I would, but knew I wouldn’t.

• From Educated (2018)

  medicine. I can't say which is true, or gets us closer to the truth. I can only report the burns as I and others remember them, and what evidence remains. Someone was screaming, a long, steady holler, so loud it woke me up. It was dark. There were streetlights, pavement, the rumble of distant cars. I was standing in the middle of Oxford Street, half a block from my dorm room. My feet were bare, and I was wearing a tank top and flannel pajama bottoms. It felt like people were gawking at me, but it was two in the morning and the street was empty. Somehow I got back into my building, then I sat on my bed and tried to reconstruct what had happened. I remembered going to sleep. I remembered the dream. What I did not remember was flying from my bed and sprinting down the hall and into the street, shouting, but that is what I had done. The dream had been of home. Dad had built a maze on Buck’s Peak and trapped me inside it. The walls were ten feet high and made of supplies from his root cellar—sacks of grain, cases of ammunition, drums of honey. I was searching for something, something precious I could never replace. I had to escape the maze to recover it, but I couldn’t find the way out, and Dad was pursuing me, sealing the exits with sacks of grain stacked into barricades.

• From Educated (2018)

  The windows were shuttered; the projector flickered on, displaying a painting. We had sixty seconds to write the work’s title and the artist’s full name. My mind produced only a dull buzz. This continued through several questions: I sat completely still, giving no answers at all. A Caravaggio flickered onto the screen—Judith Beheading Holofernes. I stared at the image, that of a young girl calmly drawing a sword toward her body, pulling the blade through a man’s neck as she might have pulled a string through cheese. I’d beheaded chickens with Dad, clutching their scabby legs while he raised the ax and brought it down with a loud thwack, then tightening my grip, holding on with all I had, when the chicken convulsed with death, scattering feathers and spattering my jeans with blood. Remembering the chickens, I wondered at the plausibility of Caravaggio’s scene: no one had that look on their face—that tranquil, disinterested expression—when taking off something’s head. I knew the painting was by Caravaggio but I remembered only the surname and even that I couldn’t spell. I was certain the title was Judith Beheading Someone but could not have produced Holofernes even if it had been my neck behind the blade. Thirty seconds left. Perhaps I could score a few points if I could just get something—anything—on the page, so I sounded out the name phonetically: “Carevajio.” That didn’t look right. One of the letters was doubled up, I remembered, so I scratched that out and wrote “Carrevagio.” Wrong again. I auditioned different spellings, each worse than the last. Twenty seconds. Next to me, Vanessa was scribbling steadily. Of course she was. She belonged here. Her handwriting was neat, and I could read what she’d written: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. And next to it, in equally pristine print, Judith Beheading Holofernes. Ten seconds. I copied the text, not including Caravaggio’s full name because, in a selective display of integrity, I decided that would be cheating. The projector flashed to the next slide. I glanced at Vanessa’s paper a few more times during the exam but it was hopeless. I couldn’t copy her essays, and I lacked the factual and stylistic know-how to compose my own. In the absence of skill or knowledge, I must have scribbled down whatever occurred to me. I don’t recall whether we were asked to evaluate Judith Beheading Holofernes,

• From Educated (2018)

  returned an hour later with two paper bags. Shopping was forbidden on the Sabbath—I’d never purchased so much as a stick of gum on a Sunday —but Mary casually unpacked eggs, milk and pasta without acknowledging that every item she was placing in our communal fridge was a violation of the Lord’s Commandments. When she withdrew a can of Diet Coke, which my father said was a violation of the Lord’s counsel for health, I again fled to my room. — THE NEXT MORNING, I got on the bus going the wrong direction. By the time I’d corrected my mistake, the lecture was nearly finished. I stood awkwardly in the back until the professor, a thin woman with delicate features, motioned for me to take the only available seat, which was near the front. I sat down, feeling the weight of everyone’s eyes. The course was on Shakespeare, and I’d chosen it because I’d heard of Shakespeare and thought that was a good sign. But now I was here I realized I knew nothing about him. It was a word I’d heard, that was all. When the bell rang, the professor approached my desk. “You don’t belong here,” she said. I stared at her, confused. Of course I didn’t belong, but how did she know? I was on the verge of confessing the whole thing—that I’d never gone to school, that I hadn’t really met the requirements to graduate— when she added, “This class is for seniors.” “There are classes for seniors?” I said. She rolled her eyes as if I were trying to be funny. “This is 382. You should be in 110.” It took most of the walk across campus before I understood what she’d said, then I checked my course schedule and, for the first time, noticed the numbers next to the course names. I went to the registrar’s office, where I was told that every freshman- level course was full. What I should do, they said, was check online every few hours and join if someone dropped. By the end of the week I’d managed to squeeze into introductory courses in English, American history, music and religion, but I was stuck in a junior-level course on art in Western civilization.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Forty-five minutes north-east of Cambridge is a landscape I’ve come to love very much indeed. It’s where wet fen gives way to parched sand. It’s a land of twisted pine trees, burned-out cars, shotgun-peppered road signs and US Air Force bases. There are ghosts here: houses crumble inside numbered blocks of pine forestry. There are spaces built for air-delivered nukes inside grassy tumuli behind twelve-foot fences, tattoo parlours and US Air Force golf courses. In spring it’s a riot of noise: constant plane traffic, gas-guns over pea fields, woodlarks and jet engines. It’s called the Brecklands – the broken lands – and it’s where I ended up that morning, seven years ago, in early spring, on a trip I hadn’t planned at all. At five in the morning I’d been staring at a square of streetlight on the ceiling, listening to a couple of late party-leavers chatting on the pavement outside. I felt odd: overtired, overwrought, unpleasantly like my brain had been removed and my skull stuffed with something like microwaved aluminium foil, dinted, charred and shorting with sparks. Nnngh. Must get out, I thought, throwing back the covers. Out! I pulled on jeans, boots and a jumper, scalded my mouth with burned coffee, and it was only when my frozen, ancient Volkswagen and I were halfway down the A14 that I worked out where I was going, and why. Out there, beyond the foggy windscreen and white lines, was the forest. The broken forest. That’s where I was headed. To see goshawks.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I’m starting to worry. Is there something wrong with her? She’s oddly tame. Where is the lunatic I’d expected? For two days I’ve sat with her and not once, contra White, have I longed to dismember her and batter her to death. I’d expected a barrelling tornado of terror and wildness, some great and awful struggle of souls, but instead, as the light deepens and the late swifts outside ascend on flickering wings to bury themselves in the sky, I sit on a sofa watching a tired hawk go to sleep. The leading edges of her wings drop and rest against the glove. One downy grey eyelid slides up to cover an eye, then the other. Her shoulders fall; her head wobbles. The tip of her glossy black beak sinks into the feathers over her crop. Watching her doze in this vesper hour my eyes close too, but when sleep comes I am standing in the skeleton of a burned-out house, in white, blank air that glitters faintly with mica or frost. Around me are blackened joists and rafters. I put out a hand. Touch a piece of charred wood. Cold, furred, wrong. Rising panic. Refusal. A sense of absolute dismay. Then of toppling, the house collapsing into itself and on top of me. And we wake together, the hawk and I, her with a start of apprehension, a tightening of feet and feathers, and me with a slow, sickening disorientation that makes me fasten desperately onto the sight of the hawk to drag me back into a world with no ash in it. The same thoughts over and over. Why is she sleeping so much? Hawks sleep when they’re sick. She must be sick. Why am I sleeping? Am I sick too? What is wrong with her? What is wrong with us? Nothing was wrong with the hawk. She wasn’t sick. She was a baby. She fell asleep because that’s what babies do. I wasn’t sick either. But I was orphaned and desperately suggestible, and I didn’t know what was happening to me. For years I’d scoffed at White’s notion of hawk-training as a rite of passage. Overblown, I’d thought. Loopy. Because it wasn’t like that. I knew it wasn’t. I’d flown scores of hawks, and every step of their training was familiar to me. But while the steps were familiar, the person taking them was not. I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life. I was turning into a hawk.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  Does this sound familiar to you? As is often the case with anxiety, we settle for mediocrity because we think we’re lucky to get anything at all. So many of us, like Jacob, exhaust ourselves with an endless stream of negative thoughts like this. Perhaps you resonated with the examples just shared from Jacob’s mindset, but in case you need some others, here are just a few more things you may be mentally treading against: • Thoughts that you are a failure or that you’re terrible at your job • Images of you embarrassing yourself or losing control somehow (e.g., getting sick in public, breaking or spilling something and people looking at you, or letting one rip accidentally) • Feelings of inadequacy in your relationships and believing it’s only a matter of time until everyone leaves you • Believing that you are “broken” because you feel anxious or depressed • Ruminating over the future and your perceived inability to cope Do any of these land for you? We start spiraling based on the messages our brains send us. And yes, I said send. Whether you like it or not, your brain has an automatic mail delivery system where it sometimes delivers helpful information, and other times it gives you nothing but spam. Where it gets confusing is in trying to filter out the helpful data from the junk pile, as the brain’s mail person delivers them simultaneously. Our anxious brains can get overwhelmed by this, and we may try to block the process entirely. The fancy term for this: “disassociation.” Dissociation is when we can feel disconnected from our minds, bodies, feelings, memories, and identity. 27 You may have experienced this momentarily when your eyes have trouble focusing or you feel like you’re out of your body for a few moments. For some, it can last for a much more extended period of time, developing into depersonalization/derealization disorder, where people feel disconnected from their physicality or their surroundings for hours, days, months, or more. Here’s the thing, though. Just as you can’t control your spam folder filling up, you are not responsible for the thoughts or images that pop up in your brain. Sometimes, the mind gives us ideas or pictures that we’d really rather not have. Some are rooted in reality, like the possibility for Jacob that his relationship would end, and some are far-fetched and highly unlikely. For example—and get ready for this—I’m guessing you don’t want to imagine peeing your pants in public. Or your pet getting hit by a car. Or getting fired from your job this week. Okay, I’ll stop before you really start hating me. But truthfully, that was the PG version. I bet your mind has come up with a lot worse than that. I say these things because chances are that your brain has already been giving you these thoughts and images anyway.

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

  F. Trechsel (pastor at Vechingen, near Bern): Die protest. Antitrinitarier vor Faustus Socinus nach den Quellen und Urkunden geschichtlich dargestellt. Heidelberg, 1839, 1844. The first part of this learned work, drawn in part from manuscript sources, is devoted to Michael Servetus and his predecessors; the second part to Lelio Sozini and his sympathizing contemporaries. The third section of vol. II. 137–201, with documents in the Appendix, pp. 431–459, treats of Lelio Sozini.—Henry, II. 484 sqq.; III. 440, Beilage, 128.—Dyer, 251 (very brief). Laelius Socinus, or Lelio Sozini, of Siena (1525–1562), son of an eminent professor of law, was well educated, and carried away by the reform movement in his early youth. He voluntarily separated from the Roman Church, in 1546, at the sacrifice of home and fortune. He removed to Chiavenna in 1547, travelled in Switzerland, France, England, Germany, and Poland, leading an independent life as a student, without public office, supported by the ample means of his father. He studied Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic with Pellican and Bibliander at Zürich and with Foster at Wittenberg, that he might reach "the fountain of the divine law" in the Bible. He made Zürich his second home, and died there in the prime of early manhood, leaving his unripe doubts and crude opinions as a legacy to his more gifted and famous nephew, who gave them definite shape and form. Laelius was learned, acute, polite, amiable, and prepossessing. He was a man of affairs, better fitted for law or diplomacy than for theology. He was constitutionally a sceptic, of the type of Thomas: an honest seeker after truth; too independent to submit blindly to authority, and yet too religious to run into infidelity. His scepticism stumbled first at the Roman Catholic, than at the Protestant orthodoxy, and gradually spread over the doctrines of the resurrection, predestination, original sin, the trinity, the atonement, and the sacraments. Yet he remained in respectful connection with the Reformers, and communed with the congregation at Zürich, although he thought that the Consensus Tigurinus attributed too much power to the sacrament. He enjoyed the confidence of Bullinger and Melanchthon, who treated him with fatherly kindness, but regarded him better fitted for a secular calling than for the service of the Church. Calvin also was favorably impressed with his talents and personal character, but displeased with his excessive "inquisitiveness."920 L. Socinus came to Geneva in 1548 or 1549, seeking instruction from the greatest divine of the age. He opened his doubts to Calvin with the modesty of a disciple. Soon afterwards he addressed to him a letter from Zürich, asking for advice on the questions, whether it was lawful for a Protestant to marry a Roman Catholic; whether popish baptism was efficacious; and how the doctrine of the resurrection of the body could be explained.

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

  faith, all bishops must turn to St. Peter.584 But the first pope, in the proper sense of the word, is Leo I., who justly bears the title of "the Great" in the history of the Latin hierarchy. In him the idea of the Papacy, as it were, became flesh and blood. He conceived it in great energy and clearness, and carried it out with the Roman spirit of dominion, so far as the circumstances of the time at all allowed. He marks the same relative epoch in the development of the papacy, as Cyprian in the history of the episcopate. He had even a higher idea of the prerogatives of the see of Rome than Gregory the Great, who, though he reigned a hundred and fifty years later, represents rather the patriarchal idea than the papal. Leo was at the same time the first important theologian in the chair of Rome, surpassing in acuteness and depth of thought all his predecessors, and all his successors down to Gregory I. Benedict XIV. placed him (A.D. 1744) in the small class of doctores ecclesiae, or authoritative teachers of the catholic faith. He battled with the Manichaean, the Priscillianist, the Pelagian, and other heresies, and won an immortal name as the finisher of the orthodox doctrine of the person of Christ. The time and place of the birth and earlier life of Leo are unknown. His letters, which are the chief source of information, commence not before the year 442. Probably a Roman585—if not one by birth, he was certainly a Roman in the proud dignity of his spirit and bearing, the high order of his legislative and administrative talent, and the strength and energy of his will—he distinguished himself first under Coelestine (423–432) and Sixtus III. (432–440) as archdeacon and legate of the Roman church. After the death of the latter, and while himself absent in Gaul, he was elected pope by the united voice of clergy, senate, and people, and continued in that office one-and-twenty years (440–461). His feelings at the assumption of this high office, he himself thus describes in one of his sermons: "Lord, I have beard your voice calling me, and I was afraid: I considered the work which was enjoined on me, and I trembled. For what proportion is there between the burden assigned to me and my weakness, this elevation and my nothingness? What is more to be feared than exaltation without merit, the exercise of the most holy functions being intrusted to one who is buried in sin? Oh, you have laid upon me this heavy burden, bear it with me, I beseech you be you my guide and my support." During the time of his pontificate he was almost the only great man in the Roman empire, developed extraordinary activity, and took a leading part in all the affairs of the church. His private life is entirely unknown, and we have no reason to question the purity of his motives or of his morals.