Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Then he answered, Verily masters you need not put yourselves to such paines, for I have men that serve for nothing but that purpose. So wee tooke leave of him and departed: and when we were come without the gates of the town, we perceived before us a great sepulchre standing out of the highway in a privy and secret place, and thither we went and opened the mouth thereof, whereas we found the sides covered with the corruption of man, and the ashes and dust of his long buried body, wherein we got ourselves to bring our purpose to passe, and having respect to the dark time of night, according to our custome, when we thought that every one was asleepe, we went with our weapons and besieged the house of Demochares round about. Then Thrasileon was ready at hand, and leaped out of the caverne, and went to kill all such as he found asleepe: but when he came to the Porter, he opened the gates and let us in, and then he shewed us a large Counter, wherein we saw the night before a great aboundance of treasure: which when by violence we had broke open, I bid every one of my fellows take as much gold and silver as they could carry away: and beare it to the sepulchre, and still as they carried away I stood at the gate, watching diligently when they would returne. The Beare running about the house, to make such of the family afeared as fortuned to wake and come out. For who is he that is so puissant and couragious, that at the ougly sight of so great a monster will not quayle and keep his chamber especially in the night? But when wee had brought this matter to so good a point, there chanced a pittifull case, for as I looked for my companions that should come from the sepulchre, behold there was a Boy of the house that fortuned to looke out of a window, and espied the Bear running about, and he went and told all the servants of the house. Whereupon incontinently they came forth with Torches, Lanthornes, and other lights, that they might see all the yard over: they came with clubs, speares, naked swords, Greyhounds, and Mastifes to slay the poore beast. Then I during this broyle thought to run away, but because I would see Thrasileon fight with the Dogs, I lay behinde the gate to behold him. And although I might perceive that he was well nigh dead, yet remembred he his owne faithfulnes and ours, and valiantly resisted the gaping and ravenous mouths of the hell hounds, so tooke hee in gree the pagiant which willingly he tooke in hand himself, and with much adoe tumbled at length out of the house: but when hee was at liberty abroad yet could he not save himself, for all the dogs of the Streete joyned themselves to the greyhounds and mastifes of the house, and came upon him.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I was such a compulsive good girl that my professors were always dangling fellowships before me. I longed to turn them down but hadn’t the guts to—so I wasted two and a half years on an M.A. and part of a Ph.D. before it occurred to me that graduate school was seriously interfering with my education. Marrying Bennett sprung me from graduate school. I took a leave of absence to follow him into the army. What else could I do? It wasn’t that I wanted to give up my fellowship—it was History giving me a boot in the ass. Marrying Bennett also got me away from New York and away from my mother and away from the Graduate English Department at Columbia and away from my ex-husband and away from my ex-boyfriends—all of whom had come to seem identical in my mind. I wanted out. I wanted escape. And Bennett was the vehicle for it. Our marriage began under that heavy burden. That it survived at all is rather a miracle. In Heidelberg, we set up house in a vast American concentration camp in the postwar section of town (a far cry from the beautiful old section near the Schloss, which tourists see). Our neighbors were mostly army captains and their “dependents.” With a few notable exceptions they were the most considerate people I’ve ever lived among. The wives welcomed you with coffee when you moved in. The children were maddeningly friendly and polite. The husbands would spring gallantly to help you dig your car out of a snowbank or carry heavy boxes upstairs. It was all the more astonishing then when they announced to you that life was cheap in Asia, that the U.S. ought to bomb the hell out of the Viet Cong, and finally, that soldiers were only there to do a job but not to have political opinions. They regarded Bennett and me as creatures from outer space, and that was rather how we felt ourselves. Across the way were our other neighbors, the Germans. In 1945, when they were still militarists, they had hated Americans for winning the war. Now, in 1966, the Germans were pacifists (at least where other nations were concerned) and they hated the Americans for being in Vietnam. The ironies multiplied so fast you could hardly absorb them. If San Antonio had been strange, Heidelberg was a thousand times stranger. We lived between two sets of enemies and we were both so unhappy that we were enemies to each other as well. I can still close my eyes and remember the dinner hour in Mark Twain Village, Heidelberg. The smell of TV dinners in passageways.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  I encountered something similar in a physician’s office not long ago. I’d been feeling fatigued for some time and had gained some weight, and the doctor asked, “Are you depressed?” I responded, “Well, I don’t have sad feelings, but I do feel dead tired much of the time.” He countered with, “Maybe you’re depressed and you don’t know it.” My doctor did not realize that unpleasant affect can have a physical cause, which in my case was probably lack of sleep from running a lab of a hundred people, staying up late working on this book, and being a mother to my teenage daughter, plus a little thing called menopause. (I wound up explaining interoception and body budgets to him.) But here’s the thing: If he had simply diagnosed me with depression, he could have actually cultivated a feeling of depression in me in that instant. Sure, I was fatigued, and I probably had some inflammation going on due to a bit of chronic stress. If I hadn’t resisted, I could have come away with a prescription for antidepressants and a belief that something was seriously wrong with my life or myself for being unable to cope. This belief might have worsened my miscalibrated body budget, if I started to search for problems in my life . . . and you can always find something if you look. Instead, my doctor and I uncovered a body-budgeting issue and looked for ways to repair it. My doctor didn’t realize it, but he was co-constructing my experience. He wanted to construct one social reality, and I had another. When prediction error from the world dominates prediction, you can have anxiety. Suppose you couldn’t predict at all, ever. What would happen? For starters, your body budget would be screwed up because you couldn’t predict your metabolic needs. You’d have difficulty integrating sensory input from vision, hearing, smell, interoception, nociception, and your other sensory systems into a cohesive whole. You’d therefore have impaired statistical learning, making it difficult for you to learn basic concepts, even to recognize the same person from different angles. Many things would be outside your affective niche. If you were an infant in that situation, you’d most likely be disinterested in other humans; you’d stop looking at the faces of your caregivers, making it harder for them to regulate your highly disrupted body budget, breaking a crucial bond. You would also have trouble learning purely mental concepts of social reality because they’re learned with words, but you’re disinterested in humans so you probably have difficulty learning language. You’d never grow a proper conceptual system.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The letter was dated September 18, 1952 (this was September 22), and the address she gave was “General Delivery, Coalmont” (not “Va.,” not “Pa.,” not “Tenn.”—and not Coalmont, anyway—I have camouflaged everything, my love). Inquiries showed this to be a small industrial community some eight hundred miles from New York City. At first I planned to drive all day and all night, but then thought better of it and rested for a couple of hours around dawn in a motor court room, a few miles before reaching the town. I had made up my mind that the fiend, this Schiller, had been a car salesman who had perhaps got to know my Lolita by giving her a ride in Beardsley—the day her bike blew a tire on the way to Miss Emperor—and that he had got into some trouble since then. The corpse of the executed sweater, no matter how I changed its contours as it lay on the back seat of the car, had kept revealing various outlines pertaining to Trapp-Schiller—the grossness and obscene bonhommie of his body, and to counteract this taste of coarse corruption I resolved to make myself especially handsome and smart as I pressed home the nipple of my alarm clock before it exploded at the set hour of six A.M. Then, with the stern and romantic care of a gentleman about to fight a duel, I checked the arrangement of my papers, bathed and perfumed my delicate body, shaved my face and chest, selected a silk shirt and clean drawers, pulled on transparent taupe socks, and congratulated myself for having with me in my trunk some very exquisite clothes—a waistcoat with nacreous buttons, for instance, a pale cashmere tie and so on. I was not able, alas, to hold my breakfast, but dismissed that physicality as a trivial contretemps, wiped my mouth with a gossamer handkerchief produced from my sleeve, and, with a blue block of ice for heart, a pill on my tongue and solid death in my hip pocket, I stepped neatly into a telephone booth in Coalmont (Ah-ah-ah, said its little door) and rang up the only Schiller—Paul, Furniture—to be found in the battered book. Hoarse Paul told me he did know a Richard, the son of a cousin of his, and his address was, let me see, 10 Killer Street (I am not going very far for my pseudonyms). Ah-ah-ah, said the little door.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Well—my car had been attended to, and I had moved it away from the pumps to let a pickup truck be serviced—when the growing volume of her absence began to weigh upon me in the windy grayness. Not for the first time, and not for the last, had I stared in such dull discomfort of mind at those stationary trivialities that look almost surprised, like staring rustics, to find themselves in the stranded traveller’s field of vision: that green garbage can, those very black, very whitewalled tires for sale, those bright cans of motor oil, that red icebox with assorted drinks, the four, five, seven discarded bottles within the incompleted crossword puzzle of their wooden cells, that bug patiently walking up the inside of the window of the office. Radio music was coming from its open door, and because the rhythm was not synchronized with the heave and flutter and other gestures of wind-animated vegetation, one had the impression of an old scenic film living its own life while piano or fiddle followed a line of music quite outside the shivering flower, the swaying branch. The sound of Charlotte’s last sob incongruously vibrated through me as, with her dress fluttering athwart the rhythm, Lolita veered from a totally unexpected direction. She had found the toilet occupied and had crossed over to the sign of the Conche in the next block. They said there they were proud of their home-clean restrooms. These prepaid postcards, they said, had been provided for your comments. No postcards. No soap. Nothing. No comments.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  28 * Erant in quadam civitate rex et regina : hi tres numero filias forma conspicuas habuere, sed maiores quidem natu, quamvis gratissima specie, idonee tamen celebrari posse laudibus humanis credebantur, 1 So Beroaldus for the MSS’ Attidis. 184 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IV like the marriage of Hippodamia and Protesilaus: but behold, good mother, now my unhappy fortune is renewed and increased : for I dreamed in my sleep that I was pulled out of our house, out of our chamber, and out of my bed, and that I roamed about in solitary and unknown places, calling upon the name of my unfortunate husband, and that he, when he was robbed of my embrace, even still smelling of per- fumes and crowned with garlands, did trace me by my steps as I fled on feet not mine own, desiring the aid of the people to assist him, in that his fair wife was violently stolen away : and as he went crying up and down, one of the thieves, moved with indignation by reason of his pursuit, took up a great stone that lay at his feet and threw it at my husband, poor youth, and killed him: by the terror of which sight I awaked in fear from so dreadful a sleep." Then the old woman, rendering out like sighs, began to speak in this sort : * My lady, take a good heart unto you, and be not afraid at feigned or strange visions or dreams, for as the visions of the day are accounted false and untrue, so the visions of the night do often chance contrary : and indeed to dream of weeping, beating, and killing is a token of good luck and prosperous change, whereas contrary, to dream of laughing, filling the belly with good cheer, or dalliance of love, is sign of sadness of heart, sickness of body, or other displeasure. But I will tell thee a pleasant old wives' tale to put away all thy sorrow and to revive thy spirits" ; and so she began in this manner: «There was sometime a certain king, inhabiting in the west parts, who had to wife a noble dame, by whom he had three daughters exceeding fair: of whom the two elder were of most comely shape and beauty, yet they did not excel all the praise and : 185

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Some stress is positive, like the challenge of learning a new subject in school. Some is negative but tolerable, like having a fight with your best friend. And some is toxic, like the chronic stress of prolonged poverty, abuse, or loneliness. In other words, stress is a population of diverse instances. It is a concept, just like “Happiness” or “Fear,” that you apply to construct experiences from an imbalanced body budget. 1 1 You construct instances of “Stress” via the same brain mechanisms that construct emotion. In each case, your brain issues predictions about your body budget in relation to the outside world and makes meaning. These predictions issue from your interoceptive network and descend along the same pathways from the brain to the body. In the opposite direction, the ascending pathways that carry sensory inputs from the body to the brain are also the same for stress and emotion. And the same pair of networks, interoceptive and control, play their same roles. (Emotion and stress researchers rarely recognize these similarities, and tend to ask how stress influences emotion and vice versa, as if stress and emotion are independent.) From the viewpoint of construction, what differs is the end result, whether your brain categorizes your sensations as stressful or emotional. 1 2 Why does the predicting brain construct instances of stress or emotion in a given situation? No one knows. Maybe the longer your body budget is out of whack, the more likely you are to categorize with the concept “Stress,” but this is pure speculation. If your body budget is unbalanced for a long time, you may experience chronic stress. (Chronic misbudgeting is often diagnosed as stress, which is why people think stress causes illness.) Chronic stress is dangerous to your physical health. It literally eats away at your interoceptive and control networks, causing them to atrophy, as your chronically imbalanced body budget remodels the very brain circuitry that regulates the budget. So much for the classical division between mental and physical illness. 1 3 Scientists are still figuring out the puzzle of immune system, stress, and emotion, but we do know a few things right now. Cumulative imbalance in the body budget—say, from growing up in adversity, where you don’t feel safe or are deprived of basic necessities like nutritious food, quiet time to sleep, and so on—also changes the structure of your interoceptive network, rewiring your brain and reducing its ability to accurately regulate your body budget.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Everything was hushed, but the air was angry and wet. Any more snow and the whole city would be covered. I passed a twitching, sweater- clad Pomeranian and its nanny on the corner, watched it lift its leg and piss on a flat, glassy plane of ice on the pavement, heard the singe of the hot stuff melting through, steam spreading in a contained bubble for a moment, then dissipating. The Egyptians extended no special greeting when I walked into the bodega. They just nodded as usual and went back to their cell phones. That was a good sign, I thought. Whatever I’d done on the Infermiterol, whomever I’d cavorted with or how hard I’d “partied,” I hadn’t behaved so badly at the bodega at least to solicit any special attention. I hadn’t shit where I ate, as the saying goes. I got cash out of the ATM, poured my two coffees and stirred in the cream and sugar, then picked out a slice of prepackaged banana bread, a cup of organic yogurt, and a rock hard pear. Three Brearley girls in tracksuits formed a line at the counter. I glanced at the newspapers while I waited to pay. Nothing earth shattering was going on, it seemed. Strom Thurmond gave Hillary Clinton a hug. A pack of wolves was spotted in Washington Heights. Nigerians smuggled into Libya might one day be washing dishes at your favorite downtown bistro. Giuliani said cursing at a cop should be a crime. It was January 3, 2001. In the elevator back up to my apartment, I thought up combinations of pills that I hoped would put me out—Ambien plus Placidyl plus Theraflu. Solfoton plus Ambien plus Dimetapp. I wanted a cocktail that would arrest my imagination and put me into a deep, boring, inert sleep. I needed to dispose of those photographs. Nembutal plus Ativan plus Benadryl. At home, I took a good helping of the latter, washing the pills down with the second coffee. Then I ate a handful of melatonin and the yogurt, and watched The Player and Soapdish, but I couldn’t sleep. I was distracted by the Polaroids under the couch cushions. I put in Presumed Innocent, hit rewind, pulled the Polaroids out, and took them and sent them down the garbage chute. That was better, I thought, and went back in and sat down. Night was falling. I felt tired, heavy, but not exactly sleepy. So I took another Nembutal, watched Presumed Innocent, then took a few Lunestas and drank the second bottle of funeral wine, but somehow the alcohol undid the sleeping pills, and I felt even more awake than before. Then I had to vomit, and did so. I had drunk too much.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  excuse. Whereupon I must go unto Fotis to ask counsel of her as of some divine, who (although she was unwilling that I should depart one foot from her company) yet at length she gave me license to be absent for a while from amorous debate, saying: “Look you, beware that you tarry not long at supper there, for there is a rabble of well-born youths that disturbeth the public peace, and you may see many murdered about in the streets, neither can the armies of the governor, for that they are afar ofi, rid the city of this great plague. And they will the sooner set upon you, by reason of your high station and for that they will disdain you being a foreigner.’ Then I answered and said: “ Have no care for me, Fotis, for I esteem the pleasure which I have with thee above the dainty meat that I eat abroad, and I will take away that fear that you have by returning again quickly. Nevertheless, I mind not to go without company, for I have here my sword by my side, whereby I hope to defend myself.” And so in this sort I went to supper, and behold I found at Byrrhaena's house a great company of strangers, the very flower of the citizens, for that she was one of the chief and principal women of the city. The tables (made of citron-wood and ivory) were richly adorned, the couches spread with cloth of gold, the cups were great and garnished preciously in sundry fashion, but were of like estimation and price: here stood a glass gorgeously wrought, there stood another of crystal finely chased, there stood a cup of glittering silver, and here stood another of shining gold, and here was another of amber arti- ficially carved, and precious stones made to drink out of; finally, there were all things that might never be found. A crowd of servitors brought orderly the ; TT 20 LUCIUS APULEIUS scitule subministrare, pueri calamistrati pulchre in- dusiati gemmas formatas in pocula vini vetusti fre- quenter offerre.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I did not try the dining-room but went, knocking and looking in, to the drawing-room at the back. It was empty and orderly, with folded newspapers, a sewing-basket and a darning mushroom on a side-table—things that a masculine household must have. From here a door was open into the kitchen, which I had not seen before. With its wall-cupboards with frosted glass sliding doors, its stoneware sink, round-topped Electrolux fridge and green enamelled gas-range, it resembled a colour plate from my dead grandmother’s just post-war copy of Mrs Beeton; the plugs, which were of black Bakelite and only two-pinned, perfected the image. At a small table under the window Charles and Lewis evidently ate their meals. The pans and plates of a modest lunch stood untouched in the sink. I felt a strong desire to loiter and look, but also, in case I was observed, to appear not to. And I began to worry about Charles. If Lewis was not around the old fellow might have collapsed undiscovered. I had not noticed whether there were bells in the rooms. I might be alone in the house with a cat and a dead man. It was an idea I did not find wholly unattractive. I strolled back through the hall, glancing at the pictures; hesitating at the foot of the stairs I peered at a little sketch of a dragoman, just a few swift lines that denoted turban, smile, sword and curled-up shoes. As I turned I saw a figure move beside me. My heart leapt and continued to pound when I realised it was only myself swivelling towards the dim old mirror I had looked in before. The gloom made it more mysterious and nervousness quickened my reaction. I did not wait to look at myself, but started to climb the stairs. I never wore metal-tipped or noisy shoes, preferring to sneak around unheard. Still, the treads of the stairs themselves so moaned and cracked as I went up that there was no chance of being furtive and I climbed boldly, two at a time, to the first floor. In the silence as I stood at the top I heard another dull noise, faint but heavy, and the indistinct sound of a voice talking. It seemed to come from the room at the back of the house, the one above the drawing-room, which would very likely, I thought, be Charles’s own bedroom. I didn’t want to interrupt what might have been a private rite, but I acted on a more reasonable belief that something must be seriously amiss. When I pushed open the door and went in it was at first impossible to say which was really the case. ‘Charles,’ I said clearly.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I didn’t want to interrupt what might have been a private rite, but I acted on a more reasonable belief that something must be seriously amiss. When I pushed open the door and went in it was at first impossible to say which was really the case. ‘Charles,’ I said clearly. ‘For God’s sake!’ The reply was desperate, muffled and close at hand. ‘Open the bloody door— please! ’ I can only have taken a second to work this out, but already there came the pent-up banging I’d heard before. I crossed the room to a smaller door whose handle I tried and a moment later turned its stiff brass key; it was a door which was rarely locked, but which, gratifyingly, still could be if need be. Charles was not gratified. He had retreated to the other side of what was evidently a little dressing-room, with a chest-of-drawers, an open wardrobe, and a corner washbasin against which he leant, red in the face, his tie and collar undone, a look of both apprehension and fury on his face. He made me think of a boxer, penned in his corner, honour-bound to make a final and fatal sortie. He had no idea who I was. ‘Where’s Lewis?’ Though questioning me he seemed to look through me. He was out of breath. ‘Has Graham gone?’ I went towards him with my arms open, but he stepped forward with no purpose of greeting or reconciliation. He lurched past me, though I turned to support him and in the event merely pawed at his shoulder, and followed him closely into the bedroom. There he grappled with a chair which was lying on its side on the floor; the stooping and the effort seemed too much and I stepped around him to help. ‘Charles, it’s William.’ He took no notice of this until he had righted the chair, and dropped on to it heavily. Then he looked at me silently and intently. ‘They’ve gone,’ he said, after a while in which I squatted in front of him and watched him with an anxious smile. ‘They locked me in there—or Lewis did. He didn’t want me to get involved. Look at this room.’ Already Charles was struggling to his feet, though he reached towards me, and I felt he had gone through a transformation, and while doubting its logic, accepted that I was there. I held his considerable weight against me, while his left arm draped round my shoulders and we tottered towards the bed like a pair of drunks. When we got to it he held out his other arm in an eloquent gesture of amazement and desolation.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I did not trust what I heard myself sa ying. In very little that I heard did I hear anything that reflected any thing which I knew, or had endured, of lif e. My mother and my father, my brothers and my sisters were not present at the tables at which I sat down, and no one in the company had ever heard of them. My own beginnings, or instincts, began to shift as nervously as the cigarette smoke that wavered around my head. I was not trying to hold on to my wretch edness. On the contrary, if my poverty was coming, at last, to an end, so much the better, and it wasn't happening a mo ment too soon-and yet, I felt an increasing chill, as though the rest of my lif e would have to be lived in silence. I think it may have been my own obsession with the Mc Carthy phenomenon which caused me to suspect the impo tence and narcissism of so many of the people whose names I had respected. I had never had any occasion to judge them, as it were, intimately. For me, simply, McCarthy was a coward and a bully, with no claim to honor, nor any claim to hon orable attention. For me, emphatically, there were not two sides to this dubious coin, and, as to his balef ul and dangerous effect, there could be no question at al l. Yet, they spent hours debating whether or not McCarthy was an enemy of domestic liberties. I couldn't but wonder what conceivable further proof they were awaiting: I thought of German Jews sitting around debating whether or not Hitler was a threat to their lives until the debate was summarily resolved for them by a knocking at the door. Nevertheless, this learned, civilized, in tellectual -lib eral debate cheerfully raged in its vacuum, while every hour brought more distress and confusion-and dis honor-to the coun try they claimed to love. The pretext for all this, of course, was the necessity of "containing" Com munism, which, they unblushingly informed me, was a threat to the "f ree" world. I did not say to what extent this free world menaced me, and millions like me. But I wondered how the justification of blatant and mindless tyranny, on any level, TAKE ME TO THE WA TER 373 could operate in the interests of liberty, and I wondered what interior, unspoken urgencies of these people made necessary so thoroughly unattractive a delusion.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The prayer meeting had originally been the brain storm of R. , a white student, foreign-born, very measured in speech, very direct in manner. There was first some uncertainty as to whether the prayer meeting should be held at all because of the pressure of exams and the homegoing plans of students, many of whom would have departed by Thursday. There had also been the hope originally, since CORE is by now a dirty word in Tallahassee, of getting broader commu nity support by asking the ministers of all faiths to give the news to their congregations and urge them to join the stu dents. It was possible to gauge the depth of official hostility and community apathy by the discussion this suggestion pre cipitated. OTH ER ESS AYS One of the Negro students suggested that not all the min isters were to be trusted; one of them would surely tccl it his duty to warn the police. A white coed student protested this vehemently, it being her view that there was no possible harm in an open prayer meeting-" lt's just a y'all-come prayer meeting!"-and refused to believe that the police would not protect such spectacular piety. And this brought up the whole question of strategy: If the police were not warned, then the prayer meeting would have to be described as spontaneous. "But you can't," said a Negro coed, "decide to have a spon taneous prayer meeting. Especially not on the steps of the Capitol on Thursday at one o'clock." "Oh, it'll be sponta neous enough," said another student-my notes do not in dicate his color-"by the time we start praying." D., a white coed, was against informing the police: "We love them dearly," she said with rather heavy sarcasm, "but I don't want them to get the impression that I'm asking their permission to do anything." "We're not asking their permission," said another white student. "We have every right to have prayer meeting and we're just informing them of it." "There's no reason," said the girl who felt that the police would not pos sibly do anything to peacefully praying people, "f or them not to treat us just like they'd treat any other group of citizens." This led to rather cynical laughter and someone, looking around the room, otl cred to name "oh, about twenty-five multicolored reasons." In all this there was no question of tear of the police; there was simply no belief whatever that they would act impartially or "that they might turn out," as Reverend Steele unconvincingly suggested, "to protect us."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  They are only be ginning to realize that the world is difficult and dangerous, that they arc, themselves, tormentingly complex and that the years that stretch before them promise to be more dangerous than the years that arc behind. And they always seem to be wrestling, in a private chamber to which no grownup has ac cess, with monumental decisions. Everyone laughs at himself once he has come through this THEY CAN 'T TURN BACK 629 storm, but it is borne in on me, suddenly, that it is a storm, a storm, moreover, that not everyone survives and through which no one comes unscathed. Decisions made at this time always seem and, in fact, nearly always turn out to be decisions that determine the course and quality of a lif e. I wonder for the first time what it can be like to be making, in the adoles cent dark, such decisions as this generation of students has made. They are in battle with more things than can be named. Not only must they summon up the force to face the law and the lawless-who are not, right now in Tallahassee, easily dis tinguishable-or the prospect of jail or the possibility of being maimed or killed; they are also dealing with problems yet more real, more dangerous and more personal than these: who they are, what they want, how they are to achieve what they want and how they are to reconcile their responsibilities to their parents with their responsibilities to themselves. Add to this exams; the peculiar difficulty of studying at all in so electric a situation; the curious demoralization that can occur in a youngster who is unable to respect his college president; and the enormous questions that, however dealt with or sup pressed, must live in the mind of a student who is already, legally, a convict and is on a year's probation. These are all very serious matters, made the more serious by the fact that the students have so few models to emulate. The young grow up by watching and imitating their elders-it is their universal need to be able to revere them; but I submit that in this country today it is quite impossible for a young person to be speeded toward his maturity in this way. (This impossibility contains the key to what has been called "the beat genera tion.") What the elders have that they can offer the young is evidence, in their own flesh, of defeats endured, disasters passed and triumphs won. This is their moral auth ority, which, however mystical it may sound, is the only authority that en dures; and it is through dealing with this authority that the young catch their first glimpse of what has been called the historical perspective.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  They would tell her how much they hate her except for me. I keep them apart. You see, my mom is pretty isolated. She would like a relationship with my dad and stepmother but there is nothing there for her. I don’t want her to find out what they really think. So I keep it cool and I always, always watch what I say. And we manage.” This was the first inkling I had that the “don’t fight” rule had limitations. In their behavior, Lisa’s parents had had the most civilized divorce of all the couples in the study. If parents got grades for how they handled divorce and the postdivorce years, these people would have earned an A plus. There was no open fighting during the marriage and there was almost none after it ended. An only child, Lisa continued to see both parents in ways that felt fair and equitable to everyone. Sometimes her father and stepmother babysat her in her mother’s home, which remained her primary residence. Both parents were devoted to their daughter. Money was adequate in both homes and included college support and vacation trips. Although her mother and stepmother experienced the kinds of ongoing tensions I just described, there was never any open conflict. Neither woman expected Lisa to take sides and both went out of their way not to criticize any family member. But there are things that adults cannot hide from children. Continuing tensions between ex-partners and stepparents are conveyed directly to children via countless nonverbal signals. A roll of the eyes, a shrug of the shoulders, an edge in the voice are enough to tell any child the truth—these adults are getting along on my behalf but they’re pretending. Lisa grew up aware of their intense enduring anger and her mother’s hurt. Good intentions can always become undermined by the frailties of human nature and its passions. Except for her continued worry about her mother and an occasional mother’s “boyfriend who drives me up the wall,” Lisa enjoyed her adolescence. Unlike children living under strict court-ordered visiting schedules, she had lots of choices about what she could do and when. Her father called her every week to arrange what they would do, according to her preferences—which included not seeing him if other activities were more desirable. She had many girlfriends at high school and prided herself on her skill in making friends. She grew up slowly. In fact, she seemed to be holding back from involvement with boyfriends. Unlike many in her generation, she was in no hurry to have a sexual relationship. The one boy she fell in love with from afar, she said sadly, “didn’t like me back.” School was enjoyable for Lisa; she got good grades and did well in sports and dance. She avoided drugs and alcohol. “They just don’t interest me,” she announced.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  There was a demarcation line, to be walked every hour of every day. The demarcation line was my apprehension of, and, therefore, my responsibility for, my own experience: the chill ing vice versa of what I had made of my experience and what that experience had made of me. I will owe the French a debt forever, for example, if only because, during one of my pas sionately insane barroom brawls, I suddenly realized that the Frenchman I was facing had not the remotest notion-and could not possibly have had the remotest notion-{)f the ten sian in my mind between Or/Cans, a French city, and New Orleans, where my father had been born, between lottis, the coin, and Louis, the French king, for whom was named the state of Louisiana, the result of which cele brated purchase had been the death of so many black people. Neither did any Af rican, as far as I could tell, at that moment of my own time and space, have any notion of this tension and torment. But what I began to see was that, if they had no notion of my torment, I certainly had no notion of theirs, and that I was treating people exactly as I had been treated at home. In order to keep the faith- climbing Jacob's ladder-! came home, to go to Little Rock and Charlotte, and so forth and so on, in 1957, and was based in America from 1957 to 1970. I have been in and out of my country, in and out of various cauldrons, for a very long time, long enough to see the doc trine of white supremacy return, like a plague, to the continent which spawned it. This is not a bitter statement. It comes, to tell the truth, out of love, for I am thinking of the children. I watch-here, for example -French and Algerian children trying to become friends with each other, reacting to, but not 778 OTH ER ES SAYS yet understanding, the terrors of their parents, and very far indeed from having any notion of the terrors of the state. They have no way of knowing that the state is menaced and shaken to the degree, precisely, that they, themselves, the pre sumed victims, or at least, the wards of the state, make man ifest their identity-wh ich is not what it might be, either for better or for worse, if they were still in Algeria. They cannot possibly know that they, ex-s lave and ex- master, cannot be used as their fathers were used-that all identities, in short, arc in question, arc about to be made new.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The entire purpose of society is to create a bulwark against the inner and 669 670 OTH ER ES SAYS the outer chaos, literally, in order to make lif e bearable and to keep the human race alive. And it is absolutely inevitable that when a tradition has been evolved, whatever the tradition is, that the people, in general, will suppose it to have existed from before the beginning of time and will be most unwilling and indeed unable to conceive of any changes in it. They do not know how they will live without those traditions which have given them their identity. Their reaction, when it is sug gested that they can or that they must, is panic. And we see this panic, I think, everywhere in the world today, from the streets of our own New Orleans to the grisly battleground of Algeria. And a higher level of consciousness among the people is the only hope we have, now or in the future, of minimizing the human damage. The artist is distinguished from all the other responsible actors in society-the politicians, legislators, educators, sci entists, et cetera-by the fact that he is his own test tube, his own la boratory, working according to very rigorous rules, however unstated these may be, and cannot allow any consid eration to supersede his responsibility to reveal all that he can possibly discover concerning the mystery of the human being. Society must accept some things as real; but he must always know that the visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and all our achievement rests on things unseen. A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven . One cannot possibly build a school, teach a child, or drive a car without taking some things for granted. The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the an swer hides. I seem to be making extremely grandiloquent claims for a breed of men and women historically despised while living and acclaimed when saf ely dead. But, in a way, the belated honor which all societies tender their artists proves the reality of the point I am trying to make. I am really trying to make clear the nature of the artist's responsibility to his society. The pe culiar nature of this responsibility is that he must never cease warring with it, for its sake and for his own. For the truth, in spite of appearances and all our hopes, is that everything is THE CR EA TIVE PR OCESS 671 always changing and the measure of our maturity as nations and as men is how well prepared we are to meet these changes and, further, to use them for our health.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This was a supposition which the modern era, which was to bring about such vast changes in the aims and dimensions of power, put to death; it only begins, in unprec edented fashion, and with dreadful implications, to be resur rected today. But even had this supposition persisted with undiminished force, the American Negro slave could not have used it to lend his condition dignity, for the reason that this supposition rests on another: that the slave in exile yet remains related to his past, has some means-if only in memory-of revering and sustaining the f( >rms of his former life, is able, in short, to maintain his identity. This was not the case with the American Negro slave. He is unique among the black men of the world in that his past was taken fro m him, almost literally, at one blow. One won ders what on earth the first slave found to say to the first dark STRANGER IN THE VILLAGE 12 5 child he bore. I am told that there are Haitians able to trace their ancestry back to African kings, but any American Negro wishing to go back so fa r will find his journey through time abruptly arrested by the signature on the bill of sale which served as the entrance paper for his ancestor. At the time-to say nothing of the circumstances--of the enslavement of the captive black man who was to become the American Negro, there was not the remotest possibility that he would ever take power fr om his master's hands. There was no reason to sup pose that his situation would ever change, nor was there, shortly, anything to indicate that his situation had ever been different. It was his necessity, in the words of E. Franklin Frazier, to find a "motive fo r living under American culture or die." The identity of the American Negro comes out of this extreme situation, and the evolution of this identity was a source of the most intolerable anxiety in the minds and the lives of his masters. F�o r the history of the....AmeriG&n-Negro_is_rnliq.ue---a.lso in this: that the question of his humaniry:,_an<iof.hi•>-figi:J-ts--th(}fe fo re as a human being, becam e_Lb.urn.ing_Qn c...ior.... s .cyJ.:r..al generations of Americans, so burning a question tha!_!Lulti m;rrcty""oecarrfCorre-oriliose used to .divide the. nation. It is our-ofthinw·gun1Cnt1nat the vem)fi1of the - epTtllet�N�er! is derived. It is an argument which Europe has never had, and hence Europe quite sincerely fa ils to understand how or why the argument arose in the first place, why its ctfects are so frequently disastrous and always so unpredictable, why it re fuses until today to be entirely settled. Europe's black posses sions remained-and do remain-in Europe's colonies, at which remove they represented no threat whatever to Euro pean identity. If they posed any problem at all tor the Eu ropean conscience, it was a problem which remained com fortingly abstract: in effect, the black man, as a man, did not exist for Europe.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  What hap pened in defense plants and army camps had repercussions, naturally, in every Negro ghetto. The situation in Harlem had grown bad enough fo r clergymen, policemen, educators, pol iticians, and social workers to assert in one breath that there was no "crime wave" and to otTer, in the very next breath, suggestions as to how to combat it. These suggestions always seemed to involve playgrounds, despite the fa ct that racial skirmishes were occurring in the playgrounds, too. Playground or not, crime wave or not, the Harlem police fo rce had been augmented in March, and the unrest grew-perhaps, in fa ct, partly as a result of the ghetto's instinctive hatred of police men. Perhaps the most revealing news item, out of the steady parade of reports of muggings, stabbings, shootings, assaults, gang wars, and accusations of police brutality, is the item con cerning six Negro girls who set upon a white girl in the sub way because, as they all too accurately put it, she was stepping on their toes. Indeed she was, all over the nation. I had never before been so aware of policemen, on fo ot, on horseback, on corners, everywhere, always two by two. Nor had I ever been so aware of small knots of people. They were on stoops and on corners and in doorways, and what was striking about them, I think, was that they did not seem to be talking. Never, when I passed these groups, did the usual sound of a curse or a laugh ring out and neither did there seem to be any hum of gossip. There was certainly, on the other hand, occurring between them communication extraor dinarily intense. Another thing that was striking was the un expected diversity of the people who made up these groups.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  His voice was light and even rather sweet, with a Southern melody in it; his body was more round than square, more square than tall; and his grin was more boyish than I had expected, and more dif fident. He had a trick, when he greeted me, of saying, "He y, boy!" with a kind of pleased, surprised expression on his face. It was very friendly, and it was also, faintly , mockingly con spiratorial-as though we were two black boys, in league against the world, and had just managed to spirit away several loads of watermelon. We sat in the living room and Richar d brought out a bottle of bourbon and ice and glasses. Ellen Wright was somewhere in the back with the baby, and made only one brief appearance near the end of the evening. I did not drink in those days, did not know how to drink, and I was terrified that the liqu or, on my empty stomach, would have the most disastrous 25+ NOBOD Y KN OWS MY NAME consequences. Richard talked to me or, rather, drew me out on the sub ject of the novel I was working on then. I was so afraid of tailing off my chair and so anxious fi>r him to be interested in me, that I told him far more about the novel than I, in fact, knew about it, madly improvisi ng, one jump ahead of the bourbon, on all the themes which cluttered up my mind. I am sure that Richard realized this, for he seemed to be amused by me . But I think he liked me. I know that I liked him, then, and later, and all the time. But I also know that, later on, he did not believe this. He agreed, that night, to read the sixty or seventy pages I had done on my novel as soon as I could send them to him. I didn't dawdle, naturall y, about getting the pages in the mail, and Richard commented very kindly and favorably on them, and his support helped me to win the Eugene F. Saxton Fel lowship. He was very proud of me then, and I was puffed up with pleasure that he was proud, and was determined to make him prouder still.