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 Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Anyone else might have been little impressed by the menace; what would I have to fear as soon as I found the means to prove that what I had just suffered had been the work not of a tribunal but of criminals? But my weakness, my natural timidity, the frightful memory of what I had undergone at Paris and recollections of the chateau de Bressac Ä it all stunned me, terrified me; I thought only of flight, and was far more stirred by anguish at having to abandon an innocent victim to those two villains, who were without doubt ready to immolate her, than I was touched by my own ills. More irritated, more afflicted morally than in physical pain, I set off at once; but, completely unoriented, never stopping to ask my way, I did but swing in a circle around Paris and on the fourth day of traveling I found I had got no further than Lieursaint. Knowing this road would lead me to the southern provinces, I resolved to follow it and try to reach those distant regions, fancying to myself that the peace and calm so cruelly denied me in those parts of France where I had grown up were, perhaps, awaiting me in others more remote; fatal error! how much there remained of grief and pain yet to experience. Chapter 19Whatever had been my trials until that time, at least I was in possession of my innocence. Merely the victim of a few monsters' attempts, I was still able to consider myself more or less in the category of an honest girl. The fact was I had never been truly soiled save by a rape operated five years earlier, and its traces had healed... a rape consummated at an instant when my numbed state had not even left me the faculty of sensation. Other than that, what was there with which I could reproach myself? Nothing, oh! nothing, doubtless; and my heart was chaste, I was overweeningly proud of it, my presumption was to be punished; the outrages awaiting me were to be such that in a short while it would no longer be possible, however slight had been my participation, for me to form the same comforting ideas in the depths of my heart. This time I had my entire fortune about me; that is to say, about a hundred crowns, comprising the total of what I had saved from Bressac's clutches and earned from Rodin. In my extreme misery I was able to feel glad that this money, at least, had not been taken from me; I flattered myself with the notion that through the frugality, temperance, and economy to which I was accustomed, this sum would amply suffice until I was so situated as to be able to find a place of some sort.

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

  "She groaned, but more with pain than with pleasure. I groped my way in the dark and gave another thrust, but my battering ram only crushed its head the more against the stronghold. I was in doubt whether I had not better put her on her back and force my entrance in real battle array, but as I pulled back I felt that I was almost overcome—no, not almost—but quite so, for I squirted her all over with my creamy, life-giving fluid. She, poor thing, felt nothing, or very little, whilst I, unnerved as I had been till then, and exhausted by my nightly rambles, fell almost senseless by her side. She looked at me for a moment, then sprang up like a cat, caught up the key that had fallen out of my pocket, and with a bound—was out of the door. "Being too jaded to follow her, I was, a few moments afterwards, fast asleep; the first sound rest I had had for a long time. "For a few days I was somewhat quieted, I even gave up attending the concerts and haunts where I could see Réné; I almost began to think that in time I might get indifferent, and forget him. "I was too eager, I endeavoured so hard to blot him at once from my mind, that my very anxiety prevented me from succeeding in doing so; I was so frightened not to be able to forget him, that that fear itself always brought his image to my mind." "And your girl?" "If I am not mistaken she felt for me what I felt for Teleny. She deemed it her bounden duty to avoid me, she even tried to despise me, to hate me, but she could not succeed in doing so." "But why to hate you?" "She seemed to understand that if she was still a virgin, it was simply because I cared so little for her; I had felt some pleasure with her, and that was more than enough for me. "Had I loved and deflowered her, she would only have loved me more tenderly for the wound I had inflicted upon her. "When I asked her if she was not grateful to me for having respected her maidenhood, she simply answered, 'No!' and it was a very decided 'no' indeed. 'Besides,' added she, 'you did nothing, simply because you could do nothing.' "'I could not?' "'No.' "A scuffle ensued again. She was once more locked within my arms and we were wrestling like two prize fighters, with as much eagerness though surely with less skill. She was a muscular little vixen, by no means weak; moreover she had begun to understand the zest which fighting gives to the victory. "It was a real pleasure to feel her body palpitating against mine; and though she was longing to yield, it was only after much ado that I could get my mouth on her's.

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

  “In spite of that, I was not at ease with the musician or with her during dinner-time and the time that elapsed before the beginning of the music. Involuntarily I followed each of their gestures and looks. The dinner, like all dinners, was tiresome and conventional. Not long afterward the music began. He went to get his violin; my wife advanced to the piano, and rummaged among the scores. Oh, how well I remember all the details of that evening! I remember how he brought the violin, how he opened the box, took off the serge embroidered by a lady’s hand, and began to tune the instrument. I can still see my wife sit down, with a false air of indifference, under which it was plain that she hid a great timidity, a timidity that was especially due to her comparative lack of musical knowledge. She sat down with that false air in front of the piano, and then began the usual preliminaries,—the pizzicati of the violin and the arrangement of the scores. I remember then how they looked at each other, and cast a glance at their auditors who were taking their seats. They said a few words to each other, and the music began. They played Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata.’ Do you know the first presto? Do you know it? Ah!” . . . Posdnicheff heaved a sigh, and was silent for a long time.

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

  “And yet the transition state is terrible. People feel that haphazard sin is inadmissible. It is necessary in some way or other to regulate the sexual relations; but there exists no other foundation than the old one, in which nobody longer believes? People marry in the old fashion, without believing in what they do, and the result is falsehood, violence. When it is falsehood alone, it is easily endured. The husband and wife simply deceive the world by professing to live monogamically. If they really are polygamous and polyandrous, it is bad, but acceptable. But when, as often happens, the husband and the wife have taken upon themselves the obligation to live together all their lives (they themselves do not know why), and from the second month have already a desire to separate, but continue to live together just the same, then comes that infernal existence in which they resort to drink, in which they fire revolvers, in which they assassinate each other, in which they poison each other.” All were silent, but we felt ill at ease. “Yes, these critical episodes happen in marital life. For instance, there is the Posdnicheff affair,” said the lawyer, wishing to stop the conversation on this embarrassing and too exciting ground. “Have you read how he killed his wife through jealousy?” The lady said that she had not read it. The nervous gentleman said nothing, and changed color. “I see that you have divined who I am,” said he, suddenly, after a pause. “No, I have not had that pleasure.” “It is no great pleasure. I am Posdnicheff.” New silence. He blushed, then turned pale again. “What matters it, however?” said he. “Excuse me, I do not wish to embarrass you.” And he resumed his old seat. CHAPTER III. I resumed mine, also. The lawyer and the lady whispered together. I was sitting beside Posdnicheff, and I maintained silence. I desired to talk to him, but I did not know how to begin, and thus an hour passed until we reached the next station. There the lawyer and the lady went out, as well as the clerk. We were left alone, Posdnicheff and I. “They say it, and they lie, or they do not understand,” said Posdnicheff. “Of what are you talking?” “Why, still the same thing.” He leaned his elbows upon his knees, and pressed his hands against his temples. “Love, marriage, family,—all lies, lies, lies.” He rose, lowered the lamp-shade, lay down with his elbows on the cushion, and closed his eyes. He remained thus for a minute. “Is it disagreeable to you to remain with me, now that you know who I am?” “Oh, no.” “You have no desire to sleep?” “Not at all.” “Then do you want me to tell you the story of my life?”

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  My absolute biggest concern was to make Arnold’s comics look authentic. I was afraid my work would look too polished and professional, or maybe too goofy, but I also didn’t want to dumb it down or stiffen it up. I briefly tried to draw like some of my teenage boy students, but that didn’t work at all—you could tell I was trying too hard and it was obvious that it wasn’t my style. So I talked about it with Sherman, and he thought it’d be fine if I just drew like me. What’s the most difficult part of the process: sketching the artwork or inking? My process for this book was different from usual. In most of my work, doing the thumbnails is hard (writing and drawing my brainstorming ideas), sketching is easier (penciling and polishing up what I’ve laid out in the thumbnails), and inking is easiest (I use a brush and india ink). For this book, the thumbnails were hard because I had to stay in Arnold’s mindset, and I was interpreting someone else’s work. Sketching was weird because I had to remember to keep the looseness of the thumbnails, and inking was REALLY HARD! The drawings needed to look like Arnold just sat down and drew them, boom. This may sound counterintuitive, but it takes way more concentration and confidence to make fast lines and swoops than my usual slow and deliberate inking. Also, Arnold wouldn’t use a brush in his sketchbook, so I used a felt-tip pen. So not only was I using an unfamiliar tool, I was trying to make labored drawings look spontaneous. I got cramps in my hand a lot. Why did you use so many different drawing styles? I used three drawing styles. In my own sketchbooks (and scraps of paper and backs of envelopes), I use different styles for different purposes, and I felt that Arnold would, too. Arnold’s artwork needed to span different situations and moods, so his drawing style needed change as well. [image "A drawing of a pair of simple drawings used as a base for final illustrations within the book." file=image_rsrc4TV.jpg] First, the more scribbled-looking illustrations and comics suggest that Arnold is jotting down his thoughts in an immediate way, like he’d just had an idea and quickly wrote it down. Most of the artwork is like that. Second, the slightly more realistic cartoons, like the annotated portraits of his family, suggest that he’s giving more thought to what he’s doing. Certain ideas would have been rumbling around his head and were well-developed by the time he put them on the page.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  “You stitch me up,” I said. “What?” “You stitch me up. I want to play tonight.” “I can’t do that, man. It’s your face. I might leave a scar or something.” “Then I’ll look tougher,” I said. “Come on, man.” So Eugene did it. He gave me three stitches in my forehead and it hurt like crazy, but I was ready to play the second half. We were down by five points. Rowdy had been an absolute terror, scoring twenty points, grabbing ten rebounds, and stealing the ball seven times. “That kid is good,” Coach said. “He’s my best friend,” I said. “Well, he used to be my best friend.” “What is he now?” “I don’t know.” We scored the first five points of the third quarter, and then Coach sent me into the game. I immediately stole a pass and drove for a layup. Rowdy was right behind me. I jumped into the air, heard the curses of two hundred Spokanes, and then saw only a bright light as Rowdy smashed his elbow into my head and knocked me unconscious. Okay, I don’t remember anything else from that night. So everything I tell you now is secondhand information. After Rowdy knocked me out, both of our teams got into a series of shoving matches and push-fights. The tribal cops had to pull twenty or thirty adult Spokanes off the court before any of them assaulted a teenage white kid. Rowdy was given a technical foul. So we shot two free throws for that. I didn’t shoot them, of course, because I was already in Eugene’s ambulance, with my mother and father, on the way to Spokane. After we shot the technical free throws, the two referees huddled. They were two white dudes from Spokane who were absolutely terrified of the wild Indians in the crowd and were willing to do ANYTHING to make them happy. So they called technical fouls on four of our players for leaving the bench and on Coach for unsportsmanlike conduct. Yep, five technicals. Ten free throws. After Rowdy hit the first six free throws, Coach cursed and screamed, and was thrown out of the game. Wellpinit ended up winning by thirty points. I ended up with a minor concussion. Yep, three stitches and a bruised brain. My mother was just beside herself. She thought I’d been murdered. “I’m okay,” I said. “Just a little dizzy.” “But your hydrocephalus,” she said. “Your brain is already damaged enough.” “Gee, thanks, Mom,” I said. Of course, I was worried that I’d further damaged my already damaged brain; the doctors said I was fine. Mostly fine. Later that night, Coach talked his way past the nurses and into my room. My mother and father and grandma were asleep in their chairs, but I was awake. “Hey, kid,” Coach said, keeping his voice low so he wouldn’t wake my family. “Hey, Coach,” I said. “Sorry about that game,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”

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

  PILLS The most fundamental change in the experience of human sexuality over the last century and a half has been the development of reliable methods of contraception. A new mid-nineteenth-century para-reproductive technology, supplanting centuries of rudimentary contraceptive devices, was based on a boom in Brazilian rubber production. Contraceptive methods radically diversified during the twentieth century, with a crucial extension from mechanical into medical means in the late 1950s. [7] Now contraceptives are readily available to anyone throughout most of the world. The result is that most sexual encounters in the developed world today are non-reproductive – heterosexual as well as homosexual, within marriage as outside it. Mutual pleasure, or maybe pleasure for one partner at least, has trumped procreation, which would not please either Pythagoreans or Clement of Alexandria. Such mutuality may recall Paul of Tarsus’s notion of the ‘marital debt’, but contraception knows no marital boundaries. Mainstream Protestantism worldwide has largely accepted this development as unavoidable and not necessarily sinful; successively modified official statements moved from blanket condemnation to cautious acceptance, a process that unfolded remarkably quickly in the first half of the twentieth century. The classic, and indeed puzzlingly precocious, example is the Anglican Communion, through the statements of successive Lambeth Conferences between 1908 and 1930. In 1908, the bishops assembled at Lambeth Palace predictably recorded their alarm at ‘the growing practice of the artificial restriction of the family, and earnestly call[ed] upon all Christian people to discountenance the use of all artificial means of restriction as demoralising to character and hostile to national welfare.’ Speaker after speaker condemned contraception as unnatural, not to mention a danger to health, rather as if it had been a form of masturbation. There was also a good deal of favourable reference to eugenics in the speeches, for instance in warnings of the diminishing birth rate of British ‘superior stocks’. [8] Twelve years later in 1920, the next Conference still spoke in similar terms of ‘the grave dangers – physical, moral and religious’ of contraception, and with a reminiscence of the ancient ‘Alexandrian rule’ pronounced the primary purpose for marriage as ‘the continuation of the race through the gift and heritage of children’. Yet the bishops could hardly avoid noticing how opinions in the medical profession were shifting, or that campaigners for birth control were gaining confidence and national attention. In the following year, no less a figure than King George V’s personal physician, Bernard Lord Dawson, President of the Royal College of Physicians, bluntly warned the Anglican Church Congress in Birmingham that ‘birth control is here to stay’. His exalted status was probably only one factor in the Church leadership listening to him: what may be the key to the bishops’ growing change of stance was the fact that Dawson’s informed opinions were part of a conversation among former public schoolboys who moved in the same social world.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  So it was necessary to take measures, lest some unpleasant nonsense result. ‘To make a call? Well, then make your call,’ the sick man agreed sadly, and suddenly begged passionately: ‘But I implore you, before you go, at least believe that the devil exists! I no longer ask you for anything more. Mind you, there exists a seventh proof of it, the surest of all! And it is going to be presented to you right now!’ ‘Very good, very good,’ Berlioz said with false tenderness and, winking to the upset poet, who did not relish at all the idea of guarding the mad German, set out for the exit from the Ponds at the corner of Bronnaya and Yermolaevsky Lane. And the professor seemed to recover his health and brighten up at once. ‘Mikhail Alexandrovich!’ he shouted after Berlioz. The latter gave a start, looked back, but reassured himself with the thought that the professor had also learned his name and patronymic from some newspaper. Then the professor called out, cupping his hands like a megaphone: ‘Would you like me to have a telegram sent at once to your uncle in Kiev?’ And again Berlioz winced. How does the madman know about the existence of a Kievan uncle? That has certainly never been mentioned in any newspapers. Oh-oh, maybe Homeless is right after all? And suppose his papers are phoney? Ah, what a strange specimen . . . Call, call! Call at once! They’ll quickly explain him! And, no longer listening to anything, Berlioz ran on. Here, just at the exit to Bronnaya, there rose from a bench to meet the editor exactly the same citizen who in the sunlight earlier had formed himself out of the thick swelter. Only now he was no longer made of air, but ordinary, fleshly, and Berlioz clearly distinguished in the beginning twilight that he had a little moustache like chicken feathers, tiny eyes, ironic and half drunk, and checkered trousers pulled up so high that his dirty white socks showed. Mikhail Alexandrovich drew back, but reassured himself by reflecting that it was a stupid coincidence and that generally there was no time to think about it now. ‘Looking for the turnstile, citizen?’ the checkered type inquired in a cracked tenor. ‘This way, please! Straight on and you’ll get where you’re going. How about a little pint pot for my information . . . to set up an ex-choirmaster! . . .’ Mugging, the specimen swept his jockey’s cap from his head. Berlioz, not stopping to listen to the cadging and clowning choirmaster, ran up to the turnstile and took hold of it with his hand. He turned it and was just about to step across the rails when red and white light splashed in his face. A sign lit up in a glass box: ‘Caution Tram-Car!’ And right then this tram-car came racing along, turning down the newly laid line from Yermolaevsky to Bronnaya.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Ivan inquired significantly, hoping to produce a great effect with his words. But the effect did not ensue, and Stravinsky quite simply asked the following question: ‘And who is this Annushka?’ This question upset Ivan a little; his face twitched. ‘Annushka is of absolutely no importance here,’ he said nervously. ‘Devil knows who she is. Just some fool from Sadovaya. What’s important is that he knew beforehand, you see, beforehand, about the sunflower oil! Do you understand me?’ ‘Perfectly,’ Stravinsky replied seriously and, touching the poet’s knee, added: ‘Don’t get excited, just continue.’ ‘To continue,’ said Ivan, trying to fall in with Stravinsky’s tone, and knowing already from bitter experience that only calm would help him, ‘so, then, this horrible type (and he’s lying that he’s a consultant) has some extraordinary power! . . . For instance, you chase after him and it’s impossible to catch up with him . . . And there’s also a little pair with him—good ones, too, but in their own way: some long one in broken glasses and, besides him, a cat of incredible size who rides the tram all by himself. And besides,’ interrupted by no one, Ivan went on talking with ever increasing ardour and conviction, ‘he was personally on Pontius Pilate’s balcony, there’s no doubt of it. So what is all this, eh? He must be arrested immediately, otherwise he’ll do untold harm.’ ‘So you’re trying to get him arrested? Have I understood you correctly?’ asked Stravinsky. ‘He’s intelligent,’ thought Ivan. ‘You’ve got to admit, even among intellectuals you come across some of rare intelligence, there’s no denying it,’ and he replied: ‘Quite correctly! And how could I not be trying, just consider for yourself! And meanwhile I’ve been forcibly detained here, they poke lamps into my eyes, give me baths, question me for some reason about my Uncle Fedya! . . . And he departed this world long ago! I demand to be released immediately!’ ‘Well, there, very nice, very nice!’ Stravinsky responded. ‘Now everything’s clear. Really, what’s the sense of keeping a healthy man in a clinic? Very well, sir, I’ll check you out of here right now, if you tell me you’re normal. Not prove, but merely tell. So, then, are you normal?’ Here complete silence fell, and the fat woman who had taken care of Ivan in the morning looked at the professor with awe. Ivan thought once again: ‘Positively intelligent!’ The professor’s offer pleased him very much, yet before replying he thought very, very hard, wrinkling his forehead, and at last said firmly: ‘I am normal.’ ‘Well, how very nice,’ Stravinsky exclaimed with relief, ‘and if so, let’s reason logically.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  SA: I’m a chronic rewriter. So the producers actually had to rein me in, to stick more with the book. I was willing to change everything. My first draft of the screenplay, it was set in an Amish community. JW: [Laughs] “The scene where Junior becomes a Jedi, we’re a little confused by...” SA: So I am perfectly willing to change everything, so long as it’s my decision. But they reined me back in, and it is very faithful to the book. JW: Oh, good. Can you imagine that first reader coming up to you and saying— SA: Saying, “I hate the movie, you broke my heart.” JW: “You’ve ruined your own book, Mister Alexie.” SA: It’s going to happen. And also in the Native American world, the Internet has made the tribalism and the tribal peer pressure even greater. The movie is going to become a big thing, a big cultural moment. And I can’t even imagine the ways in which it’s going to be judged harshly by the Native American intellectual world, who are going to be nitpicking it. I think of Thunder Boy Jr., my picture book which was published, and one page was about a kid dreaming of a powwow and there were critiques that it wasn’t an accurate representation of a powwow because there were three drums and animals were drumming. There’re not three drums at a powwow. JW: Do you know how hard it is to teach an animal to drum, to keep the same rhythm? SA: [Laughs] So at readings, I’ve been mocking those Native American critics, those fundamentalists, by saying, “I have to speak to all you non-Natives in the crowd that if you do happen to attend a powwow expecting—because of my picture book—to see a bear, a coyote, and a snake drumming, it’s not going to happen. Now, you might see three drummers nicknamed Bear, Coyote, and Snake, but you’re not going to see the actual animals, so I’m sorry for that cultural misrepresentation. I’m sorry if I’ve given you a stereotypical racist example of what could happen at a powwow.” True Diary got some of that also ten years ago, but the culture has changed so dramatically in terms of not just judging non-Native representations of Native-ness, but harshly judging Native representations of ourselves. This is my story, this stuff actually happened to me, and I get judged for telling the story of the real-life decisions I made. JW: I wondered about that, that’s another thing in the last decade, if Native American representations in films and books have changed in some way, or if those battles are still fought in the same way. SA: We’re still underrepresented in every art form.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Pick them off in the woods, lure them into the old minefields, torch their trucks. Numbers won’t matter once we have them in our territory. Stay and fight, God damn it. For Luz and Sanam and Paulette, for Gina and Mirsa and everyone else these miserable fucking Nazis have killed. Kill them. Kill them all and piss on their corpses.” There was a pause. A few women—Addison and Laurel’s little clique of normies who’d come in with the bunker exiles—looked disgusted and horrified. Fran’s heart fluttered. Her mouth was dry. I don’t want to be in a war. I don’t want to. I don’t. “We have options, ” cried Laurel, a skinny gray-haired woman in her mid-fifties who Fran knew only from sharing shifts cleaning the chicken coops and helping with laundry day at the river further inland. “We can hide, we can talk to them .” “No,” said Zia. “We can’t. They’re killing us. All of us.” Addison, no older than thirty and even thinner than Laurel, her milky right eye hidden behind a patch, cleared her throat. “I think there’s been more than a little alarmism about what may or may not be happening in Boston.” “One of them tried to kill me a few months ago, before we came here,” Fran blurted. She caught Beth’s eye across the room. “And they tried to kill me and Beth this summer.” We tried to kill them first, but that’s beside the point. Indi, seated at the table, looked around the room, then shrugged. “I say we do it. Lure them in and rip them apart.” Addison flushed angrily. Laurel said nothing. Most others murmured in agreement. Fran found herself wishing Nam-joo had come instead of these milquetoast people, women she’d seen only in passing in the Screw, traveling to and from the squash courts and the refectory in little knots of straight-haired cis isolation, all cold stares and brittle faces. The end had left them stiff and fragile, unable to accept that the suburbs were gone, that there was no more escaping the mob, no more pretending floors and toilets scrubbed themselves and reading about black people in monthly book clubs the way you’d read about the construction of London’s sewers or the history of the fur trade, as a kind of boutique curiosity, instead of actually talking to them. The rest was bickering over how soon they needed to finish the land wall and whose turn it was to clean the armory. And then, finally, little by little, it ebbed. People went out into the fading sunlight or upstairs to carry on their own insular versions of the conversation, or to fuck or cut or drink; something to clear the tension. Fran felt sick and drained, painfully conscious of her newness at the fort, her inability to intercede or help. Indi, charismatic and blunt, had stepped easily into its dynamic. Beth had her jokes. She and Robbie could fight.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  She’d stayed behind a few minutes at one of the checkpoint shacks near town, then rejoined them later, jogging down the beach. It gave Fran a bad feeling, just like the destroyer’s sharklike silhouette. Viv smiled. “Trade secret!” They were in the shadow of the ship’s aft section now, welders and wreckers in safety harnesses hanging from the rail above with their boots braced against the destroyer’s hull. Sparks struck the sand around them like little kamikaze fireflies. “Important part is, you send pork, hormones, whatever up the coast, we bring you pharmaceuticals—we’ve got a contact in Canada, still has a couple intact factories and supply networks. Sedatives, benzos, heavy-duty antibiotics. Get that little clinic you’ve got up to speed.” They walked through the relay lines of women in coveralls and heavy gloves passing scrap down to the barges, stopping every now and then to wait as slabs of metal—some still glowing at the edges—went from arm to arm ahead of them. The shadow of one of the deck guns swept over them as the crane swung it clear of Hyannis ’s bulk and toward a waiting truck bed. More women waiting to guide it in, lash it down with canvas straps. Intact and lethal under its snakeskin of flaking rust. What do you think Sophie would do? In the barges women stacked and sorted, distributing salvage so as not to upset the flat-bottomed craft. There were others, fully laden, which had already put out and were moving up the coast, against the current. They’d picked a bad time to launch. They were wasting fuel. The figures on their decks toiled in silence, rendered indistinguishable by distance. Think about it. There was a knock at the door of the Kennedy Room. “I’m not taking anyone right now,” said Beth from the little bathroom where she stood at the sink, dabbing concealer into the furrow of the scar that cut across her left cheek. Dani mixed it herself—out of what Beth didn’t know—and it looked like the real thing, but you had to redo it every couple hours or the color started to go off, like a bruised apple. One of her clients had said it made her look like she had a case of necrotizing fasciitis. She heard a key in the lock and turned from the mirror, panic and anger churning in the pit of her stomach along with her meager breakfast. A hard-boiled egg. A handful of wild blueberries. “I said I’m not taking anyone!”

• From The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967)

  consciousness. They become “subjectivized” in a double sense: Their “reality” becomes a “private” affair of individuals, that is, loses the quality of self-evident intersubjective plausibility —thus one “cannot really talk” about religion any more. And their “reality,” insofar as it is still maintained by the individual, is apprehended as being rooted within the consciousness of the individual rather than in any facticities of the external world—religion no longer refers to the cosmos or to history, but to individual Existenz or psychology. On the level of theorizing, this phenomenon serves to explain the current linkage of theology with the conceptual machineries of existentialism and psychologism. These conceptual machineries are, indeed, “empirically adequate” to the extent that they accurately reflect the “location” of religion in contemporary consciousness, which they merely serve to legitimate theoretically. It is important to understand that these legitimations are grounded in pretheoretical phenomena of consciousness, which are grounded in turn in the infrastructure of contemporary society. The individual in fact “discovers” religion within his own subjective consciousness, somewhere “deep down” within himself—the existentialist or Freudian theoretician then merely explicates this “discovery” on the level of theory. Once more, we would contend, we may predict these phenomena more accurately by means of economic data than by any “data” on, say, the workings of the “unconscious.” Indeed, the emergence of the “unconscious” itself may be analyzed in terms of specific structural developments of modern industrial society (17). In this way the demonopolization of religion is a social- structural as well as a social-psychological process. Religion no longer legitimates “the world.” Rather, different religious groups seek, by different means, to maintain their particular subworlds in the face of a plurality of competing subworlds. 176

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  I had followed the rules of fighting. I had behaved exactly the way I was supposed to behave. But these white boys had ignored the rules. In fact, they followed a whole other set of mysterious rules where people apparently DID NOT GET INTO FISTFIGHTS. “Wait,” I called after Roger. “What do you want?” Roger asked. “What are the rules?” “What rules?” I didn’t know what to say, so I just stood there red and mute like a stop sign. Roger and his friends disappeared. I felt like somebody had shoved me into a rocket ship and blasted me to a new planet. I was a freaky alien and there was absolutely no way to get home. Grandmother Gives Me Some Advice [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] I went home that night completely confused. And terrified. If I’d punched an Indian in the face, then he would have spent days plotting his revenge. And I imagined that white guys would also want revenge after getting punched in the face. So I figured Roger was going to run me over with a farm tractor or combine or grain truck or runaway pig. I wished Rowdy was still my friend. I could have sent him after Roger. It would have been like King Kong battling Godzilla. I realized how much of my self-worth, my sense of safety, was based on Rowdy’s fists. But Rowdy hated me. And Roger hated me. I was good at being hated by guys who could kick my ass. It’s not a talent you really want to have. My mother and father weren’t home, so I turned to my grandmother for advice. “Grandma,” I said. “I punched this big guy in the face. And he just walked away. And now I’m afraid he’s going to kill me.” “Why did you punch him?” she asked. “He was bullying me.” “You should have just walked away.” “He called me ‘chief.’ And ‘squaw boy.’ ” “Then you should have kicked him in the balls.” She pretended to kick a big guy in the crotch and we both laughed. “Did he hit you?” she asked. “No, not at all,” I said. “Not even after you hit him?” “Nope.” “And he’s a big guy?” “Gigantic. I bet he could take Rowdy down.” “Wow,” she said. “It’s strange, isn’t it?” I asked. “What does it mean?” Grandma thought hard for a while. “I think it means he respects you,” she said. “Respect? No way!” “Yes way! You see, you men and boys are like packs of wild dogs. This giant boy is the alpha male of the school, and you’re the new dog, so he pushed you around a bit to see how tough you are.” “But I’m not tough at all,” I said.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Roger the Giant was strong and fast and could dunk. I tried to stay out of way. I figured I’d die if he ran me over. But he just smiled all the time, played hard, and slapped me hard on the back. We all shot basketballs for a while. And then Coach stepped onto the court. Forty kids IMMEDIATELY stopped bouncing and shooting and talking. We were silent, SNAP, just like that. “I want to thank you all for coming out today,” Coach said. “There are forty of you. But we only have room for twelve on the varsity and twelve on the junior varsity.” I knew I wouldn’t make those teams. I was C squad material, for sure. “In other years, we’ve also had a twelve-man C squad,” Coach said. “But we don’t have the budget for it this year. That means I’m going to have to cut sixteen players today.” Twenty boys puffed up their chests. They knew they were good enough to make either the varsity or the junior varsity. The other twenty shook their heads. We knew we were cuttable. “I really hate to do this,” Coach said. “If it were up to me, I’d keep everybody. But it’s not up to me. So we’re just going to have to do our best here, okay? You play with dignity and respect, and I’ll treat you with dignity and respect, no matter what happens, okay?” We all agreed to that. “Okay, let’s get started,” Coach said. The first drill was a marathon. Well, not exactly a marathon. We had to run one hundred laps around the gym. So forty of us ran. And thirty-six of us finished. After fifty laps, one guy quit, and since quitting is contagious, three other boys caught the disease and walked off the court, too. I didn’t understand. Why would you try out for a basketball team if you didn’t want to run? I didn’t mind. After all, that meant only twelve more guys had to be cut. I only had to be better than twelve other guys. Well, we were good and tired after that run. And then Coach immediately had us playing full-court one-on-one. That’s right. FULL-COURT ONE-ON-ONE. That was torture. Coach didn’t break it down by position. So quick guards had to guard power forwards, and vice versa. Seniors had to guard freshmen, and vice versa. All-stars had to guard losers like me, and vice versa. Coach threw me the ball and said, “Go.” So I turned and dribbled straight down the court. A mistake. Roger easily poked the ball away and raced down toward his basket. Ashamed, I was frozen. “What are you waiting for?” Coach asked me. “Play some D.” Awake, I ran after Roger, but he dunked it before I was even close. “Go again,” Coach said. This time, Roger tried to dribble down the court.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  I was angry and jealous and absolutely terrified. “I can go! I can go!” Penelope said, ran back to me, and hugged me hard. An hour later, about twenty of us were sitting in a Denny’s in Spokane. Everybody ordered pancakes. I ordered pancakes for Penelope and me. I ordered orange juice and coffee and a side order of toast and hot chocolate and French fries, too, even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to pay for any of it. I figured it was my last meal before my execution, and I was going to have a feast. Halfway through our meal, I went to the bathroom. I thought maybe I was going to throw up, so I kneeled at the toilet. But I only retched a bit. Roger came into the bathroom and heard me. “Hey, Arnie,” he said. “Are you okay?” “Yeah,” I said. “I’m just tired.” “All right, man,” he said. “I’m happy you guys came tonight. You and Penultimate are a great couple, man.” “You think so?” “Yeah, have you done her yet?” “I don’t really want to talk about that stuff.” “Yeah, you’re right, dude. It’s none of my business. Hey, man, are you going to try out for basketball?” I knew that practice started in a week. I’d planned on playing. But I didn’t know if the Coach liked Indians or not. “Yeah,” I said. “Are you any good?” “I’m okay.” “You think you’re good enough to play varsity?” Roger asked. “No way,” I said. “I’m junior varsity all the way.” “All right,” Roger said. “It will be good to have you out there. We need some new blood.” “Thanks, man,” I said. I couldn’t believe he was so nice. He was, well, he was POLITE! How many great football players are polite? And kind? And generous like that? It was amazing. “Hey, listen,” I said. “The reason I was getting sick in there is—” I thought about telling him the whole truth, but I just couldn’t. “I bet you’re just sick with love,” Roger said. “No, well, yeah, maybe,” I said. “But the thing is, my stomach is all messed up because I, er, forgot my wallet. I left my money at home, man.” “Dude!” Roger said. “Man, don’t sweat it. You should have said something earlier. I got you covered.” He opened his wallet and handed me forty bucks. Holy, holy. What kind of kid can just hand over forty bucks like that? “I’ll pay you back, man,” I said. “Whenever, man, just have a good time, all right?” He slapped me on the back again. He was always slapping me on the back. We walked back to the table together, finished our food, and Roger drove me back to the school. I told them my dad was going to pick me up outside the gym. “Dude,” Roger said. “It’s three in the morning.” “It’s okay,” I said. “My dad works the swing shift. He’s coming here straight from work.”

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  Christians in the late 2nd century, it was a religion of women and slaves. • As we have already seen, although formal state persecutions were sporadic and interspersed with relatively long periods of neglect, they were direct attempts to suppress the movement by violence and even death. The very uncertainty of the breakout of persecution was a o contributing factor to the tension felt by Christians during these centuries. It could happen suddenly and without warning. The actual number of Christians killed is not the whole story; o the oppression of believers included the expropriation of property, economic marginalization, exile, and social ostracism. • Two responses to this context of tribulation characterize the 2nd and 3rd centuries: martyrdom and apologetic. Both had roots in Judaism, and each developed in distinctive ways during these centuries when Christians endured repression. The Tradition of Martyrdom • The term “martyr” (martys) means “witness,” and the ideal of witnessing to one’s convictions even to the point of death arose within Judaism; for Christ-believers, martyrdom found its perfect realization in the innocent suffering and death of Jesus. • In the early 2nd century B.C.E., the Maccabees resisted efforts by the Syrian king Antiochus IV Epiphanes to impose syncretistic worship, symbolized by the eating of pork forbidden by Torah. The elderly Eleazar and seven sons with their mother publicly o refused to submit, even when threatened by death, and were executed one after the other. Their witness to Torah was also a witness to the fidelity of God o and to faith in a future resurrection: God will reward those who honor him. The fourth son cries out before his execution, “It is my choice to die at the hands of men with the God-given hope 55

• From Going Clear (2013)

  [image file=Image00022.jpg] Priscilla Presley, John Travolta, and Kelly Preston at the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre’s thirty-seventh-anniversary gala, Hollywood, August 2006 The following Monday, when Schulman came into the production office, she found Haggis there, alone. “What are you doing?” she asked. “I’m prepping the movie.” Yari agreed to keep the office open for one more week, and then another, as each Monday Schulman would find Haggis at work preparing for a movie that now had no budget at all. Gradually, other people began working with him, for no pay. “If you get Sandy Bullock, you got a green light,” Schulman told him. Haggis got Sandra Bullock for the role of the district attorney’s wife, a brittle, racist socialite, a role far from the plucky gamines she had played in the past. In the movie, she’s the one who gets carjacked at gunpoint. But the producers wanted one more name: Brendan Fraser. Haggis thought he was much too young for the part, as did Fraser, but he agreed to do it. The movie was finally green-lit, just four weeks before the shooting started. Only now, the ten million dollars had shrunk to six and a half. For Haggis, everything was riding on this film. He mortgaged his house three times; he also used it as a set, in order to save on his location budget. He canceled many of the exterior scenes and borrowed the set of the television show Monk to film interiors. He was eating carelessly and smoking constantly. He lost weight. He desperately needed more time. When he finished shooting a scene in Chinatown, Cathy Schulman caught up with him to ask about the next day’s shoot. “You look like you’re clutching your chest,” she observed. Haggis admitted that he was having some pains. “Sharp pains?” Schulman urged him to see a doctor. He didn’t want to hear that. He went home. He woke the next morning in agony. He called his doctor, who told him it was probably stress but agreed to see him just to set his mind at ease. By now, Paul was short of breath, so Deborah drove him to the doctor’s office. The doctor did a few tests and said yes, it was stress and muscle fatigue. “But we’ll do an electrocardiogram just in case.” A few moments later the doctor returned. His face was snow white. “Don’t stand up!” he said in a professionally measured voice. “You’ve had a heart attack!” That night in the hospital, Haggis suffered another cardiac failure. He received three stents in the arteries to his heart in an emergency operation. He was able to watch the entire procedure on the monitor. It was really like an out-of-body experience, watching his own fragile heart being repaired. The movie he was making didn’t seem so important anymore. That changed as soon as the operation was over. Schulman arrived with some more bad news. “I talked to your doctor,” she told Haggis.

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

  She was not prone to fear, but the doctor dropped some word, like corruption of the blood, scarlatina, or else—heaven help us—diphtheria, and off she went. “It was impossible for it to be otherwise. Women in the old days had the belief that ‘God has given, God has taken away,’ that the soul of the little angel is going to heaven, and that it is better to die innocent than to die in sin. If the women of to-day had something like this faith, they could endure more peacefully the sickness of their children. But of all that there does not remain even a trace. And yet it is necessary to believe in something; consequently they stupidly believe in medicine, and not even in medicine, but in the doctor. One believes in X, another in Z, and, like all believers, they do not see the idiocy of their beliefs. They believe quia absurdum , because, in reality, if they did not believe in a stupid way, they would see the vanity of all that these brigands prescribe for them. Scarlatina is a contagious disease; so, when one lives in a large city, half the family has to move away from its residence (we did it twice), and yet every man in the city is a centre through which pass innumerable diameters, carrying threads of all sorts of contagions. There is no obstacle: the baker, the tailor, the coachman, the laundresses. “And I would undertake, for every man who moves on account of contagion, to find in his new dwelling-place another contagion similar, if not the same. “But that is not all. Every one knows rich people who, after a case of diphtheria, destroy everything in their residences, and then fall sick in houses newly built and furnished. Every one knows, likewise, numbers of men who come in contact with sick people and do not get infected. Our anxieties are due to the people who circulate tall stories. One woman says that she has an excellent doctor. ‘Pardon me,’ answers the other, ‘he killed such a one,’ or such a one. And vice versa . Bring her another, who knows no more, who learned from the same books, who treats according to the same formulas, but who goes about in a carriage, and asks a hundred roubles a visit, and she will have faith in him. “It all lies in the fact that our women are savages. They have no belief in God, but some of them believe in the evil eye, and the others in doctors who charge high fees.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Robbie came toward her from the north side of camp through the stinging smoke. He had blood on the side of his face, and more crusted the shoulder of his hoodie. It was one of hers, actually. She took a panicked half step toward him, then stopped short. He hadn’t opened his arms for her. He stopped not far away, looking relieved, but not much more. The familiar leaden pressure of rejection squeezed Fran’s throat. Did I lose him? “What happened?” she asked. He told her. His voice was flat, his eyes averted. The fertility clinic. The men and the fight with Doe and the mad drive back to Exeter where he’d met up with Zia’s people. Beth and the twins and the chain gang and the bus in the woods. When he talked about shooting his way into the Screw to get Indi, his shoulders grew so tense, his neck so rigid that she wanted to run to him and hug him close. Instead she let him talk until his words dried up while around them ash blew in the chilly predawn wind. Until all he had left to say was a dull, cold “I told you.” She swallowed past the lump in her throat, casting around desperately for some reason she hadn’t believed, for “Robbie, I—” “Apologize later.” He did look at her, then, and the anger in his pinched mouth and narrowed eyes silenced her as quickly and as totally as a slap. “I have a car hidden downhill. Not far. We have to go before the TERFs get here.” “What?” Viv whispering in her ear on the dance floor. Viv clutching the front of Ramona’s shirt as blood ran down her chin. Teach in the woods, her huge pale eyes retracing the path of Beth’s arrow to find them standing in among the waving ferns. “Why would they come?” “Because we helped half the workers Sophie promised them escape,” he said, watching a woman Fran had seen once in the gym pick through a pile of greasy ash that might have been a tent. “And if they haven’t figured it out already, they will soon.” “What happened to her?” Blond hair and hungry mouth.