Anxiety

Passages

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

Page 167 of 501 · 20 per page

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I said, IknowIknowIknow. Snaking my arms around her waist, I beached my lips on her belly button, kissed her hard as a fist. Named her my prey. _ After she fed me to the Snake, there was a scab above my butt cheeks where the Snake’s silver head nipped me. When I shoved the scab aside with my fingernails, there was a hole beneath, deep as my finger and bloodless as a glove socket. I slid my forefinger in, trying to diagnose what kind of hole it was. I named every hole-species I knew: wells; wombs; wounds; spots in the wall where my brother stuck his pencil through, thinking the walls would scab on their own, and when they didn’t, he sealed them with his boogers and let them petrify into stone; lakes; seas, which meant most of the world was a hole, which meant I was native to holes, animal burrows, anuses, atlases. Twirling my finger inside the hole above my ass, I decided that it must be the beginning of a fault-line, a seismic shift of my spine. I considered telling my mother, but she always said holes were dangerous and led only to disappearance. They’re the number-one leading cause of loss. But I told her the holes in our yard were parallel to her throat, same depth and degree of darkness. Consider them a tribute to you, I said, the day after all the floodwater evaporated from the yard. But she watched them as if they were birth-holes, as if I were the midwife of some disaster. I watched her in the yard, checking them one by one like animal traps. When she began kicking soil back into the holes, I went outside to stop her, grabbing at her ankles. She wriggled her foot away, sat down hard on the soil, and said: Before digging a hole, you need to know whose hands you own. Your Ama, she said, has the stamina of a river when it comes to discipline. She said she’d tried to be the mud, what hems the river in, but she couldn’t redirect a woman like that. Remember, she said. I’m your mother, she said, but you made me first. You needed me first, and now I’m shaped like your thirst. Standing by the kitchen window and looking out at the holes with me, she said I should be prepared for when Ama comes in the night to eat our toes. Where will she come from? I said, and she pointed at the holes. I laughed and said no woman could fit through a hole that size. If Ama ever lumbered out like a tree, I said, we’d fell her together, cleave the woman from the tiger inside her. When I asked her for a practice axe, one I could learn to wield against Hu Gu Po, she refused. You’re my mother, I said, and you’re supposed to prepare me for any future. But who, she said, can prepare you for the past?

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

  Or are they on a Jet Ski with you sitting on the back, directing every which way you go in your water? You may not realize it at first, but your life is going to continue to feel half-baked if you are always allowing everyone else but you to call the shots. I know it can feel so good in the moment to have someone else take ownership of the outcomes of your decisions. Each time you do this, though, you’re depriving yourself of your own strength. Before long, you’ll feel too weak to swim on your own. I think it’s helpful to note some of these signs of enabling behavior because they’re often happening without our realizing it. As we go through this, I want you to be mindful of how you may be asking others to accommodate you, or how you may have been appeasing others without realizing it. I also offer a way to refrain from enabling, which ultimately breaks this cycle of anxious checking behavior. WHEN YOU’RE SEEKING ENABLING WHEN YOU’RE THE ENABLER A DIFFERENT APPROACH You worry that things won’t be okay, so you ask your best friend whether everything is going to be all right. You don’t actually know whether things will turn out okay, but you make a false promise to your friend and tell them it will all work out just fine. “I don’t know what is going to happen, but I do know that we will find a way to work through it.” You’re scared that you’re going to get sick, so you ask your mom if you could be catching a bug. You have no idea whether they are going to get sick but you want to help them feel better, so you lie and say they won’t become ill. “I don’t know if you’ll get sick. Let’s talk about how we would handle it if you did get sick.” You don’t know whether you locked the door when you left the house, even though you checked it when you left. You plead with your friend to turn around so that you can check it one more time. You turn back around after driving ten minutes and check that the door is locked. You don’t go back to check if possible. You reply, “Do you remember locking the door?” Encourage your friend to trust themselves and talk through how they can cope with their fears without engaging in checking behaviors. You’re not sure whether you should end your relationship with your Based on your assessment, you tell your friend whether or not Unless you’re concerned about potential abuse, you ask your friend partner, so you ask your best friend what to do. they should break up with their partner. questions to help them come to their own conclusions.

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

  Luther and the other great reformers—Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) and John Calvin (1509–64)—were addressing a society undergoing fundamental and far-reaching change. Modernization would always be frightening: living in medias res, people are unable to see where their society is going and find its slow but radical alteration distressing. No longer feeling at home in a changing world, they found that their faith changed too. Luther himself was prey to agonizing depressions and wrote eloquently of his inability to respond to the old rituals, which had been designed for another way of life.34 Zwingli and Calvin both felt a sense of crippling helplessness before experiencing a profound conviction of the absolute power of God; this alone, they were convinced, could save them. In leaving the Roman Church, the reformers were making one of the earliest declarations of independence of Western modernity, and because of their aggressive stance toward the Catholic establishment, they were known as “Protestants.” They demanded the freedom to read and interpret the Bible as they chose—even though each of the three could be intolerant of views opposed to his own teaching. The reformed Christian stood alone with his Bible before his God: Protestants thus canonized the growing individualism of the modern spirit. Luther was also the first European Christian to advocate the separation of church and state, though his “secularist” vision was hardly irenic. God, he believed, had so retreated from the material world that it no longer had any spiritual significance. Like other rigorists before him, Luther yearned for spiritual purity and concluded that church and state should operate independently, each respecting the other’s proper sphere.35 In Luther’s political writings we see the arrival of “religion” as a discrete activity, separate from the world as a whole, which it had previously permeated. True Christians, justified by a personal act of faith in God’s saving power, belonged to the Kingdom of God, and because the Holy Spirit made them incapable of injustice and hatred, they were essentially free from state coercion. But Luther knew that such Christians were few in number. Most were still in thrall to sin and, together with non-Christians, belonged to the Kingdom of the World; it was essential, therefore, that these sinners be restrained by the state “in the same way as a savage wild beast is bound with chains and ropes so that it cannot bite and tear as it would normally do.” Luther understood that without a strong state, “the world would be reduced to chaos,” and that no government could realistically rule according to the gospel principles of love, forgiveness, and tolerance. To attempt this would be like “loosing the ropes and chains of the savage wild beasts and letting them bite and mangle everywhere.”36 The only way the Kingdom of the World, a realm of selfishness and violence ruled by the devil, could impose the peace, continuity, and order that made human society feasible was by the sword.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  But they all look exactly the same. They are exactly the same! How would you ever tell one goose from another? I mean, what, do they all have different taste in music? But a goose could recognize its partner from miles away.” “And we think we’re so special,” Dan said. He got it, and this was when she started falling for him. “True love and all that. You think we’re as random as the geese?” “But the tragedy,” she said, “is that knowing it doesn’t change a thing.” And here, a hundred and some years on, was Ranko Novak. A face among the faces, a goose like all the other geese. He was gone, and Nora was gone, and what had happened to the passion that had consumed them both? If Fiona could convince herself that it was floating around the world—just disembodied, leftover passion—wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing to believe? — At two in the afternoon, Cecily called and said she’d changed her mind; she was about to board her connection at O’Hare and would be there late tonight. She didn’t need a hotel. An old college friend lived in the Latin Quarter. “I won’t be in your way,” she said. “I’ll work on Kurt. And then—do you think I should bring presents? For the little girl?” — At five o’clock, Fiona unwrapped her bandage to apply the ointment the doctor had given her. Her hand was hurting less. It was amazing how quickly you could forget physical pain, how soon you couldn’t even summon its echo. At eight, Jake called. Serge had given him the number. He wondered if she’d come out and grab a bite. She was tired, she said, and managed to hang up. She’d have to have a word with Serge. At nine forty-five, lying in bed, she started hearing sirens. Far too many, for far too long. At nine fifty, her phone started ringing. First Damian and then Jake —frantic, cryptic questions about where she was. Stay inside, they said. Then Richard was knocking on her door. She came out to the living room to watch the news. She stood in her nightgown, her feet cold. Serge paced the floor, swearing. Richard lay on the couch. Fiona made herself breathe. The attacks were far enough from here that she tried to imagine she was home, hearing about something on the far side of the world. There was no chance Claire had been out at what sounded like some kind of heavy metal concert; a person’s tastes couldn’t change that much. She might have been at that restaurant, or walking down that sidewalk, but the odds were small. The soccer stadium was up in Saint-Denis, where Claire lived; that worried her most. But Claire had a young child, and it was so late at night. Claire had her number, at least—but why hadn’t Fiona tackled her and made her write down her own? She didn’t have Kurt’s either.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I KNOW YOU’RE AFRAID OF IT, BUT I’D MUCH RATHER BE FEARED THAN FEASTED ON. — BEN *2 小鬼, I WOULD STAY AWAY FROM WATER IF I WERE YOU. —BEN DAUGHTER Mazu The snake in Dayi’s belly breeds itself into three. A braid of snakes born in the south of her stomach, migrating up through her mouth. Most days they slept in her bowels, wearing her intestines like sweaters. When I shined my flashlight down her throat, I saw a rope-thick shadow shouldering out, tackling her teeth. Dayi said a snake swam down her throat when she was a baby. It grew to adult size inside her, eating everything in her belly and leaving nothing for her blood. I asked her how the snake swam in and she said, I fell in a river once. When I opened my mouth to shout, it made a home in me. She said: Anything open can be owned. She said: Never sleep with your mouth open or a man will slide in, just like a snake, and beach in your bowels until you belong to him. The only man you should marry is the moon, she said, so you can divorce it every morning. _ Dayi was my first aunt, the eldest of my mother’s half-sisters. Ama’s letter said her first daughter was born to be dead, a ghost in future tense, so I was expecting to pick up a corpse. But when we picked her up at the airport, she was not made of ash. The first thing she said to us was that there’d been no geese. She’d read somewhere that flocks of geese flew into the airplane engines, got minced into pie-meat, and that’s how crashes happen. It was the first time she’d ever flown, and she wondered why the windows didn’t open. My mother said there were no geese migrating until winter. And I said there was no air up there, only sky, which was not made of air but water. If she opened the window, the plane would flood and everyone would drown. Just like you almost did, I almost said, but my tail told me it wasn’t time for a confrontation. In the car, my mother watched Dayi in the rearview mirror. They had rhyming faces: same crow-colored hair that revealed its blue when the light inflected it. Same eyes: sap-soft at room temperature. The left eye and the right eye were siblings, and you could only speak to them one at a time. My mother was lighter than all her sisters, slicking so much horse-oil on her skin that the sun slid right off her. Dayi was coming to live with us because of her frequent strokes: There was a bird in her brain that laid eggs of blood. My mother offered to take care of her in our house, even though everything my mother took care of went rabid. Her apples grew teeth instead of seeds, and our birch’s branches curved down into claws.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  When the magician snapped his fingers, there was a flash, and a crack, and a puff of purple smoke; and at that the boys put their fingers to their lips, and whistled. I had seen - or felt as if I had seen - a thousand such acts; and I watched this one now, with my cigarette gripped hard between my lips, growing steadily more sick and more uncertain. I remembered sitting in my box at the Canterbury Palace, with my fluttering heart and my gloves with the bows: it seemed a time immeasurably distant and quaint. But, as I had used to do then, I clutched the sticky velvet of my seat, and gazed at where, with a hint of drooping rope and dusty floorboard, the stage gave way to the wings, and I thought of Kitty. She was there, somewhere, just beyond the edge of the curtain, perhaps straightening her costume - whatever that was; perhaps chatting with Walter or Flora; perhaps staring, as Billy-Boy told her of me - perhaps smiling, perhaps weeping, perhaps saying only, mildly, ‘Fancy that!’ - and then forgetting me... I thought all this, and the magician performed his final trick. There was another flash, and more smoke: the smoke drifted as far as the gallery, and left the entire crowd coughing, but cheering through their coughs. The curtain fell, there was another delay while the number was changed, and then a quiver of blue, white and amber, as the limes-man changed the filter across his beam. I had finished my cigarette, and now reached for another. This time, the boys in my row all saw me do it, so I held the case to them, and they each took a fag: ‘Very generous.’ I thought of Diana. Suppose the opera had ended, and she was waiting for me, cursing, beating her programme against her thigh? Suppose she went back to Felicity Place, without me? But then there came music, and the creak of the curtain. I looked at the stage - and Walter was on it. He seemed very large - much larger than I remembered. Perhaps he had grown fatter; perhaps his costume was a little padded. His whiskers he had teased with a comb, to make them stand out rather comically. He wore tartan peg-top trousers and a green velvet jacket; and on his head was a smoking-cap, in his pocket a pipe. Behind him, there was a cloth with a scene on it representing a parlour. Beside him was an armchair that he leaned on as he sang. He was quite alone. I had never seen him in costume and paint before. He was so unlike the figure I still saw, sometimes, in my dreams - the figure with the flapping shirt, the dampened beard, the hand on Kitty — that I looked at him, and frowned: my heart had barely twitched, to see him standing there.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  I stopped there, trying to read each of their faces. They seemed surprised at my outburst, though none of them was as surprised as me. I knew I was on precarious ground; I wasn’t close enough to any of them to be sure my play wouldn’t backfire. At that particular moment, though, I had no other hand to play. The boys outside moved on down the street. Shirley went to get herself more coffee. After what seemed like ten minutes, Will finally spoke up. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think we’ve talked about this same old mess long enough. Marty knows we got problems. That’s why he hired Barack. Ain’t that right, Barack?” I nodded cautiously. “Things still bad out here. Ain’t nothing gone away. So what I wanna know,” he said, turning to me, “is what we gonna do from here on out.” I told him the truth. “I don’t know, Will. You tell me.” Will smiled, and I sensed that the immediate crisis had passed. Angela agreed to give it another few months. I agreed to concentrate more time on Altgeld. We spent the next half hour talking strategy and handing out assignments. On our way out, Mona came up and took me by the arm. “You handled that meeting pretty good, Barack. Seems like you know what you’re doing.” “I don’t, Mona. I don’t have a clue.” She laughed. “Well, I promise I won’t tell nobody.” “I appreciate that, Mona. I sure do appreciate that.” That evening, I called Marty and told him some of what had happened. He wasn’t surprised: several of the suburban churches were already starting to drop out. He gave me a few suggestions for approaching the job issue in Altgeld, then advised me to pick up the pace of my interviews. “You’re going to need to find some new leaders, Barack. I mean, Will’s a terrific guy and all that, but do you really want to depend on him to keep the organization afloat?” I understood Marty’s point. As much as I liked Will, as much as I appreciated his support, I had to admit that some of his ideas were … well, eccentric. He liked to smoke reefer at the end of a day’s work (“If God didn’t want us to smoke the stuff, he wouldn’t have put it on this here earth”). He would walk out of any meeting that he decided was boring. Whenever I took him along to interview members of his church, he’d start arguing with them about their incorrect reading of Scripture, their choice of lawn fertilizer, or the constitutionality of the income tax (he felt that tax violated the Bill of Rights, and conscientiously refused to pay). “Maybe if you listened to other people a little more,” I had told him once, “they’d be more responsive.” Will had shaken his head. “I do listen. That’s the problem. Everything they say is wrong.”

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Getting him to eat felt like a moral triumph, the way having a strange dog come wagging up to you can make you proud, or how a random toddler choosing your knees to climb at a party can seem some innocent and, therefore, final testament to your good character. I was scraping the bottom of the carton when I noticed one side of Daddy’s jaw swollen up like a squirrel’s. He’d been stashing away the shrimp he couldn’t swallow. He’d leaned his far cheek into the pillow to hide it. The ragged gray wad of shrimp I spied between his lips was approaching the size of a golf ball. I cupped my palm under his lip and told him to spit it out. He’d choke falling asleep with that in there, and his eyelids had already drooped to half mast. In fact, while I stood there saying spit , he corked off entirely. His mouth lolled open another notch. The chewed-up shrimp had only to shift sideways about three quarters of an inch before his windpipe blocked off. I shook his shoulder: nothing. “Daddy!” I yelled; his eyes stayed closed, glued, sealed. I finally took aim with my index finger at his mouth’s breathing slot. Maybe he’d stay asleep, I thought, if I poked gently enough across his tongue, which felt warm and foreign as a slug. Then he bit me. Even before his eyes creaked open to thin slits, he clamped down with his slick gums hard enough to hold me by that finger. Like some terrier who’d caught me snitching his biscuit. We stood that way a minute—my finger in his mouth, his black eyes glaring out with no glimmer of recognition. And when I grasped that iron-boned jaw with my other hand as you might grab a horse’s to force it to take a bit, his good hand wrapped around my bicep so tight that in the morning I found the bruised imprint of each finger. Also the next morning, I overheard the visiting nurse asking what in God’s name had Daddy got in his mouth. But he just gave a loose-shouldered shrug, all the while staring at the wall like she’d lost her mind while she scooped the old shrimp out with a tongue depressor. The only other evening I spent alone with Daddy I had to get drunk for. Lecia and the Rice Baron had taken me to their country club summer dance, where I’d stomped through the Cotton-Eyed Joe with various doctors and insurance salesmen, intermittently downing whole goblets of a sinister rum punch. A fellow I called Gomez finally drove me home in a convertible black as the Bat-mobile. Daddy’s eyes lit up when I peeked in on him. “Hey, Pokey,” he said, his words clear as ice. Then, “You fun?” Mother had left the TV on with the volume cranked down. Why I’ll never know, for that summer the local station played nothing after midnight but reruns of old dog races.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  I knew we’d never get back there and said as much to Lecia, who claimed that was the least of our worries. I looked at her serious profile while she watched the trees tick past. She had a way of tucking her chin in. Her head dipped down like a gull’s would facing a steep wind, so her brown eyes peered up at the world from a definite slot under her blond bangs’ sharp border. She drew her chin back further into her neck’s folds. That was her way of digging back into herself, of getting down deep in the solid foundation of what she was before another change swamped over her. Seeing her profile go all chinless in the car, I felt a whole flood of dark fill me up, cold as creek water. Daddy wouldn’t even know where to come get us when he got ready. We drove all day across the high plains. All the while, Mother was babbling about how small our life in Texas had been, a town with no music but country and zydeco; no books but the Sears catalogue, which ladies I grew up with called the “dream book.” The only thing a woman might dream for there, Mother said, was a deep-freeze filled with deer meat she’d cleaned and dressed herself; or a fat vinyl ottoman to prop up her swollen feet on at day’s end. At one point, she just pitched her black beret out the window. I watched it tumble to a stop behind us and lay there like roadkill. At a Western store, we ordered blue-plate specials for supper: meatloaf, and mashed potatoes that Lecia and I molded into volcanoes. On the way out, Mother bought a man’s Stetson with two long quail feathers sloping backwards out of the band, and a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots. She also paid a hundred dollars for a squash-blossom necklace. It was made of leaded silver heavy enough to feel like an ox yoke when you put it on. By the time our pale Impala began to rise off that plain back into the mountains, the sun had gone red. Dark settled in. The speedometer glow got noticeable. I stood between their heads, Hector’s and Mother’s. His saggy, reptilian profile as he slouched behind the wheel—he always put me in mind of an alligator—showed no response to Mother’s new cowgirl motif. Hector was, to my mind anyway, in the deepest way possible along for the ride. Mother stretched out on the shotgun side of the car, her cowboy boots propped on the front dash. She’d taught us an old cowboy song earlier. I fell asleep to her singing it alone in her tuneless whisper: I’m an old cowhand, from the Rio Grande, But my legs ain’t bowed, and my cheeks ain’t tanned. Well I know all the songs that the cowboys know ’Cause I learned them all on the ra-di-o. Yippee-ay-yo-ky-yay …

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

  In 1517 Martin Luther (1483–1546), an Augustinian friar, nailed his famous ninety-five theses on the castle church door in Wittenberg and set in motion the process known as the Reformation. His attack on the Church’s sale of indulgences resonated with discontented townsfolk, who were sick of clerics extorting money from gullible people on dubious pretexts. 33 The ecclesiastical establishment treated Luther’s protest with lofty disdain, but young clerics took his ideas to the people in the towns, who initiated local reforms that effectively liberated their congregations from the control of Rome. The more intellectually vigorous clergy spread Luther’s ideas in their own books, which thanks to the new technology of printing, circulated with unprecedented speed, launching one of the first modern mass movements. Like other heretics in the past, Luther had created an antichurch. Luther and the other great reformers— Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) and John Calvin (1509–64)—were addressing a society undergoing fundamental and far-reaching change. Modernization would always be frightening: living in medias res, people are unable to see where their society is going and find its slow but radical alteration distressing. No longer feeling at home in a changing world, they found that their faith changed too. Luther himself was prey to agonizing depressions and wrote eloquently of his inability to respond to the old rituals, which had been designed for another way of life. 34 Zwingli and Calvin both felt a sense of crippling helplessness before experiencing a profound conviction of the absolute power of God; this alone, they were convinced, could save them. In leaving the Roman Church, the reformers were making one of the earliest declarations of independence of Western modernity, and because of their aggressive stance toward the Catholic establishment, they were known as “ Protestants.” They demanded the freedom to read and interpret the Bible as they chose—even though each of the three could be intolerant of views opposed to his own teaching. The reformed Christian stood alone with his Bible before his God: Protestants thus canonized the growing individualism of the modern spirit. Luther was also the first European Christian to advocate the separation of church and state, though his “secularist” vision was hardly irenic. God, he believed, had so retreated from the material world that it no longer had any spiritual significance. Like other rigorists before him, Luther yearned for spiritual purity and concluded that church and state should operate independently, each respecting the other’s proper sphere.

• From The Art of Memoir

  point of view. And if you go back and forth to your adult self, show how that feels, to slip from present tense into a memory. And here are some questions that might nudge you along. What were you trying to get, and how? Which ways worked? Which didn’t? If it’s a particularly awful memory for your character, you have to be sure not to make it more awful than it was. Many of us disassociate or check out during awful times, so maybe you want to convey that to the reader. The memoirist’s job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in. Otherwise, the reader will gawk at you like somebody on Springer, or she’ll pity you—in both cases, you lose some authority. The book becomes too much about your feeling and not enough about the reader’s. Finally, put it aside. Put it out of your head at least a week. You want it to set up like jello. And when you pick it back up, ask yourself, What haven’t I said? How might someone else involved have seen it differently? And most of all, how am I afraid of appearing? Go beyond looking bad or good. Is there posturing or self-consciousness you could cut or correct or confess and make use of? At the nadir of my confidence as a writer, I despaired of ever finishing Lit. I considered selling my apartment to give the advance money back. Then a Jesuit pal asked me, quite simply, What would you write if you weren’t afraid? I honestly didn’t know at first. But I knew finding the answer would unlock the writing for me. Now you may not know what you’d write if you weren’t afraid. I seldom do. It’s a moment-to-moment struggle. But if you’re passionate to find out, then you’re ready. God help you.

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

  53 In a purely imperial context, Caesar’s claim was legitimate: the Greek verb was used for a rendition made when one recognized a rightful claim. 54 But as all Jews knew that God was their king and that everything belonged to him, there was in fact little to “give back” to Caesar. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus followed this incident with a warning to the retainers who helped to implement Roman rule and trampled on the poor and vulnerable: “Beware of the scribes who like to walk about in long robes, to be greeted obsequiously in the market squares, to take the front seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets; these are the men who swallow the property of widows, while making a show of lengthy prayers.” 55 When God finally established his kingdom, their sentence would be severe. That Kingdom of God was at the heart of Jesus’s teaching. 56 Setting up an alternative to the violence and oppression of imperial rule could hasten the moment when God’s power would finally transform the human condition. So his followers must behave as if the kingdom had already arrived. 57 Jesus could not drive the Romans from the country, but the “kingdom” he proclaimed, based on justice and equity, was open to everybody—especially those whom the current regime had failed. You should not merely invite your friends and rich neighbors to a festivity, he told his host: “No, when you have a party, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” Invitations should be issued in “the streets and alleys of the town” and “the open roads and hedgerows.” 58 “How happy are you who are destitute [ ptochos ],” Jesus exclaimed; “yours is the kingdom of God!” 59 The poor were the only people who could be “blessed,” because anybody who benefited in any way from the systemic violence of imperial rule was implicated in their plight. 60 “Alas for you who are rich, you are having your consolation now,” Jesus continued. “Alas for you who have your fill now; you shall go hungry.” 61 In God’s Kingdom, the first would be last and the last first. 62 The Lord’s Prayer is for people who were terrified of falling into debt and could hope only for bare subsistence, one day at a time: “Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive those who are in debt to us.

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

  The Deobandis, bruised by the British abolition of the Moghul Empire, created a rigid, rule-bound form of Islam and gave us the Taliban travesty, a noxious combination of Deobandi rigidity, tribal chauvinism, and the aggression of the traumatized war orphan. In the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, the alien ideology of nationalism transformed traditional religious symbols and myths and gave them a violent dimension. But the relationship between modernity and religion has not been wholly antagonistic. Some movements, such as the two Great Awakenings and the Muslim Brotherhood, have actually helped people to embrace modern ideals and institutions in a more familiar idiom. Modern religious violence is not an alien growth but is part of the modern scene. We have created an interconnected world. It is true that we are dangerously polarized, but we are also linked together more closely than ever before. When shares fall in one region, markets plummet all around the globe. What happens in Palestine or Iraq today can have repercussions tomorrow in New York, London, or Madrid. We are connected electronically so that images of suffering and devastation in a remote Syrian village or an Iraqi prison are instantly beamed around the world. We all face the possibility of environmental or nuclear catastrophe. But our perceptions have not caught up with the realities of our situation, so that in the First World we still tend to put ourselves in a special privileged category. Our policies have helped to create widespread rage and frustration, and in the West we bear some responsibility for the suffering in the Muslim world that Bin Laden was able to exploit. “Am I my brother’s guardian?” The answer must surely be yes. War, it has been said, is caused “by our inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. Our relationship with our fellow-men. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.” 4 We need ideologies today, religious or secular, that help people to face up to the intractable dilemmas of our current “economic and historical situation” as the prophets did in the past. Even though we no longer have to contend with the oppressive injustice of the agrarian empire, there is still massive inequality and an unfair imbalance of power. But the dispossessed are no longer helpless peasants; they have found ways of fighting back. If we want a viable world, we have to take responsibility for the pain of others and learn to listen to narratives that challenge our sense of ourselves. All this requires the “surrender,” selflessness, and compassion that have been just as important in the history of religion as crusades and jihads.

• From Bestiary (2020)

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

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

  "No; had I done society any harm by it?" "Then why were you so terrified?" "Once a lady on her reception day asked her little boy—a lisping child of three—where his papa was? "'In his room,' said he. "'What is he doing?' quoth the imprudent mother. "'He is making proots,' replied the urchin, innocently, in a high treble, loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room. "Can you imagine the feelings of the mother, or those of the wife, when, a few moments afterwards, her husband came into the room? Well, the poor man told me that he almost regarded himself as a branded man, when his blushing wife told him of his child's indiscretion. Still, had he committed a crime? "Who is the man that, at least once in his lifetime, has not felt a perfect satisfaction in breaking wind, or, as the child onomatopoetically expressed it, making a 'proot?' What was there, then, to be ashamed of; that surely was no crime against nature? "The fact is that now-a-days we have got to be so mealy-mouthed, so over-nice, that Madame Eglantine, who 'raught full semely after her meat' would be looked upon, in spite of her stately manners, as something worse than a scullery-maid. We have become so demurely prim that every member of parliament will soon have to provide himself with a certificate of morality from the clergyman, or the Sabbath-school teacher, before he is allowed to take possession of his seat. At any cost, appearances must be saved; for ranting editors are jealous gods, and their wrath is implacable, for it pays well, as good people like to know what naughty folks do." "And who was the person who had written those lines to you?" "Who? I cudgelled my brain, and it evoked a number of spectres, all of which were as impalpable and as frightful as Milton's death; all threatened to hurl at me a deadly dart. I even fancied, for an instant, that it was Teleny, just to see the extent of my love for him." "It was the Countess, was it not?" "I thought so, too. Teleny was not a man to be loved by halves, and a woman madly in love is capable of everything. Still, it seemed hardly probable that a lady would use such a weapon; and moreover, she was away. No, it was not, it could not be, the Countess. But who was it? Everybody and nobody. "For a few days I was tortured so incessantly that at times I felt as if I were growing mad. My nervousness increased to such a pitch that I was actually afraid to leave the house for fear of meeting the writer of that loathsome note.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My brother and I tried hating him, but Duck Uncle’s Sichuan accent was honky and high-pitched and made us laugh until our throats tied themselves into bows. He even promised to teach us to hunt ducks, cutting targets out of shoeboxes and letting us shoot them with his BB gun. My brother had the best aim out of the three of us, threading the pellet through the penciled-in eye. I was too afraid of backfire, so I only pretended to pull the trigger, making the gunshot sound with my mouth. Duck Uncle pretended to believe me, said I’d killed so many. But I’d aimed at nothing, the bullet unspent as our silence, the ducks just make-believe. _ In a past life, our city was a landfill. In the summers, the air smelled as if it had passed through our bowels, hot and sour and slurred. My brother and I debated if the stink was spoiled plums or our farts or our father expiring from the country. Before I was born, the city bulldozed over buttocks of garbage for the roads to be built. The landfill lived just below us, digesting itself, flexing its belly. The soil was too soft to stand on and every year the houses kneeled deeper in their dung. In the backyard, my brother and I dug down to find what was dying. Our mother bought us snorkel masks to wear outside, as if sipping air through a smaller opening would shrink the scent. We met after school in the backyard and drew holes in the dirt with our toes. The grass was a ghost of its former green, and most of it had been scalped away by the heat and our feet. In the grass we found trash that smelled recently deceased: soda can tabs, beer bottles with a piss-colored liquid living inside it. My brother said we probably wouldn’t find anything else, but I said the point was the hole itself. I’d learned that there were gases trapped in the soil wherever trash was buried, and if we didn’t dig holes for the ground to fart out its gas, this whole city would explode: Houses like knocked-out teeth. Blacktop rising as a crow flock. Tracing three more holes in the dirt, he asked me what color the gas was and I said, The same as our breath. That’s what made it lethal: Its taste camouflaged with our tongues. When it entered your lungs, it became a blade inside you. From the kitchen window, our mother watched as we plotted the rest of our holes. When we came in, she scrubbed us so raw we couldn’t sleep with the sheets on our skin. Still we kept digging, saving the city from its flatulent past. We dug with our hands and waited until evening when the smell of the landfill was only as bad as our breath. My brother kneeled first. He shaped his palms into bowls and flung fistfuls of soil onto a pile behind him.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When they heard me coming, they lolled open, begging to be fed, and I could smell the rust on their breath, the blood. Sometimes, when they were bored, they inhaled birds out of the sky, sucking in a whole flock and spitting the bones at the moon. When my mother walked through the yard, the holes grew snails inside their mouths like blisters. When she tried to rebury the holes, they grew back in the morning, camouflaged in hats of moss. I sat on the letter to hide it from her. My tail pinned it down, flattening all of Ama’s words into the same sound. When my mother came in with the butterfly net, a hole gouged in it from the time my brother tried catching a raccoon, I asked her why I’d never met my fourth aunt. Whenever my mother called her sister, they spoke only in sentence-shards. My mother looked down, tearing the net off the rod like a wig, crumpling the fabric in her hands and tossing it over my head like a veil. There were dead flies floating in the folds of the netting, wings straining light through their mesh. You look like a bride, she said, turning me toward my reflection in the window. I made your fourth aunt’s veil out of a mosquito net. When she got married, it rose and flew her away. I said that protection from malaria was very important in a marriage. She laughed, plucking the net from my head, balling it in her hands. When she released it out the window, it opened into a parachute with no body attached, a ghost we watched go. * SHE’S BEEN DIGGING HOLES IN HER YARD TOO? AREN’T YOU WORRIED SHE’LL COME UP THROUGH THE ONES YOU’VE DUG? THAT SHE’S LOOKING FOR YOU? SHE’S DIGGING A HOLE FOR YOUR AGONG. I WOULD BE WORRIED. VERY WORRIED. DOES HE HAVE LIFE INSURANCE? AND WHAT DOES SHE MEAN BY “PLOTTING”? I HOPE SHE JUST MEANS SHE’S PICKED UP GARDENING. —BEN MOTHER Journey to the West (II) Arkansas 1980 It’s summer and the sky is vomiting. It rains in chunks, like that time you were sick and threw up into your pillowcase and I sat all night beside you, emptying it every hour, wringing the sweat from your hair. I calculate that the road trip from Arkansas to California is four days total if we don’t pee. Jie and Ba and Ma and I are going to do it in three. Four is a bad omen to begin on.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

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

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

  Until the early eleventh century, Jews had been fully integrated in Europe. 89 Under Charlemagne they had enjoyed imperial protection and held important public posts. They became landowners and craftsmen in all trades; Jewish physicians were much in demand. Jews spoke the same languages as Christians—Yiddish did not develop until the thirteenth century—and gave their children Latin names. There were no “ghettos”: Jews and Christians lived side by side and bought houses from one another in London until the mid-twelfth century. 90 However, during the eleventh century, there were rumors that Jews had persuaded the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim to destroy the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem in 1009, even though the caliph, who seemed to have been certifiably insane, had persecuted Jews and his fellow Muslims as well as Christians. 91 In consequence, Jews were attacked in Limoges, Orléans, Rouen, and Mainz. Linked with Islam in the Christian imagination, their position grew more precarious with each Crusade. After Richard I took the Cross in London in 1198, there were persecutions in East Anglia and Lincoln, and in York in 1193, Jews who refused baptism committed suicide en masse. The so-called blood libel, whereby the deaths of children were blamed on the local Jewish community, first surfaced when a child was killed in Norwich during the 1140s; there were similar cases in Gloucester (1168), Bury St. Edmunds, and Winchester (1192). 92 This wave of persecution was certainly inspired by a distorted Christian mythology, but it was also the product of social factors. During the slow transition from a purely agrarian to a commercialized economy, towns were beginning to dominate Western Christendom, and by the end of the twelfth century were becoming important centers of prosperity, power, and creativity. There were great disparities of wealth. Lowborn bankers and financiers were becoming rich at the expense of the aristocracy, while some townsfolk had not only been reduced to abject poverty but had also lost the traditional support structures of peasant life. 93 Money, in common use by the late eleventh century, came to symbolize the disturbing changes caused by this rapid economic growth that undermined the traditional social structure; it was seen as “the root of all evil,” and in popular iconography the deadly sin of avarice inspired visceral loathing and dread. 94 Originally Christians had been the most successful moneylenders, but during the twelfth century Jews had their lands confiscated and many were forced to become bailiffs, financial agents of the aristocracy, or moneylenders and were thereafter tainted by their association with money. 95 The Jew in Peter Abelard’s Dialogue (1125) explains that because Jews’ land tenure is so insecure, “the principal gain that is left for us is that we sustain our miserable lives here by lending money at interest to strangers. But that just makes us more hated by those who think that they are oppressed by it.” 96 Jews, of course, were not the only scapegoats of Christian anxiety.

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

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