Anxiety

Passages

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• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Charles Taylor noted the ‘fragilisation’ of belief in the modern period, which was catalysed by a growing awareness of alternative possibilities. The emergence of a pluralist culture ‘fragilises’ belief systems – whether religious or atheist – by undermining their self-evident correctness. ‘If my view of the world is right, why do other views exist?’ The hostility of certain forms of secular atheism to continuing religious belief in a supposedly secular culture is partly a response to the threat that they pose to its plausibility, heightened by the growth and enhanced visibility of religious immigrant communities in many western nations. ‘If my theory is right, religion ought not to exist.’ Peter Berger concurs: ‘The appearance of an alternative symbolic universe poses a threat because its very existence demonstrates empirically that one’s own universe is less than inevitable.’12 Communities of belief thus serve an important role in maintaining the plausibility of their own position in the face of a cultural milieu that suggests that their views are not as secure and self-evident as they might like to believe they are. The challenges posed to traditional cultural or religious values by rapid social changes in the West illustrate this concern well.13 While some see these as the bedrock of their communities of belief, other such communities see them as backward looking and oppressive. The outcome is that the existence of a plurality of communities of belief leads to a sense of anxiety and hostility, in that one’s own beliefs are not seen as respected, but as something that others believe ought to be rejected and overthrown. This means that communities of belief must also learn how to reflect on how they can survive and adapt in the present, alongside other communities with divergent views. Can their traditional beliefs simply be reasserted? Or do they need to be translated into a new social language? How can a community’s past, particularly if considered to be problematic, be repurposed, refocused or reconfigured to meet new situations and challenges? This very often involves asking hard questions about the core vision of a community. To take a political example, what exactly is the essence of being a Conservative in Britain? Or a Democrat in the United States? Which of the competing visions of these political movements is most authentic and translates into electability?

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  I grew up in Northern Ireland during the 1960s and experienced at first hand a culture characterised by ingrained political, religious and social divisions. My first love was the natural sciences, evoked by a profound respect for the world around me, a longing to understand both how it functioned and what it meant. Perhaps because I was intolerant of uncertainty, I believed that the natural sciences might provide me with indubitable answers to life’s big questions. I went on to study chemistry at Oxford University, specialising in quantum theory, and followed this with a doctorate in the biological sciences. Yet the natural sciences served another purpose for me as a teenager. To study science was like stepping into another world, governed by rules of evidence and the courteous disagreement that is essential to scientific progress. Here, political and religious tensions could be put to one side; what mattered was the quality of your proofs, furnished by experimentation. A classic example of this eirenic role of the natural sciences can be seen in the role of natural scientists in building bridges across political and religious divisions, which helped heal the cultural wounds caused by England’s Civil War.6 I was an atheist back in the late 1960s, with a strong interest in Marxism. Although I took the stubborn austerity of my teenage atheism to be a reliable indicator of its truth, I began to have anxieties about the stridency with which I now began to assert my views. The force of my conviction of the non-existence of God seemed to me to bear an inverse relation to the evidence available. I began to have private doubts, not simply about my atheism, but about any beliefs, in that these seemed to lack rigorous intellectual justification. So, for a time I condemned myself to some form of agnosticism, conceding that nothing could be known. While reading Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy at eighteen, I came across this remarkable statement that seemed to hint at a more gracious way of making sense of our world: ‘To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.’7 Russell helped me realise that it might be possible to hold beliefs without being able to prove them, opening the way for me to create a grander view of life than was possible by relying only on the sciences.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  For some epistemic Puritans, we ought only to believe what we can prove. Logic and mathematics thus provide us with the norms that we should apply to everything in life. I share their admiration for these glittering peaks of human knowledge production. Yet these are singularities, areas of knowledge in which a degree of certainty is possible which distinguishes them from other domains of human understanding, rather than being representative of them. We seem to be hard-wired to seek certainty, and so find uncertainty worrying and stressful. 1 Perhaps this helps us understand why many people impose rational and moral certainties, or find themselves drawn to populist orators offering a return to absolutist ideologies or a bygone, yet wistfully remembered, social order with familiar and known values. Yet we should challenge our natural craving for certainty in all areas of our lives. It is a delusion. The ideas I explore in this book are not new; in fact, they have a distinguished history in the long tradition of scientific and philosophical reflection and religious faith, which are deeply attuned to the problem of uncertainty, both as a cognitive and existential concern. Consider, for example, the personal credo of the Italian theoretical physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli: I believe in justice. I believe that the Earth is round. I believe that my name is Carlo and that my father’s name was Franco. I believe that life is worth living. My beliefs are rooted in me. They define me. I hold them dear and I strenuously defend them against any challenge. But I am not certain about them . 2 For Rovelli, we live in ‘a vast intermediate space’ located between ‘full ignorance and total certainty’. That’s an imaginatively helpful way of describing the realm of belief or faith, which locates itself firmly within this domain of uncertainty – a domain within which human thought, action and life must and can take place. It is within this space that we frame our ideas of meaning, value and justice – all of which are critical to human distinctiveness on the one hand, and to meaningful human existence on the other. Like Odysseus, we have to learn to find a navigable channel between the Scylla of ‘full ignorance’ and the Charybdis of ‘total certainty’. Certainty is simply not an option for any nuanced understanding of the meaning of life, why we are here, or the nature of the good. These questions matter – but we can’t answer them with the certainty we mistakenly believe is our intellectual birthright. This does not condemn us to total ignorance; it simply opens our eyes to the complexity and ambiguity of many aspects of our world, and prompts us to question the assumption that we can expect certainty in relation to life’s big questions.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  For some epistemic Puritans, we ought only to believe what we can prove. Logic and mathematics thus provide us with the norms that we should apply to everything in life. I share their admiration for these glittering peaks of human knowledge production. Yet these are singularities, areas of knowledge in which a degree of certainty is possible which distinguishes them from other domains of human understanding, rather than being representative of them. We seem to be hard-wired to seek certainty, and so find uncertainty worrying and stressful.1 Perhaps this helps us understand why many people impose rational and moral certainties, or find themselves drawn to populist orators offering a return to absolutist ideologies or a bygone, yet wistfully remembered, social order with familiar and known values. Yet we should challenge our natural craving for certainty in all areas of our lives. It is a delusion. The ideas I explore in this book are not new; in fact, they have a distinguished history in the long tradition of scientific and philosophical reflection and religious faith, which are deeply attuned to the problem of uncertainty, both as a cognitive and existential concern. Consider, for example, the personal credo of the Italian theoretical physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli: I believe in justice. I believe that the Earth is round. I believe that my name is Carlo and that my father’s name was Franco. I believe that life is worth living. My beliefs are rooted in me. They define me. I hold them dear and I strenuously defend them against any challenge. But I am not certain about them.2 For Rovelli, we live in ‘a vast intermediate space’ located between ‘full ignorance and total certainty’. That’s an imaginatively helpful way of describing the realm of belief or faith, which locates itself firmly within this domain of uncertainty – a domain within which human thought, action and life must and can take place. It is within this space that we frame our ideas of meaning, value and justice – all of which are critical to human distinctiveness on the one hand, and to meaningful human existence on the other. Like Odysseus, we have to learn to find a navigable channel between the Scylla of ‘full ignorance’ and the Charybdis of ‘total certainty’. Certainty is simply not an option for any nuanced understanding of the meaning of life, why we are here, or the nature of the good. These questions matter – but we can’t answer them with the certainty we mistakenly believe is our intellectual birthright. This does not condemn us to total ignorance; it simply opens our eyes to the complexity and ambiguity of many aspects of our world, and prompts us to question the assumption that we can expect certainty in relation to life’s big questions. We have to learn to walk the poorly signposted and unpoliced line between certainty and doubt as we try to make sense of the chaos.

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

  I can tell you with near certainty that additional communication will now be required: The busboy, a member of a profession largely comprising newcomers to America's shores, will have to take aside the already harried waiter. "Table seven. Lady say chicken cold. No like-a spinach." The waiter then must consider whether clarification, not to mention confirmation, is required before braving the chef's wrath. This means a trip back to the table, annoying the already annoyed customers by asking them to repeat their complaint. If you speak to the busboy, you might just ask him to locate your waiter. Better yet, try remembering your waiter's face. I also feel the waiter's pain when, without warning, a patron seated with friends at a table for four (a four-top) suddenly bolts to the bar (or outside) for a cigarette. This often seems to occur just when the entrees for that table are about to be served—or, as waiters say, are "in the window, ready for pickup." I know the electric shock that travels through the restaurant's spine and into the brainstem of the kitchen: The chef has that table's food up! It's sitting perilously under the destructive warmth of the heat lamps. Other orders are coming up around it, new ones are coming in, and the chef is beginning to freak: His lovely food is dying in front of him. And he's got a difficult choice to make. He can push the orders for the four-top to the side and squeeze other outgoing orders around it for a while, in the hope that the smoker will return before the food gets cold and ugly, a skin forming on the sauce that the chef was once so proud of. Or he can yank the whole order, move the "dupe" (the kitchen's printed copy of an order) back to the "order" position, and start all over again. It's a tiny, inconsequential move for the customer—a cigarette at the bar—but for the kitchen, particularly in a good restaurant, it can cause mad panic and much misery. It's polite to schedule your breaks ahead of time—as in asking the waiter, "Would now be a good time to grab a smoke?" The people at the two-top (a deuce) on my other side are friends of the house . . . or people with whom the house wants to become friends. I know this because I saw the military-type hand signals between the maitre d' and the front waiter when the couple arrived. I saw the brief, whispered conversation along the service bar. I can recognize the body language for "notify the kitchen" and "comp." These customers will be monitored as if they were in intensive care, with amuse-bouches and careful recommendations of the chef's best efforts tonight. I hope the cosseted duo will be suitably appreciative and that they understand that when the house picks up a check, it is appropriate for the guests to leave a cash tip, preferably a damn big one.

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

  No catch phrase. He refused to have a sidekick or to submit to a band or some cranked-up hyperactive studio audience or even a funny sock puppet. The last thing the television audience of Bible thumpers, widows, spinsters, and horny divorcees (deemed likely to tune in by the pollsters) cared about, really, was how to make a lemongrass-infused grilled octopus salad with Thai basil vinaigrette and pancetta lardons. Hell, most of them lived a few hundred miles from the nearest pancetta and would probably rather toss off a rabid jackelope bare-handed than let octopus anywhere near their mouths. So where was he?? It was no longer unusual for Rob to not be around, to have gone off on "research" trips to the Napa Valley or France, a book tour, a foodie symposium, golf weekends, or just to hole up in some fuck-shack with whoever he was doing lately. But it was unlike him to stay away for so long, especially when the situation was so desperate. Michelle finished dressing and poked her head in the office, where she found Paul at the desk, staring blankly at a spreading water stain on the acoustic tile on the ceiling. "Paul," she said, "has he called? Does he know what's going on?" "He knows," said Paul. "What does he say about all this?" "I haven't heard from him in a couple of days," admitted Paul. "Two days ago, he said he was coming in. He said he had to talk to me. Since then? I ain't heard shit. He doesn't answer the phone. There's nobody at his house and his cell phone goes right to voice mail. I just don't know—" "Where could he be?" Paul just shrugged. "Lissen, okay?" he said, lowering his voice, "it's not just here, all right? The whole fucking empire is going down. He's got bigger problems than just this place." Paul turned his gaze to the bulletin board on the office wall. Between price quotes from produce companies, a calendar with a wine company's logo, cooks' schedules, and a fuzzy faxed photo of the New York Times food critic, was an old snapshot of Rob and Paul, standing out front of Red House: two young men, looking cocky and triumphant in snap-front dishwasher shirts, brandishing their knives and grimacing for the camera. Red House had been the place chefs ate after work! All twelve tables were constantly booked! They had been the toast of the town . . . Things were different now, he thought. Turning slowly to Michelle, he asked her for a cigarette, lit it, took a deep draw, and sat back in his chair. "I know where he's going to be tomorrow," he said. "Get somebody to cover for you until nine. We'll go and get him." The Hitchcock Annual Christmas Party was in full swing at the Turgeson Galleries in Chelsea. An entire floor of industrial space had been set aside for the event.

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

  They also offer to a violent and unpoliced society a good deal of common-sense regulation of cruelty and general public misbehaviour, seen through the prism of the seven Deadly Sins: a new framework for organizing human affairs that transcended the intricacies of Ireland’s existing structures of power and lawmaking, reassuringly entrusting the anxious to the care of a universal Church. If this Irish/Welsh innovation had not proved to have wide appeal as part of the package of Irish Christian mission in mainland Europe, the institution of private confession would not have enjoyed such power over the following millennium, for good or ill. It has to be recognized, nevertheless, that in all eras from the earliest days a major part of that power was directed towards the regulation of sexual behaviour, even though it constituted only one-seventh of the quota of deadly sin. [21] BRITANNIA

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  It is time to move on from movements and individuals who offer facile solutions in the face of life’s endless ambiguities. We have to live with a degree of uncertainty about our lives, while realising that this does not need to overwhelm us with the feeling of confusion and disconnectedness that caused the poet John Donne such distress in 1611: ‘’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.’ Embracing Uncertainty in the Face of Spurious Certainties In his 2003 book A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, John Allen Paulos channels the first century philosopher Pliny the Elder in setting out a guiding principle he had learned to trust in life: ‘Uncertainty is the only certainty there is.’ This powerful one-liner may sound bleak; yet its austerity simply reflects the reality of the human situation, and echoes the suppressed wisdom of the past, in which this insight was regularly acknowledged and lived out. Provisional certainties often turn out to be the prevailing view of an age, before being discarded or surgically modified by its successors. We can’t be sure about what the future holds, and whether it will discredit what some currently regard as secure knowledge – including many current scientific theories. As Carlo Rovelli observed, ‘we have no other tool to guide us than our limited and always insufficient intelligence, no other reliable adviser than uncertainty.’ For Rovelli, we are constantly tempted to eagerly embrace ‘shiny new ideologies’, each proclaiming its triumph over failed alternatives. Yet we live in an age of multiple temporary certainties, unsure what will come next, or how the future will judge what we consider to be secure. Our judgements are obstinately tainted and limited by our historical location. A more literary exploration of this theme is found in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–34). This masterpiece of poetic philosophy acknowledges and affirms the human need to believe as we try to make sense of a seemingly chaotic and meaningless world, yet which seems to hint at a deeper orderliness. We might well wonder, Pope comments, why we are ‘form’d so weak, so little, and so blind?’ 4 We have to realise that we are ‘darkly wise’, in that we can only know incomplete truths, being able to grasp and understand only a small part of our universe. Human beings, Pope declared, are ‘born but to die, and reas’ning but to err’, 5 trapped in an unsettling world of belief, when some would rather inhabit a secure realm of proved certainties. For Pope, humanity longs to find beliefs that can be trusted, despite evidential uncertainty and the limits of human reasoning. We are unable to see the big picture, but can only discern some of its parts: ‘’Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.’ 6 We have to face up to the problem that the big questions in life cannot be answered with certainty. Pope’s analysis was prophetic. To understand the importance of beliefs in human life, we must confront our limitations and weaknesses.

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

  Everybody does," he says. "But don't. Really." I'm perched above him, as there's only room on the jump position for one at a time. And let me tell you: One hundred fifty feet looks a lot higher off the ground looking down than it does looking up. I can't even really see where I'm supposed to land through the white water and the waves below. Dario starts to push off. And freezes. He leans back against the rock and says, "I have to think about this . . ." A moment later, he starts to push off again. And then freezes again. He leans back, says, "Turn the cameras off"—as if they can hear us all the way down there. "I'm not-a ready. I have to think. It's been a long time since I done this . . ." Now, I'm not feeling too good about this near-suicidal enterprise myself at this point. Here I am, clinging to a rock high above the sea, and the formerly confident Count Dipshit is going wobbly on me. And that narrow space between rocks is looking narrower and narrower. Tracey, in the dinghy below, looks like a toy bobbing about in a faraway bathtub. I remind Dario what he told me: that there's no other way down. And I suggest that given his lack of success so far with aerial conveyances, signaling for a chopper is not a viable option. After yet another aborted attempt, his feet trembling spastically now, I revert to schoolyard persuasion and tell him we'll look like fucking pussies if he doesn't get his shit together and fucking take the fucking leap. I have to admit, I'm more than anxious to see him jump. If only to see if, once he does, his head reappears —and I therefore have a shot at surviving this lunacy. Finally he goes. First straight out, then a straight drop. And then, a few long seconds later, BOOM! A few more seconds and I see his head resurface, and he's swimming for the dinghy. I slide down into position. I do not want to spend any time thinking about what I'm about to do. One more look down. Two seconds. Dario still in the water . . . And, God help me, I push myself straight out into blue sky and drop, drop down toward blue and white water. And you know what surprised me? While airborne, as I flew out, and then plummeted down toward rocks and sea? I didn't care. I was not afraid. I've known love. I've seen many beautiful things. And it was enough. That was what I was thinking. Stone cold. Serene. Yet . . . happy, as I dropped, and the water rushed up to meet me at sixty miles per hour. Needless to say, I survived the experience. It's hell on the soles of your feet hitting the water at that speed. But jumping into the void made for an illuminating few seconds.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  "I have some good news for you." He picked up a slip of blue paper off the desk and went through an elaborate pantomime of focusing his eyes on it. "Your uh test... the Robinson-Kleiberg floculation test..." "I thought it was a Blomberg-Stanlouski test." The doctor tittered. "Oh dear no.... You are getting ahead of me young man. You might have misunderstood. The Blomberg-Stanlouski, weeell that's a different sort of test altogether. I do hope ... not necessary...." He tittered again: "But as I was saying before I was so charmingly interrupted... by my hurumph learned young colleague. Your KS seems to be..." He held the slip at arm's length. "...completely uh negative. So perhaps we won't be troubling you any further. And so..." He folded the slip carefully into a file. He leafed through the file. Finally he stopped and frowned and pursed his lips. He closed the file and put his hand flat on it and leaned forward. "Carl, when you were doing your military service... There must have been... in fact there were long periods when you found yourself deprived of the uh consolations and uh facilities of the fair sex. During these no doubt trying and difficult periods you had perhaps a pin up girl? Or more likely a pin up harem? Heh heh heh..." Carl looked at the doctor with overt distaste. "Yes, of course," he said. "We all did." "And now, Carl, I would like to show you some pin up girls." He pulled an envelope out of a drawer. "And ask you to please pick out the one you would most like to uh make heh heh heh...." He suddenly leaned for- ward fanning the photographs in front of Carl's face. "Pick a girl, any girl!" Carl reached out with numb fingers and touched one of the photographs. The doctor put the photo back into the pack and shuffled and cut and he placed the pack on Carl's file and slapped it smartly. He spread the photos face up in front of Carl. "Is she there?" Carl shook his head. "Of course not. She is in here where she belongs. A woman's place what??" He opened the file and held out the girl's photo attached to a Rorshach plate. "Is that her?" Carl nodded silently. "You have good taste, my boy. I may tell you in strictest confidence that some of these girls..." with gambler fingers he shifts the photos in Three Card Monte Passes -- "are really boys . In uh drag I believe is the word?" His eyebrows shot up and down with incredible speed. Carl could not be sure he had seen anything unusual. The doctor's face opposite him was absolutely immobile and expressionless. Once again Carl experienced the floating sensation in his stomach and genitals of a sudden elevator stop. "Yes, Carl, you seem to be running our little obstacle course with flying colors....

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  That’s what this weekend was all about: a last chance to renew our connection. Or maybe this was good-bye. I could no longer read from her expression what went on inside her head. I wiped my hands along the sides of my thighs and pushed open the glass door that opened onto steps to the path that wound to the narrow beach. Kari didn’t look my way as I approached. Her arms wrapped around her middle as she stared at the water. “No problem getting away?” “No. I had the days.” “Good. Have you unpacked?” At last, she glanced my way. Something in her eyes gave me hope. For the first time in a long time, she met my gaze and really looked at me. I smiled. “Not yet. But would you like a glass of wine before we get settled?” “That and a fire. It’s colder than I thought it would be.” She stepped closer. Her arm settled at my waist and she leaned in to hug me from the side. Kari was the kind to kiss friends on the lips or offer a tight hug, so I couldn’t rely on the gesture to mean anything. I draped an arm around her waist, and we walked slowly back to the cabin. Inside, the fire took me only minutes. I placed several logs and kindling in the grate and as soon as the crackling fire was built, the air inside the cabin lost its crisp edge. I pulled my sweater over my head, and, dressed only in a tank and my jeans, I sat cross-legged on the hearth rug. A glass dangled in front of me. “Thanks,” I murmured. “I was supposed to get that. Sorry.” She sat beside me. “This was a good idea. This weekend.” “Yeah.” I didn’t know what else to say, hoping she’d let me know what had been on her mind. We’d been so busy working, too tired and stretched to hook up, that we’d drifted apart. I didn’t like feeling like I was in this alone—the only one worried that our relationship was on its last legs. Friends had introduced us, knowing that both Kari and I had dated women before and knowing my preference for waiflike blondes. We shared a lot of the same interests, were close to the same age. I’d ended a long relationship and hadn’t really wanted to fall directly into another, but I did want companionship. We’d landed in bed together that same night, the attraction so hot and fast that it took my breath away. She was like that. A bolt of lightning not easily captured. Even from the start, I began preparing myself for it to end. I must have stared at the fire too long. A kiss landed on my shoulder. A hand slipped beneath the hem of my tank and glided upward to cup a breast. Kari moved closer and her body snuggled against my back.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  It would be nice to explain that! ‘Well, I hope by now you’ve remembered my name?’ But Styopa only smiled bashfully and spread his arms. ‘Really! I get the feeling that you followed the vodka with port wine! Good heavens, it simply isn’t done!’ ‘I beg you to keep it between us,’ Styopa said fawningly. ‘Oh, of course, of course! But as for Khustov, needless to say, I can’t vouch for him.’ ‘So you know Khustov?’ ‘Yesterday, in your office, I saw this individuum briefly, but it only takes a fleeting glance at his face to understand that he is a bastard, a squabbler, a trimmer and a toady.’ ‘Perfectly true!’ thought Styopa, struck by such a true, precise and succinct definition of Khustov. Yes, the previous day was piecing itself together, but, even so, uneasiness would not take leave of the director of the Variety. The thing was that a huge black hole yawned in this previous day. Say what you will, Styopa simply had not seen this stranger in the beret in his office yesterday. ‘Professor of black magic Woland,’ 3 the visitor said weightily, seeing Styopa’s difficulty, and he recounted everything in order. Yesterday afternoon he arrived in Moscow from abroad, went immediately to Styopa, and offered his show to the Variety. Styopa telephoned the Moscow Regional Entertainment Commission and had the question approved (Styopa turned pale and blinked), then signed a contract with Professor Woland for seven performances (Styopa opened his mouth), and arranged that Woland should come the next morning at ten o’clock to work out the details . . . And so Woland came. Having come, he was met by the housekeeper Grunya, who explained that she had just come herself, that she was not a live-in maid, that Berlioz was not home, and that if the visitor wished to see Stepan Bogdanovich, he should go to his bedroom himself. Stepan Bogdanovich was such a sound sleeper that she would not undertake to wake him up. Seeing what condition Stepan Bogdanovich was in, the artiste sent Grunya to the nearest grocery store for vodka and hors d’oeuvres, to the druggist’s for ice, and . . . ‘Allow me to reimburse you,’ the mortified Styopa squealed and began hunting for his wallet. ‘Oh, what nonsense!’ the guest performer exclaimed and would hear no more of it. And so, the vodka and hors d’oeuvres got explained, but all the same Styopa was a pity to see: he remembered decidedly nothing about the contract and, on his life, had not seen this Woland yesterday. Yes, Khustov had been there, but not Woland. ‘May I have a look at the contract?’

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  This is something that is right and therefore can be relied upon . There can be a universal consensus about this unassailable truth, where mere beliefs might lead to social division and tension, or the incitement of hatred. Yet truth cannot be directly correlated with relevance. I must confess I struggle to see how this truth might give me a reason to get up in the morning, or yearn to make the world a better place. It is rationally incontestable yet existentially irrelevant. As Wittgenstein noted, you can be certain about it, but it seems rather pointless. ‘Nothing would follow from it, and nothing could be explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life.’ 23 With this point in mind, I want to suggest that we reclaim an older concern – namely, considering the existential vitality of a way of thinking, asking how a belief or worldview enables human flourishing and fosters wellbeing. Is this way of thinking liveable ? Does this worldview create a satisfying ‘way of life’? Does it account for our deepest longings and desires, and help us achieve joy and peace? Does it help us to find meaning in life? Or happiness? Or does it repress and limit us, trapping us within a constrained and impoverished account of human existence? In our own time, many people choose to abandon their commitments to worldviews, whether religious or secular, because they find them oppressive in their outcomes, rather than deficient in their intellectual foundations. 24 For instance, when many sought to challenge the moral philosopher Peter Singer’s argument that it is permissible to euthanise severely disabled infants, they honed in on its consequences: the murder of disabled people. Singer’s conceptualisation of the value of a human life – founded upon rationality and autonomy – went largely unquestioned, as did his figuring of severely disabled people as a moral category apart from ‘normal human beings’. Disability advocates, however, protested his lectures – arguing that disabled people, like all people, are capable of being loved and finding meaning in life. Our revulsion at particular outcomes, in other words, can’t be separated from what we think human life is about. And for most of us, intuitively, it doesn’t come down to reason alone. There is now a substantial body of scientific studies that has established links between finding ‘meaning in life’ in lessening anxiety and enhancing wellbeing. Individuals need to feel that their lives and their existence are of importance and value (a condition now known as ‘existential mattering’). 25 We do not know why this is so; the evidence simply indicates that it is so – and is thus important to us. As the writer Jeanette Winterson observes, human beings are clearly meant to do more than just survive ; they need to flourish .

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  For Angela could never quite let the girl go. She herself would be rather bewildered at moments—she did not love Stephen, she was quite sure of that, and yet the very strangeness of it all was an attraction. Stephen was becoming a kind of strong drug, a kind of anodyne against boredom. And then Angela knew her own power to subdue; she could play with fire yet remain unscathed by it. She had only to cry long and bitterly enough for Stephen to grow pitiful and consequently gentle. ‘Stephen, don’t hurt me—I’m awfully frightened when you’re like this—you simply terrify me, Stephen! Is it my fault that I married Ralph before I met you? Be good to me, Stephen!’ And then would come tears, so that Stephen must hold her as though she were a child, very tenderly, rocking her backwards and forwards. They took to driving as far as the hills, taking Tony with them; he liked hunting the rabbits—and while he leapt wildly about in the air to land on nothing more vital than herbage, they would sit very close to each other and watch him. Stephen knew many places where lovers might sit like this, unashamed, among those charitable hills. There were times when a numbness descended upon her as they sat there, and if Angela kissed her cheek lightly, she would not respond, would not even look round, but would just go on staring at Tony. Yet at other times she felt queerly uplifted, and turning to the woman who leant against her shoulder, she said suddenly one day: ‘Nothing matters up here. You and I are so small, we’re smaller than Tony—our love’s nothing but a drop in some vast sea of love—it’s rather consoling—don’t you think so, belovèd?’ But Angela shook her head: ‘No, my Stephen; I’m not fond of vast seas, I’m of the earth earthy,’ and then: ‘Kiss me, Stephen.’ So Stephen must kiss her many times, for the hot blood of youth stirs quickly, and the mystical sea became Angela’s lips that so eagerly gave and took kisses. But when they got back to The Grange that evening, Ralph was there—he was hanging about in the hall. He said: ‘Had a nice afternoon, you two women? Been motoring Angela round the hills, Stephen, or what?’ He had taken to calling her Stephen, but his voice just now sounded sharp with suspicion as his rather weak eyes peered at Angela, so that for her sake Stephen must lie, and lie well—nor would this be for the first time either. ‘Yes, thanks,’ she lied calmly, ‘we went over to Tewkesbury and had another look at the abbey. We had tea in the town. I’m sorry we’re so late, the carburettor choked, I couldn’t get it right at first, my car needs a good overhauling.’

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

  What had I been thinking? Six days to research, cover, write, rewrite, edit, and deliver an article for a respectable major publication—while simultaneously making an hour-long episode of a show that would (and did) require every variety of bestial, excessive behavior. Even now, there was a Sammy Davis Jr. impersonator waiting for me in the Neon Boneyard, an accordion convention to attend, and more food—always more food, more meals to eat—before I was due, on the last day, to jump out of an airplane at two miles over the desert with the Flying Elvi skydiving team. "Pull yourself together, Ruhlman," I howled over the blaring radio. "Pouring beer on yourself is good. Helps avoid sunstroke. And having an open receptacle in the car is, I'm pretty sure, illegal—even in this state. Now snap out of it. And drive us to Bouchon!" Las Vegas: a bright, hopeful land of opportunity for chefs—or the elephant graveyard for cynical cooks-turned-restuarateur / entrepreneurs? A well- deserved final score for celebrity chefs, after a lifetime of toil; a last cash-out before knees fail entirely and brains cook—or just a soulless extension of The Brand? Was it possible to serve truly good food; maintain one's standards, one's integrity; do good works in Vegas's mammoth, air-conditioned Xanadus, this neon-lit theme park, these Terrordomes of twenty-four-hour beeping, bleeping, and jangling slots? Were these names of recognizable and respected chefs, these distant outposts of empire, simply far-flung knockoffs, expensive reproductions of what were once the soulful, heartfelt expressions of their strengths and dreams —now only farmed out cookie-cutter versions? Or were they just as good as their flagships, the same, only subsidized by the shattered hopes and dreams of the hapless souls two floors down, feeding their disability checks in increments into the endless banks of blinking, uncaring machines? These were the serious moral issues I was grappling with as Ruhlman crushed his size-thirteen foot onto the gas pedal and powered the eight-cylinder red beast off gravel and onto asphalt, toward Thomas Keller's Bouchon, the place I hoped would provide an answer. A few days earlier, we'd visited some usual suspects. Inevitable, really, that we'd hit Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill first. I figured that a purer example of branding could scarcely be found. I was looking for an easy hatchet job. A clear case of reptilian regeneration, a restaurant group expanding unthinkingly, like a chameleon grows back a lost tail. The story arc appeared classic: New York chef becomes fantastically well known on the Food Network, widens operation, opens in Vegas. It's easy, so easy, to dismiss Flay's whole Vegas enterprise with a New York sneer. It certainly does no serious restaurant much help in the gravitas department to locate in the Mega-Coliseum of Uber-Kitsch, Caesars Palace, among the Italianate statuary, the staff in togas, the gurgling fountains and Celine Dion gift shop. Flay's mug looks down on diners and punters alike from a giant JumboTron over the slots—in a continuous loop of clips from his television shows.

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

  In the large, well-appointed living room, on an enormous flat-screen TV set among book-lined shelves, a CNN anchor drones on about a world that seems, right now, very far away. A bottle of champagne chills in a silver ice bucket on the suitable-for-six dining room table. But I don't think I'll be drinking it tonight. Welcome to the world of ResidenSea—or The World, as our remarkable vessel is named—644.2 feet long, with 106 private residences and fifty-nine rental apartments and studios. Not a cruise ship. Not a mega-yacht. She is, as the literature proudly states, "a floating resort community of like-minded persons who will settle for nothing but the very best," the "ne plus ultra of voyaging," a self-sufficient neighborhood of luxury homes "at sea continuously circumnavigating the globe." In short, it's a big, swank, ridiculously well-fitted-out boat on which rich people can buy their own homes, dropping in or jetting off as they see fit as it wanders from continent to continent. "We'll be trapped like rats," protested Nancy, my wife, when I told her where we were going. "The rich are more boring than you and me," she said. "You want to be penned up in a floating prison with a bunch of mummies in cruise-wear? Are you insane? I am not playing shuffleboard. I am not going to see Red Buttons or Kathie Lee. And I am not contracting the Norwalk virus so you can write some stupid story. And I am not going to be your comedic device again." She was right in the middle of reading Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, about a luxury cruise with similarly grandiose claims, a book I now regretted giving her. "This ain't the Love Boat, sweetheart," I protested. There are no organized dinner seatings. No limbo contests on the Lido deck. Gopher and Julie are nowhere to be found. "It'll be great, honey! And it's free! The magazine'll pay for it! C'mon! Think of it like . . . like Gilligan's Island. Only it'll be a five-day cruise, not three hours, and with what they charge, you can be assured we won't end up trying to build a desalinization plant out of coconuts. You know how much money you gotta have to take a trip on this thing? C'mon! Let's live large!" Residents of The World, I hastened to point out, do not sleep in anything remotely resembling a "cabin." Residential apartments (and we'd be staying in one) range in size from 1,106 to an astonishing 3,242 square feet, each with "state-of-the-art kitchens," two to six bedrooms, living and dining areas, and a veranda. Four full-service restaurants, a gourmet market and deli, shops, numerous bars, a nightclub, casino, library, business center, theater, health spa, swimming pool, putting greens—and, believe it or not, a tennis court—awaited our attention should we care to make use of it. "C'mon! We'll pretend we're a retired South American dictator's idiot son and wife! Let's live a little!

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  “You want to see other people?” I closed my eyes, bracing for it. I could do this. I could share her. I just didn’t want to lose her completely. Maybe that made me weak, but I was falling for her. “Do you?” I peeked at her from beneath the fringe of my eyelashes, trying to gauge what her idle-sounding question really meant. If I said no, would she be afraid to be honest? But I didn’t want to see anyone else. Kari with her spritelike body and small kitten face was the only one I wanted to hover over while I fucked her. I gave her a cowardly shrug. My throat was too tight to push words out. She blew out an exasperated breath. “Dammit, Margot. You aren’t easy, are you?” “How can you say that? Didn’t you have my pants off an hour after we met?” “Don’t be smug. I’m serious. Things have to change.” I sat up and raked a hand through my hair, feeling frustrated and grumpy. “Can we table this until after I make you come?” Maybe if I proved to her that she wasn’t going to get any better than me, she’d be satisfied. Or maybe she’d just forget about this conversation. I could keep her busy all weekend with my mouth and fingers, keep her turned inside out and fuck-fogged. Then maybe we could put off talking until she loved me as much as I loved her. Her mouth twisted and her eyes filled. I bent quickly and kissed her, cupping her head and taking her mouth gently. “Don’t you cry,” I said harshly when I pulled back. Her mouth crimped tighter. I shoved her to her back and crawled on top, trapping her legs between mine, wrapping my hands around her wrists and pinning her to the floor. “This is good. What we have could be fucking great.” She made a noise, but I didn’t want to hear a protest, and I covered her mouth again, eating her lips the way I wanted to eat her pussy. “Just shut up. Talk later. Told you, I wanna taste.” When I came up for air, she whispered, “Sometimes, you’re such a bitch.” “Who’s talking dirty now?” I scooted downward, hovering over one breast. Her nipples were softer than mine, velvety, puffy little cones—pale peach and just a shade or two darker than the soft skin surrounding them. “You’ve got the prettiest tits I’ve ever seen.” “If you like them B-B sized,” she groused. “I do. Aren’t you lucky?” She snorted, but she settled deeper against the carpet. I had her now. I ignored the dildo and buried my face between her legs, sucking on her outer lips, sinking my tongue between them to catch the tangy fluid seeping from inside her. I thrust two fingers into her pussy and thumbed her clit, rasping my thumb over the hard, rounded knot.

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

  26. English Roman Catholic public schools readily reflected the general educational ethos of military maleness created by their Anglican equivalents. Here the Downside Officer Training Corps (created 1909) poses with sundry monks of the Benedictine Abbey and a field gun. The ideal products of Victorian public schools were obedient but resourceful officers in the armed forces, or colonial administrators programmed to endure lonely leadership amid alien cultures. Socialization even with female siblings, let alone any other variety of female, was not on the syllabus. Instead, the inevitable consequences of an all-male adolescent environment lent a peculiar anxiety to British elite attitudes to masturbation and homosexuality, particularly because of the widespread conviction that (in the words of an old Etonian and noted cricketer, who returned to Eton as Headmaster) ‘animal desires [are] far stronger in the male than in the female, at least in England’. [29] A Classical school curriculum brought public schools the usual problems in dealing with literary references to ancient Mediterranean sexual mores, and additionally there were some difficulties in handling the Christian message itself. The New Testament was little help in instilling martial manliness, and even the Saviour himself needed careful treatment by theologians who were worried that Victorian Christianity had less appeal to men than to women. Jesus’s sacrifice, nailed helpless on the cross, needed to be reframed as a specialized ideal of what the prolific writer on morality and church affairs Charles Kingsley termed ‘true manhood’; the scholar and preacher F. D. Maurice complained of the widespread perception that the Sermon on the Mount had a ‘passive or feminine character’. [30] The Hebrew Bible was a good deal more promising, but amid its descriptions of military heroes and armed mayhem well up to the standards of British imperial warfare lurked the obstinate problem of David and Jonathan. In most respects they could be seen as the perfect archetype for a Captain and Vice-Captain of Games, but rarely were they found in the myriad stained-glass windows that the Victorians commissioned for British church buildings, and their appearance always suggests an interesting agenda to investigate (Plate 20). [31] It is notable that a standard multi-volume and multi-author English biblical commentary edited by the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol in the 1880s showed a rare openness to interfaith dialogue in dealing with this problematic Old Testament couple. Canon Spence, the commentator on 1 Samuel, reached gratefully for a quotation by one of his commentary colleagues Dean Payne Smith from the liberal German rabbi and biblical scholar Ludwig Philippson (whose parallel Hebrew/German edition of the Hebrew Bible was later much esteemed by Sigmund Freud): We may indeed wonder at the delicacy of feeling and the gentleness of the sentiments which these two men in those old rough times entertained for one another.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Of this language Kafka wrote, in his parable ‘On Parables’: Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: ‘Go over,’ he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if it was worth the trouble; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something, too, that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the least. All these parables really set out to say simply that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter. Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables, you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares. Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You win. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality. In parable you lose. A similar dialogue lies at the heart of Bulgakov’s novel. In it there are those who belong to parable and those who belong to reality. There are those who go over and those who do not. There are those who win in parable and become parables themselves, and there are those who win in reality. But this reality belongs to Woland. Its nature is made chillingly clear in the brief scene when he and Margarita contemplate his special globe. Woland says: ‘For instance, do you see this chunk of land, washed on one side by the ocean? Look, it’s filling with fire. A war has started there. If you look closer, you’ll see the details.’ Margarita leaned towards the globe and saw the little square of land spread out, get painted in many colours, and turn as it were into a relief map. And then she saw the little ribbon of a river, and some village near it. A little house the size of a pea grew and became the size of a matchbox. Suddenly and noiselessly the roof of this house flew up along with a cloud of black smoke, and the walls collapsed, so that nothing was left of the little two-storey box except a small heap with black smoke pouring from it. Bringing her eye still closer, Margarita made out a small female figure lying on the ground, and next to her, in a pool of blood, a little child with outstretched arms. ‘That’s it,’ Woland said, smiling, ‘he had no time to sin. Abaddon’s work is impeccable.’ When Margarita asks which side this Abaddon is on, Woland replies: ‘He is of a rare impartiality and sympathizes equally with both sides of the fight.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  One had only to put together the behaviour of Ace of Diamonds at the cab stand by the movie theatre with certain given times, such as when the séance ended, and precisely when Rimsky could have disappeared, and then immediately send a telegram to Leningrad. An hour later (towards evening on Friday) came the reply that Rimsky had been discovered in number four-twelve on the fourth floor of the Hotel Astoria, next to the room in which the repertory manager of one of the Moscow theatres, then on tour in Leningrad, was staying—that same room which, as is known, had gilded grey-blue furniture and a wonderful bathroom. 1 Discovered hiding in the wardrobe of number four-twelve of the Astoria, Rimsky was interrogated right there in Leningrad. After which a telegram came to Moscow reporting that findirector Rimsky was in an unanswerable state, that he could not or did not wish to give sensible replies to questions and begged only to be hidden in a bulletproof room and provided with an armed guard. A telegram from Moscow ordered that Rimsky be delivered to Moscow under guard, as a result of which Rimsky departed Friday evening, under said guard, on the evening train. Towards evening on that same Friday, Likhodeev’s trail was also found. Telegrams of inquiry about Likhodeev were sent to all cities, and from Yalta came the reply that Likhodeev had been in Yalta but had left on a plane for Moscow. The only one whose trail they failed to pick up was Varenukha. The famous theatre administrator known to decidedly all of Moscow had vanished into thin air. In the meantime, there was some bother with things happening in other parts of Moscow, outside the Variety Theatre. It was necessary to explain the extraordinary case of the staff all singing ‘Glorious Sea’ (incidentally, Professor Stravinsky managed to put them right within two hours, by means of some subcutaneous injections), of persons presenting other persons or institutions with devil knows what in the guise of money, and also of persons who had suffered from such presentations. As goes without saying, the most unpleasant, the most scandalous and insoluble of all these cases was the case of the theft of the head of the deceased writer Berlioz right from the coffin in the hall of Griboedov’s, carried out in broad daylight. Twelve men conducted the investigation, gathering as on a knitting-needle the accursed stitches of this complicated case scattered all over Moscow. One of the investigators arrived at Professor Stravinsky’s clinic and first of all asked to be shown a list of the persons who had checked in to the clinic over the past three days. Thus they discovered Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy and the unfortunate master of ceremonies whose head had been torn off. However, little attention was paid to them.