Anxiety

Passages

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

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

  The very sight of her was enough to frighten one. She was like a spirited carriage-horse that has long been idle, and suddenly finds itself without a bridle. As for my wife, she had no bridle, as for that matter, ninety-nine hundredths of our women have none.” CHAPTER XIX. Posdnicheff’s face had become transformed; his eyes were pitiable; their expression seemed strange, like that of another being than himself; his moustache and beard turned up toward the top of his face; his nose was diminished, and his mouth enlarged, immense, frightful. “Yes,” he resumed “she had grown stouter since ceasing to conceive, and her anxieties about her children began to disappear. Not even to disappear. One would have said that she was waking from a long intoxication, that on coming to herself she had perceived the entire universe with its joys, a whole world in which she had not learned to live, and which she did not understand. “‘If only this world shall not vanish! When time is past, when old age comes, one cannot recover it.’ Thus, I believe, she thought, or rather felt. Moreover, she could neither think nor feel otherwise. She had been brought up in this idea that there is in the world but one thing worthy of attention,—love. In marrying, she had known something of this love, but very far from everything that she had understood as promised her, everything that she expected. How many disillusions! How much suffering! And an unexpected torture,—the children! This torture had told upon her, and then, thanks to the obliging doctor, she had learned that it is possible to avoid having children. That had made her glad. She had tried, and she was now revived for the only thing that she knew,—for love. But love with a husband polluted by jealousy and ill-nature was no longer her ideal. She began to think of some other tenderness; at least, that is what I thought. She looked about her as if expecting some event or some being. I noticed it, and I could not help being anxious. “Always, now, it happened that, in talking with me through a third party (that is, in talking with others, but with the intention that I should hear), she boldly expressed,—not thinking that an hour before she had said the opposite,—half joking, half seriously, this idea that maternal anxieties are a delusion; that it is not worth while to sacrifice one’s life to children. When one is young, it is necessary to enjoy life. So she occupied herself less with the children, not with the same intensity as formerly, and paid more and more attention to herself, to her face,—although she concealed it,—to her pleasures, and even to her perfection from the worldly point of view.

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

  In order to console himself for the sale of the said box, the good Monsieur du Harpin projected its theft, and it was to me he entrusted the execution of his plan. After having delivered a long speech upon the indifference of robbery, upon, indeed, its usefulness in the world, since it maintains a sort of equilibrium which totally confounds the inequality of property; upon the infrequence of punishment, since out of every twenty thieves it could be proven that not above two dies on the gallows; after having demonstrated to me, with an erudition of which I had not dreamt Monsieur du Harpin capable, that theft was honored throughout Greece, that several races yet acknowledge it, favor it, and reward it for a bold deed simultaneously giving proof of courage and skill (two virtues indispensable to a warlike nation), after having, in a word, exalted his personal influence which would extricate me from all embarrassments in the event I should be detected, Monsieur du Harpin tendered me two lock picks, one to open the neighbor's front door, the other his secretary within which lay the box in question; incessantly he enjoined me to get him this box and, in return for so important a service, I could expect, for two years, to receive an additional crown. "Oh Monsieur!" I exclaimed, shuddering at his proposal, "is it possible a master dare thus corrupt his domestic ! What prevents me from turning against you the weapons you put into my hands? Du Harpin, much confused, fell back on a lame subterfuge; what he was doing, said he, was being done with the simple intention of testing me; how fortunate that I had resisted this temptation, he added... how I should have been doomed had I succumbed, etc. I scoffed at this lie; but I was soon enough aware of what a mistake it had been to answer him with such asperity: malefactors do not like to find resistance in those they seek to seduce; unfortunately, there is no middle ground or median attitude when one is so unlucky as to have been approached by them: one must necessarily thereupon become either their accomplices, which is exceedingly dangerous, or their enemies, which is even more so. Had I been a little experienced, I would have quit the house forthwith, but it was already written in Heaven that every one of the honest gestures that was to emanate from me would be answered by misfortunes.

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

  practical as well as theoretical difficulties for the religious groups in question, especially those that retain the institutional and intellectual habits deriving from the happy days when they were monopolies. For the individual, existing in a particular religious world implies existing in the particular social context within which that world can retain its plausibility. Where the nomos of individual life is more or less co-extensive with that religious world, separation from the latter implies the threat of anomy. Thus travel in areas where there were no Jewish communities was not only ritually impossible but inherently anomic (that is, threatening an anomic disintegration of the only conceivable “correct” way of living) for the traditional Jew, as travel outside India was for the traditional Hindu. Such journeys into darkness were to be shunned not only because the company of pork-eaters or cow-defilers caused ritual impurity but, more importantly, because their company threatened the “purity” of the Jewish or Hindu world—that is, its subjective reality or plausibility. Thus the agonizing question of the Babylonian exiles, “How can one worship Yahweh in an alien land?,” has a decisive cognitive dimension, which indeed has been the decisive question for diaspora Judaism ever since. Since every religious world is “based” on a plausibility structure that is itself the product of human activity, every religious world is inherently precarious in its reality. In other words, “conversion” (that is, individual “transference” into another world) is always possible in principle. This possibility increases with the degree of instability or discontinuity of the plausibility structure in question. Thus the Jew whose social ambience was limited by the confines of the ghetto was much less conversion-prone than the Jew existing in the “open societies” of modern Western countries (conversion here referring to “emigration” 63

• From Going Clear (2013)

  80 Aum’s membership: Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It , p. 6. 81 with resources close to $1 billion: Ibid., p. 37. 82 “Hitler was thinking”: Russ Baker, “Clash of the Titans,” George , April 1997. 83 friends or clients of Fields: Bertram Fields, response to Lauren Wolf queries. 84 “fact-finding mission”: David Hudson, “Scientology’s ‘Holocaust,’ ” Salon Daily Clicks , Feb. 25, 1997. 85 “Individuals and businesses throughout”: Testimony of John Travolta, “Religious Intolerance in Europe Today,” hearing before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (Helsinki Commission), Sept. 18, 1997. 86 “He said he wanted to help”: Josh Young, “Bill Clinton’s Grand Seduction,” George , March 1998. 87 “Scientology point person”: Ibid. 88 The Germans were puzzled: Stephen A. Kent, “Hollywood’s Celebrity-Lobbyists and the Clinton Administration’s American Foreign Policy toward German Scientology,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 1 (Spring 2002). 89 “This is not a church”: Jennifer Tanaka, “Hollywood versus Germany over Scientology,” Maclean’s , Jan. 20, 1997. 8. BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY 1 “mother school”: Interview with Lauren Haggis. 2 “I guess I’m not supposed”: Ibid. 3 “Oh, yeah”: Interview with Alissa Haggis. 4 Miscavige was hopeful: Interview with Mark “Marty” Rathbun; Anna Schecter, “Tom Cruise’s Former Scientology Auditor Speaks about Cruise/Kidman Divorce,” Rock Center with Brian Williams , July 11, 2012. The church issued a denial that Kidman was considered a Suppressive Person; see Maureen Orth, “What Katie Didn’t Know: Marriage, Scientology-Style,” Vanity Fair , Oct. 2012. 5 “He was not in good shape”: Interview with Mark “Marty” Rathbun. 6 she had suffered a miscarriage: Meryl Gordon, “Nicole Kidman Tells It Like It Is,” Marie Claire , Nov. 11, 2007. 7 “Nic knows exactly”: Dickerson, Nicole Kidman , pp. 146–47. 8 He paired Cruise with: Interview with Jason Beghe. Cruise’s attorney says, “Mr. Cruise may have had a chance encounter with Jason Beghe at the Celebrity Center, but had no meeting with him.” 9 He had known Cruise: Interview with Tommy Davis. 10 reporting directly to Shelly Miscavige: Interview with Claire Headley. 11 Rathbun assigned Davis to: Interview with Jason Beghe. 12 One of the issues: One Day One Destiny , French documentary produced by Magneto Presse, 2009. 13 “Tommy told them over and over”: Dana Kennedy, “Katie Holmes ‘Biggest Nightmare’ in Scientology History, Say Experts,” Hollywood Reporter , July 4, 2012. 14 Rathbun’s auditing sessions: Interview with Tom De Vocht. Marc Headley told Vanity Fair that there were cameras behind a piece of furniture and in a lamp recording Cruise’s sessions: “There were two views—one close-up of the E-Meter dial and the other a long shot over Marty’s shoulder, showing Tom Cruise holding the cans.” Maureen Orth, “What Katie Didn’t Know,” Vanity Fair , Oct. 2012. 15 “I think I’m done”: Interview with Mark “Marty” Rathbun. 16 “I have never met”: 2004 International Association of Scientologists Freedom Medal of Valor Ceremony. 17 Cruise poured millions: Reitman, Inside Scientology , p. 290. 18 “would understand the details”: Interview with Mark “Marty” Rathbun; www.themortonreport.com/celebrity/notables/exclusive-bill-clinton-tom-cruise-plotted-to-use-tony-blair-to-gain-tax-breaks-for-scientology/ .

• From Going Clear (2013)

  But when her sister was about to get married, Deborah wrote to the International Justice Chief, the Scientology official in charge of such matters, who said that she was allowed to see her parents as long as they didn’t say anything against Scientology. The Benjamins readily agreed. A decade later, however, Deborah went to Clearwater, intending to take some upper-level courses, and learned that the previous ruling no longer applied. If she wanted to do more training, she would have to confront her parents’ mistakes. The church recommended that she take the Potential Trouble Source/Suppressive Persons course. Many Scientologists have taken the same course. Deborah’s friend Kelly Preston had taken it as well. “ I was PTS, but I didn’t realize it, and so I was told, ‘You need to be on PTS/SP,’ ” Preston later recalled in her interview for Celebrity magazine. She discovered that her life was full of Suppressive Persons. “Being an artist and having a lot of theta, you really attract those type of people,” Preston said. ( “Theta” is a Scientology term for life force.) “I ended up having to handle or disconnect from quite a few different people.” It took Deborah a year to complete the course, but it didn’t change her parents’ status. She petitioned officials at the Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles for help. They put her on another program that took two more years to finish. Still, nothing changed. If she failed to “handle” her parents—by persuading them to make amends to the church—she would have to disconnect not only from them but also from everyone who spoke to them, including her siblings. She realized, “ It was that, or else I had to give up being a Scientologist.” The fact that Paul refused to disconnect from her parents posed yet another conflict. According to the church, Deborah’s parents had been part of a class-action lawsuit against Scientology by disaffected members in 1987, which was dismissed the following year.2 The church required them to denounce the anti-Scientology group and offer a “token” restitution. That meant performing community service and following a rehabilitation course, called A to E, for penitents seeking to get back into the church’s good graces; it includes repaying debts, taking additional courses, and making public declarations of error. Deborah told her parents that if they wanted to remain in contact with her, they had to follow the church’s procedures. Her parents, worried that they would also be cut off from their grandson, agreed to perform community service. For three months they delivered food in a Meals on Wheels program in Los Angeles. But the church wasn’t satisfied. Deborah was told that if she maintained contact with her parents she would be labeled a Potential Trouble Source—a designation that would alienate her from the entire Scientology community and render her ineligible for further training. A senior official counseled her to agree to disconnect from her parents and have them formally branded SPs.

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

  Heaven was also not omnipotent, because it could not exist without Earth, its divine counterpart. Unlike the Shang, the Zhou exploited the agricultural potential of the great plain on a grand scale, and because Heaven’s influence could be implemented on Earth only through the work of human beings, farming, forest clearance, and road building became sacred tasks that completed the creation Heaven had begun. The Chinese were clearly more interested in sanctifying the world they lived in than finding a transcendent holiness beyond. The Zhou king was supported by a four-tier aristocracy of “gentlemen” (junzi); Western scholars have translated their titles as “duke,” “marquis,” “earl,” and “baron.” The shi, children of younger sons and second-class wives, served as men-at-arms but also as scribes and ritual experts, forming an early “civil” wing of government. The Zhou confederacy of more than a hundred small principalities survived until 771, when their western capital was overrun by the Qong Rang barbarians. The Zhou fled to the east but never fully recovered. Yet the succeeding period witnessed not merely the decline of a dynasty but also the decay of the feudal system. The kings remained nominal rulers but were increasingly challenged by the more aggressive “gentlemen” in the principalities, who were casting aside the deference on which feudalism depended. 25 The boundaries of the Chinese states were also shifting. By this time, the Chinese had absorbed several “barbarian” populations, all with very different cultural traditions that challenged the old Zhou ethos. Cities located far away from the traditional centers of Chinese civilization were becoming locally prominent, and by the end of the eighth century, when Chinese history starts to emerge from the mists of legend, they had become capitals of kingdoms: Jin in the north, Qi in the northwest, and Chu in the south. These states ruled thousands of barbarian subjects, whose grasp of Chinese custom was at best superficial. The small principalities in the center of the great plain had now become extremely vulnerable, because these peripheral states were determined to expand. During the seventh century, they broke with tradition and began to mobilize peasants as fighting foot soldiers; Jin and Chu even brought barbarians into the army, offering them land in return for military service. Deeply threatened by these aggressive kingdoms, some of the traditional principalities were also riven by internal conflict. With the decline of the Zhou, public order had deteriorated, and increasingly, brute force was becoming the norm. It was not uncommon for princes to kill ministers who dared to challenge their policies; ambassadors could be murdered and rulers assassinated during visits to another principality. To add to the tension, it seems that there was also an environmental crisis. 26 Centuries of aggressive hunting and land clearance that destroyed animal habitats meant that huntsmen were returning empty-handed and there was far less meat at the bin banquets, so the old carefree extravagance was no longer possible.

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

  But there was a disturbing portent of future trouble. In 1949 an image of Ram, incarnation of Vishnu and chief exemplar of Hindu virtue, was discovered in a building at the site of his mythological birthplace in Ayodhya on the eastern Gangetic plain. This was also the site of a mosque said to have been established by Babur, the first Moghul emperor, in 1528.19 Devout Hindus claimed that Ram’s image had been placed there by God; Muslims, naturally, denied this. There were violent clashes, and the district magistrate, a member of RSS, refused to remove the image. Because their images require regular worship, Hindus were henceforth permitted to enter the building for devotional chanting on the anniversary of the miraculous arrival of Ram’s statue. Forty years later this sacred geography would trump the scientific rationalism so confidently predicted by the secularists. [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] The founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), was an unabashed secularist who simply wanted to create a state in which Muslims would not be defined or limited by their religious affiliation. In fact, the nation was defined by Islam before it had even begun. This inevitably raised certain expectations, and from the beginning, while the government was still resolutely secularist, there was pressure to resacralize political life. The Deobandis became particularly powerful in Pakistan. They endorsed the modern system of territorial nationalism and secular democracy and offered free education to the poor in their madrassas at a time when the state school system was collapsing due to lack of funding. Their students would be isolated from mainstream secular life and schooled in the Deobandis’ peculiarly rigid and intolerant form of Islam. To protect their Islamic lifestyle, the Deobandis also founded a political party, the JUI (Association of Ulema of Islam). By the late 1960s, having accumulated tens of thousands of students and alumni, they were in an excellent position to pressure the government to Islamize civil law and the banking system, thereby creating jobs for their ultrareligious graduates.

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

  First the monks of the convent of Adrumetum in North Africa differed among themselves over the doctrine of predestination; some perverting it to carnal security, others plunging from it into anguish and desperation, and yet others feeling compelled to lay more stress than Augustine upon human freedom and responsibility. Augustine endeavored to allay the scruples of these monks by his two treatises, De gratia et libero arbitrio, and De correptione et gratia. The abbot Valentinus answered these in the name of the monks in a reverent and submissive tone.1867 But simultaneously a more dangerous opposition to the doctrine of predestination arose in Southern Gaul, in the form of a regular theological school within the Catholic church. The members of this school were first called "remnants of the Pelagians,"1868 but commonly Massilians, from Massilia (Marseilles), their chief centre, and afterwards Semi-Pelagians. Augustine received an account of this from two learned and pious lay friends, Prosper, and Hilarius,1869 who begged that he himself would take the pen against it. This was the occasion of his two works, De praedestinatione sanctorum, and De dono perseverentiae, with which he worthily closed his labors as an author. He deals with these disputants more gently than with the Pelagians, and addresses them as brethren. After his death (430) the discussion was continued principally in Gaul; for then North Africa was disquieted by the victorious invasion of the Vandals, which for several decades shut it out from the circle of theological and ecclesiastical activity. At the head of the Semi-Pelagian party stood John Cassian, the founder and abbot of the monastery at Massilia, a man of thorough cultivation, rich experience, and unquestioned orthodoxy.1870 He was a grateful disciple of Chrysostom, who ordained him deacon, and apparently also presbyter. His Greek training and his predilection for monasticism were a favorable soil for his Semi-Pelagian theory. He labored awhile in Rome with Pelagius, and afterwards in Southern France, in the cause of monastic piety, which he efficiently promoted by exhortation and example. Monasticism sought in cloistered retreats a protection against the allurements of sin, the desolating incursions of the barbarians, and the wretchedness of an age of tumult and confusion. But the enthusiasm for the monastic life tended strongly to over-value external acts and ascetic discipline, and resisted the free evangelical bent of the Augustinian theology. Cassian wrote twelve books De coenobiorum institutis, in which be first describes the outward life of the monks, and then their inward conflicts and victories over the eight capital vices: intemperance, unchastity, avarice, anger, sadness, dulness, ambition, and pride. More important are his fourteen Collationes Patrum, conversations which Cassian and his friend Germanus had had with the most experienced ascetics in Egypt, during a seven years’ sojourn there.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  The storm lasted ten days, propelling the ship eight hundred miles north, all the way to the Azores. Portuguese postcard of the Apollo Looking for a safe port, Hubbard turned toward Morocco. He thought that an Arab country might be safer and less conspicuous for the Scientology fleet, which had gained too much unfavorable attention in European ports. In October 1969, he dropped anchor in Safi, near Marrakesh. At last the crew, shaken and hungry, could take on stores. Hubbard began sizing up the country as a possible Scientology homeland. He picked Kit Harrington and Richard Wrigley, another redhead, to lead an exploratory mission to the capital, Rabat. The only order they got from Hubbard was to “secure Morocco.” Wrigley and Harrington set up in the Hôtel La Tour Hassan, where diplomats typically stayed. Wrigley became friendly with an African envoy and drifted off to the Ivory Coast, leaving Kit to secure Morocco by herself. She established an office titled the American Institute of Human Engineering and Development, and sold a project to develop hydroponic farming to the Moroccan government. That project went nowhere, but it gave her legitimate cover. With her social skills, she soon found herself hobnobbing with the royal palace’s inner circles—in particular, she made friends among some high-ranking military officers, including a tall, handsome intelligence officer named Colonel Allam. As it happened, Colonel Allam and Kit shared a birthday, May 17, so she found herself invited to a soiree at the governor’s palace in Marrakesh. In the middle of the party, there was a great stir caused by the arrival of General Mohammed Oufkir, the truculent minister of the interior. General Oufkir cast a long shadow over the nation, which had long been terrorized by the tyrannical rule of King Hassan II. Kit immediately sized him up as a shady figure—tall, hollow-cheeked, his eyes hidden by dark glasses, the blood of so many of his countrymen on his hands. Her Moroccan friends bluntly warned Kit to keep her distance from the military, but Hubbard was pressing her to do the very opposite. He and Mary Sue rented a villa in Tangier. Mary Sue was thrilled; she hated being cooped up aboard ship. The prospect of taking over Morocco began to seem not so farfetched. For most of the next year, Kit lived in Rabat, reporting to the Apollo every couple of months. In July 1971, Colonel Allam invited her and two other Scientologists to watch a war-games exercise on the occasion of the king’s forty-second birthday. The games, which were held at the king’s summer palace in Skhirat, were a panoramic fantasia of Berber tribesmen on camels, followed by infantry formations and tank maneuvers.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Amid all the anxiety, Suzette had a miscarriage. After Suzette blew, Guy recalls being sent to Happy Valley and being told he would have to divorce his wife. Jonathan Horwich, Roanne’s father, was also in Happy Valley, along with Arthur Hubbard, Ron and Mary Sue’s youngest child. One night, while Horwich was supposed to be standing guard, Arthur blew and was never recovered. In October 1988, Guy also decided to escape. Each evening, he went for a stroll along the fence line, a little farther each time, carrying a snack for the German shepherd guard dogs. One night, he jumped the fence, but the dogs betrayed him and began barking. He had to dive off the road when he saw the lights of the blow team coming after him. For hours, he stumbled through the brush, bleeding, his clothes torn, until he made it to Hemet, where he pounded on the door of a bowling alley. In broken Spanish, he told the person who peeked out that he had been in a car wreck. Guy finally rejoined Suzette. (They had two other children before he came out to her as gay. They divorced in 1998.) LIKE PAUL HAGGIS, Tom Cruise had been raised Catholic, although he was more religiously inclined than Paul. His family moved frequently, and he spent part of his childhood in Canada, where he had the reputation of being a headstrong, troublesome, charismatic, and charming boy. His schoolwork suffered because of dyslexia, and he later said that when he graduated from high school he was “a functional illiterate.” However, he excelled in sports and drama. His family, like the Haggis family, threw themselves into theater, founding an amateur troupe of players in Ottawa. His antisocial, bullying father was a disruptive force in the family, and early one morning, when Cruise was twelve, his mother packed up her three daughters and her precocious son and fled back to America. “We felt like fugitives,” Cruise later recalled. Spiritual questing and a tendency toward piety were already features of Cruise’s personality. He spent a year in seminary in Cincinnati, with a view toward joining the priesthood. But there was another, intensely ambitious side that was focused entirely on stardom. He went to Hollywood when he was eighteen, and managed to get a role in Endless Love, a movie starring Brooke Shields. He was a natural actor, but also persistent and choosy, quickly finding his way into memorable roles. The longing to express his spiritual side had never gone away, but it was difficult, in Hollywood, to know exactly how to fit that in.

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

  Brown, whose conscience was not entirely clear upon my account, as knowing as she was of the town as hackneyed as she was in bluffing through all the dangers of her vocation, could not help being alarmed at the questions, especially when he went on to talk of a Justice of peace, Newgate, the Old Bailey, indictments for keeping a disorderly house, pillory, carting, and the whole process of that nature. She, who, it is likely, imagined I had lodged an information against her house, looked extremely blank, and began to make a thousand protestations and excuses. However, to abridge, they brought away triumphantly my box of things, which, had she not ben under an awe, she might have disputed with them; and not only that, but a clearance and discharge of any demands on the house, at the expense of no more than a bowl of arrack-punch, the treat of which, together with the choice of the house conveniences, was offered and not accepted. Charles all the time acted the chance companion of the lawyer, who had brought him there, as he knew the house, and appeared in no wise interested in the issue; but he had the collateral pleasure of hearing all that I told him verified, as far as the bawd’s fears would give her leave to enter into my history, which, if one may guess by the composition she so readily came into, were not small. Phœbe, my kind tutoress Phœbe, was at the time gone out, perhaps in search of me, or their cooked-up story had not, it is probable, passed smoothly. This negociation had, however, taken up some time, which would have appeared much longer to me, left as I was, in a strange house, if the landlady, a motherly sort of a woman, to whom Charles had liberally recommended me, had not come up and borne me company. We drank tea, and her chat helped to pass away the time very agreeably, since he was our theme; but as the evening deepened, and the hour set for his return was elapsed, I could not dispel the gloom of impatience, and tender fears which gathered upon me, and which our timid sex are apt to feel in proportion to their love. Long, however, I did not suffer: the sight of him over-paid me; and the soft reproach I had prepared for him, expired before it reached my lips.

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

  Again to the doctors, and more remedies! An excellent business! “But to return to our subject. I was saying that my wife nursed her children well, that the nursing and the gestation of the children, and the children in general, quieted my tortures of jealousy, but that, on the other hand, they provoked torments of a different sort.” CHAPTER XVI. “The children came rapidly, one after another, and there happened what happens in our society with children and doctors. Yes, children, maternal love, it is a painful thing. Children, to a woman of our society, are not a joy, a pride, nor a fulfilment of her vocation, but a cause of fear, anxiety, and interminable suffering, torture. Women say it, they think it, and they feel it too. Children to them are really a torture, not because they do not wish to give birth to them, nurse them, and care for them (women with a strong maternal instinct—and such was my wife—are ready to do that), but because the children may fall sick and die. They do not wish to give birth to them, and then not love them; and when they love, they do not wish to feel fear for the child’s health and life. That is why they do not wish to nurse them. ‘If I nurse it,’ they say, ‘I shall become too fond of it.’ One would think that they preferred india-rubber children, which could neither be sick nor die, and could always be repaired. What an entanglement in the brains of these poor women! Why such abominations to avoid pregnancy, and to avoid the love of the little ones? “Love, the most joyous condition of the soul, is represented as a danger. And why? Because, when a man does not live as a man, he is worse than a beast. A woman cannot look upon a child otherwise than as a pleasure. It is true that it is painful to give birth to it, but what little hands! . . . Oh, the little hands! Oh, the little feet! Oh, its smile! Oh, its little body! Oh, its prattle! Oh, its hiccough! In a word, it is a feeling of animal, sensual maternity.

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

  After a little time, in which my air, person and whole figure had undergone a strict examination, which I had, on my part, tried to render favourable to me, by primming, drawing up my neck, and setting my best looks, she advanced and spoke to me with the greatest demureness: “Sweet-heart, do you want a place? “Yes, and please you,” (with a curtsey down to the ground). Upon this she acquainted me she was actually come to the office herself, to look out for a servant; that she believed I might do, with a little of her instruction; that she could take my very looks for a sufficient character; that London was a very wicked, vile, place; that she hoped I would be tractable, and keep out of bad company; in short, she said all to me that an old experienced practitioner in town could think of, and which was much more than was necessary to take in an artless inexperienced country maid, who was even afraid of becoming a wanderer about the streets, and therefore gladly jumped at the first offer of a shelter, especially from so grave and matron-like a lady, for such my flattering fancy assured me this new mistress of mine was, I being actually hired under the nose of the good woman that kept the office, whose shrewed smiles and shrugs I could not help observing, and innocently interpreted them as marks of being pleased at my getting into place so soon: but, as I afterwards came to know, these Beldams understood one another very well, and this was a market where Mrs. Brown, my mistress, frequently attended, on the watch for any fresh goods that might offer there, for the use of her customers, and her own profit. Madam was, however, so well pleased with her bargain that fearing I presume, lest better advice or some accident might occasion my slipping through her fingers, she would officiously take me in a coach to my inn, where, calling herself for my box, it was, I being present, delivered without the least scruple or explanation as to where I was going.

• From Between Us

  White Canadians judged Jon’s emotions without regard for the affective context; they just looked at Jon’s face. As immigrants became part of North American social life, their emotion model gradually seemed to shift from OURS to MINE. Though both Asian Canadian and Asian international students in Canada relied too on the emotional displays of the surrounding people when they were asked to judge how happy, angry, or sad Jon was, their emotion judgments became less reliant on the emotions of the surrounding people with increased exposure to North American culture. The eye-tracking data show even Asian international students, who had spent relatively little time in Canada, focused on the central person’s emotions more than the Japanese students in Japan; yet not even the Asian Canadians had bridged the gap with the European Canadians. Describing changes in emotional lives as a result of immigrating to another culture is no easy task, and the available research only scratches the surface. With exposure to another culture, emotional lives presumably change in many different ways: we may learn to feel and perceive emotions differently, and to act and interact differently with others. There are many new steps immigrants or sojourners learn, and it is not so clear which are the most essential for dancing with the majority. What is clear is that most immigrants do not learn all these new dance steps in their lifetime, but at the same time even a relatively brief exposure to another culture affects the way we do emotions. Learning Emotions It may have taken my Sephardic Jewish ancestors a full century to get attuned to the emotions of the rest of Amsterdam because for the longest time they were completely segregated: They had their own schools, their own governing board, their own jurisdiction, their own social and cultural events, and they married among themselves. They seldom interacted with majority others, and if they did, it was primarily to do business, a very narrow context for doing emotions. In the late ’70s, social psychologist Yasuko Minoura followed more than seventy Japanese-born school-aged children whose parents’ jobs took them temporarily to the United States. She interviewed them extensively, and found most emotional learning took place in children whose social lives had become American. The children who were comfortable articulating their own strengths (“pride”), made their wishes clear (i.e., made clear what made them “happy”), and took their own decisions (i.e., they pursued what made them “happy”) had spent more time in the United States, had the largest number of American friends, and also were more proficient in English—all suggesting that they were more immersed in U.S. culture.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  My parents lived in a modest home. They’d spent the last ten years making upgrades. If she thought the outside was pretty I couldn’t wait to see what she thought of my mother’s pink granite kitchen counters, or the fountain depicting a peeing boy they installed in the middle of the foyer. When I lived at home we’d had linoleum and plumbing that only worked a tenth of the time. She made no comment about the giant reindeer lawn ornaments, or the wreath almost the size of the front door. She hopped out without any reservation and followed me to the house of my very happy childhood. I looked at her before I opened the door, dressed in running clothes, her hair messy and stuck to her face. What type of woman jumped in the car with you on Christmas Day to meet your family, without putting on a cardigan and a dress? This one. She made every woman I’d ever been with feel insignificant and fake. This was going to be fun. [image file=image24.jpg] “Is this you, Senna?” He was looking at me intensely. I didn’t know what he was thinking, but I knew what I was thinking: Damn Nick and his book. I could barely … I didn’t know how to … My thoughts were trembling out of my hands. “You’re shaking,” Isaac said. He set the book on the nightstand and poured me a glass of water. The cup was one of those heavy plastic things, the color of too many colors of Play-Doh mixed together. It grossed me out, but I took it and sipped. The cup felt too heavy. Some of the water spilled down the front of my hospital gown, plastering it to my skin. I handed the cup back to Isaac, who set it aside without taking his eyes off my face. He put each one of his hands over mine to steady them. It absorbed a little of my shaking. “He wrote this for you,” Isaac said. His eyes were dark, like he had too many thoughts and they were filling him up. I didn’t want to answer. There was no mistaking the similarities in name—Senna/Brenna. There was also no mistaking the actual story itself. The fine line that squiggled between fiction and truth. It made me sick that Nick told the story. Our story? His version of our story. Some things should be buried and left to rot. I pointed to the book. “Take it,” I said. “Throw it away.” His eyebrows drew together. “Why?” “Because I don’t want the past.” He stared at me for a long minute, then picked up the book, tucked it under his arm and walked for the door. “Wait!”

• From Going Clear (2013)

  “I’m not involved with that.” In any case, for someone like Travolta, who was so publicly associated with the church, it would be hard to just walk away. He had been asked to declare himself publicly, and he had done so, again and again. The star was staying in a private house in Houston. He and Taylor met in the evening, after dinner, over a plate of chocolate-chip cookies that she had brought. She explained that she had left the Sea Org and was with her children now, then quickly changed the subject and asked about him. He described the problems he was having. Former Scientologists have given conflicting accounts of Travolta’s stressful relationship with the church at that time. The church hierarchy was desperately concerned that their most valuable member would be revealed as gay; at the same time, the hierarchy was prepared to use that against him. Bill Franks, the church’s former executive director, told Time magazine that Travolta was worried that if he defected, the church would expose his sexual identity. Jesse Prince has stated that Travolta was threatening to marry a man, although that wasn’t a legal option at the time. In Franks’s opinion, the church had Travolta trapped. At one point, the star sought assurance from Franks that his private confessions wouldn’t be used against him. “ My sessions are protected, right?” he asked Franks. In truth, intelligence officers inside the church had already been directed to gather material—called a Dead Agent pack—that would be used against Travolta if he turned. In Houston, however, Travolta told Taylor that he didn’t really feel that he needed to be recovered—he was just taking a break. However, Taylor did persuade him to buy a costly package of auditing so that he could get back on the Bridge. He had stopped his coursework after completing OT III. After that, Taylor received a letter from Hubbard saying, “ Well done.” The founder asked if there was anything she needed. She asked nothing for herself, but begged Hubbard to do a “Folder Error Summary” on Travolta, in which the founder would personally review all the star’s auditing over the years to spot any mistakes—a tremendous honor for any Scientologist. A Messenger assured her that it would be done. Not long afterward, however, Travolta stopped talking to Taylor. She got a call from Priscilla Presley, who asked what was going on. Presley had run into Travolta and he said that they should get together. “ I’ll call Spanky,” Presley had told him. “No, don’t go through Spanky,” Travolta said. When Spanky heard this, she realized she had been declared a Suppressive Person. Nobody had bothered to tell her, but from now on, no Scientologist would be allowed to talk to her. Taylor never tried to speak to Paul Haggis again, worried that she might compromise his relationship to the church. For his part, Haggis had no idea what had happened to Spanky. He wondered why she had just disappeared.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Concerned that Sweeney would confront Travolta during the publicity for the film, Rinder and Davis planned to travel together to London, but on the day of departure, Davis failed to show up. Someone went to his room, but he was nowhere to be found. Rinder had to travel to London alone. He learned from Miscavige’s communicator that Davis had blown. Sweeney immediately sensed that something was up and kept pestering Rinder about where Davis was. Rinder told him Davis had the flu. As part of the film promotion, Travolta arrived at the red-carpet London premiere on a motorcycle. Sweeney was standing in the crowd in Leicester Square, well away from the star, crying out, “ Are you a member of a sinister, brainwashing cult?” Travolta’s fans shouted Sweeney down. Later, Sweeney asked Rinder if it was true that Miscavige had beaten him, claiming to have an eyewitness. “ Who’s the witness?” Rinder asked. “He wishes to remain confidential because he says he is scared.” “John, that is typical of what you do,” Rinder said. “He says that David Miscavige knocked you to the ground.” “Absolute rubbish, rubbish, rubbish, not true, rubbish.” Rinder threatened to sue if Sweeney aired such allegations. When the BBC program ran, there was no mention of physical abuse. Rinder felt that he had spared the church considerable embarrassment. But, far from being grateful, Miscavige told him that Sweeney’s piece should never have run at all. He ordered Rinder to report to an RPF facility in England. Rinder decided he’d had enough. He blew. Davis called the church and returned voluntarily from Las Vegas, where he had been hiding.5 He was sent to Clearwater, where he was security-checked by Jessica Feshbach. The aim of the check is to gain a confession using an E-Meter. It can function as a powerful form of thought control. Davis and Feshbach subsequently married. ON A RAINY MORNING in late September 2010, I finally got my meeting with Tommy Davis. The profile of Paul Haggis I had been preparing was nearing publication. Davis and Feshbach, along with four attorneys representing the church, traveled to Manhattan to meet with me; my editor, Daniel Zalewski, and David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker ; the two lead fact-checkers on the story, Jennifer Stahl and Tim Farrington, as well as the head of the magazine’s fact-checking department, Peter Canby; and our lawyer, Lynn Oberlander. Leading the Scientology legal delegation was Anthony Michael Glassman, a former assistant US attorney who now has a boutique law firm in Beverly Hills, specializing in representing movie stars. On his website, he boasts of a $10 million judgment against the New York Times . The stakes were obvious to everyone. The Scientology delegation brought with them forty-eight three-ring binders of supporting material, stretching nearly seven linear feet, to respond to the 971 questions the checkers had posed. It was an impressive display. The binders were labeled according to categories, such as “Disappearance of L.

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

  Two new “Christianities” had therefore emerged in response to a shift in the intellectual environment, both of which could claim support from past scriptures and luminaries. With quiet and sustained reflection, this dispute could easily have been settled peaceably. Instead it became entangled with imperial politics. Constantine, of course, had no understanding of these theological issues but was determined nevertheless to repair this breach of ecclesiastical consensus. In May 325 he summoned the bishops to a council in Nicaea to settle the matter once and for all. Here Athanasius managed to get the emperor’s ear and forced his position through. Most of the bishops, anxious not to incur Constantine’s displeasure, signed Athanasius’s creed but continued to preach as they had before. Nicaea solved nothing, and the Arian controversy dragged on for another sixty years. Constantine, out of his depth theologically, would eventually veer to the other side and take the Arian position that was promoted by the more cultured, aristocratic bishops.28 Athanasius, no aristocrat himself, was reviled by his enemies as an upstart “from the lowest depths of society” who was “no different from a common artisan.” For all his talk of kenosis, Athanasius never lost his pointy elbows or his theological certainty, which was inspired in no small part by the new monastic movement that had emerged in the deserts around Alexandria. [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] In 270, the year of Constantine’s birth, a young Egyptian peasant had walked to church lost in thought. Antony had just inherited a sizable piece of land from his parents but found this good fortune an intolerable burden. He was only eighteen years old, yet now he had to provide for his sister, take a wife, have children, and toil on the farm for the rest of his life to support them all. In Egypt, where famine loomed whenever the Nile failed to flood, starvation was always a real threat, and most people accepted this relentless struggle as inevitable.29 But Jesus had said: “I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat and about your body and how to clothe it.”30 Antony also remembered that the first Christians had sold all their possessions and given the proceeds to the poor.31 Still musing on these texts, he entered the church only to hear the priest reading Jesus’s words to a rich young man: “If you wish to be perfect, go and sell what you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”32 Immediately Antony sold his property and embarked on a quest for freedom and holiness that would become a countercultural challenge to both the Christianized Roman state and the new worldly, imperial Christianity. Like other monastic communities we have considered, Antony’s followers would try to model a more egalitarian and compassionate way for people to live together.

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

  According to tradition we were to partake of a farewell supper and make jolly together, before separating in our divers paths in life." "Yes, I remember those merry suppers of the Quartier Latin." "When the supper was over—" "And everyone more or less tipsy—" "Precisely; it was agreed that we should pass the evening in visiting some of the houses of nightly entertainment. Although I was myself rather merry, and usually up to any kind of joke, still I felt somewhat shy, and would willingly have given my friends the slip, rather than expose myself to their ridicule and to all the horrors of syphilis; but do what I could it was impossible to get rid of them. "They called me a sneak, they imagined that I wanted to spend the evening with some mistress, a pretty grisette, or a fashionable cocotte, for the term horizontale had not yet come into fashion. Another hinted that I was tied to my mammy's apron-strings, that my dad had not allowed me to take the latch-key. A third said that I wanted to go and 'menarmi la rilla' as Aretino crudely expresses it. "Seeing that it was impossible to escape, I consented with a good grace to accompany them. "A certain Biou, young in years, but old in craft, who—like an elderly tom-cat—had, at sixteen, already lost an eye in a battle of love, (having got some syphilitic virus into it), proposed to shew us life in the unknown parts of the real Quartier Latin. "'First,' said he, 'I'll take you to a place where we'll spend little and have some jolly fun; it'll just put us 'en train' and from there we'll go to another house, to fire off our pistols, or I should rather say our revolvers, for mine is a seven shot barrel.' "His single eye twinkled with delight, and his trousers were stirred from within as he said this. We all agreed to his proposal, I especially feeling quite glad that I might at first remain only a spectator. I wondered, however, what the sight would be like. "We had an endless drive through the narrow straggling streets, alleys, and by-ways, where painted women appeared in gorgeous dresses at the filthy windows of some wretched houses. "As it was getting late, all the shops were now shut, except the fruiterers, who sold fried fish, mussels, and potatoes. These disgorged an offensive smell of dirt, grease, and hot oil, which mixed itself up with the stench of the gutters and that of the cesspools in the middle of the streets.

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

  Phœbe at this redoubled her laugh, and whilst I expected a very serious solution of my doubts and apprehensions in this matter, only told me that “she never heard of a mortal wound being given in those parts, by that terrible weapon, and that some she knew younger, and as delicately made as myself, had outlived the operation; that she believed, at the worst, I should take a great deal of liking; that true it was, there was a great diversity of sizes in those parts, owing to nature, child-bearing, frequent over-stretching with unmerciful machines, but that at a certain age and habit of body, even the most experienced in those affairs could not well distinguish between the maid and the woman, supposing too an absence of all artifice, in their natural situation: but that since chance had thrown in my way one sight of that sort, she would procure me another, that should feast my eyes more delicately, and go a great way in the cure of my fears from that imaginary disproportion”. On this she asked me if I knew Polly Phillips? “Undoubterly,” says I, “the fair girl which was so tender of me when I was sick, and has been, as you told me, but two months in the house.” “The same,” says Phœbe. “You must know then, she is kept by a young Genoes merchant, whom his uncle, who is immensely rich, and whose darling he is, on a pretex of settling some accounts, but in reality to humour his inclinations for travelling, and seeing the world. He met casually with this Polly once in company, and taking a likning to her, makes it worth her while to keep entirely to him. He comes to her here twice or thrice a week, and she receives him in the light closet up one pair of stairs, where he enjoys her in a taste, I suppose, peculiar to the heat, or perhaps the caprices of his own country, I say no more, but to-morrow being his day, you shall see what passes between them, from a place only known to your mistress and myself.”