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 Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  We owe it to our own nation and to others to develop a wider, more panoptic knowledge and understanding of our neighbors. First, recall the seventh step and remind yourself yet again of how little we know. People often pontificate about foreign affairs from a position of dangerous ignorance. The media are not always reliable: some newspapers or television channels have political or social agendas that slant their coverage of world events. The same is often true of politicians. In Britain during the buildup to the Iraq war, the government told the public that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he could use to attack British bases in Cyprus at forty minutes’ notice. Later it transpired that this was not the case. Many of the people who believed in the war were unaware that Western governments had supported and armed Saddam for years and therefore bore a measure of responsibility for the suffering he had inflicted on his people. The effort of getting to know one another demands sound information and a willingness to question received ideas. We may not have Socrates to goad us into self-knowledge and an appreciation of the profundity of our ignorance, but we can make a serious effort to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge. If you belong to a reading discussion group, you could use it to study books and articles that challenge some preconceived notions and discuss your reactions. Again, we begin with ourselves. We often have a myopic view of the history of our own country or religious tradition and criticize others for behavior of which “we” have been guilty in the past or even continue to be in the present. After the atrocities of September 11, 2001, I was often taken aback by the way some Christians berated the violence and intolerance they attributed to Islam, showing not only an embarrassing ignorance of Muslim history but a surprising blindness to the crusades, inquisitions, persecutions, and wars of religion that had scarred their own faith. I often felt that alongside programs titled “Understanding Islam” there should be a parallel course called “Understanding Christianity.” There was also a worrying lack of awareness about Western behavior during the colonial era, which had contributed to some of our current problems. A double standard, albeit unintended, violates our integrity and damages our credibility. In a global society, conflict is rarely the fault of only one party. All participants in a conflict have sown bad karma in the past, and we are all now reaping the results. When we are about to criticize another nation or religious tradition, we should get into the habit of catching ourselves and asking whether our own country may have been responsible for a similar abuse in the past.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  A more consistent approach was developed by the philosopher Alex Rosenberg. In his Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions, he sets out the view that that science is ‘our exclusive guide to reality’,12 offering us reliable certainties about our world and ourselves. In response to the question ‘What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad?’ Rosenberg declares that ‘there is no moral difference between them’. This alarming response needs unpacking. Rosenberg is advocating that the natural sciences are an ‘exclusive guide to reality’ – which precludes any moral values, in that these are not scientific notions. Science offers a descriptive account of how things function; it does not offer prescriptive declarations about what ought to be done. We need more than science to inform our ethics. Happily, science can answer most of our questions about the natural world, even if it can’t give us definitive answers to moral or existential questions. Science can certainly offer explanations for why we consider morality to be so important.13 For example, it could be argued that our evolutionary history predisposes us towards pro-social behaviour, in that this enhances our prospects for survival. But why should science be expected to teach us moral values? Or answer existentially important questions such as ‘How should I act?’ or ‘How should I live?’ It’s science, after all, not philosophy. Science has its own distinct toolkit, which enables it to answer its own spectrum of questions with unique authority and reliability. That’s one of the reasons why I love and respect science so much. But it doesn’t mean that science can answer all our questions, or that those that lie beyond its reach can be dismissed as pseudo-questions. Here’s the point: we feel that we need to answer moral questions – to be able to declare that certain acts are good and others bad; to name what we consider to be destructive to human wellbeing or the environment, and invest these judgements with deeper significance than a personal indication of distaste. Something deep within us whispers that these questions are important and need to be respected and answered. While modern psychological research does not (and cannot) tell us what it means to be ‘good’ or what we ought to believe about purpose or meaning in life, it makes it clear that these beliefs matter to people, and that they are integral to their wellbeing. And what about philosophy? Does it allow us to reach secure and certain conclusions, or should we think of it as offering us a critical tool for evaluating and calibrating our beliefs? Most philosophers are somewhat pessimistic about the ‘persistent and intractable disagreement’ within their discipline, often reflecting the difficulty in finding undeniable premises for philosophical arguments.14 The diversity and disagreement within the field is such that ‘most philosophical views are minority opinions,’ and there is typically ‘nothing approaching a consensus on the correct alternative’.15

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  “Resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering,” intones guru Ram Dass. As a kid I’d seen his name among my mother’s books, down at the end of the shelf where she kept The Dance of Anger and Love Is Letting Go of Fear. Now I knew why she had books with titles like that, whose unnatural collisions of nouns had puzzled me. Here was adulthood: my husband and I owned a restaurant. Love might have to look like letting go of fear. I could try. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Once I’d recovered from the shock and terror that we were, in fact, opening a restaurant, and once Brandon had recovered from his shock and terror at my shock and terror, we began to sort out a plan. With my book now finished, I was between projects, and this lull turned out to be convenient. I could gather up the energy I’d put into arguing against the restaurant and pour it instead into supporting it. I didn’t know what to write next, anyway, and it was a relief to not worry about it. I could worry instead about how to help Brandon succeed. When we got married, we’d each written vows. In mine, I promised to work alongside him to make our hopes and dreams real—a generic sentiment on paper, but when I spoke it aloud, I felt a current pass between us. I knew what this promise meant: that even if I couldn’t predict who he would be or what he would dream of, I had bound myself to him. It occurs to me now that I wasn’t worried about myself in this equation, about what I might become or want. I was the known quantity, he the variable. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] We began to refer to Delancey as our restaurant. My first book was published four months before it opened, in April 2009. Between book events, I helped him to finish the buildout, plan the menu, and hire a staff. When Delancey opened that August, Brandon and I were two of the three cooks, him at the pizza oven and me making salads, starters, and desserts. I was a confident home cook, but in the restaurant, I was anxious and inefficient. I dissolved. A person’s got to be on good terms with adrenaline to make it as a professional cook: you’ve got to like the rush, rise to meet it and ride it through to the end of the night. When confronted with a fresh wave of orders, I’d cry, hurling handfuls of romaine punitively into the bowl. Resentment calcified inside me like a bone. After we closed up each night, we’d have to clean the kitchen, because that’s part of a cook’s job. On our days off, I’d do payroll while Brandon received deliveries. At home, we distracted ourselves with back-to-back episodes of Battlestar Galactica and plastic sleeves of sandwich cookies from Trader Joe’s.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I want to be a fish! she said, sitting up straighter on the toilet seat. I’ll be a pink fish! And you’ll be a pink fish too. And Daddy will be a purple fish. I lowered myself onto the wooden stool that my second cousin had given us when June was born, with her name and birthdate spelled out in puzzle letters. We’ll all swim around together. Right, Mama? She looked at me, waiting. I nodded, not sure if I was happy, or sad, or some third thing. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] We swapped June on Mondays usually, sometimes Tuesdays. The first day without her was disorienting, as though I’d misplaced something terribly important, left my wallet at the store. But now I had time, gaping stretches of time, wide-open rolling meadows of it. I searched online for information about sexual orientation in women, trying to understand what had happened to me. One book kept coming up, so I ordered it. It was called Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire, by a psychologist named Lisa M. Diamond. When it arrived, I put it on my bedside table. Then I piled a bunch of other books on top of it. I caught up on the New Yorker. I went to IKEA, bought June a big-girl bed and assembled it. I started my first quilt. I’d learned to sew a couple of years earlier, when Brandon bought me a sewing machine for Christmas. Now with evenings to myself, I drank beer and watched YouTube videos with titles like “How to Stitch in the Ditch” and “Easy Improv Quilting.” I splashed around in my free time like it was an Olympic-size pool, all to myself. While prying loose a clump of dog hair stuck under a baseboard in the front hall, I got a splinter under my fingernail. The splinter was tiny, but I couldn’t get it out, and it leaked pus when I pressed on the nail. I called the doctor’s office, got a last-minute appointment with a nurse. Waiting in the exam room, I noticed the cover of a magazine on the chair beside me. It was a giant photo of a beaming Hollywood blonde, and next to her face, hot-pink letters shouted: 45 AND SINGLE! AND FEELING GREAT! Along came a fresh kind of dread. I took a picture of the cover and texted it to Matthew. Is this going to be me? I wrote. You’ll meet someone, he replied. How? Where? Anywhere, he says. You met Nora in a courtroom. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] On the mirror above the bathroom sink I stuck two columns of Post-it notes, reminders of things June and I were working on. June’s notes, in carnation pink: PEE BEFORE BED BRUSH 2x / FLOSS THUMB-SUCKING My notes, in light blue: BE CURIOUS BE PATIENT THE MISTAKE IS NOT IMPORTANT; THE WAY YOU RECOVER IS “YOU HAVE TO BE WILLING TO BE BAD AT IT IN ORDER TO GET GOOD AT IT”

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  in the following phrase, which reports a story of Maximilian’s, via Vera RySanova, via Austerlitz, and collapses the three names: “From time to time, so Vera recollected, said Austerlitz, Maximilian would tell the tale of how once, after a trade union meeting in Treplitz in the early summer of 1933 ...” Sebald borrowed this habit of repetitive attribution from the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, who also influenced Sebald’s diction of extremism. Almost every sentence in this book is a cunning combination of the quiet and the loud: “As usual when I go down to London on my own,” the narrator tells us in a fairly typical passage, “a kind of dull despair stirred within me in that December morming.” Or, for instance, when Austerlitz describes how moths die, he says that they will stay where they are, clinging to a wall, never moving “until the last breath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death.” In Thomas Bernhard’s work, extremity of expression is indistinguishable from the Austrian author’s comic, ranting rage, and his tendency to circle obsessively around madness and suicide. Sebald takes some of Bernhard’s wildness and estranges it—first, by muffling it in an exquisitely courteous syntax: “Had I realized at the time that for Austerlitz certain moments had no beginning or end, while on the other hand his whole life had sometimes seemed to him a blank point without duration, I would probably have waited more patiently.” Second, Sebald makes his diction mysterious by a process of deliberate antiquarianism. Notice the slightly quaint, Romantic sound of those phrases about the moths: “until the last breath is out of their bodies ... the place where they came to grief ...” In all his fiction, Sebald works this archaic strain (sometimes reminiscent of the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter) into a new, strange, and seemingly impossible composite: a kind of mildly agitated, pensive contemporary Gothic. His characters and narrators are forever finding themselves, like travelers of old, in gloomy, inimical places (East London, Norfolk) where “not a living soul stirred.” Wherever they go, they are accompanied by apprehensions of uneasiness, dread, and menace. In Austerlitz, this uneasiness amounts to a Gothicism of the past; the text is constantly in communion with the ghosts of the dead. At Liverpool Street Station, Jacques Austerlitz feels dread at the thought that the station is built on the foundations of Bedlam, the famous insane asylum: “I felt at this time,” he tells the narrator, “as if the dead were returning from their exile and filling the twilight around me with their strangely slow but incessant to-ing and fro-ing.” In Wales, the young Jacques had occasionally felt the presence of the dead, and Evan the cobbler had told the boy of those dead who had been “struck down by fate untimely, who knew they had been cheated of what was due to them and tried to return to life.”

• 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 Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The novelist and poet Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) had an ‘uncanny ability to give expression to the emotional and intellectual problems of his time’, offering penetrating reflections on the cultural disturbances of his age.1 In 1926, Hesse published an article in UHU magazine, a modernist journal established in 1924, aimed at an urban bourgeois liberal readership in Weimar Germany.2 Weimar Germany was an intellectual and creative hothouse, the home of Dada, Bauhaus, New Objectivity, and new institutes for sexuality. But frequent economic shocks, millions of war wounded and escalating political violence left Germans anxious, unable to anchor themselves in the present. Hesse set out to explain why so many Germans yearned for a coherent worldview and why it was so difficult to find one.3 Traditional answers to this craving for a secure basis for human existence were being cast aside, discredited by the devastation of the war. But the latest intellectual fashions were simply a synthesis of the values au courant at that moment, lacking in depth, substance and stability, all things that emerge from having been subjected to critical evaluation over an extended period. Hesse also argued that the trend of privileging novelty has resulted in a precipitate dismissal of the wisdom of the past and the unquestioning adoption of new and untested ideologies in a ‘frenzied search for new interpretations of human life’. It’s an important point. The Irish writer and philosopher John Moriarty later offered an insightful critique of such a dangerous preoccupation with the transient truths of the present moment. The wise person, he suggests, is not someone who walks ahead of humanity, but behind it, ‘picking up the wonderful things it leaves behind it in its flight into a future’ that might well prove to be yet another costly failure.4 It is not difficult to work out which ideologies Hesse had in mind. Marxism and Nazism were in open competition for the spiritual and intellectual soul of Germany at that time, a struggle that grew increasingly bitter and culminated in the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Germany had undergone a transformation. An untested new ideology was in the ascendancy. UHU did not survive this development and published its last issue in September 1934. Human beings, according to Hesse, experience a ‘primal need to know that there is meaning to their lives’ that is ‘as old and as important as the need for food, love and shelter.’ Many commentators have failed to grasp the importance of this yearning for meaning and significance. George Orwell, for example, complained that ‘all “progressive” thought has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain.’5 The rise of Nazism in Germany, he remarked, showed the falsity of this view. People seemed to want a deeper vision of life that speaks of meaning, significance and purpose, that might require sacrifice on their part, rather than merely meeting their physical needs.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  At home, I fumbled in the dark on the side of the house, jammed the boots into the garbage bin. I knew I’d never get the smell out. I went inside in my socks. I must have offered some excuse to the babysitter. I brushed my teeth and stood in the doorway to June’s room. She had no idea what I’d been up to lately, what her father and I were doing. How could I ever want anything but to be here with her? The light from the hall touched her round cheek, pale as the moon. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Nausea woke me at midnight. Now I knew what to do. I bolted to the bathroom, lifted the toilet lid, and got on my knees. I could hear the tap running in the kitchen. Brandon was home. I was breathing hard. I pressed the length of my forearms into my thighs and leaned over the bowl, but nothing came up. In my lap, I noticed that my hands were closing. I tried to open my fingers, using one hand to tug at the other, but they were stuck. We’d taught American Sign Language to June as a baby: milk, water, please, flower, book, more. More, my hands said. I was panting. More air, need more air. Are you okay? Brandon said. He was in the doorway. What’s wrong, babe? I puked tonight, I said, after my talk at the UW. I was whispering. My bathrobe was too hot. Somehow I was wearing my bathrobe. The tops of my feet hurt, mashed into the floor under my folded-over body. Are you okay? he asked again. He stood behind me now, one foot on either side of my knees. There was his sock, gray at the toe. There were his hands in my hair. The space behind my eyes was too small. I decided to sit down, no more kneeling. I rocked onto one hip, braced against the wall of the bathtub with one of my clamped-up hands, which were now buzzing like they’d fallen asleep. My wrists were busy cramping now too, each contracting inward. I slid my feet out from under me, tried to wiggle my ankles, but look! there they went too, my ankles like my wrists, curling in, yanking each heel toward the other. This must be a seizure. I’m having a seizure. Someone was gasping, a sucked-in half-sob. I had to tell Brandon. He needed to see this, what was happening. What was happening? June’s room was across the hall, maybe five steps away. I imagined her standing in the doorway in her floral-print underwear from Target, eyes frosted with sleep, blinking into the bathroom. Please don’t let her wake up. How could she not wake up? My head was too loud. I gave a croak. Brandon said something, and I worked to hear it.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  concourse fifteen to twenty feet below street level, was one of the darkest and most sinister places in London, a kind of entrance to the underworld, as it has often been described. The ballast between the tracks, the cracked sleepers, the brick walls with their stone bases, the cornices and panes of the tall windows, the wooden kiosks for the ticket inspectors, and the towering cast-iron columns with their palmate capitals were all covered in a greasy black layer formed, over the course of a century, by coke dust and soot, steam, sulfur, and diesel oil. Even on sunny days only a faint grayness, scarcely illuminated at all by the globes of the station lights, came through the glass roof over the main hall, and in this eternal dusk, which was full of a muffled babble of voices, a quiet scraping and trampling of feet, innumerable people passed in great tides, disembarking from the trains or boarding them, coming together, moving apart, and being held up at barriers and bottlenecks like water against a weir. Whenever I got out at Liverpool Street Station on my way back to the East End, said Austerlitz, I would stay there at least a couple of hours, sitting on a bench with other passengers who were already tired in the early morning, or standing somewhere, leaning on a handrail and feeling that constant wrenching inside me, a kind of heartache which, as I was beginning to sense, was caused by the vortex of past time. I knew that on the site where the station stood marshy meadows had once extended to the city walls, meadows which froze over for months on end in the cold winters of the so-called Little Ice Age, and that Londoners used to strap bone runners under their shoes, skating there as the people of Antwerp skated on the Schelde, sometimes going on until midnight in the flickering light of the bonfires burning here and there on the ice in heavy braziers. Later on, the marshes were progressively drained, elm trees were planted, market gardens, fish ponds, and white sandy paths were laid out to make a place where the

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

  87 Sunzi knew that civilians would look askance at this martial ethic, but their state could not survive without its troops. 88 The army should therefore be kept apart from mainstream society and be governed by its own laws, because its modus operandi was the “extraordinary” ( qi ), the counterintuitive, doing exactly what did not come naturally. This would be disastrous in all other affairs of state, 89 but if a commander learned how to exploit the qi, he could achieve a sagelike alignment with the Way of Heaven: Thus one skilled at giving rise to the extraordinary is as boundless as Heaven and Earth, as inexhaustible as the Yellow River and the ocean. Ending and beginning again, like the sun and moon. Dying and then being born, like the four seasons. 90 The dilemma of even the most benign state was that it was obliged to maintain at its heart an institution committed to treachery and violence . The cult of the “extraordinary” was not new but was widespread among the population, especially among the lower classes, and might even date back to the Neolithic period. It had strong connections with the mystical school that we call Daoism (or Taoism) in the West, which was far more popular among the masses than the elite. 91 Daoists opposed any form of government and were convinced that when rulers interfered in their subjects’ lives, they invariably made matters worse—an attitude similar to the strategists’ preference for “doing nothing” and refraining from rushing into action. Forcing people to obey man-made laws and perform unnatural rituals was simply perverse, argued the ebullient hermit Zhuangzi (c. 369–286). It was better to “do nothing,” practicing “action by inaction [ wu wei ].” It was deep within yourself, at a level far below the reasoning powers, that you would encounter the Way ( dao ) things really were. 92 In the West we tend to read the mid-third-century treatise known as the Daodejing b (“Classic of the Way and Its Potency”) as a devotional text for a personal spirituality, but it was actually a manual of statecraft, written for the prince of one of the vulnerable principalities. 93 Its anonymous author wrote under the pseudonym Laozi, or Lao-Tzu—“Old Master.” Rulers should imitate Heaven, he taught, which did not interfere with the Ways of men; so if they abandoned their meddlesome policies, political “potency” ( de ) would emerge spontaneously: “If I cease to desire and remain still, the empire will be at peace of its own accord.” 94 The Daoist king should practice meditative techniques that rid his mind of busy theorizing so that it became “empty” and “still.” Then the Dao of Heaven could act through him, and “to the end of one’s days one will meet with no danger.” 95 Laozi offered the beleaguered principalities a stratagem for survival. Statesmen usually preferred frenzied activity and shows of strength when they should be doing the exact opposite.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Communities of Belief as Places of ReflectionA second significant role of communities of faith is that they are places of reflection, in which beliefs are incubated and enabled to grow and mature within a supportive environment. The community of belief sustains and catalyses a process of learning about the intellectual and social world that these beliefs create. It is about exploring the landscape of faith, and learning to inhabit this new set of perspectives and relationships. To believe is to occupy the same physical landscape as everyone else, but to see it and experience it in a new and distinctive manner. The community of belief helps us to expand our vision of this landscape, and encourages us to go ‘further up and further in’ (C. S. Lewis) to this way of thinking and living. Communities of faith provide an environment in which their underlying beliefs – again, whether political, religious or cultural – can be studied, internalised and appropriated. Particularly in religious communities – such as churches, synagogues and mosques – education is seen as integral to achieving a mature faith, capable of engaging the world and sustaining a meaningful life. This typically takes the form of explaining the core beliefs and defining practices of a community and pointing to exemplars who are able to enact and model the community’s distinctive ethos. There is now a growing awareness of the need to prepare communities of belief for the challenges of living in a pluralist western context, in which there are no universally accepted norms of truth, justice or goodness, and in which nobody is seen as having privilege in matters of belief. While some communities of belief are trying to find an appropriate place and voice within wider culture, re-reading their histories to see if the past might help them navigate the stormy seas of the present, others isolate themselves from the complexities of our social world to maintain the myth of their totalising truths. This isolationism is a source of concern because it detaches such communities from the cultural mainstream, often leading to the perception that they are at war with, or threatened by, wider society. This can easily lead to alienation or even radicalisation within these communities, which result in political or religious extremism. Some Islamic communities in secular France or alt-right networks in Germany provide illuminating examples of this problem, for which there appears to be no obvious solution.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  We find ourselves drawn to the ‘necessary illusions’ and ‘emotionally potent oversimplifications’ that Noam Chomsky believed were constructed by governmental agencies to control public opinion. 10 We too easily allow ourselves to be cushioned against harsh truths by constructing worldviews that protect us from thoughts that we might find unbearable – such as the pointlessness of life, or the utter indifference of the cosmos to our presence. Yet the process of making connections is essential to the construction of beliefs, even if it can misfire. The French mathematician and philosopher of science Henri Poincaré helps us grasp this distinction: ‘Science is made with facts, like a house is made with stones, but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a pile of stones is a house.’ 11 Each stone is significant; yet we need to be able to see the grander structure of which it is part if we are to appreciate the wholeness of our world, without losing sight of its many individual aspects. Yet even here, there are uncertainties about the significance of this process. In the natural sciences, the debate between ‘instrumentalism’ and ‘realism’ continues. Is this ‘conceptual framework’ simply a construction of the human mind, which is read into or superimposed upon the real world? Or do we discern something that is there in the world? Have we invented something, or discovered it? Perhaps more worryingly, we often assume we must find a single master picture or narrative which makes all others redundant, exposing them as inadequate or even fraudulent. Yet while some worldviews demand exclusive control over our readings and interpretations of life, most are permissive, illuminating or interpreting aspects of life, and allowing supplementation from other perspectives. One of the reasons why I moved away from Marxism as a teenager was my sense that it imprisoned me within a controlling narrative and left me unwilling to acknowledge insights from other ways of thinking. The evidence clearly indicates that human beings are deeply pragmatic, working and living with a variety of big pictures, seeing them as helpful informing guides to some aspects of their lives (but not to others). The sociologist Christian Smith has noted how modern Americans draw selectively on about a dozen competing metanarratives – such as a Progressive Socialism narrative, a Scientific Enlightenment narrative, and a Christian narrative – to make sense of their world. 12 As Smith points out, these narratives are quite different, have different concerns and lie beyond empirical verification.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  THE NINTH STEPConcern for EverybodySo far we have confined our attention to the immediate community. But as we saw at the very beginning, this is not enough. Some religious traditions are more pluralistic than others, but all have at least one strand that insists that we cannot confine our compassion to our own group: we must also reach out in some way to the stranger and the foreigner—even to the enemy. Mozi put it clearly when he insisted that the well-being of humanity was dependent upon jian ai: “concern for everybody,” a principled and practically oriented acknowledgment of the absolute equality of human beings. It is now time to apply what we have learned to the wider global community. At an early stage of its development, tribalism enabled the human race to survive in harsh and inhospitable circumstances, but tribal chauvinism can be extremely dangerous. The Prophet Muhammad’s greatest political achievement was to find a way of helping the Arabs to transcend the aggressive jahiliyyah that was tearing Arabia apart. In the Qur’an, God tells humanity, “Behold, we have created you all out of a male and a female and have formed you into tribes and nations so that you may get to know one another.”1 Pluralism and diversity are God’s will; the evolution of human beings into national and tribal groups was meant to encourage them to appreciate and understand the essential unity and equality of the entire human family. But national or tribal chauvinism (asibiyyah), which regards one’s own group as inherently superior to all others, is condemned as arrogant and divisive. Tribalism in this sense is still alive and well today. If we continue to make our national interest an absolute value, to see our cultural heritage and way of life as supreme, and to regard outsiders and foreigners with suspicion and neglect their interests, the interconnected global society we have created will not be viable. After the world wars, genocide, and terrorism of the twentieth century, the purpose of the tribe or the nation can no longer be to fight, dominate, exploit, conquer, colonize, occupy, kill, convert, or terrorize rival groups. We have a duty to get to know one another, and to cultivate a concern and responsibility for all our neighbors in the global village. During this step, we begin to expand our horizons to make place for the more distant other. Understanding different national, cultural, and religious traditions is no longer a luxury; it is now a necessity and must become a priority. The Dalai Lama has pointed out that when countries, continents, and even villages were economically and socially independent and contacts between them few, the destruction of an enemy could have been advantageous for “us”:

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  6. Radegund: Survivor, Queen, Abbess A Privileged but Unstable Childhood As a child of royalty in the restless, shape-shifting kingdoms of 6th-century Francia and Germany, Radegund had a comfortable life—at least in terms of food and clothing. But the endemic violence of the period taught the princess at an early age to be wary of complacency. She was born around 520 to Berthar, one of three brothers who jointly ruled the Thuringians. Thuringia was roughly near the city of Erfurt, 120 miles northeast of modern-day Frankfurt. The Merovingian kingdoms lay mostly in modern-day France. Both suffered from the same problematic inheritance structure, in which kings often divided their kingdoms equally among their male heirs or made them joint rulers. These kingdoms often ended in invasion or usurpation, as the rulers of ever-shrinking kingdoms sought expansion by pushing into the territory held by their male relatives. It was not surprising that the Thuringian kingship collapsed. One of the three brothers, Hermanfrid, killed the others, taking the royal children into his court as wards. But in 531, a neighboring king and his allies seized Hermanfrid’s kingdom by force. Radegund was perhaps 11 years old when the Merovingians descended on Thuringia. In a memorable story from her hagiography, the princess’s fate was momentarily a matter of chance, as the Merovingian leaders gambled for possession of the Thuringian spoils and prisoners. She was claimed by Chlotar, a notoriously aggressive and ambitious Merovingian ruler who also married two of her cousins. He sent Radegund to a villa at Athies in northern France, where she was cared for by the king’s trusted followers. Writings about Radegund Three of Radegund’s intimates wrote about her during her life or shortly after her death, and she is also mentioned in other historical records of the Merovingian royal families. We even have some of her own writings, which make clear that the deaths of almost all her family continued to live vividly in her memory and were central to her adult identity. 40

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  increasingly tormented me. For over a year, I think, said Austerlitz, I would leave my house as darkness fell, walking on and on, down the Mile End Road and Bow Road to Stratford, then to Chigwell and Romford, right across Bethnal Green and Canonbury, through Holloway and Kentish Town and thus to Hampstead Heath, or else south over the river to Peckham and Dulwich or westward to Richmond Park. It is a fact that you can traverse this vast city almost from end to end on foot in a single night, said Austerlitz, and once you are used to walking alone and meeting only a few nocturnal specters on your way, you soon begin to wonder why, apparently because of some agreement concluded long ago, Londoners of all ages lie in their beds in those countless buildings in Greenwich, Bayswater, or Kensington, under a safe roof, as they suppose, while really they are only stretched out with their faces turned to the earth in fear, like travelers of the past resting on their way through the desert. My wanderings took me to the most remote areas of London, into outlying parts of the metropolis which I would never otherwise have seen, and when dawn came I would go back to Whitechapel on the Underground, together with all the other poor souls who flow from the suburbs towards the center at that time of day. As I passed through the stations, I thought several times that among the passengers coming towards me in the tiled passages, on the escalators plunging steeply into the depths, or behind the gray windows of a train just pulling out, I saw a face known to me from some much earlier part of my life, but I could never say whose it was. These familiar faces always had something different from the rest about them, something I might almost call indistinct, and on occasion they would haunt and disturb me for days on end. In fact at this time, usually when I came home from my nocturnal excursions, I began seeing what might be described as shapes and colors of diminished corporeality through a drifting veil or cloud of smoke, images from a faded world: a squadron of yachts putting out into the shadows over the sea from the glittering Thames estuary in the evening light, a horse-drawn cab in Spitalfields driven by a man in a top hat, a woman wearing the costume of the 1930s and casting her eyes down as she passed me by. It was at moments of particular weakness, when I thought I could not go on any longer, that my senses played these tricks on me. It sometimes seemed to me as if the noises of the city were dying down around me and the traffic was flowing silently down the street, or as if someone had plucked me by the sleeve. And I would hear people behind my back speaking in a foreign tongue, Lithuanian, Hungarian, or something else with a very alien note to it, or so I thought, said Austerlitz. I had several such experiences in Liverpool Street Station, to which I was always irresistibly drawn back on my night journeys. Before work began to rebuild it at the end of the 1980s this station, with its main

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  firmly in my hand all the way to Prague. Outside, the darkening Bohemian fields passed by, hop poles, deep brown fields, flat, empty country all around. The bus was very overheated. I felt drops of perspiration break out on my forehead and a constriction in my chest. Once, when I looked over my shoulder, I saw that the other passengers, without exception, had fallen asleep, leaning and sprawling at awkward angles in their seats. Some had their heads dropped forward, others sideways or tipped back. Several were snoring quietly. Only the driver looked straight ahead at the ribbon of road gleaming in the rain. As so often when one is traveling south, I had the impression of going steadily downhill, particularly when we reached the suburbs of Prague and it seemed as if we were descending a kind of ramp into a labyrinth through which we moved very slowly, now this way and now that, until I had lost all sense of direction. When we reached the Prague bus station, an overcrowded traffic junction at this early hour of the evening, I therefore set out the wrong way through the great throng of people waiting there or getting in and out of buses. There were so many of them streaming towards me out in the street, said Austerlitz, most of them carrying large bags and with pale, sad faces, that I thought they could only be coming away from the city center. Only later did I see from the map that I had reached the center not in a more or less straight line, as I thought at first, but by way of a wide detour taking me almost to the VySehrad, and then through the New Town and along the banks of the Vltava back to my hotel on Kampa Island. It was already late by the time I lay down, exhausted from the day’s walking, and tried to fall asleep by listening to the water rushing down over the weir outside my window. But whether I kept my eyes wide open or closed, all through the night I saw pictures from Terezin and the Ghetto Museum, the bricks of the fortification walls, the display window of the Bazaar, the endless lists of names, a leather suitcase bearing a double sticker from the Hotels Bristol in Salzburg and Vienna, the closed gates I had photographed, the grass growing between the cobblestones, a pile of briquettes outside a cellar entrance, the squirrel’s glass eye and the two forlorn figures of Agata and Vera pulling the laden toboggan through the driving snow to the Trade Fair building at HoleSovice. Only towards morning did I sleep briefly, but even then, in the deepest unconsciousness, the flow of pictures did not cease but instead condensed into a nightmare in which, from where I do not know, said Austerlitz, the north Bohemian town of Dux appeared to me situated in the middle of a devastated plain, a place of which all I had previously known was that Casanova spent the last years of his life there in Count Waldstein’s castle writing his memoirs, a number of mathematical and esoteric tracts, and his five-volume futuristic novel Icosameron. In my dream I saw the old roué shrunk to the size of a boy, surrounded by the gold-stamped

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  vanished from sight for a while, only to reappear outlined even more menacingly against the light. Marie, who was not so easily intimidated, merely laughed and said that the two shadowy riders were obviously the guard of honor specially provided by the CSSR for visitors from France. As we approached Marienbad along a road running further and further downhill between wooded slopes, darkness had fallen, and I remember, said Austerlitz, that a slight sense of disquiet brushed me as we emerged from the firs growing all the way down to the outlying houses and slid into the town, which was sparsely illuminated by a few street lamps. The car stopped outside the Palace Hotel. Marie exchanged a few words with the chauffeur as he took out our luggage, and then we were in the foyer, which was made to look double its size, so to speak, by a row of tall mirrors along the walls. The place was so deathly still and deserted that you might have thought the time long after midnight. It was some while before the reception clerk at his desk in a cramped booth looked up from what he was reading and turned to his late-come guests with a barely audible murmur of Dobry vecer. This remarkably thin man—the first thing you noticed about him was that although he could not have been much over forty his forehead was wrinkled in fan-like folds above the root of his nose—went through the necessary formalities without another word, very slowly, almost as if he were moving in a denser atmosphere than ours, asked to see our visas, looked at our passports and his register, made an entry of some length on the squared paper of a school exercise book in laborious handwriting, gave us a questionnaire to fill in, looked in a drawer for our key, and finally, ringing a bell, summoned as it seemed from nowhere a porter with a bent back, who was wearing a mouse-gray nylon coat that came down to his knees and, like the clerk at the reception desk, appeared to be afflicted by a chronic lethargy which incapacitated his limbs. When he preceded us up to the third floor with our two lightweight suitcases— the paternoster lift, Marie had pointed out to me as soon as we entered the foyer, had obviously been out of order for a very long time—he found it increasingly hard to climb the stairs and, like a mountaineer negotiating the last difficult ridge before attaining the summit, he had to stop several times for a rest, whereupon we too waited for a while a couple of steps below him. On the way up we met not a living soul except for another member of the hotel staff who, dressed in the same gray coat as his colleague and perhaps worn, I thought to myself, said Austerlitz, by all the employees of the state-owned spa hotels, was sitting asleep in a chair on the top landing with his head sunk forward, and a tin tray of broken glass on the floor beside him. The room unlocked for us was Number 38—a large room resembling a salon. The walls were covered with burgundy-red brocade wallpaper, very faded in places. The portieres dated from a past time as

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

  She is . . . too rough.") Try to visualize it in Antonioni black-and-white: Dario and his bored aristo friends and their mistresses—all in their tiny little bathing suits and wraparound sunglasses—and me and my Ugly American crew, at sea on a seventy-two- footer, sails up. Islands in the distance, a clear day. A few miles out, Dario gestures to the high, sheer cliff face on the shore of a nearby island, a magnificent edifice where waves pound against rock and coral. "I jump from that cliff all the time," he says, pointing at a hundred-fifty-foot climb straight up, with a vertical drop between reef and rocks. "When-a you go up . . . there's no way down but to jump," he says. And then he dares me, dares me, to do it with him. Now . . . you know me. There's no way I'm gonna let this cocksucker get away with this. Especially as I'm cranky, not a little bit drunk, and by now in the mood to squeeze his neck until his eyes pop out of their sockets. I figure it's worth it, if only for the possibility that I'll get to see him split his pointy fucking head open on a rock. Plus, we're desperate for a scene for the show, and I figure the "Tony Foolishly Breaks His Spine" scene will definitely spell Emmy Award—for somebody. So I hear myself saying, "I'll do it." We take dinghies over to the cliffs. Dario shows me where we have to get off and where to climb. Todd takes a camera position on a reef opposite. Tracey, who'll be shooting the jump from a dinghy, is weeping behind the lens as they ferry us over. "Are you sure you want to do this, Tony?" She knows I'm on beer number eight. And that cliff, the closer we get, is looking higher and higher. I'm not making things easier with my drunken bravado, jokingly babbling good-byes to any and all whom I've ever loved, or who have loved me. (Just in case.) This makes her cry more. We clamber off the dinghy and Dario leads me slowly and precariously straight up the crumbly limestone cliff, both of us free-climbing in bare feet, picking our way up with fingertips and toes, hanging and traversing along crevices and not, repeat not, looking down. After about half an hour of climbing, and a few hairy moments, we reach the top. Dario slides into position for his jump, clinging to a slight hump behind him with both hands, his weight supported by a tiny, brittle-looking protrusion the size of a large bar of soap. It's a straight drop down, he says. Between that rock there . . . and that shallow reef . . . there. Make sure to keep your arms tightly at your sides or you'll break them when you hit the water. "I know you gonna wanna flap your arms.

• 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.