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 Etched in Sand (2013)

  drug search?” I tell one unsuspecting neighbor as she approaches the pay phone, taking a quarter from her pocket. “I heard the R.A.’s going to pull the fire alarm and the police are coming into our rooms to search.” She stares at the phone in confusion, then slinks away. Around midnight, when KiKi brings a group of friends into our room, I slam our door shut behind me and take a spot on the hard couch in the common area near the pay phone. First I lie seething, then tears streak down my temples and into my hair. I think about Mr. Brownstein’s lectures on the role of government in our lives, how it needs to be there as a safety net . . . right now I’m the only one who’s been saved by any net, while my baby sister navigates a high-wire act with no protection whatsoever; no sisters or social workers there to defend her. Exhausted by my tears, I drift to sleep. I’m awakened by the sound of the phone. It’s rung four times when I’m finally within arm’s reach. Then, it stops. I slam my fist against the painted cinder-block wall and press my forehead against the phone. “Dammit!” Then it rings again. “Hello?” “Cherie is flying out to Idaho tomorrow,” Camille says. “And?” “She’s getting Rosie!” “How?” “We’ve got this whole plan. She’s flying into Boise and will rent a car, then she’ll stake out at Rosie’s bus stop. She’ll have to talk fast to convince her to get inside, but when she does, she has a hiding spot where they’ll put on wigs and change clothes.” “Isn’t that a little extreme?” “It’s a small town, Regina. If anybody sees Rosie in a car with Cherie, they’ll call Cookie, then Cookie will call the cops, then Cherie will get arrested. Cherie has to play it safe. Then the two of them will rush to the airport in Boise and fly back to New York.” “You feel like this plan is foolproof?” “As foolproof as it ever will be.” “Okay. I have a test to take tomorrow, then I’ll hop on a bus to Manhattan and catch the train out to you and Frank so we can wait together.” “No, Regina—you have school. You can’t screw it up.” “Camille, I screwed up the thing that’s most important to me in the world the day I signed that affidavit when I was fourteen! Rosie’s life has never been the same, and nothing matters more to me than this.” Two of my neighbors groggily stick their necks out of their rooms. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I whisper into the receiver. “I’ll call you when the train drops me at the Ronkonkoma station.”

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  For women, pudici- tia or sōphrosynē implied both an objective fact and a subjective mode of being; it was a state of body and a state of mind. Fundamentally, pudicitia was the corporal integrity of the free woman, untouched until marriage, vouchsafed for one man within marriage. Sexual modesty was inextricably fused with status, and pudicitia often appears alongside libertas as its in- separable adjunct. Nevertheless, pudicitia was a social rather than a strictly legal concept, and it could, exceptionally, even be predicated of slaves. In a vast and highly stratifi ed slave system, where slaves were delicately inter- twined with the life of the free family, pudicitia was a powerful and impre- cise enough concept that some of its mystique might devolve even on the lowest members of the house hold; but the deeper truth was that, for slaves, access to honor depended on the discretion of the master.  An ancient woman lived every moment engaged in a high- stakes game of suspicious observation. “Th e one glory of woman is pudicitia, and there- fore it is incumbent upon her to be, and to seem, chaste.” In the words of a Christian author, “A woman’s reputation for sexual modesty is a fragile thing, like a precious fl ower that breaks in the soft breeze and is ruined by the light wind.” Th ere were “so many” potential signs of immodesty; her dress, her gait, her voice, her face all acted as external projections of her in- ternal state. Th e woman’s “only protection” was never to become the cause of any gossip. To guard against the attentions of other men, the Roman matron should dress only so nice as to avoid uncleanness, she should always be chaperoned in public, she should walk with her eyes down and risk rude- ness rather than immodesty in her greetings, and she should blush when addressed.  Th e sharpest of these patriarchal prescriptions come from rhetorical school exercises, sources that no doubt caricature contemporary male bom- bast and must be taken with healthful caution. Undoubtedly the scripts of female modesty could be stifl ing. In most quarters women wore their hair  FROM SHAME TO SIN veiled from the time they reached sexual maturity. Coins of the high em- pire advertise pudicitia as a chief imperial virtue, and its image is a Roman matron, hair veiled, hand drawn partly across her face to shield it from full view. Conventional limits on visibility and movement were truly constrict- ing. Even the gentle Plutarch counsels a woman to be most visible in her husband’s presence and to hide when he is away. A woman without a man was “like a city without a wall”; fathers and husbands off ered protection, and protection brings its own types of dependence. But it would be a mis- take to underestimate the room for maneuver left to women.

• From Untrue (2018)

  “I remember the feeling”—here she made a frightened face and gave a little gasp—“of the phone ringing and knowing it was a guy I was sleeping with, and I’d have to pretend it was someone else because Dan was standing right there. It’s exhausting, and the number of heart attacks and stress—it’s complicated to keep all the lies straight. There’s a whole part of it that’s really difficult and tiring! Sometimes I would think, Okay, I’ve got to stop. This is just too hard and dangerous.” Such moments, the frissons of near discovery, are touchstones of narratives with infidelity plots—from Eyes Wide Shut to a YouTube genre called “cheaters getting caught” to Carmen Rita Wong’s novel Never Too Late, with its storyline about high-powered, very married Latina lesbian Magda, whose happy life might be turned upside down by a one-night stand with a woman who has a taste for revenge. Like many women in fiction and life, Annika got too much out of her affairs to stop—including the variety and novelty of sexual experience she craved. “I think no matter how hard you try and how exciting it is, even when your marriage is good—and mine wasn’t, at least in the sex department—you still miss that thing where you’re so excited, and it’s so new, and you can’t eat or sleep, you’re having such an intense time emotionally and sexually with this entirely new person. That’s what I kept going after, what I couldn’t say no to.” Like Sarah and Druckerman’s ladies in Florida, Annika was living what Marta Meana calls “erotic self-focus.” When others saw her as sexy and hot, she did too. Wanting to be wanted, and withering when she was unwanted (or, in the case of Meana’s study participants, wanted) by one man in perpetuity drove Annika and may drive us in ways we might not want to admit but cannot deny.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  e Consultationes presaged Augustine’s On the Good of Marriage, written a de cade later in another attempt to lay to rest the lingering eff ects of Jerome’s extremism. Augustine’s treatment of sex and marriage was to prove defi nitive. But it came in the distinctive aftermath of the Jovinianist controversy, which had seen the entire eastern ascetic tradition absorbed, debated, and reformulated in the west in the compressed space of a few de cades. Th e threefold justifi cation of marriage— fi delity, procreation, sacred bond— that Augustine hewed out of a formless chaos was bound to ensure married laypeople an authoritative ideology of respectability. In one sense the Jovinianist controversy and the aftershocks that rumbled for the next de cades were just one episode in a long history of tension between the church’s commitment to the supreme ideal of virginity and the scriptural injunctions to reproduction. Th is same tension is embedded in Paul’s epistles; it called forth the pastoral letters; it defi ned the battle between encratic and orthodox Christians in the second and third centuries; it would replay itself in the Protestant Reformation (which saw Luther derided as Jovinian reborn); it continues to rumble in Catholic debates over clerical celibacy. Because the problem of sex is inevitably tied to the problem of Christianity’s relation to the world, it is a tension that will surface during any great read-justment in the relationship between Christianity and the world. Th is is what makes the reckoning of the church in the Th eodosian period so sig- nifi cant, for these generations saw the most decisive reconciliation of the church to secular society, perhaps in all of Christian history. Th e fourth century saw the wild, untamed asceticism of the desert pour across the Mediterranean, only to be slowly and incompletely corralled into monastic orders; the fi fth century would see the diff use ideals of clerical celibacy harden into formal requirements of lifelong abstinence. As the Christian church and secular society gradually became coterminous, the multifarious strands of Christian asceticism were progressively institutionalized, as a spiritual elite presiding over the mass of mediocre Christians. Sexual renunciation became not so much a rejection of the world and its ruling order, as a seces-sion from material society and its entanglements. It is against this backdrop that the less colorful, but ultimately more consequential, formulation of Christian marriage— and conjugal sexuality— must be considered. It is not infrequently assumed that married Christians formed a “silent majority” across early Christian history. Th e breezy assumption of a quiet core of reliable reproducers is not so much inaccurate as inattentive to the C H U R C H , S O C I E T Y, A N D S E X I N T H E A G E O F T R I U M P H  actual pro cesses by which sexual culture became Christian. Th e idea of a

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  What captivated Foucault was not simply the repressive agenda of this monastic founder but the sense in which sexuality has become a deep and only semiconscious source of the self, something that must be sought and controlled through an elaborate technology of surveillance. Cassian prescribed an encompassing regime of transformation, physical and spiritual. It entailed diet and meditation. It specified grids of evaluation that seem extraordinarily detailed: three emissions a year was a modest goal for the monk earnestly in pursuit of chastity. It required forceful modes of introspection that could be achieved in dialogue between the monk and his superior. Here Cassian’s model of chastity foreshadows the confessional, a place where the deepest recesses of the self were to be searched with the sure guidance of an experienced master. The goals of this spiritual exercise were tranquility and transparency. The healed patient could hope to reach a state where “he is found to be the same in the night as in the day, whether reading or praying, when solitary or surrounded by the crowd, so that he never sees himself in secret in such a way that he would blush to be seen by others, and finally so that the eye from which there is no flight will never catch him in anything which he would wish to be hidden from human sight.” Here the notion of the sexual being, constantly before the face of God, receives its purest expression. It might seem a fair measure of the distance traveled, that we have departed from a civilization whose prime virtue was the wondrously indeterminate command of moderation and have arrived in a civilization where the frequency of involuntary discharge has become a matter of punctilious surveillance.4

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Formerly the ups and downs of my fortunes worried me chiefly because of my friends' solicitude; fears or impatience which I should have borne lightly, if alone, grew oppressive when they had to be concealed from others, or on the contrary revealed, to their distress. I resented the fact that in their affection they felt more concern for me than I did for myself, and that they failed to see beneath the surface agitation that more tranquil being to whom no one thing is wholly important, and who can therefore endure anything. But there was no time thereafter to think about myself, or not to think either. My person began to count less precisely because my point of view was beginning to matter. What was important was that someone should be in opposition to the policy of conquest, envisaging its consequences and the final aim, and should prepare himself, if possible, to repair its errors. My post on the frontiers had shown me an aspect of victory which does not appear on Trajan's Column. My return to civil administration gave me the chance to accumulate against the military party evidence still more decisive than all the proofs which I had amassed in the army. The ranking personnel of the legions and the entire Praetorian Guard are formed exclusively of native Italian stock; these distant wars were draining off the reserves of a country already underpopulated. Those who survived were as much a loss for this country as the others, since they were forced to settle in the newly conquered lands. Even in the provinces the system of recruiting caused some serious uprisings at about that time. A journey in Spain undertaken somewhat later on in order to inspect the operation of copper mines on my family estates, convinced me of the disorder introduced by war into all branches of the economy; I confirmed my belief in the justice of the protestations of business men whom I knew in Rome. I was not so sanguine as to think that it would always lie within our power to avoid all wars, but I wished them to be no more than defensive; I dreamed of an army trained to maintain order on frontiers less extended, if necessary, but secure. Every new increase in the vast imperial organism seemed to me an unsound growth, like a cancer or dropsical edema which would eventually cause our death. Not one of these ideas could be presented to the emperor. He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandons himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself. On the whole, the achievements of his principate had been admirable, but the labors of peace to which the best of his advisors had ingeniously directed him, those great projects of the architects and legists of his reign, had always counted less for him than a single victory.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Clement’s sexual ideology was in many ways idiosyncratic, most of all in his belief that physical desire could be graciously metamorphosed into a rational will to participate in creation. The small but decisive differences between Clement and his greatest student, Origen, are highly telling. Origen is almost totally unconcerned with procreation as a justification for sex; he assumes that “holy procreation” is part of the married life, but it does not bear the same great moral weight that it does in Clement, as the prime justification for the reproductive act. Even more than Clement, Origen was content to tread wherever his exegesis led him: Paul had allowed marriage and considered it a gift of God, and that was that. Origen was thus much closer to the actual spirit of Paul in First Corinthians 7. Origen was cautious not to denigrate marriage: the call to purity and the call to marry were different forms of grace, each dispensed by the mysterious benevolence of God. Origen stands one step closer to the ascetic theologies of late antiquity. But it is less often appreciated that he anticipates the entanglements of pastoral leadership that will occupy the fourth-century church. Origen is anxious about the realities of sin. Fornication is not just a property of the outside world; it is a problem for the Christian community. “If someone is in fornication, they are not just in the flesh, but something worse … they are in the mud.” “Sin corrupts the temple of God. Someone who brings a scandal upon the church corrupts the temple of God. Even more powerfully does the fornicator corrupt the temple of God.” Origen believed that there were “different classes of fornication,” some more grievous than others; each would be “judged according to its quantity and quality, its intent and duration.” Sins were to be taken “to the bishop.” “We have rulers in the church before whom we are to submit our disputes, so that we are not mocked in the courts of the heathens.”56

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Perhaps because he had heard such complaints before, he seemed to take this as a genuine sarcasm. ‘No, it’s not that,’ he insisted—which, of course, it wasn’t. ‘No, it’s because they let so many new members in.’ Still I carried on grinning at him. ‘You must be on the weights a lot, though,’ I said. ‘The way you’re filling out, my dear …’ I thought it was important to drop in a casual endearment, but he showed no response to it. We had about a ten-minute walk to Phil’s hotel, and an uncomfortable amount of it was spent in silence, with both of us looking about with affected interest at the buildings, the shops, the parked cars. Normally, if I was leaving a pub or nightclub with a pickup, and taking a cab or a tube to his place or mine, we had both of us been drinking, time sped by, and we were openly set upon sex. I had rarely felt as sober as I did on this summer evening walk; each speechless step seemed more fateful than the last; and deeply embarrassing doubts began to occupy me. I was so lucky in general, so blessed, that my pick-ups were virtually instantaneous: the man I fancied took in my body, my cock, my blue eyes at a glance. Misunderstandings were almost unknown. Any uncertainty in a boy I wanted was usually overcome by the simple insistence of my look. But with Phil I had let something dangerous happen, a roundabout, slow insinuation into my feelings. Though I very much wanted to fuck his big, muscly bum—and several times dropped behind a step or two to see it working as he walked—my stronger feeling was more protective and caressing. It was growing so strong that it allowed doubts not entertained in the brief certainties of casual sex. If I had got it all wrong, if going back to his place meant a drink in the bar, a game of chess, a handshake—‘I’ve got an early start tomorrow’—the evening would be agony.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Karen followed this script to the letter. From a merry, outgoing ten-year-old, she soon became a somber young woman. I remember her telling me when she was only eleven, “I’m really worried about my brother and sister. I have to set them a good example so they’ll be good. That means I have to be good. They fight all the time since my parents broke up. I try to stop that and teach them to talk instead of hitting. I’m also worried about my mom. Since Dad left she cries every day when she comes home from work. I try to comfort her and also to warn her about her new boyfriend. I think that he’ll hurt her feelings even more.” Karen shook her head sadly. She was overburdened by her new responsibilities but felt that she had no choice but to forfeit her needs to the needs of her family. High school, she explained at our meeting several years later, was a blur because her home situation had hardly changed. At out last meeting, when she was twenty-five, I was very concerned about Karen’s inability to break free from a young man she was living with but did not love. She tried to explain: “You remember that when I was dating guys in college, I became very frightened that anyone I really liked would abandon me or be unfaithful, and that I would end up suffering like my mom or my dad? Well, choosing Nick was safe because he has no education and no plans, which means that he’ll always have fewer choices than me. I knew that if we lived together and maybe got married someday I wouldn’t ever have to worry about him walking out.” With tears in her eyes, she added, “Nick is very kind and caring. I’m not used to that.” Although I understood that Karen felt starved for kindness, it baffled me why a bright, attractive woman like her would feel she had so few options other than a loveless relationship. She cried bitterly as she described the loneliness of her life with Nick and the strain of his passive dependence on her. “I knew it was a mistake one day after we moved in together,” she said. “But I can’t leave him. There’s no way I could hurt him that way.” And that is how I left her, standing at a crossroads, struggling with a decision whether to leave or stay. Thus I awaited her arrival the following Thursday, two days before her wedding, with equal measures of hope and concern—hope that she had turned her life around and worry that she hadn’t. What had she done between age twenty-five and thirty-four? Had she broken free of her fears? Of her sorrow? Was she still taking care of her family while feeling guilty for never doing enough? Was the man she was marrying a good choice? Was she no longer afraid of loving and being loved?

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Children of divorce need more time to grow up because they have to accomplish more: they must simultaneously let go of the past and create mental models for where they are headed, carving their own way. Those who succeed deserve gold medals for integrity and perseverance. Having rejected their parents as role models, they have to invent who they want to be and what they want to achieve in adult life. This is far and beyond what most adolescents are expected to achieve. Given the normal challenges of growing up—which they had to accomplish on their own—it’s no surprise that children of divorce get waylaid by ill-fated love affairs and similar derailments. Most are well into their late twenties and thirties before they graduate into adulthood. My analysis may not seem to match the pseudomaturity exhibited by many children of divorce who often appear on a fast track to adulthood. Compared with youngsters from more protected families, they get into the trappings of adolescent culture at an earlier age. Sex, drugs, and alcohol are rites of passage into being accepted by an older crowd. At the same time, they’re independent and justifiably proud of their ability to make their own decisions and to advise their parents. But let’s not be fooled by the swagger. The developmental path from adolescence into adulthood is thrown out of sync after divorce. Many children of divorce can’t get past adolescence because they cannot bring closure to the normal process of separating from their parents. In the normal course of adolescence, children spend several years in a kind of push and pull pas de deux with their parents, slowly weaning themselves from home. But Karen hardly experienced this separation process. By the time she left for college at age eighteen, she was still tied to her parents by her needs and theirs. And she was not alone. By late adolescence most children of divorce are more tied to their parents and paradoxically more eager to let go than their peers in intact families. Like the folk story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, the divorce is as sticky as the tar that held the rabbit. The young people want out but can’t move on because of unfinished business at home. Children of divorce are held back from adulthood because the vision of it is so frightening. From the outset, they are more anxious and uncomfortable with the opposite sex and it’s harder for them to build a relationship and gradually give it time to develop. Feeling vulnerable, bewildered, and terribly alone, and driven by biology and social pressures, these young men and women throw themselves into a shadow play of the real thing involving sex without love, passion without commitment, togetherness without a future. (We’ll explore what happens to children of divorce who marry impulsively and early marriages in Chapter 14.)

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  As Gary spoke, I could see before me the similarities and differences between him and children of divorce. Like all young men and women, Gary stood at the threshold of marriage with trepidation. His anxiety was increased by his awareness of his parents’ unhappiness, and it is no accident that he was flooded with images of their troubles at a time when he was ready to commit to Sara. He loved her but was scared by his parents’ lifelong unhappiness. But he stopped in his tracks only briefly. He also had a competing image that was equally powerful of his mother and father working closely together as a team on behalf of their children. He had a storehouse of memories of both parts of his parents’ marriage. Their unhappiness frightened him. But he also knew a lot about the skills and compromises that they made in order to keep the marriage afloat. These observations underlie his resolution, which he called an epiphany—that if he wanted a good marriage it would take hard work. School for SpousesADULTS RAISED IN intact families have been to “marriage school” alongside their academic learning. By the time they reach adulthood, they figure they’re as prepared as they will ever be to build their own family. They have watched their parents carefully, observing them in many moods, in different settings at different times, in sickness and in health. They have seen them use humor in tense situations to tide them over and watched them read each other’s moods and body language to distinguish a minor upset from an incoming storm. One colleague, Paul Amato from Pennsylvania State University, has proposed that the main difference between adults raised in intact families and those in divorce is that the latter lack social skills. But it’s more than social skills. Those raised in an intact family understand the marriage’s context. They know that to make a marriage work amid today’s pressures, you have to keep it front and center in your mind at all times. Nobody wanted a marriage just like their parents. There are big generational differences. All of the men and women in the comparison group wanted a freer, more equal relationship than their parents had, even if it meant more arguments. They all expected that the wives would work, which made a huge difference in their roles and especially in their parenting. But the children raised in intact marriages used their parents’ marriages as a model that they could shape to their liking. They did not doubt the very existence of a happy marriage, even if their parents failed to attain it. The lack of observations and memories of a working marriage is a serious handicap for children of divorce in learning to live closely with another person and striking the balance that both need. It’s like becoming a dancer without ever having seen a dance.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  A tongue of white chewing-gum, rough with grit, had welded itself to the rubber and squelched into a curl under the step of the heel. It was surprisingly difficult to detach—and I had a certain revulsion from it, and reluctance to touch it. So with drunken insouciance I remained, leaning on Phil’s bunched shoulder, one flamingo leg drawn up, and spoke quite seriously about the British Museum, outside whose bleak north entrance we were standing. On a huge pillar above our heads a poster advertised the Egyptian galleries, with a number of aproned, broken-nosed pharaohs standing stonily, but rather pathetically, in a row. As I spoke of Charles’s relief of Akhnaten Phil actually started giggling, and only giggled more when I told him to fuck off. ‘If you really cared you’d get this stuff off for me,’ I said. ‘At the one time I need help, you refuse it to me.’ He was not quite sure of the rhetorical conventions now, but muttering ‘Oh, give it here’ grabbed my foot and jerked it upwards, so that I hopped round involuntarily and hung on his neck. I don’t know how slow I was to realise that we were being watched. Certainly my eyes dwelled incuriously on the far pavement for several seconds and though I took in a figure waiting under one of the gently stirring young trees I did so abstractly, and focused all sensation in my hands on Phil’s cropped neck. To the watcher we must have been a well-lit and enigmatic group. I looked away as Phil flung down my foot, but still embraced him while he groped for a handkerchief, a quiver of protective anxiety ruffling my sexy, complacent mood. Two seconds later, the figure had moved. I was slow again to spot him, now further off, under the next tree, and screened to chest height by cars parked at meters along the middle of the street. His act was to be going away, disarming the suspicion he had aroused in me. Or perhaps he did not know he had been seen. He was looking back again now, but still moving, sidling inexpertly under a street-lamp. Then I quickly led Phil away, keeping him turned in towards me, my arm and hand oppressively around his shoulder, so that he was squashed and stumbling against me. But there could be no doubt who it was. It gave me a shock but also the pleasure of a bitter little nodding to myself in recognition of what was afoot. ‘Right!’ I thought, and then, after turning quickly at the corner to look back—but there were other people on the street now, and the distance was all a pattern of shadows—more or less forgot about it for the rest of the night. I was too taken up with the honest but slightly unworthy excitement of coming back to my old haunt with such a luscious piece of goods as Phil.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Still, I couldn’t help imagining jealous scenes and drama. I was wrong; I later learned that polyamorous people, swingers, and those in open relationships “generally report high levels of relationship satisfaction and happiness” and “do not experience any more jealousy in their relationships than monogamists do.” But what about the practical aspects of a life lived polyamorously or even “just” openly? Polyamory is an underdog when it comes to institutions as concrete as those that issue marriage licenses and as abstract as the monogamy-industrial complex, which produces dozens of books and thousands of therapy sessions and many conferences every year on how to survive the searing betrayal of an affair. Parents feel exhausted. Mothers of young children are still more likely to be primary caregivers and have less access to the field of play, so to speak, than fathers of young children do. How can we possibly balance the demands of careers with the demands of our unleashed libidos? And the emotional complexity of multiple involvements? The psychiatrist, sex therapist, and author of Love Worth Making, Stephen Snyder, MD, later told me that of the people in his practice who had open marriages over the years, most were either gay men or “older couples with the time, energy, and maturity for such [complicated negotiations], and whose kids have left the house.” (He winkingly added that he had no doubt the next sexual revolution would be fueled by retirees.) Polyamory, consensual non-monogamy, and open relationships might be nice for idealists with flexible schedules and time on their hands, I found myself thinking. But for the rest of us, it hardly seemed realistic. And all this stuff about transparency and being honest, about ethical non-monogamy and its standard of relentless candor, which Atlantic columnist Hugo Schwyzer notes is “the non-negotiable admission price to liberation” in CNM, raised red flags for me. My inner graduate student, a 1990s Foucauldian, saw and still sees mandatory disclosure—principled and ethical as it may be—as a form of social control. What made it any better, in the end, than telling women they had to be monogamous? It smacked of puritanism too: in embracing consensual non-monogamy, which a recent study found more than 20 percent of US adults have done at some point, it was as if we Americans needed to repent and confess at the very same time we were sinning. It also offended my sense of privacy, somehow, in ways I wasn’t sure I wanted to consider too deeply, and in ways that were related to my sense that if I was going to be a slut, I didn’t want someone telling me how to do it ethically. Isn’t part of the whole point of sluttiness the thrilling freedom of saying “Fuck you” to ethics? Why didn’t these people just get out of my bedroom already, I wondered crankily.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  There are no hallucinations, exactly, except for a strange buzzing on the edge of your hearing, like, your friend observes, cicadas at the height of summer. The buzzing isn’t there, of course; your minds are simply imbuing the silence. You could go mad if you stay here too long, you think. Your mind would fill in the gaps and the blanks and God knows what it would fill them with. What happens when there are no echoes, here in this underground crypt? You clap and clap but nothing answers back. Dream House as Generation StarshipEventually, everyone forgets. That’s the worst part, maybe. It’s been so long since anyone’s seen Earth; so long since that first crew made their way shipward, leaving behind their beloved planet wreathed in smoke and ice. They had to get out—they knew it, everyone knew it, but they were lucky, and found a ship. And they set course to Somewhere Else and settled down, and when they had children they told their children the story of where they used to live. They left out the worst parts, maybe, because even now, surrounded by chrome and glass and stars, the acute bite of the planet’s betrayal has lessened. And by the time they passed on, and the ship was still careening Away, the children of the children of the first crew had only the faintest wisps of understanding of what Used to Be. By the time they got to Somewhere Else (a beautiful planet, with singing stones and citrine trees and soil that smelled like cumin and water you could walk over), no one could even remember why they’d left Earth to begin with. “I suppose it must have been terrible,” they said uncertainly. “We took so much effort to leave. It must have been the worst place.” But that nagging sense of doubt was so profound they eventually gave it a name: Nonstalgia (noun) The unsettling sensation that you are never be able to fully access the past; that once you are departed from an event, some essential quality of it is lost forever. A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to. Dream House as L’esprit de L’escalierWhen I was preparing to fly to Cuba with my brother to see our ancestral home, I discovered that Santa Clara, Cuba—the city where my grandfather was born and raised, where he was once forced to eat a soup made from his pet rooster—is the sister city of Bloomington, Indiana. How was this possible? Of all the cities in the world, how were these two connected by such an arbitrary umbilical cord?

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Now more than ever people focus on their specific problems—their depression, their lack of motivation, their social inadequacies, their boredom. But what governs all of these seemingly separate problems is our attitude, how we view the world on a daily basis. It is how we see and interpret events. Improve the overall attitude and everything else will elevate as well—creative powers, the ability to handle stress, confidence levels, relationships with people. It was an idea first promulgated in the 1890s by the great American psychologist William James, but it remains a revolution waiting to happen. A negative, constricting attitude is designed to narrow down the richness of life at the cost of our creative powers, our sense of fulfillment, our social pleasures, and our vital energies. Without wasting another day under such conditions, your goal is to break out, to expand what you see and what you experience. You want to open the aperture of the lens as wide as you can. Here is your road map. How to view the world: See yourself as an explorer. With the gift of consciousness, you stand before a vast and unknown universe that we humans have just begun to investigate. Most people prefer to cling to certain ideas and principles, many of them adopted early on in life. They are secretly afraid of what is unfamiliar and uncertain. They replace curiosity with conviction. By the time they are thirty, they act as if they know everything they need to know. As an explorer you leave all that certainty behind you. You are in continual search of new ideas and new ways of thinking. You see no limits to where your mind can roam, and you are not concerned with suddenly appearing inconsistent or developing ideas that directly contradict what you believed a few months before. Ideas are things to play with. If you hold on to them for too long, they become something dead. You are returning to your childlike spirit and curiosity, from before you had an ego and being right was more important than connecting to the world. You explore all forms of knowledge, from all cultures and time periods. You want to be challenged. By opening the mind in this way, you will unleash unrealized creative powers, and you will give yourself great mental pleasure. As part of this, be open to exploring the insights that come from your own unconscious, as revealed in your dreams, in moments of tiredness, and in the repressed desires that leak out in certain moments. You have nothing to be afraid of or to repress there. The unconscious is merely one more realm for you to freely explore. How to view adversity: Our life inevitably involves obstacles, frustrations, pain, and separations.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Try to catch this as it occurs. Discern which emotions are the most contagious for you, and how your emotions shift with the various groups and subgroups you pass through. Awareness of this gives you the power to control it. Hypercertainty: When we are on our own and think about our decisions and plans, we naturally feel doubts. Have we chosen the right career path? Did we say the right thing to get the job? Are we adopting the best strategy? But when we are in the group, this doubting, reflective mechanism is neutralized. Let us say the group has to decide on an important strategy. We feel the urgency to act. Arguing and deliberating is tiring, and where will it end? We feel the pressure to decide and get behind the decision. If we dissent, we might be marginalized or excluded, and we recoil from such possibilities. Furthermore, if everyone seems to agree that this is the right course of action, we are compelled to feel confident about the decision. And so the fourth effect on us is to make us feel more certain about what we and our colleagues are doing, which makes us all the more prone to taking risks . This is what happens in financial crazes and bubbles—if everyone is betting on the price of tulips or South Sea stock (see chapter 6) or subprime mortgages, it must be a sure thing. Those who raise doubts are simply being too cautious. As individuals, it is hard to resist what others seem so certain about. We don’t want to miss out. Furthermore, if we were among just a few who bought this stock, and it failed, we would feel ridiculous and ashamed, sadly responsible for being such a sucker. But covered by thousands doing the same, we are shielded from feeling accountable, which increases the likelihood we will take such risks in the group setting. If as individuals we had some plan that was clearly ridiculous, others would warn us and bring us back down to earth, but in a group the opposite happens—everyone seems to validate the scheme, no matter how delusional (such as invading Iraq and expecting to be greeted as liberators), and there are no outsiders to splash some cold water on us. Whenever you feel unusually certain and excited about a plan or idea, you must step back and gauge whether it is a viral group effect operating on you. If you can detach yourself for a moment from your excitement, you might notice how your thinking is used to rationalize your emotions, to confirm the certainty you want to feel.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  assassination of Julius Caesar that Antony’s rival Octavius (later Augustus) understood that Antony was up to something and had hostile intentions. Related to the baseline expression, try to observe the same person in different settings, noticing how their nonverbal cues change if they are talking to a spouse, a boss, an employee. For another exercise, observe people who are about to do something exciting—a trip to some alluring place, a date with someone they’ve been pursuing, or any event for which they have high expectations. Note the looks of anticipation, how the eyes open wider and stay there, the face flushed and generally animated, a slight smile on the lips as they think of what’s about to come. Contrast this with the tension exhibited by a person about to take a test or go on a job interview. You are increasing your vocabulary when it comes to correlating emotions and facial expressions. Pay great attention to any mixed signals you pick up: a person professes to love your idea, but their face shows tension and their tone of voice is strained; or they congratulate you on your promotion, but the smile is forced and the expression seems sad. Such mixed signals are very common. They can also involve different parts of the body. In the novel The Ambassadors by Henry James, the narrator notices that a woman who has visited him smiles at him during most of the conversation but holds her parasol with a great deal of tension. Only by noticing this can he sense her real mood— discomfort. With mixed signals, you need to be aware that a greater part of nonverbal communication involves the leakage of negative emotions, and you need to give greater weight to the negative cue as indicative of the person’s true feelings. At some point, you can then ask yourself why they might feel sadness or antipathy. To take your practice further, try a different exercise. Sit in a café or some public space, and without the burden of having to be involved in a conversation, observe the people around you. Listen in on their conversations for vocal cues. Take note of walking styles and overall body language. If possible, take notes. As you get better at this, you can try to guess people’s profession by the cues you pick up, or something about their personality from their body language. It should be a pleasurable game. As you progress, you will be able to split your attention more easily—listening attentively to what people have to say, but also taking careful note of nonverbal cues. You will also become aware of signals you had not noticed before, continually expanding your vocabulary. Remember that everything people do is a sign of some sort; there is no such thing as a gesture that does not communicate. You will pay attention to people’s silences, the clothes they wear, the arrangement of objects on their desk, their breathing patterns, the

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  to not respond with the antagonism they expect. Maintain your neutrality. This will confound them and temporarily put a stop to the game they are playing. They feed off your hostility, so do not give them fuel. The Anxious Attitude. These types anticipate all kinds of obstacles and difficulties in any situation they face. With people, they often expect some sort of criticism or even betrayal. All of this stimulates unusual amounts of anxiety before the fact. What they really fear is losing control of the situation. Their solution is to limit what can possibly happen, to narrow the world they deal with. This means limiting where they go and what they’ll attempt. In a relationship, they will subtly dominate the domestic rituals and habits; they will seem brittle and demand extra careful attention. This will dissuade people from criticizing them. Everything must be on their terms. At work they will be ferocious perfectionists and micromanagers, eventually sabotaging themselves by trying to keep on top of too many things. Once outside their comfort zone—the home or the relationship they dominate—they become unusually fretful. Sometimes they can disguise their need for control as a form of love and concern. When Franklin Roosevelt came down with polio in 1921, at the age of thirty-nine, his mother, Sara, did all she could to restrict his life and keep him to one room in the house. He would have to give up his political career and surrender to her care. Franklin’s wife, Eleanor, knew him better. What he wanted and needed was to slowly get back to something resembling his old life. It became a battle between the mother and the daughter-in-law that Eleanor eventually won. The mother was able to disguise her anxious attitude and need to dominate her son through her apparent love, transforming him into a helpless invalid. Another disguise, similar to such love, is to seek to please and cajole people in order to disarm any possible unpredictable and unfriendly action. (See chapter 4, Toxic Types, The Pleaser.) If you notice such tendencies in yourself, the best antidote is to pour your energies into work. Focusing your attention outward into a project of some sort will have a calming effect. As long as you rein in your perfectionistic tendencies, you can channel your need to control into something productive. With people, try to slowly open yourself to their habits and pace of doing things, instead of the opposite. This can show you that you have nothing to fear by loosening control. Deliberately place yourself in the circumstances you most dread, discovering that your fears are grossly exaggerated. You are slowly introducing a bit of chaos into your overly ordered life. In dealing with those with this attitude, try to not feel infected with their anxiety, and instead try to provide the soothing influence they so lacked in their earliest years. If you radiate calmness, your manner will have greater effect than your words.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Of course I have dealt with snake bites & so on several times before, & managed to master my sympathy & anxiety & present an impassive doctorly face. The poor boy was still sitting, but half lying back, in the kitchen doorway, motionless with fright or caution, but breathing heavily, salivating, sweat on his upper lip. He knew enough to be holding his leg tight in both hands just below the knee. I shd have gone straight to the house, & darted over to it now to get my medicine case, fumbled to check it & close it, bounded out across the yard. My change of role made it possible for me to push him around, to enter with brusque disinterest into a kind of closeness to him that otherwise wd have remained unattainable—though it beckoned & was approached through a thousand hints & formalities. I tugged him, & he half slithered, to the step’s edge, & tugged at his hands too which were locked with desperate tightness around his leg. The sting was some way below, on the shallow, boyish incline of the calf—just where one would have stung, I thought—& looking pretty nasty. I whipped out the tourniquet & drew it to its tightest notch around his upper leg (I was severe as a matron with that stiff rubber strap). And fussily, necessarily, I shoved back the gathered folds of his djellaba, baring his thighs, glancing at them as well—though with a curiosity almost annulled by the ethical transfiguration I was enabled for a few minutes to undergo. Not so Hassan, however, who had been hovering excitedly behind me, in a state somewhere between despair & delight, & leant forward all helpfully at this point to draw the djellaba up tidily and expose the child’s private parts to his greedy glance—though after a second or two Taha brushed the folds of cloth forward again & gave Hassan, I noticed, a pained, abstracted look. As well he might, for the old lecher had hardly chosen the best moment—indeed it was a prurient piece of advantage-taking, & since it also satisfied a curiosity of my own I admonished him & sent him back indoors, before (& all this was only the matter of seconds) taking my scalpel to the boy’s inflamed leg and cutting out the sting with such delicate suddenness & firmness that he was amazed when I showed it to him between my fingers, & when he sat up & saw the blood trickling down his calf. I squeezed & cleaned & dressed the thing as best I could. Though I had been quick enough, some damage had been done & he was already a little feverish; so I picked him up—he was quite heavy & hung on to my neck with both arms, like a child not fully awoken—& took him in & laid him on the camp-bed in the room next to mine.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Every day during my breaks, I scan the classifieds for a job I feel passionately about. Unfortunately, the only openings at places even remotely dealing with public policy are for typists. Of all the courses I took in high school and college, not one was for typing. No matter how I calculate it, there’s no possible way I can learn how to type eighty words per minute—with a stopwatch and no mistakes—all by myself. Still, I take the train to the interviews in Manhattan, a place that’s romancing me more with every ninety-minute ride on the Long Island Rail Road. After a few failed interviews, I figure out a way to pass the typing test: Because I’m allowed to practice on the same script and the same typewriter I’ll be using for the test, I take my time to type the script with no mistakes . . . then I place it under my typewriter. Then I roll in a blank sheet of paper, and after the timekeeper starts her watch and leaves the room, I switch out the practice paper with the perfect script. Finally, I get a second interview for a typist position at the New York Junior League, a prestigious organization for young women that works on nonprofit causes. It’s perfect . I show up for the interview in a dark suit and white blouse with dark, low shoes—conservative and easy to foot around Manhattan. I enter the fine-carpeted cherry lobby, ready to dazzle my future boss with information on the statewide policy issues I worked on during my internship at the Senate and my solid letters of recommendation. But when they ask me to take a typing test under the watch of a timekeeper, I know how this will end. I type a total of thirty-two words in one minute, with twelve mistakes. Then I thank them, grab my bag, and bow my head to quickly leave. In August I’m called to interview for a position as an advocate for the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association. They are located in Jackson Heights, Queens, in the shining new offices that have been converted from the old Bulova watch factory. I take the Long Island Rail Road to the Woodside station, where a shuttle equipped for wheelchairs picks me up and drops me off in front of the EPVA’s office. Smelling the fresh construction, the prospect of entering this bright building morning after morning adds excitement to my steps heading toward the EPVA’s lobby. There I’m greeted by my potential bosses—all quadriplegic or paraplegic men in wheelchairs who were disabled during their service in the Vietnam and Korean wars. During the interview they tell me they need to fill an entry-level position with someone who can advocate on their behalf on the local and state levels. “We need someone who won’t have a problem making trips to Albany and traveling across Long Island on our behalf,” one explains.