Anxiety

Passages

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

Page 216 of 501 · 20 per page

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  My hand trembled on the window latch and I had to walk up and down to calm myself. That was what I was suffering from, far more than my lungs. I stood before myself as before a deforming mirror; something strange had slipped into the core of my life. Travel if you wish, taste strange dishes, gather experience in dangerous adventures, but see that your soul remains your own. Do not become a stranger to yourself, for you are lost from that day on; you will have no peace if there is not, somewhere within you, a corner of certainty, calm waters where you can take refuge in sleep. During all this period, Henry was an admirable example of calm, of smiling serenity. He had no ties that he felt he needed to break, and he saw and acted directly, without suffering. Although I was too agitated to listen to him properly, he reduced my scruples by teasing me. Do others have scruples about us? He had turned a part of his room into a workshop where he manufactured toys. He invented new toys and he carved and painted wood with great skill and taste; it was the only useful thing he had learned in his Italian school, he said. The merchants of the city had long been short of goods and they paid him whatever he asked. This source of income allowed him to break with his father for longer periods and his independence made him happy. I used to stretch out on his couch and watch him at work. As his paintbrush moved over a panel of plywood, he would talk away about his latest daydream, with great precision and carefully collected details. In his generosity, he included me in his plans. This time, he had found he had an uncle who was a planter in Argentina, a new country full of possibilities. Europe was ruined and would need everything. We would go to Argentina and carry on his uncle’s flourishing business, even extend it and plant more and more to supply Europe. Soon we would be powerful and perhaps famous in Argentina, where cultured and educated men must be relatively scarce. Henry was a practical dreamer and quoted figures as well as the promises of his uncle who had answered his questions through his daughter. He even showed me some letters! I did not take him seriously, any more than when he had planned a fishing business on the desert coasts of the South. Did the uncle really exist? But I liked Henry’s daydreams. They were a relief for me from the insoluble problems that entangled me. With a single stroke of his brush, an eye appeared; another, and there was the bear’s snout too. Henry would then stop and judge the whole. “How d’you like it?” he would ask.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  The poor prince, who was led by his wife as she pleased, went and walked alone with the gentleman, and told him that he was in still greater embarrassment than ever, being afraid that what he had told him was only an excuse to hinder him from coming at the truth, which made him more uneasy than before ; therefore he be- sought him most earnestly to tell him the name of her he loved so much. The poor gentleman implored the duke not to constrain him to break the promise he had given to a person he loved as his life, and which he had kept inviolate until that moment. It would be tanta- i;30 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE ^Niwel ^o. mount to requiring him to lose in one day what he had preserved for more than seven years, and he would rather die than do that wrong to a person who was so faithful to him. His refusal threw the duke into such a violent fit of jealousy that he exclaimed furiously, " Take your choice : either tell me the name of her you love above all others, or quit my dominions on pain of death if you are found in them after eight days." If ever faithful servant was smitten with keen anguish it was this poor gentleman, who might well say, AngnsticB swit miJii undiqne. On the one hand, if he told the truth he lost his mistress, should it come to her knowledge that he had broken his word to her ; on the cfther, if he did not tell it, he was exiled from the coun- try where she resided, and could never see her more. Thus pressed on all sides, a cold sweat broke out upon him, as if his anguish had brought him to the brink of the grave. The duke perceiving his embarrassment, imagined he loved only the duchess, and that his con- fusion arose from the fact that he could not name any- one else. In this belief he said to him sternly, " If you had told me the truth, you would have less difficulty in doing what I desire ; but I believe that it is your crime that occasions your embarrassment." The gentleman, stung by these words, an^ urged by the love he bore his master, resolved to tell him the truth, assuring himself that the duke was a man of so much honour that he would keep his secret inviolate. He fell on his knees then, and said to him, with his hands pressed together, " My liege, the obligations I am under to you, and the love I bear you, constrain me more than the fear of death. You are possessed with so false a prejudice against me that, to undeceive you, I am resolved to tell you what no torments could extort from Seventh day.\ QUEEN OF NA VARRE 53 [

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  She no longer feels nauseated or anxious again in that situation. The simple example above shows us how the elements of this biological model fit together to create a web of either fixity or flow. In nature, when one feels an internal sensation, frequently an image appears simultaneously or shortly afterward. If a client is bothered by an image, a sensation may accompany it that he is not aware of. When, with the therapist’s guidance, the client becomes conscious of both elements, a behavior, affect or new meaning generally follows. Once we understand the process and do not interfere with it, biology works to move it along. The sensation-based brain stem has the job of bringing homeostasis and, thus, goodness back to the body. Therefore, it naturally follows that when the client’s body’s behavior becomes conscious in the safety of the present moment, the thwarted movements come to an intrinsic resolution or a corrective experience—as happened with me, Nancy and the woman in the example above. This resolution leads to a discharge of energy, resulting in a fresh, new affect (A) that brings with it brand-new options or meanings. If the client is unaware of behavior or sensation, the fixed image generally leads to fixed affects and/or thoughts that were troubling the client to begin with. When a fixed behavior does not complete in a new way, the result is a habitual, or (over) coupled, affect. Because behavior reflects preparatory, protective and defensive orienting responses, assisting clients to follow their sensorimotor impulses to completion, as they come out of freeze, is a key to unlocking the constrictive and limiting prison of posttraumatic stress disorder. The therapist’s task as healer is to notice which SIBAM elements a client presents with are old, conditioned, ineffectual patterns and which are missing completely because they are unconsciously hidden. When we can read this map, we can provide the somatic tools to free the client from being tangled up in these habituated physiological associations from the past. In this way people are, thankfully, restored to a healthy, flexible and dynamic way of relating to all of the new experiences life brings. * Recall Step 3 (pendulation and containment) from Chapter 5 . † It does this specifically from what are called “stretch receptors”—specialized fibers in the muscle called intrafusal fibers. ‡ The senses of sound and touch are actually similar. In the inner ear there is a membrane called the basilar.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  5. And Jesus answering them began to say, Take heed lest any man deceive you: 6. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. 7. And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet. 8. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earth-quakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows. BEDE. (ubi sup.) Because the Lord, when some were praising the buildings of the temple, had plainly answered that all these were to be destroyed, the disciples privately enquired about the time and the signs of the destruction which was foretold; wherefore it is said: And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, over against the temple, Peter and James and John and Andrew asked him privately, Tell us when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign when all these things shall be fulfilled. The Lord sits upon the mount of Olives, over against the temple, when He discourses upon the ruin and destruction of the temple, so that even His bodily position may be in accordance with the words which He speaks, pointing out mystically that, abiding in peace with the saints, He hates the madness of the proud. For the mount of Olives marks the fruitful sublimity of the Holy Church. AUGUSTINE. (Epist. cxcix. 9.) In answer to the disciples, the Lord tells them of things which were from that time forth to have their course; whether He meant the destruction of Jerusalem which occasioned their question, or His own coming through the Church, (in which He ever comes even unto the end, for we know that He comes in His own, when His members are born day by day,) or the end itself, in which He will appear to judge the quick and the dead. THEOPHYLACT. But before answering their question, He strengthens their minds that they may not be deceived, wherefore there follows: And Jesus answering them began to say, Take heed lest any man deceive you? And this He says, because when the sufferings of the Jews began, some arose professing to be teachers, wherefore there follows: For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  It cost us two hundred francs last month!” I heard those words thousands of times. My father groaned continuously and made plans to reduce our budget. But he didn’t have the severity needed to carry out these plans; besides, we could hardly live on less than we did. In order to pay our higher rent, to buy more conventional clothes and to meet the other indispensable expenses of our new status, we could no longer eat our fill. Besides, our family was always increasing. My father and his friends discussed their common problems at the café, and each passed his own unworkable suggestions on to the next. One evening, my father came home with this scheme: “There are so many of us that each meal is very expensive. If we cut out only one meal a week we could make a real monthly saving. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we go to bed on an empty stomach. That evening, there’ll be boiled chick-peas and as much bread as you want.” In a firmer tone, he then concluded: “I’ve decided we’re going to follow my plan.” When he announced such a decision, he would wait, in the silence that followed, for some sign of revolt which might enrage him and strengthen his determination. But generally no one even moved, and his beautiful plan would then peter out in bitter words about our indifference to his worries, his troubles, and his health. The younger children continued playing or doing their homework. As for us, the older ones, we either stared into space or appeared to bury ourselves in the books we were reading without being able to understand, for that moment, a single line, a single word. My eyes and body rigid, I was then literally all ears, and this sordid speech seemed to enter deep into my flesh. The book, before my open but blind eyes, ended by changing color. Sometimes, when his words were too pointed, I began to get angry, but then my mother would offer herself as a lightning rod and divert all the blame to herself. My father had long since come to regret having accepted the proposals of Monsieur Louzel, the principal of the Alliance School. The pleasures of vanity he derived from saying that his son went to the lycée did not compensate his sense of disappointment. My material success seemed too far away to permit him to hope for financial compensation for his loss. All his colleagues had put their eldest sons to work and my father was sorry he hadn’t taken me into his store. He would then have been able to lean on me and be assured of his family’s fate.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  My mother could hurt her. Or she could win her over. I didn’t know which was worse. Claire was mine, someone who loved me. Why did my mother have to get in the middle? But that was my mother, she always had to be the center of attention, everything had to be about her. I hadn’t seen her since Starr. Marvel refused to let the van people take me, she thought the less I saw her the better. I looked in the mirror, imagining what my mother would think of me now. The scars on my face were just the start. I’d been through a few things since then. I wouldn’t know how to be with her now, I was too big to hide in her silences. And now I had Claire to worry about. I touched my hand to my forehead and told Claire, “I think I’m coming down with something.” “Stage fright,” she said, smoothing the skirt with the palms of her hands. “I’m having a bit myself.” I had second thoughts about my clothes too, a long skirt and Doc Martens, thick socks, a crocheted sweater with a lace collar from Fred Segal, where all trendy young Hollywood shopped. My mother was going to hate it. But I had nothing to change into, all my clothes were like that now. We drove east for an hour. Claire chatted nervously. She never could stand a silence. I looked out the windows, sucked a peppermint for carsickness, nestled into my thick Irish sweater. Gradually, the suburbs thinned out, replaced by lumberyards and fields, the smell of manure, and long, fog-clad views framed by lines of windbreak eucalyptus. CYA, the men’s prison. It had been more than two years since I’d last come this way, a very different girl in pink shoes. I even recognized the little market. Coke, 12 pack, $2.49. “Turn here.” We drove back along the same blacktop road to the CIW, the steam stack and the water tower, the guard tower that marked the edge of the prison. We parked in the visitors lot. Claire took a deep breath. “This doesn’t look so bad.” The crows cawed aggressively in the ficus trees. It was freezing cold. I pulled my sweater down over my hands. We passed through the guard tower. Claire brought a book for my mother, Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald, Claire’s favorite, but the guards wouldn’t let her bring it in. My boots set off the metal detector. I had to take them off for the guards to search. The jangle of keys, the slam of the gate, walkie-talkies, these were the sounds of visiting my mother. We sat at a picnic table under the blue overhang. I watched the gate where my mother would come in, but Claire was looking the wrong way, toward Reception, where the new prisoners milled around or pushed brooms—they volunteered to sweep, they were so bored.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I could not even think seriously of looking after myself. To be on the safe side and as a mere matter of routine, I went to see Dr. Nunez. He greeted me severely. He had been expecting my visit and knew all about my expedition. He said that he disapproved entirely, medically speaking, at any rate, and my visit confirmed his fears. On purpose, he exaggerated the severity of his tone. When I told him of my temperature, he immediately pushed me into the icy X-ray room. The sound common sense of doctors, which gives them their reputation for wisdom, is barely shaken by the intuition of a move they cannot understand. He was clumsy in speech, like most physicians, and fumbled for words. Finally, he decided I had been too “sentimental.” If the men suffered, there was nothing I could do about it, and to suffer with them and lose my own health would certainly not help matters. I got undressed as I listened without answering and pretended to be more obstinate than I really felt. He finally said no more, for he was not really sure he was right, and the rest of his argument trailed off in bad-tempered grunts. Finally, he put out the lights and the darkness isolated us from each other. I shivered when he pressed the cold screen against my chest. Then he made me turn around, breathe, and cough. He growled: “You may dress again.” Finally he decided to satisfy my suppressed impatience and he spoke triumphantly: I had been insane to leave. The X-ray gave him a considerably stronger position, and he forgot all his doubts. The healed spot on my lung was again an active focus and had spread. Had we been living in normal times, he would have ordered me to a sanatorium. Meanwhile, I was not to tire myself and must eat plentifully if not well.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  He doesn’t have much time left, and I need you to help me make sure that a jackhammer isn’t the last sound he hears.” “Uh . . .” They looked at each other with a mixture of confusion and disbelief, before a brawny dude with a gentle soul softly said, “You bet, ma’am. Sorry.” Then there was quiet. Ahhh . . . “May God bless you, fellas!” I yelled on my way out. Where that came from, I’m not sure, because I’m a part-time atheist—mostly on Sundays. Yet as the saying goes, there are no atheists in foxholes, and boy did I need God in that moment (or someone like her). The soundtrack of jackhammers may have subsided, but inside, my adrenaline was still totally jacked. I couldn’t stop thinking about what was actually going to happen as Dad came closer to the threshold, passing from this glorious and sometimes stress-inducing life to mysterious death. Where was he going? What would life even be without Dad’s beaming smile and familiar “Hi, love. What’s doin’?” And how the heck was I going to live in the world without this person who played such an important and valuable role in my life? ANTICIPATORY GRIEF With each urgent question came another surge of cortisol and anticipatory grief, which I didn’t know was a thing until I was going through entire tissue boxes in my downtime, even though Dad was still very much alive at that point. I’ve since learned that grief doesn’t just magically appear after loss, like sudden-onset diarrhea might come on after too much onion dip. Instead, it often begins long before life ends. Anticipatory grief is especially common for patients living with terminal illness, as well as for their caregivers. But because this surreal in-between stage is so foreign, it’s easy to feel like you’re doing something wrong, or like you can’t let the person who is sick see your worry, so you have to keep your feelings to yourself. Old ideas about grief, coupled with a general lack of awareness around anticipatory grief, can further muddy the waters and make us feel more alone. A friend of mine had this experience when she reached out to a therapist, asking if she could join the therapist’s grief support group, only to learn that since her near-death loved one was still technically alive, the therapist wouldn’t invite her to the group. “Call me when she dies.” Really? However anticipatory grief is handled, not to mention received, there’s a strong notion that it’s better to keep these “downer” feelings to ourselves. Of course, just the opposite is true.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  On September 11, 2001, five-year-old Noam Saul witnessed the first passenger plane slam into the World Trade Center from the windows of his first-grade classroom at PS 234, less than 1,500 feet away. He and his classmates ran with their teacher down the stairs to the lobby, where most of them were reunited with parents who had dropped them off at school just moments earlier. Noam, his older brother, and their dad were three of the tens of thousands of people who ran for their lives through the rubble, ash, and smoke of lower Manhattan that morning. Ten days later I visited his family, who are friends of mine, and that evening his parents and I went for a walk in the eerie darkness through the still-smoking pit where Tower One once stood, making our way among the rescue crews who were working around the clock under the blazing klieg lights. When we returned home, Noam was still awake, and he showed me a picture that he had drawn at 9:00 a.m. on September 12. The drawing depicted what he had seen the day before: an airplane slamming into the tower, a ball of fire, firefighters, and people jumping from the tower’s windows. But at the bottom of the picture he had drawn something else: a black circle at the foot of the buildings. I had no idea what it was, so I asked him. “A trampoline,” he replied. What was a trampoline doing there? Noam explained, “So that the next time when people have to jump they will be safe.” I was stunned: This five-year-old boy, a witness to unspeakable mayhem and disaster just twenty-four hours before he made that drawing, had used his imagination to process what he had seen and begin to go on with his life. Noam was fortunate. His entire family was unharmed, he had grown up surrounded by love, and he was able to grasp that the tragedy they had witnessed had come to an end. During disasters young children usually take their cues from their parents. As long as their caregivers remain calm and responsive to their needs, they often survive terrible incidents without serious psychological scars. But Noam’s experience allows us to see in outline two critical aspects of the adaptive response to threat that is basic to human survival. At the time the disaster occurred, he was able to take an active role by running away from it, thus becoming an agent in his own rescue. And once he had reached the safety of home, the alarm bells in his brain and body quieted. This freed his mind to make some sense of what had happened and even to imagine a creative alternative to what he had seen—a lifesaving trampoline.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I was delighted but a little embarrassed. Of course, I suffered from my growing awareness that I was alien in the eyes of Europeans, but it had not yet occurred to me to make a move toward the Moslems for I thought of this road as closed . “Precisely,” said Ben Smaan, “that is something new in our program: we would like to have some Jews too, so as to express the aspirations of the whole Tunisian nation.” “But are we a part of the nation?” “Of course you are! Where was your father born? And your grandfather? Have you ever had any other nationality in the last few centuries? No! There you are!” “It’s true,” I said, “that I was born here, like my father and all my ancestors, and I’ve never been out of this country since my birth. You consider that we belong to the same nation, but what about the others, Ben Smaan, what about the others? I’m afraid that, to them, we may still be foreigners.” “Maybe the times have changed. But there’s a job for those of us who know how to speak and explain and convince. We must promote unity among all the native sons of the country and make them act according to their own conscience. Why should we do without the help of the Jews who are an important part of the population and a particularly active, clever, and powerful one?” The last part of this sentence did not please me. What could he mean by “clever and powerful”? I preferred to think that his words had been tactlessly chosen. “I can only agree, but I must admit that I am a pessimist. One cannot force oneself to be accepted as a relative or even a neighbor. That is the opinion of many Jews for whom the only solution is Zionism.” He stopped me with both hands and a scornful expression on his mouth that was as small as his eyes; he curled his lips to express his indignation and disagreement. “Zionism! Leave that alone! It’s a Utopia and one that will arouse the whole Arab world. What could a handful of madmen do against the whole Arab world? No, let us put aside what would split us apart and look only to what can bring us together. ” I did not know then what to think of Zionism, but such a rapid condemnation hurt me, and the implied threat particularly shocked me. Nevertheless, I felt that Ben Smaan’s advances and generosity were sincere. His contact with the Socialist youth movement had given him a broad-minded humanism and the idea of the necessity of a social as well as a political liberation.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  THE VAN CAME at seven. Starr got up and signed the papers while the driver eyed her figure in her bathrobe. There was one other kid in the van. I took the seat in front of him, also by the window. We picked up three more on the way out. The day was overcast, June gloom, the moisture in the air beading on the windshield. You couldn’t see down the freeway as far as the next overpass. It came out of the mist and then it vanished, the world creating and erasing itself. It made me carsick. I cracked the window. We drove a long way, through suburbs and more suburbs. If only I knew what she would be like when I got there. I couldn’t imagine my mother in prison. She didn’t smoke or chew on toothpicks. She didn’t say “bitch” or “fuck.” She spoke four languages, quoted T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas, drank Lapsang souchong out of a porcelain cup. She had never even been inside a McDonald’s. She had lived in Paris and Amsterdam. Freiburg and Martinique. How could she be in prison? At Chino, we turned off the freeway and drove south. I tried to memorize this, so I could find it again in my dreams. We drove past nice suburbs, then not-so-nice ones, then brand-new subdivisions alternating with lumberyards and farm equipment rentals. Finally we came to real country, and drove along roads with no signals, just dairies and fields, the smell of manure. There was a big complex of buildings on the right. “Is that it?” I asked the girl next to me. “CYA,” she said. I shook my head. “Youth Authority.” All the kids eyed it grimly as we passed. We could be there, behind that razor wire. We were silent as death when we went by the California Institution for Men, set way back from the road in the middle of a field. Finally, we turned onto a fresh blacktopped road, past a little market, case of Bud $5.99. I wanted to remember it all. The kids got their bags, their backpacks. Now I could see the prison—a steam stack, a water tower, the guard tower. It was aluminum-sided, like Starr’s trailer. Frontera wasn’t at all as I had imagined. I’d been picturing Birdman of Alcatraz, or I Want to Live! with my mother as Susan Hayward. Its low brick buildings were widely spaced and landscaped with trees and roses and acres of green lawn. It was more like a suburban high school than a prison. Except for the guard towers, the razor wire. Crows squawked raucously in the trees. It sounded like they were tearing something apart, something they didn’t even want, just for the fun of destroying it. We filed through the guard tower, signed in. They searched our backpacks and passed us through the metal detector. They took a package away from one girl. No gifts.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Secondly, as you begin to notice the increasing amount and intensity of aches, pains and other disturbing sensations, you might be worried that they will interfere with your daily functioning and that you will become more symptomatic. Though this might be a fear of yours, it is highly unlikely. If you do feel overwhelmed or “stuck,” please enlist the help of a competent therapist trained in body-oriented therapy. b It is hardly my intention to just open you up to the malfunctioning of your organism and leave you stuck there without an effective course of action or without a way even to retreat. Specifically, it is the purpose of this phase of the experiment to have you explore the chronic patterns of seemingly meaningless tensions and sensations that have become all-too-familiar features. Realize that these sensations were there long before you became deliberately aware of them. Furthermore, you will find that continuing application of directed awareness is exactly what will allow for “corrective procedures”—not so much by doing anything but by standing out of the way of your own organism’s innate capacity for self-regulation. The Continuity of Experience The previous explorations involved proprioception and kinesthesia as the basis for awareness of the body’s tendency toward action. In this exercise we now begin to explore the fusion of internal with external experience. This processing of the organism/environmental field is what steers our forward course. Feeling is a continuous process involving varying degrees of pleasantness and unpleasantness. Feeling tones (based on physical sensations) are unique registrars of experience. They are the way that we become aware of our concerns and how we can go about satisfying them. These contours of feeling, however, are often unnoticed. This is in large part because of our lack of sensitivity to inner experiencing or because sensations are often hidden in the shadow of the more intense emotions. Most people are unaware of these nuances that are overshadowed by the periodic upheaval of discontinuous intense emotions that appear to come from nowhere. They may seem wholly irrational and even “dangerous,” leading to suppression. This only further deadens the subtlety of the continuous feeling tones … which in turn leads to the eruption of more overbearing emotional states punctuating those by increasing the flattening and deadness … and so on. This is how various feeling tones become stifled before they are born into awareness. They are aborted during gestation, never completing what they were designed for: namely, directing action. The consequence of this lack is the evoking of “secondary emotions.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  How blind I was to what I really am, how naive it was of me to hope to overcome the fundamental rift in me, the contradiction that is the very basis of my life! Well, I might as well admit it: there’s a constant ringing in my ears and a pain in my chest. At first I refused to pay any attention to it, but the ringing in my ears is now like an insistent bell. The truth is that I’m a ruined man, that I ought to declare myself a bankrupt. To give myself countenance, to escape, I continued writing for seven hours, like all the others. I even made the most of the extra fifteen minutes of grace granted to the stragglers. That is because my whole life was rising up in my throat again, because I was writing without thinking, straight from the heart to the pen. At the close of this exhausting session, I had some fifty pages to carry away with me. Perhaps, as I now straighten out this narrative, I can manage to see more clearly into my own darkness and to find a way out. PART ONE The Blind Alley ~ 1. THE BLIND ALLEY ~ My father’s breathing, a rapid hissing, punctuated the nighttime silence of our room. The world of my childhood was reassured and protected by this asthmatic breathing that dispelled the terrors of my solitary awakenings. When the moon rose high and plunged its light deep into the narrow blind alley, the anxieties of night stopped at the bars of our window, as their shadows, slowly revolving, cast a pattern of squares on the wall of the room. But I hated to stare at the room that was all sticky with the darkness that seemed to distend the clothes hanging from nails in the wall behind the closed door, that appeared to stifle the mirror of the wardrobe, and then to dissolve itself in a bluish mist by the window. I kept my eyes closed and was soon asleep again. Now, I want to remember all this. My life has known days of innocence when I had only to close my eyes in order not to see. Regularly, at dawn, I was awakened by the muffled and spasmodic rumbling of the garbage carts. Frightened, I would nestle close to my father in the big family bed, with my legs against his belly. He would then place his heavy hand on my head, with a gesture that had become a ritual.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  So I spent most of my afternoons with Henry. For hours, I would listen to him dreaming about wealth in Argentina and the wonderful life out in the open, on horseback, in boots and sombreros. I did not argue about the war any more. He had included it in his plans, which became more complex. First, we would go to England and join the British forces which were less difficult than the French. He had found out that British R.A.F. pilots were being trained in America. We might do a little fighting, to satisfy me. Afterwards, as the war drew to a close, we could get ourselves demobilized in America. From there, we could get to Argentina. Once again, I was exhausted by the effort to escape from myself. The usual cycle was completed and I was incapable of taking an interest in the world or of coming to a decision. To me, the war was far off and of no importance. I listened to Henry as he spoke with precision and conviction. I knew too well how deceptively rational and clear his dreams could seem. Anyone else, seeing us there, with me so attentive and him so bright-eyed and talkative, would never have guessed that he was only daydreaming. I borrowed some books from the public library and tried to do some studying again. It was my old means of protection against the world and against myself, in fact against anything that happened. At this time the temporary Algiers government announced by proclamation that we were reinstated in the university and that exams were to be held within two months. This forced my decision: perhaps it was wiser to continue my studies and become a professor of philosophy, as I had always so much wanted, and to bother less about others. Unfortunately, this time the way back was full of pitfalls. If I wished and, indeed, was forced to break with the West, could I peacefully keep its values and philosophy and become one of its officials? Actually, I got caught up once more in the fever of preparing for the exams and avoided my self- questioning. But I soon realized how impossible it all was. ~ 7. EXAMINATION ~ I have now come to the point where I began my narrative. Here I am in the examination hall, in the huge university library. All around me, as far as the distant shelves on the walls, my comrades are feverishly at work. The early morning sun begins to warm us through the stained glass. The first beads of sweat are tickling my forehead and forming heavy drops in my eyebrows.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Today, without any useless pride, I can really admit that I have sometimes regretted not having studied medicine. I chose, instead, this terrifying and exhausting search for one’s real identity that philosophy implies, and also the ceaseless attempt to master the universe that is the writer’s fate. But are these preferable, I mean this proud choice, the constant anxiety, the look in one’s eyes that is always restless, are these better than stability, security, no matter how mediocre? I might even have forgotten philosophy and remembered it only as a boyhood love, nostalgic and yet ridiculous. As a physician, however, I would have preserved the somewhat simple complacency and intellectual security and pride of one of those petty-bourgeois representatives of culture. On that day, however, when Monsieur Bismuth informed me that he was withdrawing his financial support, I saw it as but one more obstacle to surmount. I no longer had anybody on whom I could rely. This was one more rope that had once guaranteed my security and that had now broken and failed me. I was not afraid, I only felt that it would mean all the more glory if I made a success of my life, battling my way ahead by the sheer strength of my own wrists. I contemplated myself with some emotion and self-complacency: Alexandre Benillouche, professor of philosophy! To me, it seemed prodigious, so full of promise. For this wonderful goal remained, after all, only one of many stages on my way. As a physician, I had no chance of fame; nor could I have remained content with a profession that clearly imposed on me such intolerable limitations. As a philosopher and writer, I would be able to taste every experience and seize at every kind of glory. At that time, I never stopped to count the cost, in blood and sweat, of these experiences, nor had it yet occurred to me that, without assistance, without advice, above all spending my gifts profusely, I might collapse out of sheer exhaustion.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  To me, such promiscuity was repulsive; besides, what had I to tell? Nevertheless, shy though I was, I was forced to admit that my sexual and general isolation were becoming unbearable and that my secret demanded to be shared with another. The narrow alleys of the red-light district bordered immediately on the open ghetto and nothing particular distinguished them from other streets. Impatient men waited at the little doors of the cells only ten yards away from the ragged children playing marbles in the cracks in the uneven pavement. The first shops on these streets were still occupied by second-hand dealers. The topography of the place suited me perfectly, for I could wander around as though I were passing there by accident or looking for something. But I could not prevent myself from walking too fast and too stiffly, with a false air of preoccupation. My quick searching glances into the main street, vaulted like a covered bazaar, never went beyond the dealers, and I avoided their eyes and those of passers-by as though I would find in them some sort of ironical accusation; so I hurried past. But even if I were to cross into the zone of public shame, how could I ever accost the women I saw there, sitting on their doorsteps? That seemed an insurmountable trial. And there was another frightening obstacle. I knew, from having often heard our school supervisors say so, that one should never go there without a condom. I had already seen comrades of mine, pale and proud, with rings around their eyes and an awkward gait, announce with affected nonchalance that they had caught gonorrhea, as though that were a proof of their virility. The others, who knew most of the prostitutes by name, would nod knowingly. “Never go to Lola without a condom. Fontana caught this from her.” I listened with intense curiosity, also with some anxiety and an affectation of indifference. As virginity was considered a joke, I had to avoid being suspected of it, so I discouraged their jokes by pretending to be as calm as an old roué. But how could I possibly walk into a drugstore and, in a loud voice, in front of everybody, perhaps even women, ask for a rubber? I might just as well announce solemnly to all and sundry: “I’m on my way to a brothel.” So I would walk up and down in front of a store until the druggist’s worried attention was attracted, and then I would flee down the street while he stared suspiciously after me.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He talks to ease Hugo’s burning jealousy, perhaps to ease his own doubts. His passion is protective, compassionate, so he underlines my frailty, my naïveté; whereas I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman. June Arrived Last Night. Fred telephoned the news. I was stunned, although I had so often imagined the scene. I have been aware all day that June is in Clichy. I choke over work and food, remembering Henry’s pleading words: to wait. But the period of waiting is unbearable. I swallow large doses of sleeping medicine. I jump when the telephone rings. I call up Allendy. I’m like a person drowning. Henry telephoned me yesterday and again today, grave, bewildered. “June has come in a decent mood. She is subdued and reasonable.” He is disarmed. Will this last? How long will June stay? What must I do? I cannot wait, here, in this room, face to face with my work. I go to sleep with pain oppressing me. When I awake in the morning, it lies at the back of my head like a stone. Hugo’s love, at this moment, is tremendous, superhuman. And Allendy’s. They are fighting for me. I almost died, as a child, to win my father’s love, and I let myself die psychically for the same reason, to torment and tyrannize those I love, to obtain their care. This realization has whipped me. I am fighting now to help myself. I should not give up Henry simply because June is reasonable. Yet I must give him up temporarily, and to do this I must fill the immense vacancy his absence creates in my life. June telephoned me, and I felt no pang at the sound of her voice, no bliss, none of the excitement I expected to feel. She is coming to Louveciennes tomorrow night.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The women chatted among themselves like housewives on their doorsteps. Some smiled at us, perhaps because we were so young and so obviously embarrassed. Like in a novel, a big brunette said, and I am sure it was to me, a phrase I knew well and was at last really hearing: “Won’t you come in, darling?” Enchanted and petrified, I hardly dared look at her and, unable to smile, I went by obediently at the same pace as Bissor. Bissor had a plan. He stopped in front of a plump little woman with a pleasant face and a pointed nose. She was dressed in a short blue frock with big celluloid buttons well spaced out all the way down the front. They smiled and greeted each other: “I’ve brought you a friend. Be kind to him, he’s nice.” She turned to go into her cell. She had said not a word to me, hardly looked at me. I did not, of course, expect her to welcome me in and shake hands formally. Still, I was taken aback. In any case I had expected nothing, and anything would have surprised me as much. I hesitated in the doorway, daring neither to enter nor to leave and awaiting God only knows what. Bissor gave me a push in the back, and I found myself inside a tiny rectangular room, as narrow as a corridor, so narrow that the sparse furniture had had to be placed along the two walls. She had just finished putting a sheet of rubber cloth on the iron bed. She came back to shut the door and, as there was not room enough for two between the bed and the wall, she pushed me with her hand against the little table, covered with a newspaper, on which were crowded all sorts of combs and creams and women’s magazines. The mere contact of her hand, of the body I was about to possess, upset me. This pressure already seemed familiar and promising to me, and I tried to catch her eye to express to her my budding tenderness. But her back was turned and she was preparing herself. She poured two measures of water into an enamel basin which she then placed on top of the earthenware jar that was also against the wall. Thus crowned, with its long neck and its narrow hips, the jug looked like a water-carrier, but was all sticky with filth. Both the furniture and the room were extremely poor and evidently of no interest to their owner, for her only effort at decoration were a few pictures on the walls, women naked or in their underclothes.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  She gave him a look of gratitude and answered: “He looks like a nice man, your teacher.” I translated this comment at once for Poinsot. After that, they both remained silent and waited again. I was trying to find some other verbal link between them when I suddenly felt with real anguish how impossible any communication would be. It was like an access of vertigo. When I find myself at the foot of a wall and look up at the top and see it rising above me endlessly toward the sky, I feel this same vertigo, as if the sky had suddenly become an abyss. The two parts of my being spoke two different languages and would never understand each other. Thus, I allowed the conversation to die. My mother retired into her kitchen, accustomed to being excluded. Poinsot calmly filled his pipe and waited for the end of the storm, without asking me any questions about my nervousness and my sudden silence. It had always been his habit to wait for me to reveal my preoccupations to him. But an explanation, this time, was beyond me. I felt as if walled in. Besides, he would interpret my explanations as useless histrionics, believing that the obstacle could be overcome if one found out first what the whole problem really was. But would I ever be strong enough to survive this split in my being? I was beginning to understand that, however much I might want to become a second Poinsot, the chances were stronger that I would become but another Marrou. Faced with the impossible problem of joining the two parts of myself, I made up my mind to choose one of them. Between the East and the West, between African superstitions and philosophy, between our dialect and the French language, I now had to choose. And it was Poinsot whom I chose passionately, with all the strength of my being. One day, as I entered a café, I suddenly saw myself in a mirror and was terribly scared. I was both myself and a stranger. The mirror ahead of me covered the whole wall, so completely that I could see no frame. Each day, I thus became more alien to myself. I had to stop watching myself, I had to step out of this mirror.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Sometimes, in the dark, I thought I could feel their horrible little legs crawling over my body. At once I would turn on the light and suddenly throw off the blankets and strip myself naked, only to find it had been a false alarm. But I would go ahead and make a new inspection of all my bedding and my clothing. In the middle of the night, with silence all around me and the electric light making my tired eyes smart, I worked furiously and methodically in an attempt to exterminate my enemy. At long last, I had to give it up and decided to spend all my nights in the high school dormitory, even when I had a twenty-four hour pass. My colleagues were surprised at this, for in their eyes a night away from the dormitory was a great relief. Actually, there was another reason that made it unpleasant for me to stay at home. The children there didn’t have enough to eat and were growing up all bones, with big heads and long knotty legs. My little cousins, however, unlike my brothers and sisters, were all soft and flabby, rather too fat, with the unhealthy fat one gets from eating too many starches. They seemed to suffer from a dyspeptic appetite and they constantly asked for food. Nothing was more unbearable for me than the exasperated voice of my widowed aunt grumbling all day long after her children: “May the Red Death carry you off! You’re eating too much! I’ve nothing left to give you!” All this made me feel ashamed of the luxurious diet I enjoyed at school, and I tried to ignore the guilt-feelings I felt. Most of my joys were indeed spoiled for me in this manner, though I had learned to drive out of my mind all disquieting thoughts. At least, I had a room where I could live protected from all this, so I moved all my belongings and my books there. For a while I even thought I would be able to build myself, within the sphere of philosophy, a sort of private garden, fenced off with little columns on which would be placed the busts of Aristotle and Plato, Descartes, Kant and Hegel. Of course, I no longer wanted to live alone, but it was good too to have a place where I could withdraw and feel at peace with myself. It was in this period that I began to keep a diary, which contributed not a little toward giving me a taste for certain other adventures. At least it seems significant to me that I adopted this habit of careful written introspection exactly at the time when I had decided to abandon my reclusion and face the outside world.