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 The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  But Mary could see that she was far from all right; the warm weather was proving of little avail, even care and good food and sunshine and rest seemed unable to ease that incessant coughing. ‘You ought to see a specialist at once,’ she told Barbara rather sharply one morning. But Barbara shook her head yet again: ‘Don’t, Mary—don’t, please . . . you’ll be frightening Jamie.’ 2After their return to Paris in the autumn, Jamie sometimes joined the nocturnal parties; going rather grimly from bar to bar, and drinking too much of the crème-de-menthe that reminded her of the bull’s eyes at Beedles. She had never cared for these parties before, but now she was clumsily trying to escape, for a few hours at least, from the pain of existence. Barbara usually stayed at home or spent the evening with Stephen and Mary. But Stephen and Mary would not always be there, for now they also went out fairly often; and where was there to go to except the bars? Nowhere else could two women dance together without causing comment and ridicule, without being looked upon as freaks, argued Mary. So rather than let the girl go without her, Stephen would lay aside her work—she had recently started to write her fourth novel. Sometimes, it is true, their friends came to them, a less sordid and far less exhausting business; but even at their own house the drink was too free: ‘We can’t be the only couple to refuse to give people a brandy and soda,’ said Mary, ‘Valérie’s parties are awfully dull; that’s because she’s allowed herself to grow cranky!’ And thus, very gradually just at first, Mary’s finer perceptions began to coarsen. 3The months passed, and now more than a year had slipped by, yet Stephen’s novel remained unfinished; for Mary’s face stood between her and her work—surely the mouth and the eyes had hardened? Still unwilling to let Mary go without her, she dragged wearily round to the bars and cafés, observing with growing anxiety that Mary now drank as did all the others—not too much perhaps, but quite enough to give her a cheerful outlook on existence. The next morning she was often deeply depressed, in the grip of a rather tearful reaction: ‘It’s too beastly—why do we do it?’ she would ask. And Stephen would answer: ‘God knows I don’t want to, but I won’t let you go to such places without me. Can’t we give it all up? It’s appallingly sordid!’

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The apartment occupied by the late Berlioz, as well as by the Yalta-visiting Likhodeev, was empty, and in the study wax seals hung peacefully on the bookcases, unbroken by anyone. With that they left Sadovaya, and there also departed with them the perplexed and dispirited secretary of the house management, Bedsornev. In the evening Nikanor Ivanovich was delivered to Stravinsky’s clinic. There he became so agitated that an injection, made according to Stravinsky’s recipe, had to be given him, and only after midnight did Nikanor Ivanovich fall asleep in room 119, every now and then emitting a heavy, painful moan. But the longer he slept, the easier his sleep became. He stopped tossing and groaning, his breathing became easy and regular, and he was left alone. Then Nikanor Ivanovich was visited by a dream, at the basis of which undoubtedly lay the experience of that day. It began with Nikanor Ivanovich seeing as it were some people with golden trumpets in their hands leading him, and very solemnly, to a big lacquered door. At this door his companions played as it were a flourish for Nikanor Ivanovich, and then from the sky a resounding bass said merrily: ‘Welcome, Nikanor Ivanovich, turn over your currency!’ Exceedingly astonished, Nikanor Ivanovich saw a black loudspeaker above him. Then he found himself for some reason in a theatre house, where crystal chandeliers blazed under a gilded ceiling and Quinquet lamps 2 on the walls. Everything was as it ought to be in a small-sized but very costly theatre. There was a stage closed off by a velvet curtain, its dark cerise background spangled, as if with stars, with oversized gold pieces, there was a prompter’s box, and there was even an audience. What surprised Nikanor Ivanovich was that this audience was all of the same sex—male—and all for some reason bearded. Besides that, it was striking that there were no seats in the theatre, and the audience was all sitting on the floor, splendidly polished and slippery. Abashed in this new and big company, Nikanor Ivanovich, after a brief hesitation, followed the general example and sat down on the parquet Turkish-fashion, huddled between some stalwart, bearded redhead and another citizen, pale and quite overgrown. None of the sitters paid any attention to the newly arrived spectator. Here the soft ringing of a bell was heard, the lights in the house went out, and the curtain opened to reveal a lighted stage with an armchair, a little table on which stood a golden bell, and a solid black velvet backdrop. An artiste came out from the wings in an evening jacket, smoothly shaven, his hair neatly parted, young and with very pleasant features. The audience in the house livened up, and everyone turned towards the stage.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  RETURNED TO MILAN by the beginning of Lent, Augustine was no doubt anxious to mix again with his fellow philosophers and to find out how his dialogues, sent back from Cassiciacum, had been received. While he was on a roll, he began an extension of the Dialogues with Myself. Now that he could talk again with Simplician and Theodore, he felt he could prove that the soul is immortal. There was no scriptural commentary in the dialogues from Cassiciacum, a fact that has been used to indicate that Augustine’s conversion was less to Christ than to Plotinus. But it would have been presumptuous for him to speak out on the faith before being instructed in its reserved mysteries, the disciplina arcani. And his real exposure to the symbolic reading of Scripture came with Ambrose’s Lenten instruction to the candidates (competentes) for baptism—a disciplined course all Christians went through at the time. All through Lent, the candidates went unbathed, wore penitential hairskins, and were assigned a special place in church. We have two versions of the Ambrosian instruction on baptism—which traced prefigurings of this spiritual “bath” to Noah’s flood, to the passage of the Red Sea, to healings at the pool of Siloam; to water that Moses sweetened, or water that floated Elijah’s axe (Sacraments 2.2; Mysteries 1.3). In this period, the candidates were given, by oral recitation, the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer for memorizing. On Thursday of Holy Week they were allowed to bathe, then submitted to physical inspection (S 216.11). On the eve of Easter, they prayed through the night, renounced Satan at dawn, turned toward the sun, and were conducted to the octagonal pool we can still see, in a tunnel under the cathedral plaza of Milan (O’Donnell 3.106–7). There are few places in Europe more charged with historical significance than this baptistry where Ambrose, the creator of structured disciplines for the medieval Church, received as a Christian Augustine, the creator of the theology that would resound in that Church. 5. Ostia: 387 BAPTIZED IN THE SPRING, Augustine headed south in the summer, traveling now in humbler state than on his trip up, with a reduced company trying to reach Ostia before winter shut down the sea lanes back to Africa. But when they arrived there, they found the Mediterranean sealed off by war, not winter. The forces of both emperors, Eastern and Western, were finally arrayed against the usurper Maximus, whose court in Trier Ambrose had visited during Augustine’s time in Milan. While they were stranded in Ostia, Monnica was taken ill and died. I have not said much about Monnica so far because too much is often made of her role in Augustine’s life. Rebecca West’s indictment of her is well known:

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Violet was plump, pert and adolescent, and had lately insisted on putting her hair up. She liked men, who in consequence always liked her, for like begets like when it comes to the sexes, and Violet was full of what people call: ‘allure,’ or in simpler language, of sexual attraction. Roger was home for Christmas from Sandiest, so that he would be there to assist his mother. He was now nearly twenty, a good-looking youth with a tiny moustache which he tentatively fingered. He assumed the grand air of the man of the world who has actually weathered about nineteen summers. He was hoping to join his regiment quite soon, which greatly augmented his self-importance. Could Mrs. Antrim have ignored Stephen Gordon’s existence, she would almost certainly have done so. She disliked the girl; she had always disliked her; what she called Stephen’s ‘queerness’ aroused her suspicion—she was never quite clear as to what she suspected, but felt sure that it must be something outlandish: ‘A young woman of her age to ride like a man, I call it preposterous!’ declared Mrs. Antrim. It can safely be said that Stephen at eighteen had in no way outgrown her dread of the Antrims; there was only one member of that family who liked her, she knew, and that was the small, hen-pecked Colonel. He liked her because, a fine horseman himself, he admired her skill and her courage out hunting. ‘It’s a pity she’s so tall, of course—’ he would grumble, ‘but she does know a horse and how to stick on one. Now my children might have been brought up at Margate, they’re just about fitted to ride the beach donkeys!’ But Colonel Antrim would not count at the dance; indeed in his own house he very seldom counted. Stephen would have to endure Mrs. Antrim and Violet—and then Roger was home from Sandiest. Their antagonism had never quite died, perhaps because it was too fundamental. Now they covered it up with a cloak of good manners, but these two were still enemies at heart, and they knew it. No, Stephen did not want to go to that dance, though she went in order to please her mother. Nervous, awkward and apprehensive, Stephen arrived at the Antrims that night, little thinking that Fate, the most expert of tricksters, was waiting to catch her just round the corner.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Power stood. Gave Slim a pound. “Tell him I said he has to use the bathroom. Real bad.” • • • Flame arrived at her and Richard’s fuck spot two hours before their lunchtime date and played maid. Searching dresser drawers, under the bed, behind furniture, she packed everything that could prove she’d ever been there, dumped it in the incinerator, then called the super and pretended like she’d lost something to make sure the trash was already burning. With bucket after bucket of bleach and water, she scrubbed down everything, practically Cloroxing the place to death. At noon, Richard’s key clicked in the lock. Flame posted up on the sofa wearing nothing but a smile and the little black nightie he’d bought her from Vickie’s Secret that said everything but “Hush.” “Hello, my chocolate kitten,” he said, dropping his briefcase. Flame’s nerves were rattled again, but she pushed them aside knowing this would be the last day she’d be his “chocolate” anything. “What up, Rich,” she replied, emotionless. No longer did she have to coo and pretend, roll over and fuck. The game was over, and Enrique and his crew were hiding in the back room. Richard walked over to her, confusion etched on his face. “Bad day?” “Could be worse,” she said, then stood and switched up her mood a little. “I just need to take a shower, relax a little.” She ran her fingers through her wild hair. “Can you meet me in the room when you get settled and help me undress? Please, Daddy?” “Sure, I’ll be there as soon as I leave my client a message.” Flame closed the door behind her, nodded okay to Enrique when he pointed toward the closet, tossing her clothes to her. Huddling, her body began to tremble as she thought about the fear Richard would soon face. She hated to do it to him, but when it came down to it, it was either him or her. Reflecting on all the “chocolate whores” he’d called her, she shook the feeling and decided that he deserved what was coming to him. She heard the door open, a short scuffle, then a burner cocked. Enrique called her name, and she knew the game was over. Quietly, she opened the door as if creeping would make her less accountable. Keeping her eyes on Enrique, she stood there waiting for instructions. “Tell ’im what’chu want, mami.” Flame looked at Richard, forced a scowl on her face. “I want the deed to your house. Not the place you and your family live in, your vacation house. The deed.” Richard laughed nervously. “You can’t be—” Enrique’s henchman, Crazy Lucky, gun-butted him. “Shut da fuck up. Let’er finish.”

• From The Girls (2016)

  “Come where?” she said, her voice even. “Wherever you’re going,” I said. “I know you’re going somewhere.” The teasing lilt. “Russell didn’t ask you to go.” “But I want to,” I said. “Please.” Suzanne didn’t say yes, exactly. But she slowed enough so I could match her stride, a pace new to me, purposeful. “You should change,” Suzanne said. I looked down, trying to discern what had offended her: my cotton shirt, my long skirt. “Into dark clothes,” she said. 14The car ride was as slurred over and unbelievable as a long illness. Guy at the wheel, Helen and Donna beside him. Suzanne sat in the backseat, staring out the window, and I was right next to her. The night had dropped deep and dark, the car passing under the streetlights. Their sulfur glow gliding across Suzanne’s face, a stupor occupying the others. Sometimes it seemed like I never really left the car. That a version of me is always there. Russell stayed at the ranch that night. Which didn’t even register with me as strange. Suzanne and the others were his familiars, loosed out into the world—it had always been that way. Guy like his second in a duel, Suzanne and Helen and Donna not hesitating. Roos was supposed to have gone, too, but she didn’t—she claimed, later, that she’d gotten a bad feeling and stayed behind, but I don’t know if that is true. Did Russell hold her back, sensing a stubborn virtue in her that might yoke her to the real world? Roos with Nico, a child of her own. Roos, who did become the main witness against the others, taking the stand in a white dress with her hair parted straight down the middle. I don’t know if Suzanne told Russell I was coming—no one ever answered that question. The car radio was on, playing the laughably foreign soundtrack to other people’s lives. Other people who were getting ready to sleep, mothers who were scraping the last shreds of chicken dinner into the garbage. Helen was jawing away about a whale beaching down in Pismo and did we think it was true that it was a sign a big earthquake was gonna happen? Getting up on her knees then, like the idea thrilled her. “We’d have to go to the desert,” she said. No one was taking her bait: a hush had fallen over the car. Donna muttered something, and Helen set her jaw. “Can you open the window?” Suzanne said. “I’m cold,” Helen whined in her baby voice. “Come on,” Suzanne said, pounding the back of the seat. “I’m fucking melting.” Helen rolled the window down and the car filled with air, flavored with exhaust. The salt of the nearby ocean. And there I was among them. Russell had changed, things had soured, but I was with Suzanne. Her presence corralled any stray worries. Like the child who believes that her mother’s bedtime vigil will ward off monsters.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  4. Perpetua and Felicity: Mothers and Martyrs Christians were made uniquely vulnerable under the rule of the emperor Septimius Severus, a general who had assumed the imperial throne during a period of turmoil. Severus sought to establish his legitimacy by promoting his own cult alongside that of the Egyptian god Serapis. He also outlawed conversion to Christianity or Judaism, possibly seeing them as competitors. The ambitious Roman governor, Hilarian, sponsored games to celebrate the birthday of the emperor’s son. In Carthage, with a long history of self- sacrifice and even human sacrifice, offering blood tribute may have been especially important. Hilarian probably ordered the arrest of Christian converts for execution as part of the festival. We don’t know how the catechumens were identified, but they were immediately placed under house arrest. During this time, the prisoners underwent baptism, completing the group’s conversion and allowing Hilarian to bring the full weight of the new law into effect. They were moved to a prison and joined by Saturus, a leader of the Christian community and voluntary martyr. The group’s trial was held in the forum, with Hilarian presiding. Perpetua’s father made an impassioned plea, holding her son and begging her to think of the child. When she refused to listen and her father continued to importune her, the Passion tells us that Hilarian had him beaten, which greatly distressed Perpetua. For some scholars, that event calls into question the true status of Perpetua’s family, as a man of higher status would never have been beaten in open 28

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Georges Bengalsky, for instance, after spending three months in the clinic, recovered and left it, but had to give up his work at the Variety, and that at the hottest time, when the public was flocking after tickets: the memory of black magic and its exposure proved very tenacious. Bengalsky left the Variety, for he understood that to appear every night before two thousand people, to be inevitably recognized and endlessly subjected to jeering questions of how he liked it better, with or without his head, was much too painful. And, besides that, the master of ceremonies had lost a considerable dose of his gaiety, which is so necessary in his profession. He remained with the unpleasant, burdensome habit of falling, every spring during the full moon, into a state of anxiety, suddenly clutching his neck, looking around fearfully and weeping. These fits would pass, but all the same, since he had them, he could not continue in his former occupation, and so the master of ceremonies retired and started living on his savings, which, by his modest reckoning, were enough to last him fifteen years. He left and never again met Varenukha, who has gained universal popularity and affection by his responsiveness and politeness, incredible even among theatre administrators. The free-pass seekers, for instance, never refer to him otherwise than as father-benefactor. One can call the Variety at any time and always hear in the receiver a soft but sad voice: ‘May I help you?’ And to the request that Varenukha be called to the phone, the same voice hastens to answer: ‘At your service.’ And, oh, how Ivan Savelyevich has suffered from his own politeness! Styopa Likhodeev was to talk no more over the phone at the Variety. Immediately after his release from the clinic, where he spent eight days, Styopa was transferred to Rostov, taking up the position of manager of a large food store. Rumour has it that he has stopped drinking cheap wine altogether and drinks only vodka with blackcurrant buds, which has greatly improved his health. They say he has become taciturn and keeps away from women. The removal of Stepan Bogdanovich from the Variety did not bring Rimsky the joy of which he had been so greedily dreaming over the past several years. After the clinic and Kislovodsk, old, old as could be, his head wagging, the findirector submitted his resignation from the Variety. The interesting thing was that this resignation was brought to the Variety by Rimsky’s wife. Grigory Danilovich himself found it beyond his strength to visit, even during the daytime, the building where he had seen the cracked window-pane flooded with moonlight and the long arm making its way to the lower latch. Having left the Variety, the findirector took a job with a children’s marionette theatre in Zamoskvorechye. In this theatre he no longer had to run into the much esteemed Arkady Apollonovich Sempleyarov on matters of acoustics.

• From The Girls (2016)

  It made me nervous to have to be whatever strangers expected from a girl with long hair—I didn’t know what degree of outrage to show about the war, how to talk about the students who threw bricks at police or took over passenger planes, demanding to be flown to Cuba. I’d always been outside all that, like I was watching a movie about what should have been my own life. But it was different, now that I was heading to the ranch. I kept imagining the moment when Tamar and my father, home from the office, would realize I was actually gone. They would understand slowly, Tamar probably coming to the conclusion faster than my father. The apartment empty, no trace of my things. And maybe my father would call my mother, but what could either of them do? What punishment could they possibly pass down? They didn’t know where I’d gone. I had moved beyond their purview. Even their concern was exciting, in its way: there would be a moment when they’d have to wonder why I’d left, some murky guilt rising to the surface, and they would have to feel the full force of it, even if it was only for a second. The couple took me as far as Woodside. I waited in the parking lot of the Cal-Mart until I got a ride from a man in a rattly Chevrolet, on his way to Berkeley to drop off a motorcycle part. Every time he went over a pothole, his duct-taped glove compartment clattered. The shaggy trees flashed past the window, thick with sun, the purple stretch of the bay beyond. I held my purse on my lap. His name was Claude, and he seemed ashamed of how it jarred with his appearance. “My mother liked that French actor,” he mumbled. Claude made a point of flipping through his wallet, showing me pictures of his own daughter. She was a chubby girl, the bridge of her nose pink. Her unfashionable sausage curls. Claude seemed to sense my pity, suddenly grabbing the wallet back. “None of you girls should be doing this,” he said. He shook his head and I saw how his face moved a little with concern for me, an acknowledgment, I thought, of how brave I was. Though I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains. Some violent daydream prompting their guilty exhortations to “make it home safe.” “See, I wish I’d been like you,” Claude said. “Free and easy. Just traveling around. I always had a job.” He slid his eyes to me before turning them back to the road. The first twinge of discomfort—I’d gotten good at deciphering certain male expressions of desire. Clearing the throat, an assessing nip in the gaze. “None of you people ever work, huh?” he said. He was teasing, probably, but I couldn’t tell for sure.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Mission accomplished! Dushawn let out a loud groan that echoed through the large empty building. On his last stroke, he tried to plunge his big-ass dick up through the roof of my pussy. I felt like I was ’bout to bust wide open, but I kept ridin’. He moaned and kept grindin’. I threw my ass into overdrive and bounced on the leftovers until I finished my second hard cum. • • • We got dressed in the purple light of night. Just before we climbed out of a secret third-story entrance, Dushawn hugged me tightly and gently devoured my lips and tongue. He gave me one last sweet deep kiss and said, “Let’s bounce.” Holding hands, we left the old abandoned factory where we’d played hide-and-seek as kids, and started walkin’ back to Alameda to where we had parked our cars by Angel’s Doughnuts. We figured it was safe there cuz it’s always some old guys on the patio playin’ dominoes and takin’ bets. As we got closer to Angel’s, the streets got noisier and more crowded than usual because it was Friday night. All the soldiers lined the sidewalks and steps of their apartments, laughin’ and plottin’ capers. Pook and Dre were at the curb slippin’ dimes of Chronic, and a slick song was blastin’ from the windows of a big tan-and-white apartment building on Willowbrook. A couple of young moms were sittin’ out front, bouncin’ their babies to the beat while they kicked it and cut it up. “Hey, gurrrrrrrrrrrl!” It was this bitch named Nakisha. She knew me and Cami from Willowbrook. I could tell she was shocked to see me holdin’ hands with Dushawn. Life had not been kind to her. She was fat as fuck, with a kangaroo pouch in the front and two grocery bags of ass in the back. “Camille never told me you and her brother was kickin’ it.” “Did I miss something? When did you and Cami start kickin’ it? We talk er’ night and she never mentioned yo ass.” I shut that shit straight down, but I knew I’d have to talk to Cami right away. Dushawn never said a word, but he never let go of my hand either. A little further down, somebody was fryin’ the hell out of some chicken. It was smellin’ up the whole block. TVs were flickering through every other window. Dushawn was quiet and I was pretty quiet my damn self. My pussy was still clenching and throbbin’ from being broke off proper. I thought about Camille. I wondered how she’d act when I told her about me and Dushawn. She used to haaate the bitches that tried to get to Dushawn by tryin’ to strike up a fake-ass friendship with her. I knew I had to tell her before Nakisha blurted it out just to see the look on her face. You know how foul bitches do it. • • •

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  But shit veered off course for her the next evening when Pluto called her cell phone and told her the G-Spot was closed and to stay home for the night. Monique was suspicious. She knew that amateur-ass Juicy had fallen off on her shit a few days ago, and was too worn out to work the rooms anymore. Niggahs had been tossing their room chips back at Greco and refusing to fuck her ’cause her stank pussy was bleeding and she was talking out of her head. So vacation time had come to a close for Monique and the other hoes, and niggahs was so full of cum that she’d been forced to take on a double load the night before. Ballers had been horny and wanted to fuck, so Monique had performed all of her little tricks to get them to nut as fast as possible, and Pluto’s call had caught her soaking her sore pussy in a hot tub of water and going over her pole routines in her mind. “Yeah,” Plutotoldher. “Stay the fuck home. We closed to the public for the night. Ballers only. So keep your ass at home.” Monique was too suspicious! What kinda private party could G be having that didn’t involve his hoes? She didn’t even like the way that shit sounded, so she had to let a niggah know! “What up like that? What kinda private fuckin’ party? Why ain’t nobody invite me?” “Jawn,” Pluto growled in her ear. “I’ll snap your mother-fuckin’ neck! You better remember ya goddamn role. Don’t be asking me no fuckin’ questions. Especially on the air. Just do like I said, and stay your ass the fuck home.” Click. Monique had looked at the phone for a second, then threw that shit up against the wall. That stank niggah better not be trying to roll nowhere without her! Just the thought that Pluto might try to shake her off and leave her in Harlem made her face sweat as she sat in all that hot water. She thought about that shit for a second, and decided it was best to regroup.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

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

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  citizens could walk in their leisure time, and soon pavilions and country houses were being built all the way out to Forest Park and Arden. Until the seventeenth century, Austerlitz continued, the priory of the order of St. Mary of Bethlehem stood on the site of the present main station concourse and the Great Eastern Hotel. It had been founded by a certain Simon FitzMary in gratitude for his miraculous rescue from the hands of the Saracens when he was on a crusade, so that the pious brothers and sisters could pray henceforward for the salvation of the founder’s soul and the souls of his ancestors, his descendants, and all those related to him. The hospital for the insane and other destitute persons which has gone down in history under the name of Bedlam also belonged to the priory outside Bishopsgate. Whenever I was in the station, said Austerlitz, I kept almost obsessively trying to imagine—through the ever-changing maze of walls—the location in that huge space of the rooms where the asylum inmates were confined, and I often wondered whether the pain and suffering accumulated on this site over the centuries had ever really ebbed away, or whether they might not still, as I sometimes thought when I felt a cold breath of air on my forehead, be sensed as we passed through them. Or I imagined the bleachfields stretching westwards from Bedlam, saw the white lengths of linen spread out on the green grass and the diminutive figures of weavers and washerwomen, and on the far side of the bleachfields the places where the dead were buried once the churchyards of London could hold no more. When space becomes too cramped, the dead, like the living, move out into less densely populated districts where they can rest at a decent distance from each other. But more and more keep coming, a neverending succession of them, and in the end, when the space is entirely occupied, graves are dug through existing graves to accommodate them, until all the bones in the cemetery lie jumbled up together. At Broad Street Station, built in 1865 on the site of the former burial grounds and bleachfields, excavations during the demolition work of 1984 brought to light over four hundred skeletons underneath a taxi rank. I went there quite often at the time, said Austerlitz, partly because of my interest in architectural history and partly for other reasons which I could not explain even to myself, and I took photographs of the remains of the dead. I remember falling into conversation with one of the archaeologists, who told me that on average the skeletons of eight people had been found in every cubic meter of earth removed from the trench. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the city had grown above these strata of soil mingled with the dust and bones of decayed bodies into a warren of putrid streets and houses for the poorest Londoners, cobbled together out of beams, clods of clay, and any other building material that came to hand.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Although I am basically optimistic about remaining well, I know my illness from enough different vantage points to remain rather fatalistic about the future. As a result, I know that I listen to lectures about new treatments for manic-depressive illness with far more than just a professional interest. I also know that when I am doing Grand Rounds at other hospitals, I often visit their psychiatric wards, look at their seclusion rooms and ECT suites, wander their hospital grounds, and do my own internal ratings of where I would choose to go if I had to be hospitalized. There is always a part of my mind that is preparing for the worst, and another part of my mind that believes if I prepare enough for it, the worst won’t happen. Many years of living with the cyclic upheavals of manic-depressive illness has made me more philosophical, better armed, and more able to handle the inevitable swings of mood and energy that I have opted for by taking a lower level of lithium. I agree absolutely with Eliot’s Ecclesiastian belief that there is a season for everything, a time for building, and “a time for the wind to break the loosened pane.” Therefore, I now move more easily with the fluctuating tides of energy, ideas, and enthusiasms that I remain so subject to. My mind still, now and again, becomes a carnival of lights, laughter, and sounds and possibilities. The laughter and exuberance and ease will, filling me, spill out and over and into others. These glinting, glorious moments will last for a while, a short season, and then move on. My high moods and hopes, having ridden briefly in the top car of the Ferris wheel will, as suddenly as they came, plummet into a black and gray and tired heap. Time will pass; these moods will pass; and I will, eventually, be myself again. But then, at some unknown time, the electrifying carnival will come back into my mind.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The police went running to Sempleyarov’s box, people were climbing over the barriers, there were bursts of infernal guffawing and furious shouts, drowned in the golden clash of the orchestra’s cymbals. And one could see that the stage was suddenly empty, and that the hoodwinker Fagott, as well as the brazen tom-cat Behemoth, had melted into air, vanished as the magician had vanished earlier in his armchair with the faded upholstery. CHAPTER 13: The Hero Enters, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 13 The Hero Enters And so, the unknown man shook his finger at Ivan and whispered: ‘Shhh! . . .’ Ivan lowered his legs from the bed and peered. Cautiously looking into the room from the balcony was a clean-shaven, dark-haired man of approximately thirty-eight, with a sharp nose, anxious eyes, and a wisp of hair hanging down on his forehead. Having listened and made sure that Ivan was alone, the mysterious visitor took heart and stepped into the room. Here Ivan saw that the man was dressed as a patient. He was wearing long underwear, slippers on his bare feet, and a brown dressing-gown thrown over his shoulders. The visitor winked at Ivan, hid a bunch of keys in his pocket, inquired in a whisper: ‘May I sit down?’—and receiving an affirmative nod, placed himself in an armchair. ‘How did you get here?’ Ivan asked in a whisper, obeying the dry finger shaken at him. ‘Aren’t the balcony grilles locked?’ ‘The grilles are locked,’ the guest agreed, ‘but Praskovya Fyodorovna, while the dearest person, is also, alas, quite absent-minded. A month ago I stole a bunch of keys from her, and so gained the opportunity of getting out on the common balcony, which runs around the entire floor, and so of occasionally calling on a neighbour.’ ‘If you can get out on to the balcony, you can escape. Or is it high up?’ Ivan was interested. ‘No,’ the guest replied firmly, ‘I cannot escape from here, not because it’s high up, but because I have nowhere to escape to.’ And he added, after a pause: ‘So, here we sit.’ ‘Here we sit,’ Ivan replied, peering into the man’s brown and very restless eyes. ‘Yes . . .’ here the guest suddenly became alarmed, ‘but you’re not violent, I hope? Because, you know, I cannot stand noise, turmoil, force, or other things like that. Especially hateful to me are people’s cries, whether cries of rage, suffering, or anything else.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  A minute later she was asleep, and that morning she had no dreams. The basement rooms were silent, the builder’s whole little house was silent, and it was quiet in the solitary lane. But just then, that is, at dawn on Saturday, an entire floor of a certain Moscow institution was not asleep, and its windows, looking out on a big asphalt-paved square which special machines, driving around slowly and droning, were cleaning with brushes, shone with their full brightness, cutting through the light of the rising sun. The whole floor was occupied with the investigation of the Woland case, and the lights had burned all night in ten offices. Essentially speaking, the matter had already become clear on the previous day, Friday, when the Variety had had to be closed, owing to the disappearance of its administration and all sorts of outrages which had taken place during the notorious séance of black magic the day before. But the thing was that more and more new material kept arriving all the time and incessantly on the sleepless floor. Now the investigators of this strange case, which smacked of obvious devilry, with an admixture of some hypnotic tricks and distinct criminality, had to shape into one lump all the many-sided and tangled events that had taken place in various parts of Moscow. The first to visit the sleepless, electrically lit-up floor was Arkady Apollonovich Sempleyarov, chairman of the Acoustics Commission. After dinner on Friday, in his apartment located in a house by the Kamenny Bridge, the telephone rang and a male voice asked for Arkady Apollonovich. Arkady Apollonovich’s wife, who picked up the phone, replied sullenly that Arkady Apollonovich was unwell, had retired for the night, and could not come to the phone. However, Arkady Apollonovich came to the phone all the same. To the question of where Arkady Apollonovich was being called from, the voice in the telephone had said very briefly where it was from. ‘This second . . . at once . . . this minute . . .’ babbled the ordinarily very haughty wife of the chairman of the Acoustics Commission, and she flew to the bedroom like an arrow to rouse Arkady Apollonovich from his bed, where he lay experiencing the torments of hell at the recollection of yesterday’s séance and the night’s scandal, followed by the expulsion of his Saratov niece from the apartment.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  You’re not angry, are you, darling? I kept thinking of you alone in the study. Come here and say you’re not angry with me, even if it is three o’clock in the morning!’ Then Stephen would slip off her old tweed coat and would fling herself down on the bed beside Mary, too exhausted to do more than take the girl in her arms, and let her lie there with her head on her shoulder. But Mary would be thinking of all those things which she found so deeply appealing in Stephen—the scar on her cheek, the expression in her eyes, the strength and the queer, shy gentleness of her—the strength which at moments could not be gentle. And as they lay there Stephen might sleep, worn out by the strain of those long hours of writing. But Mary would not sleep, or if she slept it would be when the dawn was paling the windows. 4 One morning Stephen looked at Mary intently. ‘Come here. You’re not well! What’s the matter? Tell me.’ For she thought that the girl was unusually pale, thought too that her lips drooped a little at the corners; and a sudden fear contracted her heart. ‘Tell me at once what’s the matter with you!’ Her voice was rough with anxiety, and she laid an imperative hand over Mary’s. Mary protested. ‘Don’t be absurd; there’s nothing the matter, I’m perfectly well—you’re imagining things.’ For what could be the matter? Was she not here in Paris with Stephen? But her eyes filled with tears, and she turned away quickly to hide them, ashamed of her own unreason. Stephen stuck to her point. ‘You don’t look a bit well. We shouldn’t have stayed in Paris last summer.’ Then because her own nerves were on edge that day, she frowned. ‘It’s this business of your not eating whenever I can’t get in to a meal. I know you don’t eat—Pierre’s told me about it. You mustn’t behave like a baby, Mary! I shan’t be able to write a line if I feel you’re ill because you’re not eating.’ Her fear was making her lose her temper. ‘I shall send for a doctor,’ she finished brusquely. Mary refused point-blank to see a doctor. What was she to tell him? She hadn’t any symptoms. Pierre exaggerated. She ate quite enough— she had never been a very large eater. Stephen had better get on with her work and stop upsetting herself over nothing. But try as she might, Stephen could not get on—all the rest of the day her work went badly. After this she would often leave her desk and go wandering off in search of Mary. ‘Darling, where are you?’ ‘Upstairs in my bedroom!’ ‘Well, come down; I want you here in the study.’

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  And straight away, looking at the threads of fire cutting up the cloud, he began to ask that lightning strike Yeshua’s post. Repentantly looking into the clear sky that had not yet been devoured by the cloud, and where the vultures were veering on one wing to escape the storm, Levi thought he had been insanely hasty with his curses: now God was not going to listen to him. Turning his gaze to the foot of the hill, Levi fixed on the place where the strung-out cavalry regiment stood, and saw that considerable changes had taken place there. From above, Levi was able to distinguish very well the soldiers bustling about, pulling spears out of the ground, throwing cloaks on, the horse-handlers trotting towards the road leading black horses by their bridles. The regiment was moving off, that was clear. Spitting and shielding himself with his hand from the dust blowing in his face, Levi tried to grasp what it might mean if the cavalry was about to leave. He shifted his gaze further up and made out a little figure in a crimson military chlamys climbing towards the place of execution. And here a chill came over the heart of the former tax collector in anticipation of the joyful end. The man climbing the mountain in the fifth hour of the robbers’ sufferings was the commander of the cohort, who had come galloping from Yershalaim accompanied by an aide. At a gesture from Ratslayer, the file of soldiers parted, and the centurion saluted the tribune. The latter, taking Ratslayer aside, whispered something to him. The centurion saluted him a second time and moved towards the group of executioners, who were sitting on stones at the foot of the posts. The tribune meanwhile directed his steps towards the one sitting on the three-legged stool, and the seated man politely rose to meet the tribune. The tribune also said something to him in a low voice, and the two went over to the posts. They were joined by the head of the temple guard. Ratslayer, casting a squeamish sidelong glance at the dirty rags lying on the ground near the posts, rags that had recently been the criminals’ clothing, and which the executioners had rejected, called two of them and ordered: ‘Follow me!’ From the nearest post came a hoarse, senseless song. Gestas, hanging on it, had lost his mind from the flies and sun towards the end of the third hour, and was now quietly singing something about grapes, but his head, covered with a turban, occasionally swayed all the same, and then the flies rose sluggishly from his face and settled on it again. Dysmas, on the second post, suffered more than the other two because he did not lose consciousness, and he swung his head constantly and rhythmically, right and left, so that his ears struck his shoulders. Yeshua was more fortunate than the other two.

• From The Girls (2016)

  They spoke rapidly to each other in serious Asiatic voices, with sober, rational inflection, like the conversation of two little sages. Breaking into sudden hysterical laughter. —It was late in the day. We drank the dirty wine they sold by the gallon in town, sediment staining our tongues, a nauseous heat. Mitch had gotten to his feet, ready to head home. “Why don’t you go with Mitch?” Russell suggested. Squeezing my hand in submerged code. Had a look passed between him and Mitch? Or maybe I am imagining that I witnessed that exchange. The logistics of the day were shrouded in confusion, so that somehow it was dusk and Suzanne and I were driving Mitch back to his house, hurtling along the back roads of Marin in his car. Mitch was sitting in the backseat, Suzanne driving. I was up front. I kept catching sight of Mitch in the mirror, lost in an aimless fog. Then he’d jolt back into himself, staring at us with wonderment. I didn’t fully understand why we’d been chosen to take Mitch home. Information passed through selectively, so all I knew was that I got to be with Suzanne. All the windows open to the smell of summer earth and the secret flash of other driveways, other lives, along that narrow road in the shadow of Mount Tam. The loops of garden hoses, the pretty magnolia. Suzanne drove in the wrong lane sometimes, and we shrieked with happy and confused terror, though there was a flatness to my yelling: I did not believe anything bad could ever happen, not really. —Mitch changed into a white pajama-like suit, a souvenir from a three-week sojourn in Varanasi. He handed us each a glass—I caught the medical whiff of gin and something else, too, a tinge of bitterness. I drank it easily. I was almost pathologically stoned, and I kept swallowing, my nose getting stuffy. I laughed a little to myself. It seemed so odd to be in Mitch Lewis’s house. Among his cluttered shrines and new-looking furniture. “The Airplane lived here for a few months,” he said. He blinked heavily. “With one of those dogs,” he continued, staring around at his house. “The big white ones. What are they called? Newfoundlands? It tore up the lawn.” He didn’t seem to care that we were ignoring him. He was out of it, glazing over with silence. Abruptly he got to his feet, putting a record on. Turning the volume up so loud I startled, but Suzanne laughed, urging him to make it louder. It was his own music, which embarrassed me. His heavy belly pressed against his long shirt, as flowing as a dress. “You’re fun girls,” he said dimly. Watching Suzanne start to dance. Her dirty feet on the white carpet. She’d found chicken in the refrigerator and had torn off a piece with her fingers, chewing while she moved her hips. “Kona chicken,” Mitch remarked.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  of this cold and damp day, as the fog drifted over the fields, they were forced to wait, guarded by armed police, and not permitted to step out of line even for a minute, for the SS men to arrive, as they eventually did on their motorbikes at three o’clock, to carry out the count of heads and then repeat it twice before they could feel convinced that the final result, including those few still within the walls, did in fact tally with the expected number of forty thousand one hundred and forty-five, whereupon they rode away again in some haste, entirely forgetting to give any orders for the inmates’ return, so that this great crowd of many thousands stood out in the Bohusevice basin on that gray tenth of November drenched to the skin and increasingly distressed until well after dark, bowed and swaying like reeds in the showers that now swept over the countryside, before finally, driven to it by a wave of panic, they poured back into the town from which most of them had never emerged except for this one time since their transfer to Theresienstadt, where soon after the beginning of the new year, said Austerlitz, what was described as a Verschénerungsaktion or general improvement campaign was undertaken, with an eye to the imminent visit in the early summer of 1944 of a Red Cross commission, an event regarded by those authorities of the Reich responsible as a good opportunity to dissimulate the true nature of their deportation policy, and consequently it was decided to organize the ghetto inmates under the command of the SS for the purpose of a vast cleaning-up program: pathways and a grove with a columbarium were laid out, park benches and signposts were set up, the latter adorned in the German fashion with jolly carvings and floral decoration, over a thousand rosebushes were planted, a children’s nursery and créche or Kriechlingskrippe, as it was termed, said Austerlitz, in one of those perverse formulations, were adorned with pretty fairy-tale friezes and equipped with sandboxes, paddling pools, and merry-go- rounds, whilst the former OREL cinema, which until now had served as a dumping ground for the oldest inmates of the ghetto and where a huge chandelier still hung from the ceiling in the dark space inside, was converted within a few weeks into a concert hall and theater, and elsewhere shops stocked with goods from the SS storehouses were opened for the sale of food and household utensils, ladies’ and gentlemen’s clothing, shoes, underwear, travel requisites, and suitcases; there were also a convalescent home, a chapel, a lending library, a gymnasium, a post office, a bank where the manager’s office was furnished with a sort of field marshal’s desk and a suite of easy chairs, not to mention a coffeehouse with sun umbrellas and folding chairs outside it to suggest the agreeable atmosphere of a resort inviting all passersby to linger for a while, and indeed there was no end to the improvements and embellishments, with much sawing, hammering, and painting until the time of the visit itself