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 Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Marrou knew Poinsot well and often spoke to me of him. He envied Poinsot’s ability to live at ease under any sky, to hate nothing and to bear everything with ease. As soon as his first volume of verse had been greeted with some praise by Paris critics, Marrou had decided to go and live in the capital. But there, he was soon homesick for the Mediterranean and he returned to Tunis six months later. He understood that his own instability and Poinsot’s total ease were the ineradicable marks of two entirely different situations, each one complete in itself. Poinsot’s mere presence had a liberating effect on me, while Marrou made no attempt to help me. On the contrary, he openly doubted the outcome of his own situation and cultivated in me an anxiety akin to his own. At that time I had no clear notion of what these two men actually meant to me. Once in a while, a sign, a mere comparison, gave me a foreboding of it. I had long felt, for instance, a strange desire to bring Poinsot home to meet my family. Unconsciously, I wanted to make him face the facts of my life, to make him see and feel my study table in the midst of all the furnishings of our home, my few books, my couple of shelves of plain wood, roughly carpentered and painted, held to the wall by heavy iron hooks placed in badly fixed brackets. I had not been able to see him, one day, at noon; so I waited to join him after the late afternoon classes. The afternoon had been surly, and the sky was like a blanket, weighing heavily on the damp air. When he saw me turn up, as always, little Poinsot beckoned gently. He was very absent-minded and always allowed me to decide on our itinerary, following me without making a remark on the way I chose to go. On an impulse, I decided this time to take a short cut, going by our Passage, though I still had no idea how I would be able to prevail on him to enter our home. We had barely left the middle-class downtown area when it began to rain, a sudden shower with drops as big as peanuts. The crowds scattered like a flock of sparrows; in an instant, the street was deserted. I grabbed Poinsot by the sleeve and forced him to hurry. “We’re not very far from my home,” I shouted to him in the hurried tattoo of the rain splashing on the ground. “If you’d like, we can find shelter there...”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Then there is the incident in the garden at the time of Jesus’s arrest. Jesus wanted three of his friends in particular to watch and pray with him, in case they would “come into the trial” (Luke 22:40). Here we are close to Schweitzer’s theme, that the “trial” or the “tribulation” was coming upon Israel, a time of intense suffering crashing in like a tidal wave, and Jesus was determined that his followers should not suffer it with him. This might easily have happened: close associates of someone regarded as a revolutionary leader would expect to be rounded up and dealt with in the first century just as in the twenty-first. Somehow, in the dark and mayhem of that terrible night, that theme of the “tribulation” was remembered, as was the saying reported by John (18:8) in which Jesus insists that if it is him they have come to arrest, the others should be allowed to leave. Skeptics can of course quibble about any element in such a reconstruction (as one can about any reconstruction of motive for any figure of history). But once we grant the solid evidence in the middle of the picture from Jesus’s choice of Passover on, fragments like these can be seen as forming a coherent and even plausible picture of the way Jesus had construed his own vocation, perhaps from as far back as his baptism by John, when the voice from heaven (“This is my son, my beloved one; I am delighted with him,” Matt. 3:17) drew together the royal vocation of Psalm 2:7 (“You are my son; today I have begotten you”) and the “servant” vocation from Isaiah 42:1 (“Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights”). Even if that too were to be deemed a later idea read back into the texts, one would still have to explain why anyone in the early church would begin to think down those lines if the seeds of such beliefs were not already present in things that Jesus himself said and did.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Those of us who remember the 1970s will recall that commentators predicted, as a matter of certainty, a major civil war in South Africa. That this did not happen was largely due to that patient, prayerful struggle. Similar things might be said about the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others in America, speaking with a powerful Christian voice that refused to be drowned out by the Ku Klux Klan, on the one hand, or the militant Black Power activists, on the other. These things have happened in my lifetime, and they are neither to be discounted nor explained away as the inevitable progress of enlightened liberal values in the modern world. As we should know, there is nothing inevitable about such things. What we witnessed was the power of the cross to snatch power from the enslaving idols. It is comparatively easy to name yesterday’s idolatrous systems. It is much harder to point to the equivalents in today’s and tomorrow’s world. Here the church needs the wisdom of the serpent as well as the innocence of the dove, and both often seem to be in short supply. But when Christians in non- Western countries look at Europe and America, they see, behind our own much-vaunted “freedoms,” another set of idolatries and enslavements. The familiar trio of money, sex, and power are enthroned as securely as ever. A sign in my local charity shop tells me that a quarter of the world’s wealth is owned by so few people that they could all fit on an ordinary bus, while millions of desperately poor people save up what little they have to pay people smugglers to ferry them dangerously across the Mediterranean, where, if they make it across the sea, barbed wire and refugee camps await them and local politicians agonize over how to cope. You don’t have to hold a doctorate in global economics to know that something is radically wrong with whatever “systems” we have, or don’t have, in place. Western politicians clearly have no ready answers, bent as they are on solving yesterday’s problems with pragmatic short-term solutions. We don’t have a narrative that could make sense of the problem, let alone one that might solve it. And with a newly militant branch of Islam (disowned, of course, by the vast majority of the world’s Muslims) ready to advance its own cause by exploiting the plight of others, we are all aware that things could get worse. Faced with this situation, churches of all kinds in all countries need the gift of discernment to see where idolatry has resulted in slavery and to understand what it would mean to announce, in those places, the forgiveness of sins and the consequent breaking of the enslaving powers. This will be complicated, contested, and controversial. These things always are. But the attempt must be made.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  For single people, the barriers to sex—namely, putting on pants to meet someone who statistically will disappoint you—steepen with the harassment that often awaits us. There are now thousands of virtual platforms where people can look for love and sex, only to get called ugly sluts or any number of slurs. It makes sense that people would want to opt out. In one study, a third of dating site users said someone sent them sexually explicit photos or messages that they didn’t ask for, and a third have also been called explicit names, with 10 percent saying they’d been threatened with physical harm. The toll of being female, LGBTQIA+, and/or BIPOC online is burdensome, on dating apps especially. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual dating app users face more harassment, from name-calling to physical threats, than straight ones.4 Many queer people report feeling alienated, marginalized, and unprotected by dating apps, despite their very public pushes to promote inclusive branding. Trans Tinder users, for example, still report getting banned arbitrarily.5 Apps aside, it’s rough out there. Eli Sachse, a forty-one-year-old trans bi man based in Northern California, told me the challenges “start even before having sex and just dating as a trans person. You have to come out as trans at some point, especially if you’re going to have sex, but sometimes when you’re cruising with gay dudes, they don’t even give you that chance.” Sachse, a registered nurse, illustrator, and writer, is the author of Sex Without Roles: Transcending Gender. “I’ll be dancing and a dude will grab for my crotch and not find what he’s looking for, and give me a disgusted kind of look like, ‘You’re fooling me,’ that whole kind of thing,” he said. The toll of harassment—and just plain prejudice—feeds into what I believe to be the biggest sex-recessing factor, which is burnout. If you could choose between wading through hundreds of people, some abusive, to find a potential date, or lying flat on the floor, recalling that Olympics where Bob Costas’s pink eye got progressively worse, which would you choose? To rest, or to suffer? The slew of tiny exertions required to orchestrate sex—say, perusing Grindr half asleep or kissing your long-term boyfriend’s neck—feel more daunting with each passing day. Everything feels daunting now, for millennials, it seems. We’re the “burnout generation,” and efficiency isn’t the cure. Quite tragically, sex requires a wealth of physical and emotional energy. Sex feels like yet another item on the long list of things we should be doing, which renders it ever more daunting, in a way that passively sinking into forty episodes of The Nanny never will. The millennial burnout theory paints a bleak picture of the “sex recession”—it suggests that our reticence to have sex stems from a profound lethargy you can only embody when you know you’ll never be able to afford retirement. I find this explanation compelling, I type from my bed before closing my laptop for my 3 P.M. Depression Nap.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  How we are saved is closely linked to the question of what we are saved for. This had a particularly sharp focus at the time of the Reformation. In sixteenth-century Europe, a great many people worried a lot about the doctrine of purgatory, the belief that after death faithful Christians could expect to spend time in a place of punishment and purgation where sins were finally dealt with before they might finally enter heaven. Luther’s early protest was fueled by his angry rejection of the corrupt practice whereby people could buy “indulgences” that would allow relatives or friends to get out of purgatory, or at least get through it more quickly. Purgatory gripped the imagination of late medieval Europe to a degree almost impossible to imagine today. The rich, and not least the royal, often left copious sums of money to fund “chantries” in which prayers would be offered for their souls in purgatory. Behind all this was the great heaven-and-hell scheme of Western eschatology, which we see in literary works like those of Dante and in majestic visual art like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes. Bodily resurrection remained the official dogma, but the late medieval period more and more envisaged the ultimate promised future not as a new creation, but as the picture of “heaven” common to this day in Western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant. Many dictionaries still define “eschatology” using the terms “death, judgment, heaven, and hell,” often known as the “Four Last Things.” It is possible to combine this with a belief in ultimate new creation, but most people who have been taught the traditional fourfold scheme don’t even realize that this alternate schema is an option, far less that it is the biblical option. The Reformers by and large rejected not only the abuses connected with purgatory (selling indulgences and the like), but the doctrine itself. In part this may have been because they saw this teaching being used as a weapon by the clerical elite to maintain social and dogmatic control. But their objections were set out in robustly theological and biblical terms. They insisted that the Christian soul went immediately to heaven after death. (Some tried to combine this with the New Testament’s sense of a time lag before the ultimate new creation, teaching that the soul might in some sense “sleep” in between bodily death and bodily resurrection; but the point, again, was “no purgatory.”) These issues remained unresolved and are not relevant to our present discussion, except as the context for the truly important thing. The rejection of purgatory precipitated a fresh emphasis from a new angle on an interpretation of the cross that echoed, but also differed from, that of Anselm.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  IN THIS EPILOGUE we move into the higher echelons of scholarship known as conjecture. We ask about Paul’s death. How, where, and when did he die? All we can offer in reply is educated guesswork, but we will guess as closely as we can to historical probability. We begin with the last words we have from Paul himself. TO PRESERVE CHRISTIAN UNITY As we saw in Chapter 2, Paul ended his letter to the Romans by greeting twenty-seven individuals there known to him either by contact or reputation. It is not at all unusual for him to end his letters with farewell greetings, but most are kept very general and individuals are not named. For example: “Greet all the brothers and sisters with a holy kiss” (1 Thess. 5:26), and “Greet one another with a holy kiss” (2 Cor. 13:12). It is possible that Romans 16 is so different and detailed because Paul is inviting those Christian individuals to assist him as he journeys westward to Spain. But it also possible that he has premonitions that this letter might be, as it actually was, his last will and testament. That shows up at the end of Romans 15 as Paul tells them about his plans to visit them: I desire, as I have for many years, to come to you when I go to Spain. For I do hope to see you on my journey and to be sent on by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a little while…. I will set out by way of you to Spain; and I know that when I come to you, I will come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ. (15:23–24, 28–29) But he continues by noting that, before passing through Rome to Spain and the west, he has a very special and important mission to accomplish in the east: I am going to Jerusalem in a ministry to the saints; for Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to share their resources with the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. They were pleased to do this, and indeed they owe it to them; for if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material things. (15:25–27) We return in a moment to consider the content and purpose of that “ministry to the saints,” but as for premonitions, note how Paul concludes: I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to join me in earnest prayer to God on my behalf, that I may be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my ministry to Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints, so that by God’s will I may come to you with joy and be refreshed in your company. (15:30–32)

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  pewter when the sun dropped. The mountains darkened. Night came on. Dwight stopped at a tavern in a village called Marblemount, the last settlement before Chinook. He brought a hamburger and fries out to the car and told me to sit tight for a while, then he went back inside. After I finished eating I put my coat on and waited for Dwight. Time passed, and more time. Every so often I got out of the car and walked short distances up and down the road. Once I risked a look through the tavern window but the glass was fogged up. I went back to the car and listened to the radio, keeping a sharp eye on the tavern door. Dwight had told me not to use the radio because it might wear down the battery. I still felt bad about being afraid of the beaver, and I didn’t want to get in more trouble. I wanted everything to go just right. I had agreed to move to Chinook partly because I thought I had no choice. But there was more to it than that. Unlike my mother, I was fiercely conventional. I was tempted by the idea of belonging to a conventional family, and living in a house, and having a big brother and a couple of sisters—especially if one of those sisters was Norma. And in my heart I despised the life I led in Seattle. I was sick of it and had no idea how to change it. I thought that in Chinook, away from Taylor and Silver, away from Marian, away from people who had already made up their minds about me, I could be different. I could introduce myself as a scholar-athlete, a boy of dignity and consequence, and without any reason to doubt me people would believe I was that boy, and thus allow me to be that boy. I recognized no obstacle to miraculous change but the incredulity of others. This was an idea that died hard, if it ever really died at all. I played the radio softly, thinking I’d use less power that way. Dwight came out of the tavern a long time after he went in, at least as long a time as we’d spent getting there from Seattle, and gunned the car out of the lot. He drove fast, but I didn’t worry until we hit a long series of curves and the car began to fishtail. This stretch of the road ran alongside a steep gorge; to our right the slope fell almost sheer to the river. Dwight sawed the wheel back and forth, seeming not to hear the scream of the tires. When I reached out for the dashboard he glanced at me and asked what I was afraid of now. I said I was a little sick to my stomach. “Sick to your stomach? A hotshot like you?” The headlights slid off the road into darkness, then back again. “I’m not a hotshot,” I said. “That’s what I hear. I hear you’re a real hotshot. Come and go where you

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I expressed in my answer as much irony and indifference as I could: “Nothing,” I said. “But it’s impossible for me to scare up any interest in all this nonsense.” This time, however, Marrou’s piece of chalk fell and remained motionless in his hand. He stared at me, then turned without a word toward the blackboard. His arm rose slowly to write, but hesitated before he turned toward us again. The whole class was waiting, utterly silent, as it watched his face for any sign that my aggression had hit home. His prestige was at stake. Now, either exemplary punishment had to be meted out to me, or one of those particularly bitter sarcasms of his that would crush me and all my pride and re-establish his own superiority in the face of my impertinence. Marrou, by the way, was a master at this kind of crack. But I was not afraid as I had been too anxious for a showdown to be unwilling now to pay the price. Still, I trembled for the affection that I still felt for him. Good God, if he would only understand, at last! He stared at me, his face expressionless, as he dryly ordered: “You will see me after class!” Such solemn meetings were generally followed by catastrophe and Marrou had perhaps convinced the rest of the class that his reaction in my case would be terrible in its consequences. But I was sure that, this time, he had understood me. I would not have been able to say why, but I was quite sure of it. So I waited till the end of the class, my face buried in my notebook, pretending to be taking notes though I was quite unable to write a word. I was disturbed and ashamed, as though I had made an emotional declaration of friendship. From then on, he often spoke at length with me, gave me advice that made me really very happy, and confided in me his own difficulties. He was proud and ambitious, and he lived, among the instructors and pupils, in utter solitude. In the eyes of his colleagues, it was an unpardonable scandal for this alien to handle the French language better than many native sons. Their sarcastic remarks and defamations, their repeated hostility, all these made it quite clear to him though he was clumsy enough to encourage them with his own sarcastic replies and his pompous attitude. As I listened to his difficulties, I found some consolation for my own. One day, I had enough courage to show him a short story I had written. He gave it back to me the next morning and expressed a severe criticism: “Only the structure is acceptable. As for the style, it should be entirely rewritten.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Avoiding the well-lit streets, I reached Henry’s house. His window was still open and the light that shone out of his room pierced a hole in the darkness of the park. Henry was still practicing his music. I didn’t dare, or didn’t really want, to disturb him, so I let myself collapse onto a park seat. Was I only angry, or was my anger tempered with anxiety? Had I really escaped, will I ever manage to escape, from all these sounds and rhythms that live in the depths of my being and can immediately gain mastery over the beating of the blood in my arteries? After fifteen whole years of exposure to Western culture, of which ten were filled with conscious rejection of Africa, must I now accept this self-evident truth, that all these ancient and monotonous melodies move me far more deeply than all the great music of Europe? Henry was still playing and came close to the window, standing out against the rectangle of light and casting his shadow clearly on the trees of the park. The music he was playing continued according to an exact scheme, always sure of itself, transparently clear, while at the same time full and heavy, with the weight of rock crystal and the rigorous structure of something mathematical. Yes, I suppose I am an incurable barbarian! ~ 7. THE KOUTTAB SCHOOL ~ In my effort to break the mythical ties that I feared while believing that I merely despised them, I used to experience transitory moments of happiness as well as sudden defeats. Any chance scene witnessed in the street would at once make me feel the old and familiar uneasiness, so that I would doubt, all of a sudden, that I had achieved any progress.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  Then the pandemic happened. The broad increase in mental health issues and psychological pain has only steepened during COVID-19; in 2020, the CDC shared that the percentage of Americans reporting symptoms of anxiety disorder has increased roughly threefold compared with the same period in 2019, with a rise in anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation highest among adults aged eighteen to twenty-four.9 In a cruel turn of events, many of the medications prescribed to treat these conditions make arousal and orgasm extremely difficult. In tackling the central nervous system, SSRIs can affect other neurotransmitters and hormones involved in sex, including testosterone and dopamine. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had intercourse with a man for what feels like thirty hours, only for him to tell me at hour thirty and one minute that he’s on Lexapro so he can’t come but is having a blast. Usually, I’m the one flaunting the sexual side effects of medication. I’ve been on Prozac and other meds for major depression for almost half of my life. These drugs have made orgasming with a partner even more difficult for me, a chronically fatigued depressive who is insecure about approximately five major body parts. While I know orgasm cannot and should not be the arbiter of good sex—and that the pressure to orgasm adds undue anxiety—I have found it difficult to unlearn the outsized importance that’s been placed on it by society. Also, orgasming feels good! It is okay to want to orgasm during sex. On a neurobiological level, anhedonia blocks our natural biochemical responses to activities that are wired to give us joy, like exercise, social relationships, and sex. It prevents us from fully letting go into excitement, playfulness, and curiosity—basically everything that makes sex enjoyable and satisfying. Anhedonia is not the sole culprit for the Bad Sex Problem, but it steepens the biochemical barrier to entry (ayyy). If we’re already more likely to have difficulty feeling pleasure, we stand less of a chance against the other forces conspiring to ensure sex is a drag or worse, a slog. Not to be all “society!!” but social forces have further complicated our relationships to the pleasure we are already struggling to feel. So, yes, society!! CULPRIT 2: SEX EDUCATIONWe have more information at our disposal than in any other era of human history. While in line at the supermarket, I can search “is my labia wrong” and peruse 4.1 million results. One problem with this bounty of information, though, is the deluge of unvetted garbage.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  We waited at least half an hour before the first car turned up. As the day advanced there began to appear, from the other direction, an occasional big munitions truck marked with the yellow flag: explosives, danger. The Germans evidently intended to stop the Allies somewhere nearby. In a few hours we would be in the middle of the fight. At last, there came a truck bound for Tunis. We rushed for it, as fast as our stiff legs permitted; but the driver hardly even looked at us. It would be better to stand on the edge of the road, so we decided to take turns at this so as to be visible from a distance. Time passed. I was tense, my head empty, with one arm stiffly held in the hitchhiker’s gesture. The few drivers who were going toward Tunis stared curiously at us but did not answer our signals that grew more and more frantic. A caterpillar car drew up in a clatter of chains, like a huge beast. I tried to run, but my joints were stiff. Picchonero rose too, but when the German driver understood what we wanted, he cursed us and started off again. We jumped, for the first bursts of gunfire were very close, leaving trails of motionless smoke in the sky to our left. I had enough experience to realize that it was just a beginning; the reply, more dangerous for us, would not be long in coming. We had to formulate other plans, so we now joined the other men. I was surprised to find them talking, lying on their backs with their heads on their bags, in a mood of cheerfulness again. They had slept, eaten, and drunk a little; perhaps they had not quite understood the situation. I was vaguely angry with them for being so relaxed and carefree. Then I blamed myself; had I not fasted for the last twenty-four hours, and had I too rested for a while, I might also have been more cheerful. The firing was now going strong. We had to leave and go forward to get out of the range of the artillery on the opposite side. It was difficult to go faster with our feet as wounded as they were after twenty-five hours of being chafed by the clogs we wore. My big toe felt as though there was a big cut right across it. The men got up reluctantly. Through the whole of this adventure, not once did I feel so far from them as at this moment, when they stretched and yawned.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Joseph, the eldest of my uncles on my father’s side, was the patriarchal head of the family and respect was owed him because he had really been a father to his younger brothers when they had become orphans at a tender age. I refused, however, to accept these old-fashioned hierarchical systems and smiled contemptuously when my father bemoaned the disappearance of an uncle’s rights. Had we been on more intimate terms, my uncles would have had the right to box my ears. Still, I would have liked to see one of them try to spank me! But I knew how irritated my father would be if I failed to come home at once, and how the whole family would be scandalized. If my oral examination hadn’t been only two days off, I wouldn’t have minded wasting a whole afternoon. But I couldn’t afford now to squander precious time on such absurd family obligations; besides, I hardly knew Uncle Joseph at all. I sent Birou away with a vague explanation that I couldn’t come now and promised to go home as soon as I was free. I went back along the warm passage to the study hall and dropped into my uncomfortable wooden seat. I tried to get back into the mood for work. The air moved wearily, but all hope of a breeze vanished when I realized a sirocco was raising and stirring the white dust in the courtyard: it would be wiser now to close the windows. I didn’t like thinking about death. It seemed dirty and ugly to me; it stank of sulphur disinfectants and of black draperies that had been badly laundered and were produced hastily out of closets. To me, death was as disgusting as it was frightening. The mere thought of my scandalized family and of my father’s probable anger upset me, and I couldn’t settle back to my work. The heat was such that I could scarcely breathe, and I was offered the alternatives of stewing in my own sweat where I was or of swallowing the dust of the yard. Finally, I decided to interrupt my work long enough for a visit to my Uncle Joseph’s home. Why irritate my father unnecessarily? Why not take a little time off to simulate, like all the others? I shut my book and went out into the furnace of the street where I was attacked by the dry breath of the sirocco that parched my lips and my eyelids. Somehow, I still found the energy to run all the way home. I went first to the Passage. Dressed up and waiting for me, my mother was prancing about with anxiety and excitement. Marriage, birth, death, any group event made her feverish and enthusiastic in exactly the same way; the housekeeping routine would be interrupted, meals would appear at unlikely moments, and she would come home at all hours. Called to greater duties, she seemed to cease to belong to us body and soul for several days.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  It was Mimouni who gave me the idea of it, confiding in me his intention of attending mass. They seemed to be having fun there, and at least one went through the village on the way to mass. Although he seemed pretty sure of himself, he was anxious at heart and asked me to accompany him because he hoped, thanks to my approval, to gain some assurance. I hesitated, not that I felt impelled to refuse on doctrinal grounds, but because his whole proposal struck me as preposterous. I was associating daily with Christians for the first time in my life, and they aroused in me neither fear nor antagonism; they even enjoyed, in my eyes, the prestige of all Europeans, members of a very powerful sect. But we quite obviously belonged to two entirely different worlds, and nothing could be more alien to me than the idea of entering one of their churches such as I had seen in the course of my Sabbath walks, when I had furtively caught sight of red draperies and of mysterious lights. But Mimouni made fun of my timidity and told me that Christian tourists often visited the old synagogue in his part of town: the faithful always received them well and loaned them caps so that they might enter it without committing any sacrilege. It would only be proper that we be equally well received. I finally yielded, not so much in the face of his arguments as because I felt impelled to bring some interruption to the rhythm of our week. Immediately, I began to await Sunday with impatience.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  SETTLED IN BOMBAY Gokhale was very anxious that I should settle down in Bombay, practise at the bar and help him in public work. Public work in those days meant Congress work, and the chief work of the institution which he had assisted to found was carrying on the Congress administration. I liked Gokhale’s advice, but I was not overconfident of success as a barrister. The unpleasant memories of past failure were yet with me, and I still hated as poison the use of flattery for getting briefs. I therefore decided to start work first at Rajkot. Kevalram Mavji Dave, my old well-wisher, who had induced me to go to England, was there, and he started me straightaway with three briefs. Two of them were appeals before the Judicial Assistant to the Political Agent in Kathiawad and one was an original case in Jamnagar. This last was rather important. On my saying that I could not trust myself to do it justice, Kevalram Dave exclaimed: ‘Winning or losing is no concern of yours. You will simply try your best, and I am of course there to assist you.’ The counsel on the other side was the late Sjt. Samarth. I was fairly well prepared. Not that I knew much of Indian law, but Kevalram Dave had instructed me very thoroughly. I had heard friends say, before I went out to South Africa, that Sir Pherozeshah Mehta had the law of evidence at his finger- tips and that was the secret of his success. I had borne this in mind, and during the voyage had carefully studied the Indian Evidence Act with commentaries thereon. There was of course also the advantage of my legal experience in South Africa.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  doctors could not guarantee recovery. At best they could experiment. The tread of life was in the hands of God. Why not trust it to Him and in His name go on with what I thought was the right treatment? My mind was torn between these conflicting thoughts. It was night. I was in Manilal’s bed lying by his side. I decided to give him a wet sheet pack. I got up, wetted a sheet, wrung the water out of it and wrapped it about Manilal, keeping only his head out and then covered him with two blankets. To the head I applied a wet towel. The whole body was burning like hot iron, and quite parched. There was absolutely no perspiration. I was sorely tired. I left Manilal in the charge of his mother, and went out for a walk on Chaupati to refresh myself. It was about ten o’clock. Very few pedestrians were out. Plunged in deep thought, I scarcely looked at them, ‘My honour is in Thy keeping oh Lord, in this hour of trial,’ I repeated to myself. #Ramanama# was on my lips. After a short time I returned, my heart beating within my breast. No sooner had I entered the room than Manilal said, ‘You have returned, Bapu?’ ‘Yes, darling.’ ‘Do please pull me out. I am burning.’ ‘Are you perspiring, my boy?’ ‘I am simply soaked. Do please take me out.’ I felt his forehead. It was covered with beads of perspiration. The temperature was going down. I thanked God. ‘Manilal, your fever is sure to go now. A little more perspiration and then I will take you out.’ ‘Pray, no. Do deliver me from this furnace. Wrap me some other time if you like.’ I just managed to keep him under the pack for a few minutes more by diverting him. The perspiration streamed down his forehead. I undid the pack and dried his body. Father and son fell asleep in the same bed. And each slept like a log. Next morning Manilal had much less fever. He went on thus for forty days on diluted milk and fruit juices. I had no fear now. It was an obstinate type of fever, but it had been got under control. Today Manilal is the healthiest of my boys. Who can say whether his recovery was due to God’s grace, or to hydropathy, or to careful dietary and nursing? Let everyone decide according to his own faith. For my part I was sure that God had saved my honour, and that belief remains unaltered to this day. 79.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  Simone Justice is now devoted exclusively to education. After I told her about my struggles with embodiment, she offered to take me to a dungeon in Manhattan for a lesson in domination. She would find a volunteer sub for me to practice on, and I could show up in whatever clothes I wanted to; I could try out whatever I was most comfortable with. Truthfully, I wasn’t comfortable with any of it, but I felt comfortable with Simone, who listened sympathetically as I described my uneasiness receiving pleasure from others, feeling pleasure at all. A couple weeks before Simone came to town, I got sick (really!) and couldn’t meet in person. Instead I perused the internet for classes that might allow me to reap some of the benefits of BDSM; my wish list included confidence, playfulness, and a stronger mind-body connection. I stumbled upon Mistress Marley’s Sexcademy on Patreon. She’s a pro-domme and educator who shares resources on her page for sex workers, pro-dommes, and BDSM newcomers. She specializes in femdom and findom, or financial domination, in which the sub’s kink is giving money to their dom. She’s also the founder of Black Domme Sorority, a collective of Black and Afro-Latinx dommes. My education began with a video post called “BDSM terms.” Most I knew—“impact play” refers to activities involving floggers, whips, and paddles, for example, and “face sitting” refers to face sitting. When she mentioned CBT my ears perked up; I’m a depressed person (you knew this), and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is our bread and butter. She was referring, however, to cock and ball torture, which is a RACK, or risk aware consensual kink. RACK, like SSC (Safe, Sane, Consensual), is a philosophical framework within BDSM that asserts individuals can consent to riskier acts as long as they’re sufficiently informed of the risks. Murray, the kink educator, goes to college campuses teaching seminars for kink-curious students. One of her most popular sessions is called “Chains, Whips, and Self-Care Tips,” and she spends a lot of time talking about risk. When I asked her if she had any suggestions for solo BDSM play, she said, “Whether you are doing it to yourself or another person’s doing it to you, you still need to know the risks and be as informed as possible,” noting that there are certain activities—anything involving breath play or choking—that solo players should steer away from entirely because they are so high risk.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  “It’s a pace issue,” Pleasure Activism author adrienne maree brown told me. “We’re moving in a world where every single thing that is happening is urgent. Feeling contentment and satisfaction is actually often tied to stepping out of the urgency.” Recent studies show that increased smartphone usage is linked to decreased capacity to feel pleasure in the body.3 (Oh hey, anhedonia!) On a neurobiological level, technology addiction functions just like any other, offering dopamine hits that we start to crave all the time. People with addictive social media habits—i.e., most of us, because apps are designed to be addictive—become “unable to experience the natural ‘high’ of positive feelings from a release of dopamine triggered by the experience of everyday living,”4 writes Dr. Wise in Why Good Sex Matters. “They get caught in a loop of seeking more and more and more, which often leads to escalating compulsive behaviors.” Our bodies are hardwired to seek pleasure for our survival—in the form of food, sex, and safety, for example—so when this process is interrupted by a never-ending barrage of notifications, we become saddled with dissatisfaction: always seeking more but increasingly feeling less. “Our technology-driven, constantly connected culture reinforces this disruption of our pleasure system,” Wise writes. “Television binge-watching, nonstop texting, Snapchats, checking Instagram, and other repetitive behaviors that now happen almost automatically keep us distracted and numb, hijacking our neural pathways at critical points.” As Wise points out, tech engineers design their products with the express purpose of keeping us hooked—and dissatisfied. When we are stuck in this loop of perpetual seeking, “we enter a state of ‘pleasure shutdown,’ never quite getting the opportunity to learn to feel our pleasure more fully, to savor the sensations.” Beyond the erosion of our ability to concentrate, experience contentment, and stay present, our saturation in digital media can engender toxic thought patterns that distort our sexual experiences. This brings us to problem number two: not only do digital platforms affect the way we experience the world by virtue of their design, but the actual content on those platforms wield ever-increasing power over us. One particularly vulnerable demographic is teen girls; Facebook’s own research found that Instagram has a significant negative impact on their mental health and self-image.5 Our little screens perpetuate shame, misinformation, and unrealistic expectations for sex, dating, and intimacy, most notably via porn and social media.6 Idealized, unattainable depictions of sex and romance are not new—as a child, I yearned for what Julia Roberts and Richard Gere have in Runaway Bride—but the current scale of these depictions is unprecedented. We are constantly getting pummeled with normative fantasies on an ever-multiplying number of platforms, rendering those fantasies more powerful and dangerous. To orient you: in 1970, the average American child began watching television regularly at age four. A recent study found that kids began interacting with digital media, on average, at four months.7

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Just one month before our final examinations, I learned by the high-school grapevine that my name had been proposed for the philosophy prize, an honor that was awarded every year to the one student in the whole country who had maintained the highest average in his grades. It thus came as a final reward at the end of a successful school career. And now an official and public recognition would consecrate my own past efforts and talents. Well-informed classmates added, however, that the discussion for the choice of the prize-winner was going to be difficult. Though I was heartily seconded by Poinsot, my philosophy instructor, I was opposed by others, particularly our chemistry instructor. These classmates quoted remarks that had been made in the heat of the debate as well as details of the discussions, as though they had actually been present. I pretended to disdain all this idle gossip, but listened all the more intently as I knew how surprisingly reliable were their sources of information. The parents of many of these boys often invited our instructors as guests to their homes, and these teachers, flattered at finding themselves in the homes of the wealthier middle class, often confided details of school administration to their hosts. Nor were they to be blamed, their sole motive was to assume an appearance of power. I happened to hate our chemistry instructor, and the science that he taught us suffered as a consequence. Foolishly, I felt that he gave tuition to too many private pupils and had thus transformed our noble profession, already his and some day to be mine, into a trade. This indignation of mine was inspired by a prejudice that I shared with the middle classes. Why shouldn’t a teacher make the most of his profession, just like a doctor or a lawyer? But I had reasons of my own, better ones, in fact the only ones: I despised money-makers, one and all. My history instructor, on the other hand, was not prepared to forgive my political aggressiveness. The prize that was about to be awarded required an exemplary conduct. But I had shouted so often, in front of the whole class, my admiration for Robespierre and my respect for Saint-Just, or my indignation against the injustices of the nobility and the treason of the higher clergy, that I could no longer claim to have behaved with decorum.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  “Rotten day,” he said at last. “Not one serious customer. A dumb Bedouin came in this morning with a head as hard as a log and offered me fifty francs for a two-hundred-franc halter. It made my lungs ache to try to explain that I couldn’t sell it for less than cost price. He left without buying. Nothing more all afternoon. At five, a European lady came in and made me spend two hours repairing her suitcase, as though I were a luggage-merchant or a leather-worker.” Like most artisans, he hated dealing with anything outside his own craft, and he refused to change a single detail of his technique. “Then why did you do it?” my mother asked with an interest that was at least partly affected. “How could I refuse? Besides,” he admitted, “if she’d paid me decently, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But what could I ask for the job? It takes a long time and isn’t worth much. When her suitcase had been new, it wasn’t worth two hundred francs. So I said: ‘Pay me what you want.’ She gave me twenty francs — they’re in my pocket. If it goes on like this, I’ll close the shop.” He repeated this threat all his life. We didn’t more than half-believe him, but that was enough to keep us permanently anxious and unstable. Every time he had an asthma attack he would give us solemn warning that the end had come, that we must now look after ourselves, that, if he recovered, he had made up his mind to give up. Despite the frequency of the attacks, they always impressed us deeply. They might come at any hour of the day or night. At certain seasons, particularly in the fall, the long, hard, strangling cough announcing the attack would awake me every night. Her eyelids heavy, my frightened mother would climb out of bed in her slip and, barefooted, would rush to fix the usual medication. Soon the flat would be smoky with the fumes of the burning Legras powders. We heard my father gasp, choke, call upon death to deliver him. Since we could do nothing for him, we remained under our blankets. The younger children whispered their reassurance to one another through the darkness: “It’s nothing. Dad is having an attack. It’ll be over right away.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  We both know I wasn’t mentally disturbed: I was a sufferer.” Something had been worrying me about this project, and I decided to get it off my chest. “Irene, let me tell you a story.” I then told her about Mary, a good friend of mine, a psychiatrist of great integrity and compassion, and the patient, Howard, she had treated for ten years. Howard had been horribly abused as a child, and Mary had made a Herculean attempt to reparent him. In the first years of therapy he had been hospitalized at least a dozen times for suicide attempts, substance abuse, and severe anorexia. She had stood by him, done marvelous work, and somehow gotten him through everything, including helping him to graduate from high school, college, and journalism school. “Her dedication was extraordinary,” I said. “Sometimes she met with him seven times a week—and for greatly reduced fees. In fact, I often warned her that she was overly invested and needed to protect her private life more. Her office was in her home, and her husband objected to Howard’s intruding on their Sundays and to the amount of Mary’s time and energy he consumed. Howard was a wonderful teaching case, and every year Mary interviewed him in front of medical students as part of their basic psychiatry course. For a long time, maybe five years, she labored on a psychotherapy textbook in which her therapy of Howard played an important role. Each chapter was based on some aspect (heavily disguised, of course) of her work with him. And over the years, Howard was grateful to Mary and gave her full permission both to present him to medical students and residents and to write about him. “Finally the book was finished, about to be published, when Howard (now a journalist stationed abroad, married, with two children) suddenly withdrew his permission. In a short letter he explained only that he wanted to put that part of his life far behind him. Mary asked for an explanation, but he refused to give more details and ultimately broke off communication entirely. Mary was distraught—all those years she had devoted to that book—and eventually had no choice but to bury it. Even years later she remained embittered and depressed.” “Irv, Irv, I get your drift,” said Irene, patting my hand to still me. “I understand you don’t want to go Mary’s way. But let me reassure you: I’m not just giving you permission to write my story; I’m asking you to write it. I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.” “That’s putting it strongly.” “I mean it. I meant what I said about too many therapists not having a clue about treating the bereaved. You’ve learned from our work together, learned a lot, and I don’t want it to end with you. ” Noting my raised eyebrows, Irene added, “Yes, yes, I have finally gotten it.