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 Art of Memoir

  going to happen. It was late ’67 now, even the most detailed maps didn’t reveal much anymore; reading them was like trying to read the faces of the Vietnamese, and that was like trying to read the wind. We knew that the uses of most information were flexible, different pieces of ground told different stories to different people. We also knew that for years now there had been no country but the war. 1. Take it a phrase at a time. There was a map of Vietnam. If the current craze for over-the-top drama had affected the writing of Dispatches, Herr might have started with some fiery, guts-spilled war scene. Instead, he starts with a carnal object, and his reflection on it. A “true” thing—maps are meant to convey veracity. We should be able to find our way with them. He starts in a small, almost dull, everyday object that just happens to be left behind in his transient’s apartment. 2. too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. Herr doesn’t just tell us he’s tired; he gives us dramatic evidence of the extent. It’s another carnal moment of a type we all understand. 3. That map was a marvel, especially now that it wasn’t real anymore. This is his interior interpretation of the map—it’s a marvel, some kind of miraculous phenomenon, which is a theme that occupies most of the book. The phrase introduces his notion of unreality or impermeable mystery of war. 4. For one thing, it was very old. It had been left there years before by another tenant, probably a Frenchman, since the map had been made in Paris. Its antiqueness gives the map a kind of special radiance—a spiritual value, if you will. We also see Herr’s mind feeling for the truth, guessing that since it was made in Paris, a Frenchman had probably left it. It’s his first use of the word probably —the qualifier of a more truthful memoirist. He’s showing us his mind in action, his thoughtfulness, and how he tries to deduce the truth based on hard evidence. 5. The paper had buckled in its frame after years in the wet Saigon heat, laying a kind of veil over the countries it depicted. This again is

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But she is a lovely girl. Her husband was the kindest man, and Emma says she is just about despairing that she will ever find another to match him. The only men who want to court her turn out to be boxers ...’ I smiled dully; I was not much bothered about Mrs Costello, really. While Annie talked I kept glancing over to Florence. She now stood at the far side of the tent, a handkerchief gripped between her fingers but her cheeks dry and white. However long and hard I looked at her, she would not meet my gaze. I had almost decided to make my way over to her, when there came a sudden clamour: the lady on the platform had finished her speech, and the crowd was reluctantly clapping. This meant, of course, that it was time for Ralph’s address; Annie and I turned to see him hover uncertainly at the side of the little stage, then stumble up the steps as his name was announced, and take up his place at the front of the platform. I looked at Annie and grimaced, and she bit her lip. The tent had quietened a little, but not much. Most of the afternoon’s serious listeners seemed to have grown tired and left: their seats had been taken by idlers, by yawning women and by more rowdy boys. Before this careless crowd Ralph now stood and cleared his throat. He had his speech, I saw, in his hand - to refer to, I guessed, if he forgot his lines. His forehead was streaming with sweat; his neck was stiff. I knew he would never be able to project his voice to the back of the tent, with his throat so stiff and tense. With another cough, he began. “‘Why Socialism?” That is the question I have been invited to discuss with you this afternoon.’ Annie and I were sitting in the third row from the front, and even we could hardly hear him; from the mass of men and women behind us there came a cry - ‘Speak up!’ - and a ripple of laughter. Ralph coughed yet again, and when he next spoke his voice was louder, but also rather hoarse. “‘Why Socialism?”

• From The Art of Memoir

  down (nobody has yet). I keep pages private till the book’s done, and at the end, I send work out to folks I wrote about long before type’s set. As a side note, it’s not my nature to write at any length about people I don’t like. Save portraits of a grandmother who pissed me off and two pedophiles, it’s mostly love that drives me to the page. My son was in junior high when my second memoir came out, and he took a stance he held for more than a decade: “I’m not ready to read your books.” This strikes me as wise. It’s one thing to know your mother was sexually assaulted, quite another to read the graphic scene. He prefers me as a dispenser of waffles, not a literary figure. But there’s nothing in my stories he doesn’t know in rough outline—we’re close, and I’d never want him to hear family traumas from pals. With my last book, Lit, I had him vet the first chapter, because he appeared there in his then-current, college-age permutation. He changed nary a word. I’d have preferred that his father scrutinize that manuscript for accuracy, but he preferred the blurring of a pseudonym. (I did send those chapters to our former marriage counselor, just to see if she felt it fair.) Glib as I once was in suggesting Lucy Grealy piss off her own family, I was much like her before I set out to write about my less- than-perfect clan. As a single mom far from home, I dreaded pissing anybody off. Before I ever started Liars’ Club, I kept phoning my mother and sister (my daddy had passed) to take their pulses about the project and warn them about possible public scrutiny, should I be so lucky as to draw any. Part of me hoped they’d shoo me off. Much as I worshiped the form of memoir, the project’s prospect shot me through with dread. I felt compelled to write it, yet broke a sweat when I realized how easy it would be to do it wrong. Truth was, I had a financial flamethrower on my ass: no car in Syracuse, where the snow’s measurable in yards, and child-care costs that precluded my making much on summer holidays. Maybe my mother and sister were so glib about the book because they were used to my small-press poetry efforts, with

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

  Just four years earlier the First Vatican Council (1870) had promulgated the new—and highly controversial—doctrine of papal infallibility. At a time when modernity was demolishing old truths and leaving crucial questions unanswered, there was a yearning for absolute certainty. Fundamentalisms are also often preoccupied by the horror of modern warfare and violence. The shocking slaughter in Europe during the First World War could only be the beginning of the end, the evangelicals concluded; these times of unprecedented carnage must be the battles foretold in the book of Revelation. There was a deep anxiety about the centralization of modern society and anything approaching world rule. In the new League of Nations, they saw the revival of the Roman Empire predicted in Revelation, the abode of Antichrist. 4 Fundamentalists now saw themselves grappling with satanic forces that would shortly destroy the world. Their spirituality was defensive and filled with a paranoid terror of the sinister influence of the Catholic minority; they even described American democracy as the “most devilish rule this world has ever seen.” 5 The American fundamentalists’ chilling scenario of the end time, with its wars, bloodshed, and slaughter, is symptomatic of a deep-rooted distress that cannot be assuaged by cool rational analysis. In less stable countries, it would be all too easy for a similar malaise, despair, and fear to erupt in physical violence. Their horrified recoil from the violence of the First World War also led American fundamentalists to veto modern science. They became obsessed with evolutionary theory. There was a widespread belief that German wartime atrocities were the result of the nation’s devotion to Darwinian social theory, according to which existence was a brutal, godless struggle in which only the strongest should survive. This was, of course, a vulgar distortion of Darwin’s hypothesis, but at a time when people were trying to make sense of the bloodiest war in human history, evolution seemed to symbolize everything that was most ruthless in modern life. These ideas were particularly disturbing to small- town Americans who felt that their culture was being taken over by the secularist elite—almost as though they were being colonized by a foreign power. This distress came to a head in the famous Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, when the fundamentalists, represented by the Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan, tried to defend the state legislature’s prohibition of the teaching of evolution in the public schools. They were opposed by the rationalist campaigner Clarence Darrow, supported by the newly founded American Civil Liberties Union. 6 Even though the state law was upheld, Bryan’s bumbling performance under Darrow’s sharp interrogation thoroughly discredited the fundamentalists’ cause. Their response to this humiliation is instructive. The press mounted a virulent campaign exposing Bryan and his fundamentalist supporters as hopeless anachronisms.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  And she turned her face to the carriage window, where the moon showed - higher and smaller than before, but still quite pink, as if ashamed to look upon the wicked world to which it was compelled to lend its light. I, too, flushed at the lady’s words. What she had said was strange, was shocking - and yet, I guessed, might easily be true. In the bustle and swarm of the streets on which I plied my shadowy trade, a stationary or a lingering carriage would be unremarkable - especially to me, who attended to the traffic of the pavements rather than the roads. It made me horribly uneasy to think she really had been observing me, all those times ... And yet, was it not just such an audience that I had longed for? Had I not lamented, again and again, precisely the fact that my new nocturnal performances must be staged in the dark, under cover, unguessed? I thought of all the parts I had handled, the gents I’d knelt to and the cocks I’d sucked. I had done it all, as cool as Christmas; now, the idea that she had watched me went direct to the fork of my drawers and made me wet. I said - I didn’t know what else to say - I said, ‘Am I then so - special?’ ‘We shall see,’ she answered. After that, we spoke no more. She took me to her home, in St John’s Wood; and the house, as I guessed it must be, was grand - a high, pale villa in a well-swept square, with a wide front door and tall casement windows with many panes of glass. In one of these a single lamp sat gleaming; the neighbouring houses, however, presented only black, shuttered windows, and the clatter of our carriage sounded atrocious, to me, in the stillness - I was not then used to that total, unnatural hush which fills the streets and houses of the rich, when they are sleeping. She led me to her door, saying nothing. Her knock was answered by a grim-faced servant, who received her mistress’s cloak, looked once at me from beneath her lashes, but after that kept her eyes quite lowered. The lady paused to read the cards upon her table; and I, self-conscious, looked about me. We were in a spacious hall, at the bottom of a wide staircase winding up to darker, higher floors. There were doors - closed - to the left and the right of us. The floor was paved with marble, in squares of black and pink. The walls, to match it, were painted a deep, deep rose; and this darkened further, where the staircase curved and lifted, like the interior whorls of a shell.

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

  102 Khomeini liked to quote the hadith in which the Prophet announced after a battle that he was returning from the lesser to the “greater jihad,” the implementation of truly Islamic values in society, a struggle far more exacting than the “lesser” military one. As he looked at the ecstatic crowds that day, he must surely have felt apprehension at the more onerous jihad about to begin. It was indeed a struggle: almost at once, perhaps predictably, the fragile coalition of Marxists, liberals, and the devout seemed to unravel. There was opposition to the new constitution, in 1980 four separate plots against the regime were uncovered, and there were constant street battles between secularist guerrillas and Khomeini’s Revolutionary Guards. A reign of terror ensued, not unlike those that followed the French and Russian Revolutions, when so-called revolutionary councils, which the government could not control, executed hundreds of people for “un-Islamic behavior.” As a crowning blow, on September 20, 1980, the southwest of the country was invaded by Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces. During this turbulent period, the American hostage crisis proved a godsend to Khomeini. On November 4, 1979, three thousand Iranian students had stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and taken ninety prisoners. It is not clear whether Khomeini knew of their plan beforehand, and everyone expected him to release the hostages immediately. But although the women hostages and the embassy’s Marine guards were allowed to return to America, the remaining fifty-two diplomats were held for 444 days. In the West, this disreputable affair seemed to epitomize Islamic radicalism. Yet Khomeini’s decision to retain the hostages was inspired not by an Islamic imperative but simply by politics. He could see that this focus on the Great Satan would unite Iranians behind him at his difficult juncture. As he explained to his prime minister Bani Sadr: This action has many benefits. The Americans do not want to see the Islamic Republic taking root. We keep the hostages, finish our internal work, and then release them. This has united our people. Our opponents do not dare act against us. We can put the constitution to the people’s vote without difficulty, and carry out presidential and parliamentary elections. When we have finished all these jobs, we can let the hostages go. 103 As soon as they were no longer useful, the hostages were released on January 20, 1981, the inauguration day of the new U.S. president Ronald Reagan and the departure of his “satanic” predecessor Jimmy Carter. Inevitably the hostage crisis tainted the image and idealism of the Islamic Revolution. Many Iranians were unhappy about it, even while appreciating its symbolism. A nation’s embassy is regarded as its sovereign territory on foreign soil, and some thought it apt that American citizens should be held there, just as for decades Iranians had felt imprisoned in their own country with the connivance of the United States.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  For every ten paces of my journey that were illuminated by a pool of gas-light, there were a further twenty that were cast in gloom. The gloom lifted a little at Old Street itself, for here there were offices, and crowded bus stops and shops. As I walked towards the Hackney Road, however, it seemed only to deepen, and my surroundings to grow shabbier. The crossings at the Angel had been decent enough; here the roads were so clogged with manure that, every time a vehicle rumbled by, I was showered with filth. My fellow pedestrians, too - who, so far, had all been honest working-people, men and women in coats and hats as faded as my own - grew poorer. Their suits were not just dingy, but ragged. They had boots, but no stockings. The men wore scarves instead of collars, and caps rather than bowlers; the women wore shawls; the girls wore dirty aprons, or no apron at all. Everyone seemed to have some kind of burden - a basket, or a bundle, or a child upon their hip. The rain fell harder. I had been told by the tea-girl at the Angel to head for Columbia Market; now, a little way along the Hackney Road, I found myself suddenly on the edge of its great, shadowy courtyard. I shivered. The huge granite hall, its towers and tracery as elaborate as those on a gothic cathedral, was quite dark and still. A few rough-looking fellows with cigarettes and bottles slouched in its arches, blowing on their hands to keep the cold off. A sudden clamour in the clock tower made me start. Some complicated pealing of bells - as fussy and useless as the great abandoned market hall itself - was chiming out the hour: it was a quarter-past four. This was far too early to visit Florence’s house, if Florence herself was at work all day: so I stood for another hour in one of the arches of the market where the wind was not so cutting and the rain was not so hard. Only when the bells had rung half-past five did I step again into the courtyard, and look about me: I was now almost numb. There was a little girl nearby, carrying a great tray about her neck, filled with bundles of watercresses. I went up to her, and asked how far it was to Quilter Street; and then, because she looked so sad and cold and damp - and also because I had a confused idea that I must not turn up on Florence’s doorstep entirely empty-handed - I bought the biggest of her cress bouquets.

• From The Art of Memoir

  The secret to any voice grows from a writer’s finding a tractor beam of inner truth about psychological conflicts to shine the way. While an artist consciously constructs a voice, she chooses its elements because they’re natural expressions of character. So above all, a voice has to sound like the person wielding it—the super-most interesting version of that person ever—and grow from her core self. Pretty much all the great memoirists I’ve met sound on the page like they do in person. If the page is a mask, you rip it off only to find that the writer’s features exactly mold to the mask’s form, with nary a gap between public and private self. These writers’ voices make you feel close to—almost inside—their owners. Who doesn’t halfway consider even a fictional narrator like Huck Finn or Scout a pal? The voice should permit a range of emotional tones—too wiseass, and it denies pathos; too pathetic, and it’s shrill. It sets and varies distance from both the material and the reader—from cool and diffident to high-strung and close. The writer doesn’t choose these styles so much as he’s born to them, based on who he is and how he experienced the past. Voice isn’t just a manner of talking. It’s an operative mindset and way of perceiving that naturally stems from feeling oneself alive inside the past. That’s why self-awareness is so key. The writer who’s lived a fairly unexamined life—someone who has a hard time reconsidering a conflict from another point of view—may not excel at fashioning a voice because her defensiveness stands between her and what she has to say. Also, we naturally tend to superimpose our present selves onto who we were before, and that can prevent us from recalling stuff that doesn’t shore up our current identities. Or it can warp understanding to fit more comfortable interpretations. All those places we misshape the past have to be ’fessed to, and such reflections and uncertainties have to find expression in voice. You cut a contract early on to offer up the deepest perceptions you can muster without preening and posturing. Other writers may work otherwise, but every great memoirist I ever talked to sounded cursed to face up to real events. That’s just the nature of the

• From My People (2022)

  “That Jacob Zuma, he says he’s going to create jobs. How many times we look for jobs but there’s no jobs?” Jacob Zuma didn’t create the job crisis in Orange Farm, nor is he directly responsible for the uncovered pit latrines. He has been in power for a little over a year, and his term started just six months after the peak of the world financial crisis. But Zuma clearly knows that if he loses the trust of the poor he will lose any chance of governing effectively. And so he has begun a campaign to improve the civil service, which he has denounced as the worst in the world. He told me that he is prepared to get tough on delinquent officials and that he has already started making unannounced visits to check on them. People who ignore his urgings to work harder, he proclaimed, will be fired. He told me about one community where he says that he found the mayor playing hooky. “When I went back for the second time, there was change,” he said. This story scarcely illustrates a national strategy, particularly since the second visit came only after a series of violent protests had shaken the town. All it showed was that the president could pop in on lazy officials and get them to shape up. But Zuma sees it in grander terms. “People were telling me, ‘We now have water. The houses have been built,’ et cetera.” Then, referring to my encounter at Orange Farm, he said, “That’s why those people are right. ‘We want Zuma here.’ “Tomorrow, I’m going to be somewhere.” The lack of a broad strategy has earned the president widespread criticism. When he came into office, he reorganized government departments and gave them sophisticated new names. Foreign Affairs, for example, became International Relations and Cooperation. Analysts complain that he has only created confusion, particularly in financial matters. Azar Jammine, the chief economist at the consulting firm Econometrix, points out that there are now several ministries in charge of economic policy, headed by people with different ideologies. Judith February, an analyst with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, says that Zuma—who declared that 2010 would be a “year of action”—talks a lot and does nothing. “It’s the nature of the presidency that he may be finding his feet, but, at the moment, there is a sense of drift,” she said. Mbeki was criticized for deciding without listening; Zuma is called out for listening but not deciding. Still, Zuma’s position is secure for now. His term runs until 2013, and he does not have an obvious successor within the ANC, a political behemoth so dominant that South Africa is essentially a one-party state. Trevor Manuel, currently the head of the National Planning Commission, may be the most respected government official in the country, but he has a fatal political flaw.

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

  You could stamp on these shoots of benevolence just as you could cripple or deform yourself physically. On the other hand, if you cultivated them, they would acquire a strength and dynamism of their own. 16 We cannot entirely understand Mencius’s argument without considering the third part of our brain. About twenty thousand years ago, during the Paleolithic Age, human beings evolved a “new brain,” the neocortex, home of the reasoning powers and self-awareness that enable us to stand back from the instinctive, primitive passions. Humans thus became roughly as they are today, subject to the conflicting impulses of their three distinct brains. Paleolithic men were proficient killers. Before the invention of agriculture, they were dependent on the slaughter of animals and used their big brains to develop a technology that enabled them to kill creatures much larger and more powerful than themselves. But their empathy may have made them uneasy. Or so we might conclude from modern hunting societies. Anthropologists observe that tribesmen feel acute anxiety about having to slay the beasts they consider their friends and patrons and try to assuage this distress by ritual purification. In the Kalahari Desert, where wood is scarce, bushmen are forced to rely on light weapons that can only graze the skin. So they anoint their arrows with a poison that kills the animal—only very slowly. Out of ineffable solidarity, the hunter stays with his dying victim, crying when it cries, and participating symbolically in its death throes. Other tribes don animal costumes or smear the kill’s blood and excrement on cavern walls, ceremonially returning the creature to the underworld from which it came. 17 Paleolithic hunters may have had a similar understanding. 18 The cave paintings in northern Spain and southwestern France are among the earliest extant documents of our species. These decorated caves almost certainly had a liturgical function, so from the very beginning art and ritual were inseparable. Our neocortex makes us intensely aware of the tragedy and perplexity of our existence, and in art, as in some forms of religious expression, we find a means of letting go and encouraging the softer, limbic emotions to predominate. The frescoes and engravings in the labyrinth of Lascaux in the Dordogne, the earliest of which are seventeen thousand years old, still evoke awe in visitors. In their numinous depiction of the animals, the artists have captured the hunters’ essential ambivalence.

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

  It was not easy to train a warrior to put himself in harm’s way day after day. Ritual gave meaning to an essentially grim and dangerous struggle. The soma dulled inhibitions, and the hymns reminded warriors that by fighting indigenous peoples, they were continuing Indra’s mighty battles for cosmic order. It was said that Vritra had been “the worst of the Vratras,” the native warrior tribes who lurked menacingly on the fringes of Vedic society.7 The Aryans of India shared Zoroaster’s belief that an immense struggle was raging in heaven between the warlike devas and the peace-loving asuras.a But unlike Zoroaster, they rather despised the sedentary asuras and were staunchly on the side of the noble devas, “who drove their chariots, while the asuras stayed at home in their halls.”8 Such was their hatred of the tedium and triviality of settled life that only in their marauding did they feel fully alive. They were, so to speak, spiritually programmed: the constantly repeated ritual gestures imprinted in their bodies and minds an instinctive knowledge of how an alpha male should comport himself; and the emotive hymns implanted a deep-rooted sense of entitlement, an entrenched belief that Aryans were born to dominate.9 All this gave them the courage, tenacity, and energy to traverse the vast distances of northwestern India, eliminating every obstacle in their path.10 We know practically nothing about Aryan life during this period, yet because mythology is not wholly about the heavenly world but essentially about the here and now, in these Vedic texts we catch glimpses of a community fighting for its life. The mythical battles—between devas and asuras and Indra and his cosmic dragons—reflected the wars between Aryans and dasas.11 The Aryans experienced the Punjab as confinement and the dasas as perverse adversaries who were preventing them from attaining the wealth and open spaces that were their due.12 This emotion ran through many of their stories. They imagined Vritra as a huge snake, coiled around the cosmic mountain and squeezing it so tightly that the waters could not escape.13 Another story spoke of the demon Vala, who had incarcerated the sun together with a herd of cows in a cave so that without light, warmth, or food, the world was unviable. But after chanting a hymn beside the sacred fire, Indra had smashed into the mountain, liberated the cows, and set the sun high in the sky.14 The names Vritra and Vala both derived from the Indo-European root *vr, “to obstruct, enclose, encircle,” and one of Indra’s titles was Vrtrahan (“beating the resistance”).15 It was for the Aryans to fight their way through their encircling enemies as Indra had done. Liberation (moksha) would be another symbol that later generations would reinterpret; its opposite was amhas (“captivity”), cognate with the English anxiety and the German Angst, evoking a claustrophobic distress.16 Later sages would conclude that the path to moksha lay in the realization that less is more.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  A little later it occurred to me that our cattle might possibly burn, so I went out and hurried back to the Michigan Street stockyards. An old Irishman was in charge of the yard, but though he knew me perfectly well, he refused to let me take out a steer. The cattle were moving about wildly, evidently in a state of intense excitement. I pleaded with the man and begged him, and at length tied my mare up to the lamp-post at the corner and went back and got into the stockyard when he wasn’t looking. I let down two or three of the bars and the next moment started the cattle through the opening. They went crazy wild and choked the gateway. In five minutes there were ten or twelve dead cattle in the entrance and the rest had to go over them. Suddenly, just as I got through the gap, the mad beasts made a rush and carried away the rails on both sides of the gateway. The next moment I was knocked down and I had just time to drag myself through the fence and so avoid their myriad trampling heels. A few minutes later, I was on Blue Devil, trying to get the cattle out of the town and on to the prairie. The herd broke up at almost every corner but I managed to get about six hundred head right out into the country. I drove them on the dead run for some miles. By this time it was daybreak and at the second or third farmhouse I came to, I found a farmer willing to take in the cattle. I bargained with him a little and at length told him I would give him a dollar a head if he kept them for the week or so we might want to leave them with him. In two minutes he brought out his son and an Irish helper and turned the cattle back and into his pasture. There were six hundred and seventy-six of them, as near as I could count, out of practically two thousand head. By the time I had finished the business and returned to the hotel, it was almost noon and as I could get nothing to eat, I wandered out again to see the progress of the fire. Already I found that relief trains were being sent in with food from all neighboring towns and this was the feature of the next week in starving Chicago.

• From My People (2022)

  And though we moved back to the United States in 2012, we have traveled back from time to time, and South African friends visit us here in America and otherwise keep in touch. But in recent months the emails and Skype chats and talks with visiting friends have become intense and somber and worrying in a way that I haven’t previously experienced. Sooner or later, the conversation turns to disturbing reports of the direction of South African’s political culture, with accounts of ongoing corruption at the highest levels of the government of President Jacob Zuma. He is scheduled to remain in office until national elections in 2019, but is facing a revolt within his party. It is not of the same kind that drove his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, prematurely from office. Mbeki was not accused of personal corruption; what put him in jeopardy was his alleged effort to undermine Zuma’s chances of succeeding him. When the time came, Mbeki resigned rather than waiting to be removed, in part to avoid a political crisis ahead of the 2009 general election. (In South Africa, the president is chosen by Parliament immediately after an election.) At the time, Zuma had already fought off charges of corruption to win the leadership of his party, the African National Congress, and of the country. But the stigma and stain of corruption never went away; instead, they grew as Zuma financed a lavish renovation of his kraal (or homestead) in his home base, Nkandla, in KwaZulu-Natal, with state money, and was subject to allegations of cronyism. Last week, South Africa’s public protector, an ombudsman with constitutional powers, issued what has become known as the “state-capture report.” It called for a full judicial inquiry into possible corruption and conflicts of interest involving Zuma, senior state officials, and members of the wealthy Gupta family. Reports indicate that the Guptas plan to defend themselves against the charges at the upcoming inquiry. Zuma has dismissed the report and seems ready to fight it in court. Ahmed Kathrada, a revered eighty-seven-year-old anti-apartheid activist who served time in prison with Mandela, wrote an open letter earlier this year about what he called “a crisis of confidence” in the leadership of the country. He called for Zuma to step down. A few months later, Jackson Mthembu, the chief whip of the ANC, who was once one of the staunchest supporters of his party—often coming down hard on journalists who questioned anything the ANC did—called on the entire ANC executive leadership, including himself, to step down. Mthembu was quoted in the City Press as saying, of his fellow leaders, that, in certain respects, “We are not only equal to the apartheid state, we are worse.” That may be an extreme statement, but it captures the frustration and disappointment of many in South Africa. And it reminded me of something F. W. de Klerk, the last apartheid-era president, told me when I interviewed him in Johannesburg shortly before Mandela and the ANC assumed power, in 1994.

• From My People (2022)

  [W]e want to state clearly and unequivocally that we cannot tolerate, in a nation professing democracy and among people professing Christianity, the discriminatory conditions under which the Negro is living today in Atlanta, Georgia, supposedly one of the most progressive cities in the South.” In the early days, I waited for the students to pile in with their stories. In the early days, they would demonstrate for part of the day, then get arrested so as to establish a case that could be argued at a later date in court and hopefully lead to a decision that would overthrow separate and not equal. Within hours, they would then get bailed out and many would come straight to the Holman basement to tell their stories to Julian Bond, who was one of the writers of the Committee on Appeal document, as well as managing editor of the paper. He had been a student at Morehouse College but had put that on hold for the time being. I bided my time rambling around the basement, looking over textbooks belonging to Holman, who wrote under the pen name Vox. In time, I felt the need to get out of the basement and into the streets myself—not as a participant but as an observing servant of the people. And in a few years I traveled from the streets of Atlanta to streets up and down the East Coast, where there may not have been Jim Crow laws, but the pattern and practice of racial discrimination had the same effect on my people. So, along with my clothes, I packed my racial consciousness. And while some of my clothes wore out from time, my people and their stories kept my consciousness fresh and responsive to their ongoing challenges. For while their consciousness kept them focused on how far they had come in many instances, it also helped them (and me) keep their eyes on what continued and continues to be an elusive prize: equality and justice for all. At one point in 1967, following four summers of riots protesting inequality around the country, a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders was created by President Lyndon B. Johnson to address the cause of the disturbances. The commission ultimately concluded that the country was “moving toward two societies, one white and privileged, one Black and unequal.” It included in the blame the mostly white media. And while corrective steps were taken in all areas, including the media, all these years later, inequality persists, even in many well-funded and well-staffed and even prize-winning news organizations. The protests sparked by police killings of Black people over the last few years have caused another period of soul-searching, a moment to dig deeper, as clearly the racist demons of our past still haunt us.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  In those early days, I would occasionally glance at the pages she worked on; but whatever I saw, made me frown. ‘What does it mean, cooperative?’ I asked her once. It was not a word I had ever heard used at Felicity Place.And yet, there were moments at Quilter Street, when I found myself handing out cups of tea, rolling cigarettes, nursing babies while other people argued and laughed, when I thought I might as well still be in Diana’s drawing-room, dressed in a tunic. There, no one had ever asked me anything, because they never thought I might have had an opinion worth soliciting; but at least they had liked to look at me. At Florence’s house, no one looked at me at all - and what was worse, they all supposed I must be quite as good and energetic as themselves. I lived in a continual panic, therefore, that I would accidentally disenchant them - that someone would ask me my opinion on the SDF or the ILP, and my reply would make it clear that, not only had I confused the SDF with the WLF, the ILP with the WTUL, but I had absolutely no idea, and never had had, what the initials stood for anyway. When I shyly confessed one time, about six weeks after I moved in there, that I scarcely knew the difference between a Tory and a Liberal, they took it as a kind of clever joke. ‘You are so right, Miss Astley!’ a man had answered. ‘There is no difference at all, and if only everyone were as clear-sighted as yourself, our task would be an easier one.’ I smiled, and said no more. Then I collected the cups, and took Cyril into the kitchen with me; and while I waited for the kettle to boil I sang him an old song from the music hall, which made him kick his legs and gurgle.Then Florence appeared. ‘What a pretty song,’ she said absently. She was rubbing her eyes. ‘Ralph and I are going out - you won’t mind watching Cyril, will you? There is a family up the road - they are having the bailiffs in. I said we would go, in case the men get rough...’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was not a word I had ever heard used at Felicity Place. And yet, there were moments at Quilter Street, when I found myself handing out cups of tea, rolling cigarettes, nursing babies while other people argued and laughed, when I thought I might as well still be in Diana’s drawing-room, dressed in a tunic. There, no one had ever asked me anything, because they never thought I might have had an opinion worth soliciting; but at least they had liked to look at me. At Florence’s house, no one looked at me at all - and what was worse, they all supposed I must be quite as good and energetic as themselves. I lived in a continual panic, therefore, that I would accidentally disenchant them - that someone would ask me my opinion on the SDF or the ILP, and my reply would make it clear that, not only had I confused the SDF with the WLF, the ILP with the WTUL, but I had absolutely no idea, and never had had, what the initials stood for anyway. When I shyly confessed one time, about six weeks after I moved in there, that I scarcely knew the difference between a Tory and a Liberal, they took it as a kind of clever joke. ‘You are so right, Miss Astley!’ a man had answered. ‘There is no difference at all, and if only everyone were as clear-sighted as yourself, our task would be an easier one.’ I smiled, and said no more. Then I collected the cups, and took Cyril into the kitchen with me; and while I waited for the kettle to boil I sang him an old song from the music hall, which made him kick his legs and gurgle. Then Florence appeared. ‘What a pretty song,’ she said absently. She was rubbing her eyes. ‘Ralph and I are going out - you won’t mind watching Cyril, will you? There is a family up the road - they are having the bailiffs in. I said we would go, in case the men get rough...’ There was always something like this - always some neighbour in trouble, and needing money, or help, or a letter writing or a visit to the police; and it was always Ralph and Florence that they came to - I had not been with them a week before I saw Ralph leave his supper and run along the street in his shirt-sleeves, to give some word of comfort and a couple of coins to some man who had lost his job. I thought them mad to do it. We had been kind enough to our neighbours, back in Whitstable; but the kindness had had limits to it - Mother had never had time for feckless wives, or idlers, or drunkards. Florence and Ralph, however, helped everybody, even - or, it seemed to me, especially - those layabout fathers, those slatternly mothers, whom all the rest of Bethnal Green had taken against.

• From Philosophy and Religion in the West (1999)

  5. Augustine argues that this choice is inequitable but not unjust: since all are sinners, the punishment of those not chosen is deserved (and thus just) while the grace given to the chosen is undeserved (and thus merciful but not unjust). 6. Since grace cannot be earned (all are undeserving) we cannot know why God gives grace and salvation to some and not to others. 7. Thus arises the key pastoral problem concerning predestination: “what assurance have I that I am among the chosen?” C. Diverse Responses to the Problem of Predestination 1. Luther thinks the sacrament of Baptism is sufficient to assure you that you are among God’s people—but that it does not guarantee you will ultimately be saved, because it is always possible you may abandon the faith before you die. 2. In this Luther and Catholicism both follow Augustine, who argued that those who are predestined to be saved receive in addition to the grace of faith, the grace of perseverance in faith—but because we have a whole life ahead of us still, we cannot be sure we have this grace. 3. Calvin’s major innovation in the doctrine of predestination is his teaching that we can know we are among the chosen (the “elect”). 4. For Dutch Calvinism, the elect gain assurance of their election by seeing its fruits in their life: sincere faith, works of love, etc. 5. For English and American Puritans, assurance is gained through a conversion experience. 6. Hence Puritanism becomes an especially deep form of Protestant inwardness, dependent on inner experience rather than outward signs. 7. Here lies another innovation of Calvinism, which becomes the root of American revivalism: that it is through conversion, not baptism, that one is regenerated or “born again” into the life of Christ. IV. Philosophical Developments in Protestantism A. As the concern with justification and salvation takes center stage, the themes of Christian Platonist spirituality recede. ©1999 The Teaching Company. 85 B. In Protestantism, the alliance between theology and philosophy is downplayed or repudiated, and new accounts of the knowledge of God emerge to replace the Augustinian notion of a beatific intellectual vision: first that of belief in the Word, then that of inner experience. C. An abiding problem: the characteristically Biblical understanding of God as a person who chooses becomes prominent, but begins to look like bad news: if grace is divine favor, then is a gracious God playing favorites? Essential Reading: Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian” in Martin Luther: Selections, pp. 42–85. Supplemental Reading: Calvin, Institutes, 3:21–22 (on predestination) and 4:14 (on the sacraments). Luther, “The Sacrament of Penance” in Luther’s Works, vol. 35, pp. 9–22.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  People asked me what I was drinking, how much I weighed, where I was living, and if I had married yet, but no one gave me a chance to deliver my lecture on Great Literature. It was during one of these visits that I found the Thibideauxs’ burned-out house, and also stumbled on the Greek term ate. In ancient epics, when somebody boffs a girl or slays somebody or just generally gets heated up, he can usually blame ate , a kind of raging passion, pseudo-demonic, that banishes reason. So Agamemnon, having robbed Achilles of his girlfriend, said, “I was blinded by ate and Zeus took away my understanding.” Wine can invoke ate , but only if it’s ensorcered in some way. Because the ate is supernatural, it releases the person possessed of it from any guilt for her actions. When neighbors tried to explain the whole murder-suicide of the Thibideaux clan after thirty years of grass-cutting and garbage-taking-out and dutiful church-service attendance, they did so with one adjective, which I have since traced to the Homeric idea of ate: Mr. Thibideaux was Nervous. No amount of prodding on my part produced a more elaborate explanation. On the night the sheriff came to our house and Mother was adjudged more or less permanently Nervous, I didn’t yet understand the word. I had only a vague tight panic in the pit of my stomach, the one you get when your parents are nowhere in sight and probably don’t even know who has a hold of you or where you’ll wind up spending the night. I could hear the low hum of neighbor women talking as we got near the front door. They had gathered on the far side of the ditch that ran before our house, where they stood in their nightclothes like some off-duty SWAT team waiting for orders. The sheriff let go of my hand once we were outside. From inside the tall shadow of his hat, with my sister still wrapped around him in bogus slumber, he told me to wait on the top step while he talked to the ladies. Then he went up to the women, setting in motion a series of robe-tightenings and sweater-buttonings. The concrete was cold on my bottom through the thin nightgown. I plucked two june bugs off the screen and tried to line them up to race down a brick, but one flew off, and the other just flipped over and waggled its legs in the air. At some point it dawned on me that my fate for the night was being decided by Sheriff Watson and the neighbor ladies. It was my habit at that time to bargain with God, so I imagine that I started some haggling prayer about who might take us home. Don’t let it be the Smothergills , I probably prayed. They had six kids already and famously strict rules about who ate what and when.

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

  Moreover, Sufi mystics and the more charismatic ulema traveled the length and breadth of the Seljuk Empire, giving ordinary Muslims a strong sense of belonging to an international community. By the end of the eleventh century, however, the Seljuk Empire had also started to decline. It had succumbed to the usual problem of a military oligarchy, since the emirs began to fight one another for territory. They were so intent on these internal feuds that they neglected the frontier and were incapable of stopping the influx of pastoralists from the steppes who had begun to bring their herds into the fertile settled lands now ruled by their own people. Large groups of Turkish herdsmen moved steadily westward, taking over the choicest pasturage and driving out the local population. Eventually they arrived at the Byzantine frontier in the Armenian highlands. In 1071 the Seljuk chieftain Alp Arslan defeated the Byzantine army at Manzikert in Armenia, and as the Byzantines retreated, the nomadic Turks broke through the unguarded frontier and began to infiltrate Byzantine Anatolia. The beleaguered Byzantine emperor now appealed to the Christians of the West for help. 8 Crusade and Jihad Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85) was deeply disturbed to hear that hordes of Turkish tribesmen had invaded Byzantine territory, and in 1074 he dispatched a series of letters summoning the faithful to join him in “liberating” their brothers in Anatolia. He proposed personally to lead an army to the east, which would rid Greek Christians of the Turkish menace and then liberate the holy city of Jerusalem from the infidel. 1 Libertas and liberatio were the buzzwords of eleventh-century Europe; its knights had recently “liberated” land from the Muslim occupiers of Calabria, Sardinia, Tunisia, Sicily, and Apulia and had begun the Reconquista of Spain. 2 In the future, Western imperial aggression would often be couched in the rhetoric of liberty. But libertas had different connotations in medieval Europe. When Roman power collapsed in the western provinces, the bishops had taken the place of the Roman senatorial aristocracy, stepping into the political vacuum left by the departing imperial officials. 3 The Roman clergy thus adopted the old aristocracy’s ideal of libertas, which had little to do with freedom; rather, it referred to the maintenance of the privileged position of the ruling class, lest society lapse into barbarism. 4 As the successor of Saint Peter, Gregory believed that he had a divine mandate to rule the Christian world. His “crusade” was designed in part to reassert papal libertas in the Eastern Empire, which did not accept the supremacy of the bishop of Rome. Throughout his pontificate, Gregory struggled but ultimately failed to assert the libertas, the supremacy and integrity, of the Church against the rising power of the lay rulers. Hence his proposed crusade came to nothing, and in his determined effort to free the clergy from lay control, he was ignominiously defeated by Henry IV, Holy Roman emperor of the West.

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

  Disquiet about nascent capitalism and the growing violence of Western society, both of which were so obviously at odds with the radical teachings of Jesus, also surfaced in the “heresies” that the Church had begun to persecute actively in the late twelfth century. Again, the challenge was political rather than doctrinal. The conditions of peasants had reached their lowest level, and poverty had become a major problem.98 Some had become rich in the towns, but population growth had fragmented inheritances and multiplied the numbers of landless villagers roaming the countryside desperately seeking employment. The structural violence of the “three estate” system was the cause of much anxious soul-searching among Christians. In orthodox as well as heretical circles, the well-to-do were coming to the conclusion that the only way to save their souls was to give away their wealth, which they now regarded as sinful. After a serious illness, Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), son of a wealthy merchant, renounced his patrimony, lived as a hermit, and founded a new order of friars dedicated to serving the poor and sharing their poverty; it increased rapidly in membership. Francis’s rule was approved by Pope Innocent III, who hoped thereby to retain some control of the poverty movement that threatened the entire social order. Other groups were not such loyal adherents of the Church. Even after they had been excommunicated in 1181, the followers of Valdes, a rich businessman of Lyons who had given all his wealth to the poor, continued to attract much support as they traveled through the towns of Europe in pairs like the apostles, barefoot, clad in simple garments and holding all things in common. Still more worrying were the Cathari, the “Pure Ones,” who also roamed the countryside, begging for their bread, and were dedicated to poverty, chastity, and nonviolence. They founded churches in all the major cities of northern and central Italy, enjoyed the protection of influential laymen, and were especially powerful in Languedoc, Provence, Tuscany, and Lombardy. They embodied the gospel values far more clearly and authentically than did the worldly Catholic establishment who, perhaps because they felt at some level guilty about their reliance on a system that so clearly contradicted Jesus’s teachings, responded viciously. In 1207 Pope Innocent III (r. 1198–1216) commissioned Philip II of France to lead a Crusade against the Cathars in Languedoc, who, he wrote, were worse than the Muslims. The Cathar Church “gives birth continually to a monstrous brood by which its corruption is vigorously renewed after that offspring has passed on to others the canker of its own madness and a detestable succession of criminals emerges.”99