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

  This is far and beyond what most adolescents are expected to achieve. Given the normal challenges of growing up—which they had to accomplish on their own—it’s no surprise that children of divorce get waylaid by ill-fated love affairs and similar derailments. Most are well into their late twenties and thirties before they graduate into adulthood. My analysis may not seem to match the pseudomaturity exhibited by many children of divorce who often appear on a fast track to adulthood. Compared with youngsters from more protected families, they get into the trappings of adolescent culture at an earlier age. Sex, drugs, and alcohol are rites of passage into being accepted by an older crowd. At the same time, they’re independent and justifiably proud of their ability to make their own decisions and to advise their parents. But let’s not be fooled by the swagger. The developmental path from adolescence into adulthood is thrown out of sync after divorce. Many children of divorce can’t get past adolescence because they cannot bring closure to the normal process of separating from their parents. In the normal course of adolescence, children spend several years in a kind of push and pull pas de deux with their parents, slowly weaning themselves from home. But Karen hardly experienced this separation process. By the time she left for college at age eighteen, she was still tied to her parents by her needs and theirs. And she was not alone. By late adolescence most children of divorce are more tied to their parents and paradoxically more eager to let go than their peers in intact families. Like the folk story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, the divorce is as sticky as the tar that held the rabbit. The young people want out but can’t move on because of unfinished business at home. Children of divorce are held back from adulthood because the vision of it is so frightening. From the outset, they are more anxious and uncomfortable with the opposite sex and it’s harder for them to build a relationship and gradually give it time to develop. Feeling vulnerable, bewildered, and terribly alone, and driven by biology and social pressures, these young men and women throw themselves into a shadow play of the real thing involving sex without love, passion without commitment, togetherness without a future. (We’ll explore what happens to children of divorce who marry impulsively and early marriages in Chapter 14.) The fact that Karen and others were able to turn their lives around is very good news for all of us who have been worried about the long-term effects of divorce on children. It sometimes took many years and several failed relationships, but close to half of the women and over a third of the men in our study were finally able to create a new template with themselves in starring roles. They did it the hard way— by learning from their own experience. They got hurt, kept going, and tried again.

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

  For children, divorce is a watershed that permanently alters their lives. The world is newly perceived as a far less reliable, more dangerous place because the closest relationships in their lives can no longer be expected to hold firm. More than anything else, this new anxiety represents the end of childhood. Karen confirmed this change in several of our follow-up interviews. Ten years after her parents’ divorce, I learned that she was attending the University of California at Santa Cruz so that she could run home on weekends and be available for crises. And there were plenty of those, mostly involving both her younger brother and sister. When she was twenty, she told me angrily, “Since their divorce I’ve been responsible for both my parents. My dad became a pathetically needy man who always wants a woman to take care of him. I’m the backup when his girlfriends leave him. My mom is still a mess, always involved with the wrong kind of men. I’ve had to take care of them as well as my brother and sister.”

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

  Some terrible loss will change my life, and it only gets worse as things get better for me. Maybe that’s the permanent result of my parents’ divorce. Gavin says I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve learned to contain it. I no longer wake up in terror when I go to sleep happy, but this feeling does not ever go away.” “So how did you make up your mind to marry him?” I asked. “Well, it’s strange, but a near catastrophe made me change my mind. Gavin was in Nashville, giving a talk, and on the drive home was caught in a freak ice storm. He got pulled off the road in the middle of nowhere by the highway patrol and couldn’t get to a phone for eight hours. I was home, waiting for him, hearing about all sorts of fatal accidents on the roads. I was beside myself. Anything could have happened to him.” “You must have been scared out of your mind.” “Oh, yes,” said Karen. “It was ghastly. I just knew it was the disaster that I always expected and that it would blow my life away. But something really important happened to me at the same time. I realized that whether we married or not, life is always chancy. If I marry him, I might lose him. If I don’t marry him, I might lose him. So I could lose him either way. And that’s when I realized that I want to hold on to Gavin for the rest of my life and for whatever happens. I said yes, let’s get married.” Smiling at her calculation, I said, “So you decided to take a chance, to reach out for what you really want?” “That’s right, although it’s still hard for me to know what I want. But I’ve learned what I don’t want. I don’t want another edition of my relationship with Nick or with my mom or dad.” “And what do you want?” “I want a lover and a husband. I’m no longer frantic to find just anybody. I’m no longer afraid to be alone. I can stand on my own two feet.” Her last words were unforgettable. She seemed to be talking more to herself and only partly to me. “My co-workers say that I have an old soul. I’ve always felt that I would die young, that so much unhappiness was compressed into the early part of my life that it made sense. But maybe the second half of my life is the part that I will enjoy more. I never had a childhood. I always took care of everything.” A smile broke across her face. “You know, I like the kind of woman I’m becoming. I love the man I’m marrying. I like my kindness and my sensitivity. I love my work. I’m on a good path.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  I wish I could debate with her, but the fact is a towel’s probably the best we’ve got. We’ve been trying to get her to sleep on her own, rather than with Camille or me, so enticing her with the mattress as opposed to a less comfortable box spring should help our efforts. I reach into her garbage bag and pull out a polyester romper that I used to wear when I was about the same age. It has blue shorts with a cuff and a light blue sleeveless button-down top that’s attached to the shorts. Rosie steps in through the unbuttoned neck opening as I hold it up. We button it up together, taking turns. Then I pull her hair back to help cool her face, fastening it with a rubber band I’d had on my wrist. I kiss her forehead and pat her tummy. “Go help Camille and Norm find money. I’ll be down in a minute.” Rosie’s long ponytail sways back and forth with her skip. The dirt that’s collected in the folds behind her knees and her black-bottomed feet make me cringe as I try to recall the last time any of us bathed in a real bathtub. (Gas station sinks don’t count.) Rosie disappears around the corner and descends the stairs to join the hunt for our dinner fare. I fold her pajamas, put them on her bed for later, then move from room to room, opening up the windows in an attempt to cool off the floor. Somehow, I resolve, we’ll get to eat and sleep tonight. At a skinny five-foot-two, Camille and I are the same size. Her thick brown hair curls from the summer heat, framing her round face and almond eyes. “Look what I found stuffed into one of Cookie’s bras,” Camille says, unwrinkling a five-dollar food stamp. I squish my nose. Her bra ? “It’s a wonder it survived. Have you checked the basement?” Camille reasons that five dollars will be enough to get us through the grocery store without creating any suspicion. We know that kids as disheveled as we are will be pegged as shoplifters; but also, if we don’t act correctly they’ll suspect worse: that we’re unsupervised. Then the store manager will call in the police, then the police will bring in child welfare agents, and the agents will instantly see through our lies and realize that we are on our own. We’ll lose any control that we have over our lives . . . and worse, we’ll lose Rosie and Norm. No matter what horrible circumstances Cookie dumps us into, it will always be better than being separated and put into foster care. Over the years, Camille and I have perfected our food-shopping routine because we understand the consequences of any possible misstep. By now it’s three in the afternoon, and all the children’s shows are for kids younger than Rosie. I turned the TV knob to our favorite soap opera, General Hospital .

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  One day, while I am eating the school’s free breakfast, Mrs. Young crouches next to my cafeteria table. “Would you like to come with me to the office?” she asks, and I oblige her, feeling safe that we have the same thing in mind. Together with the principal, we fill out registration forms for Norman, Rosie, and me so we can get credit and finish out the school year. The only thing that will get you out of your situation is to stay in school, Regina. I remember Ms. Van Dover’s words, so I perform well on Mrs. Young’s tests and participate not like my life depends on it, but because my life depends on it. I keep to myself during free time so that none of my classmates will ever ask to come to my house. When Mrs. Young sees me reading at recess, she gives me work sheets to practice long division and encourages me to take a stab at the challenge questions in our science books. The more work I have, the safer I feel. Holding it together with a job is stressing Cookie to proportions we’ve never seen before. Making it worse is the fact that summer’s fast approaching, and the taste of independence that Cherie and Camille had living on their own is inspiring them to lash out. “I’ve got five kids, a household to manage, and a paycheck to keep!” Cookie says. “And now you sluts want to give me attitude?” Cookie stays out all night at bars or rolls out of bed just as we’re heading out the door to school. On the rare occasion she’s home when we are, the beatings are guaranteed and more brutal than ever. We all go into full-fledged survival mode and stay out of the house as much as we can when she’s home. On the school bus, Camille adopts the nickname “Dancing Queen,” swaying and boogying to kids’ boom boxes and starting impromptu dance parties, in an attempt to preserve her fast-fleeting days as a teenager. When I ask her whether she ever flirts with boys when she goes to dances at the community youth center, she looks at me dubiously. “Haven’t you seen how Cookie behaves with men?” she says. “Believe me, I’m not dancing to meet boys. I dance so I can be me. It’s the only time I can really be a teenager.” One night, I pray Camille will have beat me home when it takes me until almost seven to arrive from school. Instead I open the front door to find chicken cutlets frying on the stove, and Cookie, who turns to me with her eyes blazing. “Where the hell were you?” she says. I hesitate, until I blurt it out. “I was looking for my coat.” She burns holes through me with her eyes, spurring me to share more. “It disappeared from my locker today.” “Good goddamn job, you dumb shit. It’s gonna be a cold, wet April.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Alan tells me that the call at three o’clock Geraldine has is with President Clinton’s New Americans committee. “She’s a big supporter of mine, Regina. All you have to do is fax her a memo, then go down there and walk her through it. Give her all the data she requested. Anything extra you know about these ethnic leaders, include it. We have two hours. I’ll put you in a cab so you can meet her at her office to go over the list.” “Meet her?” I feel sweat break out of the pores in my scalp. “Alan, I can easily do that over the phone.” Alan looks at me sternly. “Regina, get in a cab and go over to meet her. This opportunity will never come again.” Spring flowers blossom on the trees along the route our taxi takes from our office across from City Hall straight up toward SoHo, to Lafayette Street. Geraldine Ferraro’s office sits on the top floor of a quaint redbrick building with a black awning over her son’s restaurant, Cascabel. As her no-nonsense secretary eyes me from her desk, I begin outwardly perspiring. The harder I focus on controlling my rising nervousness, the harder it exits my pores. I breathe inconspicuously, deeply in and out, and begin counting to calm myself, watching Geraldine through the glass window into her office. Inside the sunny, warm-toned room she moves about assuredly and with grace, her voice rising only once on the phone. It hits me: meeting Geraldine Ferraro is like meeting Amelia Earhart. Geraldine is a woman who’s blazed trails in the face of the barriers women in politics—and in society—have faced, paying no mind to the thousands of critics who wanted her to fail. She persevered, believing that fighting and being defeated would be better than not fighting at all; but here she is, right in front of me, wearing a soft peach-toned turtleneck scented with something close to Chanel, pearl earrings, and a smile spread across her perfectly proportioned face. “Regina,” she says. “Please. Come in.” Finally able to focus on our work, I’ve ceased my sweating episode. After a few minutes of going over the list together, Geraldine leans forward over her desk and asks me: “Regina, would you mind staying and participating in my call?” “Your call . . . with the White House?” “Yes. I’m just thinking—you seem much more comfortable discussing the individuals on this list than I am.” I try to think of some reason I need to run back to the office, then I remember Alan’s words: This opportunity will never come again. She directs me away from her desk to the couch in her sitting area, taking a seat across the coffee table in a sturdy armchair.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

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

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

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

• From Untrue (2018)

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

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

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

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

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

• From Untrue (2018)

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

• From In the Dream House (2019)

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

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

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

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

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

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

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

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

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

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  This was Hubert’s idea, rather than go over to the public house as normal where we had felt less than welcome before when S. was very drunk & indiscreet (not to say made up like a Regent Street margery); but the question was, where to have it? Some said in the car & Tim said we cd take it to the house of someone he knew not far away, but Eddie’s friend with the broken nose said he owed that someone a thousand pounds, so that wd never do. Then Tom’s boy suggested what he called the Old Castle, which was in the wood we cd see not far ahead, looming out of the mist. Tom said he thought it wd be acceptable to us—it was designed for just this, he said. The boy opined that it was an old place, but Tom scorned this vigorously & said it was just a ‘make-believe’, a ‘fairy-tale castle’, so we gathered it was some kind of folly or woodland lodge. We went on up the lane & then cut along the side of a field. The fence at the edge of the wood was no more than a few rotten posts, sticking out of the bracken. Many of the trees were dead or decrepit, & there was a surprising number of yews, which made the wood even darker. It must have been deathly quiet when free of people like us, swearing and pranking about. Sandy & I rather fell back & came on after the others, arm-in-arm, enjoying the melancholy mood, I thought, until S. said ‘God, I feel sick!’ & I realised his was the silence of a man who’s had too much the night before. I cd see too that he felt anxious about Tim, from the way he pretended to pay no attention to him & then I wd catch him looking at him through his eyebrows—full of humiliated fondness. The Castle was a funny old place, smaller than I’d expected & completely irregular. There was a hall in the middle, with a dark panelled room off it at the back. On either side half-collapsed walls made off into the wood, & were cunningly topped with small trees to look like authentic medieval ruins. Some of the windows were pointed, some round, some square, & through the ivy you cd see that the walls were patterned with huge pieces of vermiculated stone—not, I think, the usual builders’ material, which is drilled artificially, but the real thing, brought from some volcanic site. The whole surface of the little Castle was freakish & grotesque, with the hairy fingers of long-dead creepers, the dull gloss of the ivy, the arrow-slits, & the rough, labyrinthine lava.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  There was no one else about, though after ringing the bell a third time and also, to command attention but not to seem importunate, knocking soundly a couple of times, I looked round again to see if I was still alone. A middle-aged man had now appeared at the end of the lane, and as he passed and went into one of the derelict properties across the way I felt obliged to go through a minimal pantomime of impatience and perplexity. This involved trying the door with the flat of my hand and finding that it was unlocked and gave, slightly, inwards. I pushed it half open; and darted in. In a voice quite unlike my own, I called out ‘Hello’. There was no reply. The library door, on the left, was open, so I went cautiously in. It looked untidier than before, with papers and cuttings spread on the main table: this I attributed to Charles’s search for material for me. I was surprised, as I turned to leave, by the sudden rising, yawning and shaking of a large black cat. It had been lying in Charles’s armchair by the fire and stared at me for a moment with something close to enmity before looking away, licking itself, and carrying on as if I weren’t there. It was a beautiful animal, tall and slender, with a nose both broad and long, and erect, triangular ears; it seemed a ceremonial more than a domestic cat, and its voiceless indifference to me heightened my sense of unease and irreality. I did not try the dining-room but went, knocking and looking in, to the drawing-room at the back. It was empty and orderly, with folded newspapers, a sewing-basket and a darning mushroom on a side-table—things that a masculine household must have. From here a door was open into the kitchen, which I had not seen before. With its wall-cupboards with frosted glass sliding doors, its stoneware sink, round-topped Electrolux fridge and green enamelled gas-range, it resembled a colour plate from my dead grandmother’s just post-war copy of Mrs Beeton ; the plugs, which were of black Bakelite and only two-pinned, perfected the image. At a small table under the window Charles and Lewis evidently ate their meals. The pans and plates of a modest lunch stood untouched in the sink. I felt a strong desire to loiter and look, but also, in case I was observed, to appear not to. And I began to worry about Charles. If Lewis was not around the old fellow might have collapsed undiscovered.

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

  The Christian could achieve the transformation of natural desire into rational will. Clement believed that Moses had prohibited an Israelite man from violating a captive woman for a period of thirty days so that the “physical impulse could be scrutinized and mastered into a rational appetite.” The coming of Christ had “completely destroyed the works of desire—greed, striving, vainglory, lust for women, pederasty, gluttony, indulgence, and the like.” Clement envisioned a sort of self-transformation that was alien to the philosophical tradition. “Man’s capacity for continence, as far as the Greek philosophers regard it, is said to be a matter of striving against desire and not serving it in its deeds. The Christian ideal is not to experience desire at all. The aim is not for one to prove as strong as one’s desires, but rather somehow to be continent from desire. There is no way to achieve this continence except through the grace of God.” This is as lucid a self-perception as might be hoped for.49 Clement’s sexual ideology is closer to the monastic desert than we might suppose. “Our antagonists are Olympian in stature and sting, as is said, more sharply than a wasp. Above all pleasure, which not only by day but also by night, in our dreams, bites us and aims to deceive us with its sorcery.” But Clement’s asceticism is lodged within marriage, within the city. The endless stream of minute directives for Christian living proffered by Clement amount to a monastic rule for the Christian household. Clement clasped enthusiastically to the Paul of the pastoral letters, who had offered “so many thousands of commands about marriage, procreation, and the arts of housecraft.” Paul’s commands are exuberantly expanded into a punctilious rubric for the Christian life. Time, place, and manner restrictions are unmercifully imposed on the sexual act. Sex was not for the daytime, but neither was the darkness of night to be a veil for hidden excess. Immemorial patterns of sociability are wrapped in new rules of Christian modesty: Clement could prescribe which sorts of dinners to attend and how to behave. If women had to attend social gatherings, they should be entirely covered; the “gravest calumny” that could be leveled against an unmarried woman was that she was present at a symposium. If young men were present, they were to sit motionless, look down, and keep their legs uncrossed. Men were to eat and drink moderately, but also slowly, with a cultivated air of self-control, pausing frequently, never reaching for food, sharing generously, and departing early. For Clement, the Christian sage could pass through life amid the city, but exposure to so many temptations required unfailing vigilance and supreme control of the will.50