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 Boys & Sex (2020)

  Zane was a legal adult—eighteen when he downloaded the app. Other boys I met were not. Whether they were openly gay with limited options or closeted, Grindr had become their outlet—a safe distance from that neutered public expression of gay-best-friend sexuality—for exploring actual sex. Elliot, a high school junior at a private school in Baltimore, would tell his mom (who didn’t know he was gay) that he was going out with friends, then drive to meet a stranger for a quickie; his partners were generally in their twenties but occasionally decades older. Elliot claimed to be nineteen on the apps. It wasn’t what he wanted, he said, but seemed like his only option. “All of my straight friends have had relationships. I’d like a boyfriend, too, but this is what is presented to me.” Neither Elliot nor the other high school boys I talked with disclosed their activity to friends and certainly not to parents, so no one knew where they were or what they were doing. “I always get nervous,” Elliot admitted, “because I don’t know whose house I’m going to be in. How is he going to talk? How is he going to smell? What is his place going to look like? Am I going to die right now?” Recently, he had met a man at the Fairmont hotel in Washington, DC, a locale he considered riskier than someone’s house. I suggested that if things went wrong in a hotel at least someone might hear him scream; his partner would have had to put down a credit card for the room, too. At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, in a private home he could be chopped up into little pieces and buried in the backyard and no one would be the wiser. “You’re right,” he responded. “I never thought of that.” If Elliot had been a teenage girl using swipe apps to have sex with random older men, I would likely have felt compelled to report the behavior to an adult. So why, I asked him, was this any different? “I don’t think it is, really,” he admitted. “It’s not ideal.” The trouble is, there aren’t a lot of outlets for gay teens to form romantic attachments or explore sexuality in an age-appropriate way. Even if they are out, other boys around them may not be, limiting their possibilities. “If choosing between an inappropriate relationship and celibacy,” Dan Savage said, “a horny teen will pick ‘inappropriate’ every time. Straight teens have more options and more support. Providing no channel or outlet for gay teenagers, telling them that they have to be eunuchs or aren’t allowed to act on desire sets those kids up for disaster. It drives them onto Grindr, where good and decent guys will block them, leaving the shitty guys, or the twenty-four-year-olds who really do think you’re eighteen.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  The Cockburns were great writers. Each one of them kept a diary, in which every evening they recorded the events of their day; it was, I could see, another form of meditation, or even an examination of conscience; it was a way of making sense of their lives. Sally had kept her diary since she was eight years old, and I used to marvel at the thick volumes, one for each year, lined up on her shelves. “I don’t know how anybody manages without a diary,” she used to say. “You should have kept one in the convent. I bet you would have got out sooner; you see things so much more clearly when you write them down.” Both Sally and her parents constantly urged me to write about my years in the convent. “After all, it’s over ten years since you left,” Sally argued. “You’ll forget it all, and that would be such a pity.” In fact, I had been thinking along these lines myself. I was growing uneasy about the way these years were being trivialized, reduced to a series of funny stories to tell at dinner parties. It had been a crucial period and I needed to find out what it had really meant to me. I used to look thoughtfully at Sally’s diaries, which had clearly been a means of creative self-appraisal and discovery. Maybe I should try something similar. My mother agreed. She had recently given me a typewriter, which had been thrown out of her office. “But you can only have it on one condition,” she said. “Use it to write your story!” As it happened, I even had a literary agent lined up. Charlotte had invited me to a dinner party in her flat to meet June, who had edited an anthology of short stories to which Charlotte had contributed. June had become professionally alert as soon as she heard that I had been a nun. “You should write about that,” she said immediately. “That could be a terrific book!” “You could call it I Was a Teenage Nun!” her husband, Greg, quipped caustically. June looked at him reflectively. “Actually, that’s not bad . . .” She was just about to leave publishing and set up her own literary agency. “Remember,” she said at the end of the evening, “if ever you decide to write that book, let me know.” Things were moving a little too fast for me. The only major piece of writing I had attempted was my ill-fated thesis, and the kind of book that June had in mind was something very different. It would mean that I would have to reveal myself at my most vulnerable. It would be like stripping naked before hundreds of strangers. And writing books was something that other people did—people like Charlotte. The whole process seemed daunting. How would I know what incidents to select?

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “Yes.” In fact, this interested me. I had dropped into the Junior Common Room one evening and joined a group who were watching an adaptation of a D. H. Lawrence short story on the television. It had been about a young woman in flight from her sexuality. The play had ended with the disturbing shot of the rich old man she eventually married, who was rather like my visitant. As I explained this connection, I saw Dr. Piet brighten and scribble something on the pad in front of him. My heart sank. You didn’t have to be a genius to see how he would interpret this information. And sure enough: “Did you find yourself relating to the heroine in that play?” he asked. “Did you feel that she was like you?” As a matter of fact, I did not. She had been very flighty, beautiful, uneducated, had lots of money and not enough to fill her day. No, not very much like me. But then, what did I know? I probably was in flight from my sexuality, though as no man ever displayed the slightest interest in me, I did not see what I could do about this. Dr. Piet smiled rather smugly when I said this, as though he knew better. Perhaps he did. In the interests of my own recovery, I ought to give him the benefit of the doubt. “I’m interested that it is only the old man’s head that you see.” I raised my eyebrows. “Well, your life seems to revolve around the intellect. You seem fixated on heads and brains,” Dr. Piet continued. “You never see any of the other parts of his body.” I reflected, wryly, that perhaps I ought to be thankful for small mercies. If Dr. Piet meant what I thought he meant, these visions could be a lot worse. “I think we’re going to look at your relations with your parents,” Dr. Piet continued, leaning back in his chair and looking at me in a pleased kind of way, as though I were a promising child who had come out with all the right answers. “You see, these panic attacks seem to me to relate to your early childhood. To some shock or deprivation that occurred while you were growing up. They are rather classic images.” Again, the nod of professional pleasure. “And then, of course, we have to find out why you went into a convent in the first place. That’s hardly a normal decision for a teenage girl. Until we get to the root of that—find out what had gone so wrong in your life that you decided to leave the world— and,” he added pointedly, “to leave your family” —he paused significantly—“we cannot really get to the root of your problem.”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But I decided to answer the simple question by putting together, layer upon layer, in as simple a fashion as I could, what I thought might help someone who really wanted to find the way to Jesus, to Jesus as he really was, and so to find the way through Jesus both to God himself and to a life in which “following Jesus” would make sense. The book then falls, more or less, into three parts. Part One consists of the first five chapters, in which I try to explain what the key questions are, why they matter, and why we today find them difficult to answer. Then, in the central part of the book, Part Two (Chapters 6–14), I try, as simply as I can, to say what I think Jesus’s public career was all about, what he was trying to accomplish, and how he went about it. At this point, to be honest, the material is so rich and dense that I have found myself, like a gardening expert given half an hour to guide a visitor around the Chelsea Flower Show, both spoiled for choice as to what to talk about and anxious about maintaining some shape and direction to the conducted tour. I found it necessary, here and there, to indulge in the cinematic technique of “flashbacks,” and indeed “flash-forwards,” taking readers away from Jesus for a moment to remark on other leaders or would-be leaders in Jewish movements of the period. (I didn’t want to put those up front, or readers might have become tired, and might have despaired of ever arriving at Jesus himself. By placing them where I have, I trust they illuminate Jesus rather than distract attention from him.) In this section I ask readers to try various thought experiments. This is absolutely necessary, because first-century Jews thought very differently from the way we do now—and, indeed, from the ways in which other first-century people such as the Greeks and the Romans thought. We have to make a real effort to see things from a first-century Jewish point of view, if we are to understand what Jesus was all about. All this brings us, in the end, to Jesus’s death, resurrection, and ascension and the meaning of those events. Throughout the whole book, as will quickly become apparent, I have done my best to explore the meaning of the phrase Jesus used as the great slogan for his whole project, the “kingdom of God.”

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  The bus came to a stop in the church parking lot, and Will walked to the front of the bus. He thanked everybody for coming and urged them to stay involved. “It’s a long road we’re traveling,” he said, “but tonight showed me what we can do when we put our minds to it. That good feeling you got right now, we got to keep it going till we got this neighborhood back on its feet.” A few people smiled and offered an amen. But as I stepped off the bus, I heard a woman behind me whispering to her friend, “I don’t need to hear about the neighborhood, girl. Where these jobs they talking about?” The day after the rally, Marty decided it was time for me to do some real work, and he handed me a long list of people to interview. Find out their self-interest, he said. That’s why people become involved in organizing—because they think they’ll get something out of it. Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power. Issues, action, power, self-interest. I liked these concepts. They bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of sentiment; politics, not religion. For the next three weeks, I worked day and night, setting up and conducting my interviews. It was harder than I’d expected. There was the internal resistance I felt whenever I picked up the phone to set up the interviews, as images of Gramps’s insurance sales calls crept into my mind: the impatience that waited at the other end of the line, the empty feeling of messages left unreturned. Most of my appointments were in the evening, home visits, and the people were tired after a full day’s work. Sometimes I would arrive only to find that the person had forgotten our appointment, and I’d have to remind him or her of who I was as I was eyed suspiciously from behind a half-opened door. Still, these were minor difficulties. Once they were overcome, I found that people didn’t mind a chance to air their opinions about a do-nothing alderman or the neighbor who refused to mow his lawn. The more interviews I did, the more I began to hear certain recurring themes. I learned, for example, that most of the people in the area had been raised farther north or on Chicago’s West Side, in the cramped black enclaves that restrictive covenants had created for most of the city’s history. The people I talked to had some fond memories of that self-contained world, but they also remembered the absence of heat and light and space to breathe—that, and the sight of their parents grinding out life in physical labor.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  How drunk had Yale been? What had happened, exactly, and on what bed and when? He’d been careful about himself, protecting Roman. They hadn’t been careful the other way. Because Roman was a virgin. Because Roman was a virgin. Yale said, “Tell me.” “He’s not that hot, chill out. I met him last year at my friend Michael’s lecture at the Cultural Center. He’s got this whole tortured artist thing going on, like he just suddenly has to leave the room and be alone.” “Oh.” Yale relaxed. “I thought you met him at a bathhouse or something.” “God, Yale, I go other places. I mean—” he laughed, leaned close “—I ploughed him like a fresh spring field, but we definitely met at the Cultural Center.” Yale let Teddy step ahead of him in line. The park was more sound than color now, more vibration than reality. If he opened his eyes, he’d be in bed next to Charlie, and it would be last summer. He told Teddy he’d be back and he stepped toward Roman’s group, which was still quite far away. He needed to see that it wasn’t Roman. The mayor was still talking, and the air still smelled like hot dogs, and yes, it was Roman standing there looking bored, just like his bored and beautiful friends. Yale might have run home and hidden under his blankets, but instead he made his way past a pack of leatherdykes, past the guy with the bird, and straight to Roman. Roman tried to angle his body away, a teenager who didn’t want his friends knowing that this embarrassing person was his dad. Yale said, “May I have a word?” One of the boys in black hooted; the other said, “Who is she?” Roman opened his mouth as if he wanted to make an excuse not to talk, but then he wiped his brow with the back of his arm and stepped away with Yale. Yale didn’t care if Teddy looked over and saw them together. He was far beyond caring. He said, “We’ll make this really quick. Did you misrepresent yourself?” “I’m sorry?” “I should have been—I should have asked you more questions. I should have made you take some kind of written exam. Is this what you do? You go around doing the confused Mormon act? Like, role-playing?” Roman said, “What are you talking about?” His friends were watching, snickering. They were too far away to hear. “I’m a Mormon. That wasn’t a lie.” “But you’re a Mormon who sleeps with a lot of men. Who’s been doing this for a long time.” “Well, no. Not a lot. I mean, I used to. I was trying to be monogamous.” For a second Yale thought Roman meant monogamy with him, that their hazy midnight assignations were meant to be some kind of steady relationship, but that made no sense. And Roman kept talking. “Or, like, I had been, and then he was—like, he felt kind of suffocated, I guess.

• From The Art of Memoir

  feet wet. You’ll work up to it. Let’s face it: you dread this scene as the rich dread tax time, as demons dread Jesus. It’s a haunter. You’re going to write it now. Don’t get me wrong: your goal is not to finish these pages. The opposite. This draft will land in a folder you keep. I want you to suffer through sitting in a room for some hours with your worst memories. But you’ll start with a centering exercise in an attempt to get underneath your normal ego and into some deeper place, more receptive to the truth. Meditation as a technique to loosen creative powers fills boatloads of books. There are millions of techniques: counting your breaths one to ten, following your breath, a mantra, visualization, studying a passage of sacred writing. In getting tough-guy undergrads to meditate, I found the story of Zen basketball master Phil Jackson’s Sacred Hoops useful. Students who’d otherwise refuse to close their eyes and get woo-woo in class went along behind Jackson’s example. Phil writes about playing as a young man from a warrior’s ego— all rage for dominance. But in the NBA, as he reaches the far edge of his natural physical talent, he chooses to cultivate a mental edge. Through Zen meditation, Jackson starts to notice how much noise is in his head during a game, including anger (“That #$%^& Chamberlain. Next time he’s dead meat.”) and self-blame (“Phil, a sixth-grader could’ve made that shot!”). The litany was endless. However the simple act of becoming mindful in the frenzied parade of thoughts, paradoxically, began to quiet my mind down. . . . Yogi Berra once said about baseball: “How can you think and hit at the same time?” The same is true with basketball, except everything’s happening much faster. The same is true of writing. To tap in to your deepest talent, you need to seek out a calm, restful state of mind where your head isn’t defending your delicate ego and your heart can bloom open a little. For me, my mind is constantly checking where I am in line— comparing myself to others, or even to a former self, racing, fretting, conniving to get ahead. But underneath that is another self that quietly notices all that. A friend called to say she was going crazy

• From Wild (2012)

  Within an instant, I was among them, hopping, scrambling, leaping, and hurling myself, my pack, my tarp, and everything that sat on it into the brush beyond the beach, swatting frogs from my hair and the folds of my T-shirt as I went. I couldn’t help but squash a few beneath my bare feet. Finally safe, I stood watching them from the frog-free perimeter, the frantic motion of their little dark bodies apparent in the blazing moonlight. I checked my shorts pockets for errant frogs. I gathered my things into a little clear patch that seemed flat enough for my tent and pulled it from my pack. I didn’t need to see what I was doing. My tent was up with the flick of my wrist. I crawled out of it at 8:30 the next morning. Eight thirty was late for me, like noon in my former life. And this 8:30 felt like noon in my former life too. Like I’d been out drinking into the wee hours. I half stood, looking around groggily. I still didn’t have to pee. I packed up and pumped more filthy water and walked north beneath the scorching sun. It was even hotter than it had been the day before. Within an hour, I almost stepped on another rattlesnake, though it too warned me off politely with its rattle. By late afternoon any thought of making it all the way to McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park by day’s end had been shot down entirely by my late start, my throbbing and blistered feet, and the staggering heat. Instead, I took a short detour off the trail to Cassel, where my guidebook promised there would be a general store. It was nearly three by the time I reached it. I took off my pack and sat on a wooden chair on the store’s old-fashioned porch, nearly catatonic from the heat. The big thermometer in the shade read 102 degrees. I counted my money, feeling on the verge of tears, knowing that no matter how much I had, it wouldn’t be enough for a Snapple lemonade. My desire for one had grown so large that it wasn’t even a longing anymore. It was more like a limb growing from my gut. It would cost 99 cents or $1.05 or $1.15—I didn’t know how much exactly. I knew I had only 76 cents and that wouldn’t be enough. I went into the store anyway, just to look. “You a PCT hiker?” the woman behind the counter asked. “Yeah,” I said, smiling at her. “Where you from?”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Piet took a more bracing line—“you really mustn’t take yourself so seriously. You’ve probably just been working too hard. Or it could be a side effect of the medication. I’ll take you off the Largactil for a while and we’ll have a go at Librium. But I don’t want to hear any more of this nonsense about padded cells and the rest of it. Believe me, if I committed everyone in Oxford who had periods of forgetfulness, the hospitals would be full to overflowing and city life would grind to a halt. This kind of mental abstraction is an occupational hazard for scholars. You’ve all got your minds on higher things, supposedly. You’re just not focused on mundane reality. Try to get a sense of perspective about this.” I stared mutinously at the carpet, unconvinced. I was not and never had been in the least absentminded. I didn’t forget things; I had an almost abnormally good memory. I could—and still can— recount entire conversations years after they have taken place, recall exactly what everybody was wearing and what we had eaten for lunch. I didn’t float around in an academic haze. These were not bouts of forgetfulness but lapses into a form of unconsciousness, when I was quite compos mentis enough to boil a kettle or cross a road safely, but seemed unaware of what I was doing. This must, surely, be a symptom of something sinister. And yet a part of me longed to believe Dr. Piet. It would be so wonderful if I really were simply behaving like a regular scholar. It would be such a relief to be typical for a change, instead of a freak. And Dr. Piet seemed to have no doubts at all; maybe he really did see a lot of this. “And in any case,” he was saying, taking off his glasses and leaning seriously across the desk, “all these symptoms that you’re producing are just a smoke screen. They’re distractions from the real issue: the problems that drove you into the convent in the first place. You’re taking refuge in the dramatic and the exotic because they make you feel important, whereas, in truth, there is nothing very special about your difficulties. They all spring from identity issues, gender problems, and parental conflicts that are very common indeed. Shared by half the population, in fact. But you can’t bear to be so banal. No, you have to turn it all into some kind of Gothic trauma: convents, visions, voices, satanic terror—and now sleepwalking! Anything rather than be ordinary. Because as long as you keep producing these ‘interesting’ psychic states, you are postponing the moment when you have to accept the unwelcome fact that when push comes to shove, you’re not that interesting! You’re just another brainy girl who is having problems accepting her femininity.

• From Another Country (1962)

  1Vivaldo dreamed that he was running, running, running, through a country he had always known, but could not now remember, a rocky country. He was blinded by the rain beating down, the tough, wet vines dragged at his legs and feet, and thorns and nettles tormented his hands and arms and face. He was both fleeing and seeking, and, in his dream, the time was running out. There was a high wall ahead of him, a high, stone wall. Broken glass glittered on top of the wall, sharp points standing straight up, like spears. He was reminded of music, though he heard none: the music was created by the sight of the rain which fell in long, cruel, gleaming shafts, and by the bright glass which reared itself bitterly against it. And he felt an answering rearing in his own body, a pull fugitive and powerful and dimly troubling, such as he might have felt for a moment had there been the movement and power of a horse beneath him. And, at the same time, in his dream, as he ran or as he was propelled, he was weighed down and made sick by the certainty that he had forgotten—forgotten—what? some secret, some duty, that would save him. His breath was a terrible captive weight in his chest. He reached the wall. He grasped the stone with his bleeding hands, but the stone was slippery, he could not hold it, could not lift himself up. He tried with his feet; his feet slipped; the rain poured down.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Would he look dull and drooling? I had never done anything like this and had no idea how I would cope. How would I occupy a brain-damaged child for hours at a time, week after week? As if reading my thoughts, Jenifer only increased my anxiety as she gave me some last-minute advice. “You’ll have to find your own way,” she explained. “Find your own special thing to do with him. He tends to put us all into watertight compartments, and won’t let anyone ever encroach on somebody else’s territory. I believe this kind of ritual behavior is quite common with autistic children. Nanny is the only one who is allowed to read to him; he and I play backgammon—or try to.” She gave a short bark of a laugh. “He usually loses his temper. And he’ll help me in the garden or we’ll go for a walk. Just now, he’s out with my husband, who takes him for long drives. Though that’s not ideal really,” she added. “Herbert is not the world’s best driver. Anyway”—she brightened—“I’m sure you’ll find something. It’s really not difficult—not as hard as it sounds. He’s basically very open and loving. He generally adores grown-ups. He’ll be very eager to be your friend.” I hoped so. “What about other children?” I asked. “Does he have friends at school, for instance?” Jenifer shook her head. “No. Children worry him. Jacob is very tall for his age, you see, and he gets alarmed when little people scurry about. They’re too noisy. And I suppose they’re a bit frightened of him, and he senses that.” She stretched out her thin, brown legs and contemplated her feet, clad in clumsy men’s sandals. “That’s one of the reasons why we’ve never sent him away. To a home or hospital.” She frowned, and her tone darkened. “Lots of people said that we should do that, but it’s ludicrous!” She seemed to be rehearsing an argument that she had had many times before. “We manage very well. With Nanny—and now that you’re coming it will be even better. We can’t just send him away. That seems terribly irresponsible. And in his own way, he’s happy here—as happy as he can be. He adores Nanny and he has lots of special adult friends. We’ve got a house in Cornwall, where we spend the Easter and summer vacs, and that’s marvelous for him. It’s a huge house, right on a cliff, and he feels free there. You must come down. We have interesting people to stay.” A key rattled in the front door and I looked up apprehensively. “He’ll be very shy at first,” Jenifer warned me. “He might even throw a tantrum. Just take no notice.” I swallowed hard and assumed what I hoped was a nonchalant expression. “Mummy!” There was a peremptory cry from the hall, a jumble of footsteps, and then Jacob exploded into the room.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Mother Frances gestured toward the hot buttered toast. “Not at all, Reverend Mother.” Instantly I became the young nun again, unable to swallow a single mouthful while my former superior stood waiting to speak to me. “Well, you’re looking very well,” she went on, settling herself in one of the oak carvers at the head of the table. “Are you well?” “Not really, Reverend Mother.” I knew that I was supposed to say that everything was fine, but I suddenly pictured Rebecca’s stricken face. “I’m finding it very hard—almost impossible—to adapt. And it seems to be making me ill.” I briefly gave her the headlines: the fainting, the panic attacks, and the psychiatrist. “Oh really, Sister—Karen, I mean.” She corrected herself, laughing lightly but without amusement. “I really had hoped that you would grow out of all that nonsense! It’s high time, surely. You must be twenty-five? Twenty-six?” “Twenty-five,” I replied, though I couldn’t really see what my age had to do with it. “Well, there you are, then. Far too old for these childish displays.” “But how do I adjust?” Perhaps she should understand the problem so that she could advise other nuns who were thinking of leaving. “I trained to become a nun for five solid years. You know what it was like. You call it ‘formation’ now, I believe, and that’s what it is. It’s a training that shapes you at a very deep level. And I just can’t stop being a nun. I need a new training—one that is equally intensive—to turn me into a secular. Undoing habits and attitudes which are now engrained. I don’t know how to do this. You and Mother Walter made me a nun, but how do I reverse that? I don’t have anybody to help me deprogram myself, and I don’t think I can do it alone.” “Still as dramatic as ever, I see.” Mother Frances sounded bored, as she often did when, I suspected, she felt on uncertain ground. “It’s bound to be difficult at first. Of course it is.” She smiled brightly, and in an effort, perhaps, to avoid my eye, she started to brush away the crumbs scattered on the gleaming tabletop. “But I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.” There was finality in her tone. Subject closed, and I felt pushed back into myself, locked into my perplexity. I could almost hear her turn the key. “So tell me about your plans,” she went on briskly. “You have your final exams soon. This term, isn’t it?” “Six weeks away.” I nodded.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  This is a decidedly political as well as a religious charge. And this in turn explains once more why Jesus only gives a cryptic answer in public and waits until he is in private before saying the truly explosive thing—that what you eat is irrelevant for genuine purity. That is tantamount to burning a flag or spray-painting a revolutionary slogan on a palace wall. No wonder he had to say it in private. In the second case too (Mark 10:1–12; Matt. 19:1–12), the stakes are high. The question of divorce is no abstract ethical problem. I remember once being asked by a reporter for my views on marriage and divorce—at just about the same time that Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, was getting a divorce from Princess Diana. I remember thinking at the time that an “innocent” question about divorce and remarriage posed by a journalist to a churchman in the middle 1990s was no more “innocent” than the Pharisees’ question to Jesus. Mark and Matthew both locate the incident in question in “the districts of Judaea across the Jordan.” Memories are stirred. That was where John had been baptizing. That was where John had denounced Herod Antipas for taking his brother’s wife. To ask the question about divorce in that setting was no mere theoretical enquiry. It was inviting Jesus to incriminate himself, to say something that might lead Antipas to do to Jesus what he’d done to John. Jesus sticks to scripture, which they can hardly fault. But in doing so he demonstrates that he is speaking from a world in which God, becoming king on earth as in heaven, is transforming the very hearts of human beings as part of his project of new creation. Jesus’s hearers, thinking from within a world where the legislation for the hard-hearted still applies, cannot even recognize the kingdom when it is breaking in right there in their midst. Many other passages point in the same direction. In particular, some of the discourses in John’s gospel, climaxing in the so-called high-priestly prayer of John 17, explore at much greater depth the many-sided transformation Jesus seems to have believed would happen when people followed him and discovered what it meant for God to become king. This was, it seems, a major part of Jesus’s whole program. Just as a politician today needs to have a coherent set of policies about apparently quite different issues (immigration, foreign policy, the economy, education, and so on), so Jesus’s campaign for the kingdom seems to have included all the elements we have so far described—healings, celebrations, forgiveness, the renewed heart—and much more besides. But what then must we say about Jesus’s vision of the kingdom itself? Did he think it was already here, or was it still in the future?

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Hence the tub I had permitted myself tonight. For lunch I consumed two pieces of crispbread covered with cottage cheese (again, one carton had to last the week). So I never actually stopped eating—just cut it back, and the results were gratifying. I had really started to lose weight. This had begun quite deliberately. I knew that I was not anorexic like Rebecca, because that was an illness that was beyond one’s conscious control. I, however, was choosing of my own free will not to eat. I was often ravenously hungry, and would sometimes allow myself a piece of real toast and butter, which, if I had been truly anorexic, I told myself, would have been quite impossible. And I was not driven by any ulterior or unconscious motive. My purpose was, I believed, simple and pragmatic: I wanted to save money. Money had become a major issue. I had never handled money much before. In the convent, we had owned nothing but everything had been provided, and the same had been true while I had lived in St. Anne’s as an undergraduate. At the beginning of each term, when we received our grant checks from the government, we paid a fixed sum to the college for bed and board. Our rooms were cleaned for us and meals were served three times a day. But now I had to buy my own food and manage my own budget, and I found this obscurely frightening. I had started to panic about the future. Academic jobs were notoriously hard to get and my present scholarship would last for only three years. What would happen then? If I couldn’t get a post as a university teacher, whatever would become of me? I was trained for nothing else, and at twenty-six, I was really too old to start again. There was school teaching, of course, but I knew that I did not want to do that. There was one precaution that I could take, however: I could save money. If I built up a reserve fund, I could perhaps hang on for a few years until I finished my doctorate and was eligible for the coveted academic post. Then I would be set up for life and could eat and spend whatever I wanted. I made it sound rational, at least to myself, but this was a crazy scheme and a telling indication of the state I was in. Compared with most students, I was well off.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Yes, I would continue to take him to Blackfriars. I did not believe in any of it anymore; God had finally departed from my life; but it would do me no harm to sit for a while every week with those good people. And giving Jacob this new chance would be a positive thing to do. He had so few pleasures, and when he had found something that he so clearly relished, it would be cruel to take it away from him. It wasn’t as though I had anything else to do on Sunday mornings. In fact, I really didn’t have anything else to do in my life at all. 4. Consequently I Rejoice I have no idea how it happened, but it was the result of a wor-rying new development. At least, it was of concern to me. Dr. Piet had greeted the news with his usual nonchalance, but this latest symptom had been yet another sign to me that my mind was breaking down completely. I had started to lose control over my actions—only for a short period of time, and only infrequently, but I still found it very disturbing. The first time it occurred, I had been working in my room in Manor Place and decided that it was time for coffee. “Another cup, Karen?” Nanny smiled as I came into the kitchen and lit the gas under the kettle. “You must be thirsty this morning!” “Sorry, Nanny? What do you mean?” Nanny looked puzzled, as well she might. “Well, you were here just half an hour ago.” I must have looked blank. “I saw you going upstairs with your mug while I was tidying the drawing room. Surely you remember, Karen?” she added, disturbed about her own powers of memory. “I saw you quite distinctly,” she added, to convince herself as much as anything. “Oh yes, of course. I do apologize, Nanny. I was miles away.” Poor Nanny, I thought, as I returned to my room. She was getting on in years, and old people were notoriously forgetful. But when I opened the door to my room, I saw the mug on the windowsill; when I examined it, I found it full of coffee that was not yet entirely cold. Try as I would, I could not recall making it. I must have gone downstairs, boiled the water, poured it onto the coffee granules, and returned to my desk. And I had no recollection at all of any of this. Then, a few weeks later, I found myself unexpectedly sitting in the English Faculty Library. There I was, at a table in the upstairs reading room, with a copy of the journal Notes and Queries (known to us irreverently as Quotes and Drearies) open in front of me. And again, I had no recollection of leaving the house, taking the short walk down Manor Place, crossing the road, and entering the library. No recollection at all.

• From Another Country (1962)

  They stared at each other and his face made her frightened all over again. “Where did he go?” she asked. “I don’t know. I figured he’d gone to Harlem. He just disappeared.” “Vivaldo, she’s coming here this afternoon.” “Who is?” “His sister, Ida. I told her that I left him with you and that you would be here this afternoon.” “But I don’t know where he is . I was in the back, talking to Jane—and he said he was going to the head or something—and he never came back.” He stared at her, then at the window. “I wonder where he went.” “Maybe,” she said, “he met a friend.” He did not trouble to respond to this. “He should have known I wasn’t just going to dump him. He could have stayed at my place, I ended up at Jane’s place, anyway.” Cass watched him as he banged his cigarette out in the ashtray. “I have never,” she said, mildly, “understood what Jane wanted from you. Or, for that matter, what you wanted from her.” He examined his fingernails, they were jagged and in mourning. “I don’t know. I just wanted a girl, I guess, someone to share those long winter evenings.” “But she’s so much older than you are.” She picked up his empty glass. “She’s older than I am.” “That hasn’t got anything to do with it,” he said, sullenly. “Anyway, I wanted a girl who—sort of knows the score.” She considered him. “Yes,” she said, with a sigh, “that girl certainly knows how to keep score.” “I needed a woman,” Vivaldo said, “she needed a man. What’s wrong with that?” “Nothing,” she said. “If that’s really what both of you needed.” “What do you think I was doing?” “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t know. Only, I’ve told you, you always seem to get involved with impossible women—whores, nymphomaniacs, drunks—and I think you do it in order to protect yourself—from anything serious. Permanent.” He sighed, smiled. “Hell, I just want to be friends.” She laughed. “Oh, Vivaldo.” “You and I are friends,” he said. “Well—yes. But I’ve always been the wife of a friend of yours. So you never thought of me—” “Sexually,” he said. Then he grinned. “Don’t be so sure.” She flushed, at once annoyed and pleased. “I’m not talking about your fantasies.” “I’ve always admired you,” he said soberly, “and envied Richard. ” “Well,” she said, “you’d better get over that.” He said nothing. She rattled the ice around in his empty glass. “Well,” he said, “what am I going to do with it? I’m not a monk, I’m tired of running uptown and paying for it——” “For it’s uptown that you run,” she said, with a smile. “What a good American you are.” This angered him. “I haven’t said they were any better than white chicks.” Then he laughed. “Maybe I better cut the damn thing off.” “Don’t be such a baby.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But you know, it happened quite naturally—by accident, really. When he was little, he used to sit next to me at breakfast while I read the paper, so to keep him quiet and give him something to do, I taught him to pick out all the Os and then the As and so on, and then, all of a sudden, he started reading all by himself.” My job would be to look after Jacob while Nanny was off duty. That meant that I would take care of him after supper on Wednesday evenings, when Nanny went off to visit a friend, and Jenifer and I would share him on Saturday, which was Nanny’s half day. Jenifer would take him during the afternoon and give him his supper, and then I would take him to my room until it was time for bed. Because of his epilepsy, I would have to sit with him while he went off to sleep, until Jenifer came to bed, at about 10:30 p.m. I was startled to hear that for years she had shared a large attic room at the top of the house with Jacob, who was absolutely terrified of the dark and could not sleep alone because of his night terrors and seizures. Herbert, Jenifer’s husband, slept in his study next to the drawing room, a small, chronically disordered lair that was almost entirely filled with a massive homemade stereo system, constructed out of large wooden crates by Alan Ryan, the Harts’ former son-in-law, who was about to take up a fellowship at New College. Even though he was now divorced from Joanna, I was told that Alan was still very much a part of the family—an idea that I found intriguing. In my Catholic family, divorce was a cataclysm that led to permanent estrangement. “And,” Jenifer continued, “I wonder if you would mind relieving Nanny, who usually sits with him, when I am especially late—out at a dinner or something. Only if you’re free, of course,” she added hastily. “You can read up there. Jacob will go to sleep with the bedside light on, and you can sit on my bed until I come up.” It had sounded quite manageable when Jenifer had run through the job description in her peaceful college rooms. But now that I was about to meet Jacob, I was not so sure. “I hope you’re not worried about all this,” Jenifer said, clearly anxious herself, as she settled opposite me on the white sofa with her own goblet of sherry. “There’s no need to be. In fact, it’s very important that you don’t show any nervousness, because he’ll pick it up in a second, and then it really will be impossible.” I smiled with what I hoped looked like confidence, but I was afraid that I might be instinctively repelled by Jacob.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This was the point when you were supposed to reflect on the topics you had listed the night before. Finally you proceeded to “act,” which, for Ignatius, was the real moment of prayer. As a result of your deliberations, you made an act of will, applying the lessons you had learned to the day that lay ahead. There had to be a specific resolution. It was no good vaguely vowing to live a better life from that day forward. You had to settle for something concrete: to try harder with your sewing, for example, or to make a special effort not to think uncharitable thoughts about a sister who irritated you beyond endurance. Prayer, Ignatius taught, was an act of will. It had nothing to do with pious thoughts or feelings; these were simply a preparation for the moment of decision. Ignatian spirituality was never an end in itself, but was directed toward action and efficiency. He wanted his Jesuits to be effective in the world, and their daily meditation ensured that their activities would proceed from God. But this did not work for me. Every morning I resolved that this time I would crack it. This time there would be no distractions. I would kneel as intent upon God as my sisters, none of whom seemed to have my difficulties. I had never before had any problems of concentration. I had always been able to immerse myself in my studies for hours at a time. But to my intense distress, I found that I could not keep my mind on God for two minutes. The whole point of the careful preparation was to prevent this. It was acknowledged that at 6 a.m. we were likely to be less than fully alert and would need help in focusing our thoughts. But as soon as I sank to my knees, my mind either went off at a tangent or scuttled through a maze of pointless worries, fears, or fantasies, or else I was engulfed by the torpor of physical malaise. Like most adolescents, I craved sleep and experienced the 5:30 a.m. call as a violent assault. I often felt queasy with hunger and fatigue, and clung dizzily to the pew in front of me. At 6:30 the clock in the cloister chimed and we could sit down. But this sweet relief gave way to another trial, as I battled against sleep—and was comforted to see that even some of the older nuns listed and slumped in such a way that it was clear that they had succumbed. The minutes crawled by until the sacristan appeared to light the candles on the altar as a welcome signal that Mass was about to begin. At breakfast, an hour later, we were supposed to examine our meditation, going through a ten-point questionnaire: Had I made myself fully conscious of the presence of God? No. Had I made sufficient effort in the composition of place?

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  After the years of dreary domestic toil, I was in heaven. I also took a correspondence course in theology, scripture, and church history. In the autumn of 1966, I sat the entrance examinations for St. Anne’s College, Oxford, passed the first round, was summoned to interview, and, to my own and my superiors’ intense delight, succeeded in winning a place. In 1967, the scholasticate completed, I arrived at Cherwell Edge in South Parks Road, the Oxford convent of my order, to begin my university studies. And my life fell apart. Intellectually, everything was fine. I lived at the convent but attended lectures and tutorials with the other students, and did very well. I got a distinction in the preliminary examinations, which we sat in the spring of 1968, won a university prize, and was awarded a college scholarship. So far, so good. But as a religious, I felt torn in two. My elderly superior was bitterly opposed to the new ideas, and I fought her tooth and nail throughout the entire year. I am sure that I was quite insufferable, but I found it well nigh impossible to think logically and accurately in college, where I was encouraged to question everything, and then turn off the critical faculty I was developing when I returned to Cherwell Edge, and become a docile young nun. The stringent academic training I was receiving at the university was changing me at just as profound a level as the religious formation of the noviceship, and the two systems seemed to be irreconcilable. I was also increasingly distressed by the emotional frigidity of our lives. This was one of the areas of convent life that most desperately needed reform. Friendship was frowned upon, and the atmosphere in the convent was cold and sometimes unkind. Increasingly, it seemed to me to have moved an immeasurably long distance from the spirit of the gospels. Nevertheless, I struggled grimly on. To say that I did not want to leave would be an understatement. The very idea of returning to secular life filled me with dread. At first I could not even contemplate this option, which was surrounded with all the force of a taboo. But the strain took its toll, and in the summer of 1968 I broke down completely. It was now clear to us all that I could not continue. Everybody was wonderfully kind to me at the end, and in a sense, this made it even more distressing. It would have been so much easier to storm out in a blaze of righteous anger. But my superiors let me take as long as I needed to make my decision. I returned to college, and after a term of heart searching, I applied for a dispensation from my vows, which arrived from Rome at the end of January 1969.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I found myself thinking about Mother Frances’s parting shot when, a few days later, now back in Oxford, I boarded the number 1 bus in the High Street to go to my first meeting with the psychiatrist to whom I had been assigned. Maybe Rebecca and I had taken the rules and strictures too seriously? I remembered Mother Frances saying to me once in exasperation, “You really are a literal-minded blockhead!” after I had pointed out some inconsistency or other in our training. Or maybe it was just because we had thought too much about it all and tried to make sense of an essentially senseless system. I had already seen the consultant psychiatrist at the Littlemore, a Basque doctor with an excellent reputation, and I was feeling hopeful. Every couple of weeks I would see one of his registrars. In fact I saw a string of registrars, and was passed from one to the other, but to avoid confusion, let us create a composite figure to stand for them all, and call him Dr. Piet. The consultant had not seemed unduly perturbed about my plight. All these anxiety attacks were, perhaps, understandable in the circumstances. And he had said one thing that had made an impression upon me: “You seem to me to be stalled in some way. Life is hurtling on, like a giant merry-go-round; you are watching, but you can’t get on. You want to join in, but you can’t—for reasons that we shall have to discover.” His remark had gone home and I had recognized that it was true. I could see myself confronted with the carnival of sixties Oxford: the other young people with their long hair, confident gestures, and eager voices all understood instinctively how to make something of their lives. I cast my mind back to that party when I had heard my first Beatles record and felt alone and out of place, unable to dance or participate in any way. Maybe Dr. Piet would help me. So when I faced him in his small, functional office, I had hopes that together we could find a solution. He asked me about the fainting and the panic, and I described the strange smell, the mounting fear, those moments when the world became unrecognizable, the hallucinatory glimpses of something horrifying, the senile old man, his cavernous head nodding on a frail, stalklike neck. “Have you ever seen him—or anyone like him—in real life?” Dr. Piet wanted to know.