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 Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The increasing rate of executions in Alabama went against the national trend. Media coverage of all the innocent people wrongly convicted had an effect on the death-sentencing rate in America, which began to decline in 1999. But the terrorist attacks in New York City on September 11, 2001, and threats of terrorism and global conflict seemed to disrupt the progress toward a repeal of capital punishment. But then a few years later, rates of execution and death sentencing were once again decreasing. By 2010, the number of annual executions fell to less than half the number in 1999. Several states were seriously debating ending the death penalty. New Jersey, New York, Illinois, New Mexico, Connecticut, and Maryland all took capital punishment off the books. Even in Texas, where nearly 40 percent of the nearly 1,400 modern-era executions in the United States had taken place, the death-sentencing rate had dropped dramatically, and the pace of executions had finally slowed. Alabama’s death-sentencing rate had also dropped from the late 1990s, but it was still the highest in the country. By the end of 2009, Alabama had the nation’s highest execution rate per capita. Every other month someone was facing execution, and we were scrambling to keep up. Jimmy Callahan, Danny Bradley, Max Payne, Jack Trawick, and Willie McNair were executed in 2009. We had actively tried to block these executions, mostly by arguing about the way the executions were being carried out. In 2004, I argued a case at the U.S. Supreme Court that raised questions about the constitutionality of certain methods of execution. States had largely abandoned execution by electrocution, gas chamber, firing squad, and hanging in favor of lethal injection. Viewed as more sterile and serene, lethal injection had become the most common method for the sanctioned killing of people in virtually every death state. But questions about the painlessness and efficacy of lethal injection were emerging. In the case I argued before the Court, we challenged the constitutionality of Alabama’s protocols for lethal injection. David Nelson had very compromised veins. He was in his sixties and had been a drug addict earlier in his life, making access to his veins difficult. Members of the correctional staff were not able to insert an IV in his arm in order to carry out his execution without medical complications. The Hippocratic oath prevents doctors and medical personnel from participating in executions, so Alabama officials planned for untrained correctional staff to take a knife and make a two-inch incision in Mr. Nelson’s arm or groin so that they could find a vein in which to inject him with toxins and kill him. We argued that without anesthesia, the procedure would be needlessly painful and cruel.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  It would be based on simple justice—he was an innocent man. On the other hand, I didn’t think media attention would help win the case now pending in the Court of Criminal Appeals. In fact, the chief judge on the court, John Patterson, had famously sued The New York Times over their coverage of the Civil Rights Movement when he was Alabama’s governor. It was a common tactic used by Southern politicians during civil rights protests: Sue national media outlets for defamation if they provide sympathetic coverage of activists or if they characterize Southern politicians and law enforcement officers unfavorably. Southern state court judges and all-white juries were all too willing to rule in favor of “defamed” local officials, and state authorities had won millions of dollars in judgments this way. More important, the defamation lawsuits chilled sympathetic coverage of civil rights activism. In 1960, The New York Times printed an advertisement titled “Heed Their Rising Voices” that attempted to raise money to defend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. against perjury charges in Alabama. Southern officials responded by going on the offensive and suing the newspaper. Public Safety Commissioner L. B. Sullivan and Governor Patterson claimed defamation. A local jury awarded them half a million dollars, and the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a landmark ruling, New York Times v. Sullivan changed the standard for defamation and libel by requiring plaintiffs to prove malice —that is, evidence of actual knowledge on the part of the publisher that a statement is false. The ruling marked a significant victory for freedom of the press, and it liberated media outlets and publishers to talk more honestly about civil rights protests and activism. But in the South it generated even more contempt for the national press, and that animosity has lingered beyond the Civil Rights Era. I had no doubt that national press coverage of Walter’s case would not help our cause at the Court of Criminal Appeals. But I did think getting a more informed view of Walter’s conviction and the murder would make his life after release less dangerous— assuming we could ever get his conviction overturned. We felt that we had to take our chances and get the story out. I was concerned about the inability of people in the local community to get a fair picture of what was going on. Aside from the hostility we feared he would face if Walter was released, we were worried about what would happen if a new trial was ordered. All of the prejudicial media coverage would make a fair trial nearly impossible.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Eugenics and population genetics were both developed during the period when mate choice was either entirely rejected or presumed to be essentially identical to natural selection. This was the same period when Darwinian fitness was redefined and expanded to subsume all of sexual selection. As we have seen (chapter 1), “fitness” to Darwin referred to the capacity of an individual to do tasks that contributed to one’s survival and fecundity, just like physical fitness. In the early twentieth century, fitness was redefined as an abstract mathematical concept—the relative success of one’s genes in subsequent generations. This new definition of fitness confounded variation in survival, fecundity, and mating/fertilization success into a single concept, obscuring the differences between the Darwinian concepts of natural and sexual selection. Despite this redefinition, the original connection of fitness to adaptation was retained. In this way, the rejection of Darwin’s concept of arbitrary aesthetic mate choice was forged into the language of modern evolutionary biology, making it almost impossible to talk about reproduction and mate choice in anything other than adaptive terms. The new broad definition of fitness meant that all selection is, and should be, about adaptive improvement. Arbitrary mate choice was essentially defined out of existence, which is why arbitrary mate choice has had such a hard time in the discipline ever since. This intellectual stance contributed directly to the logical inevitability of eugenic theory. If one accepted the facts of natural selection, human evolution, heritable variation within and among human populations, and variation in human “fitness” and “quality,” then the logic of eugenics was practically inescapable. And in fact, no one in the discipline escaped it. What was missing from both the eugenic framework and all of evolutionary biology was the possibility of arbitrary, aesthetic mate choice. Although I do not think that contemporary sexual selection theory or research is actually eugenic, I do think that evolutionary biology did not overcome its eugenic history—our eugenic history—merely by rejecting theories of human racial superiority during the twentieth century. Obvious and uncomfortable intellectual similarities remain between eugenics and current adaptive mate choice theory. Eugenic theory and social programs were concerned with both the presumed genetic quality of offspring (that is, good genes) and the cultural, economic, religious, linguistic, and moral conditions of the family as the locus of human reproduction (that is, direct benefits). The twin eugenic concerns for genetic and environmental quality are still echoed in the language of adaptive mate choice today. The contemporary term “good genes” actually shares the same etymological roots as “eugenics”—from the Greek eugenes for wellborn or noble (eu, good or well; and genos, birth). Eugenics was also explicitly anti-aesthetic and anxious about the maladaptive consequences of the seductive power of sexual passion. In general, the eugenic commitment to the idea that all mate choice is, and should be, about adaptive improvement persists today in the language and logic of adaptive mate choice.

• From Untrue (2018)

  I received the address and details about the party the day before. The instructions specified the address—it was downtown, of course. I wasn’t to mention Skirt Club but rather to say simply that I was invited to C.’s party should a doorman or anyone else ask me. It shouldn’t be an issue, though, as I would be greeted in the lobby by hostesses from Skirt Club. The theme was “All Tied Up,” and there would be a performance at 8:30 sharp of shibari, the ancient and elaborate Japanese art of bondage. The party ended at 2:30 a.m. At least I was pretty sure that’s what “Carriages at 2:30 a.m.” meant. My husband, who was amused and not a little intrigued by my Skirt Club invitation, had encouraged me to go, even though I was at the tail end of a cold and wanted to spend the day and the evening in bed. But the night of, at his urging, I dragged myself to an upright position and dressed in a long-sleeved, extremely formfitting, knee-length black leather dress. He observed, “You look appropriate for either a funeral or an all-women sex party,” and then he laughed like a hyena, which I was quick to remind him was a female-dominant species with hypertrophied clitorides. He told me I had permission to do whatever I wanted. I told him crankily that I didn’t need permission, and he looked taken aback. “Oh, really,” he teased, recovering. My research was getting under my skin, and I was very nervous on the trip downtown.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Tom Tate was elected the new county sheriff days after the murder took place, and folks started to question whether he was up to the job. The Alabama Bureau of Investigation (ABI) was called in to investigate the murder but achieved no more success solving the crime than local officials had. People in Monroeville became anxious. Local businesses posted rewards offering thousands of dollars for information leading to an arrest. Gun sales, which were always robust, increased. — Meanwhile, Walter was wrestling with his own problems. He had been trying for weeks to end his relationship with Karen Kelly. The child custody proceedings and public scandal had taken a toll on her; she had started using drugs and seemed to fall apart. She began to associate with Ralph Myers, a white man with a badly disfigured face and lengthy criminal record who seemed to perfectly embody her fall from grace. Ralph was an unusual partner for Karen, but she was in such serious decline that nothing she did made any sense to her friends and family. The relationship brought Karen to rock bottom, beyond scandal and drug use into serious criminal behavior. Together they became involved in dealing drugs and were implicated in the murder of Vickie Lynn Pittman, a young woman from neighboring Escambia County. Police had quick success in investigating the Pittman murder, rapidly concluding that Ralph Myers had been involved. When the police interrogated Ralph, they encountered a man as psychologically complicated as he was physically scarred. He was emotional and frail, and he craved attention—his only effective defense was his skill in manipulation and misdirection. Ralph believed that everything he said had to be epic, shocking, and elaborate. As a child living in foster care, he had been horribly burned in a fire. The burns so scarred and disfigured his face and neck that he needed multiple surgeries to regain basic functioning. He became quite used to strangers staring at his scars with pained expressions on their faces. He was a tragic outcast who lived on the margins, but he tried to compensate by pretending to have inside knowledge about all sorts of mysteries. After initially denying any direct involvement in the Pittman murder, Myers conceded that he may have played some accidental role but quickly put the blame for the murder itself on more interesting local figures. He first accused a black man with a bad reputation named Isaac Dailey, but the police quickly discovered that Dailey had been in a jail cell on the night of the murder. Myers then confessed that he had made up the story because the true killer was none other than the elected sheriff of a nearby county. As outrageous as the claim was, ABI agents appeared to take it seriously. They asked him more questions, but the more Myers talked, the less credible his story sounded.

• From Untrue (2018)

  I settled on a floral blouse, a red coat, and black jeans. At the last minute, I also put on some bright red lipstick, because it was Friday, and I was going to a workshop on consensual non-monogamy, even though I kept transposing it, every time I told someone about it, into a workshop on “non-consensual monogamy.” “You just told me a lot,” a psychoanalyst friend had quipped when I flipped things around just so as we chatted. A heavy patient load had prevented her from signing up for the workshop. “Have lots of anonymous encounters for me!” another shrink friend who couldn’t make it for the same reason texted me the morning of, winkingly conflating shrinks who help swingers with swingers. And sex addicts. “Poor Joel,” my literary agent ribbed in faux sympathy with my husband when I told him of my day’s mission. I was learning over the course of many months of talking to people that infidelity, promiscuity, non-monogamy, whatever terms we use to describe the practice of refusing sexual exclusivity, fascinates and flusters pretty much across the board. And I knew from prodding and poking and reading and interviewing and from just being female that the specter of a woman who is untrue still raises hackles and blood pressures and outrage especially, all along the spectrum. For social conservatives, female infidelity—seizing what is generally believed to be a male privilege, doing what you want sexually speaking—is symptomatic of larger corruptions and compromises of the social fabric. (“Madam: What a decadent, pathetic woman you are. You don’t have to wonder why the west [sic] is in decline; just look in the mirror,” a self-described “traditionalist media personality” emailed me after I had written a piece on female sexuality.) Among progressives, especially those who describe themselves as “sex positive,” female sexual self-determination may be tolerated, even lauded. But in their world, a woman who has an affair is still likely to be considered or called something much worse than “self-determined” for having done so. (The echo chamber of obsessional Hillary hatred from supporters of both Sanders and Trump demonstrates that the Left can be as triggered by the idea of female autonomy in general as the Right.) Meanwhile, many advocates of “disclosed” non-monogamy believe transparency is best, and that cheating by men and women alike is unethical. But with the accreted layers of history and ideology, it’s hard to carve out a space where there isn’t a particular pall hanging over the woman who creeps and lies, even within these apparently enlightened arrangements. Everyone, I learned, seems to have a point of view about the woman who refuses sexual exclusivity, whether she does so forthrightly or on the down-low.

• From Untrue (2018)

  The sex-positive performer was a dark-haired dominatrix in all black. Her sub (or submissive) was like a blonde rag doll in the hands of her mistress, who capably attached the leather cuffs she wore on her wrists to the suspension machine overhead. Then the domme—I thought of her as the alpha female—started whipping her, gently at first, with a cat-o’-nine. Gradually, she started bringing the leather fringes down harder and harder on the woman’s bottom. Occasionally she stopped to walk around in front of her and give her a long, lingering kiss. The room was crammed as sixty women, many of them tipsy, strained to see and to hear over the loud music. The dominatrix unhooked her sub and came over to the couch where I sat with the transsexual and the Canadians, who seemed to evaporate. Alpha-domme leaned down and asked me something I didn’t understand. “Can you move over a little so I can give her a spanking here?” she repeated. I did. She sat near me on the couch. The submissive stretched out across her mistress’s lap and rested her head on mine. The domme reached her arm up and cracked it down hard on her sub’s bottom. The woman gave a little cry and smiled, clearly enjoying herself. After a few more minutes of this, the dominatrix asked whether I’d like to try. She was being generous and affiliative, doing a little coalition building, perhaps, by offering to share her partner with me, and I considered for a long moment how much it was like Louise tossing half her celery stalk to Parish. I thought of how my husband had granted me permission—it grated me still to think of the term he had used—and encouraged me to participate rather than just observe. I wondered whether etiquette required me to accept her offer. Then I thanked her and said no. The sub writhed under her mistress’s hand for several minutes more until the spanking was over. The party seemed to thin out, and I wondered whether it was ending early. Then I realized that lots of women, excited by the performance and the evening, had headed for the bedrooms.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  And the fountains pounded upwards, as if to cling to the light, and fell with only the slightest wavering of pulse onto the wide grey discs in front of us. Phil must have seen them far more often than I had, but he seemed content to stand and watch. Their mesmerising, impersonal play was a relief. Then first one, and then another, in three downward jumps, was switched off. A painful feeling of emptiness and ordinariness came over me. I turned ruefully to Phil, and looked him up and down for several seconds. As we walked on I wondered if I shouldn’t have used the moment to put an arm around him, even to kiss him. As we crossed the road to the hotel, though we both became more tense, there was a perceptible shift of power: we were entering his territory. ‘We’d better go round the back,’ he said. ‘We’re not supposed to be out front when we’re off duty.’ ‘No, sure,’ I said; then enquired, ‘When are you back on duty again?’ If it was any moment now, it would alter the whole imaginary campaign. ‘Oh, from midnight,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m here. I don’t live here, you see, but when you’re on night duty they give you a room. I’m on nights all this month.’ ‘I see. Where do you live normally?’ I had a hunger to know these facts and to read things into them. ‘Oh, up in Kentish Town. There’s a staff house there—it’s known as the Embassy. Because of all the foreign staff,’ he explained needlessly. We went along by the huge Edwardian façade of the hotel, and I glanced nervously up at its convulsed top stages: balconies, bows, gables, turrets, executed in a sickly mixture of orange brick and dully shining beige faience. Then we cut down a narrow street that sheared at an angle across the corner of the hotel site and revealed the undecorated plainness of its back parts. Phil pulled open a door with a window in it, and we penetrated into a horrible area of store-rooms, rumbling boilers and stacked wicker laundry-baskets. It was like the subterraneous parts of the worst schools we used to play matches against. There were frequent fire doors which closed the corridor into hot, brightly lit sections.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  “The defendant’s motion to change venue is granted,” the judge ruled. When the judge suggested that it be moved to a neighboring county so that witnesses wouldn’t have far to travel, Chestnut remained hopeful. Almost all of the bordering counties had fairly large African American populations: Wilcox County was 72 percent black; Conecuh was 46 percent black; Clarke County was 45 percent black; Butler 42 percent; Escambia was 32 percent black. Only affluent Baldwin County to the south, with its beautiful Gulf of Mexico beaches, was atypical, with an African American population of just 9 percent. The judge took very little time deciding where the trial should be moved. “We’ll go to Baldwin County.” Chestnut and Boynton immediately complained, but the judge reminded them it was their motion. When they sought to withdraw the motion, the judge said he couldn’t authorize a trial in a community where so many people had formed opinions about the accused. The case would be tried in Bay Minette, the seat of Baldwin County. The change of venue was disastrous for Walter. Chestnut and Boynton knew there would be very few, if any, black jurors. They also understood that while jurors from Baldwin County might be less personally connected to Ronda Morrison and her family, it was an extremely conservative county that had made even less progress leaving behind the racial politics of Jim Crow than its neighbors. Given what he’d heard from other death row prisoners about all-white juries, Walter worried about the venue change as well. But he still put his faith in this fact: No one could hear the evidence and believe that he committed this crime. He just didn’t believe that a jury, black or white, could convict him on the nonsensical story told by Ralph Myers—not when he had an unquestionable alibi with close to a dozen witnesses. The February trial was postponed. Once again, Ralph Myers was having second thoughts. After months in the county jail, away from death row, Myers again realized he didn’t want to implicate himself in a murder he had not committed. He waited until the morning that the trial was set to begin before he told investigators that he could not testify because what they wanted him to say was not true. He tried to wrangle for more favorable treatment but decided that there was no punishment he was willing to accept for a murder he hadn’t committed.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Thousands of miles away, several of the women I spoke with in the US told me that infidelity was likely to “stick to [them]” in a different way than it would a man, explaining it to me as if it were the most obvious point in the world when I asked them to elaborate. Yes, too many women die at the hands of jealous husbands and lovers, and in some countries this is still excused as a “crime of passion.” But here it is often the linked fears of reputational assault and of being caught and divorced that inform women’s decisions about monogamy. These fears also inform a male partner’s decisions about sexual exclusivity. However, there is an important difference underlying the choices heterosexual men and women make when it comes to risking infidelity. Even in regions of the world with “no-fault” type practices, divorce can be an emotional and economic trauma, but it is most especially so for women. In spite of a widely embraced stereotype of the gold digger taking her hapless husband to the cleaners, women tend to fare markedly worse financially than men in the breakup of a marriage. In a 2008 study, the Institute for Social and Economic Research found that 27 percent of women fall into poverty post-divorce—triple the rate of men. Much of that has to do with women having left or never having entered the workforce in order to raise kids. But even those who work before, during, or after their marriage experience a 20 percent drop in income when their marriages end, on average (the poverty rate for women who are separated is a staggering 27 percent, just under three times the rate for separated men). And effects of this drop are long-lasting and profound: across the board, women’s incomes tend never to reach pre-split levels post-divorce. One report found that divorced women had assets valued at 90 percent less than their married peers. Women are no fools—they see these numbers and statistics and realities played out in the lives of their sisters, girlfriends, and female colleagues, and they take note: divorce costs plenty. Such concerns can reinforce what comes to look more like compulsory monogamy than a choice to remain sexually exclusive. For Sarah, divorce would mean sacrifices, everything from struggling to pay a mortgage and run a household on her own to forgoing relative luxuries like the summer sleepaway camp the kids loved. These considerations, big and small, and the idea that her own desires, including her sexual desires, meant she and especially her kids might have less, had prevented her from initiating a divorce, or having an affair and risking getting caught, which she felt would certainly drive her husband to divorce her. “It seemed selfish and at the same time almost masochistic” to initiate a divorce herself, Sarah summarized as we sat there, even though she had long considered it.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I no longer wanted to be there for that, but I didn’t want to abandon Herbert. To leave him in a room alone with people who wanted him dead made me realize that I couldn’t back out. All of a sudden the room felt incredibly hot, like there was no air anywhere. The visitation officer came up to me after I had escorted the family out and whispered in my ear, “Thank you.” I was vexed by her thinking of me as an accomplice and didn’t know what to say. When there were less than thirty minutes before the execution, they took me back to the cell next to the execution chamber deep inside the prison where they were holding Herbert until it was time to put him in the electric chair. They had shaved the hair off his body to facilitate a “clean” execution. The state had done nothing to modify the electric chair since the disastrous Evans execution. I thought about the botched execution of Horace Dunkins a month earlier and became even more distraught. I had tried to read up on what should happen at an execution; I had some misguided thought that I could intervene if they did something incorrectly. Herbert was much more emotional when he saw me than he’d been in the visitation room. He looked shaken, and it was clear that he was upset. It must have been humiliating to be shaved in preparation for an execution. He looked worried, and when I walked into the chamber he grabbed my hands and asked if we could pray, and we did. When we were done, his face took on a distant look and then he turned to me. “Hey, man, thank you. I know this ain’t easy for you either, but I’m grateful to you for standing with me.” I smiled and gave him a hug. His face sagged with an unbearable sadness. “It’s been a very strange day, Bryan, really strange. Most people who feel fine don’t get to think all day about this being their last day alive with certainty that they will be killed. It’s different than being in Vietnam...much stranger.” He nodded at all the officers who were milling about nervously. “It’s been strange for them, too. “All day long people have been asking me, ‘What can I do to help you?’ When I woke up this morning, they kept coming to me, ‘Can we get you some breakfast?’ At midday they came to me, ‘Can we get you some lunch?’ All day long, ‘What can we do to help you?’

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AUGUSTINE. (de Qu Ev. l. ii. qu. 29.) Now having forbidden all thought about food, he next goes on to warn men not to be puffed up, saying, Neither be ye lifted up, (nolite in sublime tolli μὴ μετεωρίζισθε.) for man first seeks these things to satisfy his wants, but when he is filled, he begins to be puffed up concerning them. This is just as if a wounded man should boast that he had many plasters in his house, whereas it were well for him that he had no wounds, and needed not even one plaster. THEOPHYLACT. Or by being lifted up he means nothing else but an unsteady motion of the mind, meditating first one thing, then another, and jumping from this to that, and imagining lofty things. BASIL. And that you may understand an elation of this kind, remember the vanity of your own youth; if at any time while by yourself you have thought about life and promotions, passing rapidly from one dignity to another, have grasped riches, have built palaces, benefitted friends, been revenged upon enemies. Now such abstraction is sin, for to have our delights fixed upon useless things, leads away from the truth. Hence He goes on to add, For all these things do the nations of the world seek after, &c. GREGORY OF NYSSA. (ubi sup.) For to be careful about visible things is the part of those who possess no hope of a future life, no fear of judgment to come. BASIL. But with respect to the necessaries of life, He adds, And your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. 22. in Matt.) He said not “God,” but your Father, to incite them to greater confidence. For who is a father, and would not allow the want of his children to be supplied? But He adds another thing also; for you could not say that He is indeed a father, yet knoweth not that we are in need of these things. For He who has created our nature, knoweth its wants. AMBROSE. But He goes on to shew, that neither at the present time, nor hereafter, will grace be lacking to the faithful, if only they who desire heavenly things seek not earthly; for it is unworthy for men to care for meats, who fight for a kingdom. The king knoweth wherewithal he shall support and clothe his own family. Therefore it follows, But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you. CHRYSOSTOM. (ubi sup.) Now Christ promises not only a kingdom, but also riches with it; for if we rescue from cares those who neglecting their own concerns are diligent about ours, much more will God. BEDE. For He declares that there is one thing which is primarily given, another which is superadded; that we ought to make eternity our aim, the present life our business.

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

  The sexual life course of free women was dominated by the imperatives of marriage. In a society that was never freed from the relentless grip of a high-mortality regime, the burden of reproduction weighed heavily on the female population. The demographic explosion of the Roman Empire, which pushed human settlement into every hill and vale, testifies to a society that was constitutionally geared for reproduction and technologically incapable of putting brakes on its own fertility. The age structure of Greco-Roman marriage was an expression of the need to exploit female reproductive potential to the full, from menarche to menopause. For girls, marriage came early and inexorably. The legal age for marriage was twelve. Most girls married in their mid-teens. The higher classes may have married off their daughters latest of all, sometime in their late teens. Marriage was universal for women; there were no spinsters in antiquity. In a world where death rates were grievously high and unpredictable, early widowhood was common. Although the univira, the woman with only one husband, was idealized, in reality society could not afford to be too fastidious about remarriage, and serial marriage was widespread and unproblematic.34 It would not be hyperbolic to claim that ancient sexual morality, for men and women alike, was immanent in the age structure of marriage. Virginity at marriage was paramount for girls, an ideal rendered practical by early marriage. Though rituals confirming defloration turn up mostly in Jewish sources, it is clear that Greeks and Romans of every station wished to be sure that their wives were pure on the prima nox. Medical texts reveal no sound consensus about the physical proofs of maidenhood. Male anxiety was fueled by rumors of nurses or midwives, the usual carriers of feminine arcana, who knew how to conceal the premarital loss of virginity. Reliable paternal surveillance and pristine reputation were the best forms of insurance. For most free girls in the ancient world, the wedding night may well have been a sexual initiation. Across the Roman Empire, marriage was the single, great rite of passage for women. Whereas the male life course was marked by fine and subtle gradations, the female life course knew only the stark before and after of the wedding. It was the rite of passage, whose timeless core was the procession from the father’s house to the husband’s. The attendants of the bride and groom escorted the pair by torchlight, bellowing out the traditional, bawdy songs about the girl’s impending loss of maidenhood. Several writers of the high empire poignantly write of the woman’s initial experience as a “wounding” or “injury,” and they counsel sensitivity toward any confusion or timidity a young bride might experience. But it was not all timorous quavering: an extraordinary sequence of paintings that decorated a bedroom in a lavish villa from the age of Augustus depicts the bride’s metamorphosis from demure and reluctant creature into a sensual enthusiast.35

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

  ough rituals confi rming defl oration turn up mostly in Jewish sources, it is clear that Greeks and Romans of every station wished to be sure that their wives were pure on the prima nox. Medical texts reveal no sound consensus about the physical proofs of maidenhood. Male anxiety was fueled by rumors of nurses or midwives, the usual carriers of feminine arcana, who knew how to conceal the premarital loss of virginity. Reliable paternal surveillance and pristine reputation were the best forms of insurance. For most free girls in the ancient world, the wedding night may well have been a sexual initiation. Across the Roman Empire, marriage was the single, great rite of passage for women. Whereas the male life course was marked by fi ne and subtle gradations, the female life course knew only the stark before and after of the wedding. It was the rite of passage, whose timeless core was the pro cession from the father’s house to the husband’s. Th e attendants of the bride and groom escorted the pair by torchlight, bellow-ing out the traditional, bawdy songs about the girl’s impending loss of maidenhood. Several writers of the high empire poignantly write of the woman’s initial experience as a “wounding” or “injury,” and they counsel sensitivity toward any confusion or timidity a young bride might experience. But it was not all timorous quavering: an extraordinary sequence of paintings that decorated a bedroom in a lavish villa from the age of Augus- T H E M O R A L I T I E S O F S E X I N T H E R O M A N E M P I R E  tus depicts the bride’s metamorphosis from demure and reluctant creature into a sensual enthusiast. Th

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  No need to choose a particular day. Any day of my life—back there—would suit. Every day of my life, my tiny, microscosmic life, was a reflection of the outer chaos. Let me think back. . . . At seven-thirty the alarm went off. I didn’t bounce out of bed. I lay there till eight-thirty, trying to gain a little more sleep. Sleep—how could I sleep? In the back of my mind was an image of the office where I was already due. I could see Hymie arriving at eight sharp, the switchboard already buzzing with demands for help, the applicants climbing up the wide wooden stairway, the strong smell of camphor from the dressing room. Why get up and repeat yesterday’s song and dance? As fast as I hired them they dropped out. Working my balls off and not even a clean shirt to wear. Mondays I got my allowance from the wife—carfare and lunch money. I was always in debt to her and she was in debt to the grocer, the butcher, the landlord, and so on. I couldn’t be bothered shaving—there wasn’t time enough. I put on the torn shirt, gobble up the breakfast, and borrow a nickel for the subway. If she were in a bad mood I would swindle the money from the newsdealer at the subway. I get to the office out of breath, an hour behind time and a dozen calls to make before I even talk to an applicant. While I make one call there are three other calls waiting to be answered. I use two telephones at once. The switchboard is buzzing. Hymie is sharpening his pencils between calls. McGovern the doorman is standing at my elbow to give me a word of advice about one of the applicants, probably a crook, who is trying to sneak back under a false name. Behind me the cards and ledgers containing the name of every applicant who had ever passed through the machine. The bad ones are starred in red ink; some of them have six aliases after their names. Meanwhile the room is crawling like a hive. The room stinks with sweat, dirty feet, old uniforms, camphor, lysol, bad breaths. Half of them will have to be turned away—not that we don’t need them, but that even under the worst conditions they just won’t do. The man in front of my desk, standing at the rail with palsied hands and bleary eyes, is an ex-mayor of New York City. He’s seventy now and would be glad to take anything. He has wonderful letters of recommendation, but we can’t take any one over forty-five years of age. Forty-five in New York is the deadline. The telephone rings and it’s a smooth secretary from the Y.M.C.A. Wouldn’t I make an exception for a boy who has just walked into his office—a boy who was in the reformatory for a year or so. What did he do? He tried to rape his sister.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  My best years had been passed in travel and in camp, or on the frontiers; I had known at first hand the values of a rude life, and the salubrious effect of frozen or desert regions. I decided to name Lucius governor of that same Pannonia where I had had my first experience in rule. The situation on that frontier was less critical than formerly; his task would be limited to the peaceful work of civil administration or to routine military inspections. Such difficult country would rouse him from Rome's easy ways; he would get better acquainted with that immense world which the City governs, and on which she depends. He dreaded those distant climes, and would not understand that life could be enjoyed elsewhere than in Rome. He accepted, however, with the compliance which he always showed when he wished to please me. Throughout the summer I read with care both his official reports and those more secret communications from Domitius Rogatus, my confidential informant whom I had sent with him as a secretary instructed to watch over him. These accounts satisfied me: Lucius demonstrated in Pannonia that he was capable of the seriousness which I expected of him, but from which he might have relaxed, perhaps, after my death. He even conducted himself rather brilliantly in a series of cavalry skirmishes at the advance posts. In the provinces, as everywhere else, he succeeded in charming everyone around him; his dry and somewhat imperious manner did him no disservice; at least this would not be a case of one of those easy-going princes who is governed by a coterie. But with the very beginning of autumn he caught cold. He was thought to be well again soon, but the cough recurred and the fever persisted, setting in for good. A temporary gain was followed by a sudden relapse the next spring. The bulletins from the physicians appalled me; the public postal service, which I had just established with its relays of horses and carriages over vast territories, seemed to function only in order to bring me news of the invalid more promptly each morning. I could not pardon myself for having been inhumane towards him in the fear of being, or seeming, too indulgent. As soon as he was recovered enough to travel I had him brought back to Italy. In company with the aged Rufus of Ephesus, a specialist in phthisis, I went to the port of Baiae to await my fragile Aelius Caesar. The climate of Tibur, though better than that of Rome, is nevertheless not mild enough for affected lungs; I had decided to have him spend the late autumn in that safer region. The ship anchored in the middle of the bay; a light tender brought the sick man and his physician ashore. His haggard face seemed thinner still under the fringe of beard with which he had let his cheeks be covered, in the hope of resembling me.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Charlie had been slowly stroking his mother’s hair, desperately hoping that she would open her eyes. The blood from her head had saturated the towel and was spreading onto Charlie’s pants. Charlie thought his mother might be dying or was maybe even already dead. He had to call an ambulance. He stood up, flooded with anxiety, and cautiously made his way to the bedroom. Charlie saw George on the bed asleep and felt a surge of hatred for this man. He had never liked him, never understood why his mother had let him live with them. George didn’t like Charlie, either; he was rarely friendly to the boy. Even when he wasn’t drunk, George seemed angry all the time. His mother had told Charlie that George could be sweet, but Charlie never saw any of that. Charlie knew that George’s first wife and child had been killed in a car accident and that was why Charlie’s mom said he drank so much. In the eighteen months that George lived with them, it seemed to Charlie that there had been nothing but violence, loud arguments, pushing and shoving, threats, and turmoil. His mother had stopped smiling the way she used to; she’d become nervous and jumpy, and now, he thought, she’s on the kitchen floor, dead. Charlie walked to the dresser against the back wall of the bedroom to reach the phone. He had called 911 a year earlier, after George had hit his mom, but she had directed him to do so and told him what to say. When he reached the phone, he wasn’t sure why he didn’t just pick up the receiver. He could never really explain why he opened the dresser drawer instead, put his hand under the folded white T-shirts his mom had laundered, and felt for the handgun he knew George kept hidden there. He’d found it there when George had said Charlie could wear an Auburn University T-shirt someone had given him. It was way too small for George and way too big for Charlie, but he’d been grateful to have it; it had been one of George’s few kind gestures. This time he didn’t pull his hand back in fear as he had before. He picked up the gun. He’d never fired a gun before, but he knew he could do it. George was now snoring rhythmically. Charlie walked over to the bed, his arms stretched out, pointing the gun at George’s head. As Charlie hovered over him, the snoring stopped. The room grew very, very quiet. And that’s when Charlie pulled the trigger.

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

  Finally, the relationship between free will and sexual morality presents a privileged vantage on the deep relationship between social structure and Christian sexual ethics. The high notion of absolute freedom that is so deeply embedded in early Christian thinking about sex and sin enjoyed its fullest ascendance in the aftermath of Constantine’s conversion. The fourth century was the golden age of free will. But triumph brought unforeseen challenges. The early Christian notion of free will was a cosmological assertion, forged in opposition to Stoic causality, popular astrology, and gnostic determinism. In its very structure this libertarian model was premised on the separation of the church and the world, and its highest symbol was virginity, as a rejection of all exterior demands on the body. By the later fourth century, with the progressive entanglement of church and society, this model of free will came to look grossly inadequate. In the very generations when Christianity became a majority religion, its leadership was awakened to the insufficiency of the old absolutisms. Discussion of free will changed key, the older cosmological mode giving way to debates over the nature of volition and the absence of material capacities to choose. Augustine came to expound a view of divine grace and original sin that cut against centuries of Christian voluntarism. Moreover, rather suddenly some Christian bishops came to realize that their pure notions of free will were simply incompatible with the realities of life, above all with the centrality of sexual coercion in the Roman sexual economy. The sudden recognition that Christian sexual morality would have to account for those without volition over their sexual fate is a sign of the church’s broader social power from the later fourth century. Most remarkably, this new anxiety led directly to a program of legal reform in which Roman emperors, from Theodosius II to Justinian, attacked coerced prostitution. The campaign against violent sexual procurement is deeply symbolic of the triumph of a Christian logic of sexual morality, rooted in sin, in the order of imperial law and public culture.7

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

  While the advance of the slave trade tended to align pederastic eros with the master’s power, the law protected freeborn boys in ever starker terms. Violation of a freeborn boy was illegal in Roman law. What is underappreciated, though, is the extent to which freeborn boys in the east were gradually fenced off by public force. Dio considered sex with a freeborn boy “an assault” and “an even more lawless violation” than the corruption of women. The law “so far exceeds all else in modesty and faith that to it has been vouchsafed the matrimonial bond, the beauty of the virgin, the bloom of boys.” Seduction of freeborn boys became conspicuously dangerous, but the statutory basis of the crime is a little unclear. In the early empire the Romans gave the towns under their sway considerable control over private law, so that the empire was a patchwork of jurisdictions and legal regimes. But Roman rules had an irresistible influence. Roman law applied to the growing number of provincials who earned Roman citizenship, and Roman governors played an ever larger role in the resolution of disputes. Through whatever channels, Roman officials came to preside over the sexual honor of free provincial boys. Lucian reports that the charlatan Peregrinus, having “corrupted a pretty lad,” paid three thousand drachmas to the boy’s parents, “who were poor, to avoid being hauled before the governor of Asia.” In the early second century, a Roman prefect of Egypt, a member of the most genteel social circles in the empire, was himself undone after seducing the seventeen-year-old scion of a respectable Alexandrian family; the scandal became a cause célèbre in a culture with a ready taste for judicial drama, and stylized transcripts of the trial, before what judge we do not know, still remain.17 Whatever the law commanded, sex with freeborn boys went on. Fathers were endlessly anxious about the sexual dangers that lurked in the schools. The “lover of boys,” it was conventional to believe, only had to bribe the pedagogue or attendant and entice his beloved with a little gift. Philosophers, whose position gave them opportunity, were regularly accused of taking improper liberties with their charges; “in sum all their doctrines are mere words and they are enslaved to pleasure, some cavorting with concubines, others with prostitutes, most of them with boys.” One sign that older patterns endured is the intense reflection on the protocols of consent. The ideal partner was one who knew “the art of assenting and refusing at the same time.” Poets, anyway, could profess to believe that the life cycle still afforded a brief window of indeterminacy: it was wrong to lure a boy into sin in the years before his moral reason was developed, and twice as shameful once the young man was too old, “but between not yet and nevermore you and I have the now.”18

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  This door which the body wears, if opened out onto the world, leads to annihilation. It is the door in every fable out of which the magician steps; nobody has ever read of him returning home through the selfsame door. If opened inward there are infinite doors, all resembling trapdoors: no horizons are visible, no airlines, no rivers, no maps, no tickets. Each couche is a halt for the night only, be it five minutes or ten thousand years. The doors have no handles and they never wear out. Most important to note—there is no end in sight. All these halts for the night, so to speak, are like abortive explorations of a myth. One can feel his way about, take bearings, observe passing phenomena; one can even feel at home. But there is no taking root. Just at the moment when one begins to feel “established” the whole terrain founders, the soil underfoot is afloat, the constellations are shaken loose from their moorings, the whole known universe, including the imperishable self, starts moving silently, ominously, shudderingly serene and unconcerned, toward an unknown, unseen destination. All the doors seem to be opening at once; the pressure is so great that an implosion occurs and in the swift plunge the skeleton bursts asunder. It was some such gigantic collapse which Dante must have experienced when he situated himself in Hell; it was not a bottom which he touched, but a core, a dead center from which time itself is reckoned. Here the comedy begins, from here it is seen to be divine. All this by way of saying that in going through the revolving door of the Amarillo Dance Hall one night, some twelve or fourteen years ago, the great event took place. The interlude which I think of as the Land of Fuck, a realm of time more than of space, is for me the equivalent of that Purgatory which Dante has described in nice detail. As I put my hand on the brass rail of the revolving door to leave the Amarillo Dance Hall, all that I had previously been, was, and about to be foundered. There was nothing unreal about it; the very time in which I was born passed away, carried off by a mightier stream. Just as I had previously been bundled out of the womb, so now I was shunted back to some timeless vector where the process of growth is kept in abeyance. I passed into the world of effects. There was no fear, only a feeling of fatality. My spine was socketed to the node; I was up against the coccyx of an implacable new world. In the plunge the skeleton blew apart, leaving the immutable ego as helpless as a squashed louse. If from this point I do not begin, it is because there is no beginning. If I do not fly at once to the bright land it is because wings are of no avail.