Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  He would have given up all the animals, from aardvark to zebra, to dispatch her on a ship of her own. So now what are we going to do? Speed is necessary. This is no time for making speeches. We cannot wait. What you have to do is this. You have to find us three tubs or troughs - you know, the kind in which you knead dough or brew beer - but they have to be large enough to accommodate each one of us. And obviously they have to be able to float. Once you have them, put enough food in each of them for a day. There will be no need for any more. The waters will go down, as swiftly as they came up, at nine o’clock the next morning.’ ‘What about young Robin? And Jill, our maid?’ ‘I am afraid that they cannot be saved. Don’t ask me why. I cannot reveal the secrets of God. It must suffice that you and Alison and I will be rescued from the flood. You would be mad not to do this. So get on with it. Oh. One more thing. When you have found these three tubs, you must hang them high up from the rafters so that no one will know what we are doing. When you have done all this, and have stored all the food and drink, you must get hold of

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  You may begin showing signs of schizophrenia—like you’ll stare at the word schizophrenia so long that it will start to look wrong and you won’t be able to find it in the dictionary and you’ll start to think you made it up, and then you’ll notice a tiny mouth sore, one of those tiny canker sores that your tongue can’t keep away from, that feels like a wound the size of a marble, but when you go to study it in the mirror, you see that it is a white spot roughly as big as a pinhead. Still, the next thing you know—because you are spending too much time alone —you are convinced that you have mouth cancer, just like good old Sigmund, and you know instantly that doctors will have to cut away half of your jaw, trying to save your miserable obsessive-compulsive head from being cannibalized by the cancer, and you’ll have to go around wearing a hood over your entire face, and no one will ever want to kiss you again, not that they ever really did. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this way of thinking, only that it is ultimately not all that productive. So you might as well try to get something done. And it’s better if contact with another human being is involved. One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline—so it’s useful to give yourself a minimum quota of three hundred words a day. But also every single day a kid needs a break. So think of calling around as giving yourself a break. The truth is that there are simply going to be times when you can’t go forward in your work until you find out something about the place you grew up, when it was still a railroad town, or what the early stages of shingles are like, or what your character would actually experience the first week of beauty school. So figure out who would have this information and give that person a call. It’s best if you can think of someone who’s witty and articulate, so you can steal all of his or her material. Also, of course, it’s just more interesting to be on the phone with someone who’s sort of keen. But these qualities are not absolutely necessary, because you may just be looking for one piece of information, or even just one word, and you do not need a whole lot of background or humor to go with it. And it may also turn out that in searching for this one bit of information, something else will turn up that you absolutely could not have known would be out there waiting for you. For instance, when I was writing my second novel, I got to the part where the man comes over for his first date with the woman and brings with him a bottle of champagne. He removes the foil.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  Every effort to establish identity within the terms of this binary disjunction of “being” and “having” returns to the inevitable “lack” and “loss” that ground their phantasmatic construction and mark the incommensurability of the Symbolic and the real. If the Symbolic is understood as a culturally universal structure of signification that is nowhere fully instantiated in the real, it makes sense to ask: What or who is it that signifies what or whom in this ostensibly crosscultural affair? This question, however, is posed within a frame that presupposes a subject as signifier and an object as signified, the traditional epistemological dichotomy within philosophy prior to the structuralist displacement of the subject. Lacan calls into question this scheme of signification. He poses the relation between the sexes in terms that reveal the speaking “I” as a masculinized effect of repression, one which postures as an autonomous and self-grounding subject, but whose very coherence is called into question by the sexual positions that it excludes in the process of identity formation. For Lacan, the subject comes into being—that is, begins to posture as a self-grounding signifier within language—only on the condition of a primary repression of the pre-individuated incestuous pleasures associated with the (now repressed) maternal body. The masculine subject only appears to originate meanings and thereby to signify. His seemingly self-grounded autonomy attempts to conceal the repression which is both its ground and the perpetual possibility of its own ungrounding. But that process of meaning-constitution requires that women reflect that masculine power and everywhere reassure that power of the reality of its illusory autonomy. This task is confounded, to say the least, when the demand that women reflect the autonomous power of masculine subject/signifier becomes essential to the construction of that autonomy and, thus, becomes the basis of a radical dependency that effectively undercuts the function it serves. But further, this dependency, although denied, is also pursued by the masculine subject, for the woman as reassuring sign is the displaced maternal body, the vain but persistent promise of the recovery of preindividuated jouissance. The conflict of masculinity appears, then, to be precisely the demand for a full recognition of autonomy that will also and nevertheless promise a return to those full pleasures prior to repression and individuation. Women are said to “be” the Phallus in the sense that they maintain the power to reflect or represent the “reality” of the self-grounding postures of the masculine subject, a power which, if withdrawn, would break up the foundational illusions of the masculine subject position. In order to “be” the Phallus, the reflector and guarantor of an apparent masculine subject position, women must become, must “be” (in the sense of “posture as if they were”) precisely what men are not and, in their very lack, establish the essential function of men.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  The very notion of “dialogue” is culturally specific and historically bound, and while one speaker may feel secure that a conversation is happening, another may be sure it is not. The power relations that condition and limit dialogic possibilities need first to be interrogated. Otherwise, the model of dialogue risks relapsing into a liberal model that assumes that speaking agents occupy equal positions of power and speak with the same presuppositions about what constitutes “agreement” and “unity” and, indeed, that those are the goals to be sought. It would be wrong

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  If the mother is the original desire, and that may well be true for a wide range of late-capitalist household dwellers, then that is a desire both produced and prohibited within the terms of that cultural context. In other words, the law which prohibits that union is the selfsame law that invites it, and it is no longer possible to isolate the repressive from the productive function of the juridical incest taboo. Clearly, psychoanalytic theory has always recognized the productive function of the incest taboo; it is what creates heterosexual desire and discrete gender identity. Psychoanalysis has also been clear that the incest taboo does not always operate to produce gender and desire in the ways intended. The example of the negative Oedipal complex is but one occasion in which the prohibition against incest is clearly stronger with respect to the opposite-sexed parent than the same-sexed parent, and the parent prohibited becomes the figure of identification. But how would this example be redescribed within the conception of the incest taboo as both juridical and generative? The desire for the parent who, tabooed, becomes the figure of identification is both produced and denied by the same mechanism of power. But for what end? If the incest taboo regulates the production of discrete gender identities, and if that production requires the prohibition and sanction of heterosexuality, then homosexuality emerges as a desire which must be produced in order to remain repressed. In other words, for heterosexuality to remain intact as a distinct social form, it requires an intelligible conception of homosexuality and also requires the prohibition of that conception in rendering it culturally unintelligible. Within psychoanalysis, bisexuality and homosexuality are taken to be primary libidinal dispositions, and heterosexuality is the laborious construction based upon their gradual repression. While this doctrine seems to have a subversive possibility to it, the discursive construction of both bisexuality and homosexuality within the psychoanalytic literature effectively refutes the claim to its precultural status. The discussion of the language of bisexual dispositions above is a case in point. 48 The bisexuality that is said to be “outside” the Symbolic and that serves as the locus of subversion is, in fact, a construction within the terms of that constitutive discourse, the construction of an “outside” that is nevertheless fully “inside,” not a possibility beyond culture, but a concrete cultural possibility that is refused and redescribed as impossible. What remains “unthinkable” and “unsayable” within the terms of an existing cultural form is not necessarily what is excluded from the matrix of intelligibility within that form; on the contrary, it is the marginalized, not the excluded, the cultural possibility that calls for dread or, minimally, the loss of sanctions. Not to have social recognition as an effective heterosexual is to lose one possible social identity and perhaps to gain one that is radically less sanctioned. The “unthinkable” is thus fully within culture, but fully excluded from dominant culture.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Anyway, thieves had taken advantage of her absence to steal into the house, to frighten and threaten the girls and their customers, and help themselves to anything that they could lift: the oozing mattresses and rugs, the broken looking-glasses, the few rickety bits of furniture — also my frocks, shoes, bonnet and purse. The loss was not a great one to me; but it meant that I must go home in my masculine attire - I was wearing the old Oxford bags, and a boater - and attempt to reach my room at Mrs Best’s without her catching me. It was quite late, and I walked very slowly to Smithfield, in the hope that all the Bests might be abed and sleeping by the time I got there - and, indeed, when I reached the house, the windows were dark and all seemed still. I let myself in and stepped silently up the stairs - horribly mindful of the last time I had crept, noiselessly, through a slumbering house, and all that the creeping had led to. Perhaps it was the memory that made me blunder: for half-way up I put my hand to my head - and my hat went soaring over the banister to land with a thud in the passageway below. I came, cursing, to a halt. I knew I must go down to fetch it; just as I was about to turn and begin my descent, however, I heard the creaking of a door and saw the bobbing glow of a candle. ‘Miss Astley -’ It was my landlady’s voice, sounding thin and querulous in the darkness. ‘Miss Astley, is that you?’ I didn’t stop to answer her, but hurled myself up the remaining stairs and ran into my room. With the door closed behind me I tore the jacket from my shoulders and the trousers from my legs, and stuffed them, with my shirt and drawers, into the little curtained alcove where I hung my clothes. I found myself a night-gown, and pulled it on; as I fastened the buttons at the throat, however, I heard what I had dreaded to hear: the sound of rapid, heavy footsteps on the stairs, followed by a hammering at my door and Mrs Best’s voice, loud and shrill. ‘Miss Astley! Miss Astley! It would oblige me if you would open this door. I have found a peculiar item in the downstairs passage, and believe that you have someone in there as you should not!’ ‘Mrs Best,’ I answered, ‘what do you mean?’ ‘You know what I mean, Miss Astley. I am warning you. I have my son with me!’ She caught hold of the door-knob, and shook it.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  In 1886, the revivalist preacher Dwight Lyman Moody (1837–99) founded the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago to combat the Higher Criticism, his aim to create a cadre to oppose the false ideas that, he argued, would bring the nation to destruction. Similar colleges were founded by William B. Riley in Minneapolis in 1902 and by the oil magnate Lyman Stewart in Los Angeles in 1907. For some, the Higher Criticism was becoming a symbol of everything that was wrong in the modern world. “If we have no infallible standard,” argued the Methodist clergyman Alexander McAlister, “we may as well have no standard at all;” once biblical truth had been unraveled, all decent values would disappear.55 For the Methodist preacher Leander W. Mitchell, the Higher Criticism was to blame for the drunkenness and infidelity now widespread in the United States,56 while the Presbyterian M. B. Lambdin saw it as the cause of the rising divorce rate, graft, corruption, crime, and murder.57 But the stridency of these claims reflects an anxiety. Christians had been taught to regard the truths of religion as well within the grasp of their minds and to treat the plain sense of scripture as factual. This attitude was becoming more and more difficult to maintain. After Darwin, it was possible to deny God’s existence without flying in the face of the most authoritative scientific evidence. For the first time, unbelief was a viable and sustainable intellectual option. But people were still wary of the term “atheist.” The English social reformer George Holyoake (1817–1906) preferred to call himself a “secularist,” because atheism still had overtones of immorality.58 Charles Bradlaugh (1833–91), who refused to take the parliamentary oath with its invocation of God when he took up his seat in the House of Commons, was proud to call himself an atheist—but immediately qualified his position: “I do not say that there is no God; and until you tell me what you mean by God I am not mad enough to say anything of the kind.” But he knew that God was not “something [a word he deliberately italicized] entirely distinct and different in substance” from the world we know.59

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  For at the top right-hand corner of the page there was a date, and an address - not that of Freemantle House but, clearly, the home address that I was not allowed to know. A number, followed by the name of a street: Quilter Street, Bethnal Green, London E. I memorised it at once. Meanwhile, the woman talked kindly on. I had scarcely heard her, but now I raised my head and saw what she was about. She had taken a little key from her pocket and unlocked one of the drawers in the desk. She was saying,‘... not something we make a habit of doing, at all; but I can see that you are very weary. If you take a bus from here to Aldgate, you can pick up another there, I believe, that will take you along the Mile End Road, to Stratford.’ She held out her hand. There were three pennies in it. ‘And perhaps you might get yourself a cup of tea, along the way?’ I took the coins, and mumbled some word of thanks. As I did so a bell rang, close at hand, and we both gave a start. She glanced at a clock upon the wall. ‘My last clients of the day,’ she said. I took the hint, and rose and put on my hat. There were footsteps in the passageway below, now, and the sound of stumbling on the stairs. She ushered me to the door, and called to her visitors: ‘Come up, that’s right. It’s rather steep, I know, but worth the effort...’ A young man, followed by a woman, emerged from the gloom. They were both rather swarthy - Italians, I guessed, or Greeks - and looked terribly pinched and poor. We all shuffled around in the doorway of the office for a moment, smiling and awkward; then at last the lady and the young couple were inside the room, and I was alone at the head of the staircase. The lady raised her head, and caught my eye. ‘Good luck!’ she called, a little distractedly. ‘I do so hope you find your friend.’ Having no intention at all, now, of travelling to Stratford, I did not, as the lady recommended, catch a bus. I did, however, buy myself a cup of tea, from a stall with an awning to it, on the High Street. And when I gave back my cup to the girl, I nodded. ‘Which way,’ I asked, ‘to Bethnal Green?’ I had never been much further east before - alone, and on foot - than Clerkenwell. Now, limping down the City Road towards Old Street, I felt the beginnings of a new kind of nervousness. It had grown darker during my time in the office, and wet and foggy. The street-lamps had all been lit, and every carriage had a lantern swinging from it; City Road was not, however, like Soho, where light streamed upon the pavements from a thousand flares and windows.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Scientists no longer considered their discipline a branch of “philosophy,” which had always been interested in metaphysics, and they no longer saw themselves as gentlemen scholars but as professionals. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was not only physicists but geologists, botanists, and biologists who formulated their insights in the exact language of mathematics. As part of their new professional ethos, they were beginning to insist on a “positivist” assessment of truth that excluded anything that was not quantifiable.29 The Cambridge geologist Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873) defined science as “the consideration of all subjects, whether of a pure or mixed nature, capable of being reduced to measurement and calculation.”30 Clearly this could not include God. Because of the marvelous advances in technology, scientists were held in higher esteem than ever before. Science seemed the avatar of progress. It was definite, precise, and accurate; it accumulated truth in a methodical, purposeful manner, proved its theories, corrected earlier mistakes, and moved fearlessly into the future. Impressed by this new professional rigor and eager to share science’s prestige, people in other disciplines were increasingly influenced by its positivist standard of truth. But Lyell’s revelations gave many believers, who were used to thinking that science was on their side, a salutary jolt. In America, after a brief but intense panic, Evangelical churchmen started to pull back from their strict biblical literalism. But they still relied on the argument from design, and few were aware of the disturbing new evidence that life itself—not merely the earth’s crust—had evolved from “lower” to “higher” forms. The fossil record showed that innumerable species had failed to survive; instead of a neat design, the geologists were uncovering a natural history of pain, death, and racial extinction. In 1844, the popular Scottish writer Robert Chambers (1802–71) published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, arguing that scientists would soon prove that there was a purely natural explanation for the development of life. But others tried to “baptize” these new discoveries. For the Swiss American Harvard professor Louis Agassiz (1807–73) this struggle had been part of God’s grand design;31 God had simply been preparing the earth for its human inhabitants. Agassiz saw evidence of the divine Mind in the symmetry of nature, in which patterns were repeated in every vertebrate. This could not have been accidental: an “intelligent and intelligible connection between the facts of nature must be looked upon as a direct proof of the existence of a thinking God.”32

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Yet Mather showed how easily old beliefs could coexist with the new. During the 1680s, he had warned his congregations that Satan regarded New England as his own province and had fought a bitter campaign against the colonists. Satan himself was responsible for the Indian Wars, the smallpox epidemics, and the decline in piety that had caused such anxiety in the Puritan community. In his Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions (1689), Mather did much to fan the fears that exploded in the infamous Salem witch trials (1692), in which he took a leading role. His faith in scientific rationality had not been able to assuage his own inner demons or his conviction that evil spirits lurked everywhere, poised to overthrow the colony. But despite the explosion of irrationality in Salem, educated Americans were able to participate in the philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment. In both Europe and the American colonies, an elite group of intellectuals was convinced that humanity was beginning to leave superstition behind and was on the brink of a glorious new era. Science gave them greater control over nature than had ever been achieved before; people were living longer and felt more confident about the future. Already some Europeans had begun to insure their lives.6 The rich were now prepared to reinvest capital systematically on the basis of continuing innovation and in the firm expectation that trade would continue to improve. In order to keep abreast of these exciting developments, religion would have to change, so Enlightenment philosophers developed a new form of theism, based entirely on reason and Newtonian science, which they called Deism. It is not true that Deism was a halfway house to an outright denial of God.7 Deists were passionate about God and almost obsessed with religion. Like Newton, they believed that they had discovered the primordial faith that lay beneath the ancient biblical account. They spread their rational religion with near-missionary zeal, preaching salvation through knowledge and education. Ignorance and superstition had become the new Original Sins. The theologians Matthew Tindal (1655–1733) and John Toland (1670–1722) in the British Isles, the philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) in France, and the scientist, statesman, and philosopher Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) and the statesman Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) in America all sought to bring faith under the control of reason. The Enlightenment philosophes wanted every single person to grasp the truths unveiled by science and learn to reason and discriminate correctly.8 Inspired by Newton’s vision of a universe ruled by immutable laws, they were offended by a God who intervened erratically in nature, working miracles and revealing “mysteries” that were not accessible to our reasoning powers. Voltaire defined Deism in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764). Like Newton, he thought that true religion should be “easy,” its truths clearly discernible, and, above all, it should be tolerant.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  A God who interfered with human freedom was a tyrant, not so different from the human tyrants who had wrought such havoc in recent history. A God envisaged as a person in a world of his own, an “ego” relating to a “thou,” was simply a being. Even the Supreme Being was just another being, the final item in the series. It was, Tillich insisted, an “idol,” a human construction that had become absolute. As recent history had shown, human beings were chronically predisposed to idolatry. The “idea that the human mind is a perpetual manufacturer of idols is one of the deepest things which can be said about our thinking of God,” Tillich remarked. “Even orthodox theology is nothing other than idolatry.”60 An atheism that passionately rejected a God that had been reduced to a mere being was a religious act. For centuries, symbols such as “God” or “providence” enabled people to look through the ebb and flow of temporal life to glimpse Being itself. This helped them to endure the terror of life and the horror of death, but now, Tillich argued, many had forgotten how to interpret the old symbolism and regarded it as purely factual. Hence, these symbols had become opaque; transcendence no longer shone through them. When this happened they died and lost their power, so when we spoke of these symbols in a literal manner, we made statements that were inaccurate and untrue. That was why, like so many premodern theologians, Tillich could state without qualification: “God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.”61 This was not, as many of his contemporaries believed, an atheistic statement: We can no longer speak of God easily to anybody, because he will immediately question: “Does God exist?” Now the very asking of that question signifies that the symbols of God have become meaningless. For God, in the question, has become one of the innumerable objects in time and space which may or may not exist. And this is not the meaning of God at all.62 God could never be an object of cognition, like the objects and people we see all around us. To look through the finite symbol to the reality—the God beyond “God” that lies beyond theism—demands courage; we have to confront the dead symbol to find “the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.“63

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  26 AT HARVARD she called herself Victoria. Maia, her freshman roommate, an elfin princess from New Jersey, with colorless braces on her teeth—Don’t even ask! It’s my second round of orthodontia. My parents are thinking of suing—took one look at Bru’s picture and said, “God ... what a great-looking guy. I love those rugged, outdoorsy types. Where’s he go to school?” “He’s out of school.” “Really. What’s he do?” “He’s in construction.” “Construction?” “He works for his uncles. They build houses ... on the Vineyard.” “Oh, wow ... the Vineyard. I hear that’s a great place. So where’d he go to school?” “On the island.” “Really? There’s, like, a college on the island?” She hated Maia already and they’d just met. The freshman class was filled with high school valedictorians, people who’d scored in the high fifteen hundreds on their Boards. They were talented, brilliant, intense, and competitive, used to being number one in everything they tried. Graduating second in her class from Mountain Day meant nothing at Harvard. It was a joke. She couldn’t imagine why they’d admitted her. She was out of her league, to use Tawny’s expression. Even her roommate had bagged straight A’s. At least that’s what she claimed. She drove Vix up the wall with her running commentary and questions. Not that she answered any of them with more than a yes, no, or maybe, not since that first day. And the way Maia bit her fingernails as she studied, like a hungry gerbil. Vix had fantasies of tying her hands behind her back, or painting her nails with some vile-tasting substance that would send Maia racing across the hall to the bathroom. She couldn’t wait until Maia crashed at night so she could have some peace and quiet in their room.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Abby IT’S HER FIRST TRIP to Santa Fe and she’s anxious about meeting Phoebe at graduation. She wears her taupe Armani, a string of pearls, little heels. She’s going for an elegant, understated look. But she sees right away she’s got it all wrong. The other women gathered in the quad at the Mountain Day School are dressed like cowgirls. “At best, Linda Evans in The Big Valley—at worst, Dale Evans as herself.” She wishes Lamb hadn’t dropped her off while he went to park. The Countess rushes to her side. Precious Girl, she cries, taking her arm, leading her to a striking woman in fringed leather, silver and turquoise jewelry, her hair braided. Darlings ... the Countess coos, you two really must get to know one another. After all, you’ve had the same husband, you share the same children. Her instinct is to run, but her feet won’t move. She can’t swallow. Phoebe breaks the ice first. What a wicked girl you are! she tells the Countess, who laughs heartily, then excuses herself to greet someone else, as if she’s the hostess at a garden party, leaving her alone with Phoebe, who leans close and says, They don’t call her the Cuntess for nothing! She imagines them in bed together, Phoebe and Lamb, then shuts her eyes tight, trying to erase the picture. She hadn’t expected her to be so exotically beautiful, the long hair, the green eyes. Every male standing in the quad, every straight male, anyway, has his eye on her. And Phoebe knows it. Phoebe WELL, WELL, WELL ... isn’t she something! So chic, so East Coast elegant. In Armani, for God’s sake. And all this time she’d been so sure it would be Trisha. She tries to contain her laughter. She hears Caity warning her—Be nice at graduation, Phoeb, okay? How sweet of Caity to feel protective of Lamb’s new wife, though she’s not sure she likes the idea. Shouldn’t Caity be protecting her? She tries to imagine Lamb and his bride in bed together, but she’s bothered by the image of him holding this woman the way he once held her. Does she have regrets? Let’s just say she has fond memories. Maybe if he’d been willing to do the Aspen thing, the Santa Fe thing, but Boston ... God help her! She wasn’t about to wind up a proper Yankee wife. How ordinary, how boring!

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  So, when he saw his opportunity, he left the mill very quietly and went down into the yard. He looked about him, and finally found the clerks’ horse tied to a tree behind the mill. The miller goes up to it, unties it, and takes off its bridle. When the horse was loose it started sniffing the air and then with a ‘Weehee’ galloped off towards the fen where the wild mares roam. Well pleased, the miller returned to John and Alan. He said nothing about the horse, of course, but laughed and joked with them as he got on with the job. At last the corn was finely ground, and the meal put in a sack, all above board. Then John went out into the yard. He looked around for the horse. And then - ‘Oh fuck! The horse is gone! Alan, for fuck’s sake get oot here! We’ve lost the master’s horse!’ Alan forgot all about the meal and corn, forgot all about watching the miller, and rushed out of the mill. ‘Which way did it gan?’ he cried out to John. ‘How am I supposed to kna’?’ Then out ran the miller’s wife in a state of great excitement. ‘That horse of yours,’ she said, ‘has gone off to find the mares in the fen. Somebody didn’t tie him up properly. Somebody should have known better.’ ‘Let’s put our swords doon,’ John said, ‘and gan after it. I’m strong enough to tek hold of it. It can’t get away from both of us. Why didn’t you put him in the barn, you clown?’ So the two of them sped off towards the fen. As soon as they had gone the miller took half a bushel of flour from their sack and told his wife to bake a loaf of bread with it. ‘They won’t be back for a while,’ he said. ‘A miller can still outwit a scholar. Well, let them go. Let the children play.’ He started laughing. ‘They’ll have a hard time finding that horse.’ So the two scholars ran up and down the fen, trying to catch hold of their horse. They called out, ‘Stay! Stay!’ and ‘Here, boy! Here!’ And they called out to each other, ‘Wait! Go back a bit!’ and ‘Whistle to him. Gan on.’ However hard they tried, the animal always managed to elude them. He was fast. It was not until nightfall, in fact, that they managed to catch him in a ditch. The horse was exhausted. And so were they. They were weary, and wet from the rain. ‘I divn’t believe it,’ John said. ‘Everyone’ll be laughin’ at us now. Our corn’ll be gone. We’re both ringin’ wet. We’ve both been made to look like cocks. The master’ll rip the shit out of us. So will the scholars. And, as it happens, so will the miller. You just wait and see.’

• From The Case for God (2009)

  When Copernicus had presented his ideas in the Vatican, the pope had given his approval; ninety years later, De revolutionibus was placed on the Index. In 1605, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), counselor to King James I of England, had declared that there could be no conflict between science and religion. But that openness was giving way to dogmatism and suspicion. There would soon be no place in the new Europe for the skepticism of Montaigne or the psychological agnosticism of Shakespeare. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the notion of truth had begun to change. Thomas Aquinas would not have recognized his theology in its post-Tridentine guise. His apophatic delight in unknowing was being replaced by a strident lust for certainty and a harsh dogmatic intolerance. The spirituality of silence was giving way to wordy debate; the refusal to define (a word that literally means “to set limits upon”) was being superseded by aggressive definitions of ineffable dogma. Faith was beginning to be identified with “belief” in man-made opinions—and that would, eventually, make faith itself difficult to maintain. The first modern Western atheists, however, were not Christians who had been alienated by the terrible convictions of their clergy but Jews living in the most liberal country in Europe. Their experience tells us a good deal about our current religious predicament. By the early seventeenth century, while the rest of Europe was in the grip of severe economic recession, the Dutch were enjoying a golden age of prosperity and expansion. They did not share the new sectarian dogmatism. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, some of the Marrano Jews had been permitted to leave Portugal and migrated to Venice, Hamburg, London, and, above all, Amsterdam, which became their New Jerusalem. In Holland, Jews were not confined to ghettos, as they were elsewhere in Europe; they became successful businessmen and mingled freely with gentiles. When they arrived in Amsterdam, the Marranos were eager for the opportunity to practice their faith fully.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Upon her head was set a coronet twined from the leaves of the evergreen oak, sacred to Zeus. First she kindled two fires upon the altar, and then performed the ritual as it is outlined in the Thebaid of Statius and other ancient authorities. When the fires were fully lit she kneeled before the statue of Diana, and prayed to her. ‘Oh chaste goddess of the green woods,’ she murmured, ‘to whom all things of heaven and earth are visible, queen of Plato’s dark dominions, goddess of innocent maidens - you have seen into my heart for many years. You know my desire. I hope I never shall incur your wrath and vengeance, as Actaeon did when he was turned into a stag. But you understand, great goddess, that I seek only to remain a virgin. I never wish to be a mistress or a wife. I am a part of your order of maidens, devoted to hunting and not to love. I long to walk in the wild woods, never to marry and never to bear children. I have never wished to lie with any man. So help me now. As goddess of the chase, the moon and the underworld, cast your triune grace upon me. Cure Palamon, and also Arcite, of their passion for me. Restore love and peace between them, and turn their hearts away from me. Let all the flames of burning love and hot desire be quenched. Assuage their violent torment and put out their fire. Or, at the very least, send them other loves. But if you will not vouchsafe this favour to me, and if my destiny will not be as I wish, then I ask you this. If I must have Arcite or Palamon, grant me the one who loves me best. Yet let it not come to that. Behold, goddess of chaste purity, one who kneels before you weeping bitter tears. Since you are maid and preserver of us all, I pray you keep my maidenhead intact. As a virgin, I will serve you all my life.’ The bright flames lit up the altar, while Emily kneeled in prayer. But then to her amazement one of the fires was suddenly extinguished, only to flare up again; after that the other fire went out and, as it died away, there came a great crackling and roaring as of wet branches burning in a heap. From each of the branches of the fire there now dripped blood, drop upon drop falling to the floor of the temple. Emily was confused and terribly alarmed. What was this? In her fear she cried out like a mad woman. She broke down and wept. But at that moment she had a vision of Diana. The apparition of the goddess stood before her, with hunter’s bow in hand, and spoke thus. ‘Daughter, cast off your melancholy.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  This doesn’t mean that all minority practices are to be condoned or celebrated, but it does mean that we ought to be able to think them before we come to any kinds of conclusions about them. What worried me most were the ways that the panic in the face of such practices rendered them unthinkable. Is the breakdown of gender binaries, for instance, so monstrous, so frightening, that it must be held to be definitionally impossible and heuristically precluded from any effort to think gender? Some of these kinds of presumptions were found in what was called “French Feminism” at the time, and they enjoyed great popularity among literary scholars and some social theorists. Even as I opposed what I took to be the heterosexism at the core of sexual difference fundamentalism, I also drew from French poststructuralism to make my points. My work in Gender Trouble turned out to be one of cultural translation. Poststructuralist theory was brought to bear on U.S. theories of gender and the political predicaments of feminism. If in some of its guises, poststructuralism appears as a formalism, aloof from questions of social context and political aim, that has not been the case with its more recent American appropriations. Indeed, my point was not to “apply” poststructuralism to feminism, but to subject those theories to a specifically feminist reformulation. Whereas some defenders of poststructuralist formalism express dismay at the avowedly “thematic” orientation it receives in works such as Gender Trouble, the critiques of poststructuralism within the cultural Left have expressed strong skepticism toward the claim that anything politically progressive can come of its premises. In both accounts, however, poststructuralism is considered something unified, pure, and monolithic. In recent years, however, that theory, or set of theories, has migrated into gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial and race studies. It has lost the formalism of its earlier instance and acquired a new and transplanted life in the domain of cultural theory. There are continuing debates about whether my own work or the work of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spival, or Slavoj Žižek belongs to cultural studies or critical theory, but perhaps such questions simply show that the strong distinction between the two enterprises has broken down. There will be theorists who claim that all of the above belong to cultural studies, and there will be cultural studies practitioners who define themselves against all manner of theory (although not, significantly, Stuart Hall, one of the founders of cultural studies in Britain). But both sides of the debate sometimes miss the point that the face of theory has changed precisely through its cultural appropriations. There is a new venue for theory, necessarily impure, where it emerges in and as the very event of cultural translation. This is not the displacement of theory by historicism, nor a simple historicization of theory that exposes the contingent limits of its more generalizable claims.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  In the poêle , Descartes turned Montaigne’s skepticism on its head and made the experience of doubt the foundation of certainty. First, he insisted, the thinker must empty his mind of everything that he thought he knew. He must, he told himself, “accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognize to be so: that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitation and prejudice in judgments, and to accept in them nothing more than what was presented in my mind so clearly and distinctly that I could have no occasion to doubt it.” 11 It was a rationalized version of Denys’s way of denial. 12 A scientist must empty his mind of the truths of revelation and tradition. He could not trust the evidence of his senses, because a tower that looked round from a distance might really be square. He could not even be certain that the objects in his immediate environment were real: How did we know that we were not dreaming when we saw, heard, or touched them? How could we prove that we were awake? His aim was to find ideas that were immediately self-evident; only “clear” and “distinct” truths could provide a basis for his Universal Mathematics. Eventually, Descartes found what he was looking for. “I noticed that whilst I wished to think all things false, it was absolutely essential that the ‘I’ should be somewhat,” he concluded. Remarking that this truth, “I think, therefore I am” was so certain and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions brought forward by the sceptics were incapable of shaking it, I came to the conclusion that I could receive it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy for which I was seeking. 13 This was the one certain thing that answered Montaigne’s challenge. The internal experience of doubt itself revealed a certainty that nothing in the external world could provide. When we experience ourselves thinking and doubting, we become aware of our existence. The ego rose ineluctably from the depths of the mind by the disciplined ascesis of skepticism: 14 “What then am I? A thing which thinks [res cogitans] . What is a thing that thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels.” 15 Descartes’ famous maxim “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”) neatly reversed traditional Platonic epistemology: “I think, therefore there is that which I think.” The modern mind was solitary, autonomous, and a world unto itself, unaffected by outside influence and separate from all other beings. From this irreducible nub of certainty, Descartes went on to prove the existence of God and the reality of the external world. Because the material universe was lifeless, godless, and inert, it could tell us nothing about God. The only animate thing in the entire cosmos was the thinking self, and it was here that we should look for incontrovertible proof. Descartes was clearly influenced by Augustine and Anselm.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  There can be no doubt about it. In the patterns of the stars can be seen, as if in a glass, the death of every man. Yet who can interpret them properly? In ancient times the stars had foretold the death of Hector and of Achilles, of Caesar and of Pompey; their fates were decided before they were born. In the heavens could be seen the siege of Thebes. The stars prefigured the death of Socrates, the adventures of Hercules and the misfortunes of Sampson. Yet the wit of man is dull. He cannot see what is above him. The sultan consulted his privy council and - to cut this story short - he told them of his intention to possess Constance by any means he could. If he could not have her, he said, then he was as good as dead. So he charged them with the task of discovering a way his wish might be granted. How could he get hold of her? Diverse courtiers said diverse things. They argued between themselves and canvassed many opinions. They had plenty of ideas, of course. Some advised the use of magic, while others suggested even more deceitful methods. And yet finally they concluded that the only way to win her was to marry her. It was the best and simplest solution. But then they realized the difficulties. To be quite plain about it, there was such a difference between the laws of East and West that it would be very difficult to find any accommodation. ‘No Christian ruler,’ they said to the sultan, ‘would dream of marrying his daughter to one who professed the sweet teaching of Mahomet. Blessed be the prophet.’ The sultan gave a firm reply. ‘Rather than lose Constance, then, I will be baptized as a Christian. She must be mine. There is nothing else to be said. No. Please. There can be no argument about this. Either I have her or I will die. So go on your way without delay. Travel to Rome. Bring back the woman who has plunged me into such distress.’ What else need I say? There were negotiations and embassies between the two realms. The pope was obliged to mediate between them, too. The princes of the Church, and the princes of the Roman court, were all involved. The Romans themselves were agreed that this was a good opportunity for augmenting the Christian communion. It represented a triumph against idolatry. So these were the terms of the treaty. The sultan and all his kin, as well as the members of his court and government, would be baptized as Christians. After that ceremony was performed, the sultan was free to marry Constance. A great sum of gold was also to be paid to Rome, in surety of his good intentions. The pact was duly signed by both parties. Oh Constance, God help you! Some people would now expect me to describe the feasts and celebrations arranged by the emperor for his daughter.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  The queen thanked her lord for his graciousness and, as soon as she found the opportunity, she called the knight to her. ‘Your fate is in the balance,’ she said to him. ‘You cannot be certain of your life. The day of your doom may be nearer than you think. I will save you, if you can tell me one thing. What is it that women most desire? Be careful! Think before you speak. That is the only way you will be able to rescue your neck from the executioner’s blade. If you cannot give me the answer today, I will give you permission to leave the court. Seek out the answer far and wide. Then return here in a year and a day. Before you go, you must give me your solemn pledge that you will come back and surrender yourself to the court.’ The knight sighed, filled with doubt and perplexity. How could he answer such a question? Yet he had no real choice in the matter. In the end he decided that he would obey the queen’s command. He would leave the court and return within a year and a day. He put his faith in God to find the right course for him, and jumped on to his horse. He tried every town and village, looking for enlightenment. ‘What is it,’ he said to one and all, ‘that women desire most?’ However hard he tried, he could not find a suitable answer. No two people agreed on the subject. Some said that women loved money the most; some said that they prized honour, and others pleasure. Some said that women wanted gorgeous clothes, but others chose sex as the main dish. Some said that women loved to be married, and widowed, often. Some said that they liked to be married and looked after in luxury. The knight was told that a man could win a woman with flattery. Or that any woman, young or old, rich or poor, could be caught by fuss and attention. Of course there were others who claimed that us women really wanted our liberty. We wanted to do as we pleased, and not to be judged. I think there is a lot of truth in that. Who wants to be told that she is acting immodestly? I’ll tell you one thing. If women are attacked on a sensitive point, then they will hit back. Try it, and you will see. Even if we are vicious on the inside, we need to appear virtuous and wholesome. There were other arguments. Some people told the knight that, above all else, women wished to seem discreet and trustworthy; they wanted to have a reputation for strength of mind, and for preserving secrets. That is rubbish, naturally. Women can never keep a secret. Have you heard the story of Midas?