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 A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  In that old, comfortable suburb even the biggest mansions hunkered democratically down on the curb and sat right next to other dwellings. No concealing hedges or isolating parks could be seen anywhere. Even quite massive houses of many rooms and wings engulfed their plots down to the sidewalk. This conspicuousness declared a pride and innocence: we have nothing to hide, and we want to show you what we’ve got. Tom’s house was a Mediterranean villa with six bedrooms and servants’ quarters over a double garage, but its gleaming leaded panes and the front door (thick oak gouged into griffins) loomed up just ten paces from the street. Once inside that door, however, I felt transported into another society that had ways I could never quite master. The Wellingtons were nice but not charming. The Wellingtons gave thought to everything they did. The staircase was lined with expensive, ugly paintings done from photographs of their four children. Their kids’ teeth were bound in costly wires, their whims for sailboats or skis or guitars were lavishly but silently honored, they were all paraded in a stupor past the monuments of Europe, their vacations down rapids and over glaciers or up mountains were well funded—but silence reigned. No one said a word. Dinner there was torture. A student from the university served. Mr. Wellington carved. Mrs. Wellington, a woman with a girlish spirit trapped inside a large, swollen body, made stabs at conversation, but she was so shy she could speak only in comical accents. She’d grunt in a bass voice like a bear or squeak like a mouse or imitate Donald Duck—anything rather than say a simple declarative sentence in her own fragile, mortified voice. The father terrified us all with his manners (the long white hands wielding the fork and knife and expertly slicing the joint). He radiated disapproval. His disapproval was not the martyr’s blackmail but a sort of murderous mildness: if he weren’t so fastidious he’d murder you. We watched him carve. We were wordless, hypnotized by the candle flames, the neat incisions and deep, bloody invasions, the sound of the metal knife scraping against the tines of the fork, the sickening softness of each red slice laid to the side and the trickle down silver channels ramifying back into a bole of blood. The odd thing is that the father’s spirit did not contaminate the house. His lair, the library, was even the sunniest, most relaxed room of all as the two little dogs, Welsh corgies, trotted from couch to front door at every disturbance, their small, shaggy feet clicking on the polished red tiles. The dogs, the children, his wife—all seemed to prosper in spite of his punitive reserve, his tight eyes, the way he sniffed with contempt at the end of every sentence someone else said. “Oh yes,” he said to me, examining his overly manicured hand, “I know of your mother … by reputation,” and my heart sank.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I followed. She brewed us instant coffee. Sitting with a master’s wife discussing poetry or gossiping about the other teachers and kids struck me as “sophisticated,” that game in which grown-ups pretended I was one of them, that my opinion counted, indeed that I was autonomous enough to have an opinion. Nothing I did or said among the other boys came to me naturally. As a result, in every encounter, even the most glancing, I had to be a performer, for at all times I was aware I was impersonating a human being. “Sophisticated” conversation with Mrs. Scott was itself inauthentic, of course, delightfully so, since by its very nature it prized artifice—a release from the vague, always changing but ever-stringent demands of teenage sincerity. I wanted to be sincere but I didn’t know how. I could find no method for it except when alone. Sophistication suspended this anxiety, since to be sophisticated is to adorn oneself rather than to strip oneself bare. Mr. and Mrs. Scott got to like me, perhaps to need me, and they arranged for me to stay up with them after lights-out and after little Tim had gone to bed. Outside their apartment the long corridors resonated with silence. We inhabited a cube of warmth and light and babble. Mrs. Scott (“Call me Rachel”) would descend from her mystic platform and could even become quite chummy. The heat in the whole dormitory would go off at midnight and we’d move to the kitchen and sit around the lit oven, its door ajar. We drank cup after cup of coffee. Soon Mr. Scott (“DeQuincey”) and his wife were confiding bits and pieces of their story to me. He came from a rich Boston family, father remote tycoon, mother perfectionist socialite, three older sisters, all wielding hockey sticks. Little DeQuincey hadn’t been able to keep up, nor did he feel at home in this boisterous female world. Various prep schools followed in a descending, depressing order of academic credibility. The unsavory names at the end of the list were interchangeable with those of mental hospitals or juvenile detention homes. Next, some real hospitals made their shadowy flight over his life (“Quince, don’t go into all that”). A bit of college, some analyst-hopping, more college, a degree in Latin, another breakdown. By this point he’d somehow strayed to Miami, Florida, where two saving events took place: he met Rachel and he converted to what he liked to call “the Church of England.” Night after night the story of their lives came together, as though in puzzle pieces, a clump of sky confining the still-empty silhouette of a tree, another piece shaped like a running dog but turning out to be a child’s elbow against four pickets in a fence. One passage, complete in itself but not yet oriented to the rest, would float wonderfully to its correct position on the board.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  308The History of Christianity II õFor a long time, many white, native-born American Protestants more or less took all of this for granted. They cared about politics, but weren’t very organized because they didn’t see a pressing need. Then the 1960s happened, with occurrences like the civil rights movement, the growth of the welfare state in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, and women’s and gay liberation. These trends seemed to signal the crumbling of traditional Christian culture as they knew it. õThe new activists and organizations that arose in the 1970s, groups like Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, did not invent organized conservative Christian activism. In many ways, the roots of this movement go back to the early days of the anti-communist movement. But these new groups displayed a new level of political savvy, national organization, and institution building. 309Lecture 31—Culture Wars and the Christian Right õFalwell was a fundamentalist Baptist preacher in Virginia with his own radio and TV programs, and he used his huge mailing list to organize his supporters. Falwell deserves a lot of credit for turning conservative white Protestants into a powerful voting bloc. õBut he also deserves much of the blame for the way that journalists in the mainstream media increasingly came to ignore the diversity of conservative Protestantism, equate all evangelicals with the Christian right, and assume Falwell was their anointed spokesman. õOther activists focused more closely on gender politics. Beverly LaHaye and her husband Tim published bestselling books telling women that what they called the radical feminist movement destroyed families. õIn the late 1970s, the campaign to end legal abortion started to become a signature cause for the Christian right. A few activists began making the case that abortion is murder, as well as a symbol for all that was wrong with the modern world. ACTIVISM ABROAD õEven though conservative American evangelicals and their main allies—Catholics and Mormons—were very focused on what was going on in their own country, all these groups were also missionary cultures tuned in to the spread of Christianity abroad. õBy the end of the 20 th century, conservative Christians were feeling pretty embattled in the U.S., but elsewhere in the world, especially the Global South, conservative churches were thriving. ACTIVISM AT BEIJING õThis lecture now moves to the late 1990s to discuss the United Nations. Many conservative Americans resented the United Nations because they viewed it as a meddling bunch of bureaucrats who thought they had the right to boss Americans around.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Musical You do not realize how much you sing until she tells you to stop singing. 26 It seems that you sing everywhere: in the shower, washing the dishes, getting dressed. You sing musicals and hymns and old songs from childhood (from church, from school, from Girl Scouts). You make up songs, too, with lyrics for whatever is happening at the time. She sings along to music in the car, but only when the music is playing. You ask her to sing to you, without music, but she refuses. During a rare moment of clarity, you tell her, sassily, that if she can’t accept your singing, she can’t accept you. It is supposed to be a joke, sort of, but it lands flat. “Maybe,” she says, her voice cold down to the pith. 26. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C481, Taboo: singing. Dream House as Cautionary Tale One weekday, when you drive back from the Dream House, you notice you’re low on gas as you blow past the Illinois-Iowa border. Your GPS tells you there is a gas station off a lonely, wind-strewn exit, and as soon as you get off you sense the mistake. It looks like a long country road; just cornfields punctuated with barns and houses. You keep driving; surely a gas station will creep up over the horizon? But every time you crest a hill, you just see more country roads. Should you turn back? Perhaps a station is just around the next turn? Twilight falls away, and suddenly the landscape flattens and is swallowed by darkness. You pull the car over and consult your phone, but there is no signal. You sit there, breathing deeply. What would your dad say? What would anyone have done in this situation before cell phones? Should you walk? Should you go to someone’s front door? You just want to be home. You have been screaming for a whole minute before you become fully aware of it. You are pounding the steering wheel—your poor car, she has never done anything except your bidding—and howling, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” You don’t know why you are crying. Everyone gets lost.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  I wanted to kiss him, I wanted him to hold me, I wanted to associate sex with something besides fear and guilt. I wanted my life to be shaken up, to go from being who I was to someone renewed. In those months, hazy from lack of sleep and raw with anxiety, I felt like a calculator with someone’s finger over the solar panel— fading in and out, threatening to shut off altogether. Joel, though, seemed to run on his own hunger. I wanted to be like that. I wept the last time I saw him. I was going to college, but I didn’t want to be so far apart. He assured me he was just a phone call away. “Plus,” he said, “DC isn’t that far. Maybe I can come visit.” At school, I had my first kiss, my first grope in the dark. I felt strange afterward: elated and sad and content and like an adult. When it was over, I went back to my dorm room. It was after midnight. I took my phone into the hallway so my roommate wouldn’t overhear, and I called Joel. He asked me what had happened. I told him, one detail after another. He didn’t refuse any of them; just listened until I was done. “What should I do?” I asked him, the question slipping out of my mouth before I could stop it. Until that moment I’d been, secretly, excited, bolstered with the newness of a man’s stubble across my face, hands that went where I wanted them to. But in Joel’s silence, which carried a whiff of disapproval, I recalled the sin of it. For the first time, he didn’t seem to know what to say. Where there had always been smooth advice that felt right and good and clear, now there was reticence. Hesitation. “Ask for forgiveness,” he said, finally. A few weeks later, Joel stopped responding to my calls. I went about my normal routine, but his silence hovered around me. Was he angry about my hookup? Was he—jealous? I panicked. Maybe he had lost interest in me. Maybe I’d crossed some invisible line, committed some unforgivable act. I sent him a few emails, spaced at what I hoped were ordinary intervals. He didn’t respond. A few weeks later, I was sitting in my dorm room on my brown corduroy comforter, trying to decide whether to go to the dining hall, when my phone rang. I told my roommate to go ahead; I’d follow in a second. My mother’s voice was restrained, slightly chilly. “Pastor Jones has been fired from the church,” she said. “What?” “The rumor is, he was having an affair with a parishioner,” she said. “A woman he was giving marriage counseling to.” I hung up; called Joel. His phone rang and rang. I couldn’t believe that he could do such a thing, and then hated myself for judging him.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  where people seem to have their own way of relating to one another, with a secret language of sorts. Or we walk through a neighborhood of a much different social class than what we’re used to—much wealthier or poorer. In these moments, we are aware that we don’t belong, that others are looking at us as outsiders, and from deep within we feel uneasy and unusually alert, although in fact we may have nothing really to fear. We can observe several interesting elements to the social force: First, it exists inside us and outside us at the same time . When we experience the bodily sensations mentioned above, we are almost certain that others on our side are feeling the same. We feel the force within, but we think of it as outside ourselves as well. This is an unusual sensation, perhaps equivalent to what we feel when we are in love and experience a shared energy that passes between ourselves and the love object. We can also say this force differs, depending on the size and chemistry of the particular group . In general, the larger the group, the more intense is the effect. When we are among a very large group of people who seem to share our ideas or values, we feel quite a rush of increased strength and vitality, as well as a communal warmth or heat that comes from feeling that we belong. There is something awesome and sublime about this force multiplied in a large crowd. This increase in energy and excitement can easily shift to anger and violence in the presence of an enemy. The particular mix of people shapes the effect as well. If the leader is charismatic and bursting with energy, it filters through the group or gathered masses. If a large number of individuals have a particular emotional tendency toward anger or joy, that will alter the collective mood. And finally, we are drawn to this force . We feel attracted to numbers—a stadium full of partisan supporters of a team, choirs of people singing, parades, carnivals, concerts, religious assemblies, and political conventions. In these situations, we are reliving what our ancestors invented and refined—the gathering of the clan, massed soldiers parading in columns before the city walls, early theatrical and gladiatorial spectacles. Subtracting the minority who feel frightened by such gatherings, we generally have a love of partisan crowds for their own sake. They make us feel alive and vital. This can become an addiction—we feel compelled to expose ourselves to this energy again and again. Music and dance epitomize this aspect of the social force. The group experiences the rhythm and melody as one, and music and dance are among the earliest forms we created to satisfy this urge, to externalize the force. We can observe one other aspect to the social force, in its reverse form: when we experience a prolonged period of isolation. We know from the accounts of prisoners in solitary confinement and

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  The Avoidant Attitude. People with this attitude see the world through the lens of their insecurities, generally related to doubts about their competence and intelligence. Perhaps as children they were made to feel guilty and uncomfortable with any efforts to excel and stand out from siblings; or they were made to feel bad about any kind of mistake or possible misbehavior. What they came to dread most was the judgment of their parents. As these people get older, their main goal in life is to avoid any kind of responsibility or challenge in which their self-esteem might be at stake and for which they can be judged. If they do not try too hard in life, they cannot fail or be criticized. To enact this strategy they will constantly seek escape routes, consciously or unconsciously. They will find the perfect reason for leaving a job early and changing careers, or breaking off a relationship. In the middle of some high-stakes project they will suddenly develop an illness that will cause them to leave. They are prone to all kinds of psychosomatic maladies. Or they become alcoholics, addicts of some sort, always falling off the wagon at the right time but blaming this on the “disease” they have, and their bad upbringing that caused their addiction. If it weren’t for alcohol, they could’ve been a great writer or entrepreneur, so they say. Other strategies will include wasting time and starting too late on something, always with some built-in excuse for why that happened. They then cannot be blamed for the mediocre results. These types find it hard to commit to anything, for a good reason. If they remained at a job or in a relationship, their flaws might become too apparent to others. Better to slip away at the right moment and maintain the illusion—to themselves and to others—of their possible greatness, if only . . . Although they are generally motivated by the great fear of failing and the judgments that ensue, they are also secretly afraid of success—for with success come responsibilities and the need to live up to them. Success might also trigger their early fears about standing out and excelling. You can easily recognize such people by their checkered careers and their short-term personal relationships. They may try to disguise the source of their problems by seeming saintly—they look down on success and people who have to prove themselves. Often they will present themselves as noble idealists, propagating ideas that will never come to pass but that will add to the saintly aura they wish to project. Having to enact ideals might expose them to criticism or failure, so they choose those that are too lofty and unrealistic for the times they live in. Do not be fooled by the holier-than-thou front they present. Look at their actions, the lack of accomplishments, the great projects they never start on, always with a good excuse. If you notice traces of this attitude in yourself, a good strategy is

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Fangpu had broken this taboo. Had he gone too far? A few days after the appearance of Fangpu’s poster, some strangers arrived on campus from Beijing. They were part of “work teams” sent to schools around China to help supervise and maintain some discipline over the bourgeoning Cultural Revolution. The work team at YMS ordered Fangpu to publicly apologize to Secretary Ding. At the same time, however, they lifted the ban on posters that criticized teachers. As in schools around China, they also suspended all classes and exams at YMS. Students were to devote themselves to making revolution, under their watchful eye. Suddenly feeling free of the yoke of the past and all the habits of obedience drummed into them, the students at YMS began to brazenly attack those teachers who had demonstrated less than revolutionary zeal or had been unkind to students. Jianhua felt compelled to join the campaign, but this was difficult —he happened to like almost all of his teachers. He did not want to seem, however, like a revisionist. Besides, he respected the wisdom and authority of Mao. He decided to make a poster attacking Teacher Wen, who had criticized him once for not being sufficiently interested in politics, which had bothered him at the time. He made his criticism of her as gentle as possible. Others took this up and went further with their attacks on Teacher Wen, and Jianhua felt bad. To satisfy the students’ growing anger, some teachers began to confess to some minor revolutionary sins, but this made the students feel they were hiding even more. They had to apply more pressure to get them to reveal the truth, and a student nicknamed “Little Bawang” ( bawang meaning “overseer,” referring to his love of giving orders) had an idea on how to do this. He had read Mao’s description of how during the revolution in the 1940s peasants had captured the most notorious landlords and paraded them through their villages with enormous dunce caps on their heads and heavy wooden boards—with inscriptions describing their crimes—hung around their necks. To avoid such public humiliation, certainly the teachers would come clean and confess. The students agreed to try this, and their first target for such treatment was to be Teacher Li, Jianhua’s favorite. Teacher Li was accused of faking his switch to communism. Stories began to come out of his telling other teachers about his visits to brothels in Shanghai. Clearly he had a secret life, and Jianhua now felt disappointed in Li. China before the communist revolution had been a cruel place, and if Li was working to bring that back, he could only hate him. Unwilling to confess to any crimes, Li was the first to be paraded through school with the dunce cap and board around his neck. Along the way some students poured a bucket of poster paste over his head. Jianhua followed the parade from a distance, trying to repress his uneasiness at the humiliation of his teacher.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  27Still in Parkington. Finally, I did achieve an hour’s slumber—from which I was aroused by gratuitous and horribly exhausting congress with a small hairy hermaphrodite, a total stranger. By then it was six in the morning, and it suddenly occurred to me it might be a good thing to arrive at the camp earlier than I had said. From Parkington I had still a hundred miles to go, and there would be more than that to the Hazy Hills and Brice-land. If I had said I would come for Dolly in the afternoon, it was only because my fancy insisted on merciful night falling as soon as possible upon my impatience. But now I foresaw all kinds of misunderstandings and was all a-jitter lest delay might give her the opportunity of some idle telephone call to Ramsdale. However, when at 9.30 A.M. I attempted to start, I was confronted by a dead battery, and noon was nigh when at last I left Parkington. I reached my destination around half past two; parked my car in a pine grove where a green-shirted, redheaded impish lad stood throwing horseshoes in sullen solitude; was laconically directed by him to an office in a stucco cottage; in a dying state, had to endure for several minutes the inquisitive commiseration of the camp mistress, a sluttish worn out female with rusty hair. Dolly she said was all packed and ready to go. She knew her mother was sick but not critically. Would Mr. Haze, I mean, Mr. Humbert, care to meet the camp counsellors? Or look at the cabins where the girls live? Each dedicated to a Disney creature? Or visit the Lodge? Or should Charlie be sent over to fetch her? The girls were just finishing fixing the Dining Room for a dance. (And perhaps afterwards she would say to somebody or other: “The poor guy looked like his own ghost.”) Let me retain for a moment that scene in all its trivial and fateful detail: hag Holmes writing out a receipt, scratching her head, pulling a drawer out of her desk, pouring change into my impatient palm, then neatly spreading a banknote over it with a bright “… and five!”; photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall (“nature study”); the framed diploma of the camp’s dietitian; my trembling hands; a card produced by efficient Holmes with a report of Dolly Haze’s behavior for July (“fair to good; keen on swimming and boating”); a sound of trees and birds, and my pounding heart … I was standing with my back to the open door, and then I felt the blood rush to my head as I heard her respiration and voice behind me. She arrived dragging and bumping her heavy suitcase. “Hi!” she said, and stood still, looking at me with sly, glad eyes, her soft lips parted in a slightly foolish but wonderfully endearing smile.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “We have,” said Haze, “an excellent dentist. Our neighbor, in fact. Dr. Quilty. Uncle or cousin, I think, of the playwright. Think it will pass? Well, just as you wish. In the fall I shall have him ‘brace’ her, as my mother used to say. It may curb Lo a little. I am afraid she has been bothering you frightfully all these days. And we are in for a couple of stormy ones before she goes. She has flatly refused to go, and I confess I left her with the Chatfields because I dreaded to face her alone just yet. The movie may mollify her. Phyllis is a very sweet girl, and there is no earthly reason for Lo to dislike her. Really, monsieur, I am very sorry about that tooth of yours. It would be so much more reasonable to let me contact Ivor Quilty first thing tomorrow morning if it still hurts. And, you know, I think a summer camp is so much healthier, and—well, it is all so much more reasonable as I say than to mope on a suburban lawn and use mamma’s lipstick, and pursue shy studious gentlemen, and go into tantrums at the least provocation.” “Are you sure,” I said at last, “that she will be happy there?” (lame, lamentably lame!) “She’d better,” said Haze. “And it won’t be all play either. The camp is run by Shirley Holmes—you know, the woman who wrote Campfire Girl. Camp will teach Dolores Haze to grow in many things—health, knowledge, temper. And particularly in a sense of responsibility toward other people. Shall we take these candles with us and sit for a while on the piazza, or do you want to go to bed and nurse that tooth?” Nurse that tooth.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  8I did my best, your Honor, to tackle the problem of boys. Oh, I used even to read in the Beardsley Star a so-called Column for Teens, to find out how to behave! A word to fathers. Don’t frighten away daughter’s friend. Maybe it is a bit hard for you to realize that now the boys are finding her attractive. To you she is still a little girl. To the boys she’s charming and fun, lovely and gay. They like her. Today you clinch big deals in an executive’s office, but yesterday you were just highschool Jim carrying Jane’s school books. Remember? Don’t you want your daughter, now that her turn has come, to be happy in the admiration and company of boys she likes? Don’t you want them to have wholesome fun together? Wholesome fun? Good Lord! Why not treat the young fellows as guests in your house? Why not make conversation with them? Draw them out, make them laugh and feel at ease? Welcome, fellow, to this bordello. If she breaks the rules don’t explode out loud in front of her partner in crime. Let her take the brunt of your displeasure in private. And stop making the boys feel she’s the daughter of an old ogre. First of all the old ogre drew up a list under “absolutely forbidden” and another under “reluctantly allowed.” Absolutely forbidden were dates, single or double or triple—the next step being of course mass orgy. She might visit a candy bar with her girl friends, and there giggle-chat with occasional young males, while I waited in the car at a discreet distance; and I promised her that if her group were invited by a socially acceptable group in Butler’s Academy for Boys for their annual ball (heavily chaperoned, of course), I might consider the question whether a girl of fourteen can don her first “formal” (a kind of gown that makes thin-armed teen-agers look like flamingoes). Moreover, I promised her to throw a party at our house to which she would be allowed to invite her prettier girl friends and the nicer boys she would have met by that time at the Butler dance. But I was quite positive that as long as my regime lasted she would never, never be permitted to go with a youngster in rut to a movie, or neck in a car, or go to boy-girl parties at the houses of schoolmates, or indulge out of my earshot in boy-girl telephone conversations, even if “only discussing his relations with a friend of mine.”

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  I have been butching up more when I go outside, these last few days. I used to do it for long journeys, but now I feel I need to do it just to go to town. I wouldn’t say it makes me feel strong exactly, but it makes good camouflage. I know this, too, won’t solve anything. If writing about you was going to make everything right, then I’d be right by now. In the past sixty-four days I’ve barely written about anything other than you. I’ve written blogs and poems, half of a one-woman show, tweets at three in the morning that I deleted when I woke up at seven. You have become my cottage industry and, although I hate the thought of that, I sat at my desk with my mobile phone propped against my aging, webcamless laptop and told you, wherever you are, that: Sometimes I call you my rapist, and that feels wrong somehow, but I cannot keep saying “the woman who raped me” every time I mention you, and cannot say your name because I only know your first name anyway, and in saying even that I turn accuser and am too aware how easily my case could be undone, an accuser who’d been drinking when it happened; an accuser who’d consented, at the start; an accuser who, at the time, was presenting as male: an accuser who’d be bound to fail, in court. So I, out of need for variation, name you mine: My rapist. It feels wrong. Too intimate somehow, suggests collusion, a joint enterprise between us. “It takes two,” they say. “Two, babe: me. You.” It smacks of going steady and those creepy ’50s love songs: Every night, I hope and pray this fear will go away, but I cannot say your name, and the woman who raped me sounds clunky and anyway is legally someone who can’t exist: English law defines rape as an act committed only by the male. It’s sexual assault when women do it. As if the two are easily distinguished, but the woman who sexually assaulted me is clunkier still than the woman the law calls impossible, so, sometimes, you are my rapist, and I wonder if, in some sense, that is true: was I the only one? You seemed surprised that I said no. Was it shock that spurred you on as much as malice? Or instead of it? And do I want that? Does it make you better, or me special, if it was only the once? It doesn’t matter if I’m one or one of many. I may call you my rapist but we know that isn’t true. Whatever law or rumor says, whoever else there was, you were never mine. You were the rapist I ran into And I thought This, this is the one that solves it, but it didn’t. Nothing ever does.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Nothing could hurry my father or Old Boy along. We stopped at every bush and every overflowing garbage can behind every silent, darkened cottage. We went all the way down to the deserted village: the store, the post office, the boat works. A speedboat, its bottom leprous and in need of sanding and painting, was turned upside down on trestles. A chain rattled against the flagpole in front of the post office. A woman wearing a nurse’s white cap drove past, the only car we’d seen. We retraced our steps. As daybreak came closer, the birds began to twitter and the leaves on birches fluttered in the rising breeze. Down the sloped shore the lake slowly took on shape, then color. Behind a door an unseen dog yapped at us, and Old Boy became frantic with curiosity. “What is it? Tell me. You can tell me. What is it, Old Boy?” As the sun, like life returning to a body, stole over the world, the beam from my father’s flashlight grew less and less distinct until it had been absorbed in the clarity of something that was new yet again. SIX The more isolated I became, the more incapable I thought I was of resisting my homosexual fate. I blamed my sister and my mother—my sister for eroding my confidence (as though homosexuality were a form of shyness) and my mother for babying me (homosexuality as prolonged infancy). At the same time I recognized that my mother was my best and truest friend, that she alone fretted over my health, listened to my term papers, waited up for my return, attempted to understand my enthusiasms. In my immense world-weariness I decided to become a Buddhist. My mother had for years encouraged my sister and me to find a church of our own, one that answered our real needs. True to type, my sister in her burrowing if vexed drive toward normality had become a Presbyterian. The local church had the most affable, crew-cut minister (former football coach) and the most prestigious congregation (semi-believers in a heaven of jocks, a hell of brains and a purgatory of friendless stay-at-homes). I interpreted my mother’s mandate in a different way. I spent day after day at the library reading through Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East as one might try on clothes—but isn’t Hinduism just a bit busy? Confucianism? Too sensible, no flair. But Buddhism appealed to me. Not in its later, elaborated northern form, the Mahayana with its infinite regress of paradises, its countless bodhisattvas (those compassionate midwives), its efficacious prayers and praying effigies given over to the pornography of worship, squirming nude maidens representing the anima straddling the erect lingam of the meditating animus. No, what I liked was the earlier Hinayana, those austere instructions that lead to an extinction of desire (in Sanskrit, nirvana means “to extinguish,” as one might blow out a candle flame).

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Settle into long-term work? Sell the house and move the family to Florida? Or maybe she’ll rent an apartment in New York City, where she always wanted to live before her responsibilities got in the way. The possibilities are, if not endless, pretty extensive for women like Ellie Newman. At the end of the book, she’s still working out the details, but she knows she’s ready for a change. And one of those changes is getting away from Aunt Ruth. The novel is as much a coming-of-age for Ellie as it is for Karen. During a climactic fight scene, Bill shouts at her: “You never grew up! You’re still Ruth’s baby!” He’s being cruel, but the book implies that he’s also correct—Ellie hasn’t been trained in making her own decisions. Her character arc is about learning to flex that muscle. Finding the fourth dimension is the goal for Ellie; divorce is simply the exercise. And for Judy, clearly some of these issues were on her mind as she was writing. “At the time, my own marriage was in trouble, but I wasn’t ready or able to admit it to myself, let alone anyone else,” Blume explains in the afterword to the twenty-first-century edition of It’s Not the End of the World . She hung on to the life she thought she had wanted for as long as she could. When the moment came to dedicate the book, she chose to honor her existing role as a devoted wife and jotted down, For John. Chapter Seven Money “It’s scary to think about my mother with no money to feed us or buy our clothes.” Before Judy had a job, she and the children lived on John’s income. John controlled the family’s finances and doled out cash for her to pay for groceries and other household necessities. This made her, and all the other unemployed housewives out there like her, vulnerable. If a married woman had no money of her own, how could she leave? Or worse—what would she do if her husband left her ? The women’s movement wasn’t just about personal fulfillment. It was about women renegotiating the terms of their very survival. The realities of divorce woke up a lot of otherwise privileged white women in the late 1960s, said Suzanne Kahn. The divorce rates had gone up for women of color as well, but it was generally white women who were blindsided by the struggle that came next. “The reason that divorce became the politicizing moment for many white women was because they had been so included in the culturally dominant narrative, and also in public policy. Black women were already suffering from many different forms of exclusion, both political, legal and cultural,” Kahn said. From a political perspective, white women had sauntered through their milestones and, at the same time, divested themselves of power. They had gone to work after college, but then quit their jobs the moment their pregnant bellies started to pop.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Saturday. For some days already I had been leaving the door ajar, while I wrote in my room; but only today did the trap work. With a good deal of additional fidgeting, shuffling, scraping—to disguise her embarrassment at visiting me without having been called—Lo came in and after pottering around, became interested in the nightmare curlicues I had penned on a sheet of paper. Oh no: they were not the outcome of a bellelettrist’s inspired pause between two paragraphs; they were the hideous hieroglyphics (which she could not decipher) of my fatal lust. As she bent her brown curls over the desk at which I was sitting, Humbert the Hoarse put his arm around her in a miserable imitation of blood-relationship; and still studying, somewhat shortsightedly, the piece of paper she held, my innocent little visitor slowly sank to a half-sitting position upon my knee. Her adorable profile, parted lips, warm hair were some three inches from my bared eyetooth; and I felt the heat of her limbs through her rough tomboy clothes. All at once I knew I could kiss her throat or the wick of her mouth with perfect impunity. I knew she would let me do so, and even close her eyes as Hollywood teaches. A double vanilla with hot fudge—hardly more unusual than that. I cannot tell my learned reader (whose eyebrows, I suspect, have by now traveled all the way to the back of his bald head), I cannot tell him how the knowledge came to me; perhaps my ape-ear had unconsciously caught some slight change in the rhythm of her respiration—for now she was not really looking at my scribble, but waiting with curiosity and composure—oh, my limpid nymphet!—for the glamorous lodger to do what he was dying to do. A modern child, an avid reader of movie magazines, an expert in dream-slow close-ups, might not think it too strange, I guessed, if a handsome, intensely virile grown-up friend—too late. The house was suddenly vibrating with voluble Louise’s voice telling Mrs. Haze who had just come home about a dead something she and Leslie Tomson had found in the basement, and little Lolita was not one to miss such a tale. Sunday. Changeful, bad-tempered, cheerful, awkward, graceful with the tart grace of her coltish subteens, excruciatingly desirable from head to foot (all New England for a lady-writer’s pen!), from the black ready-made bow and bobby pins holding her hair in place to the little scar on the lower part of her neat calf (where a roller-skater kicked her in Pisky), a couple of inches above her rough white sock. Gone with her mother to the Hamiltons—a birthday party or something. Full-skirted gingham frock. Her little doves seem well formed already. Precocious pet!

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  In my choice of Beardsley I was guided not only by the fact of there being a comparatively sedate school for girls located there, but also by the presence of the women’s college. In my desire to get myself casé, to attach myself somehow to some patterned surface which my stripes would blend with, I thought of a man I knew in the department of French at Beardsley College; he was good enough to use my textbook in his classes and had attempted to get me over once to deliver a lecture. I had no intention of doing so, since, as I have once remarked in the course of these confessions, there are few physiques I loathe more than the heavy low-slung pelvis, thick calves and deplorable complexion of the average coed (in whom I see, maybe, the coffin of coarse female flesh within which my nymphets are buried alive); but I did crave for a label, a background, and a simulacrum, and, as presently will become clear, there was a reason, a rather zany reason, why old Gaston Godin’s company would be particularly safe. Finally, there was the money question. My income was cracking under the strain of our joy-ride. True, I clung to the cheaper motor courts; but every now and then, there would be a loud hotel de luxe, or a pretentious dude ranch, to mutilate our budget; staggering sums, moreover, were expended on sightseeing and Lo’s clothes, and the old Haze bus, although a still vigorous and very devoted machine, necessitated numerous minor and major repairs. In one of our strip maps that has happened to survive among the papers which the authorities have so kindly allowed me to use for the purpose of writing my statement, I find some jottings that help me compute the following. During that extravagant year 1947–1948, August to August, lodgings and food cost us around 5,500 dollars; gas, oil and repairs, 1,234, and various extras almost as much; so that during about 150 days of actual motion (we covered about 27,000 miles!) plus some 200 days of interpolated standstills, this modest rentier spent around 8,000 dollars, or better say 10,000 because, unpractical as I am, I have surely forgotten a number of items. And so we rolled East, I more devastated than braced with the satisfaction of my passion, and she glowing with health, her bi-iliac garland still as brief as a lad’s, although she had added two inches to her stature and eight pounds to her weight. We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour hooks, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  When she starts to have questions about boys, she casually asks Helen to loan her her “sex book.” Deenie and her friends are old enough that their giddy schoolgirl crushes are being noticed and even reciprocated, with all the attendant exploration that entails. Over the course of the novel, she goes from sweatily holding hands with her classmate Buddy Brader at the movies to kissing him in the locker room during the seventh-grade mixer. While Janet and Barbara are out having fun on the dance floor, Deenie stiffens as Buddy starts touching her over her shirt. “I know he was trying to feel me,” she says. “I also knew that Buddy wasn’t feeling anything but my brace, which only made everything worse.” Even though she likes him, her nerves get the better of her at that point and she darts out of the locker room. But the next time she sees Buddy outside of school, at a party in Janet’s basement, things go smoother. After telling him that she can’t take off her brace, Deenie lets herself relax into the moment—mostly. “This time when he kissed me, I concentrated on kissing him back. I hoped I was doing it right,” she says. But when it comes to masturbation, Deenie is more or less in the dark. She leaves the question about it in her teacher’s dropbox because she wants to know if what she’s been doing is “normal.” After Mrs. Rappoport reads Deenie’s anonymous query out loud, it becomes clear that most of Deenie’s peers are underinformed about it, too. “I wasn’t the one who wrote the question but I’ve heard that boys who touch themselves too much can go blind or get very bad pimples or their bodies can even grow deformed,” one classmate offers. That last possibility sends waves of fear—and embarrassment—through Deenie. “Maybe that’s why my spine started growing crooked!” she thinks, while her face gets hot. “Please, God… don’t let it be true, I prayed.” Mrs. Rappoport is quick to correct this line of speculation. First, she tackles the suggestion that it’s only boys who explore their own bodies. “It’s very common for girls as well as boys, beginning with adolescence,” she says. “Nobody went crazy from masturbating, but a lot of young people make themselves sick from worrying about it.” Deenie—who, under different circumstances, might have spent the next four years choking down portions of shame and self-disgust—instantly feels relieved. She’s grateful to have had the class discussion and looks forward to the next one. Unfortunately, plenty of real American kids weren’t quite so lucky. Judy spoke directly to her readers in her books, and sometimes that meant writing an adult character who represented an ideal: a mouthpiece for how Blume believed things should be. Mrs. Rappoport is the model sex ed teacher, tackling Deenie’s question without awkwardness or judgment.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  So she focused on the fasten-seat-belt sign, willing herself not to give in to the waves of nausea rolling over her. Focus…focus…think about Steve, who’d be there when she landed. Should she give him a hug? Would that be too forward? “I actually hate it when I can’t see the ground,” she said. Secretary Patterson took her hand. He smiled at her. “It will be okay,” he said in a very reassuring voice. She nodded. It would be okay. SteveSteve and Phil cut American history, their last class of the day, to meet Kathy at the airport. After umpteen years of American history they still hadn’t made it to World War II, never mind Korea. Phil borrowed his mother’s car that morning, a blue Ford convertible, but given today’s foggy, rainy weather, they couldn’t put the top down the way they’d planned. Who in their right minds would put the top down in the middle of January, anyway? Assuming Steve and Phil were in their right minds, and some people might dispute that, starting with their American history teacher. He and Phil couldn’t wait until graduation. They already had summer jobs lined up at Shackamaxon Country Club as parking attendants. Both the Osners and the Steins were members. Maybe Phil’s cute cousin would spend time around the pool. Yeah, that’d be good. He wouldn’t mind getting a long look at Kathy in a bathing suit. Ever since they’d kissed on New Year’s Eve he’d been thinking about her. He and Phil were already trying to decide which fraternity to pledge when they got to Syracuse next fall. Kathy had given them the lowdown on each. Not that they’d know if they were accepted at the college until April, but with their grades, SAT scores and sports, they weren’t worried. Newark Airport was just three miles from Jefferson High School. They hit some traffic on Route 1 because of the rain but they still made it in plenty of time. They parked in the airport lot, then ran from the car to the terminal. No umbrellas for them. Only pansies carried umbrellas, they told themselves, shaking the water off their heads. They planned to meet Kathy at the gate. Instead they met her mother, Phil’s aunt, who decided to pick up Kathy after all. “In this weather I didn’t want you boys to have to drive all the way to Perth Amboy, then back to Elizabeth.” Steve tried to hide his disappointment. He’d had a different idea about how the afternoon would go, and it didn’t include Kathy’s mother. LauraLaura Barnes didn’t like this weather. She looked out the window of her first-floor apartment on South Street, holding the baby in her arms. Today’s flight was nothing, she reminded herself. Just a Convair 240 on a milk run. Something Tim had done hundreds of times. He could do it in his sleep.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “Some day, Lo, you will understand many emotions and situations, such as for example the harmony, the beauty of spiritual relationship.” “Bah!” said the cynical nymphet. Shallow lull in the dialogue, filled with some landscape. “Look, Lo, at all those cows on that hillside.” “I think I’ll vomit if I look at a cow again.” “You know, I missed you terribly, Lo.” “I did not. Fact I’ve been revoltingly unfaithful to you, but it does not matter one bit, because you’ve stopped caring for me, anyway. You drive much faster than my mummy, mister.” I slowed down from a blind seventy to a purblind fifty. “Why do you think I have ceased caring for you, Lo?” “Well, you haven’t kissed me yet, have you?” Inly dying, inly moaning, I glimpsed a reasonably wide shoulder of road ahead, and bumped and wobbled into the weeds. Remember she is only a child, remember she is only— Hardly had the car come to a standstill than Lolita positively flowed into my arms. Not daring, not daring let myself go—not even daring let myself realize that this (sweet wetness and trembling fire) was the beginning of the ineffable life which, ably assisted by fate, I had finally willed into being—not daring really kiss her, I touched her hot, opening lips with the utmost piety, tiny sips, nothing salacious; but she, with an impatient wriggle, pressed her mouth to mine so hard that I felt her big front teeth and shared in the peppermint taste of her saliva. I knew, of course, it was but an innocent game on her part, a bit of backfisch foolery in imitation of some simulacrum of fake romance, and since (as the psychotherapist, as well as the rapist, will tell you) the limits and rules of such girlish games are fluid, or at least too childishly subtle for the senior partner to grasp—I was dreadfully afraid I might go too far and cause her to start back in revulsion and terror. And, as above all I was agonizingly anxious to smuggle her into the hermetic seclusion of The Enchanted Hunters, and we had still eighty miles to go, blessed intuition broke our embrace—a split second before a highway patrol car drew up alongside. Florid and beetle-browed, its driver stared at me: “Happen to see a blue sedan, same make as yours, pass you before the junction?” “Why, no.” “We didn’t,” said Lo, eagerly leaning across me, her innocent hand on my legs, “but are you sure it was blue, because—” The cop (what shadow of us was he after?) gave the little colleen his best smile and went into a U-turn. We drove on. “The fruithead!” remarked Lo. “He should have nabbed you.” “Why me for heaven’s sake?” “Well, the speed in this bum state is fifty, and—No, don’t slow down, you, dull bulb. He’s gone now.” “We have still quite a stretch,” I said, “and I want to get there before dark. So be a good girl.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The sun made its usual round of the house as the afternoon ripened into evening. I had a drink. And another. And yet another. Gin and pineapple juice, my favorite mixture, always double my energy. I decided to busy myself with our unkempt lawn. Une petite attention. It was crowded with dandelions, and a cursed dog—I loathe dogs—had defiled the flat stones where a sundial had once stood. Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons. The gin and Lolita were dancing in me, and I almost fell over the folding chairs that I attempted to dislodge. Incarnadine zebras! There are some eructations that sound like cheers—at least, mine did. An old fence at the back of the garden separated us from the neighbor’s garbage receptacles and lilacs; but there was nothing between the front end of our lawn (where it sloped along one side of the house) and the street. Therefore I was able to watch (with the smirk of one about to perform a good action) for the return of Charlotte: that tooth should be extracted at once. As I lurched and lunged with the hand mower, bits of grass optically twittering in the low sun, I kept an eye on that section of suburban street. It curved in from under an archway of huge shade trees, then sped towards us down, down, quite sharply, past old Miss Opposite’s ivied brick house and high-sloping lawn (much trimmer than ours) and disappeared behind our own front porch which I could not see from where I happily belched and labored. The dandelions perished. A reek of sap mingled with the pineapple. Two little girls, Marion and Mabel, whose comings and goings I had mechanically followed of late (but who could replace my Lolita?) went toward the avenue (from which our Lawn Street cascaded), one pushing a bicycle, the other feeding from a paper bag, both talking at the top of their sunny voices. Leslie, old Miss Opposite’s gardener and chauffeur, a very amiable and athletic Negro, grinned at me from afar and shouted, re-shouted, commented by gesture, that I was mighty energetic to-day. The fool dog of the prosperous junk dealer next door ran after a blue car—not Charlotte’s. The prettier of the two little girls (Mabel, I think), shorts, halter with little to halt, bright hair—a nymphet, by Pan!—ran back down the street crumpling her paper bag and was hidden from this Green Goat by the frontage of Mr. and Mrs. Humbert’s residence. A station wagon popped out of the leafy shade of the avenue, dragging some of it on its roof before the shadows snapped, and swung by at an idiotic pace, the sweatshirted driver roof-holding with his left hand and the junkman’s dog tearing alongside. There was a smiling pause—and then, with a flutter in my breast, I witnessed the return of the Blue Sedan. I saw it glide downhill and disappear behind the corner of the house. I had a glimpse of her calm pale profile. It occurred to me that until she went upstairs she would not know whether I had gone or not. A minute later, with an expression of great anguish on her face, she looked down at me from the window of Lo’s room. By sprinting upstairs, I managed to reach that room before she left it.