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 Master and Margarita (1966)

  It would be nice to explain that! ‘Well, I hope by now you’ve remembered my name?’ But Styopa only smiled bashfully and spread his arms. ‘Really! I get the feeling that you followed the vodka with port wine! Good heavens, it simply isn’t done!’ ‘I beg you to keep it between us,’ Styopa said fawningly. ‘Oh, of course, of course! But as for Khustov, needless to say, I can’t vouch for him.’ ‘So you know Khustov?’ ‘Yesterday, in your office, I saw this individuum briefly, but it only takes a fleeting glance at his face to understand that he is a bastard, a squabbler, a trimmer and a toady.’ ‘Perfectly true!’ thought Styopa, struck by such a true, precise and succinct definition of Khustov. Yes, the previous day was piecing itself together, but, even so, uneasiness would not take leave of the director of the Variety. The thing was that a huge black hole yawned in this previous day. Say what you will, Styopa simply had not seen this stranger in the beret in his office yesterday. ‘Professor of black magic Woland,’ 3 the visitor said weightily, seeing Styopa’s difficulty, and he recounted everything in order. Yesterday afternoon he arrived in Moscow from abroad, went immediately to Styopa, and offered his show to the Variety. Styopa telephoned the Moscow Regional Entertainment Commission and had the question approved (Styopa turned pale and blinked), then signed a contract with Professor Woland for seven performances (Styopa opened his mouth), and arranged that Woland should come the next morning at ten o’clock to work out the details . . . And so Woland came. Having come, he was met by the housekeeper Grunya, who explained that she had just come herself, that she was not a live-in maid, that Berlioz was not home, and that if the visitor wished to see Stepan Bogdanovich, he should go to his bedroom himself. Stepan Bogdanovich was such a sound sleeper that she would not undertake to wake him up. Seeing what condition Stepan Bogdanovich was in, the artiste sent Grunya to the nearest grocery store for vodka and hors d’oeuvres, to the druggist’s for ice, and . . . ‘Allow me to reimburse you,’ the mortified Styopa squealed and began hunting for his wallet. ‘Oh, what nonsense!’ the guest performer exclaimed and would hear no more of it. And so, the vodka and hors d’oeuvres got explained, but all the same Styopa was a pity to see: he remembered decidedly nothing about the contract and, on his life, had not seen this Woland yesterday. Yes, Khustov had been there, but not Woland. ‘May I have a look at the contract?’

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  This is something that is right and therefore can be relied upon . There can be a universal consensus about this unassailable truth, where mere beliefs might lead to social division and tension, or the incitement of hatred. Yet truth cannot be directly correlated with relevance. I must confess I struggle to see how this truth might give me a reason to get up in the morning, or yearn to make the world a better place. It is rationally incontestable yet existentially irrelevant. As Wittgenstein noted, you can be certain about it, but it seems rather pointless. ‘Nothing would follow from it, and nothing could be explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life.’ 23 With this point in mind, I want to suggest that we reclaim an older concern – namely, considering the existential vitality of a way of thinking, asking how a belief or worldview enables human flourishing and fosters wellbeing. Is this way of thinking liveable ? Does this worldview create a satisfying ‘way of life’? Does it account for our deepest longings and desires, and help us achieve joy and peace? Does it help us to find meaning in life? Or happiness? Or does it repress and limit us, trapping us within a constrained and impoverished account of human existence? In our own time, many people choose to abandon their commitments to worldviews, whether religious or secular, because they find them oppressive in their outcomes, rather than deficient in their intellectual foundations. 24 For instance, when many sought to challenge the moral philosopher Peter Singer’s argument that it is permissible to euthanise severely disabled infants, they honed in on its consequences: the murder of disabled people. Singer’s conceptualisation of the value of a human life – founded upon rationality and autonomy – went largely unquestioned, as did his figuring of severely disabled people as a moral category apart from ‘normal human beings’. Disability advocates, however, protested his lectures – arguing that disabled people, like all people, are capable of being loved and finding meaning in life. Our revulsion at particular outcomes, in other words, can’t be separated from what we think human life is about. And for most of us, intuitively, it doesn’t come down to reason alone. There is now a substantial body of scientific studies that has established links between finding ‘meaning in life’ in lessening anxiety and enhancing wellbeing. Individuals need to feel that their lives and their existence are of importance and value (a condition now known as ‘existential mattering’). 25 We do not know why this is so; the evidence simply indicates that it is so – and is thus important to us. As the writer Jeanette Winterson observes, human beings are clearly meant to do more than just survive ; they need to flourish .

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  At the centre of the difficulty was marriage and celibacy, one of the major issues in Sasanian persecution: the Shahs could detest Manichees and Christians equally because they both belittled the institution of marriage through the programmatic celibacy of their clergy. Sexual abstention offended the Zoroastrian principle that humanity had a moral obligation to have children and to work the land: Zoroastrians saw the monastic vocation of prayer and abstention as an insult to this divine command, and such an offence to the divinity deserved to be punished by death. To counter this, a Synod of the Church of the East held at Seleucia-Ctesiphon (the Sasanian capital) resolved in 486 that all clergy should be married and beget children; the presiding Patriarch Akakios (Aqaq or Acacius, reigned 485–96) echoed Paul of Tarsus in pronouncing that ‘it is much better to take a wife than to burn with desire.’ That did present the problem that, despite Sasanian hostility, the Church contained many monastic communities, and, as the Church expanded through Central Asia, its expansion was driven by missionaries who tended to be monks. In such circumstances, the leadership bent the rules: whereas in the heartland of the Church, bishops were elected by the local clergy and laity, both of course mainly married, in these more remote regions, the Patriarch himself chose bishops for the local episcopal hierarchy. Thus monastic leadership survived in the Church of the East, aided by a resolution of the energetically reforming Patriarch Aba I at a moment of favourable relations with the Sasanian regime in 544 that henceforth the Patriarch himself should be a celibate. Other bishops were forbidden marriage only as late as the twelfth century. [54] It is worth noting how remote much of the argument in these disputes was from the discourse of holiness and virginity in the Mediterranean Churches. There were severe practicalities to consider in a Church dominated by external power: survival and distinct identity. Patriarch Yosep presented his Synod in 554 with a canon on the marriage of bishops, which pointed out that a married episcopate was liable to lead to corrupt appropriation of Church land for the benefit of the family: worse still, a female descendant of the erring bishop might marry a Zoroastrian, and so former Church property might be lost to the ‘entire community of Christianity’. [55] Despite the central importance of marriage for Zoroastrians, their practice of it was disconcertingly at odds with Christian custom. The Church did not have the advantage it had enjoyed in entering Graeco-Roman society where the dominant culture was monogamous; Zoroastrians allowed polygyny, and they also made close-kin marriage not merely an honourable custom but a religious duty, whereas as we have seen the Romans particularly detested it (above, Chapter 3). One can sample Syrian Christians wrestling with the resulting difficulties in their relations with the Zoroastrian authorities through an extraordinary Syriac text entitled The Cave of Treasures , probably composed in the sixth century.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Similar concerns were, of course, expressed after the First World War. Lewis was traumatised by the brutality of this conflict, initially blaming God for failing to prevent it, but gradually realising that the real target of his criticism ought to be human self-deception. Another option is to block out the memory of troubling events or episodes that subvert the plausibility of individual beliefs or ensembles of beliefs – such as the goodness of humanity. The ‘art of forgetting’ plays a significant role in Renaissance literature, allowing ‘those moments that threaten to destabilise – or even to shatter – identity’ to be erased from an individual’s memory, and thus cease to be a threat to a worldview that underlies existential wellbeing. 20 Lewis himself bears witness to this construction of mental frontiers and imaginative barriers, as he sought to keep his traumatic memories of combat in the First World War at a safe distance. Some might see this as a ‘flight from reality’. Lewis, however, chose to see this as ‘a treaty with reality, the fixing of a frontier.’ 21 Lewis realised that there were limits to the ‘reality’ that he could cope with, and had to draw a dividing line between what he wanted to remember and what he needed to forget. A third option is to affirm individual human goodness, while suggesting that social forces give rise to pressures and stimuli that lead good people to do bad things. One of the most influential and thoughtful presentations of this approach is found in Reinhold Niebuhr’s classic work of moral theology Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932). Niebuhr’s prophetic essay recognises the ‘constant and seemingly irreconcilable conflict between the needs of society and the imperatives of a sensitive conscience.’ 22 The pure morality of the individual conscience is simply not transferable to the messy realities of collective human activity. It’s a fair point. Yet others would object that ‘society’ is an aggregate of human beings, so that the problem of human goodness has simply been displaced, not resolved. Held Captive by a Big Picture: Wittgenstein the Therapist In famously declaring that ‘a picture held us captive’, 23 making it difficult for us to liberate ourselves from its imaginative thrall, Ludwig Wittgenstein was pointing out how easily our understanding of our world can be controlled by an ‘organizing myth’ 24 – a worldview or metanarrative that has, whether we realise it or not, come to dominate our perception of our world, in effect predisposing us to interpret experience in certain manners as natural or self-evidentially correct, while blinding us to alternative ways of understanding it. When you are trapped in a worldview, you need a philosophical therapist who can diagnose the problem and propose a solution.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  For Angela could never quite let the girl go. She herself would be rather bewildered at moments—she did not love Stephen, she was quite sure of that, and yet the very strangeness of it all was an attraction. Stephen was becoming a kind of strong drug, a kind of anodyne against boredom. And then Angela knew her own power to subdue; she could play with fire yet remain unscathed by it. She had only to cry long and bitterly enough for Stephen to grow pitiful and consequently gentle. ‘Stephen, don’t hurt me—I’m awfully frightened when you’re like this—you simply terrify me, Stephen! Is it my fault that I married Ralph before I met you? Be good to me, Stephen!’ And then would come tears, so that Stephen must hold her as though she were a child, very tenderly, rocking her backwards and forwards. They took to driving as far as the hills, taking Tony with them; he liked hunting the rabbits—and while he leapt wildly about in the air to land on nothing more vital than herbage, they would sit very close to each other and watch him. Stephen knew many places where lovers might sit like this, unashamed, among those charitable hills. There were times when a numbness descended upon her as they sat there, and if Angela kissed her cheek lightly, she would not respond, would not even look round, but would just go on staring at Tony. Yet at other times she felt queerly uplifted, and turning to the woman who leant against her shoulder, she said suddenly one day: ‘Nothing matters up here. You and I are so small, we’re smaller than Tony—our love’s nothing but a drop in some vast sea of love—it’s rather consoling—don’t you think so, belovèd?’ But Angela shook her head: ‘No, my Stephen; I’m not fond of vast seas, I’m of the earth earthy,’ and then: ‘Kiss me, Stephen.’ So Stephen must kiss her many times, for the hot blood of youth stirs quickly, and the mystical sea became Angela’s lips that so eagerly gave and took kisses. But when they got back to The Grange that evening, Ralph was there—he was hanging about in the hall. He said: ‘Had a nice afternoon, you two women? Been motoring Angela round the hills, Stephen, or what?’ He had taken to calling her Stephen, but his voice just now sounded sharp with suspicion as his rather weak eyes peered at Angela, so that for her sake Stephen must lie, and lie well—nor would this be for the first time either. ‘Yes, thanks,’ she lied calmly, ‘we went over to Tewkesbury and had another look at the abbey. We had tea in the town. I’m sorry we’re so late, the carburettor choked, I couldn’t get it right at first, my car needs a good overhauling.’

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  What had I been thinking? Six days to research, cover, write, rewrite, edit, and deliver an article for a respectable major publication—while simultaneously making an hour-long episode of a show that would (and did) require every variety of bestial, excessive behavior. Even now, there was a Sammy Davis Jr. impersonator waiting for me in the Neon Boneyard, an accordion convention to attend, and more food—always more food, more meals to eat—before I was due, on the last day, to jump out of an airplane at two miles over the desert with the Flying Elvi skydiving team. "Pull yourself together, Ruhlman," I howled over the blaring radio. "Pouring beer on yourself is good. Helps avoid sunstroke. And having an open receptacle in the car is, I'm pretty sure, illegal—even in this state. Now snap out of it. And drive us to Bouchon!" Las Vegas: a bright, hopeful land of opportunity for chefs—or the elephant graveyard for cynical cooks-turned-restuarateur / entrepreneurs? A well- deserved final score for celebrity chefs, after a lifetime of toil; a last cash-out before knees fail entirely and brains cook—or just a soulless extension of The Brand? Was it possible to serve truly good food; maintain one's standards, one's integrity; do good works in Vegas's mammoth, air-conditioned Xanadus, this neon-lit theme park, these Terrordomes of twenty-four-hour beeping, bleeping, and jangling slots? Were these names of recognizable and respected chefs, these distant outposts of empire, simply far-flung knockoffs, expensive reproductions of what were once the soulful, heartfelt expressions of their strengths and dreams —now only farmed out cookie-cutter versions? Or were they just as good as their flagships, the same, only subsidized by the shattered hopes and dreams of the hapless souls two floors down, feeding their disability checks in increments into the endless banks of blinking, uncaring machines? These were the serious moral issues I was grappling with as Ruhlman crushed his size-thirteen foot onto the gas pedal and powered the eight-cylinder red beast off gravel and onto asphalt, toward Thomas Keller's Bouchon, the place I hoped would provide an answer. A few days earlier, we'd visited some usual suspects. Inevitable, really, that we'd hit Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill first. I figured that a purer example of branding could scarcely be found. I was looking for an easy hatchet job. A clear case of reptilian regeneration, a restaurant group expanding unthinkingly, like a chameleon grows back a lost tail. The story arc appeared classic: New York chef becomes fantastically well known on the Food Network, widens operation, opens in Vegas. It's easy, so easy, to dismiss Flay's whole Vegas enterprise with a New York sneer. It certainly does no serious restaurant much help in the gravitas department to locate in the Mega-Coliseum of Uber-Kitsch, Caesars Palace, among the Italianate statuary, the staff in togas, the gurgling fountains and Celine Dion gift shop. Flay's mug looks down on diners and punters alike from a giant JumboTron over the slots—in a continuous loop of clips from his television shows.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  In the large, well-appointed living room, on an enormous flat-screen TV set among book-lined shelves, a CNN anchor drones on about a world that seems, right now, very far away. A bottle of champagne chills in a silver ice bucket on the suitable-for-six dining room table. But I don't think I'll be drinking it tonight. Welcome to the world of ResidenSea—or The World, as our remarkable vessel is named—644.2 feet long, with 106 private residences and fifty-nine rental apartments and studios. Not a cruise ship. Not a mega-yacht. She is, as the literature proudly states, "a floating resort community of like-minded persons who will settle for nothing but the very best," the "ne plus ultra of voyaging," a self-sufficient neighborhood of luxury homes "at sea continuously circumnavigating the globe." In short, it's a big, swank, ridiculously well-fitted-out boat on which rich people can buy their own homes, dropping in or jetting off as they see fit as it wanders from continent to continent. "We'll be trapped like rats," protested Nancy, my wife, when I told her where we were going. "The rich are more boring than you and me," she said. "You want to be penned up in a floating prison with a bunch of mummies in cruise-wear? Are you insane? I am not playing shuffleboard. I am not going to see Red Buttons or Kathie Lee. And I am not contracting the Norwalk virus so you can write some stupid story. And I am not going to be your comedic device again." She was right in the middle of reading Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, about a luxury cruise with similarly grandiose claims, a book I now regretted giving her. "This ain't the Love Boat, sweetheart," I protested. There are no organized dinner seatings. No limbo contests on the Lido deck. Gopher and Julie are nowhere to be found. "It'll be great, honey! And it's free! The magazine'll pay for it! C'mon! Think of it like . . . like Gilligan's Island. Only it'll be a five-day cruise, not three hours, and with what they charge, you can be assured we won't end up trying to build a desalinization plant out of coconuts. You know how much money you gotta have to take a trip on this thing? C'mon! Let's live large!" Residents of The World, I hastened to point out, do not sleep in anything remotely resembling a "cabin." Residential apartments (and we'd be staying in one) range in size from 1,106 to an astonishing 3,242 square feet, each with "state-of-the-art kitchens," two to six bedrooms, living and dining areas, and a veranda. Four full-service restaurants, a gourmet market and deli, shops, numerous bars, a nightclub, casino, library, business center, theater, health spa, swimming pool, putting greens—and, believe it or not, a tennis court—awaited our attention should we care to make use of it. "C'mon! We'll pretend we're a retired South American dictator's idiot son and wife! Let's live a little!

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  But it was my only chance. I was just tying up for my morning shot when they walked in with a pass key. It was a special kind you can use even when the door is locked from the inside with a key in the lock. On the table in front of me was a packet of junk, spike, syringe -- I got the habit of using a regular syringe in Mexico and never went back to using a dropper -- alcohol, cotton and a glass of water. "Well well," says O'Brien.... "Long time no see eh?" "Put on your coat, Lee," says Hauser. He had his gun out. He always has it out when he makes a pinch for the psychological effect and to forestall a rush for toilet, sink or window. "Can I take a bang first, boys?" I asked.... "There's plenty here for evidence...." I was wondering how I could get to my suitcase if they said no. The case wasn't locked, but Hauser had the gun in his hand. "He wants a shot," said Hauser. "Now you know we can't do that, Bill," said O'Brien in his sweet con voice, dragging out the name with an oily, insinuating familiarity, brutal and obscene. He meant, of course, "What can you do for us , Bill?" He looked at me and smiled. The smile stayed there too long, hideous and naked, the smile of an old painted pervert, gathering all the negative evil of O'Brien's ambiguous function. "I might could set up Marty Steel for you," I said. I knew they wanted Marty bad. He'd been pushing for five years, and they couldn't hang one on him. Marty was an oldtimer, and very careful about who he served. He had to know a man and know him well before he would pick up his money. No one can say they ever did time because of me. My rep is perfect, but still Marty wouldn't serve me because he didn't know me long enough. That's how skeptical Marty was. "Marty?" said O'Brien. "Can you score from him?" "Sure I can." They were suspicious. A man can't be a cop all his life without developing a special set of intuitions. "O.K.," said Hauser finally. "But you'd better deliver, Lee." "I'll deliver all right. Believe me I appreciate this." I tied up for a shot, my hands trembling with eagerness, an archetype dope fiend. "Just an old junky, boys, a harmless old shaking wreck of a junky." That's the way I put it down. As I had hoped, Hauser looked away when I started probing for a vein. It's a wildly unpretty spectacle. O'Brien was sitting on the arm of a chair smoking an Old Gold, looking out the window with that dreamy what I'll do when I get my pension look. I hit a vein right away. A column of blood shot up into the syringe for an instant sharp and solid as a red cord.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  plagiarized. The sudden male preoccupation with a primordial human habit in the eighteenth century is yet another symptom of the age of individual choice, for few pursuits are more shaped by individual decision than masturbation. It must have been encouraged by the general development of greater privacy in the design of northern European housing, and the value on personal privacy that sprang out of that: many more sexual activities could now take place in private than would have been the case for earlier generations. [30] Society’s inability to control masturbation unnerved the self-confident philosophe or the moralizing clergyman just as much as did the self-assertion of women or the public emergence of homosexuality. At the end of the century, the lifelong bachelor Immanuel Kant accompanied his exposition of Enlightenment with extended intemperate remarks about masturbation: he loaded ‘self-abuse’ with preconceptions shaped more by personal dread than by logic, condemning it as worse than self-murder, that is, suicide. It was the ultimate enemy of the mature government of the self that Kant proclaimed as Enlightenment. This was in the context of his affirmation that any sexual act is of itself automatically debasing: ‘a stance almost religious in its dourness’, in the splendid phrase of one modern commentator on the German Enlightenment and society. [31] THE CHANCE TO

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  THE COUNTY CLERK The County Clerk has his office in a huge red brick building known as the Old Court House. Civil cases are, in fact, tried there, the proceeding inexorably dragging out until the contestants die or abandon litigation. This is due to the vast number of records pertaining to absolutely everything, all filed in the wrong place so that no one but the County Clerk and his staff of assistants can find them, and he often spends years in the search. In fact, he is still looking for material relative to a damage suit that was settled out of court in 1910. Large sections of the Old Court House have fallen in ruins, and others are highly dangerous owing to frequent cave-ins. The County Clerk assigns the more dangerous missions to his assistants, many of whom have lost their lives in the service. In 1912 two hundred and seven assistants were trapped in a collapse of the North-by- North-East wing. When suit is brought against anyone in the Zone, his lawyers connive to have the case transferred to the Old Court House. Once this is done, the plaintiff has lost the case, so the only cases that actually go to trial in the Old Court House are those instigated by eccentrics and paranoids who want "a public hearing," which they rarely get since only the most desperate famine of news will bring a reporter to the Old Court House. The Old Court House is located in the town of Pigeon Hole outside the urban zone. The inhabitants of this town and the surrounding area of swamps and heavy timber are people of such great stupidity and such barbarous practices that the Administration has seen fit to quarantine them in a reservation surrounded by a radioactive wall of iron bricks. In retaliation the citizens of Pigeon Hole plaster their town with signs: " Urbanite Don't Let The Sun Set On You Here ," an unnecessary injunction, since nothing but urgent business would take any urbanite to Pigeon Hole. Lee's case is urgent. He has to file an immediate affidavit that he is suffering from bubonic plague to avoid eviction from the house he has occupied ten years without paying the rent. He exists in perpetual quarantine. So he packs his suitcase of affidavits and petitions and injunctions and certificates and takes a bus to the Frontier. The Urbanite customs inspector waves him through: "I hope you've got an atom bomb in that suitcase." Lee swallows a handful of tranquilizing pills and steps into the Pigeon Hole customs shed. The inspectors spend three hours pawing through his papers, consulting dusty books of regulations and duties from which they read incomprehensible and ominous excerpts ending with: "And as such is subject to fine and penalty under act 666." They look at him significantly.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Unable to suppress a painful grimace, the procurator ran a cursory, sidelong glance over the writing, returned the parchment to the secretary, and said with difficulty: ‘The accused is from Galilee? 6 Was the case sent to the tetrarch?’ ‘Yes, Procurator,’ replied the secretary. ‘And what then?’ ‘He refused to make a decision on the case and sent the Sanhedrin’s 7 death sentence to you for confirmation,’ the secretary explained. The procurator twitched his cheek and said quietly: ‘Bring in the accused.’ And at once two legionaries brought a man of about twenty-seven from the garden terrace to the balcony under the columns and stood him before the procurator’s chair. The man was dressed in an old and torn light-blue chiton. His head was covered by a white cloth with a leather band around the forehead, and his hands were bound behind his back. Under the man’s left eye there was a large bruise, in the corner of his mouth a cut caked with blood. The man gazed at the procurator with anxious curiosity. The latter paused, then asked quietly in Aramaic: 8 ‘So it was you who incited the people to destroy the temple of Yershalaim?’ 9 The procurator sat as if made of stone while he spoke, and only his lips moved slightly as he pronounced the words. The procurator was as if made of stone because he was afraid to move his head, aflame with infernal pain. The man with bound hands leaned forward somewhat and began to speak: ‘Good man! Believe me . . .’ But the procurator, motionless as before and not raising his voice in the least, straight away interrupted him: ‘Is it me that you are calling a good man? You are mistaken. It is whispered about me in Yershalaim that I am a fierce monster, and that is perfectly correct.’ And he added in the same monotone: ‘Bring the centurion Ratslayer.’ It seemed to everyone that it became darker on the balcony when the centurion of the first century, Mark, nicknamed Ratslayer, presented himself before the procurator. Ratslayer was a head taller than the tallest soldier of the legion and so broad in the shoulders that he completely blocked out the still-low sun. The procurator addressed the centurion in Latin: ‘The criminal calls me “good man”. Take him outside for a moment, explain to him how I ought to be spoken to. But no maiming.’ And everyone except the motionless procurator followed Mark Ratslayer with their eyes as he motioned to the arrested man, indicating that he should go with him. Everyone generally followed Ratslayer with their eyes wherever he appeared, because of his height, and those who were seeing him for the first time also because the centurion’s face was disfigured: his nose had once been smashed by a blow from a Germanic club.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Weaving Beliefs Together: Towards a Big Picture of RealityCountless philosophical, spiritual and religious writers have commended an integrative account of human wisdom, bringing together the multiple dispersed elements of knowledge to yield a greater whole. The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer spoke of our ability to acquire ‘a new dimension of reality’, reflecting humanity’s apparently unique capacity to construct ‘symbolic systems’ which extend our vision of the social world, and make its inhabitation meaningful. This means going beyond a mere accumulation of facts and observations, and finding a way of integrating them to see the ‘big picture’ that lies behind them. So how can we do this? How can we, for example, achieve a workable synthesis of ethics and physics? In 1905, Albert Einstein published a seminal paper concerning the interchangeability of mass and energy, memorably expressed in the famous scientific equation, E = mc2. Forty years later, this scientific principle was put to destructive use in the two atom bombs that devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although Einstein played no role in this technological development, he was alarmed at the way in which science was being used to develop new and more deadly weapons of mass destruction, such as napalm (developed in the Harvard laboratories of Professor Louis Fieser in 1942) or nuclear weapons. Yet for Einstein, science by itself could not provide scientists with a viable moral framework: ‘science can only ascertain what is, not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgements of all kinds remain necessary.’36 David Hume, one of Einstein’s two favourite philosophers (the other being Baruch Spinoza), had exposed the intellectual problems of moving from an account of the way things are and the way things should be, and Einstein could see no way round this disjunction of fact and value. In their quest to be moral, scientists would have to draw on ethical values that originated from beyond their own specialist field of studies. Mary Midgley, perhaps the most significant public philosopher to deal with this question, highlighted the need to use all our ‘philosophical tools to bring these distinct kinds of thought together.’37 For Midgley, it was clear that ‘all explanation, and particularly the explanation of human action, quite properly uses many non-competing but convergent methods.’38 Difference in method does not entail incompatibility. Neither does difference in outcome, in that each could be seen as a particular perspective on a complex reality – such as the nature of universe or the meaning of human existence – which resists reduction to simplistic categories or single levels of explanation. We have to try and use our tools of knowing as best we can to align our ‘knowledge’ with something that we encounter but cannot control, and that demands progressing beyond monochrome surface readings of reality.

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  “You want to see other people?” I closed my eyes, bracing for it. I could do this. I could share her. I just didn’t want to lose her completely. Maybe that made me weak, but I was falling for her. “Do you?” I peeked at her from beneath the fringe of my eyelashes, trying to gauge what her idle-sounding question really meant. If I said no, would she be afraid to be honest? But I didn’t want to see anyone else. Kari with her spritelike body and small kitten face was the only one I wanted to hover over while I fucked her. I gave her a cowardly shrug. My throat was too tight to push words out. She blew out an exasperated breath. “Dammit, Margot. You aren’t easy, are you?” “How can you say that? Didn’t you have my pants off an hour after we met?” “Don’t be smug. I’m serious. Things have to change.” I sat up and raked a hand through my hair, feeling frustrated and grumpy. “Can we table this until after I make you come?” Maybe if I proved to her that she wasn’t going to get any better than me, she’d be satisfied. Or maybe she’d just forget about this conversation. I could keep her busy all weekend with my mouth and fingers, keep her turned inside out and fuck-fogged. Then maybe we could put off talking until she loved me as much as I loved her. Her mouth twisted and her eyes filled. I bent quickly and kissed her, cupping her head and taking her mouth gently. “Don’t you cry,” I said harshly when I pulled back. Her mouth crimped tighter. I shoved her to her back and crawled on top, trapping her legs between mine, wrapping my hands around her wrists and pinning her to the floor. “This is good. What we have could be fucking great.” She made a noise, but I didn’t want to hear a protest, and I covered her mouth again, eating her lips the way I wanted to eat her pussy. “Just shut up. Talk later. Told you, I wanna taste.” When I came up for air, she whispered, “Sometimes, you’re such a bitch.” “Who’s talking dirty now?” I scooted downward, hovering over one breast. Her nipples were softer than mine, velvety, puffy little cones—pale peach and just a shade or two darker than the soft skin surrounding them. “You’ve got the prettiest tits I’ve ever seen.” “If you like them B-B sized,” she groused. “I do. Aren’t you lucky?” She snorted, but she settled deeper against the carpet. I had her now. I ignored the dildo and buried my face between her legs, sucking on her outer lips, sinking my tongue between them to catch the tangy fluid seeping from inside her. I thrust two fingers into her pussy and thumbed her clit, rasping my thumb over the hard, rounded knot.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  26. English Roman Catholic public schools readily reflected the general educational ethos of military maleness created by their Anglican equivalents. Here the Downside Officer Training Corps (created 1909) poses with sundry monks of the Benedictine Abbey and a field gun. The ideal products of Victorian public schools were obedient but resourceful officers in the armed forces, or colonial administrators programmed to endure lonely leadership amid alien cultures. Socialization even with female siblings, let alone any other variety of female, was not on the syllabus. Instead, the inevitable consequences of an all-male adolescent environment lent a peculiar anxiety to British elite attitudes to masturbation and homosexuality, particularly because of the widespread conviction that (in the words of an old Etonian and noted cricketer, who returned to Eton as Headmaster) ‘animal desires [are] far stronger in the male than in the female, at least in England’. [29] A Classical school curriculum brought public schools the usual problems in dealing with literary references to ancient Mediterranean sexual mores, and additionally there were some difficulties in handling the Christian message itself. The New Testament was little help in instilling martial manliness, and even the Saviour himself needed careful treatment by theologians who were worried that Victorian Christianity had less appeal to men than to women. Jesus’s sacrifice, nailed helpless on the cross, needed to be reframed as a specialized ideal of what the prolific writer on morality and church affairs Charles Kingsley termed ‘true manhood’; the scholar and preacher F. D. Maurice complained of the widespread perception that the Sermon on the Mount had a ‘passive or feminine character’. [30] The Hebrew Bible was a good deal more promising, but amid its descriptions of military heroes and armed mayhem well up to the standards of British imperial warfare lurked the obstinate problem of David and Jonathan. In most respects they could be seen as the perfect archetype for a Captain and Vice-Captain of Games, but rarely were they found in the myriad stained-glass windows that the Victorians commissioned for British church buildings, and their appearance always suggests an interesting agenda to investigate (Plate 20). [31] It is notable that a standard multi-volume and multi-author English biblical commentary edited by the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol in the 1880s showed a rare openness to interfaith dialogue in dealing with this problematic Old Testament couple. Canon Spence, the commentator on 1 Samuel, reached gratefully for a quotation by one of his commentary colleagues Dean Payne Smith from the liberal German rabbi and biblical scholar Ludwig Philippson (whose parallel Hebrew/German edition of the Hebrew Bible was later much esteemed by Sigmund Freud): We may indeed wonder at the delicacy of feeling and the gentleness of the sentiments which these two men in those old rough times entertained for one another.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Of this language Kafka wrote, in his parable ‘On Parables’: Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: ‘Go over,’ he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if it was worth the trouble; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something, too, that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the least. All these parables really set out to say simply that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter. Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables, you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares. Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You win. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality. In parable you lose. A similar dialogue lies at the heart of Bulgakov’s novel. In it there are those who belong to parable and those who belong to reality. There are those who go over and those who do not. There are those who win in parable and become parables themselves, and there are those who win in reality. But this reality belongs to Woland. Its nature is made chillingly clear in the brief scene when he and Margarita contemplate his special globe. Woland says: ‘For instance, do you see this chunk of land, washed on one side by the ocean? Look, it’s filling with fire. A war has started there. If you look closer, you’ll see the details.’ Margarita leaned towards the globe and saw the little square of land spread out, get painted in many colours, and turn as it were into a relief map. And then she saw the little ribbon of a river, and some village near it. A little house the size of a pea grew and became the size of a matchbox. Suddenly and noiselessly the roof of this house flew up along with a cloud of black smoke, and the walls collapsed, so that nothing was left of the little two-storey box except a small heap with black smoke pouring from it. Bringing her eye still closer, Margarita made out a small female figure lying on the ground, and next to her, in a pool of blood, a little child with outstretched arms. ‘That’s it,’ Woland said, smiling, ‘he had no time to sin. Abaddon’s work is impeccable.’ When Margarita asks which side this Abaddon is on, Woland replies: ‘He is of a rare impartiality and sympathizes equally with both sides of the fight.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  One had only to put together the behaviour of Ace of Diamonds at the cab stand by the movie theatre with certain given times, such as when the séance ended, and precisely when Rimsky could have disappeared, and then immediately send a telegram to Leningrad. An hour later (towards evening on Friday) came the reply that Rimsky had been discovered in number four-twelve on the fourth floor of the Hotel Astoria, next to the room in which the repertory manager of one of the Moscow theatres, then on tour in Leningrad, was staying—that same room which, as is known, had gilded grey-blue furniture and a wonderful bathroom. 1 Discovered hiding in the wardrobe of number four-twelve of the Astoria, Rimsky was interrogated right there in Leningrad. After which a telegram came to Moscow reporting that findirector Rimsky was in an unanswerable state, that he could not or did not wish to give sensible replies to questions and begged only to be hidden in a bulletproof room and provided with an armed guard. A telegram from Moscow ordered that Rimsky be delivered to Moscow under guard, as a result of which Rimsky departed Friday evening, under said guard, on the evening train. Towards evening on that same Friday, Likhodeev’s trail was also found. Telegrams of inquiry about Likhodeev were sent to all cities, and from Yalta came the reply that Likhodeev had been in Yalta but had left on a plane for Moscow. The only one whose trail they failed to pick up was Varenukha. The famous theatre administrator known to decidedly all of Moscow had vanished into thin air. In the meantime, there was some bother with things happening in other parts of Moscow, outside the Variety Theatre. It was necessary to explain the extraordinary case of the staff all singing ‘Glorious Sea’ (incidentally, Professor Stravinsky managed to put them right within two hours, by means of some subcutaneous injections), of persons presenting other persons or institutions with devil knows what in the guise of money, and also of persons who had suffered from such presentations. As goes without saying, the most unpleasant, the most scandalous and insoluble of all these cases was the case of the theft of the head of the deceased writer Berlioz right from the coffin in the hall of Griboedov’s, carried out in broad daylight. Twelve men conducted the investigation, gathering as on a knitting-needle the accursed stitches of this complicated case scattered all over Moscow. One of the investigators arrived at Professor Stravinsky’s clinic and first of all asked to be shown a list of the persons who had checked in to the clinic over the past three days. Thus they discovered Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy and the unfortunate master of ceremonies whose head had been torn off. However, little attention was paid to them.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  We have to learn to walk the poorly signposted and unpoliced line between certainty and doubt as we try to make sense of the chaos. In a 1770 letter to Frederick II of Prussia, Voltaire complained that only charlatans offered certainty. ‘While doubt is not a particularly pleasant state, certainty is a ridiculous state.’ 3 Some would suggest that the Enlightenment is to blame for these unrealistic expectations for human knowledge, which suggested that a universal human reason could eliminate uncertainties and ambiguities. I think the problem lies much deeper than this – in human nature itself. The human craving for certainty is rooted deep within us. While we cannot eliminate it, we can at least challenge it, and try to rise above it. We have to learn to live with it and resist the temptation to overstate the capacity of human reason. Does this realism about reality prevent us trying to find a set of habitable beliefs, capable of sustaining meaningful life? No. But it allows us to understand why there have been so many false dawns, promising direct access to certainties that turned out to be contested opinions, imposed dogmas, or cultural fads. We seem to be drawn to people who exude certainty, perhaps assuming their attitude reflects a vastly superior grasp of reality than the rest of us. Maybe that’s why Forrest Gump gained such a following as he ran across the United States. People felt he had a personal authenticity, a certainty of purpose that they could share by running alongside him – before, of course, he declared he was tired and going home, leaving his frustrated followers to reluctantly figure things out for themselves. In this book, I have argued for a retrieval of the more modest category of belief, which squares up to this disturbing human tendency to construct certainties when the evidence does not permit it. I have told you something about what I believe to illustrate some of the points that I have been making, but my own beliefs are of little relevance to this discussion. My position is this: believing is not only intellectually defensible but existentially necessary .

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [1] We are all familiar with the strains on the planet’s resources and climate that these changes have caused, worsened by our two centuries of prodigal over-reliance on fossil fuels. Social strains are also apparent. Ageing populations are less prone to interpersonal violence, a nexus that is connected to the fact that across the world, these societies also generally enjoy greater financial and personal security. Violence has been particularly disruptive in many regions with rapidly expanding and therefore predominantly young human populations, leading to the mass movement of peoples that encourages angry rhetoric about migration among politicians looking for votes. Lurking alongside their opportunism is the uncomfortable contrary fact that the areas of twentieth-century power in Europe, north America and Japan still consume far more economic resources than the rest of the world, which they are reluctant to share more equally. What passes for theological and ethical reflection in many Christian quarters is an exercise in ignoring the reality of these present imbalances that disfigure divine creation, usually through strident repetition of old certainties, not least about how to speak about sex and gender. Amid these cross-cultural tensions and anxieties, Christians remain the world’s most numerous adherents of any religion, with around twice as many followers as their nearest competitor, Islam. Moreover, one survey of world religions made after the final phases of disintegration of the European empires revealed the most movement around Christian practice, mostly in Christianity’s favour: the estimate was that in one year in the 1990s worldwide, around 25 million people chose a new faith, 18 million of them converts to Christianity and 7 million moving from Christianity to other beliefs. Africa has confounded those who predicted that the end of Christian colonial empires would also bring the death of African Christianity: instead, around 1985, African Christian numbers exceeded the total of African Muslims for the first time. Equally unexpected has been the resurgence of Chinese Christianity, demonized in 1949 by the victorious Communist regime as symbolizing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century humiliations of China by Europeans; the expulsion of all missionaries followed. As systematic Communist ideology leached away from the government system in the 1980s, an extraordinary variety of now indigenous Christian practice emerged out of repression, and its vitality remains a difficult challenge for the Chinese authorities. [2] THE

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  And when he’s done, he pulls out gently, undoes my gag gently, slides me over onto my back gently, smoothes down my skirt gently, and gently, very gently, reaches under my skirt and flicks one slick finger against my clit. I explode. I come against his hand with a roar, violent waves of pleasure crashing onto me. He holds me as I come, body to body, gripping me tightly until my moans subside. Then, just as quickly as he entered, he puts his dick back in his pants, zips up, and leaves. THE WEEKEND Delilah Devlin I placed the grocery bag on the counter, set down my purse, then glanced around the airy living room of the cabin. It was early Friday evening—the first night of a lovers’ weekend I’d planned down to the last detail. The view through the large picture window was of the small lake, the water shining without a single ripple to mar the mirrorlike surface. A lone figure walked along the bank, hands thrust deep into pockets, while the rising wind tore at her pale hair. I swallowed hard and hesitated. Did she want company? Did she need more time to think about us, about whether we still “worked”? That’s what this weekend was all about: a last chance to renew our connection. Or maybe this was good-bye. I could no longer read from her expression what went on inside her head. I wiped my hands along the sides of my thighs and pushed open the glass door that opened onto steps to the path that wound to the narrow beach. Kari didn’t look my way as I approached. Her arms wrapped around her middle as she stared at the water. “No problem getting away?” “No. I had the days.” “Good. Have you unpacked?” At last, she glanced my way. Something in her eyes gave me hope. For the first time in a long time, she met my gaze and really looked at me. I smiled. “Not yet. But would you like a glass of wine before we get settled?” “That and a fire. It’s colder than I thought it would be.” She stepped closer. Her arm settled at my waist and she leaned in to hug me from the side. Kari was the kind to kiss friends on the lips or offer a tight hug, so I couldn’t rely on the gesture to mean anything. I draped an arm around her waist, and we walked slowly back to the cabin. Inside, the fire took me only minutes. I placed several logs and kindling in the grate and as soon as the crackling fire was built, the air inside the cabin lost its crisp edge. I pulled my sweater over my head, and, dressed only in a tank and my jeans, I sat cross-legged on the hearth rug. A glass dangled in front of me. “Thanks,” I murmured. “I was supposed to get that. Sorry.” She sat beside me. “This was a good idea.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  2 Weimar Germany was an intellectual and creative hothouse, the home of Dada, Bauhaus, New Objectivity, and new institutes for sexuality. But frequent economic shocks, millions of war wounded and escalating political violence left Germans anxious, unable to anchor themselves in the present. Hesse set out to explain why so many Germans yearned for a coherent worldview and why it was so difficult to find one. 3 Traditional answers to this craving for a secure basis for human existence were being cast aside, discredited by the devastation of the war. But the latest intellectual fashions were simply a synthesis of the values au courant at that moment, lacking in depth, substance and stability, all things that emerge from having been subjected to critical evaluation over an extended period. Hesse also argued that the trend of privileging novelty has resulted in a precipitate dismissal of the wisdom of the past and the unquestioning adoption of new and untested ideologies in a ‘frenzied search for new interpretations of human life’. It’s an important point. The Irish writer and philosopher John Moriarty later offered an insightful critique of such a dangerous preoccupation with the transient truths of the present moment. The wise person, he suggests, is not someone who walks ahead of humanity, but behind it, ‘picking up the wonderful things it leaves behind it in its flight into a future’ that might well prove to be yet another costly failure. 4 It is not difficult to work out which ideologies Hesse had in mind. Marxism and Nazism were in open competition for the spiritual and intellectual soul of Germany at that time, a struggle that grew increasingly bitter and culminated in the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Germany had undergone a transformation. An untested new ideology was in the ascendancy. UHU did not survive this development and published its last issue in September 1934. Human beings, according to Hesse, experience a ‘primal need to know that there is meaning to their lives’ that is ‘as old and as important as the need for food, love and shelter.’ Many commentators have failed to grasp the importance of this yearning for meaning and significance. George Orwell, for example, complained that ‘all “progressive” thought has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain.’ 5 The rise of Nazism in Germany, he remarked, showed the falsity of this view. People seemed to want a deeper vision of life that speaks of meaning, significance and purpose, that might require sacrifice on their part, rather than merely meeting their physical needs. Hesse’s reflections frame the core themes of this chapter – the human longing for a secure and stable big picture, capable of creating and sustaining the good life; and the precariousness of the quest for such a worldview, which can easily go badly wrong.