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 Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  No one respected them for their labor in a country where the idea of honorable poverty had vanished. And yet we had done something, we’d loaded transcontinental trucks. More than most fuckin’ men did in a night. But mostly I just ached. The pain of work, real labor, had driven splinters into my muscles, into the crouching muscles, the climbing muscles, the bending-over muscles, the lifting muscles, the just-standing-there muscles. My upper body had rusted shut in its basin of pelvic bones and couldn’t turn anymore. I was a tired animal, and I tied a feedbag of milk and cereal over my nose. I couldn’t tell if I was big or small. In some ways I felt big, because the men said I was strong and could get stronger, but the boy in me was skinny and losing weight fast in that sweatbox. I couldn’t figure out my size, because in my mind I kept modeling a wax effigy of myself, now puny, now a big bear of a worker, now a supple girl without breasts or vagina although responsively female: treat me as a woman and you can rule me. The wax was soft and getting softer, nearly fluid, and as it melted its color became milkier. It would flow out of the chubby cool forms of a child, his sturdy legs, big head, lips lucent as fruit jellies, into lanky adolescence. A moment later it had set into a thick neck, barrel chest, thickening biceps, and even my penis, a moment ago nothing but a tiny urine spout, would thicken and grow, the river god’s sex in a bed of ropey moss. On my day off I went to the Oak Street beach. Luxury apartment buildings lined the lakefront and the six-lane Outer Drive. On one side of the drive strolled businessmen in coats and ties and women in dresses and big summer hats. On the other was a wide, white-sand beach and bathers in swimsuits surveyed by lifeguards. Between these two worlds, one formal, the other nearly nude, the traffic streamed ceaselessly. I felt my grip on this, the “nice” part of town, was slipping. I had no confidence I’d ever land a decent job after school. Would I be condemned to loading trucks? My shoulders thickened brutishly. On the beach I saw a group of older gay guys, and I spread my towel beside them. They quieted down as I stripped to my swimsuit, and one of them even put on his glasses. I couldn’t tell what the verdict was. But Midwesterners are friendly people who chat and joke easily with strangers, and soon enough I was talking with one of my neighbors, a rosy-cheeked countertenor with a haze of silky hair unexpectedly covering his back and shoulders. His nose and the bald top of his head were painfully red. He put on a shirt and baseball cap.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Before entering the coffee shop, we looked in through Tex’s windows. Gone were those glossy new novels and records, the plush carpet, the spotlights. Now nothing but concrete floors, dangling wires, and on the door a bankruptcy notice. Where was Tex now? Morris? Who was fleshing out the cop’s domestic expenses? Tex, like a torch singer, had ruined himself for love. He’d hocked his jewels to win one more smile from the policeman with the jug ears. Once Tex had said to me, very sister-to-sister, “Aren’t we mad, we gay boys, starving ourselves to sylphlike fragility, all so we can attract a straight cop with a beer belly?” As Maria and I sat in the coffee-shop window and drank hot cider, I told her about my friendship with Tex. Something about the passionate opera music stirred me; this scene was scored for confession. Just as the betrayed Des Grieux sang, “Be silent, you’re breaking my heart,” I spoke up. “I don’t know what you’d think if I told you, uh, that guy next door? Tex? was a little weird?” Des Grieux was singing “Nell’occhio tuo profondo io leggo il mio destin” as I looked into Maria’s eyes for my destiny, her scorn or disgust. “Are you trying to say your friend Tex is homosexual?” “Yes.” “These are my kisses,” the lovers sang, “this is my love,” as I added, “So am I.” “So am I, Dumpling,” Maria replied with a puzzled smile. “I thought that was the whole idea. I thought we were both gay.” “But what about Sam?” I asked, naming her bearded ex-lover. “Oh, I have a faiblesse for men,” she confessed. “I even prefer making love with men, but I only fall in love with women.” Her thoughts went on silently until a sigh replaced her jaunty smile and she said, “Alas. Women are no damn good.” Maria sketched in her gay past. “Women are so impossible, always hurtling about in station wagons and Pendleton shirts and swearing drunken vengeance on Cuddles or Babs. And then this fatal attraction to the country —you can’t get the farm out of the girl. And no fashion sense. Nothing wrong with a dyke that couldn’t be cured by six months in finishing school.” She went on talking in the lightest, most frivolous terms, concocting a heady mix of diesel dykes and sulfurous femmes damnées (“Damn women, as Baudelaire said”). Although her lesbianism relieved my anxiety, the ease with which she apparently went from men to women dismayed me, as did the glamour of her milieu. There was nothing glamorous about my time in the toilets, that long sentence I was serving. Although I was appalled by the hair fetishist who slipped his questionnaire under the partition, at least his tastes were specific enough to be fulfillable, whereas mine were raging but shifting, leaving me no peace. I couldn’t find the answer because I couldn’t phrase the question.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Muerdo la esquina de mi boca, así no me rio, pero mi estómago se sacude igual, y dejo salir un resoplido. Frunce el ceño. —¿De qué te ríes? —Nada —respondo rápidamente, asintiendo—. Van Damne. Es un gran actor. Tiene películas muy relevantes. Sin embargo no puedo ocultar la risa de mi rostro, y frunce el ceño sabiendo que soy una mentirosa. Justo entonces escucho una risita desde alguna parte detrás de mí, y giro la cabeza sobre mi hombro, viendo a Jay alejado de la pantalla e inclinándose hacia la chica, besándose abiertamente. —¿Los conoces? —pregunta el hombre a mi lado. Niego. Él no debe saber mis cosas. Nos quedamos en silencio, y termino las palomitas en mi mano, dejando caer mi cabeza hacia atrás mientras miro el techo alto y los antiguos arcos dorados arriba. Él está sentado a mi lado, e inhalo y exhalo lentamente, a pesar del golpeteo en mi pecho. ¿Por qué estoy nerviosa? Es Jay. No, ni siquiera estoy pensando en él en este momento. La gente habla a nuestro alrededor, esperando que la película empiece, pero no puedo escuchar lo que están diciendo, y no me importa. Mi piel se siente cálida. —Entonces, ¿qué estudian en Doral State? —pregunta. Le disparo una mirada de sorpresa. ¿Cómo sabe a dónde voy a la escuela? Asesino serial. Pero entonces apunta a mi bolso en el suelo, y veo el llavero colgando de este con el emblema de la universidad grabado. Oh, duh. Me enderezo. —Paisajismo —contesto—. Quiero hacer bonitos los espacios exteriores. —Eso es bueno. Trabajo en construcción. Le muestro una media sonrisa. —Entonces, haces bonitos los espacios interiores.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Pero no, necesito mi ropa y mis libros para la universidad. Puedo conseguir el resto en otro momento, pero ahora mismo necesito algunas cosas. Estaciono y salgo del auto, tomando la pequeña maleta que tomé prestada de mi hermana y atravieso el césped hacia las escaleras. Sacando mi llave, voy a desbloquear la puerta pero veo que ya está abierta. Doy un cuidadoso paso dentro. La sala de estar está vacía y me dirijo a la cocina, viendo que ahí tampoco hay nadie. Relajo los hombros ligeramente. Dirigiéndome a las escaleras me sujeto a la barandilla. —Jordan. Me congelo, la conciencia y los nervios hacen que se me erice el vello de la nuca. Mierda. Girándome, endurezco mi expresión y alzo la barbilla cuando enfrento a Pike. Está de pie entre la cocina y la sala de estar, limpiándose las manos con una toalla sucia, sus brazos y dedos están cubiertos de tierra. Está mojado, el sudor empapa partes de su camiseta gris y su rostro está más moreno que la última vez que lo vi. Como si hubiese estado fuera las últimas veinticuatro horas. —Solo necesito recoger mis cosas —le indico y giro de regreso a las escaleras. Pero me detiene de nuevo. —Jordan. —Mira, lo que sea, ¿está bien? —Lo detengo, girando de nuevo hacia él —. De todos modos no debería estar aquí, y tampoco es como si Cole estuviera aquí la mitad del tiempo, así que permíteme que corte por lo sano y recoja mis cosas. Da un paso adelante. —¿A dónde irás? Casi quiero llorar. —A casa de mi padre. En Meadow Lake —respondo—. No soy tu problema, ¿está bien? Ahí. Está hecho. No necesito fingir que no tengo otras opciones. Me marcho. Odio la idea de volver a ese parque de casas rodantes de mierda, pero no será para siempre. Sobreviviré. Me muevo de nuevo hacia las escaleras, pero él habla, casi apresurado. —Por favor —dice rápidamente, deteniéndome—. Ven aquí un minuto. Tengo algo que quiero mostrarte.

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

  I asked. They nodded and I told them all about my airline fears and how many moving parts there were to this trip east. They nodded again. They seemed to believe that between Jesus and a travel agent, things could probably be worked out. I sighed. My meeting was starting in another room, so I trudged off. My mind spun with images of the talk show, the airplane crash, and the madman with the Uzi at Dallas–Fort Worth. I was having a little trouble concentrating. The meeting ended, and on my way out, a little book on prayer caught my eye. I picked it up and stuck it in my purse, figuring I could look at it over dinner and then return it the next Sunday. All the way to the hamburger joint, I worried that I would be involved in a car accident and the book would be found on me. My survivors would know I had finally snapped, that I had become one of those fundamentalists who think the world is going to end tomorrow right after lunch. I made it to the restaurant, though, and when I sat down, I took out the little book. I opened it before I got it out of my purse so the cover wouldn’t show, as if it were the rankest sort of pornography, like Big Beautiful Butts or something. I started to read and within a page came upon this beautiful passage: “The Gulf Stream will flow through a straw provided the straw is aligned to the Gulf Stream, and not at cross purposes with it.” To make a long story short, I flew to New York and everything went fine. I didn’t have to stop in Dallas-Fort Worth, and I got home in time to teach my class. So now I always tell my students about the Gulf Stream: that what it means for us, for writers, is that we need to align ourselves with the river of the story, the river of the unconscious, of memory and sensibility, of our characters’ lives, which can then pour through us, the straw. When KFKD is playing, we are at cross purposes with the river. So we need to sit there, and breathe, calm ourselves down, push back our sleeves, and begin again. JealousyOf all the voices you’ll hear on KFKD, the most difficult to subdue may be that of jealousy.

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

  I don’t like to be touched. Anyone here ever tries to touch me, I’ll kill them,” at which point Warren Oates jumps in and says, “Hey—lighten up, Francis.” This is not a bad line to have taped to the wall of your office. Say to yourself in the kindest possible way, Look, honey, all we’re going to do for now is to write a description of the river at sunrise, or the young child swimming in the pool at the club, or the first time the man sees the woman he will marry. That is all we are going to do for now. We are just going to take this bird by bird. But we are going to finish this one short assignment. Shitty First DraftsNow, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.) Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the snow. One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, “It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do—you can either type or kill yourself.” We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Someone had a studio apartment just above a used-textbook store on a corner of an otherwise nonresidential block. There at ten on a Saturday night in January, I found myself armed with a cigarette and beer (one of the four cans William had had to buy for me with my money, since I was still below drinking age). We sat on top of stacks of books, sipped and watched the twenty men squeezed into the small room. I didn’t know any of the other fellows. I’d never seen any of them at the toilets. I suspected that handsome gay men all knew each other and avoided public cruising. For the first time William seemed shy, but he said he was simply trying to butch it up. “Look, doll,” he whispered, “people think a queen’s a hoot, but the life of the party goes home alone while everyone makes a last-ditch play for the idiot hood who’s been standing in the corner all night by himself. My dear, who did the lighting here? I should get my own light man written into my contracts just like Marlene. Nothing like a baby-pink follow spot to take years off a gal.” At twenty-two William was terrified of aging. “I’m going to kill myself when I turn thirty. Thirty is gay menopause. I’ve always liked that saying, ‘Live hard, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse.’ ‘O Rose, thou art sick.’ Maybe that would make a good drag name for you: Rose. Sick you certainly are.” And William laughed with his special blend of mischief, compounded of humor, spite, and sadness in a ratio even he wasn’t sure of but that he mixed by feel. I saw a big blond man in a blue crewneck sweater and tan slacks and suddenly I had the impression we were all here to please him but no one could. Pagans would have known how to worship him as the temporary perch of a winged demon; poor monotheists blind to all gods but the invisible one must ascribe their attraction to love rather than fear. And yet actually everyone in the room was afraid of Harry, the huge biology major from Canton, Ohio.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ‘ There she is at her desk! What more could you ask? ’ she said triumphantly, pointing to Stephen whose hair was literally standing on end, as is sometimes the way with youthful authors. She even managed occasionally, to make Stephen see the journal- ists herself. 4 STEPHEN got up, stretched, and went to the window. The sun had retreated behind the clouds; a kind of brown twilight hung over the Embankment, for the wind had now dropped and a fog was threatening. The discouragement common to all fine writers was upon her, she was hating what she had written. Last night’s work seemed inadequate and unworthy; she decided to put a blue pencil through it and to rewrite the chapter from start to finish. She began to give way to a species of panic; her new book would be a ludicrous failure, she felt it, she would never again write a novel possessing the quality of The Furrow. The Furrow had been the result of shock to which she had, strangely enough, reacted by a kind of unnatural mental vigour. But now she could not react any more, her brain felt like over-stretched elastic, it would not spring back, it was limp, unresponsive. And then there was something else that distracted, something she was longing to put into words yet that shamed her so that it held her tongue- tied. She lit a cigarette and when it was finished found another and kind!ed it at the stump. THE WELL OF LONELINESS 245 ‘Stop embroidering that curtain, for God’s sake, Puddle. I simply can’t stand the sound of your needle; it makes a booming noise like a drum every time you prod that tightly stretched linen.’ Puddle looked up: ‘ You’re smoking too much.’ ‘I dare say I am. I can’t write any more.’ ‘Since when?’ * Ever since I began this new book.’ ‘ Don’t be such a fool! ’ ‘ But it’s God’s truth, I tell you — I feel flat, it’s a kind of spiritual dryness. This new book is going to be a failure, some- times I think I’d better destroy it.’ She began to pace up and down the room, dull-eyed yet tense as a tightly drawn bow string. ‘ This comes of working all night,’ Puddle murmured. ‘I must work when the spirit moves me,’ snapped Stephen. Puddle put aside her wool work embroidery. She was not much moved by this sudden depression, she had grown quite accustomed to these literary moods, yet she looked a little more closely at Stephen and something that she saw in her face disturbed her. ‘ You look tired to death; why not lie down and rest?’ ‘Rot! I want to work.’ ‘You're not fit to work. You look all on edge, somehow. What’s the matter with you? > And then very gently: ‘ Stephen, come here and sit down by me, please, I must know what’s the matter.’

• From Vox (1992)

  I held the tape, she held the blanket. Anyway, she put the bag down in the middle of the living room, and she said, ‘So, will you give me the grand tour ?’ And the conventionality of ‘grand tour’ showed how nervous she was, but she was one of those people who are improved by being nervous, you know?—who are nervous in a way that makes your detection of their nervousness seem like a privilege. So I showed her the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom—she nodded knowingly at the magnets on my refrigerator—beautifully nervous. I listed off what I could offer her to drink, and she said she wanted orange herb tea and she went in the bathroom. So I put two cups of orange herb tea in the microwave. Normally I make only one cup, of course, and I put it on two minutes, but I figured four minutes to handle the extra volume of water, but it was a bit too long, and the water was very hot. I walked out with the two teas and saw her again in the living room, with her back to me: she had been linking at the TV—it’s just a dinky Malaysian TV, somehow everybody still thinks that if you have a VCR, that means you’ve got to have a TV worthy of it—but I don’t know, I think maybe even the smallness was right for that evening. But anyway she slid her purse off her arm and put it on the rug next to an armchair on the wall farthest away from the couch, and took off her shoes and put them next to her purse—establishing a little separate non-couch locus for herself. I went into the bathroom for a second, and when I came out, she was sitting on the couch leafing through People in the dim light coming from the kitchen. I still hadn’t turned on any of the lights in the living room, because it would have been so uncomfortable to have to turn them off later. She half pretended to be startled out of reading an article when I clicked the TV on, with no volume, and she said something about Arsenio Hall.

• From Vox (1992)

  50 "At the moment, my true wad could not be farther from shooting. It is work getting the two of you together. I feel that any second I'm going to misstep in telling this. It's very stressful." "Now listen," she said. "Harvey leaves, slamming the door, so the sign says CLOSED, and I, me, I am left, abandoned right in the middle of things by Harvey, and I'm standing there in the shop with the taciturn and very rich guy Forky, Forky Pigtail, who's holding the necklace that I made in his big knuckly fingers. He sits down on a step stool, he looks down at the necklace, looks up at me. What does he do?" "He says, 'I really do have to see what it looks like on someone before I know whether it's something I want.' And you look down at your shirt with the green and black stars and you sort of pluck at it and smile and say, 'I'm sorry, I'm not wearing the clothes for that piece. It's really an evening piece, for a low-cut dress.' With your finger you trace the ideal curve of the neckline of the dress. And Fork says, Then unbutton your shirt.' Well, what can you do? You unbutton the top three buttons of your shirt. With each button, you feel the fabric shift slightly against your collarbone. Fork stands up, letting the necklace dangle from his left hand, and, to your astonishment, he begins unbuttoning the buttons of his fly. Because of course he's a button-fly kind of guy. He unbuttons three buttons. The two of you are still about ten feet apart. You fold your shirt down, trying to make

• From The Decameron (1353)

  It hath already been clearly enough shown who Calandrino was and who were the others of whom I am to speak in this story, wherefore, without further preface, I shall tell you that an aunt of his chanced to die and left him two hundred crowns in small coin; whereupon he fell a-talking of wishing to buy an estate and entered into treaty with all the brokers in Florence, as if he had ten thousand gold florins to expend; but the matter still fell through, when they came to the price of the estate in question. Bruno and Buffalmacco, knowing all this, had told him once and again that he were better spend the money in making merry together with them than go buy land, as if he had had to make pellets;[426] but, far from this, they had never even availed to bring him to give them once to eat. One day, as they were complaining of this, there came up a comrade of theirs, a painter by name Nello, and they all three took counsel together how they might find a means of greasing their gullets at Calandrino's expense; wherefore, without more delay, having agreed among themselves of that which was to do, they watched next morning for his coming forth of his house, nor had he gone far when Nello accosted him, saying, 'Good-day, Calandrino.' Calandrino answered God give him good day and good year, and Nello, halting awhile, fell to looking him in the face; whereupon Calandrino asked him, 'At what lookest thou?' Quoth the painter, 'Hath aught ailed thee this night? Meseemeth thou are not thyself this morning.' Calandrino incontinent began to quake and said, 'Alack, how so? What deemest thou aileth me?' 'Egad,' answered Nello, 'as for that I can't say; but thou seemest to me all changed; belike it is nothing.' So saying, he let him pass, and Calandrino fared on, all misdoubtful, albeit he felt no whit ailing; but Buffalmacco, who was not far off, seeing him quit of Nello, made for him and saluting him, enquired if aught ailed him. Quoth Calandrino, 'I know not; nay, Nello told me but now that I seemed to him all changed. Can it be that aught aileth me?' 'Ay,' rejoined Buffalmacco, 'there must e'en be something or other amiss with thee, for thou appearest half dead.' [Footnote 426: _i.e._ balls for a pellet bow, usually made out of clay. Bruno and Buffalmacco were punning upon the double meaning, land and earth (or clay), of the word _terra_.]

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Pyrrhus, who had again and again pondered the words that Lusca had said to him, had determined, and she should return to him, to make her another guess answer and altogether to submit himself to comply with the lady's wishes, so but he might be certified that it was not a trick to try him, and accordingly answered, 'Harkye, Lusca; all that thou sayst to me I allow to be true; but, on the other hand, I know my lord for very discreet and well-advised, and as he committeth all his affairs to my hands, I am sore adread lest Lydia, with his counsel and by his wish, do this to try me; wherefore, an it please her for mine assurance do three things that I shall ask, she shall for certain thereafterward command me nought but I will do it forthright. And the three things I desire are these: first, that in Nicostratus his presence she slay his good hawk; secondly, that she send me a lock of her husband's beard and lastly, one of his best teeth.' These conditions seemed hard unto Lusca and to the lady harder yet; however, Love, who is an excellent comforter[354] and a past master in shifts and devices, made her resolve to do his pleasure and accordingly she sent him word by her chamberwoman that she would punctually do what he required and that quickly, and that over and above this, for that he deemed Nicostratus so well-advised, she would solace herself with him in her husband's presence and make the latter believe that it was not true. [Footnote 354: Syn. encourager, helper, auxiliary (_confortatore_).]

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  This was, of course, years before the Supreme Court ruling that made same-sex marriage legal in all fifty states. Still, it wasn’t exactly the Dark Ages: celebrities such as Melissa Etheridge and Ellen DeGeneres publicly embraced their sexuality in the 1990s. Openly gay characters were increasingly common (and nuanced) on TV and in movies, too. Perhaps as a result, the average age of coming out in the United States began to plummet: from twenty-five in 1991 to between fourteen and sixteen today. “Children report awareness of sexual attraction at about age ten,” Caitlin Ryan, director of the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University, told me. “That’s earlier than most adults, including parents, believe. But sexual orientation isn’t only about sex. It’s also about social and emotional relatedness, human relationships, feelings of connection.” As an example, she pointed to the Broadway musical Fun Home, based on cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir. Nine-year-old “Small Alison” first confronts her own difference when she sees a butch deliverywoman enter a diner. “Ring of Keys,” the showstopping song she sings, is not about eroticism but identity, recognition: a paean to the woman’s “swagger” and “bearing,” her “just right” cropped hair, jeans, and lace-up boots, her way of being, of presenting to the world. Maybe Amber’s avatars were her “ring of keys.” At any rate, it didn’t last—once again, her parents checked her computer history and discovered what she was up to. By then they had divorced, and her father had moved out of state. Amber remembers an airport handoff, sitting in her mom’s car while her parents conferred on the curb. “It happened again,” she heard her dad say grimly. Later, her mother asked Amber why she’d chosen male avatars, but before Amber could answer, her mother fed her the response she wanted to hear. “She said, ‘You just wanted to see what it was like, right?’” Amber recalled. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s right—I wanted to see what it was like.’” If her mother harbored any ideas about her daughter’s sexuality, she didn’t let Amber know.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I’d plunge his cock as fast and as deep into me as possible. I knew I had to leave Dr. O’Reilly. Annie Schroeder had dug a kitchen knife into her heart. She’d been hospitalized, released, and she’d stabbed herself a second time. Now she was in a maximum-security ward. O’Reilly himself was deteriorating quickly, more and more often falling asleep during my hours, forgetting my name, mumbling incomprehensibly. I knew I had to leave him, but even my body rebelled against such a rebellion. I fell sick with a high fever, then I danced one night at a fraternity party in a shoe so tight that three days later my left foot was abscessed and I had to be hospitalized. The foot became painfully swollen and had to be lanced. Afterward it was placed inside a sort of aluminum dog kennel that protected it from the touch of sheet and blanket. For some reason, a graduate student in psychotherapy came by my bed. Outside, the first snow of the year was falling. The therapist, whose forehead was flushed and scaling, wore a tweed jacket and smelled of sweet tobacco. His mouth shot up on one side in an accent aigu of irony. We didn’t speak very directly. I was sharing the room with someone who was asleep, to be sure, but he might have been faking it. I said that I thought I was resisting breaking off with Dr. O’Reilly. “At least that’s what I assume. I don’t feel anything, naturally, since I’ve somatized the anxiety. ” He wasn’t smoking, but he touched his lip with his pipe as though he needed the feel of the cold amber mouthpiece to release his thoughts or words. “But why are you going to a shrink at all?” “I want to change.” “Change what?” “My object choice.” He looked me intently in the eye, and now I could see that he, too, must be homosexual. “But people don’t really change,” he said. “It’s useless to try. It’s more a question of adjusting, of learning to play the hand you’ve been dealt.” “Oh no,” I said, angry. “I am changing, I must change. I’d kill myself if I thought I was stuck with these cards, which frankly are lousy—and you know it.” His face folded shut, and he left after exchanging a few of the necessary banalities. I felt triumphant. I couldn’t get well. I stayed in the infirmary, first with one ailment, then another. I watched the snow fall. My foot healed, but I broke out in hives. The hives subsided, and I was wracked with diarrhea. My roommates came and went. One of them, who was in traction, turned the conversation one evening to girls, then more generally to sex, finally to men. I watched his erection grow under the sheet. My own pressed against my stomach like a ruler on a board, hour after hour through the slow routines of the hospital.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Although I was appalled by the hair fetishist who slipped his questionnaire under the partition, at least his tastes were specific enough to be fulfillable, whereas mine were raging but shifting, leaving me no peace. I couldn’t find the answer because I couldn’t phrase the question. After I ejaculated I felt full of self-hatred every time, and every time I swore I’d never return to the toilets. Every time I had a free moment during the day when I could roost in the poultry house, I felt the excitement of anticipation creep over me. My hands went cold, a blotch of blush would float cloud-slow up my chest and neck, cover my face. If a girl stopped me to chat in the hall, I’d be torn by anxiety. What if he got away, the one big fish to cruise our pond today? I’d never said one word to all but one of the other campus homosexuals who were john queens. But I knew them all: the beetle-browed man whose outsize glasses touched his hairline above and his beard below and who, in his stall, would lower his ponderous haunches just far enough for my hand to touch his canine penis; the tall law student bearing a heavy tome of torts and investing his stall like a city under siege—no cough, no tapping foot, no lightest emery board of a sigh; the businessman in monogrammed shirt and glossy sharkskin I’d seen give a blow job that first day; and Jeremy, the only one I spoke to, a fat boy with a huge mouth and pomaded hair who waddled out of his booth with a diva’s disdain, gathering his reversible windbreaker around him as though it were a sable. None of us wanted each other but contempt had bred familiarity and we’d raise a weary eyebrow or stifle a yawn as we passed each other on our rounds as though to say, “Still at it?” or, “Slim pickings tonight.” The thrill came when one bagged not another old fruit but a hot young college kid, for although I myself was at least young and in college, I already saw myself as vampire-cold, turned prematurely old as a punishment for vice, and not nearly enviable enough to be that exciting thing, a “college kid.” I’d learned to feel nostalgia for my own youth while I was living it. I started dating Annie Schroeder, although I sometimes felt I was carting an aunt about. Her makeup was too elaborate and her clothes too stylish for the Beatniks I was meeting, among whom the women wore little other than black wool sweaters and skirts and black tights and paisley babushkas. For variety, they might tote a green bookbag or paint on badger eyes or let their bushy, waist-length hair bounce over their shoulders.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  In fact, the recourse to affective notions of sympathy, love, and delight point to a long history of affective politics among Black women. Consequently, these early Black feminist theories of race should inform the contemporary “turn to affect.” The invocation of affect in Black women’s theorizing and activism is fundamentally tied up, as Melissa Harris-Perry has argued, with a desire for social recognition as both fully human on the one hand and as fully capable citizens on the other. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Harris-Perry argues that “the public sphere makes a unique contribution to human self-actualization by offering opportunities for recognition.” 74 Though Williams misunderstands this desire for recognition in terms of a working-class desire for recognition from the upper class, she rightly realizes that there is a fundamental need for mutual recognition in the work of racial uplift. Her work appreciated the fact that, as Megan Watkins has argued, “the corporeal instantiation of recognition, the sensations one may feel in being recognized” ... accumulate “over time, fostering a sense of selfworth. Moments of recognition, therefore, function as affective force.” 75 This notion of corporeal instantiation—that is, embodied awareness—coupled with nineteenth-century Black women’s deep insistence on the notion of impressibility as a mechanism for the social regeneration of the race, suggest that affective ideas informed their notions of kinship, intellectual labor, and political activism. 76 Moreover, the NACW, as an organ of race public opinion and a social service organization that recognized both the intensity of Black suffering and the limitlessness of Black possibility, marshaled a certain level of “affective force” in order to do its intellectual and political work. That shared sense of care and sympathy for the suffering of Black women that animated the work of the NACW arcs back to the affective term used to frame this chapter: organized anxiety. Williams demonstrated the ways that the work of the NACW helped to inculcate a notion of racial unity through the cultivation of broad racial sympathy and the ways that the NACW helped to codify race public opinion. 77 Racial sociality and race public opinion are two critical components in the creation of a Black public sphere. So Williams’s work offers a fundamental insight about the operation of Black public life, namely that Black publics are forged—organized—on anxious terms. Anxiety is used in her work not only in the negative but also in the positive sense; that is, not only in terms of what Black people are anxious about but also what they are anxious for. It is simultaneously an anxiety of adversity and an anxiety of aspiration. There was a collective anxiety of aversion to the oppressive social conditions Black people endured and also a kind of aspirational anxiety to achieve something different. Williams uses anxiety in both senses in “The Club Woman” essay. She registers her aversion to the social repression of Black women in her proclamation about organized anxiety.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  The problem is that such theorizations overdetermine and oversimplify the complex ways that Black women both theorized and engaged the politics of Black female embodiment. Certainly, race women worked hard to keep their private lives out of public view, but the readiness with which they spoke about their feelings and about their experiences of bodily violation suggests that dissemblance as a theoretical framework can cause us to misrecognize the powerful ways that Black women did choose to make their bodies and their feelings visible to the public. Mary Church Terrell, the first president of the NACW and one of the key architects of the ideology of Black women’s respectability, spoke in her autobiography not only to intergenerational issues with depression but also of her own bodily commitment to pleasure through dance (see chapter two). Perhaps Black women’s expressions of feeling in public were part of a larger enigmatic dissemblance project, as Hine suggests. But if we view the public expressions of feeling and public invocations of embodied discourse as forms of dissimulation, then we also mire Black women’s theorizing and public work in a kind of mistrust that makes them always unknowable. But Williams and Matthews’s explicit investment in removing Black women from the veil of obscurity and in making Black women knowable entities suggests that to read them primarily according to the terms of dissemblance is to miss the powerful ways that they attempted to both frame and politicize their interior lives and feelings. Melissa Harris-Perry argues that Black women’s “emotions affect how we engage in politics” and that “to understand black women as political actors we must explore how intersecting disadvantages based on race, gender, class, and sexuality influence how these women feel and think.”28 Williams argued that Black women’s feelings, particularly their anxiety, influenced and shaped their political agenda.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Indicative of this cultural upheaval, an Ebony Magazine special issue on “The Negro Woman” contained an article entitled “Problems of the Negro Woman Intellectual.”1 It began with this observation: “The Negro woman intellectual is easily one of the most misunderstood, unappreciated and problem-ridden of all God’s creatures. In fact, if it were left to many Negro males alone to decide, she would not even exist.”2 Cultural hyperbole aside, being a Black woman intellectual apparently constituted the stuff of existential crisis. Though Black communities may have been in crisis because of shifts in Black leadership and damaging national discourses, Ebony Magazine chose to place that crisis at the feet of Black women, even though the author acknowledged that it was Black men who were most uncomfortable. Black men were quick, wrote Ponchitta Pierce, to “deprecate the woman intellectual,” even though “few really know this object of their discontent.”3 Black women intellectuals defied existing categories of cultural and racial identity, creating both a political and intellectual problem within Black communities that, since the nineteenth century, had responded to political instability by reasserting the primacy of traditional gender roles. The escalation of the intergenerational conflict between Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) in the summer of 1966 dramatized not only two kinds of Black political possibilities, but also two potential kinds of Black masculine gender performance—the respectable racial manhood of old and the revolutionary militant Black manhood of the present. The fact that the constitution of Black gender categories was at stake in these political battles was obscured by the more pressing problem of choosing a political path. By 1967, in response to this cultural and political upheaval, Harold Cruse proclaimed Black intellectuals to be in full-scale crisis, in his now-classic polemic Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. With the notable exception of Lorraine Hansberry, whom he lambasted along with the rest of his targets, Cruse’s procession of Negro Intellectuals was all male. They included Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, Edward Blyden, Alexander Crummell, Henry M. Turner, George Washington Williams, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and W. E. B. Du Bois.4 The overarching narrative of crisis has been a salient feature of Black political life at least since Du Bois began serving as editor of the NAACP magazine of the same name. This recourse to the narrative of Black political crisis frequently obscures an attendant upheaval over gender politics, particularly a broad discontent over the opportunities to pursue certain kinds of respectable racial manhood. Consequently, resolutions to Black political crises are frequently pursued through the insistence on prescribing traditional gender roles for Black communities. Ebony, however, repackaged the cultural crisis over racial manhood as a crisis over Black femininity and Black womanhood, obscuring the political stakes of this battle for Black men. This repackaging laid the responsibility for rectifying the crisis at the feet of Black women who simply needed to figure out their role and play it.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  The Tropic of Cancer is a sort of human document, written in blood, recording the struggle in the womb of death. The strong sexual odor is, if anything, the aroma of birth, disagreeable, repulsive even, when dissociated from its significance. The Tropic of Capricorn represents another death and birth, the transition, if I may say so, from the conscious artist to the budding spiritual being which is the last phase of evolution. In between I have known many births and deaths, but they were minor ones. But from this point on, my feeling is that whatever metamorphoses are to occur will manifest themselves in the realm of action, in conduct and example rather than in writing. There is in process, then, a gigantic conflict between the artist resolved to finish his task and the man who knows in himself that he is no longer obliged to express his conquests in the medium of language. There is a battle going on, more or less conscious, between Duty and Desire. The part of me which belongs to the world wishes to do its duty: the part of me which belongs to God wishes simply to fulfill what is required and which is unstateable. I am obliged to adapt myself to a struggle in a realm wherein I see nothing to sustain me but my own powers. I have to write retrospectively and act forwardly. If I slip I go down into an abyss from which no man can rescue me. The struggle is on all fronts, ceaselessly and remorselessly. Like every man I am my own worst enemy, but unlike most men I know too that I am my own saviour. I know something of freedom and responsibility. I realize how easily desire is transformed into reality. I have to be careful even of what I dream, since for me between dream and reality there is only the thinnest veil. The One Book I Always Wanted to Write—The World of SexIn reading my books which are purely autobiographical one should bear in mind that I am writing of things which happened a considerable time ago. The Tropic of Capricorn , for example, which will run to several volumes, deals chiefly with a period of about seven years’ duration, my life with a woman called Mona in Tropic of Cancer . In telling this story I am not following a strict chronological sequence but have chosen to adopt a circular or spiral form of time development which enables me to expand freely in any direction at any given moment. The ordinary chronological development seems to me wooden and artificial, a synthetic reconstitution of the facts of life.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  21 And Daniel remained there until the h first year of [the reign of] King Cyrus [over Babylon; now this was at the end of the seventy-year exile of Judah (the Southern Kingdom) in Babylonia, as foretold by Jeremiah]. [Ezra 1:1–3 ; Jer 25:11 , 12 ; 29:10 ] Daniel 2 The King’s Forgotten Dream 1 I N THE second year (604 B .C .) of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar had dreams which troubled and disturbed his spirit and [interfered with] his ability to sleep. 2 Then the king gave a command to call the magicians, the enchanters, the sorcerers, and the a Chaldeans to tell the king his dreams. So they came in and stood before the king. 3 The king said to them, “I had a dream, and my spirit is troubled and anxious to know the [content and meaning of the] dream.” 4 Then the Chaldeans said to the king in b Aramaic, “O king, live forever! Tell the dream to your servants, and we will declare the interpretation.” 5 The king replied to the Chaldeans, “My command is firm and unchangeable: if you do not reveal to me the [content of the] dream along with its interpretation, you shall be cut into pieces and your houses shall be made a heap of rubbish. 6 “But if you tell [me] the [content of the] dream along with its interpretation, you shall receive from me gifts and rewards and great honor. So tell me the dream and its interpretation.” 7 They answered again, “Let the king tell the dream to his servants, and we will explain its interpretation [to you].” 8 The king replied, “I know for certain that you are bargaining for time, because you have seen that my command [to you] is firm and irrevocable. 9 “If you will not reveal to me the [content of the] dream, there is but one sentence for you; for you have [already] prepared lying and corrupt words [and you have agreed together] to speak [them] before me [hoping to delay your execution] until the situation is changed. Therefore, tell me the dream [first], and then I will know [with confidence] that you can give me its interpretation.” 10 The Chaldeans answered the king and said, “There is not a man on earth who can tell the king this matter, for no king, lord or ruler has ever asked such a thing as this of any magician or enchanter or Chaldean. 11 “Furthermore, what the king demands is an unusual and difficult thing indeed! No one except the gods can reveal it to the king, and their dwelling is not with [mortal] flesh.” 12 Because of this the king was indignant and extremely furious and gave a command to destroy all the wise men of Babylon. 13 So the decree went out that the wise men were to be killed; and they looked for Daniel and his companions to put them to death.