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.

Page 35 of 501 · 20 per page

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  That is my job, and most of all I must trust my presentiment, for it has never yet deceived me. The information is that one of Ha-Nozri’s secret friends, indignant at this money-changer’s monstrous betrayal, is plotting with his accomplices to kill him tonight, and to foist the money paid for the betrayal on the high priest, with a note: “I return the cursed money.” ’ The head of the secret service cast no more of his unexpected glances at the hegemon, but went on listening to him, narrowing his eyes, as Pilate went on: ‘Imagine, is it going to be pleasant for the high priest to receive such a gift on the night of the feast?’ ‘Not only not pleasant,’ the guest replied, smiling, ‘but I believe, Procurator, that it will cause a very great scandal.’ ‘I am of the same opinion myself. And therefore I ask you to occupy yourself with this matter—that is, to take all measures to protect Judas of Kiriath.’ ‘The hegemon’s order will be carried out,’ said Aphranius, ‘but I must reassure the hegemon: the evil-doers’ plot is very hard to bring off. Only think,’ the guest looked over his shoulder as he spoke and went on, ‘to track the man down, to kill him, and besides that to find out how much he got, and manage to return the money to Kaifa, and all that in one night? Tonight?’ ‘And none the less he will be killed tonight,’ Pilate stubbornly repeated. ‘I have a presentiment, I tell you! Never once has it deceived me.’ Here a spasm passed over the procurator’s face, and he rubbed his hands briskly. ‘Understood,’ the guest obediently replied, stood up, straightened out, and suddenly asked sternly: ‘So they will kill him, Hegemon?’ ‘Yes,’ answered Pilate, ‘and all hope lies in your amazing efficiency alone.’ The guest adjusted the heavy belt under his cloak and said: ‘I salute you and wish you health and joy!’ ‘Ah, yes,’ Pilate exclaimed softly, ‘I completely forgot! I owe you something! . . .’ The guest was amazed. ‘Really, Procurator, you owe me nothing.’ ‘But of course! As I was riding into Yershalaim, remember, the crowd of beggars . . . I wanted to throw them some money, but I didn’t have any, and so I took it from you.’ ‘Oh, Procurator, it was a trifle!’ ‘One ought to remember trifles, too.’ Here Pilate turned, picked up the cloak that lay on the chair behind him, took a leather bag from under it, and handed it to the guest. The man bowed, accepting it, and put the bag under his cloak. ‘I expect a report on the burial,’ said Pilate, ‘and also on the matter to do with Judas of Kiriath, this same night, do you hear, Aphranius, this night. The convoy will have orders to awaken me the moment you appear. I’ll be expecting you.’ ‘I salute you,’ the head of the secret service said and, turning, left the balcony.

• From The Girls (2016)

  I had only the limited reference point of men like my father or boys I’d had crushes on. The way these girls spoke of Russell was different, their worship more practical, with none of the playful, girlish longing I knew. Their certainty was unwavering, invoking Russell’s power and magic as though it were as widely acknowledged as the moon’s tidal pull or the earth’s orbit. Donna said Russell was unlike any other human. That he could receive messages from animals. That he could heal a man with his hands, pull the rot out of you as cleanly as a tumor. “He sees every part of you,” Roos added. As if that were a good thing. The possibility of judgment being passed on me supplanted any worries or questions I might have about Russell. At that age, I was, first and foremost, a thing to be judged, and that shifted the power in every interaction onto the other person. The hint of sex that crossed their faces when they spoke of Russell, a prom-night giddiness. I understood, without anyone exactly saying so, that they all slept with him. The arrangement made me blush, inwardly shocked. No one seemed jealous of anyone else. “The heart doesn’t own anything,” Donna chimed. “That’s not what love is about,” she said, squeezing Helen’s hand, a look passing between them. Even though Suzanne was mostly silent, sitting apart from us, I saw her face change at the mention of Russell. A wifely tenderness in her eyes that I wanted to feel, too. I may have smiled to myself as I watched the familiar pattern of the town pass, the bus cruising through shade to sunshine. I’d grown up in this place, had the knowledge of it so deep in me that I didn’t even know most street names, navigating instead by landmarks, visual or memorial. The corner where my mother had twisted her ankle in a mauve pantsuit. The copse of trees that had always looked vaguely attended by evil. The drugstore with its torn awning. Through the window of that unfamiliar bus, the burr of old carpet under my legs, my hometown seemed scrubbed clean of my presence. It was easy to leave it behind. —They discussed plans for the solstice party. Helen up on her knees, tightening her pigtails with happy, brisk habit. Thrilling while they described the dresses they’d change into, some goofy solstice song Russell had made up. Someone named Mitch had given them enough money to buy alcohol: Donna said his name with a confusing emphasis. “You know,” she repeated. “Mitch. Like Mitch Lewis?” I hadn’t recognized Mitch’s name, but I’d heard of his band—I’d seen them on TV, playing in the hot lights of a studio set, sweat needling their foreheads. The background was a shag of tinsel, the stage revolving so the band members turned like jewelry-box ballerinas.

• From The Girls (2016)

  How he took me in, like he wanted to see all the way through. “Eve,” Russell said when Suzanne introduced me. “The first woman.” I was nervous I’d say the wrong thing, expose the error of my presence. “It’s Evelyn, really.” “Names are important, aren’t they?” Russell said. “And I don’t see any snake in you.” Even this mild approval relieved me. “What do you think of our solstice celebration, Evie?” he said. “Our spot?” All the while his hand was pulsing a message on my back I couldn’t decode. I slivered a glance at Suzanne, aware that the sky had darkened without me noticing, the night gliding deeper. I felt drowsy from the fire and the dope. I hadn’t eaten and there was an empty throb in my stomach. Was he saying my name a lot? I couldn’t tell. Suzanne’s whole body was directed at Russell, her hand moving uneasy in her hair. I told Russell I liked it here. Other meaningless, nervous remarks, but even so, he was getting other information from me. And I never did lose that feeling. Even after. That Russell could read my thoughts as easily as taking a book from a shelf. When I smiled, he tilted my chin up with his hand. “You’re an actress,” he said. His eyes were like hot oil, and I let myself feel like Suzanne, the kind of girl a man would startle at, would want to touch. “Yeah, that’s it. I see it. You gotta be standing on a cliff and looking out to sea.” I told him I wasn’t an actress, but my grandmother was. “Right on,” he said. As soon as I said her name, he was even more attentive. “I picked that up right off. You look like her.” Later I’d read about how Russell sought the famous and semifamous and hangers-on, people he could court and wring for resources, whose cars he could borrow and houses he could live in. How pleased he must have been at my arrival, not even needing to be coaxed. Russell reached out to draw Suzanne closer. When I caught her eye, she seemed to retreat. I hadn’t thought, until that moment, that she might be nervous about me and Russell. A new feeling of power flexed within me, a quick tightening of ribbon so unfamiliar I didn’t recognize it. “And you’ll be in charge of our Evie,” Russell said to Suzanne. “Won’t you?” Neither looked at me. The air between them crisscrossed with symbols. Russell held my hand for a moment, his eyes avalanching over me. “Later, Evie,” he said. Then a few whispered words to Suzanne. She rejoined me with a new air of briskness. “Russell says you can stick around, if you want,” she said. I felt how energized she was by seeing Russell. Alert with renewed authority, studying me as she spoke. I didn’t know if the jump I felt was fear or interest.

• From The Girls (2016)

  His features were smeary, an unhealthy dampness on his skin, though his upper-class upbringing kicked in like a first language. “This is Sasha,” he said, nudging the girl. “Hi,” she peeped, uncomfortable. I’d forgotten that dopey part of teenage girls: the desire for love flashing in her face so directly that it embarrassed me. “And Sasha,” Julian said, “this is—” Julian’s eyes struggled to focus on me. “Evie,” I reminded him. “Right,” he said, “Evie. Man.” He drank from his beer, the amber bottle catching the blare of the lights. He was staring past me. Glancing around at the furniture, the contents of the bookshelves, like this was my house and he was the outsider. “God, you must’ve thought we were like, breaking in or something.” “I thought you were locals.” “There was a break-in here once,” Julian said. “When I was a kid. We weren’t here. They just stole our wet suits and a bunch of abalone from the freezer.” He took another drink. Sasha kept her eyes on Julian. She was in cutoffs, all wrong for the cold coast, and an oversize sweatshirt that must have been his. The cuffs gnawed and wet looking. Her makeup looked terrible, but it was more of a symbol, I suppose. I could see she was nervous with my eyes on her. I understood the worry. When I was that age, I was uncertain of how to move, whether I was walking too fast, whether others could see the discomfort and stiffness in me. As if everyone were constantly gauging my performance and finding it lacking. It occurred to me that Sasha was very young. Too young to be here with Julian. She seemed to know what I was thinking, staring at me with surprising defiance. “I’m sorry your dad didn’t tell you I’d be here,” I said. “I can sleep in the other room if you want the bigger bed. Or if you want to be here alone, I’ll figure something—” “Nah,” Julian said. “Sasha and I can sleep anywhere, can’t we, babe? And we’re just passing through. On our way north. A weed run,” he said. “I make the drive, L.A. to Humboldt, at least once a month.” It occurred to me that Julian thought I’d be impressed. “I don’t sell it or anything,” Julian went on, backpedaling. “Just transport. All you really need is a couple Watershed bags and a police scanner.” Sasha looked worried. Would I get them in trouble? “How’d you know my dad again?” Julian said. Draining his beer and opening another. They’d brought a few six-packs. The other supplies in sight: the nutty gravel of trail mix. An unopened package of sour worms, the stale crumple of a fast-food bag. “We met in L.A.,” I said. “We lived together for a while.” Dan and I had shared an apartment in Venice Beach in the late seventies, Venice with its third world alleyways, the palm trees that hit the windows in the warm night winds.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Yes, this was unquestionably the chief. He sat down on a stool, while everyone else remained standing. ‘Doctor Stravinsky,’ the seated man introduced himself to Ivan and gave him a friendly look. ‘Here, Alexander Nikolaevich,’ someone with a trim beard said in a low voice, and handed the chief Ivan’s chart, all covered with writing. ‘They’ve sewn up a whole case!’ Ivan thought. And the chief ran through the chart with a practised eye, muttered ‘Mm-hm, mm-hm . . .’, and exchanged a few phrases with those around him in a little-known language. ‘And he speaks Latin like Pilate,’ Ivan thought sadly. Here one word made him jump; it was the word ‘schizophrenia’—alas, already uttered yesterday by the cursed foreigner at the Patriarch’s Ponds, and today repeated here by Professor Stravinsky. ‘And he knew that, too!’ Ivan thought anxiously. The chief apparently made it a rule to agree with and rejoice over everything said to him by those around him, and to express this with the words ‘Very nice, very nice . . .’ ‘Very nice!’ said Stravinsky, handing the chart back to someone, and he addressed Ivan: ‘You are a poet?’ ‘A poet,’ Ivan replied glumly, and for the first time suddenly felt some inexplicable loathing for poetry, and his own verses, coming to mind at once, seemed to him for some reason distasteful. Wrinkling his face, he asked Stravinsky in turn: ‘You are a professor?’ To this, Stravinsky, with obliging courtesy, inclined his head. ‘And you’re the chief here?’ Ivan continued. Stravinsky nodded to this as well. ‘I must speak with you,’ Ivan Nikolaevich said meaningly. ‘That is what I’m here for,’ returned Stravinsky. ‘The thing is,’ Ivan began, feeling his hour had come, ‘that I’ve been got up as a madman, and nobody wants to listen to me! . . .’ ‘Oh, no, we shall hear you out with great attention,’ Stravinsky said seriously and soothingly, ‘and by no means allow you to be got up as a madman.’ ‘Listen, then: yesterday evening I met a mysterious person at the Patriarch’s Ponds, maybe a foreigner, maybe not, who knew beforehand about Berlioz’s death and has seen Pontius Pilate in person.’ The retinue listened to the poet silently and without stirring. ‘Pilate? The Pilate who lived in the time of Jesus Christ?’ Stravinsky asked, narrowing his eyes at Ivan. ‘The same.’ ‘Aha,’ said Stravinsky, ‘and this Berlioz died under a tram-car?’ ‘Precisely, he’s the one who in my presence was killed by a tram-car yesterday at the Ponds, and this same mysterious citizen . . .’ ‘The acquaintance of Pontius Pilate?’ asked Stravinsky, apparently distinguished by great mental alacrity. ‘Precisely him,’ Ivan confirmed, studying Stravinsky. ‘Well, so he said beforehand that Annushka had spilled the sunflower oil . . . And he slipped right on that place! How do you like that?’

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  before us as we turned a corner, every facade, every flight of steps looked to me both familiar and utterly alien. I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind, which I could not explain either to myself or to Marie, not on this first walk we took through the deserted park nor in the late afternoon, when we sat in the dimly lit kavarna of the Mésto Moskva under a picture of pink water lilies measuring at least four square yards. I remember, said Austerlitz, that we ordered an ice cream, or rather, as it turned out, a confection resembling an ice cream, a plaster- like substance tasting of potato starch and notable chiefly for the fact that even after more than an hour it did not melt. Apart from us the only customers in the Mésto Moskva were two old gentlemen playing chess at one of the tables at the back. The waiter who was standing by the net curtains, which were discolored with smoke, his hands behind his back and looking out, lost in thought, at the rubbish dump overgrown with giant hogweed on the other side of the road, was himself advanced in age. His white hair and moustache were carefully trimmed, and although he too wore one of those mouse-gray nylon coats it was easy to imagine him in deep black, well-cut tails, with a velvet bow tie above a starched shirtfront radiant with supernatural cleanliness, wearing shiny patent-leather shoes which reflected the lamplight of a grand hotel lobby. When he brought Marie a flat pack of forty Cuban cigarettes displaying a pretty palm-frond motif, and then gave her a light with an elegantly executed gesture, I could see that she greatly admired him. The Cuban tobacco smoke hung in blue drifts in the air between us, and some time went by before Marie asked what was in my mind, why I was so abstracted, so lost in thought; how could I have lapsed so suddenly from the happy mood which she had sensed in me yesterday? And all I could say was that I didn’t know. I think, said Austerlitz, I tried to explain that something or other unknown wrenched at my heart here in Marienbad, something very obvious like an ordinary name or a term which one cannot remember for the sake of anyone or anything in the world. I do not now recall in detail how we spent those few days in Marienbad, said Austerlitz. I know that I often lay for hours in the bubbling mineral baths and the retiring rooms, which did me good in one way but in another may have weakened the resistance I had put up for so many years against the emergence of memory. Once we went to a concert at the Gogol Theater, where a Russian pianist called Bloch played the Papillons and Kinderszenen to an audience of half a dozen. On the way back to the hotel Marie spoke, almost as a warning, so it seemed to me, said Austerlitz, of the clouding of Schumann’s mind as his madness came on and how at last, in the middle of

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  in the following phrase, which reports a story of Maximilian’s, via Vera RySanova, via Austerlitz, and collapses the three names: “From time to time, so Vera recollected, said Austerlitz, Maximilian would tell the tale of how once, after a trade union meeting in Treplitz in the early summer of 1933 ...” Sebald borrowed this habit of repetitive attribution from the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, who also influenced Sebald’s diction of extremism. Almost every sentence in this book is a cunning combination of the quiet and the loud: “As usual when I go down to London on my own,” the narrator tells us in a fairly typical passage, “a kind of dull despair stirred within me in that December morming.” Or, for instance, when Austerlitz describes how moths die, he says that they will stay where they are, clinging to a wall, never moving “until the last breath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death.” In Thomas Bernhard’s work, extremity of expression is indistinguishable from the Austrian author’s comic, ranting rage, and his tendency to circle obsessively around madness and suicide. Sebald takes some of Bernhard’s wildness and estranges it—first, by muffling it in an exquisitely courteous syntax: “Had I realized at the time that for Austerlitz certain moments had no beginning or end, while on the other hand his whole life had sometimes seemed to him a blank point without duration, I would probably have waited more patiently.” Second, Sebald makes his diction mysterious by a process of deliberate antiquarianism. Notice the slightly quaint, Romantic sound of those phrases about the moths: “until the last breath is out of their bodies ... the place where they came to grief ...” In all his fiction, Sebald works this archaic strain (sometimes reminiscent of the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter) into a new, strange, and seemingly impossible composite: a kind of mildly agitated, pensive contemporary Gothic. His characters and narrators are forever finding themselves, like travelers of old, in gloomy, inimical places (East London, Norfolk) where “not a living soul stirred.” Wherever they go, they are accompanied by apprehensions of uneasiness, dread, and menace. In Austerlitz, this uneasiness amounts to a Gothicism of the past; the text is constantly in communion with the ghosts of the dead. At Liverpool Street Station, Jacques Austerlitz feels dread at the thought that the station is built on the foundations of Bedlam, the famous insane asylum: “I felt at this time,” he tells the narrator, “as if the dead were returning from their exile and filling the twilight around me with their strangely slow but incessant to-ing and fro-ing.” In Wales, the young Jacques had occasionally felt the presence of the dead, and Evan the cobbler had told the boy of those dead who had been “struck down by fate untimely, who knew they had been cheated of what was due to them and tried to return to life.”

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  citizens could walk in their leisure time, and soon pavilions and country houses were being built all the way out to Forest Park and Arden. Until the seventeenth century, Austerlitz continued, the priory of the order of St. Mary of Bethlehem stood on the site of the present main station concourse and the Great Eastern Hotel. It had been founded by a certain Simon FitzMary in gratitude for his miraculous rescue from the hands of the Saracens when he was on a crusade, so that the pious brothers and sisters could pray henceforward for the salvation of the founder’s soul and the souls of his ancestors, his descendants, and all those related to him. The hospital for the insane and other destitute persons which has gone down in history under the name of Bedlam also belonged to the priory outside Bishopsgate. Whenever I was in the station, said Austerlitz, I kept almost obsessively trying to imagine—through the ever-changing maze of walls—the location in that huge space of the rooms where the asylum inmates were confined, and I often wondered whether the pain and suffering accumulated on this site over the centuries had ever really ebbed away, or whether they might not still, as I sometimes thought when I felt a cold breath of air on my forehead, be sensed as we passed through them. Or I imagined the bleachfields stretching westwards from Bedlam, saw the white lengths of linen spread out on the green grass and the diminutive figures of weavers and washerwomen, and on the far side of the bleachfields the places where the dead were buried once the churchyards of London could hold no more. When space becomes too cramped, the dead, like the living, move out into less densely populated districts where they can rest at a decent distance from each other. But more and more keep coming, a neverending succession of them, and in the end, when the space is entirely occupied, graves are dug through existing graves to accommodate them, until all the bones in the cemetery lie jumbled up together. At Broad Street Station, built in 1865 on the site of the former burial grounds and bleachfields, excavations during the demolition work of 1984 brought to light over four hundred skeletons underneath a taxi rank. I went there quite often at the time, said Austerlitz, partly because of my interest in architectural history and partly for other reasons which I could not explain even to myself, and I took photographs of the remains of the dead. I remember falling into conversation with one of the archaeologists, who told me that on average the skeletons of eight people had been found in every cubic meter of earth removed from the trench. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the city had grown above these strata of soil mingled with the dust and bones of decayed bodies into a warren of putrid streets and houses for the poorest Londoners, cobbled together out of beams, clods of clay, and any other building material that came to hand.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Although I am basically optimistic about remaining well, I know my illness from enough different vantage points to remain rather fatalistic about the future. As a result, I know that I listen to lectures about new treatments for manic-depressive illness with far more than just a professional interest. I also know that when I am doing Grand Rounds at other hospitals, I often visit their psychiatric wards, look at their seclusion rooms and ECT suites, wander their hospital grounds, and do my own internal ratings of where I would choose to go if I had to be hospitalized. There is always a part of my mind that is preparing for the worst, and another part of my mind that believes if I prepare enough for it, the worst won’t happen. Many years of living with the cyclic upheavals of manic-depressive illness has made me more philosophical, better armed, and more able to handle the inevitable swings of mood and energy that I have opted for by taking a lower level of lithium. I agree absolutely with Eliot’s Ecclesiastian belief that there is a season for everything, a time for building, and “a time for the wind to break the loosened pane.” Therefore, I now move more easily with the fluctuating tides of energy, ideas, and enthusiasms that I remain so subject to. My mind still, now and again, becomes a carnival of lights, laughter, and sounds and possibilities. The laughter and exuberance and ease will, filling me, spill out and over and into others. These glinting, glorious moments will last for a while, a short season, and then move on. My high moods and hopes, having ridden briefly in the top car of the Ferris wheel will, as suddenly as they came, plummet into a black and gray and tired heap. Time will pass; these moods will pass; and I will, eventually, be myself again. But then, at some unknown time, the electrifying carnival will come back into my mind.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The police went running to Sempleyarov’s box, people were climbing over the barriers, there were bursts of infernal guffawing and furious shouts, drowned in the golden clash of the orchestra’s cymbals. And one could see that the stage was suddenly empty, and that the hoodwinker Fagott, as well as the brazen tom-cat Behemoth, had melted into air, vanished as the magician had vanished earlier in his armchair with the faded upholstery. CHAPTER 13: The Hero Enters, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 13 The Hero Enters And so, the unknown man shook his finger at Ivan and whispered: ‘Shhh! . . .’ Ivan lowered his legs from the bed and peered. Cautiously looking into the room from the balcony was a clean-shaven, dark-haired man of approximately thirty-eight, with a sharp nose, anxious eyes, and a wisp of hair hanging down on his forehead. Having listened and made sure that Ivan was alone, the mysterious visitor took heart and stepped into the room. Here Ivan saw that the man was dressed as a patient. He was wearing long underwear, slippers on his bare feet, and a brown dressing-gown thrown over his shoulders. The visitor winked at Ivan, hid a bunch of keys in his pocket, inquired in a whisper: ‘May I sit down?’—and receiving an affirmative nod, placed himself in an armchair. ‘How did you get here?’ Ivan asked in a whisper, obeying the dry finger shaken at him. ‘Aren’t the balcony grilles locked?’ ‘The grilles are locked,’ the guest agreed, ‘but Praskovya Fyodorovna, while the dearest person, is also, alas, quite absent-minded. A month ago I stole a bunch of keys from her, and so gained the opportunity of getting out on the common balcony, which runs around the entire floor, and so of occasionally calling on a neighbour.’ ‘If you can get out on to the balcony, you can escape. Or is it high up?’ Ivan was interested. ‘No,’ the guest replied firmly, ‘I cannot escape from here, not because it’s high up, but because I have nowhere to escape to.’ And he added, after a pause: ‘So, here we sit.’ ‘Here we sit,’ Ivan replied, peering into the man’s brown and very restless eyes. ‘Yes . . .’ here the guest suddenly became alarmed, ‘but you’re not violent, I hope? Because, you know, I cannot stand noise, turmoil, force, or other things like that. Especially hateful to me are people’s cries, whether cries of rage, suffering, or anything else.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  A minute later she was asleep, and that morning she had no dreams. The basement rooms were silent, the builder’s whole little house was silent, and it was quiet in the solitary lane. But just then, that is, at dawn on Saturday, an entire floor of a certain Moscow institution was not asleep, and its windows, looking out on a big asphalt-paved square which special machines, driving around slowly and droning, were cleaning with brushes, shone with their full brightness, cutting through the light of the rising sun. The whole floor was occupied with the investigation of the Woland case, and the lights had burned all night in ten offices. Essentially speaking, the matter had already become clear on the previous day, Friday, when the Variety had had to be closed, owing to the disappearance of its administration and all sorts of outrages which had taken place during the notorious séance of black magic the day before. But the thing was that more and more new material kept arriving all the time and incessantly on the sleepless floor. Now the investigators of this strange case, which smacked of obvious devilry, with an admixture of some hypnotic tricks and distinct criminality, had to shape into one lump all the many-sided and tangled events that had taken place in various parts of Moscow. The first to visit the sleepless, electrically lit-up floor was Arkady Apollonovich Sempleyarov, chairman of the Acoustics Commission. After dinner on Friday, in his apartment located in a house by the Kamenny Bridge, the telephone rang and a male voice asked for Arkady Apollonovich. Arkady Apollonovich’s wife, who picked up the phone, replied sullenly that Arkady Apollonovich was unwell, had retired for the night, and could not come to the phone. However, Arkady Apollonovich came to the phone all the same. To the question of where Arkady Apollonovich was being called from, the voice in the telephone had said very briefly where it was from. ‘This second . . . at once . . . this minute . . .’ babbled the ordinarily very haughty wife of the chairman of the Acoustics Commission, and she flew to the bedroom like an arrow to rouse Arkady Apollonovich from his bed, where he lay experiencing the torments of hell at the recollection of yesterday’s séance and the night’s scandal, followed by the expulsion of his Saratov niece from the apartment.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  You’re not angry, are you, darling? I kept thinking of you alone in the study. Come here and say you’re not angry with me, even if it is three o’clock in the morning!’ Then Stephen would slip off her old tweed coat and would fling herself down on the bed beside Mary, too exhausted to do more than take the girl in her arms, and let her lie there with her head on her shoulder. But Mary would be thinking of all those things which she found so deeply appealing in Stephen—the scar on her cheek, the expression in her eyes, the strength and the queer, shy gentleness of her—the strength which at moments could not be gentle. And as they lay there Stephen might sleep, worn out by the strain of those long hours of writing. But Mary would not sleep, or if she slept it would be when the dawn was paling the windows. 4 One morning Stephen looked at Mary intently. ‘Come here. You’re not well! What’s the matter? Tell me.’ For she thought that the girl was unusually pale, thought too that her lips drooped a little at the corners; and a sudden fear contracted her heart. ‘Tell me at once what’s the matter with you!’ Her voice was rough with anxiety, and she laid an imperative hand over Mary’s. Mary protested. ‘Don’t be absurd; there’s nothing the matter, I’m perfectly well—you’re imagining things.’ For what could be the matter? Was she not here in Paris with Stephen? But her eyes filled with tears, and she turned away quickly to hide them, ashamed of her own unreason. Stephen stuck to her point. ‘You don’t look a bit well. We shouldn’t have stayed in Paris last summer.’ Then because her own nerves were on edge that day, she frowned. ‘It’s this business of your not eating whenever I can’t get in to a meal. I know you don’t eat—Pierre’s told me about it. You mustn’t behave like a baby, Mary! I shan’t be able to write a line if I feel you’re ill because you’re not eating.’ Her fear was making her lose her temper. ‘I shall send for a doctor,’ she finished brusquely. Mary refused point-blank to see a doctor. What was she to tell him? She hadn’t any symptoms. Pierre exaggerated. She ate quite enough— she had never been a very large eater. Stephen had better get on with her work and stop upsetting herself over nothing. But try as she might, Stephen could not get on—all the rest of the day her work went badly. After this she would often leave her desk and go wandering off in search of Mary. ‘Darling, where are you?’ ‘Upstairs in my bedroom!’ ‘Well, come down; I want you here in the study.’

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  And straight away, looking at the threads of fire cutting up the cloud, he began to ask that lightning strike Yeshua’s post. Repentantly looking into the clear sky that had not yet been devoured by the cloud, and where the vultures were veering on one wing to escape the storm, Levi thought he had been insanely hasty with his curses: now God was not going to listen to him. Turning his gaze to the foot of the hill, Levi fixed on the place where the strung-out cavalry regiment stood, and saw that considerable changes had taken place there. From above, Levi was able to distinguish very well the soldiers bustling about, pulling spears out of the ground, throwing cloaks on, the horse-handlers trotting towards the road leading black horses by their bridles. The regiment was moving off, that was clear. Spitting and shielding himself with his hand from the dust blowing in his face, Levi tried to grasp what it might mean if the cavalry was about to leave. He shifted his gaze further up and made out a little figure in a crimson military chlamys climbing towards the place of execution. And here a chill came over the heart of the former tax collector in anticipation of the joyful end. The man climbing the mountain in the fifth hour of the robbers’ sufferings was the commander of the cohort, who had come galloping from Yershalaim accompanied by an aide. At a gesture from Ratslayer, the file of soldiers parted, and the centurion saluted the tribune. The latter, taking Ratslayer aside, whispered something to him. The centurion saluted him a second time and moved towards the group of executioners, who were sitting on stones at the foot of the posts. The tribune meanwhile directed his steps towards the one sitting on the three-legged stool, and the seated man politely rose to meet the tribune. The tribune also said something to him in a low voice, and the two went over to the posts. They were joined by the head of the temple guard. Ratslayer, casting a squeamish sidelong glance at the dirty rags lying on the ground near the posts, rags that had recently been the criminals’ clothing, and which the executioners had rejected, called two of them and ordered: ‘Follow me!’ From the nearest post came a hoarse, senseless song. Gestas, hanging on it, had lost his mind from the flies and sun towards the end of the third hour, and was now quietly singing something about grapes, but his head, covered with a turban, occasionally swayed all the same, and then the flies rose sluggishly from his face and settled on it again. Dysmas, on the second post, suffered more than the other two because he did not lose consciousness, and he swung his head constantly and rhythmically, right and left, so that his ears struck his shoulders. Yeshua was more fortunate than the other two.

• From The Girls (2016)

  They spoke rapidly to each other in serious Asiatic voices, with sober, rational inflection, like the conversation of two little sages. Breaking into sudden hysterical laughter. —It was late in the day. We drank the dirty wine they sold by the gallon in town, sediment staining our tongues, a nauseous heat. Mitch had gotten to his feet, ready to head home. “Why don’t you go with Mitch?” Russell suggested. Squeezing my hand in submerged code. Had a look passed between him and Mitch? Or maybe I am imagining that I witnessed that exchange. The logistics of the day were shrouded in confusion, so that somehow it was dusk and Suzanne and I were driving Mitch back to his house, hurtling along the back roads of Marin in his car. Mitch was sitting in the backseat, Suzanne driving. I was up front. I kept catching sight of Mitch in the mirror, lost in an aimless fog. Then he’d jolt back into himself, staring at us with wonderment. I didn’t fully understand why we’d been chosen to take Mitch home. Information passed through selectively, so all I knew was that I got to be with Suzanne. All the windows open to the smell of summer earth and the secret flash of other driveways, other lives, along that narrow road in the shadow of Mount Tam. The loops of garden hoses, the pretty magnolia. Suzanne drove in the wrong lane sometimes, and we shrieked with happy and confused terror, though there was a flatness to my yelling: I did not believe anything bad could ever happen, not really. —Mitch changed into a white pajama-like suit, a souvenir from a three-week sojourn in Varanasi. He handed us each a glass—I caught the medical whiff of gin and something else, too, a tinge of bitterness. I drank it easily. I was almost pathologically stoned, and I kept swallowing, my nose getting stuffy. I laughed a little to myself. It seemed so odd to be in Mitch Lewis’s house. Among his cluttered shrines and new-looking furniture. “The Airplane lived here for a few months,” he said. He blinked heavily. “With one of those dogs,” he continued, staring around at his house. “The big white ones. What are they called? Newfoundlands? It tore up the lawn.” He didn’t seem to care that we were ignoring him. He was out of it, glazing over with silence. Abruptly he got to his feet, putting a record on. Turning the volume up so loud I startled, but Suzanne laughed, urging him to make it louder. It was his own music, which embarrassed me. His heavy belly pressed against his long shirt, as flowing as a dress. “You’re fun girls,” he said dimly. Watching Suzanne start to dance. Her dirty feet on the white carpet. She’d found chicken in the refrigerator and had torn off a piece with her fingers, chewing while she moved her hips. “Kona chicken,” Mitch remarked.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  of this cold and damp day, as the fog drifted over the fields, they were forced to wait, guarded by armed police, and not permitted to step out of line even for a minute, for the SS men to arrive, as they eventually did on their motorbikes at three o’clock, to carry out the count of heads and then repeat it twice before they could feel convinced that the final result, including those few still within the walls, did in fact tally with the expected number of forty thousand one hundred and forty-five, whereupon they rode away again in some haste, entirely forgetting to give any orders for the inmates’ return, so that this great crowd of many thousands stood out in the Bohusevice basin on that gray tenth of November drenched to the skin and increasingly distressed until well after dark, bowed and swaying like reeds in the showers that now swept over the countryside, before finally, driven to it by a wave of panic, they poured back into the town from which most of them had never emerged except for this one time since their transfer to Theresienstadt, where soon after the beginning of the new year, said Austerlitz, what was described as a Verschénerungsaktion or general improvement campaign was undertaken, with an eye to the imminent visit in the early summer of 1944 of a Red Cross commission, an event regarded by those authorities of the Reich responsible as a good opportunity to dissimulate the true nature of their deportation policy, and consequently it was decided to organize the ghetto inmates under the command of the SS for the purpose of a vast cleaning-up program: pathways and a grove with a columbarium were laid out, park benches and signposts were set up, the latter adorned in the German fashion with jolly carvings and floral decoration, over a thousand rosebushes were planted, a children’s nursery and créche or Kriechlingskrippe, as it was termed, said Austerlitz, in one of those perverse formulations, were adorned with pretty fairy-tale friezes and equipped with sandboxes, paddling pools, and merry-go- rounds, whilst the former OREL cinema, which until now had served as a dumping ground for the oldest inmates of the ghetto and where a huge chandelier still hung from the ceiling in the dark space inside, was converted within a few weeks into a concert hall and theater, and elsewhere shops stocked with goods from the SS storehouses were opened for the sale of food and household utensils, ladies’ and gentlemen’s clothing, shoes, underwear, travel requisites, and suitcases; there were also a convalescent home, a chapel, a lending library, a gymnasium, a post office, a bank where the manager’s office was furnished with a sort of field marshal’s desk and a suite of easy chairs, not to mention a coffeehouse with sun umbrellas and folding chairs outside it to suggest the agreeable atmosphere of a resort inviting all passersby to linger for a while, and indeed there was no end to the improvements and embellishments, with much sawing, hammering, and painting until the time of the visit itself

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  When it’s two o’clock in the morning, and you’re manic, even the UCLA Medical Center has a certain appeal. The hospital—ordinarily a cold clotting of uninteresting buildings—became for me, that fall morning not quite twenty years ago, a focus of my finely wired, exquisitely alert nervous system. With vibrissae twinging, antennae perked, eyes fast-forwarding and fly faceted, I took in everything around me. I was on the run. Not just on the run but fast and furious on the run, darting back and forth across the hospital parking lot trying to use up a boundless, restless, manic energy. I was running fast, but slowly going mad. […] My colleague, fortunately, was thinking far better than I was and managed to reach down into some deeply intuitive part of his own and the world’s collective unconscious and said, “We’re both on the faculty in the psychiatry department.” The policeman looked at us, smiled, went back to his squad car, and drove away. Being professors of psychiatry explained everything.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  By that time both Levi and the body of Yeshua were gone from the hilltop. CHAPTER 17: An Unquiet Day, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 17 An Unquiet Day On Friday morning, that is, the day after the accursed séance, all the available staff of the Variety—the bookkeeper Vassily Stepanovich Lastochkin, two accountants, three typists, both box-office girls, the messengers, ushers, cleaning women—in short, all those available, were not at their places doing their jobs, but were all sitting on the window-sills looking out on Sadovaya and watching what was going on by the wall of the Variety. By this wall a queue of many thousands clung in two rows, its tail reaching to Kudrinskaya Square. At the head of the line stood some two dozen scalpers well known to theatrical Moscow. The line behaved with much agitation, attracting the notice of the citizens streaming past, and was occupied with the discussion of inflammatory tales about yesterday’s unprecedented séance of black magic. These same tales caused the greatest consternation in the bookkeeper Vassily Stepanovich, who had not been present at the previous evening’s performance. The ushers told of God knows what, among other things that after the conclusion of the famous séance, some female citizens went running around in the street looking quite indecent, and so on in the same vein. The modest and quiet Vassily Stepanovich merely blinked his eyes, listening to the tall tales of these wonders, and decidedly did not know what to undertake, and yet something had to be undertaken, and precisely by him, because he now turned out to be the senior member of the whole Variety team. By ten o’clock the line of people desiring tickets had swelled so much that rumour of it reached the police, and with astonishing swiftness detachments were sent, both on foot and mounted, to bring this line into some sort of order. However, in itself even an orderly snake a half-mile long presented a great temptation, and caused utter amazement in the citizens on Sadovaya. That was outside, but inside the Variety things were also none too great. Early in the morning the telephones began to ring and went on ringing without interruption in Likhodeev’s office, in Rimsky’s office, at the bookkeeper’s, in the box office, and in Varenukha’s office. Vassily Stepanovich at first made some answer, the box-office girl also answered, the ushers mumbled something into the telephones, but then they stopped altogether, because to questions of where Likhodeev, Varenukha and Rimsky were, there was decidedly no answer. At first they tried to get off by saying ‘Likhodeev’s at home’, but the reply to this was that they had called him at home, and at home they said Likhodeev was at the Variety. An agitated lady called, started asking for Rimsky, was advised to call his wife, to which the receiver, sobbing, answered that she was his wife and that Rimsky was nowhere to be found. Some sort of nonsense was beginning.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  20 Lecture 3: The First Cultural Context—Judaism Assimilation and Separation in the Diaspora • Jews in the Diaspora experienced the same tension between the desire to assimilate and the desire to separate that similar minority groups often do. o Assimilation was expressed by adoption of the majority language, the change of names, and participation in shared cultural pursuits (as at the gymnasium); thus, in Alexandria, Jews read the Bible in Greek and interpreted it allegorically, as Greek philosophers did Homer. o Separation was expressed by the maintenance of “holiness” (difference) in assembly (the synagogue), in worship (the Sabbath), and in ancestral identity markers (circumcision). • Gentiles, in turn, responded ambivalently to the presence of Jewish communities in their midst. o Many Gentiles were attracted to Judaism because of its antiquity, moral teaching, and bloodless worship; some became converts (proselytes), and others were “God-fearers” who frequented synagogues but resisted full initiation. o Other Gentiles engaged in anti-Semitic attacks, accusing Jews of a variety of crimes, including “atheism.” These crimes can be summed up by the terms amixia (“failure to mingle”) or misanthropia (“hatred of humans”). • Jews in the Diaspora responded to attacks by developing a wide- ranging apologetic literature based on the Septuagint (the Greek Bible), using a variety of genres (history, poetry, moral instruction) to demonstrate that Jews were philanthropic (“lovers of humanity”). o One of the most famous of these writers was Philo of Alexandria, whose allegorical interpretations of Scripture were influential on later Christians. o Many of the apologetic arguments used by Diaspora Jews would be employed by Christians when they later faced similar attacks.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  90 noigileR dna scitiloP lairepmI :31 erutceL Imperial Politics and Religion Lecture 13 In the first part of the course, we saw how Christianity, beginning as an inauspicious sect of Judaism, grew—despite hostility and persecution— into a significant player in the larger world, with strong internal organization, an empire-wide system of communication, and an increasing confidence in both its moral and intellectual superiority. We now take a major turn in the course, just as Christianity took a major turn in the 4th century. From this point forward, it will be difficult to disentangle Christianity as a religious phenomenon from its role in the political order. In this lecture, we will see how the persecuted Christian cult became the established religion of the Roman Empire. The Transition of Christianity • The transition of Christianity from a persecuted cult to an established religion is represented by the emperor under whom the last great persecution was carried out, Diocletian (284–305), and the emperor under whom toleration and much more occurred, Constantine I (306–337). But history is not merely a matter of great men, however important; beneath their actions, powerful social forces were at work. • The Roman Empire’s transition from pagan to Christian was more gradual—and more complex—than is sometimes thought. We have seen how Christianity grew in numbers, organization, and intellectual self-confidence in the preceding centuries. The consequences of Constantine’s decision to establish Christianity as the imperial religion were, however, for both empire and church, undoubtedly decisive. Nothing was ever again the same for either. The empire, which had already left behind its republican roots o with the first Caesars and become increasingly autocratic, found itself patron of a religion with subversion in its genes. It is not clear whether the emperors had any idea how resistant to imperial rule Christianity could be.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  another member of staff calls you into a separate cubicle, as if you were on business of an extremely dubious nature, or at least had to be dealt with away from the public gaze, and here you must say again what it is you have come for and receive the relevant instructions. Despite such measures of control I finally succeeded, said Austerlitz, in gaining admission to the newly opened Haut-de- jardin public reading room, where I subsequently sat for many hours and days on end, looking out abstractedly, as my habit now is, at the inner courtyard and the curious nature reserve cut, so to speak, from the surface of the promenade deck and sunk two or three stories deep, which has been planted with about a hundred full-grown stone pines from the Forét de Bord transported, how I do not know, to this place of banishment. If one looks down from the deck at the spreading gray-green crowns of the trees, some of which perhaps are still thinking of their home in Normandy, it is like looking across an uneven expanse of moorland, while from the reading room you can see only the blotched red trunks which, although fixed in place with steel hawsers rising at an oblique angle, sway slightly back and forth on stormy days like waterweed in an aquarium. In the daydreams into which I fell in the reading room, said Austerlitz, I sometimes felt as if I saw circus acrobats climbing the cables slanting up from the ground to the evergreen canopy, placing one foot in front of the other as they made their way upwards with the ends of their balancing poles quivering, or as if, always on the edge of invisibility, I saw dodging now here, now there, those two mythical squirrels said to have been brought to the library in the hope that they will increase and multiply, founding a large colony of their species in this artificial pine grove to entertain any readers who look up from their books now and then. And several times, said Austerlitz, birds which had lost their way in the library forest flew into the mirror images of the trees in the reading room windows, struck the glass with a dull thud, and fell lifeless to the ground. Sitting at my place in the reading room, said Austerlitz, I thought at length about the way in which such unforeseen accidents, the fall of a single creature to its death when diverted from its natural path, or the recurrent symptoms of paralysis affecting the electronic data retrieval system, relate to the Cartesian overall plan of the Bibliothéque Nationale, and I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed ultimately must coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability. At any rate, as far as I myself was concerned, a man who, after all, had devoted almost the whole of his life to the study of books and who had been equally at home in the Bodleian, the British Museum, and the rue Richelieu, I for my part, said