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 Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Some terrible loss will change my life, and it only gets worse as things get better for me. Maybe that’s the permanent result of my parents’ divorce. Gavin says I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve learned to contain it. I no longer wake up in terror when I go to sleep happy, but this feeling does not ever go away.” “So how did you make up your mind to marry him?” I asked. “Well, it’s strange, but a near catastrophe made me change my mind. Gavin was in Nashville, giving a talk, and on the drive home was caught in a freak ice storm. He got pulled off the road in the middle of nowhere by the highway patrol and couldn’t get to a phone for eight hours. I was home, waiting for him, hearing about all sorts of fatal accidents on the roads. I was beside myself. Anything could have happened to him.” “You must have been scared out of your mind.” “Oh, yes,” said Karen. “It was ghastly. I just knew it was the disaster that I always expected and that it would blow my life away. But something really important happened to me at the same time. I realized that whether we married or not, life is always chancy. If I marry him, I might lose him. If I don’t marry him, I might lose him. So I could lose him either way. And that’s when I realized that I want to hold on to Gavin for the rest of my life and for whatever happens. I said yes, let’s get married.” Smiling at her calculation, I said, “So you decided to take a chance, to reach out for what you really want?” “That’s right, although it’s still hard for me to know what I want. But I’ve learned what I don’t want. I don’t want another edition of my relationship with Nick or with my mom or dad.” “And what do you want?” “I want a lover and a husband. I’m no longer frantic to find just anybody. I’m no longer afraid to be alone. I can stand on my own two feet.” Her last words were unforgettable. She seemed to be talking more to herself and only partly to me. “My co-workers say that I have an old soul. I’ve always felt that I would die young, that so much unhappiness was compressed into the early part of my life that it made sense. But maybe the second half of my life is the part that I will enjoy more. I never had a childhood. I always took care of everything.” A smile broke across her face. “You know, I like the kind of woman I’m becoming. I love the man I’m marrying. I like my kindness and my sensitivity. I love my work. I’m on a good path.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  drug search?” I tell one unsuspecting neighbor as she approaches the pay phone, taking a quarter from her pocket. “I heard the R.A.’s going to pull the fire alarm and the police are coming into our rooms to search.” She stares at the phone in confusion, then slinks away. Around midnight, when KiKi brings a group of friends into our room, I slam our door shut behind me and take a spot on the hard couch in the common area near the pay phone. First I lie seething, then tears streak down my temples and into my hair. I think about Mr. Brownstein’s lectures on the role of government in our lives, how it needs to be there as a safety net . . . right now I’m the only one who’s been saved by any net, while my baby sister navigates a high-wire act with no protection whatsoever; no sisters or social workers there to defend her. Exhausted by my tears, I drift to sleep. I’m awakened by the sound of the phone. It’s rung four times when I’m finally within arm’s reach. Then, it stops. I slam my fist against the painted cinder-block wall and press my forehead against the phone. “Dammit!” Then it rings again. “Hello?” “Cherie is flying out to Idaho tomorrow,” Camille says. “And?” “She’s getting Rosie!” “How?” “We’ve got this whole plan. She’s flying into Boise and will rent a car, then she’ll stake out at Rosie’s bus stop. She’ll have to talk fast to convince her to get inside, but when she does, she has a hiding spot where they’ll put on wigs and change clothes.” “Isn’t that a little extreme?” “It’s a small town, Regina. If anybody sees Rosie in a car with Cherie, they’ll call Cookie, then Cookie will call the cops, then Cherie will get arrested. Cherie has to play it safe. Then the two of them will rush to the airport in Boise and fly back to New York.” “You feel like this plan is foolproof?” “As foolproof as it ever will be.” “Okay. I have a test to take tomorrow, then I’ll hop on a bus to Manhattan and catch the train out to you and Frank so we can wait together.” “No, Regina—you have school. You can’t screw it up.” “Camille, I screwed up the thing that’s most important to me in the world the day I signed that affidavit when I was fourteen! Rosie’s life has never been the same, and nothing matters more to me than this.” Two of my neighbors groggily stick their necks out of their rooms. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I whisper into the receiver. “I’ll call you when the train drops me at the Ronkonkoma station.”

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  For women, pudici- tia or sōphrosynē implied both an objective fact and a subjective mode of being; it was a state of body and a state of mind. Fundamentally, pudicitia was the corporal integrity of the free woman, untouched until marriage, vouchsafed for one man within marriage. Sexual modesty was inextricably fused with status, and pudicitia often appears alongside libertas as its in- separable adjunct. Nevertheless, pudicitia was a social rather than a strictly legal concept, and it could, exceptionally, even be predicated of slaves. In a vast and highly stratifi ed slave system, where slaves were delicately inter- twined with the life of the free family, pudicitia was a powerful and impre- cise enough concept that some of its mystique might devolve even on the lowest members of the house hold; but the deeper truth was that, for slaves, access to honor depended on the discretion of the master.  An ancient woman lived every moment engaged in a high- stakes game of suspicious observation. “Th e one glory of woman is pudicitia, and there- fore it is incumbent upon her to be, and to seem, chaste.” In the words of a Christian author, “A woman’s reputation for sexual modesty is a fragile thing, like a precious fl ower that breaks in the soft breeze and is ruined by the light wind.” Th ere were “so many” potential signs of immodesty; her dress, her gait, her voice, her face all acted as external projections of her in- ternal state. Th e woman’s “only protection” was never to become the cause of any gossip. To guard against the attentions of other men, the Roman matron should dress only so nice as to avoid uncleanness, she should always be chaperoned in public, she should walk with her eyes down and risk rude- ness rather than immodesty in her greetings, and she should blush when addressed.  Th e sharpest of these patriarchal prescriptions come from rhetorical school exercises, sources that no doubt caricature contemporary male bom- bast and must be taken with healthful caution. Undoubtedly the scripts of female modesty could be stifl ing. In most quarters women wore their hair  FROM SHAME TO SIN veiled from the time they reached sexual maturity. Coins of the high em- pire advertise pudicitia as a chief imperial virtue, and its image is a Roman matron, hair veiled, hand drawn partly across her face to shield it from full view. Conventional limits on visibility and movement were truly constrict- ing. Even the gentle Plutarch counsels a woman to be most visible in her husband’s presence and to hide when he is away. A woman without a man was “like a city without a wall”; fathers and husbands off ered protection, and protection brings its own types of dependence. But it would be a mis- take to underestimate the room for maneuver left to women.

• From Untrue (2018)

  “I remember the feeling”—here she made a frightened face and gave a little gasp—“of the phone ringing and knowing it was a guy I was sleeping with, and I’d have to pretend it was someone else because Dan was standing right there. It’s exhausting, and the number of heart attacks and stress—it’s complicated to keep all the lies straight. There’s a whole part of it that’s really difficult and tiring! Sometimes I would think, Okay, I’ve got to stop. This is just too hard and dangerous.” Such moments, the frissons of near discovery, are touchstones of narratives with infidelity plots—from Eyes Wide Shut to a YouTube genre called “cheaters getting caught” to Carmen Rita Wong’s novel Never Too Late, with its storyline about high-powered, very married Latina lesbian Magda, whose happy life might be turned upside down by a one-night stand with a woman who has a taste for revenge. Like many women in fiction and life, Annika got too much out of her affairs to stop—including the variety and novelty of sexual experience she craved. “I think no matter how hard you try and how exciting it is, even when your marriage is good—and mine wasn’t, at least in the sex department—you still miss that thing where you’re so excited, and it’s so new, and you can’t eat or sleep, you’re having such an intense time emotionally and sexually with this entirely new person. That’s what I kept going after, what I couldn’t say no to.” Like Sarah and Druckerman’s ladies in Florida, Annika was living what Marta Meana calls “erotic self-focus.” When others saw her as sexy and hot, she did too. Wanting to be wanted, and withering when she was unwanted (or, in the case of Meana’s study participants, wanted) by one man in perpetuity drove Annika and may drive us in ways we might not want to admit but cannot deny.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  e Consultationes presaged Augustine’s On the Good of Marriage, written a de cade later in another attempt to lay to rest the lingering eff ects of Jerome’s extremism. Augustine’s treatment of sex and marriage was to prove defi nitive. But it came in the distinctive aftermath of the Jovinianist controversy, which had seen the entire eastern ascetic tradition absorbed, debated, and reformulated in the west in the compressed space of a few de cades. Th e threefold justifi cation of marriage— fi delity, procreation, sacred bond— that Augustine hewed out of a formless chaos was bound to ensure married laypeople an authoritative ideology of respectability. In one sense the Jovinianist controversy and the aftershocks that rumbled for the next de cades were just one episode in a long history of tension between the church’s commitment to the supreme ideal of virginity and the scriptural injunctions to reproduction. Th is same tension is embedded in Paul’s epistles; it called forth the pastoral letters; it defi ned the battle between encratic and orthodox Christians in the second and third centuries; it would replay itself in the Protestant Reformation (which saw Luther derided as Jovinian reborn); it continues to rumble in Catholic debates over clerical celibacy. Because the problem of sex is inevitably tied to the problem of Christianity’s relation to the world, it is a tension that will surface during any great read-justment in the relationship between Christianity and the world. Th is is what makes the reckoning of the church in the Th eodosian period so sig- nifi cant, for these generations saw the most decisive reconciliation of the church to secular society, perhaps in all of Christian history. Th e fourth century saw the wild, untamed asceticism of the desert pour across the Mediterranean, only to be slowly and incompletely corralled into monastic orders; the fi fth century would see the diff use ideals of clerical celibacy harden into formal requirements of lifelong abstinence. As the Christian church and secular society gradually became coterminous, the multifarious strands of Christian asceticism were progressively institutionalized, as a spiritual elite presiding over the mass of mediocre Christians. Sexual renunciation became not so much a rejection of the world and its ruling order, as a seces-sion from material society and its entanglements. It is against this backdrop that the less colorful, but ultimately more consequential, formulation of Christian marriage— and conjugal sexuality— must be considered. It is not infrequently assumed that married Christians formed a “silent majority” across early Christian history. Th e breezy assumption of a quiet core of reliable reproducers is not so much inaccurate as inattentive to the C H U R C H , S O C I E T Y, A N D S E X I N T H E A G E O F T R I U M P H  actual pro cesses by which sexual culture became Christian. Th e idea of a

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  What captivated Foucault was not simply the repressive agenda of this monastic founder but the sense in which sexuality has become a deep and only semiconscious source of the self, something that must be sought and controlled through an elaborate technology of surveillance. Cassian prescribed an encompassing regime of transformation, physical and spiritual. It entailed diet and meditation. It specified grids of evaluation that seem extraordinarily detailed: three emissions a year was a modest goal for the monk earnestly in pursuit of chastity. It required forceful modes of introspection that could be achieved in dialogue between the monk and his superior. Here Cassian’s model of chastity foreshadows the confessional, a place where the deepest recesses of the self were to be searched with the sure guidance of an experienced master. The goals of this spiritual exercise were tranquility and transparency. The healed patient could hope to reach a state where “he is found to be the same in the night as in the day, whether reading or praying, when solitary or surrounded by the crowd, so that he never sees himself in secret in such a way that he would blush to be seen by others, and finally so that the eye from which there is no flight will never catch him in anything which he would wish to be hidden from human sight.” Here the notion of the sexual being, constantly before the face of God, receives its purest expression. It might seem a fair measure of the distance traveled, that we have departed from a civilization whose prime virtue was the wondrously indeterminate command of moderation and have arrived in a civilization where the frequency of involuntary discharge has become a matter of punctilious surveillance.4

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Formerly the ups and downs of my fortunes worried me chiefly because of my friends' solicitude; fears or impatience which I should have borne lightly, if alone, grew oppressive when they had to be concealed from others, or on the contrary revealed, to their distress. I resented the fact that in their affection they felt more concern for me than I did for myself, and that they failed to see beneath the surface agitation that more tranquil being to whom no one thing is wholly important, and who can therefore endure anything. But there was no time thereafter to think about myself, or not to think either. My person began to count less precisely because my point of view was beginning to matter. What was important was that someone should be in opposition to the policy of conquest, envisaging its consequences and the final aim, and should prepare himself, if possible, to repair its errors. My post on the frontiers had shown me an aspect of victory which does not appear on Trajan's Column. My return to civil administration gave me the chance to accumulate against the military party evidence still more decisive than all the proofs which I had amassed in the army. The ranking personnel of the legions and the entire Praetorian Guard are formed exclusively of native Italian stock; these distant wars were draining off the reserves of a country already underpopulated. Those who survived were as much a loss for this country as the others, since they were forced to settle in the newly conquered lands. Even in the provinces the system of recruiting caused some serious uprisings at about that time. A journey in Spain undertaken somewhat later on in order to inspect the operation of copper mines on my family estates, convinced me of the disorder introduced by war into all branches of the economy; I confirmed my belief in the justice of the protestations of business men whom I knew in Rome. I was not so sanguine as to think that it would always lie within our power to avoid all wars, but I wished them to be no more than defensive; I dreamed of an army trained to maintain order on frontiers less extended, if necessary, but secure. Every new increase in the vast imperial organism seemed to me an unsound growth, like a cancer or dropsical edema which would eventually cause our death. Not one of these ideas could be presented to the emperor. He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandons himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself. On the whole, the achievements of his principate had been admirable, but the labors of peace to which the best of his advisors had ingeniously directed him, those great projects of the architects and legists of his reign, had always counted less for him than a single victory.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Clement’s sexual ideology was in many ways idiosyncratic, most of all in his belief that physical desire could be graciously metamorphosed into a rational will to participate in creation. The small but decisive differences between Clement and his greatest student, Origen, are highly telling. Origen is almost totally unconcerned with procreation as a justification for sex; he assumes that “holy procreation” is part of the married life, but it does not bear the same great moral weight that it does in Clement, as the prime justification for the reproductive act. Even more than Clement, Origen was content to tread wherever his exegesis led him: Paul had allowed marriage and considered it a gift of God, and that was that. Origen was thus much closer to the actual spirit of Paul in First Corinthians 7. Origen was cautious not to denigrate marriage: the call to purity and the call to marry were different forms of grace, each dispensed by the mysterious benevolence of God. Origen stands one step closer to the ascetic theologies of late antiquity. But it is less often appreciated that he anticipates the entanglements of pastoral leadership that will occupy the fourth-century church. Origen is anxious about the realities of sin. Fornication is not just a property of the outside world; it is a problem for the Christian community. “If someone is in fornication, they are not just in the flesh, but something worse … they are in the mud.” “Sin corrupts the temple of God. Someone who brings a scandal upon the church corrupts the temple of God. Even more powerfully does the fornicator corrupt the temple of God.” Origen believed that there were “different classes of fornication,” some more grievous than others; each would be “judged according to its quantity and quality, its intent and duration.” Sins were to be taken “to the bishop.” “We have rulers in the church before whom we are to submit our disputes, so that we are not mocked in the courts of the heathens.”56

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Perhaps because he had heard such complaints before, he seemed to take this as a genuine sarcasm. ‘No, it’s not that,’ he insisted—which, of course, it wasn’t. ‘No, it’s because they let so many new members in.’ Still I carried on grinning at him. ‘You must be on the weights a lot, though,’ I said. ‘The way you’re filling out, my dear …’ I thought it was important to drop in a casual endearment, but he showed no response to it. We had about a ten-minute walk to Phil’s hotel, and an uncomfortable amount of it was spent in silence, with both of us looking about with affected interest at the buildings, the shops, the parked cars. Normally, if I was leaving a pub or nightclub with a pickup, and taking a cab or a tube to his place or mine, we had both of us been drinking, time sped by, and we were openly set upon sex. I had rarely felt as sober as I did on this summer evening walk; each speechless step seemed more fateful than the last; and deeply embarrassing doubts began to occupy me. I was so lucky in general, so blessed, that my pick-ups were virtually instantaneous: the man I fancied took in my body, my cock, my blue eyes at a glance. Misunderstandings were almost unknown. Any uncertainty in a boy I wanted was usually overcome by the simple insistence of my look. But with Phil I had let something dangerous happen, a roundabout, slow insinuation into my feelings. Though I very much wanted to fuck his big, muscly bum—and several times dropped behind a step or two to see it working as he walked—my stronger feeling was more protective and caressing. It was growing so strong that it allowed doubts not entertained in the brief certainties of casual sex. If I had got it all wrong, if going back to his place meant a drink in the bar, a game of chess, a handshake—‘I’ve got an early start tomorrow’—the evening would be agony.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Karen followed this script to the letter. From a merry, outgoing ten-year-old, she soon became a somber young woman. I remember her telling me when she was only eleven, “I’m really worried about my brother and sister. I have to set them a good example so they’ll be good. That means I have to be good. They fight all the time since my parents broke up. I try to stop that and teach them to talk instead of hitting. I’m also worried about my mom. Since Dad left she cries every day when she comes home from work. I try to comfort her and also to warn her about her new boyfriend. I think that he’ll hurt her feelings even more.” Karen shook her head sadly. She was overburdened by her new responsibilities but felt that she had no choice but to forfeit her needs to the needs of her family. High school, she explained at our meeting several years later, was a blur because her home situation had hardly changed. At out last meeting, when she was twenty-five, I was very concerned about Karen’s inability to break free from a young man she was living with but did not love. She tried to explain: “You remember that when I was dating guys in college, I became very frightened that anyone I really liked would abandon me or be unfaithful, and that I would end up suffering like my mom or my dad? Well, choosing Nick was safe because he has no education and no plans, which means that he’ll always have fewer choices than me. I knew that if we lived together and maybe got married someday I wouldn’t ever have to worry about him walking out.” With tears in her eyes, she added, “Nick is very kind and caring. I’m not used to that.” Although I understood that Karen felt starved for kindness, it baffled me why a bright, attractive woman like her would feel she had so few options other than a loveless relationship. She cried bitterly as she described the loneliness of her life with Nick and the strain of his passive dependence on her. “I knew it was a mistake one day after we moved in together,” she said. “But I can’t leave him. There’s no way I could hurt him that way.” And that is how I left her, standing at a crossroads, struggling with a decision whether to leave or stay. Thus I awaited her arrival the following Thursday, two days before her wedding, with equal measures of hope and concern—hope that she had turned her life around and worry that she hadn’t. What had she done between age twenty-five and thirty-four? Had she broken free of her fears? Of her sorrow? Was she still taking care of her family while feeling guilty for never doing enough? Was the man she was marrying a good choice? Was she no longer afraid of loving and being loved?

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  This was Hubert’s idea, rather than go over to the public house as normal where we had felt less than welcome before when S. was very drunk & indiscreet (not to say made up like a Regent Street margery); but the question was, where to have it? Some said in the car & Tim said we cd take it to the house of someone he knew not far away, but Eddie’s friend with the broken nose said he owed that someone a thousand pounds, so that wd never do. Then Tom’s boy suggested what he called the Old Castle, which was in the wood we cd see not far ahead, looming out of the mist. Tom said he thought it wd be acceptable to us—it was designed for just this, he said. The boy opined that it was an old place, but Tom scorned this vigorously & said it was just a ‘make-believe’, a ‘fairy-tale castle’, so we gathered it was some kind of folly or woodland lodge. We went on up the lane & then cut along the side of a field. The fence at the edge of the wood was no more than a few rotten posts, sticking out of the bracken. Many of the trees were dead or decrepit, & there was a surprising number of yews, which made the wood even darker. It must have been deathly quiet when free of people like us, swearing and pranking about. Sandy & I rather fell back & came on after the others, arm-in-arm, enjoying the melancholy mood, I thought, until S. said ‘God, I feel sick!’ & I realised his was the silence of a man who’s had too much the night before. I cd see too that he felt anxious about Tim, from the way he pretended to pay no attention to him & then I wd catch him looking at him through his eyebrows—full of humiliated fondness. The Castle was a funny old place, smaller than I’d expected & completely irregular. There was a hall in the middle, with a dark panelled room off it at the back. On either side half-collapsed walls made off into the wood, & were cunningly topped with small trees to look like authentic medieval ruins. Some of the windows were pointed, some round, some square, & through the ivy you cd see that the walls were patterned with huge pieces of vermiculated stone—not, I think, the usual builders’ material, which is drilled artificially, but the real thing, brought from some volcanic site. The whole surface of the little Castle was freakish & grotesque, with the hairy fingers of long-dead creepers, the dull gloss of the ivy, the arrow-slits, & the rough, labyrinthine lava.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  There was no one else about, though after ringing the bell a third time and also, to command attention but not to seem importunate, knocking soundly a couple of times, I looked round again to see if I was still alone. A middle-aged man had now appeared at the end of the lane, and as he passed and went into one of the derelict properties across the way I felt obliged to go through a minimal pantomime of impatience and perplexity. This involved trying the door with the flat of my hand and finding that it was unlocked and gave, slightly, inwards. I pushed it half open; and darted in. In a voice quite unlike my own, I called out ‘Hello’. There was no reply. The library door, on the left, was open, so I went cautiously in. It looked untidier than before, with papers and cuttings spread on the main table: this I attributed to Charles’s search for material for me. I was surprised, as I turned to leave, by the sudden rising, yawning and shaking of a large black cat. It had been lying in Charles’s armchair by the fire and stared at me for a moment with something close to enmity before looking away, licking itself, and carrying on as if I weren’t there. It was a beautiful animal, tall and slender, with a nose both broad and long, and erect, triangular ears; it seemed a ceremonial more than a domestic cat, and its voiceless indifference to me heightened my sense of unease and irreality. I did not try the dining-room but went, knocking and looking in, to the drawing-room at the back. It was empty and orderly, with folded newspapers, a sewing-basket and a darning mushroom on a side-table—things that a masculine household must have. From here a door was open into the kitchen, which I had not seen before. With its wall-cupboards with frosted glass sliding doors, its stoneware sink, round-topped Electrolux fridge and green enamelled gas-range, it resembled a colour plate from my dead grandmother’s just post-war copy of Mrs Beeton ; the plugs, which were of black Bakelite and only two-pinned, perfected the image. At a small table under the window Charles and Lewis evidently ate their meals. The pans and plates of a modest lunch stood untouched in the sink. I felt a strong desire to loiter and look, but also, in case I was observed, to appear not to. And I began to worry about Charles. If Lewis was not around the old fellow might have collapsed undiscovered.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The Christian could achieve the transformation of natural desire into rational will. Clement believed that Moses had prohibited an Israelite man from violating a captive woman for a period of thirty days so that the “physical impulse could be scrutinized and mastered into a rational appetite.” The coming of Christ had “completely destroyed the works of desire—greed, striving, vainglory, lust for women, pederasty, gluttony, indulgence, and the like.” Clement envisioned a sort of self-transformation that was alien to the philosophical tradition. “Man’s capacity for continence, as far as the Greek philosophers regard it, is said to be a matter of striving against desire and not serving it in its deeds. The Christian ideal is not to experience desire at all. The aim is not for one to prove as strong as one’s desires, but rather somehow to be continent from desire. There is no way to achieve this continence except through the grace of God.” This is as lucid a self-perception as might be hoped for.49 Clement’s sexual ideology is closer to the monastic desert than we might suppose. “Our antagonists are Olympian in stature and sting, as is said, more sharply than a wasp. Above all pleasure, which not only by day but also by night, in our dreams, bites us and aims to deceive us with its sorcery.” But Clement’s asceticism is lodged within marriage, within the city. The endless stream of minute directives for Christian living proffered by Clement amount to a monastic rule for the Christian household. Clement clasped enthusiastically to the Paul of the pastoral letters, who had offered “so many thousands of commands about marriage, procreation, and the arts of housecraft.” Paul’s commands are exuberantly expanded into a punctilious rubric for the Christian life. Time, place, and manner restrictions are unmercifully imposed on the sexual act. Sex was not for the daytime, but neither was the darkness of night to be a veil for hidden excess. Immemorial patterns of sociability are wrapped in new rules of Christian modesty: Clement could prescribe which sorts of dinners to attend and how to behave. If women had to attend social gatherings, they should be entirely covered; the “gravest calumny” that could be leveled against an unmarried woman was that she was present at a symposium. If young men were present, they were to sit motionless, look down, and keep their legs uncrossed. Men were to eat and drink moderately, but also slowly, with a cultivated air of self-control, pausing frequently, never reaching for food, sharing generously, and departing early. For Clement, the Christian sage could pass through life amid the city, but exposure to so many temptations required unfailing vigilance and supreme control of the will.50

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The Symposium of Methodius can be regarded as the last text of early Christianity. It reflects the authority of Paul’s words as a benchmark of Christian sexual morality. It gives poetic expression to an ascetic theology forced, begrudgingly, to accommodate marriage as an acceptable institution. It treats sexuality as a prime domain of moral exercise and sees humans as sufficiently equipped always to choose righteousness. But for Methodius, the freedom of the sexual will was still an intellectual problem rather than a social or psychological one. In this regard Methodius is much closer to the self-styled philosophers of second-century Christianity than to many of his own contemporaries, who would survive into the heady age of Christian triumph. In the work of Methodius, moral autonomy is a cosmological postulate, a statement about the place of man before the eyes of God. His Symposium is untroubled by the possibility of material constraints on human volition or even by dark undercurrents of the self that required external grace to enable moral freedom. Methodius is one of the last Christians to write in an apologetic voice, as the spokesman of a philosophy distinctly apart from the machinery of society. On June 20 of AD 312, that machinery turned against him. Methodius was tried—perhaps before the Roman emperor himself—and executed, in one of the very final spasms of state violence faced by the early Christians.5 This chapter attempts to summarize the sexual code which took shape in the unruly world of early Christianity and to take stock of how the new religion’s outlook on sex differed from mainstream values and philosophical attitudes toward the body. It has been very much doubted that there was anything like a consensus within the early church on questions of sexual comportment. Indeed, the discovery of the fierce internal struggles that took place within the Christian movement has been a revelation, for it restores some of the urgency and depth to the ancient debates. We know the future of the early church. But the men and women of the first centuries did not imagine a future where the sexual protocols they formed would be placed in the hands of a powerful institutional church. Indeed, the strident tone of so much early Christian writing on sexuality was nurtured in an atmosphere where the advocates of the religion were a small, persecuted minority. Christian sexual morality of the second century has a shrill tone precisely because it is the urgent message of an embattled, if confident, group of dissenters.6

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But nothing came of it, neither attack nor sedition, nor even complaints. I was no longer the newcomer trying to win public opinion after the execution of four men of consular rank; nineteen years of just rule arbitrated in my favor; my enemies were execrated as a group, and the crowd approved me for having rid myself of a traitor. Fuscus was commiserated, but without being judged innocent. The Senate, I well knew, would not pardon me for having once more struck down one of its members, but it kept quiet, and would remain quiet until my death. As formerly, also, an admixture of clemency soon mitigated the dose of severity: not one of the partisans of Servianus was disturbed. The only exception to this rule was the eminent Apollodorus, the malevolent depositary of my brother-in-law's secrets, who perished with him. That talented man had been the favorite architect of my predecessor; he had piled up the great stone blocks of Trajan's Column with art. We did not care much for each other: he had of old derided my unskilled amateur paintings, my conscientious still-lifes of pumpkins and gourds; I had on my side, with a young man's presumption, criticized his works. Later on he had disparaged mine: he knew nothing of the finest period of Greek art; that literal mind reproached me for having filled our temples with colossal statues which, if they were to rise, would batter their brows against the vaults of their sanctuaries. An inane criticism that, and one to hurt Phidias even more than me. But the gods do not rise; they rise neither to warn us nor to protect us, nor to recompense nor to punish. Nor did they rise on that night to save Apollodorus. By spring the health of Lucius began to cause me rather grave concern. One morning in Tibur we went down from the bath to the palaestra where Celer was exercising with other youths; someone proposed one of those contests where each participant runs bearing his shield and his spear. Lucius managed to excuse himself from the sport, as he usually did, but finally yielded to our friendly raillery; in equipping himself he complained of the weight of the bronze shield; compared with the firm beauty of Celer that slender body seemed frail. After a few strides he fell breathless, and spit blood. The incident had no sequel, and he recovered without difficulty; but I had been alarmed. I should not have been so soon reassured. I resisted these first symptoms of his illness with the stupid confidence of a man who had long been robust, and who had implicit faith in the undepleted reserves of youth and in the capacities of bodies to function as they should. It is true that he was mistaken, too; some light flame sustained him, and his vivacity created the same illusion for him as for us.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Clement has what might seem an embarrassing amount of advice on the proper consumption of food and drink. His interest in dietetics and medical lore places him in the mainstream of imperial culture. Clement admired those who abstained from wine completely in the name of chastity and “thought it best if boys and girls are kept apart from this drug completely. It is not advisable to pour liquid heat on smouldering youth.… Ramped up by its influence, their privates expand and their breasts swell, so that their genitals are an omen, the image of fornication.” Clement would harness conventional medical wisdom in the name of not just healthful balance, but also transformation. “Food is for hunger and drink is for thirst, but it calls for the most acute self-protection against any slip, for one step down the path of wine makes one apt to fall. With care we can keep our souls pure, dry, and luminous.” The more extreme regimes of mortification, which will exploit the medical tradition with gusto, lie not far in the future.51 Clement’s Christians find their will to transcend the lures of desire and pleasure threatened in every direction. His writings are an unmatched guide to the mundane dangers of modest wealth in a household of the Roman Empire. He is the first Christian to worry about the temptation that slaves, specifically eunuchs, posed to the women of a household. He is distressed by the built environment of the ancient city, aghast at a culture in which erotic art was a normal accoutrement of the domestic sphere. Clement’s believers faced constant visual bombardment. They were surrounded by the vibrant erotic anarchy of ancient Alexandria. Clement was, like so many of his contemporaries, acutely sensitive to the ocular experience of living in a great Roman town. For him the words of Christ not to look with lust posed an overwhelming challenge. “He pulls up desire from its root.” Inviting looks were “nothing other than adultery with the eyes, desire cast from afar through them. For the eyes are corrupted before the rest of the body.” In his belief that vision was a sort of particulate intromission, it has been noted, Clement is not at all far from Achilles Tatius, who described the erotic gaze as “fondling from afar.” What for Achilles was one of the harmless thrills of life was for Clement an environmental hazard, clogging the air with pollutants that threatened the purity of the body.52

• From Untrue (2018)

  Vaginas: Everything Old Is New AgainGrown-ups also practice rituals that reveal truths about the culture we live in. In a number of privileged metropolitan niches, including the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where I lived, sent my children to school, and studied rites of femininity and motherhood for several years, there is a growing fixation on retrofitted virginity, the ultimate accessory in a culture that at once overtly objectifies women and romanticizes mothers. Self-described “medi spas” have opened to serve the well-turned-out inhabitants of New York City’s richest zip code and its summer migratory setting, the Hamptons. These “spas” offer what they promise is a “quick, easy” procedure to “rejuvenate” a woman’s vagina. Doctors use lasers with names like FemiLift, MonaLisa Touch, IntimaLase, and, my favorite, ThermiVa (why not just call it ThermiVag?) to allegedly “improve the laxity” of the vagina because so many women are worried that after kids “they are loose ‘down there,’” in the words of one soi-disant vaginal rejuvenator MD. This procedure is distinct from labiaplasty, which promises—in the age of Brazilian bikini waxes, in which it is all out there for every lover to see—“prettier” exterior parts. Nor is it one of the surgeries that addresses medical conditions such as uterine prolapse or incontinence. No, “rejuvenation” is about “improved sensation” and “increased tightness,” often after a woman has had several children. Well might we ask, Really? And, Improved sensation for whom? In 2017, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists reaffirmed their dim view of such procedures, describing them as “not medically indicated.” Further, they warned that “the safety and effectiveness of these procedures have not been documented.” They also urge doctors to tell women who request the procedures about “potential complications, including infection, altered sensation, dyspareunia, adhesions, and scarring.” Dyspareunia means “painful sexual intercourse.” It is extraordinary to consider that this is a risk women under certain conditions are not only willing but eager to take in order to engineer what they hope, with no guarantee, will be even more pleasurable sexual intercourse not for themselves but for their men. In 2017, at an ACOG symposium, Cheryl Iglesia, MD, said there was not enough “formal evaluation for both efficacy and safety” of numerous vaginal enhancement procedures and surgeries.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Accurate stats are tricky to come by not only because we don’t like to disclose stigmatized behaviors but also because our definitions of infidelity and cheating have shifted over the decades. Is forming a tight bond with someone without ever having sex, sometimes called “microcheating,” actually cheating? Is it cheating when you aren’t married? Is sexting, including sending or receiving nude and seminude photos, infidelity? (One survey found that over two-thirds of men and more than half of women had sexted; half of them were married.) To keep up with our morphing beliefs and practices, experts now divide infidelity into several types: sexual intercourse; sexual activity without intercourse; “emotional infidelity,” which doesn’t involve sex at all but is still perceived as a betrayal; and “cyber infidelity,” in which sexy messages and photos are exchanged digitally. Experts like Marianne Brandon tell us that while our cultural norm is monogamy, we have high rates of undisclosed non-monogamy. However we define infidelity, what is clear is that it happens, and not infrequently. One study characterizes infidelity as a “secret, but widespread (and widely acknowledged) social practice,” while sociologist Eric Anderson, author of The Monogamy Gap, says it plain: “Cheating is as common as fidelity…although society cherishes monogamy.” In other words, the baseline we cling to as the measure of whether we are healthy and moral—monogamy—is arguably no baseline at all. And yet the difficulty of monogamy and even the fact of struggling with it can create tremendous pressure. “People wonder, What’s wrong with me that I can’t do this? That’s something my patients, particularly my female patients, struggle with a lot,” author of The New Monogamy Tammy Nelson told me. The stakes are high: numerous studies tell us that infidelity is the most commonly cited reason couples divorce. If monogamy is so hard and we’re so bad at it, why do we keep doing it? Not a few anthropologists, taking the long and unsentimental view of these things, tell us monogamy and monogamous marriage are neither in our blood nor in our DNA. They are rather a relatively recent, imperfect, species-wide compromise, a good enough way to find companionship and raise kids in our current ecological circumstances, in which we’re far from extended family and without easy or high-quality childcare options. Some data suggest that long-term, committed relationships are good for us physically and emotionally. But there is also research indicating that marriage brings health benefits for men, not for women. And one sixteen-year longitudinal study of a representative sample of more than eleven thousand adults showed not only that marriage has little impact on health or happiness but that any positive effects of marriage are likely attributable to a more positive evaluation of one’s life rather than improvement on concrete measures. While there may be some psychological benefit to being exclusively coupled in a culture that pathologizes singleness, that hardly seems cause for dancing in the streets or buying a ring.

• From Untrue (2018)

  I received the address and details about the party the day before. The instructions specified the address—it was downtown, of course. I wasn’t to mention Skirt Club but rather to say simply that I was invited to C.’s party should a doorman or anyone else ask me. It shouldn’t be an issue, though, as I would be greeted in the lobby by hostesses from Skirt Club. The theme was “All Tied Up,” and there would be a performance at 8:30 sharp of shibari, the ancient and elaborate Japanese art of bondage. The party ended at 2:30 a.m. At least I was pretty sure that’s what “Carriages at 2:30 a.m.” meant. My husband, who was amused and not a little intrigued by my Skirt Club invitation, had encouraged me to go, even though I was at the tail end of a cold and wanted to spend the day and the evening in bed. But the night of, at his urging, I dragged myself to an upright position and dressed in a long-sleeved, extremely formfitting, knee-length black leather dress. He observed, “You look appropriate for either a funeral or an all-women sex party,” and then he laughed like a hyena, which I was quick to remind him was a female-dominant species with hypertrophied clitorides. He told me I had permission to do whatever I wanted. I told him crankily that I didn’t need permission, and he looked taken aback. “Oh, really,” he teased, recovering. My research was getting under my skin, and I was very nervous on the trip downtown.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Tom Tate was elected the new county sheriff days after the murder took place, and folks started to question whether he was up to the job. The Alabama Bureau of Investigation (ABI) was called in to investigate the murder but achieved no more success solving the crime than local officials had. People in Monroeville became anxious. Local businesses posted rewards offering thousands of dollars for information leading to an arrest. Gun sales, which were always robust, increased. — Meanwhile, Walter was wrestling with his own problems. He had been trying for weeks to end his relationship with Karen Kelly. The child custody proceedings and public scandal had taken a toll on her; she had started using drugs and seemed to fall apart. She began to associate with Ralph Myers, a white man with a badly disfigured face and lengthy criminal record who seemed to perfectly embody her fall from grace. Ralph was an unusual partner for Karen, but she was in such serious decline that nothing she did made any sense to her friends and family. The relationship brought Karen to rock bottom, beyond scandal and drug use into serious criminal behavior. Together they became involved in dealing drugs and were implicated in the murder of Vickie Lynn Pittman, a young woman from neighboring Escambia County. Police had quick success in investigating the Pittman murder, rapidly concluding that Ralph Myers had been involved. When the police interrogated Ralph, they encountered a man as psychologically complicated as he was physically scarred. He was emotional and frail, and he craved attention—his only effective defense was his skill in manipulation and misdirection. Ralph believed that everything he said had to be epic, shocking, and elaborate. As a child living in foster care, he had been horribly burned in a fire. The burns so scarred and disfigured his face and neck that he needed multiple surgeries to regain basic functioning. He became quite used to strangers staring at his scars with pained expressions on their faces. He was a tragic outcast who lived on the margins, but he tried to compensate by pretending to have inside knowledge about all sorts of mysteries. After initially denying any direct involvement in the Pittman murder, Myers conceded that he may have played some accidental role but quickly put the blame for the murder itself on more interesting local figures. He first accused a black man with a bad reputation named Isaac Dailey, but the police quickly discovered that Dailey had been in a jail cell on the night of the murder. Myers then confessed that he had made up the story because the true killer was none other than the elected sheriff of a nearby county. As outrageous as the claim was, ABI agents appeared to take it seriously. They asked him more questions, but the more Myers talked, the less credible his story sounded.