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

  We’d gotten calls from various news magazine programs over the previous few years that expressed interest in covering our work, but I was wary. My general attitude was that press coverage rarely helped our clients. Beyond the general anti-media sentiments in the South, the death penalty was particularly polarizing. It’s such a politically charged topic that even sympathetic pieces about people on death row usually triggered a local backlash that created more problems for the client and the case. Even though the clients sometimes wanted press attention, I was extremely resistant to media interviews about pending cases. I knew of too many cases where a favorable profile in the media had provoked an expedited execution date or retaliatory mistreatment that made things much worse. We filed our appeal in the Court of Criminal Appeals that summer. With no small amount of lingering uncertainty, I decided to move forward with the 60 Minutes piece. Veteran reporter Ed Bradley and his producer David Gelber came down from New York City to Monroeville on a 100-degree day in July and interviewed many of the people whose testimony we’d presented at our hearing. They spoke with Walter, Ralph Myers, Karen Kelly, Darnell Houston, Clay Kast, Jimmy Williams, Walter’s family, and Woodrow Ikner. They confronted Bill Hooks at his job and conducted an extensive interview with Tommy Chapman. Word got around quickly that news celebrity Ed Bradley was in town, upsetting local officials. The Monroe Journal wrote: Too many of these [out-of-town] writers express open scorn for the people and institutions they encounter here, making no more than a superficial effort to gather facts. Worse, a few have been demonstrably inaccurate. We could do without any more news coverage of the “big-time reporter comes to hick town” genre. Even before the piece was broadcast, the local media seemed to be urging the community to distrust anything they heard reported about the case. In “CBS Examines Murder Case,” a local reporter for the Monroe Journal wrote, “Monroe County District Attorney Tommy Chapman said he believes researchers for the CBS television news-magazine program 60 Minutes had their minds made up before ever coming here.” Chapman had taken to using a photo of Walter obtained at the time of his arrest that showed him with long bushy hair and a beard, which Chapman thought made it clear that he was a dangerous criminal. “The person they interviewed at Holman prison is not the same person arrested by Sheriff Tate for this murder,” Chapman explained. The Journal added that Chapman offered CBS the photograph of the “real” McMillian taken at the time of his arrest, but they were “not interested.” Prisoners in Alabama are required to remain clean-shaven, so of course Walter looked different when interviewed on camera.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  At other moments I expected to be supplanted by Palma or cut off by Quietus as soon as my services could be dispensed with. I had no real power: I did not even manage to obtain an audience for the influential members of the Sanhedrin of Antioch, who were as fearful as we of the surprise moves of the Jewish agitators, and who would have enlightened Trajan as to the contrivings of their fellow Jews. My friend Latinius Alexander, who was descended from one of the ancient royal families of Asia Minor, and whose name and wealth had great weight, was heeded no more than I. Pliny, sent out four years before to Bithynia, died there without having had time to inform the emperor of the exact state of public opinion and finances, even supposing that his incurable optimism would have allowed him to do so. The secret reports of the Lycian merchant Opramoas, who knew Asian affairs thoroughly, were derided by Palma. The freedmen took advantage of the morning headaches which followed the drunken evenings to keep me out of the imperial chamber; the emperor's orderly, a man named Phoedimus, an honest but stupid fellow, and set against me, twice refused me entry. On the contrary, my enemy Celsus, of consular rank, locked himself in one evening with Trajan for a conference which lasted for hours, and at the end of which I thought myself lost. I sought allies where I could; for a price, in gold, I corrupted former slaves whom otherwise I would willingly have sent to the galleys; I caressed more than one curly-headed darling. Nerva's diamond had lost its fire. And it was then that the wisest of my good geniuses came to my aid: Plotina. I had known the empress for nearly twenty years. We were of the same circle and of about the same age. I had seen her living calmly through almost as constrained an existence as my own, and one more deprived of future. She had taken my part, without appearing to notice that she did so, in my difficult moments. But it was during the evil days at Antioch that her presence became indispensable to me, as was always her esteem in after times, an esteem which I kept till her death. I grew accustomed to that white-clad figure, in garments as simple as a woman's can be, and to her silences, or to words so measured as to be never more than replies, and these as succinct as possible.

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

  Heliodorus reworks the conventions of romance to serve his own purposes. Theagenes and Charicleia find themselves enslaved at the palace of a Persian satrap, whose wife has sensual designs on Theagenes. Threats to the hero are not uncommon in romance, but this scene is far removed from its direct parallel in Leucippe and Clitophon, which has Clitophon indulge the harmless desires of his seductress, Melite. For Heliodorus, the bodily purity of Theagenes is supremely important. Earlier in the story he has sworn that he is innocent of experience with a woman. At the end of the story, he too will undergo a virginity test (in fact, a test to ensure that he is pure, so that he can be the victim of a human sacrifice!). The language of physical and ritual purity, usually reserved for female bodies, is applied to Theagenes. He faces the threat of seduction as a threat not to his romantic fidelity but rather to his corporal integrity. He is distraught lest he, “without any experience of Charicleia, will be polluted by unlawful intercourse with another woman.”23 Heliodorus has constructed a scene where the male hero faces the dangers that conventionally threaten a heroine’s chastity. In these desperate straits Charicleia offers counsel to her lover. “If you have in mind to go all the way through with this deed, I have no place to argue. For indeed our very salvation and survival may depend upon it.” But, of course, she hopes he will resolve not to submit. Charicleia tells him that he should feign assent and string out the plot, deluding the woman in her hopes and desires. “Surely in the space of time that you create it will be the will of the gods somehow to effect our deliverance.” She tells him to create a mēchanē, a device to protect his virtue in an impossible situation. Charicleia, in short, teaches Theagenes how to be a romantic heroine. She simultaneously gives voice to the theodicy of romance. The will of the gods is inscrutable, but at the very least the shape of the story they create promises deliverance—in the form of chastity and marriage—to the protagonists.24

• 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.

• From Untrue (2018)

  I settled on a floral blouse, a red coat, and black jeans. At the last minute, I also put on some bright red lipstick, because it was Friday, and I was going to a workshop on consensual non-monogamy, even though I kept transposing it, every time I told someone about it, into a workshop on “non-consensual monogamy.” “You just told me a lot,” a psychoanalyst friend had quipped when I flipped things around just so as we chatted. A heavy patient load had prevented her from signing up for the workshop. “Have lots of anonymous encounters for me!” another shrink friend who couldn’t make it for the same reason texted me the morning of, winkingly conflating shrinks who help swingers with swingers. And sex addicts. “Poor Joel,” my literary agent ribbed in faux sympathy with my husband when I told him of my day’s mission. I was learning over the course of many months of talking to people that infidelity, promiscuity, non-monogamy, whatever terms we use to describe the practice of refusing sexual exclusivity, fascinates and flusters pretty much across the board. And I knew from prodding and poking and reading and interviewing and from just being female that the specter of a woman who is untrue still raises hackles and blood pressures and outrage especially, all along the spectrum. For social conservatives, female infidelity—seizing what is generally believed to be a male privilege, doing what you want sexually speaking—is symptomatic of larger corruptions and compromises of the social fabric. (“Madam: What a decadent, pathetic woman you are. You don’t have to wonder why the west [sic] is in decline; just look in the mirror,” a self-described “traditionalist media personality” emailed me after I had written a piece on female sexuality.) Among progressives, especially those who describe themselves as “sex positive,” female sexual self-determination may be tolerated, even lauded. But in their world, a woman who has an affair is still likely to be considered or called something much worse than “self-determined” for having done so. (The echo chamber of obsessional Hillary hatred from supporters of both Sanders and Trump demonstrates that the Left can be as triggered by the idea of female autonomy in general as the Right.) Meanwhile, many advocates of “disclosed” non-monogamy believe transparency is best, and that cheating by men and women alike is unethical. But with the accreted layers of history and ideology, it’s hard to carve out a space where there isn’t a particular pall hanging over the woman who creeps and lies, even within these apparently enlightened arrangements. Everyone, I learned, seems to have a point of view about the woman who refuses sexual exclusivity, whether she does so forthrightly or on the down-low.

• From Untrue (2018)

  The sex-positive performer was a dark-haired dominatrix in all black. Her sub (or submissive) was like a blonde rag doll in the hands of her mistress, who capably attached the leather cuffs she wore on her wrists to the suspension machine overhead. Then the domme—I thought of her as the alpha female—started whipping her, gently at first, with a cat-o’-nine. Gradually, she started bringing the leather fringes down harder and harder on the woman’s bottom. Occasionally she stopped to walk around in front of her and give her a long, lingering kiss. The room was crammed as sixty women, many of them tipsy, strained to see and to hear over the loud music. The dominatrix unhooked her sub and came over to the couch where I sat with the transsexual and the Canadians, who seemed to evaporate. Alpha-domme leaned down and asked me something I didn’t understand. “Can you move over a little so I can give her a spanking here?” she repeated. I did. She sat near me on the couch. The submissive stretched out across her mistress’s lap and rested her head on mine. The domme reached her arm up and cracked it down hard on her sub’s bottom. The woman gave a little cry and smiled, clearly enjoying herself. After a few more minutes of this, the dominatrix asked whether I’d like to try. She was being generous and affiliative, doing a little coalition building, perhaps, by offering to share her partner with me, and I considered for a long moment how much it was like Louise tossing half her celery stalk to Parish. I thought of how my husband had granted me permission—it grated me still to think of the term he had used—and encouraged me to participate rather than just observe. I wondered whether etiquette required me to accept her offer. Then I thanked her and said no. The sub writhed under her mistress’s hand for several minutes more until the spanking was over. The party seemed to thin out, and I wondered whether it was ending early. Then I realized that lots of women, excited by the performance and the evening, had headed for the bedrooms.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  And the fountains pounded upwards, as if to cling to the light, and fell with only the slightest wavering of pulse onto the wide grey discs in front of us. Phil must have seen them far more often than I had, but he seemed content to stand and watch. Their mesmerising, impersonal play was a relief. Then first one, and then another, in three downward jumps, was switched off. A painful feeling of emptiness and ordinariness came over me. I turned ruefully to Phil, and looked him up and down for several seconds. As we walked on I wondered if I shouldn’t have used the moment to put an arm around him, even to kiss him. As we crossed the road to the hotel, though we both became more tense, there was a perceptible shift of power: we were entering his territory. ‘We’d better go round the back,’ he said. ‘We’re not supposed to be out front when we’re off duty.’ ‘No, sure,’ I said; then enquired, ‘When are you back on duty again?’ If it was any moment now, it would alter the whole imaginary campaign. ‘Oh, from midnight,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m here. I don’t live here, you see, but when you’re on night duty they give you a room. I’m on nights all this month.’ ‘I see. Where do you live normally?’ I had a hunger to know these facts and to read things into them. ‘Oh, up in Kentish Town. There’s a staff house there—it’s known as the Embassy. Because of all the foreign staff,’ he explained needlessly. We went along by the huge Edwardian façade of the hotel, and I glanced nervously up at its convulsed top stages: balconies, bows, gables, turrets, executed in a sickly mixture of orange brick and dully shining beige faience. Then we cut down a narrow street that sheared at an angle across the corner of the hotel site and revealed the undecorated plainness of its back parts. Phil pulled open a door with a window in it, and we penetrated into a horrible area of store-rooms, rumbling boilers and stacked wicker laundry-baskets. It was like the subterraneous parts of the worst schools we used to play matches against. There were frequent fire doors which closed the corridor into hot, brightly lit sections.

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

  “The defendant’s motion to change venue is granted,” the judge ruled. When the judge suggested that it be moved to a neighboring county so that witnesses wouldn’t have far to travel, Chestnut remained hopeful. Almost all of the bordering counties had fairly large African American populations: Wilcox County was 72 percent black; Conecuh was 46 percent black; Clarke County was 45 percent black; Butler 42 percent; Escambia was 32 percent black. Only affluent Baldwin County to the south, with its beautiful Gulf of Mexico beaches, was atypical, with an African American population of just 9 percent. The judge took very little time deciding where the trial should be moved. “We’ll go to Baldwin County.” Chestnut and Boynton immediately complained, but the judge reminded them it was their motion. When they sought to withdraw the motion, the judge said he couldn’t authorize a trial in a community where so many people had formed opinions about the accused. The case would be tried in Bay Minette, the seat of Baldwin County. The change of venue was disastrous for Walter. Chestnut and Boynton knew there would be very few, if any, black jurors. They also understood that while jurors from Baldwin County might be less personally connected to Ronda Morrison and her family, it was an extremely conservative county that had made even less progress leaving behind the racial politics of Jim Crow than its neighbors. Given what he’d heard from other death row prisoners about all-white juries, Walter worried about the venue change as well. But he still put his faith in this fact: No one could hear the evidence and believe that he committed this crime. He just didn’t believe that a jury, black or white, could convict him on the nonsensical story told by Ralph Myers—not when he had an unquestionable alibi with close to a dozen witnesses. The February trial was postponed. Once again, Ralph Myers was having second thoughts. After months in the county jail, away from death row, Myers again realized he didn’t want to implicate himself in a murder he had not committed. He waited until the morning that the trial was set to begin before he told investigators that he could not testify because what they wanted him to say was not true. He tried to wrangle for more favorable treatment but decided that there was no punishment he was willing to accept for a murder he hadn’t committed.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Thousands of miles away, several of the women I spoke with in the US told me that infidelity was likely to “stick to [them]” in a different way than it would a man, explaining it to me as if it were the most obvious point in the world when I asked them to elaborate. Yes, too many women die at the hands of jealous husbands and lovers, and in some countries this is still excused as a “crime of passion.” But here it is often the linked fears of reputational assault and of being caught and divorced that inform women’s decisions about monogamy. These fears also inform a male partner’s decisions about sexual exclusivity. However, there is an important difference underlying the choices heterosexual men and women make when it comes to risking infidelity. Even in regions of the world with “no-fault” type practices, divorce can be an emotional and economic trauma, but it is most especially so for women. In spite of a widely embraced stereotype of the gold digger taking her hapless husband to the cleaners, women tend to fare markedly worse financially than men in the breakup of a marriage. In a 2008 study, the Institute for Social and Economic Research found that 27 percent of women fall into poverty post-divorce—triple the rate of men. Much of that has to do with women having left or never having entered the workforce in order to raise kids. But even those who work before, during, or after their marriage experience a 20 percent drop in income when their marriages end, on average (the poverty rate for women who are separated is a staggering 27 percent, just under three times the rate for separated men). And effects of this drop are long-lasting and profound: across the board, women’s incomes tend never to reach pre-split levels post-divorce. One report found that divorced women had assets valued at 90 percent less than their married peers. Women are no fools—they see these numbers and statistics and realities played out in the lives of their sisters, girlfriends, and female colleagues, and they take note: divorce costs plenty. Such concerns can reinforce what comes to look more like compulsory monogamy than a choice to remain sexually exclusive. For Sarah, divorce would mean sacrifices, everything from struggling to pay a mortgage and run a household on her own to forgoing relative luxuries like the summer sleepaway camp the kids loved. These considerations, big and small, and the idea that her own desires, including her sexual desires, meant she and especially her kids might have less, had prevented her from initiating a divorce, or having an affair and risking getting caught, which she felt would certainly drive her husband to divorce her. “It seemed selfish and at the same time almost masochistic” to initiate a divorce herself, Sarah summarized as we sat there, even though she had long considered it.

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

  I no longer wanted to be there for that, but I didn’t want to abandon Herbert. To leave him in a room alone with people who wanted him dead made me realize that I couldn’t back out. All of a sudden the room felt incredibly hot, like there was no air anywhere. The visitation officer came up to me after I had escorted the family out and whispered in my ear, “Thank you.” I was vexed by her thinking of me as an accomplice and didn’t know what to say. When there were less than thirty minutes before the execution, they took me back to the cell next to the execution chamber deep inside the prison where they were holding Herbert until it was time to put him in the electric chair. They had shaved the hair off his body to facilitate a “clean” execution. The state had done nothing to modify the electric chair since the disastrous Evans execution. I thought about the botched execution of Horace Dunkins a month earlier and became even more distraught. I had tried to read up on what should happen at an execution; I had some misguided thought that I could intervene if they did something incorrectly. Herbert was much more emotional when he saw me than he’d been in the visitation room. He looked shaken, and it was clear that he was upset. It must have been humiliating to be shaved in preparation for an execution. He looked worried, and when I walked into the chamber he grabbed my hands and asked if we could pray, and we did. When we were done, his face took on a distant look and then he turned to me. “Hey, man, thank you. I know this ain’t easy for you either, but I’m grateful to you for standing with me.” I smiled and gave him a hug. His face sagged with an unbearable sadness. “It’s been a very strange day, Bryan, really strange. Most people who feel fine don’t get to think all day about this being their last day alive with certainty that they will be killed. It’s different than being in Vietnam...much stranger.” He nodded at all the officers who were milling about nervously. “It’s been strange for them, too. “All day long people have been asking me, ‘What can I do to help you?’ When I woke up this morning, they kept coming to me, ‘Can we get you some breakfast?’ At midday they came to me, ‘Can we get you some lunch?’ All day long, ‘What can we do to help you?’

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

  Stevenson. If you can’t make your case in three days after all of this drama you’ve stirred up, you don’t really have anything.” “Judge, I—” “Adjourned.” — After spending another long day in Monroeville tracking down a few final witnesses, Michael and I went back to the office to plot out how to present all of the evidence in the narrow amount of time the judge was giving us. We needed to make the complexity of the case and the multiple ways that Walter’s rights had been violated coherent and understandable to the judge. Another concern was Myers and his love of fantastical narration, so we sat down with him a few days before the hearing and tried to make it as plain as possible. “No long excursions about police corruption,” I said. “Just answer the questions accurately and honestly, Ralph.” “I always do,” Ralph said confidently. “Wait, did you just say you always do?” Michael asked. “What are you talking about, you always do? Ralph, you lied through your ass the entire trial. That’s what we’re going to expose at this hearing.” “I know,” Myers said coolly. “I meant I always tell y’all the truth.” “Don’t freak me out, Ralph. Just testify truthfully,” Michael said. Ralph had been calling our office almost daily with an unending stream of strange thoughts, ideas, and conspiracies. I was frequently too busy to talk to him, so Michael had been fielding most of the calls and had become increasingly worried about Ralph’s unique perspective on the world. But we could do no more about it. We arrived at the courthouse the morning of the hearing early and anxious. We were both dressed in dark suits, white shirts, and muted ties. I usually dressed as conservatively as possible for court. I was a young, bearded black man, and even when there was no jury I still tried to meet the court’s expectation of what a lawyer looked like, if only for the sake of my clients. We first went to check on Myers to make sure he had arrived safely and was in a stable state of mind before the hearing began. The Baldwin County Sheriff’s Department deputies had brought Ralph from the prison in St. Clair County to the courthouse the night before the hearing. The five-hour trip through the nighttime roads of southern Alabama had clearly unnerved Ralph. We met with him in his holding cell; he was palpably anxious. Worse, he was quiet and reserved, which was even more unusual. After we finished that unsettling meeting, I went to see Walter, who was also at the courthouse in one of the holding cells. Being back at the courthouse where his fate had seemingly been sealed four years earlier had shaken him as well, but he forced himself to smile when I walked in. “Was the trip okay?” I asked. “Everything is good.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CHRYSOSTOM. And He said not, Shall be given, but, Shall be added, that you may learn that the things that are now, are nought to the greatness of the things that shall be. AUGUSTINE. (Serm. in Mont. ii. 17.) But when we read that the Apostle suffered hunger and thirst, let us not think that God’s promises failed him; for these things are rather aids. That Physician to whom we have entirely entrusted ourselves, knows when He will give and when He will withhold, as He judges most for our advantage. So that should these things ever be lacking to us, (as God to exercise us often permits,) it will not weaken our fixed purpose, but rather confirm it when wavering. 6:3434. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. GLOSS. (ap. Anselm.) Having forbid anxiety for the things of the day, He now forbids anxiety for future things, such a fruitless care as proceeds from the fault of men, in these words, Be not ye anxious about the morrow. JEROME. To-morrow in Scripture signifies time future, as Jacob in Genesis says, To-morrow shall my righteousness hear me. (Gen. 30:33.) And in the phantasm of Samuel the Pythoness says to Saul, To-morrow shalt thou be with me. (1 Sam. 28:19.) He yields therefore unto them that they should care for things present, though He forbids them to take thought for things to come. For sufficient for us is the thought of time present; let us leave to God the future which is uncertain. And this is that He says, The morrow shall he anxious for itself; that is, it shall bring its own anxiety with it. For sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. By evil He means here not that which is contrary to virtue, but toil, and affliction, and the hardships of life. CHRYSOSTOM. Nothing brings so much pain to the spirit as anxiety and cark. That He says, The morrow shall he anxious for itself, comes of desire to make more plain what He speaks; to that end employing a prosopopeia of time, after the practice of many in speaking to the rude populace; to impress them the more, He brings in the day itself complaining of its too heavy cares. Has not every day a burden enough of its own, in its own cares? why then do you add to them by laying on those that belong to another day?

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

  Although the specific rigors and allowances of his sexual code flow from a reading of Paul’s epistles, Methodius does reveal one preoccupation that would have been as unfamiliar to the apostle as to Plato. “Of all evils, the greatest that has taken root among the many is the notion that the movements of the stars cause our sins and that the necessities of fate steer our life.” In his concern with astral determinism, Methodius marks himself as a man of his age. His tirade against determinism addressed one of the predominant themes of intellectual culture in the Roman Empire, one whose currents run through popular wonderment and formal philosophy alike. Methodius dedicated an entire tract, On Free Will, to the problem of fate. He revealed himself as an advocate of radical moral freedom. The Christian was possessed of a “self-ruling and autonomous” moral faculty, “free of all compulsion, its own master to choose what it wishes, slave neither to fate nor fortune.” The problem of free will cut to the core of the most profound questions about the nature of the cosmos and man’s place in it. Unsurprisingly, debates about moral autonomy gravitated toward sex. Sex became a privileged testing ground for doctrines of moral freedom. The authors of romance knew as much. For Achilles Tatius, Leucippe’s “freedom” was a perfect alloy of her virtue, her social status, and her assurance that she was safe within the rules of the romantic narrative; Achilles Tatius playfully mocked Stoic ideals of freedom by revealing how little space for action was implied in the notion of voluntary assent to fate. For Christians, there could be no ambiguity about a matter so fundamental, and so eternally consequential, as the cause of sin. Nothing—not the stars, not physical violence, not even the quiet undertow of social expectation—could be held responsible for the individual’s choice of good and evil. The Christians of the second and third centuries invented the notion of free will. Against the threat of gnostic determinism, amid a popular culture increasingly addicted to astrology, and in opposition to a philosophical culture with ever more sophisticated accounts of moral causation, the Christians entered the fray with a message that was jarringly simple and distinctive. The individual, whatever his or her condition, was a moral agent with unqualified capability and responsibility. These crystalline notions of freedom and responsibility came to focus on the realm of moral behavior whose wellsprings might seem most inscrutable: sex.4

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

  Two Latino men had been spotted in Monroeville looking for work the day Ronda Morrison’s body was found, and they became the first suspects. Police tracked them down in Florida and determined that the two men could not have committed the murder. The former owner of the cleaners, an older white man named Miles Jackson, fell under suspicion, but there was no evidence that pointed to him as a killer. The current owner of the cleaners, Rick Blair, was questioned but considered an unlikely suspect. Within a few weeks, the police had tapped out their leads. People in Monroe County began to whisper about the incompetence of the police. When there were still no arrests several months later, the whispers became louder, and public criticisms of the police, sheriff, and local prosecutor were aired in the local newspaper and on local radio stations. 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.

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

  Origen was thus much closer to the actual spirit of Paul in First Corinthians 7. Origen was cau- tious not to denigrate marriage: the call to purity and the call to marry were diff erent forms of grace, each dispensed by the mysterious benevolence of God. Origen stands one step closer to the ascetic theologies of late antiq- uity. 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 fl esh, 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 power- fully does the fornicator corrupt the temple of God.” Origen believed that there were “diff erent classes of fornication,” some more grievous than oth- ers; 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.”  For Origen, the possibility of personal transformation looms large. But for Origen it is virginity, and the complete dissociation from the grip of the world, rather than Christian house craft, that off ers the surest path to such transformation. Th is is the most subtle, and decisive, shift between Clem- THE WILL AND THE WORLD  ent and Origen. Total sexual renunciation steadily came to occupy a larger place in the moral imagination of Christian theologians. Origen was the prophet of a type of cosmic spiritual warfare that would captivate the next generation of Christians and lead directly to the desert. Clement assumes, but rarely talks about, a Christian cosmology that for Origen was always near. Angels and demons lurk in the background of Clement’s panorama, behind the statues of the pagan gods, in the lush erotic art of the ancient town. For Origen, otherworldly spirits crowd around the soul. Where Clement draws on an ancient philosophical vocabulary of “inclinations,” Origen will imagine demonic “impulses” rushing through the fi nely tensed air making up the human soul. Th e ascetic movement of which Origen is the premonition was not a sudden wave that washed out the foundations of a moderate core of conjugal Christianity. Rather, it presages the develop- ment of a bifurcated church, in which virgins represented a spiritual elite.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  No need to choose a particular day. Any day of my life—back there—would suit. Every day of my life, my tiny, microscosmic life, was a reflection of the outer chaos. Let me think back. . . . At seven-thirty the alarm went off. I didn’t bounce out of bed. I lay there till eight-thirty, trying to gain a little more sleep. Sleep—how could I sleep? In the back of my mind was an image of the office where I was already due. I could see Hymie arriving at eight sharp, the switchboard already buzzing with demands for help, the applicants climbing up the wide wooden stairway, the strong smell of camphor from the dressing room. Why get up and repeat yesterday’s song and dance? As fast as I hired them they dropped out. Working my balls off and not even a clean shirt to wear. Mondays I got my allowance from the wife—carfare and lunch money. I was always in debt to her and she was in debt to the grocer, the butcher, the landlord, and so on. I couldn’t be bothered shaving—there wasn’t time enough. I put on the torn shirt, gobble up the breakfast, and borrow a nickel for the subway. If she were in a bad mood I would swindle the money from the newsdealer at the subway. I get to the office out of breath, an hour behind time and a dozen calls to make before I even talk to an applicant. While I make one call there are three other calls waiting to be answered. I use two telephones at once. The switchboard is buzzing. Hymie is sharpening his pencils between calls. McGovern the doorman is standing at my elbow to give me a word of advice about one of the applicants, probably a crook, who is trying to sneak back under a false name. Behind me the cards and ledgers containing the name of every applicant who had ever passed through the machine. The bad ones are starred in red ink; some of them have six aliases after their names. Meanwhile the room is crawling like a hive. The room stinks with sweat, dirty feet, old uniforms, camphor, lysol, bad breaths. Half of them will have to be turned away—not that we don’t need them, but that even under the worst conditions they just won’t do. The man in front of my desk, standing at the rail with palsied hands and bleary eyes, is an ex-mayor of New York City. He’s seventy now and would be glad to take anything. He has wonderful letters of recommendation, but we can’t take any one over forty-five years of age. Forty-five in New York is the deadline. The telephone rings and it’s a smooth secretary from the Y.M.C.A. Wouldn’t I make an exception for a boy who has just walked into his office—a boy who was in the reformatory for a year or so. What did he do? He tried to rape his sister.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  My best years had been passed in travel and in camp, or on the frontiers; I had known at first hand the values of a rude life, and the salubrious effect of frozen or desert regions. I decided to name Lucius governor of that same Pannonia where I had had my first experience in rule. The situation on that frontier was less critical than formerly; his task would be limited to the peaceful work of civil administration or to routine military inspections. Such difficult country would rouse him from Rome's easy ways; he would get better acquainted with that immense world which the City governs, and on which she depends. He dreaded those distant climes, and would not understand that life could be enjoyed elsewhere than in Rome. He accepted, however, with the compliance which he always showed when he wished to please me. Throughout the summer I read with care both his official reports and those more secret communications from Domitius Rogatus, my confidential informant whom I had sent with him as a secretary instructed to watch over him. These accounts satisfied me: Lucius demonstrated in Pannonia that he was capable of the seriousness which I expected of him, but from which he might have relaxed, perhaps, after my death. He even conducted himself rather brilliantly in a series of cavalry skirmishes at the advance posts. In the provinces, as everywhere else, he succeeded in charming everyone around him; his dry and somewhat imperious manner did him no disservice; at least this would not be a case of one of those easy-going princes who is governed by a coterie. But with the very beginning of autumn he caught cold. He was thought to be well again soon, but the cough recurred and the fever persisted, setting in for good. A temporary gain was followed by a sudden relapse the next spring. The bulletins from the physicians appalled me; the public postal service, which I had just established with its relays of horses and carriages over vast territories, seemed to function only in order to bring me news of the invalid more promptly each morning. I could not pardon myself for having been inhumane towards him in the fear of being, or seeming, too indulgent. As soon as he was recovered enough to travel I had him brought back to Italy. In company with the aged Rufus of Ephesus, a specialist in phthisis, I went to the port of Baiae to await my fragile Aelius Caesar. The climate of Tibur, though better than that of Rome, is nevertheless not mild enough for affected lungs; I had decided to have him spend the late autumn in that safer region. The ship anchored in the middle of the bay; a light tender brought the sick man and his physician ashore. His haggard face seemed thinner still under the fringe of beard with which he had let his cheeks be covered, in the hope of resembling me.