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 Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  I asked. “Oh, I want to go, I want to go,” she said. “Let me go ask Daddy.” Oh, man, I saw my only escape. I could only hope that Earl wouldn’t let her go. Only Earl could save me now. I was counting on Earl! That’s how bad my life was at that particular moment! Penelope skipped over toward her father’s car. “Hey, Penultimate,” Roger said. “I’ll go with you. I’ll tell Earl you guys are riding with me. And I’ll drive you guys home.” Roger’s nickname for Penelope was Penultimate. It was maybe the biggest word he knew. I hated that he had a nickname for her. And as they walked together toward Earl, I realized that Roger and Penelope looked good together. They looked natural. They looked like they should be a couple. And after they all found out I was a poor-ass Indian, I knew they would be a couple. Come on, Earl! Come on, Earl! Break your daughter’s heart! But Earl loved Roger. Every dad loved Roger. He was the best football player they’d ever seen. Of course they loved him. It would have been un- American not to love the best football player. I imagined that Earl said his daughter could go only if Roger got his hands into her panties instead of me. I was angry and jealous and absolutely terrified. “I can go! I can go!” Penelope said, ran back to me, and hugged me hard. An hour later, about twenty of us were sitting in a Denny’s in Spokane. Everybody ordered pancakes. I ordered pancakes for Penelope and me. I ordered orange juice and coffee and a side order of toast and hot chocolate and French fries, too, even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to pay for any of it. I figured it was my last meal before my execution, and I was going to have a feast. Halfway through our meal, I went to the bathroom. I thought maybe I was going to throw up, so I kneeled at the toilet. But I only retched a bit. Roger came into the bathroom and heard me. “Hey, Arnie,” he said. “Are you okay?” “Yeah,” I said. “I’m just tired.” “All right, man,” he said. “I’m happy you guys came tonight. You and Penultimate are a great couple, man.” “You think so?” “Yeah, have you done her yet?” “I don’t really want to talk about that stuff.” “Yeah, you’re right, dude. It’s none of my business. Hey, man, are you going to try out for basketball?” I knew that practice started in a week. I’d planned on playing. But I didn’t know if the Coach liked Indians or not. “Yeah,” I said. “Are you any good?” “I’m okay.” “You think you’re good enough to play varsity?” Roger asked. “No way,” I said. “I’m junior varsity all the way.” “All right,” Roger said. “It will be good to have you out there.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “He went along the hall to get his overcoat. Fearing lest he might frighten them, I accompanied him to his little room, and waited for him to put on his things. In the dining-room could be heard the sound of conversation and the rattling of knives and plates. They were eating. They had not heard the ring. ‘Now if they only do not go out,’ I thought. “Gregor put on his fur-collared coat and went out. I closed the door after him. I felt anxious when I was alone, thinking that directly I should have to act. How? I did not yet know. I knew only that all was ended, that there could be no doubt of his innocence, and that in an instant my relations with her were going to be terminated. Before, I had still doubts. I said to myself: ‘Perhaps this is not true. Perhaps I am mistaken.’ Now all doubt had disappeared. All was decided irrevocably. Secretly, all alone with him, at night! It is a violation of all duties! Or, worse yet, she may make a show of that audacity, of that insolence in crime, which, by its excess, tends to prove innocence. All is clear. No doubt. I feared but one thing,—that they might run in different directions, that they might invent some new lie, and thus deprive me of material proof, and of the sorrowful joy of punishing, yes, of executing them.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  When the articles of the treaty had been fully agreed on, the stipulated payments duly secured, and nothing now remained but the execution of the main point, which centered in the surrender of my person up to his free disposal and use, Mrs. Cole managed her objections, especially to his lodgings, and insinuations so nicely, that it became his own mere notion and urgent request, that this copy of a wedding should be finished at her house: “At first, indeed, she did not care, not she, to have such doings in it... she would not for a thousand pounds have any of the servants or apprentices know it... her precious good name would be gone for ever...,” with the like excuses. However, on superior objections to all other expedients, whilst she took care to start none but those which were most liable to them it came round at last to the necessity of her obliging him in that conveniency, and of doing a little more where she had already done so much. The night then was fixed, with all possible respect to the eagerness of his impatience, and in the mean time Mrs. Cole had omitted no instructions, nor even neglected any preparation, that might enable me to come off with honour, in regard to the appearance of my virginity, except that, favoured as I was by nature with all the narrowness of stricture in that part requisite to conduct my designs, I had no occasion to borrow those auxiliaries of art that create a momentary one, easily discovered by the test of a warm bath; and as to the usual sanguinary symptoms of defloration, which, if not always, are generally attendants on it, Mrs. Cole had made me the mistress of an invention of her own, which could hardly miss its effect, and of which more in its place. Every thing then being disposed and fixed for Mr. Norbert’s reception, he was, at the hour of eleven at night, with all the mysteries of silence and secrecy, let in by Mrs. Cole herself, and introduced into her bedchamber, where, in an old-fashioned bed of her’s, I lay, fully undressed, and panting, if not with the fears of a real maid, at least with those perhaps greater of a dissembled one which gave me an air of confusion and bashfulness that maiden-modesty had all the honour of, and was indeed scarce distinguishable from it, even by less partial eyes than those of my lover: so let me call him, for I ever thought the term “cully” too cruel a reproach to the men, for their abused weakness for us.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  In bed one morning I asked Lecia why didn’t Mother just put Grandma in the trunk. Lecia propped up on her elbow and said that wasn’t very nice for your dead mother. Following that same line of logic, I figured out for myself that she wouldn’t let anybody truss the old lady on top of the car like a deer, just so we’d all get to ride out too. So for years, I pictured Mother driving the five hundred miles across Texas with Grandma’s corpse stretched out on the backseat. (I guess it wasn’t till I read William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying , where the kids are dragging their dead mother across Mississippi, and the stink gets so bad and the flies and maggots get at her, that I began to figure that some ambulance had probably carted the body back. Mother had small tolerance for odors.) The trip must have been grisly. The newly dead do, after all, rent a lot of skull space from us. So I still imagine Mother alone in that car with some ghost of her dead mother sitting beside. Mother was driving at night as Grandma would have, for the cool and the lack of traffic night provided. It’s a fourteen-hour drive, and the sky can get awful black in that time, like a big black bowl somebody set over you. One pair of headlights can put you in a trance with the white road dashes coming up in them at exact intervals. And as John Milton says, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n. I myself am Hell.” I sometimes want to beam myself back to the old Impala so Mother won’t have to make that drive alone. I always picture myself being incredibly useful—pouring coffee from the thermos or finding something of a soothing and classical nature on the radio—never whining or asking to pee as I surely would have. Maybe I would roll down all the windows just to shoo the mean ghost of my grandmother out. Mother had left us at home because she was hurt. For her, being hurt meant drawing into herself. (Old joke: What’s the loneliest place in Louisiana? Bayou Self.) And that’s where I have to leave her, alone on the dark highway with the cacti rearing up and falling back down as she passes. Grandma’s death gave me my first serious case of insomnia. When I lay in bed next to Lecia’s solid, sleeping form, that picture of Grandma’s pale arm with the ants would rear up behind my closed eyes. With it came a low humming in my head—a sound like a crazy cello player sawing the same note over and over, or like a zillion bees coming up out of the ground.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “And always the same feeling of anxiety about her, and of hatred because of this anxiety. “Toward eleven o’clock in the morning came her sister, her ambassadress. Then began the usual phrases: ‘She is in a terrible state. What is the matter?’ ‘Why, nothing has happened.’ I spoke of her asperity of character, and I added that I had done nothing, and that I would not take the first step. If she wants a divorce, so much the better! My sister-in-law would not listen to this idea, and went away without having gained anything. I was obstinate, and I said boldly and determinedly, in talking to her, that I would not take the first step. Immediately she had gone I went into the other room, and saw the children in a frightened and pitiful state, and there I found myself already inclined to take this first step. But I was bound by my word. Again I walked up and down, always smoking. At breakfast I drank brandy and wine, and I reached the point which I unconsciously desired, the point where I no longer saw the stupidity and baseness of my situation. “Toward three o’clock she came. I thought that she was appeased, or admitted her defeat. I began to tell her that I was provoked by her reproaches. She answered me, with the same severe and terribly downcast face, that she had not come for explanations, but to take the children, that we could not live together. I answered that it was not my fault, that she had put me beside myself. She looked at me with a severe and solemn air, and said: ‘Say no more. You will repent it.’ I said that I could not tolerate comedies. Then she cried out something that I did not understand, and rushed toward her room. The key turned in the lock, and she shut herself up. I pushed at the door. There was no response. Furious, I went away. “A half hour later Lise came running all in tears. ‘What! Has anything happened? We cannot hear Mamma!’ We went toward my wife’s room. I pushed the door with all my might. The bolt was scarcely drawn, and the door opened. In a skirt, with high boots, my wife lay awkwardly on the bed. On the table an empty opium phial. We restored her to life. Tears and then reconciliation! Not reconciliation; internally each kept the hatred for the other, but it was absolutely necessary for the moment to end the scene in some way, and life began again as before. These scenes, and even worse, came now once a week, now every month, now every day. And invariably the same incidents. Once I was absolutely resolved to fly, but through some inconceivable weakness I remained. “Such were the circumstances in which we were living when the man came. The man was bad, it is true. But what! No worse than we were.” CHAPTER XXI.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  “I didn’t mean to hit you,” I said. “I was aiming for the wall.” “Were you really aiming for the wall?” Dang it. He was, like, interrogating me. I was starting to get upset. “No,” I said. “I wasn’t aiming for anything really. Well, I was planning on hitting something, you know? Like the wall or a desk or the chalkboard. Something dead, you know, not something alive.” “Alive like me?” “Or like a plant.” Mr. P had three plants in his classroom. He talked to those green things more often than he talked to us. “You do know that hitting a plant and hitting me are two different things, right?” he asked. “Yeah, I know.” He smiled mysteriously. Adults are so good at smiling mysteriously. Do they go to college for that? I was getting more and more freaked out. What did he want? “You know, Mr. P, I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but you’re, like, freaking me out here. I mean, why are you here, exactly?” “Well, I want you to know that hitting me with that book was probably the worst thing you’ve ever done. It doesn’t matter what you intended to do. What happens is what you really did. And you broke an old man’s nose. That’s almost unforgivable.” He was going to punish me now. He couldn’t beat me up with his old man fists, but he could hurt me with his old man words. “But I do forgive you,” he said. “No matter how much I don’t want to. I have to forgive you. It’s the only thing that keeps me from smacking you with an ugly stick. When I first started teaching here, that’s what we did to the rowdy ones, you know? We beat them. That’s how we were taught to teach you. We were supposed to kill the Indian to save the child.” “You killed Indians?” “No, no, it’s just a saying. I didn’t literally kill Indians. We were supposed to make you give up being Indian. Your songs and stories and language and dancing. Everything. We weren’t trying to kill Indian people. We were trying to kill Indian culture.” Man, at that second, I hated Mr. P hard. I wished I had a whole dang set of encyclopedias to throw at him. “I can’t apologize to everybody I hurt,” Mr. P said. “But I can apologize to you.” It was so backward. I’d broken his nose but he was trying to apologize to me. “I hurt a lot of Indian kids when I was a young teacher,” he said. “I might have broken a few bones.” All of a sudden, I realized he was confessing to me.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Anyone else might have been little impressed by the menace; what would I have to fear as soon as I found the means to prove that what I had just suffered had been the work not of a tribunal but of criminals? But my weakness, my natural timidity, the frightful memory of what I had undergone at Paris and recollections of the chateau de Bressac Ä it all stunned me, terrified me; I thought only of flight, and was far more stirred by anguish at having to abandon an innocent victim to those two villains, who were without doubt ready to immolate her, than I was touched by my own ills. More irritated, more afflicted morally than in physical pain, I set off at once; but, completely unoriented, never stopping to ask my way, I did but swing in a circle around Paris and on the fourth day of traveling I found I had got no further than Lieursaint. Knowing this road would lead me to the southern provinces, I resolved to follow it and try to reach those distant regions, fancying to myself that the peace and calm so cruelly denied me in those parts of France where I had grown up were, perhaps, awaiting me in others more remote; fatal error! how much there remained of grief and pain yet to experience. Chapter 19Whatever had been my trials until that time, at least I was in possession of my innocence. Merely the victim of a few monsters' attempts, I was still able to consider myself more or less in the category of an honest girl. The fact was I had never been truly soiled save by a rape operated five years earlier, and its traces had healed... a rape consummated at an instant when my numbed state had not even left me the faculty of sensation. Other than that, what was there with which I could reproach myself? Nothing, oh! nothing, doubtless; and my heart was chaste, I was overweeningly proud of it, my presumption was to be punished; the outrages awaiting me were to be such that in a short while it would no longer be possible, however slight had been my participation, for me to form the same comforting ideas in the depths of my heart. This time I had my entire fortune about me; that is to say, about a hundred crowns, comprising the total of what I had saved from Bressac's clutches and earned from Rodin. In my extreme misery I was able to feel glad that this money, at least, had not been taken from me; I flattered myself with the notion that through the frugality, temperance, and economy to which I was accustomed, this sum would amply suffice until I was so situated as to be able to find a place of some sort.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  As soon as Clement was asleep, Armande came near to me. "He will awake shortly," she said; "he will behave like a madman: Nature only puts his senses to sleep in order to give them, after a little rest, a much greater energy; one more scene and we will have peace until tomorrow." "But you," I said to my companion, "aren't you going to sleep a little while ?" "How can I ?" Armande replied, "when, were I not to remain awake and standing by his side, and were my negligence to be perceived, he would be the man to stab me to death." "O Heaven!" I sighed, "why! even as he sleeps the villain would that those around him remain in a state of suffering !" "Yes," my companion responded, "it is the very barbarity of the idea which procures the furious awakening you are going to witness; upon this he is like unto those perverse writers whose corruption is so dangerous, so active, that their single aim is, by causing their appalling doctrines to be printed, to immortalize the sum of their crimes after their own lives are at an end; they themselves can do no more, but their accursed writings will instigate the commission of crimes, and they carry this sweet idea with them to their graves: it comforts them for the obligation, enjoined by death, to relinquish the doing of evil." "The monsters!" I cried.... Armande, who was a very gentle creature, kissed me as she shed a few tears, then went back to pacing about the roue's bed. Two hours passed and then the monk did indeed awake in a prodigious agitation and seized me with such force I thought he was going to strangle me; his respiration was quick and labored, his eyes glittered, he uttered incoherent words which were exclusively blasphemous or libertine expressions; he summoned Armande, called for whips, and started in again with his flogging of us both, but in a yet more vigorous manner than before having gone to sleep. It seemed as if he wished to end matters with me; shrill cries burst from his mouth; to abridge my sufferings, Armande excited him violently, he lost his head entirely, and finally made rigid by the most violent sensations, the monster lost both his ardor and his desires together with smoking floods of semen. Nothing transpired during the rest of the night; upon getting up, the monk was content to touch and examine each of us; and as he was going to say Mass, we returned to the seraglio. The superintendent could not be prevented from desiring me in. the inflamed state she swore I must be in; exhausted I indeed was and, thus weakened, how could I defend myself ? She did all she wished, enough to convince me that even a woman, in such a school, soon losing all the delicacy and restraint native to her sex, could only, after those tyrants' example, become obscene and cruel.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  “Are you sure?” my parents asked. “You could maybe wait until the semester break. Or until next year. Get a fresh start.” “No, if I don’t go now, I never will. I have to do it now.” “Okay,” they said. Yep, it was that easy with my parents. It was almost like they’d been waiting for me to ask them if I could go to Reardan, like they were psychics or something. I mean, they’ve always known that I’m weird and ambitious, so maybe they expect me to do the weirdest things possible. And going to Reardan is truly a strange idea. But it isn’t weird that my parents so quickly agreed with my plans. They want a better life for my sister and me. My sister is running away to get lost, but I am running away because I want to find something. And my parents love me so much that they want to help me. Yeah, Dad is a drunk and Mom is an ex-drunk, but they don’t want their kids to be drunks. “It’s going to be hard to get you to Reardan,” Dad said. “We can’t afford to move there. And there ain’t no school bus going to come out here.” “You’ll be the first one to ever leave the rez this way,” Mom said. “The Indians around here are going to be angry with you.” Shoot, I figure that my fellow tribal members are going to torture me. [image "A hand-drawn illustration depicts a person with glasses who is partially buried, surrounded by ants. A thought bubble reads ‘Hope?’" file=image_rsrc4S2.jpg] Rowdy Sings the Blues [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] So the day after I decided to transfer to Reardan, and after my parents agreed to make it happen, I walked over to the tribal school, and found Rowdy sitting in his usual place on the playground. He was alone, of course. Everybody was scared of him. “I thought you were on suspension, dickwad,” he said, which was Rowdy’s way of saying, “I’m happy you’re here.” “Kiss my ass,” I said. I wanted to tell him that he was my best friend and I loved him like crazy, but boys didn’t say such things to other boys, and nobody said such things to Rowdy. “Can I tell you a secret?” I asked. “It better not be girly,” he said. “It’s not.” “Okay, then, tell me.” “I’m transferring to Reardan.” Rowdy’s eyes narrowed. His eyes always narrowed right before he beat the crap out of someone. I started shaking. “That’s not funny,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be funny,” I said. “I’m transferring to Reardan. I want you to come with me.” “And when are you going on this imaginary journey?” “It’s not imaginary. It’s real. And I’m transferring now. I start school tomorrow at Reardan.” “You better quit saying that,” he said. “You’re getting me mad.”

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  She sat down with that false air in front of the piano, and then began the usual preliminaries,—the pizzicati of the violin and the arrangement of the scores. I remember then how they looked at each other, and cast a glance at their auditors who were taking their seats. They said a few words to each other, and the music began. They played Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata.’ Do you know the first presto? Do you know it? Ah!” . . . Posdnicheff heaved a sigh, and was silent for a long time. “A terrible thing is that sonata, especially the presto! And a terrible thing is music in general. What is it? Why does it do what it does? They say that music stirs the soul. Stupidity! A lie! It acts, it acts frightfully (I speak for myself), but not in an ennobling way. It acts neither in an ennobling nor a debasing way, but in an irritating way. How shall I say it? Music makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own. Under the influence of music I really seem to feel what I do not feel, to understand what I do not understand, to have powers which I cannot have. Music seems to me to act like yawning or laughter; I have no desire to sleep, but I yawn when I see others yawn; with no reason to laugh, I laugh when I hear others laugh. And music transports me immediately into the condition of soul in which he who wrote the music found himself at that time. I become confounded with his soul, and with him I pass from one condition to another. But why that? I know nothing about it? But he who wrote Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ knew well why he found himself in a certain condition. That condition led him to certain actions, and for that reason to him had a meaning, but to me none, none whatever. And that is why music provokes an excitement which it does not bring to a conclusion. For instance, a military march is played; the soldier passes to the sound of this march, and the music is finished. A dance is played; I have finished dancing, and the music is finished. A mass is sung; I receive the sacrament, and again the music is finished. But any other music provokes an excitement, and this excitement is not accompanied by the thing that needs properly to be done, and that is why music is so dangerous, and sometimes acts so frightfully. “In China music is under the control of the State, and that is the way it ought to be.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  But love with a husband polluted by jealousy and ill-nature was no longer her ideal. She began to think of some other tenderness; at least, that is what I thought. She looked about her as if expecting some event or some being. I noticed it, and I could not help being anxious. “Always, now, it happened that, in talking with me through a third party (that is, in talking with others, but with the intention that I should hear), she boldly expressed,—not thinking that an hour before she had said the opposite,—half joking, half seriously, this idea that maternal anxieties are a delusion; that it is not worth while to sacrifice one’s life to children. When one is young, it is necessary to enjoy life. So she occupied herself less with the children, not with the same intensity as formerly, and paid more and more attention to herself, to her face,—although she concealed it,—to her pleasures, and even to her perfection from the worldly point of view. She began to devote herself passionately to the piano, which had formerly stood forgotten in the corner. There, at the piano, began the adventure. “The man appeared.” Posdnicheff seemed embarrassed, and twice again there escaped him that nasal sound of which I spoke above. I thought that it gave him pain to refer to the man, and to remember him. He made an effort, as if to break down the obstacle that embarrassed him, and continued with determination. “He was a bad man in my eyes, and not because he has played such an important rôle in my life, but because he was really such. For the rest, from the fact that he was bad, we must conclude that he was irresponsible. He was a musician, a violinist. Not a professional musician, but half man of the world, half artist. His father, a country proprietor, was a neighbor of my father’s. The father had become ruined, and the children, three boys, were all sent away. Our man, the youngest, was sent to his godmother at Paris. There they placed him in the Conservatory, for he showed a taste for music. He came out a violinist, and played in concerts.” On the point of speaking evil of the other, Posdnicheff checked himself, stopped, and said suddenly: “In truth, I know not how he lived.

• From The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967)

  adopted. This tenuousness can (indeed must) be mitigated by seeking more broadly based plausibility structures. Typically, these are the churches or other wider religious groupings. By the very nature of their social character as voluntary associations “located” primarily in the private sphere, however, such churches can only augment the strength and durability of the required plausibility structures to a limited extent. The “polarization” of religion brought about by secularization, and the concomitant loss of commonality and/or “reality,” can also be described by saying that secularization ipso facto leads to a pluralistic situation. The term “pluralism,” to be sure, has usually been applied only to those cases (of which the American one is prototypical) in which different religious groups are tolerated by the state and engage in free competition with each other. There is little point to arguments over terminology and there is nothing wrong with this limited use of the term. If, however, one looks at the underlying social forces producing even this limited kind of pluralism, the deeper linkage between secularization and pluralism becomes apparent. One may then say that, as we have seen, secularization brings about a demonopolization of religious traditions and thus, ipso facto, leads to a pluralistic situation. Through most of human history religious establishments have existed as monopolies in society—monopolies, that is, in the ultimate legitimation of individual and collective life. Religious institutions really were institutions properly speaking, that is, regulatory agencies for both thought and action. The world as defined by the religious institution in question was the world, maintained not just by the mundane powers of the society and their instruments of social control, but much more fundamentally maintained by the “common 156

• From Going Clear (2013)

  In July 1977, thirteen-year-old Tom De Vocht signed the billion-year contract for the Sea Org. De Vocht became one of Miscavige’s allies and moved up the bureaucratic ladder quickly. In 1986, he was appointed the Commanding Officer of the Commodore’s Messengers Org at Flag. In 2001, Miscavige called him, complaining, “Tom, I can’t get my building done.” The new headquarters for the Religious Technology Center at Gold Base, Building 50, was years behind schedule and well over budget. Miscavige directed De Vocht to come to Gold Base and oversee the construction. The first day he got there, De Vocht realized that “this building is going to be the end of me.” Forty-seven million dollars—more than a thousand dollars per square foot—had previously been spent on the new center. The building had already been completed a couple of times, using the highest-grade materials—cold rolled steel, and anigre, a beautiful but extremely hard, pinkish African wood—only to have components ripped out because they didn’t meet Miscavige’s standards. Miscavige’s desk, also made of steel, was so heavy that De Vocht worried whether the structure would support it. He discovered that there were no actual architectural drawings for the building; there were only renderings of what it should look like. The stucco exterior walls were already cracked because the whole edifice was at a 1.25-inch tilt. The walls weren’t actually connected to the floors. Even a minor earthquake (Gold Base was just west of the San Andreas Fault) might cause the whole building to collapse. De Vocht recommended that the building be torn down and rebuilt from scratch, but Miscavige rejected that idea. The expense of essentially rebuilding a poorly constructed building from the inside was immense. When De Vocht had almost finished construction, having spent an additional $60 million, Miscavige still had a list of complaints. He was also critical of the landscaping. Gold Base is in a desert, but Miscavige demanded that the building appear to be set in a forest. One morning, De Vocht says, Miscavige and his wife were inspecting the large vault in the legal department of Building 50, when the leader stopped in his tracks and began rubbing his head. He turned pale. “Where did we put the gold bullion?” he asked his wife. For a full minute, Miscavige kept rubbing his head and asking about the gold, but then he snapped out of it and went on as if nothing had happened. De Vocht recalls that forty-five minutes later, Shelly Miscavige called him and asked him, “What are we going to do? He’s losing it.” She told him that Dave had gone “Type 3”—psychotic—because of all the Suppressive Persons at the base.3 While De Vocht was working on Building 50, he was forced to attend a séance with five hundred other Sea Org members on Gold Base.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The very sight of her was enough to frighten one. She was like a spirited carriage-horse that has long been idle, and suddenly finds itself without a bridle. As for my wife, she had no bridle, as for that matter, ninety-nine hundredths of our women have none.” CHAPTER XIX. Posdnicheff’s face had become transformed; his eyes were pitiable; their expression seemed strange, like that of another being than himself; his moustache and beard turned up toward the top of his face; his nose was diminished, and his mouth enlarged, immense, frightful. “Yes,” he resumed “she had grown stouter since ceasing to conceive, and her anxieties about her children began to disappear. Not even to disappear. One would have said that she was waking from a long intoxication, that on coming to herself she had perceived the entire universe with its joys, a whole world in which she had not learned to live, and which she did not understand. “‘If only this world shall not vanish! When time is past, when old age comes, one cannot recover it.’ Thus, I believe, she thought, or rather felt. Moreover, she could neither think nor feel otherwise. She had been brought up in this idea that there is in the world but one thing worthy of attention,—love. In marrying, she had known something of this love, but very far from everything that she had understood as promised her, everything that she expected. How many disillusions! How much suffering! And an unexpected torture,—the children! This torture had told upon her, and then, thanks to the obliging doctor, she had learned that it is possible to avoid having children. That had made her glad. She had tried, and she was now revived for the only thing that she knew,—for love. But love with a husband polluted by jealousy and ill-nature was no longer her ideal. She began to think of some other tenderness; at least, that is what I thought. She looked about her as if expecting some event or some being. I noticed it, and I could not help being anxious. “Always, now, it happened that, in talking with me through a third party (that is, in talking with others, but with the intention that I should hear), she boldly expressed,—not thinking that an hour before she had said the opposite,—half joking, half seriously, this idea that maternal anxieties are a delusion; that it is not worth while to sacrifice one’s life to children. When one is young, it is necessary to enjoy life. So she occupied herself less with the children, not with the same intensity as formerly, and paid more and more attention to herself, to her face,—although she concealed it,—to her pleasures, and even to her perfection from the worldly point of view.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  In order to console himself for the sale of the said box, the good Monsieur du Harpin projected its theft, and it was to me he entrusted the execution of his plan. After having delivered a long speech upon the indifference of robbery, upon, indeed, its usefulness in the world, since it maintains a sort of equilibrium which totally confounds the inequality of property; upon the infrequence of punishment, since out of every twenty thieves it could be proven that not above two dies on the gallows; after having demonstrated to me, with an erudition of which I had not dreamt Monsieur du Harpin capable, that theft was honored throughout Greece, that several races yet acknowledge it, favor it, and reward it for a bold deed simultaneously giving proof of courage and skill (two virtues indispensable to a warlike nation), after having, in a word, exalted his personal influence which would extricate me from all embarrassments in the event I should be detected, Monsieur du Harpin tendered me two lock picks, one to open the neighbor's front door, the other his secretary within which lay the box in question; incessantly he enjoined me to get him this box and, in return for so important a service, I could expect, for two years, to receive an additional crown. "Oh Monsieur!" I exclaimed, shuddering at his proposal, "is it possible a master dare thus corrupt his domestic ! What prevents me from turning against you the weapons you put into my hands? Du Harpin, much confused, fell back on a lame subterfuge; what he was doing, said he, was being done with the simple intention of testing me; how fortunate that I had resisted this temptation, he added... how I should have been doomed had I succumbed, etc. I scoffed at this lie; but I was soon enough aware of what a mistake it had been to answer him with such asperity: malefactors do not like to find resistance in those they seek to seduce; unfortunately, there is no middle ground or median attitude when one is so unlucky as to have been approached by them: one must necessarily thereupon become either their accomplices, which is exceedingly dangerous, or their enemies, which is even more so. Had I been a little experienced, I would have quit the house forthwith, but it was already written in Heaven that every one of the honest gestures that was to emanate from me would be answered by misfortunes.

• From The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967)

  practical as well as theoretical difficulties for the religious groups in question, especially those that retain the institutional and intellectual habits deriving from the happy days when they were monopolies. For the individual, existing in a particular religious world implies existing in the particular social context within which that world can retain its plausibility. Where the nomos of individual life is more or less co-extensive with that religious world, separation from the latter implies the threat of anomy. Thus travel in areas where there were no Jewish communities was not only ritually impossible but inherently anomic (that is, threatening an anomic disintegration of the only conceivable “correct” way of living) for the traditional Jew, as travel outside India was for the traditional Hindu. Such journeys into darkness were to be shunned not only because the company of pork-eaters or cow-defilers caused ritual impurity but, more importantly, because their company threatened the “purity” of the Jewish or Hindu world—that is, its subjective reality or plausibility. Thus the agonizing question of the Babylonian exiles, “How can one worship Yahweh in an alien land?,” has a decisive cognitive dimension, which indeed has been the decisive question for diaspora Judaism ever since. Since every religious world is “based” on a plausibility structure that is itself the product of human activity, every religious world is inherently precarious in its reality. In other words, “conversion” (that is, individual “transference” into another world) is always possible in principle. This possibility increases with the degree of instability or discontinuity of the plausibility structure in question. Thus the Jew whose social ambience was limited by the confines of the ghetto was much less conversion-prone than the Jew existing in the “open societies” of modern Western countries (conversion here referring to “emigration” 63

• From Going Clear (2013)

  80 Aum’s membership: Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It , p. 6. 81 with resources close to $1 billion: Ibid., p. 37. 82 “Hitler was thinking”: Russ Baker, “Clash of the Titans,” George , April 1997. 83 friends or clients of Fields: Bertram Fields, response to Lauren Wolf queries. 84 “fact-finding mission”: David Hudson, “Scientology’s ‘Holocaust,’ ” Salon Daily Clicks , Feb. 25, 1997. 85 “Individuals and businesses throughout”: Testimony of John Travolta, “Religious Intolerance in Europe Today,” hearing before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (Helsinki Commission), Sept. 18, 1997. 86 “He said he wanted to help”: Josh Young, “Bill Clinton’s Grand Seduction,” George , March 1998. 87 “Scientology point person”: Ibid. 88 The Germans were puzzled: Stephen A. Kent, “Hollywood’s Celebrity-Lobbyists and the Clinton Administration’s American Foreign Policy toward German Scientology,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 1 (Spring 2002). 89 “This is not a church”: Jennifer Tanaka, “Hollywood versus Germany over Scientology,” Maclean’s , Jan. 20, 1997. 8. BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY 1 “mother school”: Interview with Lauren Haggis. 2 “I guess I’m not supposed”: Ibid. 3 “Oh, yeah”: Interview with Alissa Haggis. 4 Miscavige was hopeful: Interview with Mark “Marty” Rathbun; Anna Schecter, “Tom Cruise’s Former Scientology Auditor Speaks about Cruise/Kidman Divorce,” Rock Center with Brian Williams , July 11, 2012. The church issued a denial that Kidman was considered a Suppressive Person; see Maureen Orth, “What Katie Didn’t Know: Marriage, Scientology-Style,” Vanity Fair , Oct. 2012. 5 “He was not in good shape”: Interview with Mark “Marty” Rathbun. 6 she had suffered a miscarriage: Meryl Gordon, “Nicole Kidman Tells It Like It Is,” Marie Claire , Nov. 11, 2007. 7 “Nic knows exactly”: Dickerson, Nicole Kidman , pp. 146–47. 8 He paired Cruise with: Interview with Jason Beghe. Cruise’s attorney says, “Mr. Cruise may have had a chance encounter with Jason Beghe at the Celebrity Center, but had no meeting with him.” 9 He had known Cruise: Interview with Tommy Davis. 10 reporting directly to Shelly Miscavige: Interview with Claire Headley. 11 Rathbun assigned Davis to: Interview with Jason Beghe. 12 One of the issues: One Day One Destiny , French documentary produced by Magneto Presse, 2009. 13 “Tommy told them over and over”: Dana Kennedy, “Katie Holmes ‘Biggest Nightmare’ in Scientology History, Say Experts,” Hollywood Reporter , July 4, 2012. 14 Rathbun’s auditing sessions: Interview with Tom De Vocht. Marc Headley told Vanity Fair that there were cameras behind a piece of furniture and in a lamp recording Cruise’s sessions: “There were two views—one close-up of the E-Meter dial and the other a long shot over Marty’s shoulder, showing Tom Cruise holding the cans.” Maureen Orth, “What Katie Didn’t Know,” Vanity Fair , Oct. 2012. 15 “I think I’m done”: Interview with Mark “Marty” Rathbun. 16 “I have never met”: 2004 International Association of Scientologists Freedom Medal of Valor Ceremony. 17 Cruise poured millions: Reitman, Inside Scientology , p. 290. 18 “would understand the details”: Interview with Mark “Marty” Rathbun; www.themortonreport.com/celebrity/notables/exclusive-bill-clinton-tom-cruise-plotted-to-use-tony-blair-to-gain-tax-breaks-for-scientology/ .

• From Going Clear (2013)

  But when her sister was about to get married, Deborah wrote to the International Justice Chief, the Scientology official in charge of such matters, who said that she was allowed to see her parents as long as they didn’t say anything against Scientology. The Benjamins readily agreed. A decade later, however, Deborah went to Clearwater, intending to take some upper-level courses, and learned that the previous ruling no longer applied. If she wanted to do more training, she would have to confront her parents’ mistakes. The church recommended that she take the Potential Trouble Source/Suppressive Persons course. Many Scientologists have taken the same course. Deborah’s friend Kelly Preston had taken it as well. “ I was PTS, but I didn’t realize it, and so I was told, ‘You need to be on PTS/SP,’ ” Preston later recalled in her interview for Celebrity magazine. She discovered that her life was full of Suppressive Persons. “Being an artist and having a lot of theta, you really attract those type of people,” Preston said. ( “Theta” is a Scientology term for life force.) “I ended up having to handle or disconnect from quite a few different people.” It took Deborah a year to complete the course, but it didn’t change her parents’ status. She petitioned officials at the Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles for help. They put her on another program that took two more years to finish. Still, nothing changed. If she failed to “handle” her parents—by persuading them to make amends to the church—she would have to disconnect not only from them but also from everyone who spoke to them, including her siblings. She realized, “ It was that, or else I had to give up being a Scientologist.” The fact that Paul refused to disconnect from her parents posed yet another conflict. According to the church, Deborah’s parents had been part of a class-action lawsuit against Scientology by disaffected members in 1987, which was dismissed the following year.2 The church required them to denounce the anti-Scientology group and offer a “token” restitution. That meant performing community service and following a rehabilitation course, called A to E, for penitents seeking to get back into the church’s good graces; it includes repaying debts, taking additional courses, and making public declarations of error. Deborah told her parents that if they wanted to remain in contact with her, they had to follow the church’s procedures. Her parents, worried that they would also be cut off from their grandson, agreed to perform community service. For three months they delivered food in a Meals on Wheels program in Los Angeles. But the church wasn’t satisfied. Deborah was told that if she maintained contact with her parents she would be labeled a Potential Trouble Source—a designation that would alienate her from the entire Scientology community and render her ineligible for further training. A senior official counseled her to agree to disconnect from her parents and have them formally branded SPs.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Heaven was also not omnipotent, because it could not exist without Earth, its divine counterpart. Unlike the Shang, the Zhou exploited the agricultural potential of the great plain on a grand scale, and because Heaven’s influence could be implemented on Earth only through the work of human beings, farming, forest clearance, and road building became sacred tasks that completed the creation Heaven had begun. The Chinese were clearly more interested in sanctifying the world they lived in than finding a transcendent holiness beyond. The Zhou king was supported by a four-tier aristocracy of “gentlemen” (junzi); Western scholars have translated their titles as “duke,” “marquis,” “earl,” and “baron.” The shi, children of younger sons and second-class wives, served as men-at-arms but also as scribes and ritual experts, forming an early “civil” wing of government. The Zhou confederacy of more than a hundred small principalities survived until 771, when their western capital was overrun by the Qong Rang barbarians. The Zhou fled to the east but never fully recovered. Yet the succeeding period witnessed not merely the decline of a dynasty but also the decay of the feudal system. The kings remained nominal rulers but were increasingly challenged by the more aggressive “gentlemen” in the principalities, who were casting aside the deference on which feudalism depended. 25 The boundaries of the Chinese states were also shifting. By this time, the Chinese had absorbed several “barbarian” populations, all with very different cultural traditions that challenged the old Zhou ethos. Cities located far away from the traditional centers of Chinese civilization were becoming locally prominent, and by the end of the eighth century, when Chinese history starts to emerge from the mists of legend, they had become capitals of kingdoms: Jin in the north, Qi in the northwest, and Chu in the south. These states ruled thousands of barbarian subjects, whose grasp of Chinese custom was at best superficial. The small principalities in the center of the great plain had now become extremely vulnerable, because these peripheral states were determined to expand. During the seventh century, they broke with tradition and began to mobilize peasants as fighting foot soldiers; Jin and Chu even brought barbarians into the army, offering them land in return for military service. Deeply threatened by these aggressive kingdoms, some of the traditional principalities were also riven by internal conflict. With the decline of the Zhou, public order had deteriorated, and increasingly, brute force was becoming the norm. It was not uncommon for princes to kill ministers who dared to challenge their policies; ambassadors could be murdered and rulers assassinated during visits to another principality. To add to the tension, it seems that there was also an environmental crisis. 26 Centuries of aggressive hunting and land clearance that destroyed animal habitats meant that huntsmen were returning empty-handed and there was far less meat at the bin banquets, so the old carefree extravagance was no longer possible.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  But there was a disturbing portent of future trouble. In 1949 an image of Ram, incarnation of Vishnu and chief exemplar of Hindu virtue, was discovered in a building at the site of his mythological birthplace in Ayodhya on the eastern Gangetic plain. This was also the site of a mosque said to have been established by Babur, the first Moghul emperor, in 1528.19 Devout Hindus claimed that Ram’s image had been placed there by God; Muslims, naturally, denied this. There were violent clashes, and the district magistrate, a member of RSS, refused to remove the image. Because their images require regular worship, Hindus were henceforth permitted to enter the building for devotional chanting on the anniversary of the miraculous arrival of Ram’s statue. Forty years later this sacred geography would trump the scientific rationalism so confidently predicted by the secularists. [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] The founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), was an unabashed secularist who simply wanted to create a state in which Muslims would not be defined or limited by their religious affiliation. In fact, the nation was defined by Islam before it had even begun. This inevitably raised certain expectations, and from the beginning, while the government was still resolutely secularist, there was pressure to resacralize political life. The Deobandis became particularly powerful in Pakistan. They endorsed the modern system of territorial nationalism and secular democracy and offered free education to the poor in their madrassas at a time when the state school system was collapsing due to lack of funding. Their students would be isolated from mainstream secular life and schooled in the Deobandis’ peculiarly rigid and intolerant form of Islam. To protect their Islamic lifestyle, the Deobandis also founded a political party, the JUI (Association of Ulema of Islam). By the late 1960s, having accumulated tens of thousands of students and alumni, they were in an excellent position to pressure the government to Islamize civil law and the banking system, thereby creating jobs for their ultrareligious graduates.