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 Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  6. Radegund: Survivor, Queen, Abbess A Privileged but Unstable Childhood As a child of royalty in the restless, shape-shifting kingdoms of 6th-century Francia and Germany, Radegund had a comfortable life—at least in terms of food and clothing. But the endemic violence of the period taught the princess at an early age to be wary of complacency. She was born around 520 to Berthar, one of three brothers who jointly ruled the Thuringians. Thuringia was roughly near the city of Erfurt, 120 miles northeast of modern-day Frankfurt. The Merovingian kingdoms lay mostly in modern-day France. Both suffered from the same problematic inheritance structure, in which kings often divided their kingdoms equally among their male heirs or made them joint rulers. These kingdoms often ended in invasion or usurpation, as the rulers of ever-shrinking kingdoms sought expansion by pushing into the territory held by their male relatives. It was not surprising that the Thuringian kingship collapsed. One of the three brothers, Hermanfrid, killed the others, taking the royal children into his court as wards. But in 531, a neighboring king and his allies seized Hermanfrid’s kingdom by force. Radegund was perhaps 11 years old when the Merovingians descended on Thuringia. In a memorable story from her hagiography, the princess’s fate was momentarily a matter of chance, as the Merovingian leaders gambled for possession of the Thuringian spoils and prisoners. She was claimed by Chlotar, a notoriously aggressive and ambitious Merovingian ruler who also married two of her cousins. He sent Radegund to a villa at Athies in northern France, where she was cared for by the king’s trusted followers. Writings about Radegund Three of Radegund’s intimates wrote about her during her life or shortly after her death, and she is also mentioned in other historical records of the Merovingian royal families. We even have some of her own writings, which make clear that the deaths of almost all her family continued to live vividly in her memory and were central to her adult identity. 40

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  increasingly tormented me. For over a year, I think, said Austerlitz, I would leave my house as darkness fell, walking on and on, down the Mile End Road and Bow Road to Stratford, then to Chigwell and Romford, right across Bethnal Green and Canonbury, through Holloway and Kentish Town and thus to Hampstead Heath, or else south over the river to Peckham and Dulwich or westward to Richmond Park. It is a fact that you can traverse this vast city almost from end to end on foot in a single night, said Austerlitz, and once you are used to walking alone and meeting only a few nocturnal specters on your way, you soon begin to wonder why, apparently because of some agreement concluded long ago, Londoners of all ages lie in their beds in those countless buildings in Greenwich, Bayswater, or Kensington, under a safe roof, as they suppose, while really they are only stretched out with their faces turned to the earth in fear, like travelers of the past resting on their way through the desert. My wanderings took me to the most remote areas of London, into outlying parts of the metropolis which I would never otherwise have seen, and when dawn came I would go back to Whitechapel on the Underground, together with all the other poor souls who flow from the suburbs towards the center at that time of day. As I passed through the stations, I thought several times that among the passengers coming towards me in the tiled passages, on the escalators plunging steeply into the depths, or behind the gray windows of a train just pulling out, I saw a face known to me from some much earlier part of my life, but I could never say whose it was. These familiar faces always had something different from the rest about them, something I might almost call indistinct, and on occasion they would haunt and disturb me for days on end. In fact at this time, usually when I came home from my nocturnal excursions, I began seeing what might be described as shapes and colors of diminished corporeality through a drifting veil or cloud of smoke, images from a faded world: a squadron of yachts putting out into the shadows over the sea from the glittering Thames estuary in the evening light, a horse-drawn cab in Spitalfields driven by a man in a top hat, a woman wearing the costume of the 1930s and casting her eyes down as she passed me by. It was at moments of particular weakness, when I thought I could not go on any longer, that my senses played these tricks on me. It sometimes seemed to me as if the noises of the city were dying down around me and the traffic was flowing silently down the street, or as if someone had plucked me by the sleeve. And I would hear people behind my back speaking in a foreign tongue, Lithuanian, Hungarian, or something else with a very alien note to it, or so I thought, said Austerlitz. I had several such experiences in Liverpool Street Station, to which I was always irresistibly drawn back on my night journeys. Before work began to rebuild it at the end of the 1980s this station, with its main

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  firmly in my hand all the way to Prague. Outside, the darkening Bohemian fields passed by, hop poles, deep brown fields, flat, empty country all around. The bus was very overheated. I felt drops of perspiration break out on my forehead and a constriction in my chest. Once, when I looked over my shoulder, I saw that the other passengers, without exception, had fallen asleep, leaning and sprawling at awkward angles in their seats. Some had their heads dropped forward, others sideways or tipped back. Several were snoring quietly. Only the driver looked straight ahead at the ribbon of road gleaming in the rain. As so often when one is traveling south, I had the impression of going steadily downhill, particularly when we reached the suburbs of Prague and it seemed as if we were descending a kind of ramp into a labyrinth through which we moved very slowly, now this way and now that, until I had lost all sense of direction. When we reached the Prague bus station, an overcrowded traffic junction at this early hour of the evening, I therefore set out the wrong way through the great throng of people waiting there or getting in and out of buses. There were so many of them streaming towards me out in the street, said Austerlitz, most of them carrying large bags and with pale, sad faces, that I thought they could only be coming away from the city center. Only later did I see from the map that I had reached the center not in a more or less straight line, as I thought at first, but by way of a wide detour taking me almost to the VySehrad, and then through the New Town and along the banks of the Vltava back to my hotel on Kampa Island. It was already late by the time I lay down, exhausted from the day’s walking, and tried to fall asleep by listening to the water rushing down over the weir outside my window. But whether I kept my eyes wide open or closed, all through the night I saw pictures from Terezin and the Ghetto Museum, the bricks of the fortification walls, the display window of the Bazaar, the endless lists of names, a leather suitcase bearing a double sticker from the Hotels Bristol in Salzburg and Vienna, the closed gates I had photographed, the grass growing between the cobblestones, a pile of briquettes outside a cellar entrance, the squirrel’s glass eye and the two forlorn figures of Agata and Vera pulling the laden toboggan through the driving snow to the Trade Fair building at HoleSovice. Only towards morning did I sleep briefly, but even then, in the deepest unconsciousness, the flow of pictures did not cease but instead condensed into a nightmare in which, from where I do not know, said Austerlitz, the north Bohemian town of Dux appeared to me situated in the middle of a devastated plain, a place of which all I had previously known was that Casanova spent the last years of his life there in Count Waldstein’s castle writing his memoirs, a number of mathematical and esoteric tracts, and his five-volume futuristic novel Icosameron. In my dream I saw the old roué shrunk to the size of a boy, surrounded by the gold-stamped

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  vanished from sight for a while, only to reappear outlined even more menacingly against the light. Marie, who was not so easily intimidated, merely laughed and said that the two shadowy riders were obviously the guard of honor specially provided by the CSSR for visitors from France. As we approached Marienbad along a road running further and further downhill between wooded slopes, darkness had fallen, and I remember, said Austerlitz, that a slight sense of disquiet brushed me as we emerged from the firs growing all the way down to the outlying houses and slid into the town, which was sparsely illuminated by a few street lamps. The car stopped outside the Palace Hotel. Marie exchanged a few words with the chauffeur as he took out our luggage, and then we were in the foyer, which was made to look double its size, so to speak, by a row of tall mirrors along the walls. The place was so deathly still and deserted that you might have thought the time long after midnight. It was some while before the reception clerk at his desk in a cramped booth looked up from what he was reading and turned to his late-come guests with a barely audible murmur of Dobry vecer. This remarkably thin man—the first thing you noticed about him was that although he could not have been much over forty his forehead was wrinkled in fan-like folds above the root of his nose—went through the necessary formalities without another word, very slowly, almost as if he were moving in a denser atmosphere than ours, asked to see our visas, looked at our passports and his register, made an entry of some length on the squared paper of a school exercise book in laborious handwriting, gave us a questionnaire to fill in, looked in a drawer for our key, and finally, ringing a bell, summoned as it seemed from nowhere a porter with a bent back, who was wearing a mouse-gray nylon coat that came down to his knees and, like the clerk at the reception desk, appeared to be afflicted by a chronic lethargy which incapacitated his limbs. When he preceded us up to the third floor with our two lightweight suitcases— the paternoster lift, Marie had pointed out to me as soon as we entered the foyer, had obviously been out of order for a very long time—he found it increasingly hard to climb the stairs and, like a mountaineer negotiating the last difficult ridge before attaining the summit, he had to stop several times for a rest, whereupon we too waited for a while a couple of steps below him. On the way up we met not a living soul except for another member of the hotel staff who, dressed in the same gray coat as his colleague and perhaps worn, I thought to myself, said Austerlitz, by all the employees of the state-owned spa hotels, was sitting asleep in a chair on the top landing with his head sunk forward, and a tin tray of broken glass on the floor beside him. The room unlocked for us was Number 38—a large room resembling a salon. The walls were covered with burgundy-red brocade wallpaper, very faded in places. The portieres dated from a past time as

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  She is . . . too rough.") Try to visualize it in Antonioni black-and-white: Dario and his bored aristo friends and their mistresses—all in their tiny little bathing suits and wraparound sunglasses—and me and my Ugly American crew, at sea on a seventy-two- footer, sails up. Islands in the distance, a clear day. A few miles out, Dario gestures to the high, sheer cliff face on the shore of a nearby island, a magnificent edifice where waves pound against rock and coral. "I jump from that cliff all the time," he says, pointing at a hundred-fifty-foot climb straight up, with a vertical drop between reef and rocks. "When-a you go up . . . there's no way down but to jump," he says. And then he dares me, dares me, to do it with him. Now . . . you know me. There's no way I'm gonna let this cocksucker get away with this. Especially as I'm cranky, not a little bit drunk, and by now in the mood to squeeze his neck until his eyes pop out of their sockets. I figure it's worth it, if only for the possibility that I'll get to see him split his pointy fucking head open on a rock. Plus, we're desperate for a scene for the show, and I figure the "Tony Foolishly Breaks His Spine" scene will definitely spell Emmy Award—for somebody. So I hear myself saying, "I'll do it." We take dinghies over to the cliffs. Dario shows me where we have to get off and where to climb. Todd takes a camera position on a reef opposite. Tracey, who'll be shooting the jump from a dinghy, is weeping behind the lens as they ferry us over. "Are you sure you want to do this, Tony?" She knows I'm on beer number eight. And that cliff, the closer we get, is looking higher and higher. I'm not making things easier with my drunken bravado, jokingly babbling good-byes to any and all whom I've ever loved, or who have loved me. (Just in case.) This makes her cry more. We clamber off the dinghy and Dario leads me slowly and precariously straight up the crumbly limestone cliff, both of us free-climbing in bare feet, picking our way up with fingertips and toes, hanging and traversing along crevices and not, repeat not, looking down. After about half an hour of climbing, and a few hairy moments, we reach the top. Dario slides into position for his jump, clinging to a slight hump behind him with both hands, his weight supported by a tiny, brittle-looking protrusion the size of a large bar of soap. It's a straight drop down, he says. Between that rock there . . . and that shallow reef . . . there. Make sure to keep your arms tightly at your sides or you'll break them when you hit the water. "I know you gonna wanna flap your arms.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Charles Taylor noted the ‘fragilisation’ of belief in the modern period, which was catalysed by a growing awareness of alternative possibilities. The emergence of a pluralist culture ‘fragilises’ belief systems – whether religious or atheist – by undermining their self-evident correctness. ‘If my view of the world is right, why do other views exist?’ The hostility of certain forms of secular atheism to continuing religious belief in a supposedly secular culture is partly a response to the threat that they pose to its plausibility, heightened by the growth and enhanced visibility of religious immigrant communities in many western nations. ‘If my theory is right, religion ought not to exist.’ Peter Berger concurs: ‘The appearance of an alternative symbolic universe poses a threat because its very existence demonstrates empirically that one’s own universe is less than inevitable.’12 Communities of belief thus serve an important role in maintaining the plausibility of their own position in the face of a cultural milieu that suggests that their views are not as secure and self-evident as they might like to believe they are. The challenges posed to traditional cultural or religious values by rapid social changes in the West illustrate this concern well.13 While some see these as the bedrock of their communities of belief, other such communities see them as backward looking and oppressive. The outcome is that the existence of a plurality of communities of belief leads to a sense of anxiety and hostility, in that one’s own beliefs are not seen as respected, but as something that others believe ought to be rejected and overthrown. This means that communities of belief must also learn how to reflect on how they can survive and adapt in the present, alongside other communities with divergent views. Can their traditional beliefs simply be reasserted? Or do they need to be translated into a new social language? How can a community’s past, particularly if considered to be problematic, be repurposed, refocused or reconfigured to meet new situations and challenges? This very often involves asking hard questions about the core vision of a community. To take a political example, what exactly is the essence of being a Conservative in Britain? Or a Democrat in the United States? Which of the competing visions of these political movements is most authentic and translates into electability?

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  I grew up in Northern Ireland during the 1960s and experienced at first hand a culture characterised by ingrained political, religious and social divisions. My first love was the natural sciences, evoked by a profound respect for the world around me, a longing to understand both how it functioned and what it meant. Perhaps because I was intolerant of uncertainty, I believed that the natural sciences might provide me with indubitable answers to life’s big questions. I went on to study chemistry at Oxford University, specialising in quantum theory, and followed this with a doctorate in the biological sciences. Yet the natural sciences served another purpose for me as a teenager. To study science was like stepping into another world, governed by rules of evidence and the courteous disagreement that is essential to scientific progress. Here, political and religious tensions could be put to one side; what mattered was the quality of your proofs, furnished by experimentation. A classic example of this eirenic role of the natural sciences can be seen in the role of natural scientists in building bridges across political and religious divisions, which helped heal the cultural wounds caused by England’s Civil War.6 I was an atheist back in the late 1960s, with a strong interest in Marxism. Although I took the stubborn austerity of my teenage atheism to be a reliable indicator of its truth, I began to have anxieties about the stridency with which I now began to assert my views. The force of my conviction of the non-existence of God seemed to me to bear an inverse relation to the evidence available. I began to have private doubts, not simply about my atheism, but about any beliefs, in that these seemed to lack rigorous intellectual justification. So, for a time I condemned myself to some form of agnosticism, conceding that nothing could be known. While reading Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy at eighteen, I came across this remarkable statement that seemed to hint at a more gracious way of making sense of our world: ‘To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.’7 Russell helped me realise that it might be possible to hold beliefs without being able to prove them, opening the way for me to create a grander view of life than was possible by relying only on the sciences.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  For some epistemic Puritans, we ought only to believe what we can prove. Logic and mathematics thus provide us with the norms that we should apply to everything in life. I share their admiration for these glittering peaks of human knowledge production. Yet these are singularities, areas of knowledge in which a degree of certainty is possible which distinguishes them from other domains of human understanding, rather than being representative of them. We seem to be hard-wired to seek certainty, and so find uncertainty worrying and stressful. 1 Perhaps this helps us understand why many people impose rational and moral certainties, or find themselves drawn to populist orators offering a return to absolutist ideologies or a bygone, yet wistfully remembered, social order with familiar and known values. Yet we should challenge our natural craving for certainty in all areas of our lives. It is a delusion. The ideas I explore in this book are not new; in fact, they have a distinguished history in the long tradition of scientific and philosophical reflection and religious faith, which are deeply attuned to the problem of uncertainty, both as a cognitive and existential concern. Consider, for example, the personal credo of the Italian theoretical physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli: I believe in justice. I believe that the Earth is round. I believe that my name is Carlo and that my father’s name was Franco. I believe that life is worth living. My beliefs are rooted in me. They define me. I hold them dear and I strenuously defend them against any challenge. But I am not certain about them . 2 For Rovelli, we live in ‘a vast intermediate space’ located between ‘full ignorance and total certainty’. That’s an imaginatively helpful way of describing the realm of belief or faith, which locates itself firmly within this domain of uncertainty – a domain within which human thought, action and life must and can take place. It is within this space that we frame our ideas of meaning, value and justice – all of which are critical to human distinctiveness on the one hand, and to meaningful human existence on the other. Like Odysseus, we have to learn to find a navigable channel between the Scylla of ‘full ignorance’ and the Charybdis of ‘total certainty’. Certainty is simply not an option for any nuanced understanding of the meaning of life, why we are here, or the nature of the good. These questions matter – but we can’t answer them with the certainty we mistakenly believe is our intellectual birthright. This does not condemn us to total ignorance; it simply opens our eyes to the complexity and ambiguity of many aspects of our world, and prompts us to question the assumption that we can expect certainty in relation to life’s big questions.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  For some epistemic Puritans, we ought only to believe what we can prove. Logic and mathematics thus provide us with the norms that we should apply to everything in life. I share their admiration for these glittering peaks of human knowledge production. Yet these are singularities, areas of knowledge in which a degree of certainty is possible which distinguishes them from other domains of human understanding, rather than being representative of them. We seem to be hard-wired to seek certainty, and so find uncertainty worrying and stressful.1 Perhaps this helps us understand why many people impose rational and moral certainties, or find themselves drawn to populist orators offering a return to absolutist ideologies or a bygone, yet wistfully remembered, social order with familiar and known values. Yet we should challenge our natural craving for certainty in all areas of our lives. It is a delusion. The ideas I explore in this book are not new; in fact, they have a distinguished history in the long tradition of scientific and philosophical reflection and religious faith, which are deeply attuned to the problem of uncertainty, both as a cognitive and existential concern. Consider, for example, the personal credo of the Italian theoretical physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli: I believe in justice. I believe that the Earth is round. I believe that my name is Carlo and that my father’s name was Franco. I believe that life is worth living. My beliefs are rooted in me. They define me. I hold them dear and I strenuously defend them against any challenge. But I am not certain about them.2 For Rovelli, we live in ‘a vast intermediate space’ located between ‘full ignorance and total certainty’. That’s an imaginatively helpful way of describing the realm of belief or faith, which locates itself firmly within this domain of uncertainty – a domain within which human thought, action and life must and can take place. It is within this space that we frame our ideas of meaning, value and justice – all of which are critical to human distinctiveness on the one hand, and to meaningful human existence on the other. Like Odysseus, we have to learn to find a navigable channel between the Scylla of ‘full ignorance’ and the Charybdis of ‘total certainty’. Certainty is simply not an option for any nuanced understanding of the meaning of life, why we are here, or the nature of the good. These questions matter – but we can’t answer them with the certainty we mistakenly believe is our intellectual birthright. This does not condemn us to total ignorance; it simply opens our eyes to the complexity and ambiguity of many aspects of our world, and prompts us to question the assumption that we can expect certainty in relation to life’s big questions. We have to learn to walk the poorly signposted and unpoliced line between certainty and doubt as we try to make sense of the chaos.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The challenges posed to traditional cultural or religious values by rapid social changes in the West illustrate this concern well. 13 While some see these as the bedrock of their communities of belief, other such communities see them as backward looking and oppressive. The outcome is that the existence of a plurality of communities of belief leads to a sense of anxiety and hostility, in that one’s own beliefs are not seen as respected, but as something that others believe ought to be rejected and overthrown. This means that communities of belief must also learn how to reflect on how they can survive and adapt in the present, alongside other communities with divergent views. Can their traditional beliefs simply be reasserted? Or do they need to be translated into a new social language? How can a community’s past, particularly if considered to be problematic, be repurposed, refocused or reconfigured to meet new situations and challenges? This very often involves asking hard questions about the core vision of a community. To take a political example, what exactly is the essence of being a Conservative in Britain? Or a Democrat in the United States? Which of the competing visions of these political movements is most authentic and translates into electability? Holding Communities Together: Narratives and Rituals Foundational narratives are essential to building a sense of community and explaining not simply how a community came into being, but why. What core themes and concerns were hardwired into its emergence? Abraham Lincoln, one of America’s most admired presidents, did much to consolidate the emergence of American identity, particularly in the aftermath of the Civil War. His Gettysburg Address of November 1863 sought to consolidate the idea that America was ‘a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’ Lincoln’s address set out a new foundational narrative for a United States without slavery , thus distancing himself from the views of the Founding Fathers, many of whom (such as Thomas Jefferson, author of the ‘Declaration of Independence’ and third President of the United States) had been slave-owners. The identity of what is now known as the European Union is shaped by a series of foundational narratives explaining the decision of the original six nations – Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany – to work together collaboratively. 14 Four distinct foundational narratives were constructed to account for the formation of this union, and to give its members a sense of identity and direction for the future. This was essential at the time, given that it ‘was largely an elite-led project’, lacking a core vision. Perhaps the most important function of these narratives was to create a shared vision for this new political community, and depict it as offering a new way ahead, allowing these six nations to move on from a troubled past.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  7. Saint Making in the Middle Ages Many small, informal communities sprang up, often with advice from a spiritual director at a nearby church. They might take formal vows before a bishop or simply decide on their own to live as religious. They worked or begged for a living, served the poor, and spent time in prayer and contemplation in private houses. They were known as Beguines, pinzochere, and bizzoche and by other terms. A few communities in the area of modern- day Belgium grew quite large, as thousands of women banded together to provide a safe harbor for the many women who flocked to the city looking for work. They ran businesses, hired themselves out as servants, and lived otherwise normal lives. Some of these experimental communities met with great success, but some proved susceptible to charismatic preachers who led them astray, giving rise to anxiety about accidental heresies. The line between orthodoxy and heresy in this period of foment and heady experimentation was so vague, some scholars argue, that it was simply in the eye of the beholder. Reading Andrews, Frances. The Early Humiliati. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Bartlett, Robert. The Hanged Man. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. ——— . Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Simons, Walter. Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1565. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Slocum, Kay Brainerd. The Cult of Thomas Becket: History and Historiography through Eight Centuries. New York: Routledge, 2018. Vauchez, André. Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages. Translated by Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 53 8 Mendicants: Francis of Assisi and Louis of Toulouse T he 13th century saw a boom in new orders, which also heralded a wave of new saints: charismatic founders, inspired preachers, and devoted servants of the poor. None is more famous than Francis of Assisi. This lecture addresses his life as well as that of a little-known saint, Louis of Toulouse. Both men were born into comfortable family circumstances, experienced a conversion in early adulthood, and followed the vita apostolica, “apostolic life.” Their paths to sainthood say a great deal about the challenges facing new saints and the new barriers to sainthood that arose during the tumultuous later Middle Ages. 54

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  I can tell you with near certainty that additional communication will now be required: The busboy, a member of a profession largely comprising newcomers to America's shores, will have to take aside the already harried waiter. "Table seven. Lady say chicken cold. No like-a spinach." The waiter then must consider whether clarification, not to mention confirmation, is required before braving the chef's wrath. This means a trip back to the table, annoying the already annoyed customers by asking them to repeat their complaint. If you speak to the busboy, you might just ask him to locate your waiter. Better yet, try remembering your waiter's face. I also feel the waiter's pain when, without warning, a patron seated with friends at a table for four (a four-top) suddenly bolts to the bar (or outside) for a cigarette. This often seems to occur just when the entrees for that table are about to be served—or, as waiters say, are "in the window, ready for pickup." I know the electric shock that travels through the restaurant's spine and into the brainstem of the kitchen: The chef has that table's food up! It's sitting perilously under the destructive warmth of the heat lamps. Other orders are coming up around it, new ones are coming in, and the chef is beginning to freak: His lovely food is dying in front of him. And he's got a difficult choice to make. He can push the orders for the four-top to the side and squeeze other outgoing orders around it for a while, in the hope that the smoker will return before the food gets cold and ugly, a skin forming on the sauce that the chef was once so proud of. Or he can yank the whole order, move the "dupe" (the kitchen's printed copy of an order) back to the "order" position, and start all over again. It's a tiny, inconsequential move for the customer—a cigarette at the bar—but for the kitchen, particularly in a good restaurant, it can cause mad panic and much misery. It's polite to schedule your breaks ahead of time—as in asking the waiter, "Would now be a good time to grab a smoke?" The people at the two-top (a deuce) on my other side are friends of the house . . . or people with whom the house wants to become friends. I know this because I saw the military-type hand signals between the maitre d' and the front waiter when the couple arrived. I saw the brief, whispered conversation along the service bar. I can recognize the body language for "notify the kitchen" and "comp." These customers will be monitored as if they were in intensive care, with amuse-bouches and careful recommendations of the chef's best efforts tonight. I hope the cosseted duo will be suitably appreciative and that they understand that when the house picks up a check, it is appropriate for the guests to leave a cash tip, preferably a damn big one.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  No catch phrase. He refused to have a sidekick or to submit to a band or some cranked-up hyperactive studio audience or even a funny sock puppet. The last thing the television audience of Bible thumpers, widows, spinsters, and horny divorcees (deemed likely to tune in by the pollsters) cared about, really, was how to make a lemongrass-infused grilled octopus salad with Thai basil vinaigrette and pancetta lardons. Hell, most of them lived a few hundred miles from the nearest pancetta and would probably rather toss off a rabid jackelope bare-handed than let octopus anywhere near their mouths. So where was he?? It was no longer unusual for Rob to not be around, to have gone off on "research" trips to the Napa Valley or France, a book tour, a foodie symposium, golf weekends, or just to hole up in some fuck-shack with whoever he was doing lately. But it was unlike him to stay away for so long, especially when the situation was so desperate. Michelle finished dressing and poked her head in the office, where she found Paul at the desk, staring blankly at a spreading water stain on the acoustic tile on the ceiling. "Paul," she said, "has he called? Does he know what's going on?" "He knows," said Paul. "What does he say about all this?" "I haven't heard from him in a couple of days," admitted Paul. "Two days ago, he said he was coming in. He said he had to talk to me. Since then? I ain't heard shit. He doesn't answer the phone. There's nobody at his house and his cell phone goes right to voice mail. I just don't know—" "Where could he be?" Paul just shrugged. "Lissen, okay?" he said, lowering his voice, "it's not just here, all right? The whole fucking empire is going down. He's got bigger problems than just this place." Paul turned his gaze to the bulletin board on the office wall. Between price quotes from produce companies, a calendar with a wine company's logo, cooks' schedules, and a fuzzy faxed photo of the New York Times food critic, was an old snapshot of Rob and Paul, standing out front of Red House: two young men, looking cocky and triumphant in snap-front dishwasher shirts, brandishing their knives and grimacing for the camera. Red House had been the place chefs ate after work! All twelve tables were constantly booked! They had been the toast of the town . . . Things were different now, he thought. Turning slowly to Michelle, he asked her for a cigarette, lit it, took a deep draw, and sat back in his chair. "I know where he's going to be tomorrow," he said. "Get somebody to cover for you until nine. We'll go and get him." The Hitchcock Annual Christmas Party was in full swing at the Turgeson Galleries in Chelsea. An entire floor of industrial space had been set aside for the event.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  They also offer to a violent and unpoliced society a good deal of common-sense regulation of cruelty and general public misbehaviour, seen through the prism of the seven Deadly Sins: a new framework for organizing human affairs that transcended the intricacies of Ireland’s existing structures of power and lawmaking, reassuringly entrusting the anxious to the care of a universal Church. If this Irish/Welsh innovation had not proved to have wide appeal as part of the package of Irish Christian mission in mainland Europe, the institution of private confession would not have enjoyed such power over the following millennium, for good or ill. It has to be recognized, nevertheless, that in all eras from the earliest days a major part of that power was directed towards the regulation of sexual behaviour, even though it constituted only one-seventh of the quota of deadly sin. [21] BRITANNIA

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  It is time to move on from movements and individuals who offer facile solutions in the face of life’s endless ambiguities. We have to live with a degree of uncertainty about our lives, while realising that this does not need to overwhelm us with the feeling of confusion and disconnectedness that caused the poet John Donne such distress in 1611: ‘’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.’ Embracing Uncertainty in the Face of Spurious Certainties In his 2003 book A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, John Allen Paulos channels the first century philosopher Pliny the Elder in setting out a guiding principle he had learned to trust in life: ‘Uncertainty is the only certainty there is.’ This powerful one-liner may sound bleak; yet its austerity simply reflects the reality of the human situation, and echoes the suppressed wisdom of the past, in which this insight was regularly acknowledged and lived out. Provisional certainties often turn out to be the prevailing view of an age, before being discarded or surgically modified by its successors. We can’t be sure about what the future holds, and whether it will discredit what some currently regard as secure knowledge – including many current scientific theories. As Carlo Rovelli observed, ‘we have no other tool to guide us than our limited and always insufficient intelligence, no other reliable adviser than uncertainty.’ For Rovelli, we are constantly tempted to eagerly embrace ‘shiny new ideologies’, each proclaiming its triumph over failed alternatives. Yet we live in an age of multiple temporary certainties, unsure what will come next, or how the future will judge what we consider to be secure. Our judgements are obstinately tainted and limited by our historical location. A more literary exploration of this theme is found in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–34). This masterpiece of poetic philosophy acknowledges and affirms the human need to believe as we try to make sense of a seemingly chaotic and meaningless world, yet which seems to hint at a deeper orderliness. We might well wonder, Pope comments, why we are ‘form’d so weak, so little, and so blind?’ 4 We have to realise that we are ‘darkly wise’, in that we can only know incomplete truths, being able to grasp and understand only a small part of our universe. Human beings, Pope declared, are ‘born but to die, and reas’ning but to err’, 5 trapped in an unsettling world of belief, when some would rather inhabit a secure realm of proved certainties. For Pope, humanity longs to find beliefs that can be trusted, despite evidential uncertainty and the limits of human reasoning. We are unable to see the big picture, but can only discern some of its parts: ‘’Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.’ 6 We have to face up to the problem that the big questions in life cannot be answered with certainty. Pope’s analysis was prophetic. To understand the importance of beliefs in human life, we must confront our limitations and weaknesses.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  11 In a post-truth age, it seems reasonable to claim experiential or emotional privilege for our beliefs and desires – ‘it’s true for me.’ This self-referential position allows the individual thinker absolute authority in matters of their own beliefs; given their dismissal of external perspectives or adjudications, there would seem to be no way of disproving what they assert in terms that they would consider to be valid. Yet even in a world in which there is a widening fissure between public truth and private belief, most still agree that beliefs need to be examined and assessed. The New Testament’s advice that Christians should ‘test everything, and hold fast to what is good’ exemplifies the critical spirit that intelligent religious faith demands, deserves and regularly – though sadly not invariably – exhibits. 12 Pope Francis speaks for the Christian tradition as a whole when he points out that faith must be grounded in truth; if it does not it is simply ‘a beautiful story, the projection of our deep yearning for happiness, something capable of satisfying us to the extent that we are willing to deceive ourselves.’ 13 As Plato suggested, an ‘unexamined life’ is not a meaningful form of existence. We need to think critically about what we believe – both in terms of what we affirm, and what we exclude. We cannot live authentically through affirming publicly what we know to be false privately. Yet as an educationalist, I have come to the reluctant conclusion that an alarming number of people don’t want to think about their core beliefs or values, whether secular or religious, fearing that these might be exposed as inadequate or delusional. I remember a conversation with a retired politician in Belfast many years ago, when I queried him on this point. How, I asked him, could he publicly defend an idea that was (at least in my view) ridiculous. His answer? ‘Practice, dear boy. Lots of practice.’ We need to have a serious conversation about these matters. The denial of reality may be a convenient political stratagem, but it is hardly a basis for a sustainable worldview. Can we live a meaningful life if we suspect that we may have based our identities on something false? A good place to start is the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s 1978 speech ‘How to build a universe that doesn’t fall apart two days later’, in which he reflected on the nature of reality, and our generally hopeless attempts to resist the lure of fake realities. 14 We live in a society in which ‘spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups – and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener.’ But there is a problem here that goes right to the heart of human identity: ‘Fake realities will create fake humans.’

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  enthusiastic for marriages without sex. It was a remarkably long-lived rejection of the procreational principle for marriage that Clement had imported into Christianity from Pythagoreanism and which lurks amid much modern theology about marriage, Catholic and Protestant. * Embedded in these debates on syneisactism was a complicated conversation straddling the boundaries of clergy, ascetics and laity, marriage and celibacy. Much of it, though not all, was closely linked to the status and role of clergy. Was sexual intercourse a taint on the episcopal or priestly role in presiding at the celebration of the Eucharist? Back in the third century, Origen had suggested that prayer and sexual activity were practices to be kept strictly apart (above, Chapter 7), as indeed they were in the lives of ascetics; should that principle apply to all clergy? By Origen’s time, the main clerical orders of bishop, priest and deacon had become universal in the Church, though debate remained as to how far women could be part of these structures as well as men. By then, too, celibate asceticism had emerged in the eastern Mediterranean: but asceticism was a separate phenomenon to clerical orders. Should the rule of celibacy apply to both? If it did, that would involve a great deal of social engineering in the middle of the Constantinian revolution after 306. Nearly all Christian clergy of the third century for whom it has been possible to establish whether they were married or not, turn out in fact to have been married: that may seem a startling conclusion, but it is consistent with the regulations set out in the Pastoral Epistles in the later first century, which had assumed that both bishops and deacons should have a wife. [39] One significant moment was the Council of Nicaea, presided over by the Emperor Constantine himself in 325, which did so much for both the future direction of theology and the organization of the Church in both East and West. The third of its canons, much copied by Councils thereafter, ‘altogether forbids any bishop, presbyter or deacon, or any of the clergy, to have a woman dwelling with him, excepting a mother, or sister, or aunt, or such persons only as are above all suspicion’. That sounds comprehensive, but there could be plenty of argument about what woman was ‘above all suspicion’: did that define or exclude a wife? The ambiguity had been absent from the pronouncements of a Council of bishops held at Elvira in Spain around twenty years before, which among much rigorist regulation had declared that clergy should ‘entirely keep themselves from their wives and not have children’, on pain of dismissal from their clerical orders. On Elvira’s reckoning, if clerical marriage were to continue it must strictly be without sex, in the syneisactic manner. [40] There was a strong movement at Nicaea to go down this same route, perhaps not surprisingly since Hosius, the chief ecclesiastical advisor of the Emperor at the Council, was himself a bishop from Spain.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Koroviev grinned expressively, inclining his body, and again Margarita’s heart went cold. ‘In short!’ Koroviev cried out. ‘Quite shortly: you won’t refuse to take this responsibility upon yourself?’ ‘I won’t refuse!’ Margarita replied firmly. ‘Done!’ said Koroviev and, raising the little lamp, added: ‘Please follow me.’ They walked between the columns and finally came to another hall, in which for some reason there was a strong smell of lemons, where some rustlings were heard and something brushed against Margarita’s head. She gave a start. ‘Don’t be frightened,’ Koroviev reassured her sweetly, taking Margarita under the arm, ‘it’s Behemoth’s contrivances for the ball, that’s all. And generally I will allow myself the boldness of advising you, Margarita Nikolaevna, never to be afraid of anything. It is unreasonable. The ball will be a magnificent one, I will not conceal it from you. We will see persons the scope of whose power in their own time was extremely great. But, really, once you think how microscopically small their possibilities were compared to those of him to whose retinue I have the honour of belonging, it seems ridiculous, and even, I would say, sad . . . And, besides, you are of royal blood yourself.’ ‘Why of royal blood?’ Margarita whispered fearfully, pressing herself to Koroviev. ‘Ah, my Queen,’ Koroviev rattled on playfully, ‘questions of blood are the most complicated questions in the world! And if we were to question certain great-grandmothers, especially those who enjoyed a reputation as shrinking violets, the most astonishing secrets would be uncovered, my esteemed Margarita Nikolaevna! I would not be sinning in the least if, in speaking of that, I should make reference to a whimsically shuffled pack of cards. There are things in which neither barriers of rank nor even the borders between countries have any validity whatsoever. A hint: one of the French queens who lived in the sixteenth century would, one must suppose, be very amazed if someone told her that after all these years I would be leading her lovely great-great-great-granddaughter on my arm through the ballrooms of Moscow. But we’ve arrived!’ Here Koroviev blew out his lamp and it vanished from his hands, and Margarita saw lying on the floor in front of her a streak of light under some dark door. And on this door Koroviev softly knocked. Here Margarita became so agitated that her teeth chattered and a chill ran down her spine. The door opened. The room turned out to be very small. Margarita saw a wide oak bed with dirty, rumpled and bunched-up sheets and pillows. Before the bed was an oak table with carved legs, on which stood a candelabrum with sockets in the form of a bird’s claws.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  In a 1770 letter to Frederick II of Prussia, Voltaire complained that only charlatans offered certainty. ‘While doubt is not a particularly pleasant state, certainty is a ridiculous state.’3 Some would suggest that the Enlightenment is to blame for these unrealistic expectations for human knowledge, which suggested that a universal human reason could eliminate uncertainties and ambiguities. I think the problem lies much deeper than this – in human nature itself. The human craving for certainty is rooted deep within us. While we cannot eliminate it, we can at least challenge it, and try to rise above it. We have to learn to live with it and resist the temptation to overstate the capacity of human reason. Does this realism about reality prevent us trying to find a set of habitable beliefs, capable of sustaining meaningful life? No. But it allows us to understand why there have been so many false dawns, promising direct access to certainties that turned out to be contested opinions, imposed dogmas, or cultural fads. We seem to be drawn to people who exude certainty, perhaps assuming their attitude reflects a vastly superior grasp of reality than the rest of us. Maybe that’s why Forrest Gump gained such a following as he ran across the United States. People felt he had a personal authenticity, a certainty of purpose that they could share by running alongside him – before, of course, he declared he was tired and going home, leaving his frustrated followers to reluctantly figure things out for themselves. In this book, I have argued for a retrieval of the more modest category of belief, which squares up to this disturbing human tendency to construct certainties when the evidence does not permit it. I have told you something about what I believe to illustrate some of the points that I have been making, but my own beliefs are of little relevance to this discussion. My position is this: believing is not only intellectually defensible but existentially necessary. It is time to move on from movements and individuals who offer facile solutions in the face of life’s endless ambiguities. We have to live with a degree of uncertainty about our lives, while realising that this does not need to overwhelm us with the feeling of confusion and disconnectedness that caused the poet John Donne such distress in 1611: ‘’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.’ Embracing Uncertainty in the Face of Spurious CertaintiesIn his 2003 book A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, John Allen Paulos channels the first century philosopher Pliny the Elder in setting out a guiding principle he had learned to trust in life: ‘Uncertainty is the only certainty there is.’ This powerful one-liner may sound bleak; yet its austerity simply reflects the reality of the human situation, and echoes the suppressed wisdom of the past, in which this insight was regularly acknowledged and lived out.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  At the centre of the difficulty was marriage and celibacy, one of the major issues in Sasanian persecution: the Shahs could detest Manichees and Christians equally because they both belittled the institution of marriage through the programmatic celibacy of their clergy. Sexual abstention offended the Zoroastrian principle that humanity had a moral obligation to have children and to work the land: Zoroastrians saw the monastic vocation of prayer and abstention as an insult to this divine command, and such an offence to the divinity deserved to be punished by death. To counter this, a Synod of the Church of the East held at Seleucia-Ctesiphon (the Sasanian capital) resolved in 486 that all clergy should be married and beget children; the presiding Patriarch Akakios (Aqaq or Acacius, reigned 485–96) echoed Paul of Tarsus in pronouncing that ‘it is much better to take a wife than to burn with desire.’ That did present the problem that, despite Sasanian hostility, the Church contained many monastic communities, and, as the Church expanded through Central Asia, its expansion was driven by missionaries who tended to be monks. In such circumstances, the leadership bent the rules: whereas in the heartland of the Church, bishops were elected by the local clergy and laity, both of course mainly married, in these more remote regions, the Patriarch himself chose bishops for the local episcopal hierarchy. Thus monastic leadership survived in the Church of the East, aided by a resolution of the energetically reforming Patriarch Aba I at a moment of favourable relations with the Sasanian regime in 544 that henceforth the Patriarch himself should be a celibate. Other bishops were forbidden marriage only as late as the twelfth century. [54] It is worth noting how remote much of the argument in these disputes was from the discourse of holiness and virginity in the Mediterranean Churches. There were severe practicalities to consider in a Church dominated by external power: survival and distinct identity. Patriarch Yosep presented his Synod in 554 with a canon on the marriage of bishops, which pointed out that a married episcopate was liable to lead to corrupt appropriation of Church land for the benefit of the family: worse still, a female descendant of the erring bishop might marry a Zoroastrian, and so former Church property might be lost to the ‘entire community of Christianity’. [55] Despite the central importance of marriage for Zoroastrians, their practice of it was disconcertingly at odds with Christian custom. The Church did not have the advantage it had enjoyed in entering Graeco-Roman society where the dominant culture was monogamous; Zoroastrians allowed polygyny, and they also made close-kin marriage not merely an honourable custom but a religious duty, whereas as we have seen the Romans particularly detested it (above, Chapter 3). One can sample Syrian Christians wrestling with the resulting difficulties in their relations with the Zoroastrian authorities through an extraordinary Syriac text entitled The Cave of Treasures , probably composed in the sixth century.