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

  In the following year, no less a figure than King George V’s personal physician, Bernard Lord Dawson, President of the Royal College of Physicians, bluntly warned the Anglican Church Congress in Birmingham that ‘birth control is here to stay’. His exalted status was probably only one factor in the Church leadership listening to him: what may be the key to the bishops’ growing change of stance was the fact that Dawson’s informed opinions were part of a conversation among former public schoolboys who moved in the same social world. [9] As a result, a great change in attitudes appeared in 1930, when the Lambeth Conference acknowledged in cautious Anglican-speak that there would be occasions when ‘a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood’, and ‘a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence’ would justify contraception in the light of Christian principles. The decision to use contraceptives should thus be up to the consciences of individual couples. More importantly, a majority among the bishops no longer considered birth control sinful by its nature. Some even argued that there was no real moral difference between sexual abstinence and artificial contraception, since both set out deliberately to prevent conception. [10] All through this discussion, eugenics remained significant; it was the chosen emphasis of the Church’s self-appointed expert on birth control, Theodore Woods, the Bishop of Winchester, who noted the alarming decline in birth rate among the middle and upper classes and considered that the lesser orders needed encouraging to limit their families so that the British population would be rebalanced towards the leaders of society and Empire. That argument swayed many doubters, though other speakers did say more about individual morality, and also equity for women. [11] The Anglican Communion had by whatever route become the first major Church grouping in the world to accept contraception as legitimate. The triumph of contraception in Anglicanism was sealed at the Lambeth Conference of 1958, where over three hundred bishops from forty-six countries unanimously decided that family planning was a ‘right and important factor in Christian family life’ – and it seems that where Anglicans lead, the world follows: in 2012 the United Nations declared access to family planning a universal human right. [12] Opposition to this momentous step had been still loud in the Lambeth debates in 1930. Anglo-Catholics were split, the final direction of the Conference being set from among their ranks by the moral theologian and later Bishop of Oxford Kenneth Kirk, while others in opposition echoed nineteenth-century Roman Catholic moral theology, chief among them being the veteran Anglo-Catholic leader and monk, Bishop Charles Gore of Oxford. Gore was an exceptionally clear-sighted theologian, austerely ready to call a spade a spade.

• From The Art of Memoir

  each other in ways that would horrify many of our male kinfolk. But publishing such gossip, Lucy suggested, was something much worse. Geoffrey Wolff bemoaned the effects of Duke on his prim mother, who’d been called a nasty name by a scumbag reviewer. “After that,” he’d told me, “it was clear she wished the book had never existed.” He particularly warned me off TV talk shows where complex family issues get warped into sound bites: You take the people you love most in the world and make them characters in a narrative. Then you lose control of that narrative. . . . Dick Cavett found my life droll. Then Toby’s book came out to wild acclaim. I’d twice met their mother—immaculately coiffed and tiny. I sat behind them all in the movie version of This Boy’s Life. She’s played by a chirpy Ellen Barkin, Toby by Leo DiCaprio; De Niro does the awful stepdad. Toby had to urge the director to edit out a supersexual part. “How could I have witnessed such a thing!” The New York Times Magazine quoted Geoffrey as saying: Here’s this woman—she’s been written about once. The train’s rolled over her going north. She picks herself up and dusts herself off, and here comes the train about to back over her. Mother Wolff’s quip: “If I’d known both my boys were going to be writers, I might have lived a little differently.” Now comes the juncture where I either detail my own travails with others or end the chapter. The trusty literary advisers I call my Kitchen Cabinet have warned me off spending time here on my own processes. Maybe any writer who yaps about her work outside brief interviews comes off as a car salesman. Or worse, as if she’s touting herself as the doyenne. Believe me, I’m not—no one can be. It’s all too personal. Yet I don’t know anyone else’s adventures with family as intimately as my own, and not to include them seems coy at best, deceitful at worst. So here goes. In general terms, there are three parts to my handling of others. I notify them way in advance, to give them a chance to shoot it

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Having stumbled upon what remained disconcerting questions, Tennyson bundles the whole thing toward an awkward conclusion, for he seems to have an uneasy prescience that the entire system he calls “love” is in some danger. Princess Ida has flatly refused to marry the prince. The poet complicates the plot with side issues of “colorful” antiquarian character such as wars of rapine, property interests as big as kingdoms, forced marriages arranged by contract in childhood, and that species of masculine vanity called honor. The poet’s choice of a pseudo-medieval setting in which to “debate” the “problem of woman” and her very present demand for educational opportunity has the effect of diluting a contemporary issue nearly to the point of insipidness. To fend off the troublesome implications he intuits lie in his subject, Tennyson is reduced to the expedient of having his hero wounded in a tournament and require the decorous attentions of a nursemother in order to recover. Ida is beaten when he plays dead. By feigning infantile helplessness he can convert his virago into the glowing image of mama, which the poem repeatedly exalts. This (to the Victorian sensibility) is perhaps safely asexual. In any case it fends off the peril of competition. As fantasy is the only vehicle which Tennyson can use to conduct his discussion, Ida is a shadowy princess abiding in a Cloud-Cuckoo-Land college from which all men are rigidly excluded. Having invaded the sanctuary anyway, the prince has fallen desperately in love with her according to the hyperbole of chivalrous stereotype; her hair is somehow “a stately fretwork in the sun,” despite the fact that it is black, and her companions are “a hundred airy does”…all step with “tender feet, light as air,” and so forth. But when the bargaining begins, and the prince shifts from courting to the marriage contract, the submission he wants to impose upon Ida is not forthcoming. Yet the conditions of the union are ones our poet and his readers would regard as just. With commendable logic Ida still refuses the swain who would coerce her. Tennyson then grows so nervous he turns Ida into an Amazon caricature. To complicate things and obscure the issue even further, the prince is fitted out with a father who is a male supremicist of the most vulgar and abusive variety: Man for the field and woman for the hearth; Man for the sword and for the needle she; Man with the head, and woman with the heart; Man to command, and woman to obey; All else confusion. The irascible old man sees in Ida a likely breeder of warriors, and advises his son to get her: Man is the hunter; woman is his game. The sleek and shining creatures of the chase, We hunt them for the beauty of their skins; They love us for it and we ride them down.

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

  As for myself, I am leaving you: your kindnesses in my regard engaged me to make you privy to my Grenoble adventure. One man dead, Monseigneur, one dead man; I must fly Ä" "Ah no, no, charming woman!" cried the master of the place; "no, stay, and fear nothing while you have my protection! You are as a soul unto my pleasures; you alone possess the art of exciting and satisfying them, and the more you multiply your crimes, the more the thought of you inflames my mind.... But this Therese is a pretty thing...." and addressing himself to me: "what is your age, my child?" "Twenty-six, Monseigneur," I replied, "and much grief." "Ha, yes, grief indeed, lots of distress, excellent, I'm familiar with all that, hugely amusing, just what I like; we're going to straighten everything out, we'll put a stop to these tumbles; I guarantee you that in twenty-four hours you'll be unhappy no longer, ha!..." and, with that, dreadful flights of laughter... " 'tis true, eh, Dubois? I've a sure method for ending a young girl's misfortunes, haven't I?" "Indeed you do," the odious creature replied; "and if Therese weren't a friend of mine, I'd never have brought her to you; but it is only fair I reward her for what she did for me. You'd never imagine how useful this dear thing was to me during my latest enterprise at Grenoble; you, Monseigneur, have had the kindness to accept my expression of gratitude, and, I pray you, repay what I owe her with interest." The opaque ambiguity of these phrases, what Dubois had said to me upon entering, the species of gentleman with whom I had to do, this other girl whose forthcoming appearance had been announced, all this instantly troubled my imagination to a degree it would be difficult to describe.

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

  When they had taken my old belongings, I had been careful, as I told you, to remove my little fortune which came to about six louis, and these I had always kept hidden with extreme caution; as I left, I put them into my hair, and nearly all of our chamber having left for that night's supper, finding no one about but one of my companions who had gone to bed as soon as the others had descended, I entered my cabinet; there, clearing the hole I had scrupulously kept covered at all times, I knotted my cord to one of the undamaged bars, then, sliding down outside, I soon touched the ground Ä 'twas not this part which troubled me: the six enclosures of stone and trees my companion had mentioned were what intrigued me far more. Once there, I discovered that each concentric space between one barrier and the next was no more than eight feet wide, and it was this proximity which assured a casual glance that there was nothing in the area but a dense cluster of trees. The night was very dark; as I turned round the first alley to discover where I might not find a gap in the palisade, I passed beneath the dining hall, which seemed deserted; my inquietude increased; however, I continued my search and thus at last came abreast the window to the main underground room, located directly below that in which the orgies were staged. Much light flooded from the basement, I was bold enough to approach the window and had a perfect view of the interior. My poor companion was stretched out upon a trestle table, her hair in disarray; she was doubtless destined for some terrible torture by which she was going to find freedom, the eternal end of her miseries....

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

  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. 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. Quite different was the Jamaat-i-Islami, which had been founded in India in 1941 to oppose the creation of a separate secular state. Jamaat had no madrassa base and did not cling to the past, as the Deobandis did, but developed an Islamic ideology influenced by the modern ideals of liberty and independence. Abul Ala Maududi (1903–79), its founder, argued that because God alone ruled human affairs, nothing else—“be it a human being, a family, a class, or a group of people, or even the human race as a whole”—could claim sovereignty. 20 Therefore nobody was obliged to obey any mortal authority. Each generation had to fight the jahiliyyah of its day, as the Prophet had done, since jahili violence, greed, and Godlessness were an ever-present danger. Western secularism epitomized the modern jahiliyyah because it amounted to a rebellion against God’s rule.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The term ‘dogma’ has a neutral sense of a belief that is seen as being of critical importance for a belief system or scientific theory. Early Christianity, for example, recognised two such dogmas – the two natures of Christ, and the Trinity – which gave Christianity its coherence and focus. This terminology is also regularly used in the natural sciences. The ‘central dogma’ of molecular biology, for example, concerns the asymmetry between genomes and enzymes: informational asymmetry, in that information flows from genomes to enzymes but not from enzymes to genomes; and catalytic asymmetry, in that enzymes provide chemical catalysis, but genomes do not.23 Dogmatism, however, designates a different category of discourse, which can be framed as a tendency to regard the beliefs and principles of a specific individual or community as objectively and self-evidently correct, despite their deficient evidential foundations and the existence of viable alternatives. Whereas ‘good thinking’ leads to a confidence that is proportional to the evidence available, dogmatic beliefs are held and asserted with a confidence that masks their being grounded on inadequate or biased thinking. Although some suggest that dogmatism is characteristic of religious people or beliefs, the evidence clearly indicates that it is linked with a wide range of domains, situations, topics and issues – particularly politics.24 While the Enlightenment project of the eighteenth century emphasised the importance of open-mindedness and the destructive nature of dogmatism, the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a new authoritarianism, made tangible in the rise of Fascism and the cult of submission to strongmen such as Mussolini, Hitler or Stalin.25 Our concern, however, is not so much with an ‘authoritarian personality’ (someone who prefers a social system with a strong ruler)26 as with dogmatic beliefs or hardened belief systems – ideas that clearly cannot be shown to be true, but which are asserted and enforced as if they were absolute certainties. A dogma is a belief which commands acquiescence and assent as a matter of obedience to a charismatic individual or a controlling community – such as the Soviet Communist Party during the 1930s and 1940s. Though having the epistemic status of a belief or opinion, a dogma is treated as a truth whose denial constituted irrationality or mental illness. It is worth recalling that Pravda (the Russian word for ‘truth’) was the official organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1991, which informed its readers what they ought to think. This was the ‘truth’ that Party members were required to acknowledge.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  rather, if I understood him correctly, of the back of the eye through the iris, the pupil, and the vitreous humor. The technician already waiting for me in a small room specially equipped for such purposes was a man of extraordinarily distinguished appearance who wore a white turban and looked, I foolishly thought, rather like the Prophet Muhammad. He carefully rolled up my shirt sleeve, and inserted the tip of the needle into the prominent vein below the crook of my elbow without my feeling anything at all. While he was introducing the contrast medium into my bloodstream he said I might feel slightly unwell in a little while, and in any case my skin would be discolored yellow for a few hours. After we had sat in silence for a moment or two, both in our respective places in the little room which, like a sleeping car, was illuminated only by a dim bulb, he asked me to move closer to him and place my head in the framework fixed in a kind of stand on the table, with my chin in a shallow depression and my forehead against the iron band above it. As I write this I once again see the little points of light that shot into my widely opened eyes each time he pressed the shutter release. Half an hour later I was sitting in the saloon bar of the Great Eastern Hotel at Liverpool Street, waiting for the next train home. I had sought out a dark corner, since by now I did indeed feel rather qualmish inside my yellow skin. On the way to the station in the taxi we had seemed to be driving in a wide, looping trajectory through some kind of Luna Park, so strangely did the city lights turn beyond the windscreen, and now the dim globes of the sconces, the mirrors behind the bar, and the colorful batteries of bottles of spirits were circling before my eyes as if I were on a roundabout. Leaning my head against the wall, and breathing deeply and slowly from time to time when I felt nausea rising, I had for a good while been watching the toilers in the City gold mines as they came to meet at their usual watering hole early in the evening, all of them identical in their dark blue suits, striped shirts, and gaudy ties, and as I tried to grasp the mysterious habits of the members of this species, which is not to be found in any bestiary—their preference for crowding close together, their semi- gregarious, semi-aggressive demeanor, the way they put their throats back in emptying their glasses, the increasingly excitable babble of their voices, the sudden hasty departure of one or another of them—as I was watching all of this I suddenly noticed a solitary figure on the edge of the agitated crowd, a figure who could only be Austerlitz, whom I realized at that moment I had not seen for nearly twenty years. He had not changed at all in either his carriage or his clothing, and even had the rucksack still slung over his shoulder. Only his fair, wavy hair was paler, although it still stuck out oddly from his head as it used to. Nonetheless, while I had always thought he was about ten years older than I, he now seemed ten years younger, whether because of my own poor state of health

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

  The rest you know. “This affair had however no ruinous consequences, the young gentleman escaping then, and many more times undiscovered. But the warmth of my constitution, that made the pleasures of love a kind of necessary of life to me, having betrayed me into indiscretions fatal to my private fortune, I fell at length to the public; from which, it is probable, I might have met with the worst of ruin, if my better fate had not thrown me into this safe and agreeable refuge.” Here Louisa ended; and these little histories having brought the time for the girls to retire, and to prepare for the revels of the evening, I staid with Mrs. Cole, till Emily came, and told us the company was met, and waited for us. Mrs. Cole on this, taking me by the hand, with a smile of encouragement, led me up stairs, preceded by Louisa, who was come to hasten us, and lighted us with two candles, one in each hand. On the landing-place of the first pair of stairs, we were met by a young gentleman, extremely well dressed, and a very pretty figure, to whom I was to be indebted for the first essay of the pleasures of the house. He saluted me with great gallantry, and handed me into the drawing room, the floor of which was overspread with a Turkey carpet, and all its furniture voluptuously adapted to every demand of the most studied luxury; now too it was, by means of a profuse illumination, enlivened by a light scarce inferior, and perhaps more favourable to joy, more tenderly pleasing, than that of broad sunshine. On my entrance into the room, I had the satisfaction! to hear a buzz of approbation run through the whole company, which now consisted of four gentlemen, including my particular (this was the cant term of the house for one’s gallant for the time), the three young-women, in a neat flowing dishabille, the mistress of the academy, and myself. I was welcomed and saluted by a kiss all round, in which, however, it was easy to discover, in the superior warmth of that of the men, the distinction of the sexes. Awed, and confounded as I was, at seeing myself surrounded, caressed, and made court to by so many strangers, I could not immediately familiarize myself to all that air of gaiety and joy, which dictated their compliments, and animated their caresses. They assured me that I was so perfectly to their taste, as to have but one fault against me, which I might easily be cured of, and that was my modesty: this, they observed, might pass for a beauty the more with those who wanted it for a heightener; but their maxim was, that it was an impertinent mixture, and dashed the cup so as to spoil the sincere draught of pleasure; they considered it accordingly as their mortal enemy, and gave it no quarter wherever they met with it.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Then through the dead lights and back into the city, past the south end of the docks where rusted ships sat sunken and crooked between rotting pilings and collapsing piers and a small fleet of barges and container ships waited at anchor for the boats ferrying the city’s latest crop of salvage. In among the buildings, jungle of brick and concrete, down narrow connecting roads named after revolutionary generals where carts of knockoff handbags and lucky cat souvenirs with their upraised paws moldered, crushed back against graffitied walls. At an intersection, teams of city laborers rolled derelict cars onto a carrier to be hauled away for scrap while Legion women stood around, watching the connecting streets. Protests had been getting louder. A woman in Molly’s detachment had been hit in the teeth with a brick on patrol near Back Bay station while they were out of town. For a while they drove in silence. On the corner of Beach and Harrison, Ramona saw two women in headscarves and heavy skirts and aprons jointing a man’s carcass strung up by its ankles from a frame of welded fence posts. A bucket of offal lay by one woman’s feet. They paused in their work as the car passed them. Blood dribbled from the dead man’s mouth onto a stained brown tarp weighted at the corners with rubble. Ramona wondered what a man’s flesh tasted like. They skirted a massive pothole half-flooded with groundwater and she caught sight of the rusted sign for Kneeland Street. Faded billboards and murals. Mock Buddhist tourist trap architecture squashed up against ancient brick apartment buildings plastered with rotting signs for third-floor bubble tea places and nail salons. Chinatown. Ramona’s heart skipped a beat. She can’t know. There’s no way she could know. Molly would never— Teach leaned forward and pressed the intercom as they took the corner. “Pull over. We’ll have lunch here.” She released the button and settled back into her seat, those pale, unblinking eyes unreadable. “It looks good, don’t you think?” “Yeah,” said Ramona, her mouth dry. The driver pulled up to the curb outside the weathered green-and-gold facade of Hunan Palace with its gilded dragons at the upper corners of its doorframe, about two blocks from Feather’s building. How many times had she been in there on her way to their apartment? Inside, the owner ushered them toward a corner table. A smiling younger woman took their coats. There were only a few others in the place, a table of three and another where a tired middle-aged woman was occupied with helping a frail older one spoon up her steaming broth. Through the tinted front window Ramona watched Molly and the doughy, slump-shouldered driver, standing together on the sidewalk, light cigarettes from the wavering flame of Molly’s BIC. They stepped back under the eaves as a thin, leaden rain began to fall.

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

  No sooner did this sort of thing get said than fellows at the bar would leave their stools and head for the pay phone booth out in the parking lot. They’d line up to call their bookies so as to up or hedge their bets. Leechfield had evacuated a few years before for Hurricane Audrey. That was the first storm I remember in the alphabetical lineup of girls’ names. During Audrey, Mother made a big stink about the female gender taking the heat for all that destruction. “Hell, it’s men who fight wars,” I remember her saying. After Audrey came Betsy. She skirted us, but spilled over the levees and sandbags piled up around New Orleans so the whole town filled up like a saucer with seawater. Hurricane Carla first arrived in my skull on a particular evening when Grandma was sitting in her wheelchair tatting with movements so tiny they looked like worry itself. Mother was stretched the length of the couch with a mug of coffee miraculously balanced on her breastbone. Lecia and I were squatting down at her feet inflicting our version of a pedicure on her. This involved coloring in her toenails with various shades of Crayola. (I favored purples and lavenders and royal blues. Lecia stuck with the more fashionable pinks.) They ran film clips of Audrey, with Cattleman Bill bragging that he had personally rowed a pirogue—a kind of Cajun kayak—up Main Street with a camera crew in the motorboat beside him. Mother said, Oh horseshit. She claimed that he’d left his wife and kids eating handout food in the high school gym while he “evacuated” up to Oklahoma City with his secretary. Cattleman Bill was, in Mother’s estimation, nearly as big a sissy as Grandma, who was apparently so terrified of any kind of storm that she was always the first one down in the storm cellar out in West Texas when the wind started blowing. Grandma didn’t even seem to hear about Carla. She just kept worrying that lace into being with that mean little shuttle. When the storm did wheel in toward us, Grandma rallied some crazed kind of courage, so we weren’t the first ones out of town. I don’t suppose we were the last to leave, either. But the guys from the National Guard who were driving up and down the streets with bullhorns telling folks to evacuate had to stop at our house twice. For two days before the storm came inland, folks had been getting ready. Weather reports got scarier. Windows were boarded up with sheets of plywood. Bags were packed. The supermarket had runs on batteries and candles and canned beans. Higher ground was just about anywhere else, and people were heading for it. Transistor radios repeated over and over that this was a Class Four hurricane. Nobody wanted to ride that out.

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

  When I get back from Germany, I’m walking up the road, and he’s just climbing outta his Jeep. ‘Pete,’ he says, ‘you’re the very duck I been waiting for.’ And he tells me this plan he’s worked out. “Next morning we get up, and sure enough, they ain’t talking. Old Annie hugged on my neck—she could flat hug you hard. Spoke to me like he wasn’t even in the room. After a little while she gets the eggs and bacon cooked and a mess of grits. We set there and eat. And when she leaves for church, me and Lee we get the lumber saw and split that house as clean in half as a oyster. Top to bottom, roof down to the floor. I mean, when she pulls up in that old Jeep that night—they had some function or other that kept her all day—we’re just hooking up the tractor to haul her half off.” “And she don’t have nothing to say about all this?” Shug asks. He’s helping me untangle one of my lure’s three-pronged hooks from the green nylon line. “Wouldn’t have said shit with a mouthful of it. See those reeds over there, Pokey?” He gestures with his Schlitz can. “I’d try and put it over there.” He frequently leaves off his own fishing to instruct me, and I am today feeling too big to be instructed, having already been instructed out of my plastic worm and into this miserable excuse for a lure by Mr. Bederman. “Why didn’t they just get a divorce?” Shug asked. Daddy cuts his eyes back over at Shug like he’s nuts, then shrugs. My lure plops in the reeds while I squint to recollect the divided house. The two halves sat on the same acre of ground, a scruffy bank of pines separating one half from sight of the other. Daddy and Uncle Lee had nailed raw planks over the sawed-open part. But the idea of the house split wide open like that, showing everything inside, gave me the hives. Maybe that’s what Mother and Daddy should have done. Still, I swore to myself in that very boat that if they ever split up for good, I would run away and live in the bathroom of the Esso station. I would buy a thirty-five-cent corn dog one day and tamales from the road stand the next. However much that added up to, I planned to make it shining shoes at the barbershop. Mother kept a copy of a map I left her once when I was running away from home. It shows a dashed line between our house and the Gulf station. There’s an X in the ladies’ room with “me” marked above it. What I didn’t know until I finally did leave home at fifteen was that, if I had lit out, nobody would organize any posse to sniff me down. Hell, they just figured that wherever I was headed, it must be better than Leechfield.

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

  But I was far from done with these striking examples of the triumph of vice, examples so disheartening for Virtue, and the flourishing condition of the personage whose acquaintance I was about to renew was surely to exasperate and amaze me more than any other, since it was that of one of the men at whose hands I had endured the bloodiest outrages. I was exclusively busied with preparing my departure when one evening a lackey clad in gray and completely unknown to me brought me a note; upon presenting it, he said his master had charged him to obtain my response without fail. The missive was worded this way: "A man who has somewhat wronged you, who believes he recognized you in the Place de Belle-cour, is most desirous to see you and to make amends for his conduct: hasten to come to meet him; he has things to tell you which may help liquidate his entire indebtedness to you." The message carried no signature and the lackey offered no explanations. Having declared I was resolved to make no answer at all lest I was informed of who his master was: "He is Monsieur de Saint-Florent, Mademoiselle," the lackey said; "he has had the honor to know you formerly in the neighbor-hood of Paris; you rendered him, he maintains, services for which he burns to attest his gratitude. Presently risen to a position of undisputed eminence in this city's commercial circles, he at once enjoys the consideration and the means which put him in a position to prove his regard for you. He awaits you." My deliberations were soon completed.

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

  Two live-long days had I lingered through without hearing from him, I who breathed, who existed but in him, and had never yet seen twenty-four hours pass without seeing or hearing from him. The third day my impatience was so strong, my alarms had been so severe, that I perfectly sickened with them; and being unable to support the shock longer, I sunk upon the bed, and ringing for Mrs. Jones, who had far from comforted me under my anxieties, she came up, and I had scarce breath and spirit enough to find words to beg of her, if she would save my life, to fall upon some means of finding out, instantly, what was become of its only prop and comfort. She pitied me in a way that rather sharpened my affliction than suspended it, and went out upon this commission. For she had but to go to Charles’s house, who lived but an easy distance, in one of the streets that run into Covent Garden. There she went into a public house, and from thence sent for a mid servant, whose name I had given her, as the properest to inform her. The maid readily came, and as readily, when Mrs. Jones enquired of her what had become of Mr.

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

  In fact, that humming was the sound our car tires had made on the Orange Bridge when Mother either did or didn’t try to crash through the guardrail and fly us screaming down to the river. If I kept my eyes open, the humming stopped. If they fell closed, even for a second, that humming would swamp over every good thought I’d ever had. Nights, I lay awake with my eyes burning. What I was protecting myself against on these vigils was, in fact, my own skull, which must be the textbook definition of early-onset Nervous if ever there was one. That small psychic crisis kicked off a metaphysical one. Why was everybody so fired up about nature all the time, and God? These kids sitting around me with their heads crooked earnestly over their giant drawing papers seemed to have forgotten that the ocean had decided for no good reason to dislodge itself on top of hundreds of people across the river in Louisiana. Our bodies could have been the ones people saw on TV newsreels after school. Families on these film clips went from one child-sized body bag to another—the bags having been lined up in rows across some movie-theater parking lot. The sheriff would unzip the bag’s top a little bit, and the daddy would peer in, then shake his head no. Then he’d step back while the sheriff rezipped before going on to the next bag. This happened over and over till the sheriff finally unzipped the face the family was looking for—little Junior or baby Jackie, blue-skinned and bloated, tongue black and sticking out. The cameras didn’t show those faces, of course. But Daddy had seen plenty guys dead in war. I remember he rubbed the sleeve of his faded chambray shirt and said that a human face could go just as blue as that. He also said it wasn’t the coldness of a dead man’s skin that gave you the willies, but how the skin went hard all over, so touching him was like touching wood or concrete. During this talk, we were sitting in bed eating dinner, a habit we’d gone right back to after Grandma died. Only we’d added the drone of TV news. Its blue-white light was our family hearth. “I shit you not,” Daddy said as he tore off a hunk of biscuit. “You touch a dead man sometime.” He took a swallow of buttermilk. “Hard as that table. Got no more to do with being alive than that table does.” That description didn’t scare me so much as the news footage of some daddy folding in on himself once he’d recognized a kid’s face. The mothers cried too, of course, and bitterly. But they seemed better equipped for it. They held each other while they cried, or fell to their knees, or screamed up at the sky. But you could tell by the moans and bellows those grown men let out that their grief had absolutely nowhere to go.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  It’s all alphabetical; there, on the spines.” She tapped one, indicating the peeling yellow-white sticker near its base. “I lock up at ten. Then maybe we can get that coffee?” She flashed a dazzling smile. “What—oh, yeah, right,” said Robbie, suddenly uncertain. “But—” “Later,” said Zia, her voice suddenly tight, and with that she vanished back into the stacks, leaving Robbie alone with the handcart and its complement of well-thumbed paperbacks and graphic novels. He looked them over idly, pulling one at random off the cart. New Moon. The Mormon lady’s vampire story. The rest was mostly young adult stuff, too, the kind of thing he’d read before the end of the world took all the appeal out of stories about beautiful teenagers being brave or hugging fascists until they turned good. He scanned the shelves for a minute and then began slotting books back into place. He’d always liked that part of library work. Match the letters and the numbers. Click the physical object of the book into its appointed space. Minutes passed. He was replacing the last volume of some candy-colored superhero glurge when the fluorescents flickered, dimmed, and died, and Zia, armed with a penlight’s narrow blue-white beam, came and found him. “Sorry,” she hissed, sotto voce. “Cameras. Doe doesn’t watch all the recordings, but she can read lips.” Robbie imagined the gray, heavily lidded eyes of Sophie’s chief lieutenant following him across the motor pool, tracing the movements of his mouth and jaw to pluck his words out of the distance. It felt true. “Okay,” he said. “Why did you plant that letter on me? Why do you want to talk to me?” “I’d usually wait,” she said, stepping closer. She was a full foot taller than him. “Take my time, see what you’re made of. It’s just that your friend isn’t working out as a daddy, so I think they’re going to sell her to a chain gang.” Feather watched her from the bed as she laced up her boots. It was too warm for the season, the breeze that blew in through the open window salty and humid, and their tawny skin was dewed with sweat. They lay on their back, their own bruised breasts cupped in their hands. “You had a boyfriend before, didn’t you?” Ramona looked up from her feet. “What?” Feather rolled onto their side, tugging the sheets over the stretch marks that glistened on the swell of their hip. “It’s just something about you. Even when you’re here, I feel like you’re hiding from me. Like you’re waiting to go back to something real.” She tugged her laces taut and tied a bow.

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

  The booty is divided, Coeur-de-fer wants me to have my share; it comes to twenty louis, which I am compelled to accept. I tremble at the obligation to take such money; however, we are in a hurry, everyone snatches up his belongings and off we go. The next day we find ourselves out of danger and in the forest of Chantilly; during supper, the men reckon what their latest operation has been worth to them, and evaluate the total capture at no more than two hundred louis. "Indeed," says one of them, "it wasn't worth the trouble to commit three murders for such a little sum."

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

  It is peculiar to vice to tremble at the enquiries of justice; and Mrs. Brown, whose conscience was not entirely clear upon my account, as knowing as she was of the town as hackneyed as she was in bluffing through all the dangers of her vocation, could not help being alarmed at the questions, especially when he went on to talk of a Justice of peace, Newgate, the Old Bailey, indictments for keeping a disorderly house, pillory, carting, and the whole process of that nature. She, who, it is likely, imagined I had lodged an information against her house, looked extremely blank, and began to make a thousand protestations and excuses. However, to abridge, they brought away triumphantly my box of things, which, had she not ben under an awe, she might have disputed with them; and not only that, but a clearance and discharge of any demands on the house, at the expense of no more than a bowl of arrack-punch, the treat of which, together with the choice of the house conveniences, was offered and not accepted. Charles all the time acted the chance companion of the lawyer, who had brought him there, as he knew the house, and appeared in no wise interested in the issue; but he had the collateral pleasure of hearing all that I told him verified, as far as the bawd’s fears would give her leave to enter into my history, which, if one may guess by the composition she so readily came into, were not small. Phœbe, my kind tutoress Phœbe, was at the time gone out, perhaps in search of me, or their cooked-up story had not, it is probable, passed smoothly. This negociation had, however, taken up some time, which would have appeared much longer to me, left as I was, in a strange house, if the landlady, a motherly sort of a woman, to whom Charles had liberally recommended me, had not come up and borne me company. We drank tea, and her chat helped to pass away the time very agreeably, since he was our theme; but as the evening deepened, and the hour set for his return was elapsed, I could not dispel the gloom of impatience, and tender fears which gathered upon me, and which our timid sex are apt to feel in proportion to their love.

• From The Art of Memoir

  most of all, you owe all the truth you can wheedle out of yourself. So while it is a shaped experience, the best ones come from the soul of a human unit oddly compelled to root out the past’s truth for his own deeply felt reasons. In fact, every memoirist I know seems doomed to explore the past in an often-agonized death march down the pages. If you met them all at a cocktail party, they’d strike you as frank and upfront, more curious about the past than defensive about their own versions. Think of that family meal we’ve all had when each person’s colliding version of an event ricochets off every other. You weren’t even born when that happened. At such a meal, I may defend my own account like a wolf her turf, but lying awake later, I’ll often feel the creeping suspicion I’m wrong. Unless you’re a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That’s the quality I’ve found most consistently in those life-story writers I’ve met. Truth is not their enemy. It’s the bannister they grab for when feeling around on the dark cellar stairs. It’s the solution. Wow, there it is, my long-lost theory, stolen obviously from the Delphic oracle with her pesky, near-impossible demand to “know thyself.” A curious mind probing for truth may well set your scribbling ass free. A fierce urge to try reexperiencing your own mind and body and throbbing heart alive inside the most vivid stories from your past is step one. (No doubt if you weren’t haunted by those stories, you wouldn’t waste your time trying to write it.) Then you just have to tell it, right? The second-hardest part. I’ve inserted the words “the truth” to replace the word “God” in the quote below from monk Thomas Merton’s memoir Seven-Storey Mountain: The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of the truth. . . . The truth utters me like a word containing a partial thought to himself. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. With that idea in the air like rain mist, I usually enter one of my memoir classes like some kid coming off the beach with a roaring

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Life stopped. I drank martinis in the daytime and wept. We’d starve, we’d die. Fumio grinned and listened to me rave. Columbia’s gates were shut now; I was outside the walls of academe forever; I had lost my profession. But I could still write that damn thesis. So I did. The whole world was ahead of me and I didn’t know it. But in the desert of time around that holiday season and into the new year I toiled over what became chapter two, the “Theory of Sexual Politics.” Tried a little version of it out in a speech at Cornell, wore my best jumper and a silk blouse and even got paid seventy-five dollars. Driving back into the city of New York over the George Washington Bridge, I had a panic attack and confessed to my comrades that I had lost my job. I was now on my own. Fumio went off to paint Persian miniatures by the hour. I had the whole day ahead of me, so I started to play, to work at writing the way I’d made sculpture, for fun. At the end of a week I had a rough draft of chapter one, exemplary quotations of sexual intercourse with commentary, and read it to our pal Jim Wagenvoord, a young writer who stopped by for a drink that Friday evening. He laughed his head off. So did Fumio. With this encouragement I called up Betty Prashker at Doubleday, who had politely refused to publish the little pamphlet I wrote with the education committee of NOW, but had offered to read whatever I wrote next. She did. She liked the first chapter and offered me an advance of four thousand dollars. Now it remained to find someone at Columbia who would direct such a thesis. The professor assigned to me declined and moved on to Harvard. I went after Steven Marcus: marshaling my outrageous attack on patriarchy into a semblance of academic respectability, I waited for him in the hall and hoped he’d listen. He did. The book holds water, thanks not only to his intellectual courage but to his dogged insistence upon proof and more proof, exhaustive reading, research, and analysis. He raised the argument above feminist rhetoric into the kind of cultural criticism it aimed for and hoped to help invent. Betty Prashker was an editor who really worked on a text. I was an angry young woman with a message, a graduate student who wanted to be a scholar, a sculptor who wanted to learn to write. They taught me by being tough and patient and exacting; the book owes them both a great debt.