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 Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  As a young adult, James was plagued with a number of physical illnesses. He suffered a wide array of symptoms and was diagnosed as having a condition known as neurasthenia. Neurasthenia, though no longer an included diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders by the American Psychiatric Association, included symptoms such as fatigue, depression, anxiety, digestive disorders, and headaches, among other symptoms. James often suffered from bouts of depression in his young adulthood, contemplating suicide at some points. This ailment came on at the start of America's Civil War, and though two of his other brothers enlisted, William did not, citing his neurasthenia as the cause. This period in his life very likely had a profound impact on his eventual contribution to the field of psychology. While still in college, James began studying the field of medicine in 1864. He took a break the following year to join an expedition along the Amazon. He went with a man named Louis Aggasiz, a naturalist who tried getting James interested in his field. The ultimate goal of the journey was to collect specimens from the river and surrounding area for further study. The trip was expensive for James, and though he began the trip excited for the adventure that lay ahead, he fell into deep depression from the moments of isolation he felt during the voyage. This was the greatest distance he had ever been from his family, which compounded the intensity of his isolation. Within eight months of starting the trip, James quit and returned home to continue his studies at the medical school at Harvard. In April 1867, James once again became afflicted with the symptoms of his neurasthenia. This time, however, the affliction was so painful that he collapsed. This event served as the impetus for his deciding to try and discover a cure for his condition. After telling his family about the incident, he travelled to Europe to continue his medical studies in physiology. This was, however, a masked attempt to find a cure for the physical symptoms he suffered, most notably the back pain. He went to Germany and France, staying in various places on the continent until November 1868. At that point he returned to America to continue his studies without having been able to find the cure-all for his ailments. In 1869, James finally graduated, receiving a degree from Harvard's medical school. Oddly enough, he decided not to go into medical practice, feeling an unnerving hunger for some other kind of knowledge and an anxiety about what he would do for a career. The same year he graduated, his illness symptoms steadily became worse. For the next year, his level of depression increased and he contemplated suicide once again.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  It is a feeling which every one knows, but which most people would call quite indescribable. We get it in the sensorial sphere whenever we seek to catch an impression of extreme faintness , be it of sight, hearing, taste, smell, or touch; we get it whenever we seek to discriminate a sensation merged in a mass of others that are similar; we get it whenever we resist the attractions of more potent stimuli and keep our mind occupied with some object that is naturally unimpressive. We get it in the intellectual sphere under exactly similar conditions: as we strive to sharpen and make distinct an idea which we but vaguely seem to have; or painfully discriminate a shade of meaning from its similars; or resolutely hold fast to a thought so discordant with our impulses that, if left unaided, it would quickly yield place to images of an exciting and impassioned kind. All forms of attentive effort would be exercised at once by one whom we might suppose at a dinner-party resolutely to listen to a neighbor giving him insipid and unwelcome advice in a low voice, whilst all around the guests were loudly laughing and talking about exciting and interesting things. There is no such thing as voluntary attention sustained for more than a few seconds at a time. What is called sustained voluntary attention is a repetition of successive efforts which bring back the topic to the mind.[341] The topic once brought back, if a congenial one, develops ; and if its development is interesting it engages the attention passively for a time. Dr. Carpenter, a moment back, described the stream of thought, once entered, as 'bearing him along.' This passive interest may be short or long. As soon as it flags, the attention is diverted by some irrelevant thing, and then a voluntary effort may bring it back to the topic again; and so on, under favorable conditions, for hours together. During all this time, however, note that it is not an identical object in the psychological sense (p. 183), but a succession of mutually related objects forming an identical topic only, upon which the attention is fixed. No one can possibly attend continuously to an object that does not change. Now there are always some objects that for the time being will not develop . They simply go out ; and to keep the mind upon anything related to them requires such incessantly renewed effort that the most resolute Will ere long gives out and let its thoughts follow the more stimulating solicitations after it has withstood them for what length of time it can. There are topics known to every man from which he shies like a frightened horse, and which to get a glimpse of is to shun.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The movement is generally the closing of an electric key with the hand. The foot, the jaw, the lips, even the eyelid, have been in turn made organs of reaction, and the apparatus has been modified accordingly.[106] The time usually elapsing between stimulus and movement lies between one and three tenths of a second, varying according to circumstances which will be mentioned anon. The subject of experiment, whenever the reactions are short and regular, is in a state of extreme tension, and feels, when the signal comes, as if it started the reaction, by a sort of fatality, and as if no psychic process of perception or volition had a chance to intervene. The whole succession is so rapid that perception seems to be retrospective, and the time-order of events to be read off in memory rather than known at the moment. This at least is my own personal experience in the matter, and with it I find others to agree. The question is, What happens inside of us, either in brain or mind? and to answer that we must analyze just what processes the reaction involves. It is evident that some time is lost in each of the following stages: 1. The stimulus excites the peripheral sense-organ adequately for a current to pass into the sensory nerve; 2. The sensory nerve is traversed; 3. The transformation (or reflection) of the sensory into a motor current occurs in the centres; 4. The spinal cord and motor nerve are traversed; 5. The motor current excites the muscle to the contracting point. Time is also lost, of course, outside the muscle, in the joints, skin, etc., and between the parts of the apparatus; and when the stimulus which serves as signal is applied to the skin of the trunk or limbs, time is lost in the sensorial conduction through the spinal cord. The stage marked 3 is the only one that interests us here. The other stages answer to purely physiological processes, but stage 3 is psycho-physical; that is, it is a higher-central process, and has probably some sort of consciousness accompanying it. What sort? Wundt has little difficulty in deciding that it is consciousness of a quite elaborate kind. He distinguishes between two stages in the conscious reception of an impression, calling one perception , and the other apperception , and likening the one to the mere entrance of an object into the periphery of the field of vision, and the other to its coming to occupy the focus or point of view. Inattentive awareness of an object, and attention to it, are, it seems to me, equivalents for perception and apperception, as Wundt uses the words. To these two forms of awareness of the impression Wundt adds the conscious volition to react, gives to the trio the name of 'psycho-physical' processes, and assumes that they actually follow upon each other in the succession in which they have been named.[107] So at least I understand him.

• From The Hours (1998)

  “You too.” “Happy birthday.” “Thank you.” He stands. For a while they are all absorbed in the ritual of his leaving: the taking on of jacket and briefcase; the flurry of kisses; the waves, he from over his shoulder as he crosses the lawn to the driveway, Laura and Richie from behind the screen door. Their lawn, extravagantly watered, is a brilliant, almost unearthly green. Laura and Richie stand like spectators at a parade as the man pilots his ice-blue Chevrolet down the short driveway and into the street. He waves one last time, jauntily, from behind the wheel. “Well,” she says, after the car has disappeared. Her son watches her adoringly, expectantly. She is the animating principle, the life of the house. Its rooms are sometimes larger than they should be; they sometimes, suddenly, contain things he’s never seen before. He watches her, and waits. “Well, now,” she says. Here, then, is the daily transition. With her husband present, she is more nervous but less afraid. She knows how to act. Alone with Richie, she sometimes feels unmoored—he is so entirely, persuasively himself. He wants what he wants so avidly. He cries mysteriously, makes indecipherable demands, courts her, pleads with her, ignores her. He seems, almost always, to be waiting to see what she will do next. She knows, or at least suspects, that other mothers of small children must maintain a body of rules and, more to the point, an ongoing mother-self to guide them in negotiating the days spent alone with a child. When her husband is here, she can manage it. She can see him seeing her, and she knows almost instinctively how to treat the boy firmly and kindly, with an affectionate maternal off handedness that seems effortless. Alone with the child, though, she loses direction. She can’t always remember how a mother would act. “You need to finish your breakfast,” she says to him. “Okay,” he says. They return to the kitchen. Her husband has washed his coffee cup, dried it, put it away. The boy sets about eating with a certain tractorish steadiness that has more to do with obedience than appetite. Laura pours herself a fresh cup of coffee, sits at the table. She lights a cigarette. . . . the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June. She exhales a rich gray plume of smoke. She is so tired. She was up until after two, reading. She touches her belly—is it bad for the new baby, her getting so little sleep? She hasn’t asked the doctor about it; she’s afraid he’ll tell her to stop reading altogether. She promises that tonight she’ll read less. She’ll go to sleep by midnight, at the latest. She says to Richie, “Guess what we’re going to do today? We’re going to make a cake for your father’s birthday. Oh, what a big job we have ahead of us.”

• From The Hours (1998)

  She pulls up in front of Mrs. Latch’s house, where two painted plaster squirrels are attached to the gable over the garage. She gets out of her car and stands for a moment, looking up at the plaster squirrels, still holding her car keys. Beside her, the car emits a peculiar ticking sound (it’s been doing this for several days now, she’ll have to take it by the mechanic’s). She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it. Standing beside her ticking car, facing Mrs. Latch’s garage (the plaster squirrels throw long shadows), she is no one; she is nothing. It seems, briefly, that by going to the hotel she has slipped out of her life, and this driveway, this garage, are utterly strange to her. She has been away. She has been thinking kindly, even longingly, of death. It comes to her here, in Mrs. Latch’s driveway—she has been thinking longingly of death. She has gone to a hotel in secret, the way she might go to meet a lover. She stands, holding her car keys and her purse, staring at Mrs. Latch’s garage. The door, painted white, has a little green-shuttered window in it, as if the garage were a miniature house attached to the larger house. Laura’s breathing is suddenly labored. She’s slightly dizzy—it seems she might stumble and collapse onto Mrs. Latch’s smooth concrete drive. She considers getting back into her car, and driving away again. She forces herself to go forward. She reminds herself: she has to retrieve her child, take him home, and finish assembling her husband’s birthday dinner. She has to do those ordinary things. With some effort, she draws a breath and goes up the walk to Mrs. Latch’s narrow front porch. It’s the secrecy, she tells herself; it’s the strangeness of what she’s just done, though there’s no real harm in it, is there? She’s not meeting a lover, like some wife from a cheap romance. She simply went away for a few hours, read her book, and came back. It’s a secret only because she can’t quite think how she’d explain, well, any of it—the kiss, the cake, the panicky moment when her car topped Chavez Ravine. She certainly doesn’t know how she’d explain two and a half hours spent reading in a rented room. She draws another breath. She rings Mrs. Latch’s rectangular, illuminated doorbell, which glows orange in the late-afternoon sun. Mrs. Latch opens the door almost immediately, as if she’d been standing right there, waiting. Mrs. Latch is florid, huge-hipped in Bermuda shorts, overly kind; her house is full of a rich brown smell, some sort of meat roasting, which unfurls from behind her when she opens the door. “Well, hello,” she says. “Hi,” Laura answers. “Sorry I’m late.” “Not at all. We’ve been having a fine time. Come on in.”

• From The Hours (1998)

  She turns down Bleecker, goes up Thompson. The neighborhood today is an imitation of itself, a watered-down carnival for tourists, and Clarissa, at fifty-two, knows that behind these doors and down these alleys lies nothing more or less than people living their lives. Grotesquely, some of the same bars and coffeehouses are still here, done up now to resemble themselves for the benefit of Germans and Japanese. The stores all sell essentially the same things: souvenir T-shirts, cheap silver jewelry, cheap leather jackets. At Richard’s building she lets herself in through the vestibule door and thinks, as she always does, of the word “squalid.” It is almost funny, the way the entrance to Richard’s building so perfectly demonstrates the concept of squalor. It is so obviously, dreadfully squalid that it still surprises her slightly, even after all these years. It surprises her in almost the way a rare and remarkable object, a work of art, can continue to surprise; simply because it remains, throughout time, so purely and utterly itself. Here again, surprisingly, are the faded yellow-beige walls, more or less the color of an arrowroot biscuit; here is the fluorescent panel on the ceiling emitting its sputtering, watery glare. It is worse—much worse—that the cramped little lobby was cheaply and half heartedly renovated a decade ago. The lobby is far more discouraging with its soiled white brick-patterned linoleum and its artificial ficus tree than it could possibly have been in its original decrepitude. Only the ancient marble wainscoting—a palomino-colored marble, veined in blue and gray with a deep yellow, smoky overlay, like a very fine old cheese, now hideously echoed by the yellowish walls—indicates that this was once a building of some consequence; that hopes were nurtured here; that upon entering the lobby people were expected to feel as if they were moving in an orderly fashion into a future that held something worth having. She gets into the elevator, a tiny chamber of intensified, bleached brightness, paneled in wood-grain metal, and pushes the button for the fifth floor. The elevator door sighs and rattles shut. Nothing happens. Of course. It works only intermittently; in fact, it is something of a relief to abandon it and climb the stairs instead. Clarissa presses the button marked with a chipped white “O” and, after a nervous hesitation, the door rattles open again. She is always afraid of getting trapped between floors in this elevator—she can all too easily imagine the long, long wait; the cries for help to tenants who might or might not speak English and who might or might not care to intervene; the strange numbing deathlike fear of standing there, alone, for a considerable time, in the brilliant, stale-smelling emptiness, either looking or not looking at her distorted reflection in the dim circular mirror fastened to the upper right-hand corner. It is better, really, to find the elevator frankly inoperable, and to walk up five flights. It is better to be free.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  There were too few who could cultivate the soil. Patrick Tailfer, who drafted one of the petitions in support of slaveholding, refused to cultivate a single acre of the land he had been granted. 51 We should make clear that Oglethorpe was not a modern egalitarian. He did not imagine his colony as a multiracial community, nor did he surmount common prejudices with respect to Africans. He permitted there to be a small number of Indian slaves in the colony. His plan centered on class: he restricted slavery principally because he believed it would shift the balance of class power in Georgia and “starve the poor white laborer.” In the larger scheme of things, his reform philosophy recognized that weak and desperate men could be led to choose a path that dictated against their own interests. A man might sell his land for a glass of rum; debt and idleness were always a temptation. 52 Despite his good intentions, the colony failed to eliminate all class divisions. In addition to the fifty acres allotted to charity cases, settlers who paid their own way might be granted as many as five hundred acres. They were expected to employ between four and ten servants. But five hundred acres was the maximum limit for freeholders. The trustees wanted settlers to occupy the land, not to speculate in land. Absentee landholders were not welcome. Georgia also instituted a policy of keeping the land “tail-male,” which meant that land descended to the eldest male child. This feudal rule bound men to their families. The tail-male provision protected heirs whose poor fathers might otherwise feel pressure to sell their land. 53 Many settlers disliked the practice. Hardworking families worried about the fate of their unmarried daughters, who might be left with nothing. One such complaint came from Reverend Dumont, a leader of French Protestants interested in migrating to Georgia. What would happen to widows “too old to marry or beget children,” he asked. And how could daughters survive, especially those “unfit for Marriage, either by Sickness or Evil Construction of their Body”? 54 Dumont’s questions went to the core of Oglethorpe’s and the trustees’ philosophy. Young widows and daughters were seen as breeders of the next generation of free white laborers. Georgia’s policy was to nurture the natural process of “propagation,” as Oglethorpe declared in one of his promotional tracts. His grand plan was to ensure that English and other Protestants would quickly outnumber the French and Spanish in North America. The war against the rival Catholic colonial powers was, at length, a battle of numbers. Georgia had to have enough free white men to field its armies, and it had to benefit from a reproductive advantage, winning the demographic war as well.

• From The Hours (1998)

  For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would have to be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach. It is Los Angeles. It is 1949. Laura Brown is trying to lose herself. No, that’s not it exactly—she is trying to keep herself by gaining entry into a parallel world. She lays the book face down on her chest. Already her bedroom (no, their bedroom) feels more densely inhabited, more actual, because a character named Mrs. Dalloway is on her way to buy flowers. Laura glances at the clock on the nightstand. It’s well past seven. Why did she buy this clock, this hideous thing, with its square green face in a rectangular black Bakelite sarcophagus—how could she ever have thought it was smart? She should not be permitting herself to read, not this morning of all mornings; not on Dan’s birthday. She should be out of bed, showered and dressed, fixing breakfast for Dan and Richie. She can hear them downstairs, her husband making his own breakfast, ministering to Richie. She should be there, shouldn’t she? She should be standing before the stove in her new robe, full of simple, encouraging talk. Still, when she opened her eyes a few minutes ago (after seven already!)— when she still half inhabited her dream, some sort of pulsating machinery in the remote distance, a steady pounding like a gigantic mechanical heart, which seemed to be drawing nearer—she felt the dank sensation around her, the nowhere feeling, and knew it was going to be a difficult day. She knew she was going to have trouble believing in herself, in the rooms of her house, and when she glanced over at this new book on her nightstand, stacked atop the one she finished last night, she reached for it automatically, as if reading were the singular and obvious first task of the day, the only viable way to negotiate the transit from sleep to obligation. Because she is pregnant, she is allowed these lapses. She is allowed, for now, to read unreasonably, to linger in bed, to cry or grow furious over nothing. She will make up for breakfast by baking Dan a perfect birthday cake; by ironing the good cloth; by setting a big bouquet of flowers (roses?) in the middle of the table, and surrounding it with gifts. That should compensate, shouldn’t it? She will read one more page. One more page, to calm and locate herself, then she’ll get out of bed.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Her cake is a failure, but she is loved anyway. She is loved, she thinks, in more or less the way the gifts will be appreciated: because they’ve been given with good intentions, because they exist, because they are part of a world in which one wants what one gets. What would she prefer, then? Would she rather have her gifts scorned, her cake sneered at? Of course not. She wants to be loved. She wants to be a competent mother reading calmly to her child; she wants to be a wife who sets a perfect table. She does not want, not at all, to be the strange woman, the pathetic creature, full of quirks and rages, solitary, sulking, tolerated but not loved. Virginia Woolf put a stone into the pocket of her coat, walked into a river, and drowned. Laura will not let herself go morbid. She’ll make the beds, vacuum, cook the birthday dinner. She will not mind, about anything. Someone taps at the back door. Laura, washing the last of the dishes, can see the faint outline of Kitty through the filmy white curtain. Here is the vague halo of Kitty’s brown-blond hair, the scrubbed pink blur of her face. Laura swallows a pang of excitement and something stronger than excitement, something that resembles panic. She is about to receive a visit from Kitty. Her hair is hardly brushed; she is still wearing her bathrobe. She looks, too much, like the woman of sorrows. She wants to rush to the door and she wants to stand here, immobile, at the sink, until Kitty gives up and goes away. She might actually have done it, stood motionless, holding her breath (can Kitty see inside, would she know?), but there is the problem of Richie, witness to everything, running now into the kitchen, holding a red plastic truck, shouting with a mix of delight and alarm that someone’s at the door. Laura dries her hands on a dish towel covered with red roosters, and opens the door. It’s only Kitty, she tells herself. It’s only her friend from two doors down, and this, of course, is what people do. They drop by and are received; it doesn’t matter about your hair or your robe. It doesn’t matter about the cake. “Hi, Kitty,” she says. “Am I interrupting anything?” Kitty asks. “Of course not. Come on in.”

• From The Hours (1998)

  For the past half hour it has been enough to be headed, vaguely, toward downtown Los Angeles, but now here it is—the staunch, squat older buildings, the skeletons of newer, taller ones going up— all suffused with the steady white glare of the day, which seems to emanate not so much from the sky down to the earth as from the air itself, as if invisible particles in the ether emitted a steady, slightly foggy phosphorescence. Here is the city, and Laura must either enter it, by way of the left-hand lane, or switch to the right-hand lane and bypass it altogether. If she does that, if she simply continues driving, she’ll be headed into the vast, flat stretch of factories and low-rise apartment buildings that surrounds Los Angeles for a hundred miles in every direction. It would be possible to veer right, and find her way eventually to Beverly Hills, or to the beach at Santa Monica, but she doesn’t want to shop and she hasn’t brought anything for the beach. There is surprisingly little to enter, in this immense bright smoky landscape, and what she wants—someplace private, silent, where she can read, where she can think— is not readily available. If she goes to a store or restaurant, she’ll have to perform—she’ll have to pretend to need or want something that does not, in any way, interest her. She’ll have to move in an orderly fashion; she’ll have to examine merchandise and refuse offers of help, or she’ll have to sit at a table, order something, consume it, and leave. If she simply parks her car somewhere and sits there, a woman alone, she’ll be vulnerable to criminals and to those who’ll try to protect her from criminals. She’ll be too exposed; she’ll look too peculiar. Even a library would be too public, as would a park. She pilots her car into the left-hand lane, and drives into the city. She seems to arrive at her decision almost physically, as if by going left she had entered a course of action that was waiting for her as palpably as is Figueroa Street, with its shop windows and shadowed sidewalks. She will check into a hotel. She will say (of course) that she’s there for the night, that her husband will be joining her soon. As long as she pays for the room, what’s wrong with using it only a couple of hours? It seems such an extravagant, reckless gesture that she is giddy with the possibility of it, and nervous as a girl. Yes, it’s wasteful—a hotel room for an entire night, when all she means to do is sit there reading for two hours or so—but money is not particularly tight right now, and she runs the household with relative thrift. How much can a room cost, really? It can’t be that much. Although she should go to a cheap place—a motel, somewhere on the outskirts—she can’t bring herself to.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  With the dainty lacquered key basket in one hand and the other lightly pushed into the side pocket of her dark red dressing gown, she seriously let the long, soft folds caress her, while the naive and ignorant expression of her mouth betrayed In the Pensee room she moved about with the little brass shower to soak the black soil of the leafy plants. She was very fond of her palm trees, which added so magnificently to the grandeur of the apartment. She carefully felt a young shoot on one of the thick, round shafts, tenderly examined the majestically unfolded fans and here and there removed a yellow tip with scissors... Suddenly she listened. The conversation in the smoking-room, which had been lively for several minutes, now grew so loud that every word was heard inside, although the door was strong and the portiere heavy. 'Don't scream! Moderate yourself, God in heaven!' was heard to call Herr Grünlich, whose soft voice couldn't stand the strain and therefore squeaked over and over again ... 'Have another cigar!' he then added with despairing gentleness. "Yes, with the greatest pleasure, thank you very much," replied the banker, which was followed by a pause during which Mr. Kesselmeyer helped himself. Then he said: "In short, do you want it or not, one of the two?" "Kesselmeyer, extend it!" »Ah? Well... hey, no , my dear, not at all, that's not what we're talking about at all..." "Why not? What is it about you? Be sensible, for heaven's sake! Have you waited so long…” "Not another day, my dear! Yes, let's say eight days, but not an hour longer! Does anyone still rely on…” "No name, Kesselmeyer!" “No name… fine. Does anyone still rely on your laudable Herr Schw…” “No designation…! Almighty God, don't be silly!' 'Fine, no designation! Does anyone still rely on the conscious company that your credit stands and falls with, dear? How much did she lose in the bankruptcy in Bremen? Fifty thousand? seventy thousand? hundred thousand? Even more? The sparrows on the roofs know that she was involved, enormously involved... It's a matter of mood. Yesterday was... nice, no name! Yesterday the company you knew was good and unconsciously protected you completely from distress... Today it's dull, and B. Grünlich is duller-most dull...isn't that clear? Don't you notice? You're the first to feel such fluctuations... How are you met? How are you looking at? Bock and Goudstikker are probably extremely courteous and trusting? How is the credit bank behaving?” "She's prolonging." »Ah? are you lying? I know she kicked you yesterday? A most, most encouraging kick?... Now look!... But don't be ashamed. It is of course in your best interest to make me believe that the others are still calm and secure … Well – hey, my dear! Write to the consul. I'll wait a week." "A down payment, Kesselmeyer!" »Deduction amount back and forth! Advance payments can be shot in order to convince oneself of someone's ability to pay!

• From The Hours (1998)

  “Here we go, then,” she says. He cautiously moves the cup to the other bowl and holds it there, paralyzed, over the bowl’s gleaming white concavity (it is the next smaller in a series of nesting bowls, pale green, with the same band of white leaves at its rim). He understands that he’s expected to dump the flour into the bowl but it seems possible that he’s misunderstood the directions, and will ruin everything; it seems possible that by spilling out the flour he will cause some larger catastrophe, upset some precarious balance. He wants to look at his mother’s face but can’t take his eyes off the cup. “Turn it over,” she says. He turns it over in one hurried, frightened motion. The flour hesitates for a fraction of a second, then spills out. The flour falls solidly, in a mound that loosely echoes the shape of the measuring cup. A bigger cloud rises, almost touches his face, then vanishes. He stares down at what he’s made: a white hill, slightly granular, speckled with pinpoint shadows, standing up from the glossy, creamier white of the bowl’s interior. “Oopsie,” his mother says. He looks at her in terror. His eyes fill with tears. Laura sighs. Why is he so delicate, so prone to fits of inexplicable remorse? Why does she have to be so careful with him? For a moment—a moment—Richie’s shape subtly changes. He becomes larger, brighter. His head expands. A dead-white glow seems, briefly, to surround him. For a moment she wants only to leave—not to harm him, she’d never do that—but to be free, blameless, unaccountable. “No, no,” Laura says. “It’s good. Very good. That’s just exactly right.” He smiles tearfully, suddenly proud of himself, almost insanely relieved. All right, then; nothing was needed but a few kind words, a bit of reassurance. She sighs. She gently touches his hair. “Now, then,” she says. “Are you ready to do another one?”

• From The Hours (1998)

  He nods solemnly. The weight and grain of life reassert themselves; the nowhere feeling vanishes. This moment, now, midblock, as the car approaches a stop sign, is unexpectedly large and still, serene—Laura enters it the way she might enter a church from a noisy street. On either side, sprinklers throw brilliant cones of mist up over the lawns. Late sun gilds an aluminum carport. It is unutterably real. She knows herself as a wife and mother, pregnant again, driving home, as veils of water are tossed up into the air. Richie doesn’t speak. He watches her. Laura brakes for the stop sign. She says, “It’s a good thing Daddy works as late as he does. We’ll put it all together in time, don’t you think so?” She glances at him. She meets his eyes, and sees something there she can’t quite recognize. His eyes, his entire face, seem lit from within; he appears, for the first time, to be suffering from an emotion she can’t read. “Honey,” she says, “what is it?” He says, louder than necessary, “Mommy, I love you.” There is something odd in his voice, something chilling. It is a tone she’s never heard from him before. He sounds frantic, foreign. He could be a refugee, someone with only rudimentary English, trying desperately to convey a need for which he has not learned the proper phrase. “I love you too, baby,” she replies, and although she’s said the words thousands of times, she can hear the flanneled nervousness lodged now in her throat, the effort she must make to sound natural. She accelerates through the intersection. She drives carefully, with both hands precisely centered on the wheel. It seems the boy will start crying again, as he does so often, so inexplicably, but his eyes remain bright and dry, unblinking. “What’s wrong?” she asks. He continues staring at her. He does not blink. He knows. He must know. The little boy can tell she’s been somewhere illicit; he can tell she’s lying. He watches her constantly, spends almost every waking hour in her presence. He’s seen her with Kitty. He’s watched her make a second cake, and bury the first one under other garbage in the can beside the garbage. He is devoted, entirely, to the observation and deciphering of her, because without her there is no world at all. Of course he would know when she’s lying. She says, “Don’t worry, honey. Everything’s fine. We’re going to have a wonderful party for Daddy’s birthday tonight. Do you know how happy he’ll be? We’ve got all these presents for him. We’ve made him such a nice cake.” Richie nods, unblinking. He rocks gently back and forth. Quietly, wishing to be overheard rather than heard, he says, “Yes, we’ve made him such a nice cake.” There is a surprisingly mature hollowness in his voice.

• From The Hours (1998)

  She knows Leonard can be gruff, stingy, and all but impossibly demanding. She knows these young people are often criticized unfairly but she will not side with them against him. She will not be the mother who intervenes, much as they beg her to with their eager smiles and wounded eyes. Ralph, after all, is Lytton’s worry, and Lytton is welcome to him. He, like his brothers or sisters to come, will go on and do whatever they do in the greater world—no one expects them to make a career out of assisting at the press. Leonard may be autocratic, he may be unfair, but he is her companion and caretaker, and she will not betray him, certainly not for handsome, callow Ralph, or Marjorie, with her parakeet’s voice. “There are ten errors in eight pages,” Leonard says. The brackets around his mouth are so deep you could slip a penny in. “Lucky to have found them,” Virginia says. “They seem to congregate around the middle section. Do you think bad writing actually attracts a higher incidence of misfortune?” “How I’d love to live in a world in which that were true. I’m going for a walk to clear my head, then I’ll come and pitch in.” “We’re making good progress,” Ralph says. “We should be through by the end of the day.” “We shall be lucky,” Leonard says, “to be through by this time next week.” He glowers; Ralph turns a finer and more precise shade of red. Of course, she thinks. Ralph set the type, and did it carelessly. The truth, she thinks, sits calmly and plumply, dressed in matronly gray, between these two men. It does not reside with Ralph, the young foot soldier, who appreciates literature but appreciates also, with equal or perhaps greater fervor, the brandy and biscuits waiting when the day’s work is done; who is good-hearted and unexceptional and can barely be counted on to perpetuate, in his allotted span, the ordinary business of the ordinary world. The truth likewise does not (alas) reside with Leonard, brilliant and indefatigable Leonard, who refuses to distinguish between setback and catastrophe; who worships accomplishment above all else and makes himself unbearable to others because he genuinely believes he can root out and reform every incidence of human fecklessness and mediocrity. “I’m sure,” she says, “that between us we can get the book into some sort of acceptable shape, and still have Christmas.” Ralph grins at her with a relief so visible she has an urge to slap him. He overestimates her sympathy—she has spoken not on his behalf but on Leonard’s, in much the way her own mother might have made light of a servant’s blunder during dinner, declaring for the sake of her husband and all others present that the shattered tureen portended nothing; that the circle of love and forbearance could not be broken; that all were safe. Mrs. Woolf She walks up Mt. Ararat Road, planning Clarissa Dalloway’s suicide.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  It was a wild burning and piercing pain, a malicious torment, which had taken hold of a diseased molar from the whole left side of the lower jaw. The inflammation pounded in it with red-hot little hammers and caused fever to rush to his face and tears to his eyes. The sleepless night had taken a terrible toll on his nerves. He had just had to pull himself together while speaking so his voice wouldn't break. In Mühlenstrasse he entered a house painted yellow-brown oil paint and climbed up to the first floor, where a brass plaque on the door read "Dentist Brecht." He didn't see the maid who opened the door for him. The corridor smelled warm of beefsteak and cauliflower. Then suddenly he breathed the pungent air of the waiting room into which he was being forced. "Have a seat . . . a momang!" cried an old woman's voice. It was Josephus who was sitting in his bare pawn at the back of the room and staring at him crookedly and maliciously with small, poisonous eyes. The senator sat down at the round table and tried to take in the jokes in a volume of Flying Papers, but then closed the book in disgust, pressed the cool silver of his cane to his cheek, closed his stinging eyes, and groaned. Everything was quiet all around, and only Josephus bit into the surrounding bars with a cracking and crunching sound. Herr Brecht owed it to himself, even when he wasn't busy, to keep us waiting for a while. Thomas Buddenbrook got up hastily and drank a glass of water from a carafe set up at a small table that smelled and tasted of chloroform. Then he opened the door to the corridor and called out with irritated intonation that, unless there was an urgent need to stop him, would Herr Brecht be so good as to hurry up a little. He's in pain. A moment later the graying moustache, hooked nose and bald forehead of the dentist appeared in the doorway to the operating room. "Please," he said. "Please!" also shouted Josephus. The senator accepted the invitation without laughing. A hard case! thought Herr Brecht and changed color ... They both walked quickly across the bright room to the large, adjustable chair with a headrest and green plush armrests that stood in front of one of the two windows. As he sat down, Thomas Buddenbrook briefly explained what it was about, tilted his head back and closed his eyes. Herr Brecht scraped the chair a little and then got to work on the tooth with a little mirror and a steel rod. His hand smelled of almond soap, his breath of beefsteak and cauliflower. "We must proceed to extraction," he said after a while, and hereditarily even more so. "Just walk," said the senator, closing his eyelids even tighter. Now there was a pause. Herr Brecht was preparing something on a barrier and was looking for instruments.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  "So far!" said Herr Ballerstedt and asked for the class register to certify with his signature that he was in charge of this hour of office. Hanno Buddenbrook closed his Bible and stretched, trembling and yawning nervously; but when he lowered his arms and tensed his limbs, he had to breathe quickly and laboriously in order to bring his heart, which for a moment weak and faltering, stopped working, a little. Now came the Latin ... He threw a sideways glance at Kai for help, who didn't seem to have noticed the end of the lesson and was still absorbed in his private reading, pulled the Ovid bound in marbled cardboard out of his portfolio and opened the verses, to be memorized for today... No, there was no hope, those black lines lined up, penciled, dead straight and numbered in fives, staring at him so hopelessly dark and unknown, to familiarize yourself a little. He could scarcely understand their meaning, let alone recite one of them off the top of his head. And he did not unravel a single sentence of those who followed suit and who had to be prepared for today. "What does 'deciderant, patula Jovis arbore, glandes' mean ?" he asked in a despairing voice to Adolf Todtenhaupt, who was working next to him in the class register. "That's all nonsense! Just to bully you..." "How?" said Todtenhaupt, continuing to write... "The acorns from the tree of Jupiter... That's the oak... Yes, I don't really know myself..." "Just tell me a little bit, Todtenhaupt, when it's up to me!" Hanno asked, pushing the book away from him. Then, after scowling at the Primus' heedless and noncommittal nod, he sidestepped out of the bench and stood. The situation had changed. Herr Ballerstedt had left the room and instead of him there was a small, weak and emaciated professor standing at the lectern, very straight and taut Male with a thin white beard, whose little red neck protruded from a narrow foldable collar, and who with one of his white-haired hands held his top hat out in front of him, opening upwards. The students called it "the spider" and it was actually called Professor Hückopp. Since he was in charge of the corridor during this break, he also had to check on things in the classrooms... "Turn off the lights! The curtains up! Open the windows!' it said, giving its little voice as much command as possible and waving its arm in the air with an awkwardly energetic gesture, as if it were turning a crank... 'And all down, out into the fresh air, a thousand times more!' The lamps went out, the curtains flew up, the faint daylight filled the room, and the cold misty air rushed in through the wide windows, while the lower-secondary students pushed past Professor Hückopp towards the exit; only the Primus was allowed to stay up here.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  Can't wait to get back to the asylum on Monday morning, as you know best, dear... No, I just stayed up here for fun. The profound chief teacher was in charge and did not consider it robbery to drive the people down to worship. So I made it so that I was always close behind his back... No matter how he turned and peeked around, the mystic, I was always close behind his back until he went away, and that's how I was able to stay up... But you «, he said compassionately and sat down next to Hanno on the bench with a tender movement... »You had to run, didn’t you? Poor! You look very harried. Your hair is sticking to your temples..." And he took a ruler from the table and loosened it, seriously and carefully, little John's hair. "So you slept through the time? By the way, I'm sitting here in Adolf Todtenhaupt's place," he interrupted himself and looked around, "in the place dedicated to Primus! Well, I guess it doesn't matter for this time... So you slept through it?" Hanno had laid his face back on his crossed arms. "I was at the theater last night," he said after a heavy sigh. "Oh, right, I forgot!... Was it that nice?" Kai got no answer. "You're lucky," he continued persuasively, "you should consider that, Hanno. You see, I've never been to the theatre, and there's not the slightest chance I'll ever get into it for many years to come...' "If only it weren't for the hangover," said Hanno tightly. "Yes, I know the condition anyway." And Kai bent down for his friend's hat and overcoat that were lying on the floor next to the bench, took the things and carried them quietly out into the corridor. "Then you don't have the Metamorphosis verses in your head very well, then?" he asked, coming in again. "No," said Hanno. "Or are you perhaps primed for the geography extemporal?" "I'm nothing and I can't do anything," said Hanno. “So not chemistry and English either! All right! We are heartfelt friends and brothers in arms!” Kai was visibly relieved. "I'm in exactly the same position," he explained cheerfully. "I didn't work on Saturday because tomorrow was Sunday, and not on Sunday, out of respect... No, nonsense... mainly because I had something better to work on, of course," he said with sudden seriousness, his face flushing slightly flew over. "Yes, today can be fun, Hanno." "If I get another reprimand," said little Johann, "I'll stay where I am; and I'm sure I'll get that if he takes me on in Latin. It's the letter B's turn, Kai, there's no getting rid of it..." “Let's wait and see! Ha, Caesar is going out. Dangers in my back have always only threatened me; when they see Caesar's forehead...' But Kai didn't finish his declamation. He also felt very bad. He went to the lectern, sat on it, and began rocking in the armchair, scowling.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  And every time little Johann stretched out his arm in the blue sailor's sleeve embroidered with an anchor horizontally in front of the door, shook his head and after a moment's silence said quietly and firmly: "Nobody is allowed in. – Papa makes his will.” Sixth Chapter In the autumn Doctor Longneck said, letting his beautiful eyes play like a woman's: 'Your nerves, Senator ... it's all down to your nerves. And here and there the blood circulation leaves a little to be desired. May I allow myself a piece of advice? You should relax a little more this year! Of course, these few Sundays in the sea air in the summer didn't do much... It's the end of September, Travemünde is still in operation, it's not yet completely depopulated. Go there, senator, and sit down on the beach a little longer. A fortnight or three weeks fixes a lot..." And Thomas Buddenbrook said yes and amen to this. But when his family found out about the decision, Christian offered to accompany him. "I'm going with you, Thomas," he said simply. "I guess you don't mind." And although the senator actually objected a lot, he said yes and amen again. The fact was that Christian was now more in control of his time than ever, for failing health had forced him to give up his last commercial activity, the champagne and cognac agency. The mirage of a man who sat on his sofa in the twilight and nodded to him was fortunately not repeated. But with the periodic "torment" in his left side it had possibly got worse, and hand in hand with it went a great number of other ailments, which Christian carefully observed and wrinkled his nose in describing where he was going and where he was. Often, as before, his swallowing muscles gave out when he was eating, so that he sat there with the bite in his throat and let his small, round, deep-set eyes wander. Often, as before, he suffered from the vague but invincible dread of sudden paralysis of his tongue, throat, extremities, even his mind. True, nothing about him was paralyzed; but wasn't the fear of it almost worse? He related in detail how one day, when he was making tea, he held the lit match over the open spirit bottle instead of over the cooking apparatus, so that not only he himself, but also the other residents of the house, yes, maybe those in the neighboring houses too would have perished horribly... This was going too far. But what he described, with particular length, urgency, and effort to make himself fully understood, was a horrid anomaly which he had recently noticed in himself, and which consisted in the fact that on certain days, that is, in certain weather conditions and state of mind, could not see an open window without being seized by that dreadful and unjustified urge, to leap out...

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The feeling awakened by the nascent excitement of each alternative nerve-tract seems by its attractive or repulsive quality to determine whether the excitement shall abort or shall become complete. Where indecision is great, as before a dangerous leap, consciousness is agonizingly intense. Feeling, from this point of view, may be likened to a cross-section of the chain of nervous discharge, ascertaining the links already laid down, and groping among the fresh ends presented to it for the one which seems best to fit the case. The phenomena of 'vicarious function' which we studied in Chapter II seems to form another bit of circumstantial evidence. A machine in working order acts fatally in one way. Our consciousness calls this the right way. Take out a valve, throw a wheel out of gear or bend a pivot, and it becomes a different machine, acting just as fatally in another way which we call the wrong way. But the machine itself knows nothing of wrong or right: matter has no ideals to pursue. A locomotive will carry its train through an open drawbridge as cheerfully as to any other destination. A brain with part of it scooped out is virtually a new machine, and during the first days after the operation functions in a thoroughly abnormal manner. As a matter of fact, however its performances become from day to day more normal, until at last a practised eye may be needed to suspect anything wrong. Some of the restoration is undoubtedly due to 'inhibitions' passing away. But if the consciousness which goes with the rest of the brain, be there not only in order to take cognizance of each functional error, but also to exert an efficient pressure to check it if it be a sin of commission, and to lend a strengthening hand if it be a weakness or sin of omission,—nothing seems more natural than that the remaining parts, assisted in this way, should by virtue of the principle of habit grow back to the old teleological modes of exercise for which they were at first incapacitated. Nothing, on the contrary, seems at first sight more unnatural than that they should vicariously take up the duties of a part now lost without those duties as such exerting any persuasive or coercive force. At the end of Chapter XXVI I shall return to this again. There is yet another set of facts which seem explicable on the supposition that consciousness has causal efficacy. It is a well-known fact that pleasures are generally associated with beneficial, pains with detrimental, experiences . All the fundamental vital processes illustrate this law. Starvation, suffocation, privation of food, drink and sleep, work when exhausted, burns, wounds, inflammation, the effects of poison, are as disagreeable as filling the hungry stomach, enjoying rest and sleep after fatigue, exercise after rest, and a sound skin and unbroken bones at all times, are pleasant. Mr.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  a wild and scarcely repressible impulse, a kind of senseless and desperate high spirits! One Sunday, when the family was eating in the fishermen's pit, he described how, using all his moral strength, he had to crawl on his hands and feet to the open window in order to close it ... But here everyone cried out and nobody wanted to listen to him any longer. He noted these and similar things with a certain horrid satisfaction. But what he did not observe and did not notice, what remained unconscious to him and therefore steadily worsened, was the strange lack of tact he felt had become more and more her own over the years. It was bad that he was telling anecdotes in the family circle of such a nature that he should at most have told them in the club. But there were also direct signs that his sense of physical modesty was failing. With the intention of showing his sister-in-law Gerda, with whom he was on friendly terms, how well made his English socks were, and how thin he had become, by the way, he wore it over himself, before her eyes, in his wide, checkered trousers pulled back high above the knee... "Look how thin I'm getting... Isn't it striking and strange?" he said sorrowfully, pointing with a wrinkled nose at his bony and severely bulging leg in his white woolen underpants, As I said, he had now given up all commercial activities; but he tried to fill the hours of the day that he did not spend in the "club" in various ways, and he liked to emphasize that in spite of all handicaps he had never completely stopped working. He improved his knowledge of the language and, for the sake of science and without any practical end, had recently begun to learn Chinese, at which he had spent a fortnight diligently. At the moment he was busy "supplementing" an English-German lexicon that seemed to him inadequate; but since a small change of scenery was necessary for him again anyway and since it was ultimately desirable for the senator to have someone to accompany him, this business was not possible now, The two brothers went to the sea; They drove, while the rain drummed on the top of the car, along the country road, which was only a puddle, and hardly spoke a word. Christian let his eyes wander as if listening for something suspicious; Thomas sat shivering, wrapped in his cloak, with tired, reddened eyes, and the long tips of his mustache towered rigidly over his whitish cheeks. So in the afternoon they drove to the Kurgarten one with wheels crunching in the washed gravel. The old broker Sigismund Gosch sat on the glass veranda of the main building and drank grog from rum. He stood up, hissing through his teeth, and then they sat down with him to enjoy something warm of their own while the suitcases were carried upstairs .