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 Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  But then I guess he sits at home, fuming, or maybe drinking, and finally he fires back. But she can’t let him have the last word, so then she fires back. Finally Cranium has to intervene—not on Facebook, but in real life, at the office. He calls the two of them into a meeting and tells them to knock this shit off, because they are making the company look bad. I love this. I think this is great. I wish they would fight every day. I have dreams where Trotsky and Spinner are dressed up in lucha libre costumes, stepping into an MMA octagon while the women on the blog team throw candy at them and jeer. Eighteen [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] A House of Cards?O ne Thursday morning in the first week of April 2014 Trotsky pulls me aside in a hallway and shares a secret: HubSpot has filed its IPO paperwork. “It’s not public yet, and I’m not supposed to tell anyone,” he says, practically whispering. We’re about to go into a meeting. We’re waiting for the people in the conference room to finish up and get out. “But they’re hoping to start trading in June.” In the past few months I’ve started having doubts about whether HubSpot can pull off an IPO. I first started worrying after Halligan called that come-to-Jesus meeting in October and told us he was booting out the head of sales. “The machine is just not working that well” is his quote that has stuck in my mind. But here we are. The deal is on. HubSpot is going to sell its shares to the public, and we’re all going to cash out. It’s really going to happen. Only it doesn’t. The problem is that HubSpot files its paperwork right after another tech start-up, Box, announces its own plans to go public. Box is a high-profile company in Silicon Valley. It’s seen as a bellwether for other cloud computing companies, including HubSpot. Box has a charming, charismatic, twenty-something CEO, Aaron Levie, and everyone has been under the impression that the company is doing a booming business. But now it has published its financial results and the numbers are underwhelming. Sales are growing, but Box is spending way too much on sales and marketing, and losing huge amounts of money. To be sure, that’s the case for most of the other cloud software companies. But even by the relaxed standards of the second tech bubble, Box’s results are disappointing. Meanwhile, for some reason, shares in cloud computing and “software as a service” companies are starting to swoon. One index of thirty-seven publicly traded cloud-related companies loses $58 billion in market value over the course of two months. Salesforce.com, our rival and role model, drops 25 percent. Workday, another cloud company that’s comparable to HubSpot, drops 40 percent.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  1000 to 722 BCE The Assyrian Empire, 744 to 612 BCE The Greek City-States Family Tree of the Olympian Gods The Principalities and Peripheral Kingdoms of China During the Early Spring and Autumn Period The Land of the Arya c. 1000 BCE The Chinese Principalities and States During the Late Spring and Autumn Period Jerusalem and Judah After 722 BCE The Babylonian Empire, 626 to 539 BCE The Persian Empire Judea During the Persian Period The Eastern Ganges Region from the 6th Century BCE The Seven Warring States of China c. 485 to 221 BCE The Seleucid, Ptolemaic, and Mauryan Empires The Qin Empire The Han Empire The Religions of the Axial Age Today: World Population Introduction Perhaps every generation believes that it has reached a turning point of history, but our problems seem particularly intractable and our future increasingly uncertain. Many of our difficulties mask a deeper spiritual crisis. During the twentieth century, we saw the eruption of violence on an unprecedented scale. Sadly, our ability to harm and mutilate one another has kept pace with our extraordinary economic and scientific progress. We seem to lack the wisdom to hold our aggression in check and keep it within safe and appropriate bounds. The explosion of the first atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki laid bare the nihilistic self-destruction at the heart of the brilliant achievements of our modern culture. We risk environmental catastrophe because we no longer see the earth as holy but regard it simply as a “resource.” Unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that can keep abreast of our technological genius, it is unlikely that we will save our planet. A purely rational education will not suffice. We have found to our cost that a great university can exist in the same vicinity as a concentration camp. Auschwitz, Rwanda, Bosnia, and the destruction of the World Trade Center were all dark epiphanies that revealed what can happen when the sense of the sacred inviolability of every single human being has been lost. Religion, which is supposed to help us to cultivate this attitude, often seems to reflect the violence and desperation of our times. Almost every day we see examples of religiously motivated terrorism, hatred, and intolerance. An increasing number of people find traditional religious doctrines and practices irrelevant and incredible, and turn to art, music, literature, dance, sport, or drugs to give them the transcendent experience that humans seem to require.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  As they entered the second half of the fifth century, despite the apparent success of their city, some of the older Athenians felt uncertain about the future. Pericles had led the polis to the zenith of its power. The new buildings on the Acropolis were a triumph; sculptors were creating astonishing work, and the great tragedians continued to present their masterpieces at the City Dionysia. In 446, Athens and Sparta had negotiated a truce for thirty years, dividing the Hellenic world between them: Athens would control the Aegean, while Sparta, a land power, held the Peloponnesus. Athens could look forward to a period of peace and prosperity, and yet Pericles built long defensive walls, enclosing the city and the port of Piraeus. Many Athenians still felt vulnerable, grimly aware that the subject poleis resented their imperial rule. In 446 they had sustained heavy losses in Boetia; cities had tried to defect from the Delian League, and there was war on Samos, in which the Persians threatened to intervene. Athens was not a major world power but only a small, overextended city-state. How could forty thousand fighting men rule the whole of Greece? But the younger generation did not appreciate this. Born after the battle of Marathon, they had known only easy success. They were becoming impatient with Pericles, who was now sixty years old, and were ready to listen to the new ideas that had the city buzzing during the 430s. There was a major intellectual shift during these years. People had started to feel frustrated and even baffled by the philosophers, whose work was becoming increasingly abstruse. Zeno (b. 490), the disciple of Parmenides, had tried to demonstrate the validity of his master’s controversial ideas by formulating a series of mischievous paradoxes. Parmenides had claimed that despite the evidence of our senses, everything was immobile. Zeno illustrated this by stating that an arrow in flight was actually motionless. At each second it occupied a space that was exactly equal to itself and was therefore always at rest, wherever it was. “What is moving is moving neither in the place in which it is, nor in the place in which it is not.”12 Again Zeno argued that it was impossible for Achilles, who ran faster than anyone else, even to begin the race of the Panathenaea: before he could complete the course, he had to travel halfway; before he reached that point, he had to get a quarter of the way there. But this line of reasoning could continue ad infinitum: before Achilles covered any distance he had to cover half of it.13 It was, therefore, impossible to talk sensibly about motion, so it was better, as Parmenides advised, to say nothing about it at all.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  We agreed not to run any water or flush the toilet; but since everyone’s stomach was churning from all the tension, you can imagine the stench after we’d each had a turn in the bathroom. Incidents like these are always accompanied by other disasters, and this was no exception. Number one: the Westertoren bells stopped chiming, and I’d always found them so comforting. Number two: Mr. Voskuijlleft early last night, and we weren’t sure if he’d given Bep the key and she’d forgotten to lock the door. But that was of little importance now. The night had just begun, and we still weren’t sure what to expect. We were somewhat reassured by the fact that between eight-fifteen -- when the burglar had first entered the building and put our lives in jeopardy, and ten-thirty, we hadn’t heard a sound. The more we thought about it, the less likely it seemed that a burglar would have forced a door so early in the evening, when there were still people out on the streets. Besides that, it occurred to us that the warehouse manager at the Keg Company next door might still have been at work. What with the excitement and the thin walls, it’s easy to mistake the sounds. Besides, your imagination often plays tricks on you in moments of danger. So we went to bed, though not to sleep. Father and Mother and Mr. Dussel were awake most of the night, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that I hardly got a wink of sleep. This morning the men went downstairs to see if the outside door was still locked, but all was well! Of course, we gave the entire office staff a blow-by-blow account of the incident, which had been far from pleasant. It’s much easier to laugh at these kinds of things after they’ve happened, and Bep was the only one who took us seriously. Yours, Anne PS. This morning the toilet was clogged, and Father had to stick in a long wooden pole and fish out several pounds of excrement and strawberry recipes (which is what we use for toilet paper these days). Afterward we burned the pole. SATURDAY, MARCH 27, 1943 Dearest Kitty, We’ve finished our shorthand course and are now working on improving our speed. Aren’t we smart! Let me tell you more about my “time killers” (this is what I call my courses, because all we ever do is try to make the days go by as quickly as possible so we are that much closer to the end of our time here). I adore mythology, espe cially the Greek and Roman gods. Everyone here thinks my interest is just a passing fancy, since they’ve never heard of a teenager with an appreciation of mythology. Well then, I guess I’m the first! Mr. van Daan has a cold. Or rather, he has a scratchy throat, but he’s making an enormous to-do over it.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  Unfortunately, he’s not doing very well. He isn’t making it any easier for his family, because his attitude seems to be: what do I care, I’m going to die anyway! When I think how touchy everyone is here, I can just imagine what it must be like at the Voskuijls’. I’ve been taking valerian every day to fight the anxiety and depression, but it doesn’t stop me from being even more miserable the next day. A good hearty laugh would help better than ten valerian drops, but we’ve almost forgotten how to laugh. Sometimes I’m afraid my face is going to sag with all this sorrow and that my mouth is going to permanently droop at the corners. The others aren’t doing any better. Everyone here is dreading the great terror known as winter. Another fact that doesn’t exactly brighten up our days is that Mr. van Maaren, the man who works in the warehouse, is getting suspicious about the Annex. A person with any brains must have noticed by now that Miep sometimes says she’s going to the lab, Bep to the file room and Mr. Kleiman to the Opekta supplies, while Mr. Kugler claims the Annex doesn’t belong to this building at all, but to the one next door. We wouldn’t care what Mr. van Maaren thought of the situation except that he’s known to be unreliable and to possess a high degree of curiosity. He’s not one who can be put off with a flimsy excuse. One day Mr. Kugler wanted to be extra cautious, so at twenty past twelve he put on his coat and went to the drugstore around the corner. Less than five minutes later he was back, and he sneaked up the stairs like a thief to visit us. At one-fifteen he started to leave, but Bep met him on the landing and warned him that van Maaren was in the office. Mr. Kugler did an about-face and stayed with us until one-thirty. Then he took off his shoes and went in his stockinged feet (despite his cold) to the front attic and down the other stairway, taking one step at a time to avoid the creaks. It took him fifteen minutes to negotiate the stairs, but he wound up safely in the office after having entered from the outside. In the meantime, Bep had gotten rid of van Maaren and come to get Mr. Kugler from the Annex. But he’d already left and at that moment was still tiptoeing down the stairs. What must the passersby have thought when they saw the manager putting on his shoes outside? Hey, you there, in the socks! Yours, Anne WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1943 Dearest Kitty, It’s Mrs. van Daan’s birthday. Other than one ration stamp each for cheese, meat and bread, all she received from us was a jar of jam. Her husband, Dussel and the office staff gave her nothing but flowers and also food. Such are the times we live in!

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  They regarded Socrates’ teaching as blasphemous, even though he was traditionally devout and attended the public rituals as scrupulously as he performed his military service. But anxiety was about to turn into hysteria. In 416, Alcibiades made an emotional speech in the assembly, arguing that Athens should go to the aid of its ally Segesta, in Sicily, which was being attacked by the nearby city of Selinus. The general Niceas (Socrates’ sparring partner) was against the expedition, but Alcibiades and the younger generation carried the day. It was a disastrous decision, since most of the citizens who voted for the war had no idea of the size and power of Sicily. Just before the fleet disembarked, somebody vandalized the Herms, the phallic statues of the god Hermes that were placed throughout the city to protect streets and houses. Nobody knew who was responsible, but the incident shook Athens to the core. People were convinced that this blatant sacrilege would call down divine vengeance. There were witch hunts, suspects were executed, and eventually Alcibiades himself was recalled from Sicily to answer charges of blasphemy. There ensued a series of disasters. The Athenian navy was blockaded in the harbor at Syracuse, and the troops were incarcerated in nearby stone quarries. At a stroke, Athens lost about forty thousand men and half its fleet. In 411, a pro-Spartan cabal overturned the democratic government in Athens. The coup was short-lived, and democracy was restored the following year, but it was a sign of Athens’s new vulnerability. The war with Sparta continued until 405, when the Spartan general Lysander forced Athens to surrender. Yet again, an oligarchy was established under a government of thirty pro-Spartan aristocrats, who killed so many citizens in the ensuing reign of terror that it was overthrown, and democracy reestablished after only a year. Athens had regained its independence, its democracy, and its fleet, but its power was broken, the empire dismantled, and Pericles’ great defensive wall demolished. Against this terrifying backcloth, two great tragedies were enacted in Athens. Just before Athens conceded defeat in 406, Euripides died, and his final dark, bitter plays, lurid with a sense of looming catastrophe, were performed posthumously. The last was The Bacchae, presented in 402. 42 As the play opened, the god Dionysus arrived incognito in Thebes, the city that had rejected his mother, Semele, when she had fallen pregnant, and had consistently prohibited his cult. But now most Thebans were enchanted by the fascinating stranger who had suddenly turned up in their midst. The women of the city, who had not been properly initiated into the Dionysian mystery, abandoned themselves to unbridled frenzy, roaming through the woods, clad in animal pelts. The young king Pentheus tried to restore order, but to no avail.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The states were also weakened by internal problems. During the sixth century, Qi, Jin, and Chu were all fatally debilitated by chronic civil wars. In Lu, three competing baronial families had reduced the legitimate duke to a mere puppet. This in itself was a sign of the times. The descendant of the great duke of Zhou had been stripped of all power except his ritual duties, and was financially dependent upon the usurpers. Old political and social structures were disintegrating, and China seemed to be rushing headlong into anarchy. Yet these struggles signaled a deeper change. The noblemen who rebelled against their princes were certainly motivated by greed and ambition, but they were also trying to free themselves from the domination of the older families. The Chinese were painfully moving toward a more egalitarian polity that would undermine the hitherto unchallenged rule of the hereditary princes. 88 In Cheng and Lu, there were fiscal and agricultural reforms that improved the lot of the peasants. In the second half of the sixth century, Zichan, prime minister of the principality of Cheng, inscribed and displayed the penal laws on large bronze cauldrons. There was now a definite law code, which anybody could consult to challenge arbitrary rule. As archaeologists have discovered, there was a growing contempt for ritual observance: people were placing profane objects in the tombs of their relatives instead of the prescribed ritual vessels. The old spirit of moderation was in decline: many of the Chinese had developed a new taste for luxury, which put an unbearable strain on the economy, as demand outstripped resources. Some of the ordinary gentlemen ( shi ) at the bottom of the feudal hierarchy had begun to ape the lifestyle of the great families. As a result, there were now too many aristocrats, so a worrying number of the shi were fatally impoverished. There were now so many nouveaux riches that some members of the nobility could no longer own a fief, because there was not enough land to go around. Many gentlemen, including some who were close relatives of the princes, lost their lands and titles and were reduced to the rank of commoners. Some of the demoted shi were scribes, ritualists, or captains in the army, who were now forced to leave the city and take their skills into the countryside, where they lived with the common people. This was not simply a social and political crisis. Heaven and earth were so interdependent that many people feared that the current scorn for the Way of Heaven endangered the entire cosmos. The ritualists of Lu saw the new greed, aggression, and materialism as a blasphemous assault on the sacred rites. Others were more skeptical. In 534, many of the Chinese states were devastated by a typhoon, which was followed by deadly forest fires.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Inevitably, you begin to feel the need to control your lover. You have crucial emotional interests to protect because your well-being now seems to depend on the actions and feelings of someone else. In addition, you naturally want to express the enlarged sense of self he or she has stimulated. You want your beloved to recognize and respond to your needs, preferably knowing what they are as if by magic. You may resort to manipulation and ultimatums to get your way, strategies not noted for winning affection. The intensity and insecurity of the romantic situation can push both surrender and control to their destructive extremes. Dr. Person sums up the danger: “When the pursuit of merger is unchecked, the lover becomes either a slave or a tyrant.”8 In her classic book The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir speculates that extremes of romantic surrender may be a natural outgrowth of feminine psychology, especially the inferior social standing of women. At the same time, men—having learned to react to danger with aggression and force—are probably more prone to slip into dominance. Love’s darkest aspects frequently loom largest when limerence is about to die. Occasionally, romantic intensity merely sputters out. More commonly, dying love turns rancid for a time. The same selective and exaggerated perceptions that idealized the beloved in early limerence now reverse and turn him or her into a monster. As love turns to hate, mental energies that once concentrated on adoration are now directed toward fantasies of revenge, sometimes leading to destructive, occasionally murderous acts. Dr. Person eloquently gets to the heart of the matter: The deep irrational force in love, so necessary to the projects of transcendence and transformation, may sometimes run amok. This is, of course, why love is so often likened to madness. Passionate love, like all the experiences that open up the self, verges on the borders of self-harm and aggression. In fact, such hazards are intrinsic to all the great creative projects. Rare though the descent from passion to madness may be, its very possibility is the main inspiration for the cautionary approach to love, and for the futile attempt to rationalize and tame it, to declare “rational” mature love as the happy alternative to passionate love.9 She believes, as I do, that the romantic experience can only move and change us—for better or worse—to the extent that the usual barriers between conscious and unconscious, ideal self and dark self, are temporarily let down. No wonder the romantic adventure is fraught with risk.

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

  All which is rationally explicable by expectation and suggestion, if only it be farther admitted that his senses are acutely sharpened for all the operator's movements. [538] He often shows great anxiety and restlessness if the latter is out of the room. A favorite experiment of Mr. E. Gurney's was to put the subject's hands through an opaque screen, and cause the operator to point at one finger. That finger presently grew insensible or rigid. A bystander pointing simultaneously at another finger, never made that insensible or rigid. Of course the elective rapport with their operator had been developed in these trained subjects during the hypnotic state, but the phenomenon then occurred in some of them during the waking state, even when their consciousness was absorbed in animated conversation with a fourth party. [539] I confess that when I saw these experiments I was impressed with the necessity for admitting between the emanations from different people differences for which we have no name, and a discriminative sensibility for them of the nature of which we can form no clear conception, but which seems to be developed in certain subjects by the hypnotic trance.— The enigmatic reports of the effect of magnets and metals, even if they be due, as many contend, to unintentional suggestion on the operator's part, certainly involve hyperæsthetic perception, for the operator seeks as well as possible to conceal the moment when the magnet is brought into play, and yet the subject not only finds it out that moment in away difficult to understand, but may develop effects which (in the first instance certainly) the operator did not expect to find. Unilateral contractures, movements, paralyses, hallucinations, etc., are made to pass to tile other side of the body, hallucinations to disappear, or to change to the complementary color, suggested emotions to pass into their opposites, etc. Many Italian observations agree with the French ones, and the upshot is that if unconscious suggestion lie at the bottom of this matter, the patients show an enormously exalted power of divining what it is they are expected to do. This hyperæsthetic perception is what concerns us now. [540] Its modus cannot yet be said to be defined. Changes in the nutrition of the tissues may be produced by suggestion. These effects lead into therapeutics—a subject which I do not propose to treat of here. But I may say that there seems no reasonable ground for doubting that in certain chosen subjects the suggestion of a congestion, a burn, a blister, a raised papule, or a bleeding from the nose or skin, may produce the effect. Messrs, Beaunis, Berjon, Bernheim, Bourru, Burot, Charcot, Delbœuf, Dumontpalier, Focachon, Forel, Jendrássik, Krafft-Ebing, Liébault, Liégeois, Lipp, Mabille, and others have recently vouched for one or other of these effects. Messrs. Delbœuf and Liégeois have annulled by suggestion, one the effects of a burn, the other of a blister.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  It’s getting to be a bore, and it’s all I can do to keep from turning into a dreary old crone myself! Though with all the old folks around me, that might not be such a bad idea! Here’s a shining example, a speech made by our beloved Winston Churchill. Nine o’clock, Sunday evening. The teapot, under its cozy, is on the table, and the guests enter the room. Dussel sits to the left of the radio, Mr. van D. in front of it and Peter to the side. Mother is next to Mr. van D., willi Mrs. van D. behind them. Margot and I are sitting in the last row and Pim at the table. I realize this isn’t a very clear description of our seating arrangements, but it doesn’t matter. The men smoke, Peter’s eyes close from the strain of listening, Mama is dressed in her long, dark negligee, Mrs. van D. is trembling because of the planes, which take no notice of the speech but fly blithely on toward Essen, Father is slurping his tea, and Margot and I are united in a sisterly way by the sleeping Mouschi, who has taken possession of both our knees. Margot’s hair is in curlers and my nightgown is too small, too tight and too short. It all looks so intimate, cozy and peaceful, and for once it really is. Yet I await the end of the speech willi dread. They’re impatient, straining at the leash to start another argument! Pst, pst, like a cat luring a mouse from its hole, they goad each other into quarrels and dissent. Yours, Anne TUESDAY, MARCH 28, 1944 My dearest Kitty, As much as I’d like to write more on politics, I have lots of other news to report today. First, Mother has virtually forbidden me to go up to Peter’s, since, according to her, Mrs. van Daan is jealous. Second, Peter’s invited Margot to join us upstairs. Whether he really means it or is just saying it out of politeness, I don’t know. Third, I asked Father if he thought I should take any notice of Mrs. van Daan’s jealousy and he said I didn’t have to. What should I do now? Mother’s angry, doesn’t want me going upstairs, wants me to go back to doing my homework in the room I share willi Dussel. She may be jealous herself. Father doesn’t begrudge us those few hours and thinks it’s nice we get along so well. Margot likes Peter too, but feels that three people can’t talk about the same things as two. Furthermore, Mother thinks Peter’s in love with me. To tell you the truth, I wish he were. Then we’d be even, and it’d be a lot easier to get to know each other. She also claims he’s always looking at me. Well, I suppose we do give each other the occasional wink. But I can’t help it if he keeps admiring my dimples, can I?

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  A society of se l f - ful fillers, whose affilia tions are more and more seen as revocable, cannot sustain the stron g identification with the political commu nity which public freedom needs. Robert Bellah and his co-authors probe this erosion of the political in their Habits of the Heart. The primacy of self-fulfilment, particularly in it s therapeutic variants, generates the notion that the only associations one can identify with are those formed voluntarily and which foster self-fulfilment, such as the 'life-style enclaves' in which people of similar interests or situation dus ter--e.g. , the retirement suburbs in the South, or revocable romantic relationships. 19 Beyond these associations lies the domain of strategic rela tions, where instrumental considerations are paramount. The therapeutic outlook seems to conceive community on the model of associations like Parents without Partners, a body which is highly useful for its members w hile they are in a given predicament, but to which there is no call to feel any allegiance once one is no longer in need. 20 The ethic generat ed bey ond se lf-fulfilment is precisely that of procedural fairness, w hich plays a big role in the instrumentalist outlook. Politically, this bit of the 'counter-culture' fits perfectly into the instrumental, bureaucratic world it was thought t o c hal lenge. It strengthens it. There can also be more sinister or threatening offshoots of this cult u re. The "triumph of the therapeutic" can also mean an abdication of autono m y , where the lapse of traditional standards, coupled with the belief in techniq u e , makes p eople cease to trust their own instincts about happiness, fulfil m e n t, and how to bring up their children. Then the "helping professions" take o v e r th eir lives , 2 1 a p rocess described by Foucault but perha p s not adequ a t el y explain e d by hi�. And the extreme mobility and provisional nature o f relationships can lead to a s hrinking of th e time sense, a feeling of inhabi t in g a narrow band of time, with an unknown past and a foreshortened futu r e.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Mencius was acutely aware that China had changed—in his view, for the worse. “The people have never suffered more under tyrannical government than today,” he lamented. “It must be that Heaven does not desire to bring peace to the world.” But if Heaven did want to save the world, who else but he could do it? 43 As a mere commoner, he could not be a sage king, but he did believe that he been appointed Heaven’s messenger to the princes. The people were crying out for good leadership. They would flock to any ruler who treated them kindly, with benevolence and justice. When it was clear that the princes would never take him seriously, Mencius retired and wrote a book that recorded his discussions with the rulers he had tried to serve. He believed that it was impossible to govern by force. The people submitted to coercive rule because they had no choice, but if a peace- loving king came to power, they would flock to him “with admiration in their hearts” because goodness had a “transformative power.” 44 Instead of relying on military might, he told King Hui, he should “reduce punishment and taxation, and get the people to plough deeply and weed promptly.” In their spare time, able-bodied young men must learn to live by the family li, and become good brothers and sons. Once they had received this moral grounding, they would, as a matter of course, be loyal subjects and a source of great strength. They would “inflict defeat on the strong armour and sharp weapons” of the larger states, even if they were “armed with nothing but staves.” 45 Why? Because all the best ministers would want to serve in the administration of a just and compassionate king; farmers would want to cultivate his lands; merchants to trade in his cities. “Anyone with a grievance against their own rulers would come and complain to your Majesty,” Mencius told King Hui. “If that happens, who could stop it?” 46 Confucius had believed that ritual alone could transform society, but Mencius had witnessed the economic and agricultural revolutions of the Warring States period. Instead of admiring their ritual proficiency, Mencius revered Yao and Shun as engineers, practical men of action. At the time of Yao, China had been overwhelmed by a terrible flood, and Yao—alone of all the people—“was filled with anxiety.” 47 He cut channels for the water, so that it could flow into the sea, and the people were able to level the ground and make it habitable. Shun appointed Yu his minister of works, and for eight long years Yu had dredged the rivers, deepened their beds, and built new dikes. In all that time, he never slept a single night in his own house.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  During the Chinese Axial Age, some of the philosophers would reject the artifice of ritual, but others would build a profound spirituality based upon these liturgical ceremonies. The establishment of the rites was one of the great achievements of the Zhou, and later generations recognized this. The Record of Rites, a text that was only completed after the Axial Age, remarked that the Shang had put the spirits in first place, and the rites second, but the Zhou put the rites first and the spirits second.55 The Shang had wanted to use their rituals to control and exploit the gods, but the Zhou had intuitively realized that the rites themselves contained a much stronger transformative power. By the end of the ninth century, it was clear that the Zhou dynasty was in dire straits. In 842, King Lih was deposed and forced into exile. The embarrassing failure of the kings made some people skeptical. If the sons of Heaven were so incompetent and shortsighted, what did that say about the High God himself? Poets began to write satirical odes: “Di on High is so contradictory, that the people below are all exhausted,” one wrote. The kings and their royal rites no longer embodied the Way: “You utter talk that is not true . . . and there is no substance at the altar.”56 When King Lih died in exile in 828, his son was restored to power. But the Way was not reestablished; poets noted that in these days there was one natural disaster after another. Despite the meticulous performance of the rites, drought was burning up the country, and the ancestors did nothing at all to help: The great mandate is about to end. Nothing to look ahead to or back upon. The host of dukes and past rulers Does not help us. As for Mother and Father and the ancestors How can they treat us so?57 The rituals were still performed beautifully, and still had a profound effect on the participants, but a few tough-minded critics were beginning to lose faith in their magical efficacy. Yet the response to this growing crisis would be more ritual—not less. By the ninth century, ritual experts in India had embarked on a liturgical reformation that inaugurated India’s Axial Age. In the course of a systematic analysis of the sacrificial rituals, they discovered the inner self. We know little about these ritualists as individuals. We do not know their names, and they left no personal record of their journey toward this new vision. We know only that they belonged to the Brahmin priestly class, which had risen to new prominence during the late Vedic period.58 Their work was preserved in the Brahmanas, technical ritual texts compiled between the ninth and seventh centuries. What does emerge from these somewhat dry treatises is that the reformers were motivated by the desire to eliminate violence from the sacrificial rites.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Brian’s bind is far from unusual. Sex therapists regularly encounter men—and sometimes women too—who seem determined to avoid the comfortable, nonperformance-oriented touching that has helped thousands to resolve their sexual problems. Unfortunately, relatively few therapists are prepared to grapple with the untidy fact that anxiety isn’t just a pesky impediment to be banished as efficiently as possible. The neat-and-clean view of sexuality that dominates modern sex therapy has little to offer someone like Brian. What he needed was to have the awkward truth about his inner conflict recognized; comfort and arousal had become hopelessly incompatible. For many years Brian’s CET, with its focus on the dangerous edge, had enabled him to transform anxiety into a source of excitation—well worth the occasional disruption of his sexual functioning. But now anxiety-the-aphrodisiac had become anxiety-the-erection-killer. Once Brian understood what was going on, he invited Julia to join us for couple’s therapy, an invitation she eagerly accepted.3 As they worked together to rebuild mutually satisfying sexual interactions, Brian’s attachment to anxiety as an aphrodisiac and his concern that relaxation was incompatible with arousal were an open and regular part of our discussions. EMOTIONAL APHRODISIACS IN CONTEXTVirtually any emotion can either promote or negate arousal. While some people are able to put up with very high levels of even the most potentially disruptive emotions, others can tolerate practically none at all. A person’s response to emotion can also change over time, often dramatically, as it had for Brian. What had brought Brian’s conflict with anxiety to the breaking point? For one thing, Brian was getting older. Most men recall a time in their teens and twenties when erections were triggered reflexively by almost anything. Young men manage to get and keep erections under the most awkward conditions—such as fumbling nervously in the backseat of a car while pretending to know what they’re doing. As men age, however, an increasing proportion can’t always take their erections for granted. So it was for Brian, who, entering his forties, was becoming increasingly susceptible to the arousal-blocking effects of high anxiety. Equally important was the fact that he had grown to care for Julia more than any other woman he had ever dated. Since he wanted the relationship to work, a new form of anxiety entered the picture—a fear that sex might ruin his chances for love. Also, Julia preferred easy, comfortable sex in the safety of her own bed—the polar opposite of Brian. You can see how a combination of changing circumstances can transform an aphrodisiac into an antiaphrodisiac. And when an unworkable turn-on collapses, it often leaves a gaping void where desire used to be. Nancy and Burt: Alcohol recovery unleashes guilt

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

  Cold produces pallor and gooseflesh, warmth smooths out the skin and widens the vessels. If one notices the uncomfortable mood brought about by strained expectation, anxiety before a public address, vexation at an unmerited affront, etc., one finds that the suffering part of it concentrates itself principally in the chest, and that it consists in a soreness, hardly to be called pain, felt in the middle of the breast and due to an unpleasant resistance which is offered to the movements of inspiration, and sets a limit to their extent. The insufficiency of the diaphragm is obtruded upon consciousness, and we try by the aid of the external voluntary chest-muscles to draw a deeper breath. [This is the sigh.] If we fail, the unpleasantness of the situation is increased, for then to our mental distress is added the corporeally repugnant feeling of lack of air, a slight degree of suffocation. If, on the contrary, the outer muscles overcome the resistance of the inner ones, the oppressed breast is lightened. We think we speak symbolically when we speak of a stone weighing on our heart, or of a burden rolled from off our breast. But really we only express the exact fact, for we should have to raise the entire weight of the atmosphere (about 820 kilog.) at each inspiration, if the air did not balance it by streaming into our lungs." (P. 55.) It must not be forgotten that an inhibition of the inspiratory centre similar to that produced by exciting the superior laryngeal nerve may possibly play a part in these phenomena. For a very interesting discussion of the respiratory difficulty and its connection with anxiety and fear, see 'A Case of Hydrophobia' by the lamented Thos. B. Curtis in the Boston Med. and Surg. Journal, Nov. 7 and 14, 1878, and remarks thereon by James J. Putnam, ibid. Nov. 21. [415] Origin of the Emotions, Darwin, pp. 290-2. [416] La Physionomie et l'Expression des Sentiments (Paris, 1885), p. 140. [417] Lange, op. cit. p. 75. [418] Professor Höffding, in his excellent treatise on Psychology, admits (p. 342) the mixture of bodily sensation with purely spiritual affection in the emotions. He does not, however, discuss the difficulties of discerning the spiritual affection (nor even show that he has fairly considered them) in his contention that it exists. [419] Ein Fall von allgemeiner Anæsthesie (Heidelberg, 1882). [420] Ziemssen's Deutsches Archiv für klinische Medicin, XXII. 321. [421] The not very uncommon cases of hysterical hemianæsthesia are not complete enough to be utilized in this inquiry. Moreover, the recent researches, of which some account was given in Chapter IV, tend to show that hysterical anæsthesia is not a real absence of sensibility, but a 'dissociation,' as M. Pierre Janet calls it, or splitting-off of certain sensations from the rest of the person's consciousness, this rest forming the self which remains connected with tire ordinary organs of expression.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  He lives with a charming Christian lady who’s quite a bit younger than he is. They’re probably not married, but that’s beside the point. He’s known to be quiet and refined, and he seemed, from our superficial acquaintance with him, to be nice. Miep knows him as well, so she’ll be able to make the necessary arrangements. If he comes, Mr. Dussel will have to sleep in my room instead of Margot, who will have to make do with the folding bed.* [*After Dussel arrived, Margot slept in her parents’ bedroom.] We’ll ask him to bring along something to fill cavities with. Yours, Anne THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 1942 Dearest Kitty, Miep came to tell us that she’d been to see Dr. Dussel. He asked her the moment she entered the room if she knew of a hiding place and was enormously pleased when Miep said she had something in mind. She added “that he’d need to go into hiding as soon as possible, preferably Saturday, but he thought this was highly improbable, since he wanted to bring his records up to date, settle his accounts and attend to a couple of patients. Miep relayed the message to us this morning. We didn’t think it was wise to wait so long. All these preparations require explanations to various people who we feel ought to be kept in the dark. Miep went to ask if Dr. Dussel couldn’t manage to come on Saturday after all, but he said no, and now he’s scheduled to arrive on Monday. I think it’s odd that he doesn’t jump at our proposal. If they pick him up on the street, it won’t help either his records or his patients, so why the delay? If you ask me, it’s stupid of Father to humor him. Otherwise, no news. Yours, Anne TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1942 Dearest Kitty! Mr. Dussel has arrived. Everything went smoothly. Miep told him to be at a certain place in front of the post office at 11 A.M., when a man would meet him, and he was at the appointed place at the appointed time. Mr. Kleiman went up to him, announced that the man he was expecting to meet was unable to come and asked him to drop by the office to see Miep. Mr. Kleiman took a streetcar back to the office while Mr. Dussel followed on foot. It was eleven-twenty when Mr. Dussel tapped on the office door. Miep asked him to remove his coat, so the yellow star couldn’t be seen, and brought him to the private office, where Mr. Kleiman kept him occupied until the cleaning lady had gone. On the pretext that the private office was needed for something else, Miep took Mr. Dussel upstairs, opened the bookcase and stepped inside, while Mr. Dussellooked on in amazement. In the meantime, the seven of us had seated ourselves around the dining table to await the latest addition to our family with coffee and cognac.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The Shang nobility had no interest in agriculture, but they clearly experienced the landscape as rich in spiritual meaning. Mountains, rivers, and winds were all important gods, as were the lords of the four cardinal directions. These nature gods belonged to the Earth, which was the divine counterpart of Di, the Sky God. Because they could affect the harvest, they were placated and cajoled by sacrifice. Of even greater importance, however, were the ancestors of the royal house, whose cult was at the heart of Shang religion. Excavations at Yin (modern Anyang) have uncovered the tombs of nine kings; they lay in their coffins on a central platform, surrounded by the remains of soldiers who had been sacrificed at their funerals. After his death, a king achieved divine status; he lived in heaven with Di and could ask him to help his living relatives on earth.71 The Shang were convinced that the fate of the dynasty depended upon the goodwill of the deceased kings. While Di had no special cult of his own, and the nature gods no regular rites, the ancestors were worshiped in lavish ceremonies; each had his or her festival day in the ritual calendar. The kings held ceremonies, “hosting” (bin) their forefathers. Members of the royal family would dress up as their deceased relatives, feeling themselves to be possessed by the ancestor they impersonated, and when they entered the court, the king would bow down before them. The nature gods were summoned to share the feast in the palace courtyard, where quantities of animals were sacrificed and cooked. Then gods, ancestors, and human beings would feast together. But behind this elaborate ritual lurked a deep anxiety.72 Di was the guardian of towns and cities. He ruled the rains and the winds, and gave orders to the nature gods in the same way as the Shang king gave directions to his officials and soldiers. But Di was unpredictable. He often sent drought, flooding, and disaster. Even the ancestors were unreliable. The Shang believed that the spirits of the dead could be dangerous, so relatives buried the deceased in thick wooden coffins, treated their bodies with jade, and stuffed their orifices, lest the spirit escape and prey upon the living. Rituals were devised to turn a potentially troublesome ghost into a helpful, benevolent presence. The deceased was given a new name and assigned a special day for worship in the hope that he would now be kindly disposed toward the community. With the passing of time, an ancestor became more powerful, so rituals were designed to persuade the newly deceased to plead their cause with the more exalted ancestors, who might, in their turn, intercede with Di.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  In addition to whatever limits you place on your body, you’ve also seen how emotional concerns, conflicts, and fears as varied as fingerprints are woven into your erotic patterns. Any deeply held doubts you may have about your desirability, attractiveness, sexual adequacy, or the normalcy of your preferences are particularly potent and persistent inhibitors. Your CET tries valiantly to transform these difficulties into aphrodisiacs but isn’t always successful. Miraculously, during peak experiences the body tends to release its rigid postures as all emotional concerns spontaneously evaporate. Somehow you’re able to revel in the joy of the moment and celebrate your childlike freedom. Here’s how Maslow describes these extraordinary states: …a complete, though momentary, loss of fear, anxiety, inhibition, defense and control, a giving up of renunciation, delay and restraint. The fear of disintegration and dissolution, the fear of being overwhelmed by the “instincts,” the fear of death and insanity, the fear of giving in to unbridled pleasure and emotion, all tend to disappear or go into abeyance for the time being.3 One-third of The Group’s peak encounters and a fifth of their fantasies spontaneously include references to themselves or their partners or both letting go of inhibitions, becoming playfully experimental, or highly expressive. I’m convinced that at least some reduction in those things that normally hold us back is a prerequisite for peak sex. BETTER SEX THROUGH CHEMISTRY?It’s not unusual for people to seek chemical assistance in their struggle with inhibitions. Among The Group, 46 percent reported having at least one drink before peak encounters, 14 percent used marijuana, 4 percent used cocaine or other stimulants, and a handful used psychedelics or nitrite inhalants (“poppers”). Any of these drugs can help overcome inhibitions and increase our focus on building sensations. The risk, of course, is that we may become dependent on one or more drugs to free us. In the worst cases it’s difficult or impossible for a person to experience high arousal when sober—obviously a sign of serious trouble.4 Relatively few members of The Group who use alcohol or other drugs before or during their peak turn-ons actually mention them in their stories. Instead they reveal their drug use by answering questions about it in the SES. Those who do allude to drugs in their stories usually mention drinking as part of the social context for an encounter or as a calculated strategy for overcoming their own inhibitions or those of a reticent partner. The smaller number who mention smoking marijuana in their stories typically comment on its ability to intensify sensations.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  After my irregular French verbs, I joined them and read The Woods Are Singing for All Eternity. It’s quite a beautiful book, but very unusual. I’m almost finished. Next week it’s Bep’s turn to spend the night. Yours, Anne THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29, 1942 My dearest Kitty, I’m very worried. Father’s sick. He’s covered with spots and has a high temperature. It looks like measles. Just think, we can’t even call a doctor! Mother is making him perspire in hopes of sweating out the fever. This morning Miep told us that the furniture has been removed from the van Daans’ apartment on Zuider-Amstellaan. We haven’t told Mrs. van D. yet. She’s been so “nervenmassig”* [*nervous] lately, and we don’t feel like hearing her moan and groan again about all the beautiful china and lovely chairs she had to leave behind. We had to abandon most of our nice things too. What’s the good of grumbling about it now? Father wants me to start reading books by Hebbel and other well-known German writers. I can read German fairly well by now, except that I usually mumble the words instead of reading them silently to myself. But that’ll pass. Father has taken the plays of Goethe and Schiller down from the big bookcase and is planning to read to me every evening. We’ve started off with Don Carlos. Encouraged by Father’s good example, Mother pressed her prayer book into my hands. I read a few prayers in German, just to be polite. They certainly sound beautiful, but they mean very little to me. Why is she making me act so religious and devout? Tomorrow we’re going to light the stove for the first time. The chimney hasn’t been swept in ages, so the room is bound to fill with smoke. Let’s hope the thing draws! Yours, Anne MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1942 Dear Kitty, Bep stayed with us Friday evening. It was fun, but she didn’t sleep very well because she’d drunk some wine. For the rest, there’s nothing special to report. I had an awful headache yesterday and went to bed early. Margot’s being exasperating again. This morning I began sorting out an index card file from the office, because it’d fallen over and gotten all mixed up. Before long I was going nuts. I asked Margot and Peter to help, but they were too lazy, so I put it away. I’m not crazy enough to do it all by myself! Anne Frank PS. I forgot to mention the important news that I’m probably going to get my period soon. I can tell because I keep finding a whitish smear in my panties, and Mother predicted it would start soon. I can hardly wait. It’s such a momentous event. Too bad I can’t use sanitary napkins, but you can’t get them anymore, and Mama’s tampons can be used only by women who’ve had a baby.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  All over the country people are trying to get hold of an old radio that they can hand over instead of their “morale booster.” It’s true: as the reports from outside grow worse and worse, the radio, with its wondrous voice, helps us not to lose heart and to keep telling ourselves, “Cheer up, keep your spirits high, things are bound to get better!” Yours, Anne SUNDAY, JULY 11, 1943 Dear Kitty, To get back to the subject of child-rearing (for the umpteenth time), let me tell you that I’m doing my best to be helpful, friendly and kind and to do all I can to keep the rain of rebukes down to a light drizzle. It’s not easy trying to behave like a model child with people you can’t stand, especially when you don’t mean a word of it. But I can see that a little hypocrisy gets me a lot further than myoid method of saying exactly what I think (even though no one ever asks my opinion or cares one way or another). Of course, I often forget my role and find it impossible to curb my anger when they’re unfair, so that they spend the next month saying the most impertinent girl in the world. Don’t you think I’m to be pitied sometimes? It’s a good thing I’m not the grouchy type, because then I might become sour and bad-tempered. I can usually see the humorous side of their scoldings, but it’s easier when somebody else is being raked over the coals. Further, I’ve decided (after a great deal of thought) to drop the shorthand. First, so that I have more time for my other subjects, and second, because of my eyes. That’s a sad story. I’ve become very nearsighted and should have had glasses ages ago. (Ugh, won’t I look like a dope!). But as you know, people in hiding can’t. . . Yesterday all anyone here could talk about was Anne’s eyes, because Mother had suggested I go to the ophthalmologist with Mrs. Kleiman. Just hearing this made my knees weak, since it’s no small matter. Going outside! Just think of it, walking down the street! I can’t imagine it. I was petrified at first, and then glad. But it’s not as simple as all that; the various authorities who had to approve such a step were unable to reach a quick decision. They first had to carefully weigh all the difficulties and risks, though Miep was ready to set off immediately with me in tow. In the meantime, I’d taken my gray coat from the closet, but it was so small it looked as if it might have belonged to my little sister. We lowered the hem, but I still couldn’t button it.