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 Austerlitz (2001)

  others served the Lithuanians and then the Russians once more as prisons. In 1941 they fell into German hands, including the notorious Fort IX where Wehrmacht command posts were set up and where more than thirty thousand people were killed over the next three years. Their remains, says Jacobson, lie under a field of oats a hundred meters outside the walls. Transports from the west kept coming to Kaunas until May 1944, when the war had long since been lost, as the last messages from those locked in the dungeons of the fortress bear witness. One of them, writes Jacobson, scratched the words Nous sommes neuf cents Francais on the cold limestone wall of the bunker. Others left only a date and place of origin with their names: Lob, Marcel, de St. Nazaire; Wechsler, Abram, de Limoges; Max Stern, Paris, 18.5.44. Sitting by the moat of the fortress of Breendonk, I read to the end of the fifteenth chapter of Heshel’s Kingdom, and then set out on my way back to Mechelen, reaching the town as evening began to fall. ~ On looking through these notes I remember that in February 1971, during a short visit to Switzerland, one of the places I visited was Lucerne. After seeing the Glacier Museum I spent some time standing on the bridge over the lake on my way back to the station, because the view of its dome and the snow-white heights of the Pilatus massif rising in the clear winter sky behind it had reminded me of my conversation with Austerlitz in Antwerp four and a half years earlier. A few hours later, on the night of 4 February, long after I was fast asleep in my hotel room in Zurich, a fire broke out in Lucerne Station, spread very rapidly and entirely destroyed the domed building. I could not get the pictures I saw next day in the newspapers and on television out of my head for several weeks, and they gave me an uneasy, anxious feeling which crystallized into the idea that I had been to blame, or at least one of those to blame, for the Lucerne fire. In my dreams, even years later, I sometimes saw the flames leaping from the dome and lighting up the entire panorama of the snow-covered Alps. ABOUT THE AUTHOR W. G. SEBALD was born in Wertach im Allgau, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His books have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. He died in December 2001. 2011 Modern Library Trade Paperback Edition

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  another member of staff calls you into a separate cubicle, as if you were on business of an extremely dubious nature, or at least had to be dealt with away from the public gaze, and here you must say again what it is you have come for and receive the relevant instructions. Despite such measures of control I finally succeeded, said Austerlitz, in gaining admission to the newly opened Haut-de- jardin public reading room, where I subsequently sat for many hours and days on end, looking out abstractedly, as my habit now is, at the inner courtyard and the curious nature reserve cut, so to speak, from the surface of the promenade deck and sunk two or three stories deep, which has been planted with about a hundred full-grown stone pines from the Forét de Bord transported, how I do not know, to this place of banishment. If one looks down from the deck at the spreading gray-green crowns of the trees, some of which perhaps are still thinking of their home in Normandy, it is like looking across an uneven expanse of moorland, while from the reading room you can see only the blotched red trunks which, although fixed in place with steel hawsers rising at an oblique angle, sway slightly back and forth on stormy days like waterweed in an aquarium. In the daydreams into which I fell in the reading room, said Austerlitz, I sometimes felt as if I saw circus acrobats climbing the cables slanting up from the ground to the evergreen canopy, placing one foot in front of the other as they made their way upwards with the ends of their balancing poles quivering, or as if, always on the edge of invisibility, I saw dodging now here, now there, those two mythical squirrels said to have been brought to the library in the hope that they will increase and multiply, founding a large colony of their species in this artificial pine grove to entertain any readers who look up from their books now and then. And several times, said Austerlitz, birds which had lost their way in the library forest flew into the mirror images of the trees in the reading room windows, struck the glass with a dull thud, and fell lifeless to the ground. Sitting at my place in the reading room, said Austerlitz, I thought at length about the way in which such unforeseen accidents, the fall of a single creature to its death when diverted from its natural path, or the recurrent symptoms of paralysis affecting the electronic data retrieval system, relate to the Cartesian overall plan of the Bibliothéque Nationale, and I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed ultimately must coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability. At any rate, as far as I myself was concerned, a man who, after all, had devoted almost the whole of his life to the study of books and who had been equally at home in the Bodleian, the British Museum, and the rue Richelieu, I for my part, said

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  38 Politics thus often morph into forms of religion , claiming the right to define the fundamental purpose and meaning of human life. The result is inevitable – a tendency towards intolerance and violence when these secular ‘objects of worship and devotion’ are challenged or threatened. Ontologically, they are secular; functionally, they are divine – and divisive. On Coping with Difference I noted earlier Charles Taylor’s remark that ‘understanding the “other”’ is the greatest social challenge that we face today. While I think he’s right, I’m not sure he offers us a solution to this problem – more a way of understanding how it arises, and how we might learn to live with it. It’s better than nothing. But dare we hope for more? The central problem is this: our defining beliefs – especially about ultimate questions, such as the nature of justice or the question of meaning in life – remain obstinately resistant to philosophical or scientific justification. There is no Archimedean point from which such beliefs can be evaluated. The modern period has witnessed a surge of alternative beliefs (often carefully packaged and presented as reliable certainties), rather than a solution to how we live with a plurality of informing and controlling beliefs, and cope with the social tensions that inevitably arise from this. Belief systems are often an extension or an essential component of what Hélène Cixous describes as ‘the battle for mastery’ that rages everywhere between social classes and people groups. Paradoxically, many of those who challenge their social, political or intellectual ‘masters’ simply propose an overcoming of those specific masters and their replacement with alternatives – a process that Julietta Singh describes as ‘an overcoming, a mastering of that which masters’. 39 Singh’s concern is that this appears to concede ‘the inescapability of mastery as a way of life’. A similar pattern underlies critiques of beliefs. The problem, we are told, is that we have the wrong set of beliefs; once we adopt the right set, everything will be just fine. For reasons we have explored, there are good reasons for accepting the ‘inescapability of belief as a way of life’. Yet this does not resolve the question of how we cope with such diversity and learn to live with the ensuing uncertainty. Individuals often find a sense of intellectual achievement and inner stability when they feel that they have found a way of holding together multiple aspects of their lives and when they can accept the tensions between their and others’ views. Yet when confronted by the fact of an irreducible plurality of beliefs, a liberal society needs to navigate a set of shared public values. Or so John Rawls argued in his impressive manifesto of egalitarian liberalism A Theory of Justice (1971), demanding that we find and impose principles of fairness that are independent of people’s different and contestable conceptions of what is ‘good’.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  As we went up to the third floor in the cramped lift, which scraped against one side of the shaft, in silence and with a sense of awkwardness because of the unnatural physical proximity into which one is forced in such a box, I saw a gentle pulsation in the curve of a blue vein beneath the skin of her right temple, almost as fast as the throbbing in a lizard’s throat when it lies motionless on a rock in the sun. We reached Mrs. Ambrosova’s office by walking down one of the galleries encircling the courtyard. I hardly dared glance over the balustrade to the depths below where two or three cars were parked, looking curiously elongated from above, or at least much longer than they would appear in the street. The office which we entered straight from this gallery was full of stacks of papers tied up with string, not a few of them discolored by sunlight and brittle at the edges, crammed into roll-front cupboards, deposited on shelves that sagged under their weight, piled high on a rickety little trolley which seemed to be specially intended for the transport of files, on an old-fashioned wing chair pushed against the wall, and on the two desks facing each other in the room. There were a good dozen houseplants among these mountains of paper, in plain clay flowerpots or brightly colored majolica jardiniéres: mimosas and myrtles, thick-leaved aloes, gardenias, and a large hoya twining its way around a trelliswork frame. Mrs Ambrosova, who had very courteously pulled out a chair for me beside her desk, listened attentively with her head tilted slightly to one side as, for the first time in my life, I began explaining to someone else that because of certain circumstances my origins had been unknown to me, and that for other reasons I had never inquired into them, but now felt compelled, because of a series of coincidental events, to conclude or at least to conjecture

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  zoo where large animals from the African colonies had once been put on display, said Austerlitz, elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, dromedaries, and crocodiles, although most of the enclosures, decked out with pitiful remnants of natural objects—tree stumps, artificial rocks, and pools of water—were now empty and deserted. On these walks it was not unusual for us to hear one of the children whose adult companions still took them to the zoo calling out, in some exasperation: Mais il est ou? Pourquoi il se cache? Pourquoi il ne bouge pas? Est-ce qu’il est mort? I recollect that I myself saw a family of fallow deer gathered together by a manger of hay near the perimeter fence of a dusty enclosure where no grass grew, a living picture of mutual trust and harmony which also had about it an air of constant vigilance and alarm. Marie particularly asked me to take a photograph of this beautiful group, and as she did so, said Austerlitz, she said something which I have never forgotten, she said that captive animals and we ourselves, their human counterparts, view one another a travers une bréche d’incompréhension. Marie spent every second or third weekend, continued Austerlitz, his narrative taking another direction, with her parents or wider family, who owned several estates in the wooded country around Compiégne or further north in Picardy. At those times when she was not in Paris, which always cast me into an anxious mood, I regularly set off to explore the outlying districts of the city, taking the Métro out to Montreuil, Malakoff, Charenton, Bobigny, Bagnolet, Le Pré St. Germain, St. Denis, St. Mandé, or elsewhere, to walk through the empty Sunday streets taking hundreds of banlieu-photographs, as I called them, pictures which in their very emptiness, as I realized only later, reflected my orphaned frame of mind. It was on such a suburban expedition, one unusually oppressive Sunday in September when gray storm clouds were rolling over the sky from the southwest, that I went out to Maisons-Alfort and there discovered the museum of veterinary medicine, of which I had never heard before, in the extensive grounds of the Ecole Vétérinaire, itself founded two hundred years ago. An old Moroccan sat at the entrance, wearing a kind of burnoose, with a fez on his head. I still have the twenty-franc ticket he sold me in my wallet, said Austerlitz, and taking it out he handed it to me over the table of the bistro where we were sitting as if there were something very special about it. (754115 ry On ereaet saake | see * . CHEQUE Postaunx DATE : BRL VIE KER Om a VERSEMENT | CHEQUES Se daaatin Nacasien |_OfsiGnANON DES PROoUTs | YESSENENT hancares

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  We owe it to our own nation and to others to develop a wider, more panoptic knowledge and understanding of our neighbors. First, recall the seventh step and remind yourself yet again of how little we know. People often pontificate about foreign affairs from a position of dangerous ignorance. The media are not always reliable: some newspapers or television channels have political or social agendas that slant their coverage of world events. The same is often true of politicians. In Britain during the buildup to the Iraq war, the government told the public that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he could use to attack British bases in Cyprus at forty minutes’ notice. Later it transpired that this was not the case. Many of the people who believed in the war were unaware that Western governments had supported and armed Saddam for years and therefore bore a measure of responsibility for the suffering he had inflicted on his people. The effort of getting to know one another demands sound information and a willingness to question received ideas. We may not have Socrates to goad us into self-knowledge and an appreciation of the profundity of our ignorance, but we can make a serious effort to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge. If you belong to a reading discussion group, you could use it to study books and articles that challenge some preconceived notions and discuss your reactions. Again, we begin with ourselves. We often have a myopic view of the history of our own country or religious tradition and criticize others for behavior of which “we” have been guilty in the past or even continue to be in the present. After the atrocities of September 11, 2001, I was often taken aback by the way some Christians berated the violence and intolerance they attributed to Islam, showing not only an embarrassing ignorance of Muslim history but a surprising blindness to the crusades, inquisitions, persecutions, and wars of religion that had scarred their own faith. I often felt that alongside programs titled “Understanding Islam” there should be a parallel course called “Understanding Christianity.” There was also a worrying lack of awareness about Western behavior during the colonial era, which had contributed to some of our current problems. A double standard, albeit unintended, violates our integrity and damages our credibility. In a global society, conflict is rarely the fault of only one party. All participants in a conflict have sown bad karma in the past, and we are all now reaping the results. When we are about to criticize another nation or religious tradition, we should get into the habit of catching ourselves and asking whether our own country may have been responsible for a similar abuse in the past.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  A more consistent approach was developed by the philosopher Alex Rosenberg. In his Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions, he sets out the view that that science is ‘our exclusive guide to reality’,12 offering us reliable certainties about our world and ourselves. In response to the question ‘What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad?’ Rosenberg declares that ‘there is no moral difference between them’. This alarming response needs unpacking. Rosenberg is advocating that the natural sciences are an ‘exclusive guide to reality’ – which precludes any moral values, in that these are not scientific notions. Science offers a descriptive account of how things function; it does not offer prescriptive declarations about what ought to be done. We need more than science to inform our ethics. Happily, science can answer most of our questions about the natural world, even if it can’t give us definitive answers to moral or existential questions. Science can certainly offer explanations for why we consider morality to be so important.13 For example, it could be argued that our evolutionary history predisposes us towards pro-social behaviour, in that this enhances our prospects for survival. But why should science be expected to teach us moral values? Or answer existentially important questions such as ‘How should I act?’ or ‘How should I live?’ It’s science, after all, not philosophy. Science has its own distinct toolkit, which enables it to answer its own spectrum of questions with unique authority and reliability. That’s one of the reasons why I love and respect science so much. But it doesn’t mean that science can answer all our questions, or that those that lie beyond its reach can be dismissed as pseudo-questions. Here’s the point: we feel that we need to answer moral questions – to be able to declare that certain acts are good and others bad; to name what we consider to be destructive to human wellbeing or the environment, and invest these judgements with deeper significance than a personal indication of distaste. Something deep within us whispers that these questions are important and need to be respected and answered. While modern psychological research does not (and cannot) tell us what it means to be ‘good’ or what we ought to believe about purpose or meaning in life, it makes it clear that these beliefs matter to people, and that they are integral to their wellbeing. And what about philosophy? Does it allow us to reach secure and certain conclusions, or should we think of it as offering us a critical tool for evaluating and calibrating our beliefs? Most philosophers are somewhat pessimistic about the ‘persistent and intractable disagreement’ within their discipline, often reflecting the difficulty in finding undeniable premises for philosophical arguments.14 The diversity and disagreement within the field is such that ‘most philosophical views are minority opinions,’ and there is typically ‘nothing approaching a consensus on the correct alternative’.15

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  “Resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering,” intones guru Ram Dass. As a kid I’d seen his name among my mother’s books, down at the end of the shelf where she kept The Dance of Anger and Love Is Letting Go of Fear. Now I knew why she had books with titles like that, whose unnatural collisions of nouns had puzzled me. Here was adulthood: my husband and I owned a restaurant. Love might have to look like letting go of fear. I could try. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Once I’d recovered from the shock and terror that we were, in fact, opening a restaurant, and once Brandon had recovered from his shock and terror at my shock and terror, we began to sort out a plan. With my book now finished, I was between projects, and this lull turned out to be convenient. I could gather up the energy I’d put into arguing against the restaurant and pour it instead into supporting it. I didn’t know what to write next, anyway, and it was a relief to not worry about it. I could worry instead about how to help Brandon succeed. When we got married, we’d each written vows. In mine, I promised to work alongside him to make our hopes and dreams real—a generic sentiment on paper, but when I spoke it aloud, I felt a current pass between us. I knew what this promise meant: that even if I couldn’t predict who he would be or what he would dream of, I had bound myself to him. It occurs to me now that I wasn’t worried about myself in this equation, about what I might become or want. I was the known quantity, he the variable. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] We began to refer to Delancey as our restaurant. My first book was published four months before it opened, in April 2009. Between book events, I helped him to finish the buildout, plan the menu, and hire a staff. When Delancey opened that August, Brandon and I were two of the three cooks, him at the pizza oven and me making salads, starters, and desserts. I was a confident home cook, but in the restaurant, I was anxious and inefficient. I dissolved. A person’s got to be on good terms with adrenaline to make it as a professional cook: you’ve got to like the rush, rise to meet it and ride it through to the end of the night. When confronted with a fresh wave of orders, I’d cry, hurling handfuls of romaine punitively into the bowl. Resentment calcified inside me like a bone. After we closed up each night, we’d have to clean the kitchen, because that’s part of a cook’s job. On our days off, I’d do payroll while Brandon received deliveries. At home, we distracted ourselves with back-to-back episodes of Battlestar Galactica and plastic sleeves of sandwich cookies from Trader Joe’s.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I want to be a fish! she said, sitting up straighter on the toilet seat. I’ll be a pink fish! And you’ll be a pink fish too. And Daddy will be a purple fish. I lowered myself onto the wooden stool that my second cousin had given us when June was born, with her name and birthdate spelled out in puzzle letters. We’ll all swim around together. Right, Mama? She looked at me, waiting. I nodded, not sure if I was happy, or sad, or some third thing. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] We swapped June on Mondays usually, sometimes Tuesdays. The first day without her was disorienting, as though I’d misplaced something terribly important, left my wallet at the store. But now I had time, gaping stretches of time, wide-open rolling meadows of it. I searched online for information about sexual orientation in women, trying to understand what had happened to me. One book kept coming up, so I ordered it. It was called Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire, by a psychologist named Lisa M. Diamond. When it arrived, I put it on my bedside table. Then I piled a bunch of other books on top of it. I caught up on the New Yorker. I went to IKEA, bought June a big-girl bed and assembled it. I started my first quilt. I’d learned to sew a couple of years earlier, when Brandon bought me a sewing machine for Christmas. Now with evenings to myself, I drank beer and watched YouTube videos with titles like “How to Stitch in the Ditch” and “Easy Improv Quilting.” I splashed around in my free time like it was an Olympic-size pool, all to myself. While prying loose a clump of dog hair stuck under a baseboard in the front hall, I got a splinter under my fingernail. The splinter was tiny, but I couldn’t get it out, and it leaked pus when I pressed on the nail. I called the doctor’s office, got a last-minute appointment with a nurse. Waiting in the exam room, I noticed the cover of a magazine on the chair beside me. It was a giant photo of a beaming Hollywood blonde, and next to her face, hot-pink letters shouted: 45 AND SINGLE! AND FEELING GREAT! Along came a fresh kind of dread. I took a picture of the cover and texted it to Matthew. Is this going to be me? I wrote. You’ll meet someone, he replied. How? Where? Anywhere, he says. You met Nora in a courtroom. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] On the mirror above the bathroom sink I stuck two columns of Post-it notes, reminders of things June and I were working on. June’s notes, in carnation pink: PEE BEFORE BED BRUSH 2x / FLOSS THUMB-SUCKING My notes, in light blue: BE CURIOUS BE PATIENT THE MISTAKE IS NOT IMPORTANT; THE WAY YOU RECOVER IS “YOU HAVE TO BE WILLING TO BE BAD AT IT IN ORDER TO GET GOOD AT IT”

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  in the following phrase, which reports a story of Maximilian’s, via Vera RySanova, via Austerlitz, and collapses the three names: “From time to time, so Vera recollected, said Austerlitz, Maximilian would tell the tale of how once, after a trade union meeting in Treplitz in the early summer of 1933 ...” Sebald borrowed this habit of repetitive attribution from the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, who also influenced Sebald’s diction of extremism. Almost every sentence in this book is a cunning combination of the quiet and the loud: “As usual when I go down to London on my own,” the narrator tells us in a fairly typical passage, “a kind of dull despair stirred within me in that December morming.” Or, for instance, when Austerlitz describes how moths die, he says that they will stay where they are, clinging to a wall, never moving “until the last breath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death.” In Thomas Bernhard’s work, extremity of expression is indistinguishable from the Austrian author’s comic, ranting rage, and his tendency to circle obsessively around madness and suicide. Sebald takes some of Bernhard’s wildness and estranges it—first, by muffling it in an exquisitely courteous syntax: “Had I realized at the time that for Austerlitz certain moments had no beginning or end, while on the other hand his whole life had sometimes seemed to him a blank point without duration, I would probably have waited more patiently.” Second, Sebald makes his diction mysterious by a process of deliberate antiquarianism. Notice the slightly quaint, Romantic sound of those phrases about the moths: “until the last breath is out of their bodies ... the place where they came to grief ...” In all his fiction, Sebald works this archaic strain (sometimes reminiscent of the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter) into a new, strange, and seemingly impossible composite: a kind of mildly agitated, pensive contemporary Gothic. His characters and narrators are forever finding themselves, like travelers of old, in gloomy, inimical places (East London, Norfolk) where “not a living soul stirred.” Wherever they go, they are accompanied by apprehensions of uneasiness, dread, and menace. In Austerlitz, this uneasiness amounts to a Gothicism of the past; the text is constantly in communion with the ghosts of the dead. At Liverpool Street Station, Jacques Austerlitz feels dread at the thought that the station is built on the foundations of Bedlam, the famous insane asylum: “I felt at this time,” he tells the narrator, “as if the dead were returning from their exile and filling the twilight around me with their strangely slow but incessant to-ing and fro-ing.” In Wales, the young Jacques had occasionally felt the presence of the dead, and Evan the cobbler had told the boy of those dead who had been “struck down by fate untimely, who knew they had been cheated of what was due to them and tried to return to life.”

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

  26. English Roman Catholic public schools readily reflected the general educational ethos of military maleness created by their Anglican equivalents. Here the Downside Officer Training Corps (created 1909) poses with sundry monks of the Benedictine Abbey and a field gun. The ideal products of Victorian public schools were obedient but resourceful officers in the armed forces, or colonial administrators programmed to endure lonely leadership amid alien cultures. Socialization even with female siblings, let alone any other variety of female, was not on the syllabus. Instead, the inevitable consequences of an all-male adolescent environment lent a peculiar anxiety to British elite attitudes to masturbation and homosexuality, particularly because of the widespread conviction that (in the words of an old Etonian and noted cricketer, who returned to Eton as Headmaster) ‘animal desires [are] far stronger in the male than in the female, at least in England’. [29] A Classical school curriculum brought public schools the usual problems in dealing with literary references to ancient Mediterranean sexual mores, and additionally there were some difficulties in handling the Christian message itself. The New Testament was little help in instilling martial manliness, and even the Saviour himself needed careful treatment by theologians who were worried that Victorian Christianity had less appeal to men than to women. Jesus’s sacrifice, nailed helpless on the cross, needed to be reframed as a specialized ideal of what the prolific writer on morality and church affairs Charles Kingsley termed ‘true manhood’; the scholar and preacher F. D. Maurice complained of the widespread perception that the Sermon on the Mount had a ‘passive or feminine character’. [30] The Hebrew Bible was a good deal more promising, but amid its descriptions of military heroes and armed mayhem well up to the standards of British imperial warfare lurked the obstinate problem of David and Jonathan. In most respects they could be seen as the perfect archetype for a Captain and Vice-Captain of Games, but rarely were they found in the myriad stained-glass windows that the Victorians commissioned for British church buildings, and their appearance always suggests an interesting agenda to investigate (Plate 20). [31] It is notable that a standard multi-volume and multi-author English biblical commentary edited by the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol in the 1880s showed a rare openness to interfaith dialogue in dealing with this problematic Old Testament couple. Canon Spence, the commentator on 1 Samuel, reached gratefully for a quotation by one of his commentary colleagues Dean Payne Smith from the liberal German rabbi and biblical scholar Ludwig Philippson (whose parallel Hebrew/German edition of the Hebrew Bible was later much esteemed by Sigmund Freud): We may indeed wonder at the delicacy of feeling and the gentleness of the sentiments which these two men in those old rough times entertained for one another.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The novelist and poet Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) had an ‘uncanny ability to give expression to the emotional and intellectual problems of his time’, offering penetrating reflections on the cultural disturbances of his age.1 In 1926, Hesse published an article in UHU magazine, a modernist journal established in 1924, aimed at an urban bourgeois liberal readership in Weimar Germany.2 Weimar Germany was an intellectual and creative hothouse, the home of Dada, Bauhaus, New Objectivity, and new institutes for sexuality. But frequent economic shocks, millions of war wounded and escalating political violence left Germans anxious, unable to anchor themselves in the present. Hesse set out to explain why so many Germans yearned for a coherent worldview and why it was so difficult to find one.3 Traditional answers to this craving for a secure basis for human existence were being cast aside, discredited by the devastation of the war. But the latest intellectual fashions were simply a synthesis of the values au courant at that moment, lacking in depth, substance and stability, all things that emerge from having been subjected to critical evaluation over an extended period. Hesse also argued that the trend of privileging novelty has resulted in a precipitate dismissal of the wisdom of the past and the unquestioning adoption of new and untested ideologies in a ‘frenzied search for new interpretations of human life’. It’s an important point. The Irish writer and philosopher John Moriarty later offered an insightful critique of such a dangerous preoccupation with the transient truths of the present moment. The wise person, he suggests, is not someone who walks ahead of humanity, but behind it, ‘picking up the wonderful things it leaves behind it in its flight into a future’ that might well prove to be yet another costly failure.4 It is not difficult to work out which ideologies Hesse had in mind. Marxism and Nazism were in open competition for the spiritual and intellectual soul of Germany at that time, a struggle that grew increasingly bitter and culminated in the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Germany had undergone a transformation. An untested new ideology was in the ascendancy. UHU did not survive this development and published its last issue in September 1934. Human beings, according to Hesse, experience a ‘primal need to know that there is meaning to their lives’ that is ‘as old and as important as the need for food, love and shelter.’ Many commentators have failed to grasp the importance of this yearning for meaning and significance. George Orwell, for example, complained that ‘all “progressive” thought has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain.’5 The rise of Nazism in Germany, he remarked, showed the falsity of this view. People seemed to want a deeper vision of life that speaks of meaning, significance and purpose, that might require sacrifice on their part, rather than merely meeting their physical needs.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  At home, I fumbled in the dark on the side of the house, jammed the boots into the garbage bin. I knew I’d never get the smell out. I went inside in my socks. I must have offered some excuse to the babysitter. I brushed my teeth and stood in the doorway to June’s room. She had no idea what I’d been up to lately, what her father and I were doing. How could I ever want anything but to be here with her? The light from the hall touched her round cheek, pale as the moon. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Nausea woke me at midnight. Now I knew what to do. I bolted to the bathroom, lifted the toilet lid, and got on my knees. I could hear the tap running in the kitchen. Brandon was home. I was breathing hard. I pressed the length of my forearms into my thighs and leaned over the bowl, but nothing came up. In my lap, I noticed that my hands were closing. I tried to open my fingers, using one hand to tug at the other, but they were stuck. We’d taught American Sign Language to June as a baby: milk, water, please, flower, book, more. More, my hands said. I was panting. More air, need more air. Are you okay? Brandon said. He was in the doorway. What’s wrong, babe? I puked tonight, I said, after my talk at the UW. I was whispering. My bathrobe was too hot. Somehow I was wearing my bathrobe. The tops of my feet hurt, mashed into the floor under my folded-over body. Are you okay? he asked again. He stood behind me now, one foot on either side of my knees. There was his sock, gray at the toe. There were his hands in my hair. The space behind my eyes was too small. I decided to sit down, no more kneeling. I rocked onto one hip, braced against the wall of the bathtub with one of my clamped-up hands, which were now buzzing like they’d fallen asleep. My wrists were busy cramping now too, each contracting inward. I slid my feet out from under me, tried to wiggle my ankles, but look! there they went too, my ankles like my wrists, curling in, yanking each heel toward the other. This must be a seizure. I’m having a seizure. Someone was gasping, a sucked-in half-sob. I had to tell Brandon. He needed to see this, what was happening. What was happening? June’s room was across the hall, maybe five steps away. I imagined her standing in the doorway in her floral-print underwear from Target, eyes frosted with sleep, blinking into the bathroom. Please don’t let her wake up. How could she not wake up? My head was too loud. I gave a croak. Brandon said something, and I worked to hear it.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  concourse fifteen to twenty feet below street level, was one of the darkest and most sinister places in London, a kind of entrance to the underworld, as it has often been described. The ballast between the tracks, the cracked sleepers, the brick walls with their stone bases, the cornices and panes of the tall windows, the wooden kiosks for the ticket inspectors, and the towering cast-iron columns with their palmate capitals were all covered in a greasy black layer formed, over the course of a century, by coke dust and soot, steam, sulfur, and diesel oil. Even on sunny days only a faint grayness, scarcely illuminated at all by the globes of the station lights, came through the glass roof over the main hall, and in this eternal dusk, which was full of a muffled babble of voices, a quiet scraping and trampling of feet, innumerable people passed in great tides, disembarking from the trains or boarding them, coming together, moving apart, and being held up at barriers and bottlenecks like water against a weir. Whenever I got out at Liverpool Street Station on my way back to the East End, said Austerlitz, I would stay there at least a couple of hours, sitting on a bench with other passengers who were already tired in the early morning, or standing somewhere, leaning on a handrail and feeling that constant wrenching inside me, a kind of heartache which, as I was beginning to sense, was caused by the vortex of past time. I knew that on the site where the station stood marshy meadows had once extended to the city walls, meadows which froze over for months on end in the cold winters of the so-called Little Ice Age, and that Londoners used to strap bone runners under their shoes, skating there as the people of Antwerp skated on the Schelde, sometimes going on until midnight in the flickering light of the bonfires burning here and there on the ice in heavy braziers. Later on, the marshes were progressively drained, elm trees were planted, market gardens, fish ponds, and white sandy paths were laid out to make a place where the

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

  87 Sunzi knew that civilians would look askance at this martial ethic, but their state could not survive without its troops. 88 The army should therefore be kept apart from mainstream society and be governed by its own laws, because its modus operandi was the “extraordinary” ( qi ), the counterintuitive, doing exactly what did not come naturally. This would be disastrous in all other affairs of state, 89 but if a commander learned how to exploit the qi, he could achieve a sagelike alignment with the Way of Heaven: Thus one skilled at giving rise to the extraordinary is as boundless as Heaven and Earth, as inexhaustible as the Yellow River and the ocean. Ending and beginning again, like the sun and moon. Dying and then being born, like the four seasons. 90 The dilemma of even the most benign state was that it was obliged to maintain at its heart an institution committed to treachery and violence . The cult of the “extraordinary” was not new but was widespread among the population, especially among the lower classes, and might even date back to the Neolithic period. It had strong connections with the mystical school that we call Daoism (or Taoism) in the West, which was far more popular among the masses than the elite. 91 Daoists opposed any form of government and were convinced that when rulers interfered in their subjects’ lives, they invariably made matters worse—an attitude similar to the strategists’ preference for “doing nothing” and refraining from rushing into action. Forcing people to obey man-made laws and perform unnatural rituals was simply perverse, argued the ebullient hermit Zhuangzi (c. 369–286). It was better to “do nothing,” practicing “action by inaction [ wu wei ].” It was deep within yourself, at a level far below the reasoning powers, that you would encounter the Way ( dao ) things really were. 92 In the West we tend to read the mid-third-century treatise known as the Daodejing b (“Classic of the Way and Its Potency”) as a devotional text for a personal spirituality, but it was actually a manual of statecraft, written for the prince of one of the vulnerable principalities. 93 Its anonymous author wrote under the pseudonym Laozi, or Lao-Tzu—“Old Master.” Rulers should imitate Heaven, he taught, which did not interfere with the Ways of men; so if they abandoned their meddlesome policies, political “potency” ( de ) would emerge spontaneously: “If I cease to desire and remain still, the empire will be at peace of its own accord.” 94 The Daoist king should practice meditative techniques that rid his mind of busy theorizing so that it became “empty” and “still.” Then the Dao of Heaven could act through him, and “to the end of one’s days one will meet with no danger.” 95 Laozi offered the beleaguered principalities a stratagem for survival. Statesmen usually preferred frenzied activity and shows of strength when they should be doing the exact opposite.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

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

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

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

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

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

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

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

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

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