Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Beside Woland, on a heavy stand, stood a strange globe, as if alive, lit on one side by the sun. The silence lasted a few seconds. ‘He’s studying me,’ thought Margarita, and with an effort of will she tried to control the trembling in her legs. At last Woland began to speak, smiling, which made his sparkling eye as if to flare up. ‘Greetings to you, Queen, and I beg you to excuse my casual attire.’ The voice of Woland was so low that on some syllables it drew out into a wheeze. Woland took a long sword from the sheets, leaned down, poked it under the bed, and said: ‘Out with you! The game is cancelled. The guest has arrived.’ ‘By no means,’ Koroviev anxiously piped, prompter-like, at Margarita’s ear. ‘By no means . . .’ began Margarita. ‘Messire . . .’ Koroviev breathed into her ear. ‘By no means, Messire,’ Margarita replied softly but distinctly, gaining control over herself, and she added with a smile: ‘I beg you not to interrupt your game. I imagine the chess journals would pay good money for the chance to publish it.’ Azazello gave a low but approving grunt, and Woland, looking intently at Margarita, observed as if to himself: ‘Yes, Koroviev is right. How whimsically the deck has been shuffled! Blood!’ He reached out and beckoned Margarita to him with his hand. She went up, not feeling the floor under her bare feet. Woland placed his hand, heavy as if made of stone and at the same time hot as fire, on Margarita’s shoulder, pulled her towards him, and sat her on the bed by his side. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘since you are so charmingly courteous—and I expected nothing else—let us not stand on ceremony.’ He again leaned over the side of the bed and cried: ‘How long will this circus under the bed continue? Come out, you confounded Hans!’ 3 ‘I can’t find my knight,’ the cat responded from under the bed in a muffled and false voice, ‘it’s ridden off somewhere, and I keep getting some frog instead.’ ‘You don’t imagine you’re at some fairground, do you?’ asked Woland, pretending to be angry. ‘There’s no frog under the bed! Leave these cheap tricks for the Variety. If you don’t appear at once, we’ll consider that you’ve forfeited, you damned deserter!’ ‘Not for anything, Messire!’ yelled the cat, and he got out from under the bed that same second, holding the knight in his paw. ‘Allow me to present . . .’ Woland began and interrupted himself: ‘No, I simply cannot look at this buffoon. See what he’s turned himself into under the bed!’ Standing on his hind legs, the dust-covered cat was meanwhile making his bows to Margarita. There was now a white bow-tie on the cat’s neck, and a pair of ladies’ mother-of-pearl opera glasses hung from a strap on his neck.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  further, the grating over the drain in the middle of it and the metal pail standing beside the drain, a picture of our laundry room at home in W. rose from the abyss and with it, suggested perhaps by the iron hook hanging on a cord from the ceiling, the image of the butcher’s shop I always had to pass on my way to school, where at noon Benedikt was often to be seen in a rubber apron washing down the tiles with a thick hose. No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open. But I do remember that there in the casemate at Breendonk a nauseating smell of soft soap rose to my nostrils, and that this smell, in some strange place in my head, was linked to the bizarre German word for scrubbing brush, Wurzelbuirste, which was a favorite of my father’s and which I had always disliked. Black striations began to quiver before my eyes, and I had to rest my forehead against the wall, which was gritty, covered with bluish spots, and seemed to me to be perspiring with cold beads of sweat. It was not that as the nausea rose in me I guessed at the kind of third-degree interrogations which were being conducted here around the time I was born, since it was only a few years later that I read Jean Ameéry’s description of the dreadful physical closeness between torturers and their victims, and of the tortures he himself suffered in Breendonk when he was hoisted aloft by his hands, tied behind his back, so that with a crack and a splintering sound which, as he says, he had not yet forgotten when he came to write his account, his arms dislocated from the sockets in his shoulder joints, and he was left dangling as they were wrenched up behind him and twisted together above his head: la pendaison par les mains liées dans le dos jusqu’a évanouissement—this is how it is described in the book Le Jardin des Plantes, in which Claude Simon descends once more into the storehouse of his memories, and on page 235 begins to tell the fragmentary tale of a certain Gastone Novelli who, like Améry, was subjected to this particular form of torture. The passage opens with an entry of 26 October 1943 from General Rommel’s diary, in which Rommel comments that in view of the total powerlessness of the police in Italy one must now take charge oneself. As a result of the measures thereupon introduced by the Germans, says Simon, Novelli was arrested and taken to Dachau. Novelli, Simon continues, never mentioned what happened to him there except on one occasion, when he said that after his liberation from the camp he found the sight of a German, or indeed any so-called civilized being, male or female, so intolerable that, hardly recovered, he embarked on the first ship he could find, to make his living prospecting for diamonds and gold in South America. For some time Novelli lived in the green jungle with a tribe of small people who had gleaming, coppery skins and had emerged beside him as if out of nowhere one day, without moving

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Literature: The Chronicles of Salimbene, Villani, etc.: Gerson: Contra sectam flagellantium, 1417, Du Pin’s ed., Antwerp, 1706. Gerson’s letter to Ferrer and his address to the council of Constance concerning the Flagellants are given by Van der Hardt: Constant. concilium, Frankf., 1700, III. 92–104.—J. Boileau: Hist. Flagel., Paris, 1700, new ed., 1770.—*E. G. Förstemann: D. christl. Geisslergesellschaften, Halle, 1828.—W. M. Cooper: Flagellation and the Flagellants, A Hist. of the Rod in all Countries, Lond., 1877; new ed., 1896.—Fredericq, in Corpus doc. inquis., etc. gives reports of their trials in Holland, I. 190 sqq., etc.—*F. Neukirch: D. Leben d. P. Damiani, Gött., 1875.—Lea: Hist. of Inq., I. 72 sqq., II. 381 sqq.—Artt. Geissler and Geisselung in Wetzer-Welte by Knöpfler, IV. 1532 sqq. and in Herzog by Haupt, VI. 432 sqq. For the older lit., see Förstemann, pp. 291–325. A genuine indication of popular interest in religion within orthodox circles was the strange movement represented by the Flagellants. Gregorovius has gone so far as to pronounce their appearance "one of the most striking phenomena of the Middle Ages."2116 Although they started within the Church and are not to be classed with the mediaeval sectaries, the Flagellants in a later age came to be regarded with suspicion, were formally condemned by the council of Constance, and were even the object of ecclesiastical prosecution. They appeared first in 1259, then in 1333, 1349, 1399, and last at the time the council of Constance was sitting. The most notable appearance was in 1349, at the time the Black Death was raging in Europe. The movement had no compact organization, as is shown from its spasmodic character. It grew out of discontent with the Church and a longing for true penitence and amendment of life. The prophecies of Joachim, who set 1260 as the time for the appearance of anti-christ, probably had something to do with stirring up unrest; perhaps also the famine in Italy, of 1258, which was followed by a strange physical malady, characterized by numbness of the bodily organs. Salimbene reports that the bells were left untolled for funerals, lest the sick should be terrified. The enthusiasm took the form of processions, scourgings, and some novel and strange ceremonies. It was a species of evangelism, and attempted a campaign against physical and other sins, as the Crusades did against the Saracens of the East. It sought to make popular the discipline of flagellation, which was practised in the convent, and to secure penitential results, such as the monk was supposed to reach.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  You may rest. Right now a storm is coming, the last storm, it will complete all that needs completing, and we’ll be on our way.’ ‘Very well, Messire,’ the two buffoons replied and disappeared somewhere behind the round central tower, which stood in the middle of the terrace. The storm of which Woland had spoken was already gathering on the horizon. A black cloud rose in the west and cut off half the sun. Then it covered it entirely. The air became cool on the terrace. A little later it turned dark. This darkness which came from the west covered the vast city. Bridges and palaces disappeared. Everything vanished as if it had never existed in the world. One fiery thread ran across the whole sky. Then a thunderclap shook the city. It was repeated, and the storm began. Woland could no longer be seen in its gloom. CHAPTER 30: It’s Time! It’s Time!, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 30 It’s Time! It’s Time! ‘You know,’ said Margarita, ‘just as you fell asleep last night, I was reading about the darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea . . . and those idols, ah, the golden idols! For some reason they never leave me in peace. I think it’s going to rain now, too. Do you feel how cool it’s getting?’ ‘That’s all well and good,’ replied the master, smoking and breaking up the smoke with his hand, ‘and as for the idols, God be with them . . . but what will happen further on is decidedly unclear!’ This conversation occurred at sunset, just at the moment when Matthew Levi came to Woland on the terrace. The basement window was open, and if anyone had looked through it, he would have been astonished at how strange the talkers looked. Margarita had a black cloak thrown directly over her naked body, and the master was in his hospital underwear. The reason for this was that Margarita had decidedly nothing to put on, because all her clothes had stayed in her house, and though this house was very near by, there was, of course, no question of going there to take her clothes. And the master, whose clothes were all found in the wardrobe as if he had never gone anywhere, simply did not want to get dressed, developing before Margarita the thought that some perfect nonsense was about to begin at any moment. True, he was clean-shaven for the first time since that autumn night (in the clinic his beard had been cut with clippers). The room also had a strange look, and it was very hard to make anything out in its chaos. Manuscripts were lying on the rug, and on the sofa as well.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  A symptomatic after-effect of Rome’s fall was the Pinian affair (411) in Hippo. The highborn and wealthy Albina, a devout Christian, left Italy with her daughter Melania and her son-in-law Pinian. They went to an estate in Thagaste, Augustine’s birthplace, where his friend Alypius was now bishop. Albina wrote to Augustine hoping he would someday visit them. Since Augustine said he was unable to leave his church, Alypius took the three famous people to Hippo—where the congregation tried to induct the wealthy Christian celebrity Pinian as their priest, though Augustine had pledged that the visitor would not be pressured into that service. When Alypius tried to get his endangered guest out of the church, the people charged him with keeping Pinian to himself so he could control his vast holdings for Thagaste. Augustine told his congregation it could gain Pinian as priest only by losing him as its bishop. But his congregation was frenzied and he could not quiet it. He withdrew to the apse and drew its curtain shut. Pinian sent word to him that he would not be ordained, but that he would take an oath to live in Hippo and not to accept ordination elsewhere. After tense negotiations over the terms, Pinian took this oath—only to skip town the next day (L 126). Alypius took the view that a coerced oath is not binding, but Augustine’s strict line on deception, especially where religion was involved, made him write that Pinian must return to Hippo according to his word (L 125). Hard feelings all around were later assuaged, and Pinian went to the Holy Land, where he became a monk and Melania became an abbess. The story shows what a touchy matter it was for Augustine to control his volatile community, even after that early showdown over the drunken celebration of a martyr’s day. Augustine was a judge over property and other disputes, since the empire “farmed out” as much of its administrative tasks as it could, letting bishops hold ecclesiastical courts even for civil matters. These hearings were a time-consuming distraction for Augustine, but he felt obliged to conduct them daily (VDM 259–65), since they gave him a chance to teach moral principles of equity and social concord. They also let him set an example of leniency in punishment, something he was always preaching to Roman officials. He was, he hoped, saving some people from the imperial judges, of whom he had a low opinion: “Ignorance in the judge is often doom to the defendant” (CG 19.6).

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  How many hours of sleep had I been getting? Did I have any problems in concentrating? Had I been more talkative than usual? Did I talk faster than usual? Had anyone told me to slow down or that they couldn’t make sense out of what I was saying? Had I felt a pressure to talk constantly? Had I been more energetic than usual? Were other people saying that they were having difficulty keeping up with me? Had I become more involved in activities than usual, or undertaken more projects? Had my thoughts been going so quickly that I had difficulty keeping track of them? Had I been more physically restless or agitated than usual? More sexually active? Had I been spending more money? Acting impulsively? Had I been more irritable or angry than usual? Had I felt as though I had special talents or powers? Had I had any visions or heard sounds or voices that other people probably hadn’t seen or heard? Had I experienced any strange sensations in my body? Had I ever had any of these symptoms earlier in my life? Did anyone else in my family have similar sorts of problems? I realized that I was on the receiving end of a very thorough psychiatric history and examination; the questions were familiar, I had asked them of others a hundred times, but I found it unnerving to have to answer them, unnerving not to know where it all was going, and unnerving to realize how confusing it was to be a patient. I answered yes to virtually all of his questions, including a long series of additional ones about depression, and found myself gaining a new respect for psychiatry and professionalism. Gradually, his experience as a physician, and self-confidence as a person, began to take effect, much in the same way that medications gradually begin to take hold and calm the turmoil of mania. He made it unambivalently clear that he thought I had manic-depressive illness and that I was going to need to be on lithium, probably indefinitely. The thought was very frightening to me—much less was known then than is known now about the illness and its prognosis—but all the same I was relieved: relieved to hear a diagnosis that I knew in my mind of minds to be true. Still, I flailed against the sentence I felt he had handed me. He listened patiently. He listened to all of my convoluted, alternative explanations for my breakdown—the stress of a stressed marriage, the stress of joining the psychiatry faculty, the stress of overwork—and he remained firm in his diagnosis and recommendations for treatment. I was bitterly resentful, but somehow greatly relieved. And I respected him enormously for his clarity of thought, his obvious caring, and his unwillingness to equivocate in delivering bad news.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  He is humane and simply wants to comfort me. I don’t deny, however, that I’m much better now. Yes, so where did I leave off? Frost, those flying trams . . . I knew that this clinic had been opened, and set out for it on foot across the entire city. Madness! Outside the city I probably would have frozen to death, but chance saved me. A truck had broken down, I came up to the driver, it was some three miles beyond the city limits, and to my surprise he took pity on me. The truck was coming here. And he took me along. I got away with having my left toes frostbitten. But they cured that. And now this is the fourth month that I’ve been here. And, you know, I find it not at all bad here. One mustn’t make grandiose plans, dear neighbour, really! I, for instance, wanted to go all around the globe. Well, so it turns out that I’m not going to do it. I see only an insignificant piece of that globe. I suppose it’s not the very best there is on it, but, I repeat, it’s not so bad. Summer is coming, the ivy will twine up on to the balcony. So Praskovya Fyodorovna promises. The keys have broadened my possibilities. There’ll be the moon at night. Ah, it’s gone! Turning cool. It’s falling past midnight. Time to go.’ ‘Tell me, what happened afterwards with Yeshua and Pilate?’ Ivan asked. ‘I beg you, I want to know.’ ‘Ah, no, no,’ the guest replied with a painful twitch. ‘I cannot recall my novel without trembling. And your acquaintance from the Patriarch’s Ponds would do it better than I. Thank you for the conversation. Goodbye.’ And before Ivan could collect his senses, the grille closed with a quiet clang, and the guest vanished. CHAPTER 14: Glory to the Cock!, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 14 Glory to the Cock! His nerves gave out, as they say, and Rimsky fled to his office before they finished drawing up the report. He sat at his desk and stared with inflamed eyes at the magic banknotes lying before him. The findirector’s wits were addled. A steady hum came from outside. The audience poured in streams from the Variety building into the street. Rimsky’s extremely sharpened hearing suddenly caught the distant trill of a policeman. That in itself never bodes anything pleasant.

• From The Girls (2016)

  streambeds or clustered at cliff bases, picked off as easily as peaches. I had heard my mother tell Sal that Frank was still married but wouldn’t be for long. I didn’t know if that was true. Frank didn’t seem the type to leave his family. He wore a shirt with creamy buttons, peonies embroidered in raised red thread on the shoulders. My mother was acting nervous, touching her hair, slipping her fingernail between her front teeth. She looked from me to Frank. “Evie’s a very smart girl,” she said. She was talking too loud. Still, it was nice to hear her say it. “She’ll really blossom at Catalina.” This was the boarding school I’d attend, though September seemed years away. “Big brains,” Frank boomed. “Can’t go wrong there, can you?” I didn’t know if he was joking or not, and my mother didn’t seem to know either. We ate a casserole in silence in the dining room, and I picked out the blats of tofu and built a pile on my plate. I watched my mother decide not to say anything. Frank was good-looking, even if his shirt was strange, too fussy and feminine, and he made my mother laugh. He was not as handsome as my father, but still. She kept reaching out to touch his arm with her fingertips. “Fourteen years old, huh?” Frank said. “Bet you have a ton of boyfriends.” Adults always teased me about having boyfriends, but there was an age where it was no longer a joke, the idea that boys might actually want you. “Oh, heaps,” I said, and my mother perked to attention, hearing the coldness in my voice. Frank didn’t seem to notice, smiling widely at my mother, patting her hand. She was smiling, too, in a masklike way, her eyes bouncing from me to him across the table. Frank had gold mines in Mexico. “No regulations down there,” he said. “Cheap labor. It’s pretty much a sure thing.” “How much gold have you found?” I asked. “So far, I mean.” “Well, once all the equipment is in place, I’ll be finding a ton.” He drank from a wineglass, his fingers leaving ghosts of grease. My mother went soft, in his glance; her shoulders relaxing, her lips parting. She was young looking that night. I had a queer twinge of motherly feeling for her,

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Many of these concerns carry over into my research and writing. I have written extensively in medical and scientific journals about manic-depressive illness. Will my work now be seen by my colleagues as somehow biased because of my illness? It is a discomforting thought, although one of the advantages of science is that one’s work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not. Biases, because of this, tend to be minimized over time. I worry, however, about my colleagues’ reactions once I am open about my illness: if, for example, I am attending a scientific meeting and ask a question, or challenge a speaker, will my question be treated as though it is coming from someone who has studied and treated mood disorders for many years, or will it instead be seen as a highly subjective, idiosyncratic view of someone who has a personal ax to grind? It is an awful prospect, giving up one’s cloak of academic objectivity. But, of course, my work has been tremendously colored by my emotions and my experiences. They have deeply affected my teaching, my advocacy work, my clinical practice, and what I have chosen to study: manic-depressive illness in general and, more specifically, suicide, psychosis, psychological aspects of the disease and its treatment, lithium noncompliance, positive features of mania and cyclothymia, and the importance of psychotherapy. Most important, however, as a clinician, I have had to consider the question that Mouseheart so artfully managed to slip into our lunchtime conversation in Malibu: Do I really think that someone with mental illness should be allowed to treat patients? When I left the University of California in the winter of 1986 to return to Washington, I was eager to continue teaching and to obtain an academic appointment at a university medical school. Richard, who had gone to medical school at Johns Hopkins, thought I would love it. At his suggestion, I applied to the Department of Psychiatry for a faculty appointment, and I started teaching at Hopkins within a few months of moving back East. Richard was right. I loved Hopkins straightaway. And, as he predicted, one of the many pleasures I found in being on the Hopkins faculty was the seriousness with which teaching obligations are taken. The excellence of clinical care was another. It was only a matter of time. The issue of clinical privileges was bound to come up.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  CHAPTER 9: Koroviev’s Stunts, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 9 Koroviev’s Stunts Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, chairman of the tenants’ association 1 of no. 302-bis on Sadovaya Street in Moscow, where the late Berlioz used to reside, had been having the most terrible troubles, starting from that Wednesday night. At midnight, as we already know, a commission of which Zheldybin formed a part came to the house, summoned Nikanor Ivanovich, told him about the death of Berlioz, and together with him went to apartment no. 50. There the sealing of the deceased’s manuscripts and belongings was carried out. Neither Grunya, the daytime housekeeper, nor the light-minded Stepan Bogdanovich was there at the time. The commission announced to Nikanor Ivanovich that it would take the deceased’s manuscripts for sorting out, that his living space, that is, three rooms (the former study, living room and dining room of the jeweller’s wife), reverted to the disposal of the tenants’ association, and that the belongings were to be kept in the aforementioned living space until the heirs were announced. The news of Berlioz’s death spread through the whole house with a sort of supernatural speed, and as of seven o’clock Thursday morning, Bosoy began to receive telephone calls and then personal visits with declarations containing claims to the deceased’s living space. In the period of two hours, Nikanor Ivanovich received thirty-two such declarations. They contained pleas, threats, libels, denunciations, promises to do renovations at their own expense, references to unbearable overcrowding and the impossibility of living in the same apartment with bandits. Among others there were a description, staggering in its artistic power, of the theft from apartment no. 31 of some meat dumplings, tucked directly into the pocket of a suit jacket, two vows to end life by suicide and one confession of secret pregnancy. Nikanor Ivanovich was called out to the front hall of his apartment, plucked by the sleeve, whispered to, winked at, promised that he would not be left the loser. This torture went on until noon, when Nikanor Ivanovich simply fled his apartment for the management office by the gate, but when he saw them lying in wait for him there, too, he fled that place as well. Having somehow shaken off those who followed on his heels across the asphalt-paved courtyard, Nikanor Ivanovich disappeared into the sixth entrance and went up to the fifth floor, where this vile apartment no. 50 was located. After catching his breath on the landing, the corpulent Nikanor Ivanovich rang, but no one opened for him. He rang again, and then again, and started grumbling and swearing quietly. Even then no one opened. His patience exhausted, Nikanor Ivanovich took from his pocket a bunch of duplicate keys belonging to the house management, opened the door with a sovereign hand, and went in. ‘Hey, housekeeper!’

• From The Girls (2016)

  poverty. The cold, dark sand, a bonfire, Mitch on a break between records. Someone in a porkpie hat tending a pot of steamed clams. Mitch, I’d learn, had been having a crisis—money disputes with a manager who’d been a childhood friend, a marijuana arrest that had been expunged, but still—and Russell must have seemed like a citizen of a realer world, stoking Mitch’s guilt over the gold records, the parties where he covered the pool in Perspex. Russell offered up a mystic salvation, buttressed by the young girls who cast their eyes down in adoration when Russell spoke. Mitch invited the whole group back to his house in Tiburon, letting them gorge on the contents of his refrigerator, crash in his guest room. They drained bottles of apple juice and pink champagne and tracked mud onto the bed, thoughtless as an occupying army. In the morning, Mitch gave them a lift back to the ranch: by then Russell had seduced Mitch, speaking softly of truth and love, those invocations especially potent to wealthy searchers. I believed everything the girls told me that day, their buzzy, swarming pride as they spoke of Russell’s brilliance. How pretty soon he wouldn’t be able to walk down the street without getting mobbed. How he’d be able to tell the whole world how to be free. And it was true that Mitch had set up a recording session for Russell. Thinking maybe Mitch’s label would find Russell’s vibe interesting and of the moment. I didn’t know it until much later, but the session had gone badly, the failure legendary. This was before everything else happened. — There are those survivors of disasters whose accounts never begin with the tornado warning or the captain announcing engine failure, but always much earlier in the timeline: an insistence that they noticed a strange quality to the sunlight that morning or excessive static in their sheets. A meaningless fight with a boyfriend. As if the presentiment of catastrophe wove itself into everything that came before. Did I miss some sign? Some internal twinge? The bees glittering and crawling in the crate of tomatoes? An unusual lack of cars on the road? The question I remember Donna asking me in the bus—casually, almost as an afterthought. “You ever hear anything about Russell?” The question didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand that she was trying to gauge how many of the rumors I’d heard: about orgies, about frenzied acid trips and teen runaways forced to service older men. Dogs sacrificed on moonlit beaches, goat heads rotting in the sand. If I’d had friends besides Connie, I might’ve heard chatter of Russell at parties, some hushed gossip in the kitchen. Might’ve known to be wary. But I just shook my head. I hadn’t heard anything.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  He attempted to smile, but alarm still jumped in his eyes and his hands trembled. However, he gradually calmed down, fanned himself with his handkerchief and, having said rather cheerfully: ‘Well, and so . . .’, went on with the conversation interrupted by their soda-drinking. This conversation, as was learned afterwards, was about Jesus Christ. The thing was that the editor had commissioned from the poet a long anti-religious poem for the next issue of his journal. Ivan Nikolaevich had written this poem, and in a very short time, but unfortunately the editor was not at all satisfied with it. Homeless had portrayed the main character of his poem—that is, Jesus—in very dark colours, but nevertheless the whole poem, in the editor’s opinion, had to be written over again. And so the editor was now giving the poet something of a lecture on Jesus, with the aim of underscoring the poet’s essential error. It is hard to say what precisely had let Ivan Nikolaevich down—the descriptive powers of his talent or a total unfamiliarity with the question he was writing about—but his Jesus came out, well, completely alive, the once-existing Jesus, though, true, a Jesus furnished with all negative features. Now, Berlioz wanted to prove to the poet that the main thing was not how Jesus was, good or bad, but that this same Jesus, as a person, simply never existed in the world, and all the stories about him were mere fiction, the most ordinary mythology. It must be noted that the editor was a well-read man and in his conversation very skilfully pointed to ancient historians—for instance, the famous Philo of Alexandria 6 and the brilliantly educated Flavius Josephus 7 —who never said a word about the existence of Jesus. Displaying a solid erudition, Mikhail Alexandrovich also informed the poet, among other things, that the passage in the fifteenth book of Tacitus’s famous Annals , 8 the forty-fourth chapter, where mention is made of the execution of Jesus, was nothing but a later spurious interpolation. The poet, for whom everything the editor was telling him was new, listened attentively to Mikhail Alexandrovich, fixing his pert green eyes on him, and merely hiccuped from time to time, cursing the apricot soda under his breath. ‘There’s not a single Eastern religion,’ Berlioz was saying, ‘in which, as a rule, an immaculate virgin did not give birth to a god.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  3. Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. Sebald once confided to me, in an interview, that about 30 percent of the photographs in The Emigrants had an entirely fictitious relationship to their supposed subjects. Sebald, for instance, wrote the farewell note that Ambros Adelwarth writes to his family, and then took the photograph himself. In the second half of the 1960s I traveled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to me, staying sometimes for just one or two days, sometimes for several weeks. On one of these Belgian excursions which, as it seemed to me, always took me further and further abroad, I came on a glorious early summer’s day to the city of Antwerp, known to me previously only by name. Even on my arrival, as the train rolled slowly over the viaduct with its curious pointed turrets on both sides and into the dark station concourse, I had begun to feel unwell, and this sense of indisposition persisted for the whole of my visit to Belgium on that occasion. I still remember the uncertainty of my footsteps as I walked all round the inner city, down Jeruzalemstraat, Nachtegaalstraat, Pelikaanstraat, Paradijsstraat, Immerseelstraat, and many other streets and alleyways, until at last, plagued by a headache and my uneasy thoughts, I took refuge in the zoo by the Astridplein, next to the Centraal Station, waiting for the pain to subside. I sat there on a bench in dappled shade, beside an aviary full of brightly feathered finches and siskins fluttering about. As the afternoon drew to a close I walked through the park, and finally went to see the Nocturama, which had first been opened only a few months earlier. It was some time before my eyes became used to its artificial dusk and I could make out different animals leading their sombrous lives behind the glass by the light of a pale moon. I cannot now recall exactly what creatures I saw on that visit to the Antwerp Nocturama, but there were probably bats and jerboas from Egypt and the Gobi Desert, native European hedgehogs and owls, Australian opossums, pine martens, dormice, and lemurs, leaping from branch to branch, darting back and forth over the grayish- yellow sandy ground, or disappearing into a bamboo thicket. The only animal which has remained lingering in my memory is the raccoon. I watched it for a long time as it sat beside a little stream with a serious expression on its face, washing the same piece of apple over and over again, as if it hoped that all this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness, would help it to escape the unreal world in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of

• From The Girls (2016)

  sudden shift of luck, with monitoring the slow trickle of sweat under my arms. I kept waiting to be spotted, to be identified as an intruder who didn’t belong. My hair too clean. Little nods toward presentation and decorum that seemed to concern no one else. My hair cut crazily across my vision from the open windows, intensifying the dislocation, the abruptness of being in this strange bus. A feather hanging from the rearview with a cluster of beads. Some dried lavender on the dashboard, colorless from the sun. “She’s coming to the solstice,” Donna chimed, “the summer solstice.” It was early June and I knew the solstice was at the end of the month: I didn’t say anything. The first of many silences. “She’s gonna be our offering,” Donna told the others. Giggling. “We’re gonna sacrifice her.” I looked to Suzanne—even our brief history seemed to ratify my presence among them—but she was sitting off to the side, absorbed by the box of tomatoes. Applying pressure to the skins, sifting out the rot. Waving away the bees. It would occur to me later that Suzanne was the only one who didn’t seem overjoyed to come upon me, there on the road. Something formal and distant in her affect. I can only think it was protective. That Suzanne saw the weakness in me, lit up and obvious: she knew what happened to weak girls. — Donna introduced me around, and I tried to remember their names. Helen, a girl who seemed close to my age, though maybe it was just her pigtails. She was pretty in the youthful way of hometown beauties, snub- nosed, her features accessible, though with an obvious expiration date. Roos. “Short for Roosevelt,” she told me. “As in, Franklin D.” She was older than the other girls, with a face as round and rosy as a storybook character. I couldn’t remember the name of the tall girl who was driving: I never saw her again after that day. Donna made a space, patting the nub of an embroidered cushion. “Come here,” she said, and I sat down on the itchy pile. Donna seemed odd, slightly oafish, but I liked her. All of her greed and pettiness was

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  Momma cut down a few give-aways that had been traded to her by white women's maids and sat long nights in the dining room sewing jumpers and skirts for me. She looked pretty sad, but each time I found her watching me she'd say, as if I had already disobeyed, “You be a good girl now. You hear? Don't you make people think I didn't raise you right. You hear?” She would have been more surprised than I had she taken me in her arms and wept at losing me. Her world was bordered on all sides with work, duty, religion and “her place.” I don't think she ever knew that a deep-brooding love hung over everything she touched. In later years I asked her if she loved me and she brushed me off with: “God is love. Just worry about whether you're being a good girl, then He will love you.” I sat in the back of the car, with Dad's leather suitcases, and our cardboard boxes. Although the windows were rolled down, the smell of fried chicken and sweet potato pie lay unmoving, and there wasn't enough room to stretch. Whenever he thought about it, Dad asked, “Are you comfortable back there, Daddy's baby?” He never waited to hear my answer, which was “Yes, sir,” before he'd resume his conversation with Bailey. He and Bailey told jokes, and Bailey laughed all the time, put out Dad's cigarettes and held one hand on the steering wheel when Dad said, “Come on, boy, help me drive this thing.” After I got tired of passing through the same towns over and over, and seeing the empty-looking houses, small and unfriendly, I closed myself off to everything but the kissing sounds of the tires on the pavement and the steady moan of the motor. I was certainly very vexed with Bailey. There was no doubt that he was trying to butter up Dad; he even started to laugh like him, a Santa Claus, Jr., with his “Ho, ho, ho.” “How are you going to feel seeing your mother? Going to be happy?” he was asking Bailey, but it penetrated the foam I had packed around my senses. Were we going to see Her? I thought we were going to California. I was suddenly terrified. Suppose she laughed at us the way he did? What if she had other children now, whom she kept with her? I said, “I want to go back to Stamps.” Dad laughed. “You mean Daddy's baby doesn't want to go to St. Louis to see her mother? She's not going to eat you up, you know.” He turned to Bailey and I looked at the side of his face; he was so unreal to me I felt as if I were watching a doll talk. “Bailey, Junior, ask your sister why she wants to go back to Stamps.” He sounded more like a white man than a Negro.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Aunt Sarah secretly pitied the girl who must surely be living a dull existence, bound, no doubt, by a false sense of gratitude to this freakish and masterful-looking woman—pretty girls should find husbands and homes of their own, and this one she considered excessively pretty. Thus it was that while Mary in all loyalty and love was doing her best to extol Stephen’s virtues, to convey an impression of her own happiness, of the privilege it was to serve so great a writer by caring for her house and her personal needs, she was only succeeding in getting herself pitied. But as good luck would have it, she was blissfully unconscious of the sympathy that her words were arousing; indeed she was finding it very pleasant at Aunt Sarah’s hospitable house in Passy. As for Martin, he had never been very subtle, and just now he must rejoice in a long-lost friendship—to him it appeared a delightful luncheon. Even after the guests had said good-bye, he remained in the very highest of spirits, for the Comtesse was capable of unexpected tact, and while praising Mary’s prettiness and charm, she was careful in no way to disparage Stephen. ‘Oh, yes, undoubtedly a brilliant writer, I agree with you, Martin.’ And so she did. But books were one thing and their scribes another; she saw no reason to change her opinion with regard to this author’s unpleasant affectation, while she saw every reason to be tactful with her nephew. 4On the drive home Mary held Stephen’s hand. ‘I enjoyed myself awfully, didn’t you? Only—’ and she frowned; ‘only will it last? I mean, we mustn’t forget Lady Massey. But he’s so nice, and I liked the old aunt . . .’ Stephen said firmly: ‘Of course it will last.’ Then she lied. ‘I enjoyed it very much too.’ And even as she lied she came to a resolve which seemed so strange that she flinched a little, for never before since they had been lovers, had she thought of this girl as apart from herself. Yet now she resolved that Mary should go to Passy again—but should go without her. Sitting back in the car she half closed her eyes; just at that moment she did not want to speak lest her voice should betray that flinching to Mary. CHAPTER 531W

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  They wanted to have a gay time—it was so lonely for Ginette with Jo-Jo in the hospital. I told them I had to work, but that on my night off I’d come back and take them out. I made it clear too that I had no dough to spend on them. Ginette, who was really thunderstruck to hear this, pretended that that didn’t matter in the least. In fact, just to show what a good sport she was, she insisted on driving me to work in a cab. She was doing it because I was a friend of Jo-Jo’s. And therefore I was a friend of hers. “And also,” thought I to myself, “if anything goes wrong with your Jo-Jo you’ll come to me on the double-quick. Then you’ll see what a friend I can be!” I was as nice as pie to her. In fact, when we got out of the cab in front of the office, I permitted them to persuade me into having a final Pernod together. Yvette wanted to know if she couldn’t call for me after work. She had a lot of things to tell me in confidence, she said. But I managed to refuse without hurting her feelings. Unfortunately I did unbend sufficiently to give her my address. Unfortunately , I say. As a matter of fact, I’m rather glad of it when I think back on it. Because the very next day things began to happen. The very next day, before I had even gotten out of bed, the two of them called on me. Jo-Jo had been removed from the hospital—they had incarcerated him in a little château in the country, just a few miles out of Paris. The château , they called it. A polite way of saying “the bughouse.” They wanted me to get dressed immediately and go with them. They were in a panic. Perhaps I might have gone alone—but I just couldn’t make up my mind to go with these two. I asked them to wait for me downstairs while I got dressed, thinking that it would give me time to invent some excuse for not going. But they wouldn’t leave the room. They sat there and watched me wash and dress, just as if it were an everyday affair. In the midst of it, Carl popped in. I gave him the situation briefly, in English, and then we hatched up an excuse that I had some important work to do. However, to smooth things over, we got some wine in and we began to amuse them by showing them a book of dirty drawings. Yvette had already lost all desire to go to the château. She and Carl were getting along famously. When it came time to go Carl decided to accompany them to the château. He thought it would be funny to see Fillmore walking around with a lot of nuts. He wanted to see what it was like in the nuthouse.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  “Christ!” I shouted, “you can’t do that! Not now. It’s too late. You’re going to take the train and I’m going to tend to her myself. I’ll go see her just as soon as I leave you. Why, you poor boob, if she ever thought you had tried to run away from her she’d murder you, don’t you realize that? You can’t go back any more. It’s settled.” Anyway, what could go wrong? I asked myself. Kill herself? Tant mieux . When we rolled up to the station we had still about twelve minutes to kill. I didn’t dare to say good-bye to him yet. At the last minute, rattled as he was, I could see him jumping off the train and scooting back to her. Anything might swerve him. A straw. So I dragged him across the street to a bar and I said: “Now you’re going to have a Pernod—your last Pernod and I’m going to pay for it… with your dough.” Something about this remark made him look at me uneasily. He took a big gulp of the Pernod and then, turning to me like an injured dog, he said: “I know I oughtn’t to trust you with all that money, but… but… Oh, well, do what you think best. I don’t want her to kill herself, that’s all.” “Kill herself?” I said. “Not her! You must think a hell of a lot of yourself if you can believe a thing like that. As for the money, though I hate to give it to her, I promise you I’ll go straight to the post office and telegraph it to her. I wouldn’t trust myself with it a minute longer than is necessary.” As I said this I spied a bunch of post cards in a revolving rack. I grabbed one off—a picture of the Eiffel Tower it was—and made him write a few words. “Tell her you’re sailing now. Tell her you love her and that you’ll send for her as soon as you arrive. … I’ll send it by pneumatique when I go to the post office. And tonight I’ll see her. Everything’ll be Jake, you’ll see.” With that we walked across the street to the station. Only two minutes to go. I felt it was safe now. At the gate I gave him a slap on the back and pointed to the train. I didn’t shake hands with him—he would have slobbered all over me. I just said: “Hurry! She’s going in a minute.” And with that I turned on my heel and marched off. I didn’t even look round to see if he was boarding the train. I was afraid to. I hadn’t thought, all the while I was bundling him off, what I’d do once I was free of him. I had promised a lot of things—but that was only to keep him quiet. As for facing Ginette, I had about as little courage for it as he had.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Do you think I should go with her… to Borneo or wherever it is she wants to take me? What would I do with a rich cunt like that on my hands? I don’t know how to shoot. I am afraid of guns and all that sort of thing. Besides, she’ll be wanting me to fuck her night and day… nothing but hunting and fucking all the time… I can’t do it!” “Maybe it won’t be so bad as you think. She’ll buy you ties and all sorts of things. …” “Maybe you’ll come along with us, eh? I told her all about you. …” “Did you tell her I was poor? Did you tell her I needed things?” “I told her everything. Shit, everything would be fine, if she were just a few years younger. She said she was turning forty. That means fifty or sixty. It’s like fucking your own mother… you can’t do it… it’s impossible.” “But she must have had some attractiveness… you were kissing her breasts, you said.” “Kissing her breasts—what’s that? Besides it was dark, I’m telling you.” Putting on his pants a button falls off. “Look at that, will you. It’s falling apart, the goddamned suit. I’ve worn it for seven years now. … I never paid for it either. It was a good suit once, but it stinks now. And that cunt would buy me suits too, all I wanted most likely. But that’s what I don’t like, having a woman shell out for me. I never did that in my life. That’s your idea. I’d rather live alone. Shit, this is a good room isn’t it? What’s wrong with it? It’s a damned sight better than her room, isn’t it? I don’t like her fine hotel. I’m against hotels like that. I told her so. She said she didn’t care where she lived… said she’d come and live with me if I wanted her to. Can you picture her moving in here with her big trunks and her hatboxes and all that crap she drags around with her? She has too many things—too many dresses and bottles and all that. It’s like a clinic, her room. If she gets a little scratch on her finger it’s serious. And then she has to be massaged and her hair has to be waved and she mustn’t eat this and she mustn’t eat that. Listen, Joe, she’d be all right if she were just a little younger. You can forgive a young cunt anything. A young cunt doesn’t have to have any brains. They’re better without brains. But an old cunt, even if she’s brilliant, even if she’s the most charming woman in the world, nothing makes any difference. A young cunt is an investment; an old cunt is a dead loss. All they can do for you is buy you things. But that doesn’t put meat on their arms or juice between the legs. She isn’t bad, Irene.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  On the hill, going toward the school, Bailey walked behind with Uncle Willie, who muttered, “Go on, Ju.” He wanted him to walk ahead with us because it embarrassed him to have to walk so slowly. Bailey said he'd let the ladies walk together, and the men would bring up the rear. We all laughed, nicely. Little children dashed by out of the dark like fireflies. Their crepe-paper dresses and butterfly wings were not made for running and we heard more than one rip, dryly, and the regretful “uh uh” that followed. The school blazed without gaiety. The windows seemed cold and unfriendly from the lower hill. A sense of ill-fated timing crept over me, and if Momma hadn't reached for my hand I would have drifted back to Bailey and Uncle Willie, and possibly beyond. She made a few slow jokes about my feet getting cold, and tugged me along to the now-strange building. Around the front steps, assurance came back. There were my fellow “greats,” the graduating class. Hair brushed back, legs oiled, new dresses and pressed pleats, fresh pocket handkerchiefs and little handbags, all homesewn. Oh, we were up to snuff, all right. I joined my comrades and didn't even see my family go in to find seats in the crowded auditorium. The school band struck up a march and all classes filed in as had been rehearsed. We stood in front of our seats, as assigned, and on a signal from the choir director, we sat. No sooner had this been accomplished than the band started to play the national anthem. We rose again and sang the song, after which we recited the Pledge of Allegiance. We remained standing for a brief minute before the choir director and the principal signaled to us, rather desperately I thought, to take our seats. The command was so unusual that our carefully rehearsed and smooth-running machine was thrown off. For a full minute we fumbled for our chairs and bumped into each other awkwardly. Habits change or solidify under pressure, so in our state of nervous tension we had been ready to follow our usual assembly pattern: the American national anthem, then the Pledge of Allegiance, then the song every Black person I knew called the Negro National Anthem. All done in the same key, with the same passion and most often standing on the same foot. Finding my seat at last, I was overcome with a presentiment of worse things to come. Something unrehearsed, unplanned, was going to happen, and we were going to be made to look bad. I distinctly remember being explicit in the choice of pronoun. It was “we,” the graduating class, the unit, that concerned me then. The principal welcomed “parents and friends” and asked the Baptist minister to lead us in prayer. His invocation was brief and punchy, and for a second I thought we were getting back on the high road to right action.