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 Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  An extended tour, such as was planned, met with some opposition from the parents, an opposition countered by the possible long-term benefits of the tour in so far as the boys’ careers were concerned and, even more urgently, by the assurance that, at the very least, the boys would come home with a considerably larger sum of money than any of them were making on their jobs. (The political implications do not seem to have carried much weight.) A series of churches had been lined up for them presumably throughout the South. “The understanding,” writes David, “was that we were supposed to sing”; after which the party was to take over to make speeches and circulate petitions. “The arrangement,” David notes laconically, “sounded very promising, so we decided to go.” And, indeed, they traveled South in splendor, in a Pullman, to be exact, in which, since what David describes as a “Southern gentleman and wife” took exception to their presence, they traveled alone. At the Wallace headquarters in Atlanta they were introduced to a Mrs. Branson Price, a grey-haired white woman of incurably aristocratic leanings who seems to have been the directress of the party in that region. The graciousness of her reception was only slightly marred by the fact that she was not expecting singers and thought they were a new group of canvassers. She arranged for them to take rooms on Butler Street at the YMCA. Here the first gap between promise and performance was made manifest, a gap, they felt, which was perhaps too trifling to make a fuss about. In New York they had been promised comparative privacy, two to a room; but now, it developed, they were to sleep in a dormitory. This gap, in fact, it was the province of Mr. Warde to close, but whether he was simply weary from the trip or overwhelmed by the aristocratic Mrs. Price, he kept his mouth shut and, indeed, did not open it again for quite some time. When they returned to headquarters, somewhat irritated at having had to wait three hours for the arrival of Louis Burner, who had the money for their rooms, Mrs. Price suggested that they go out canvassing. This was wholly unexpected, since no one had mentioned canvassing in New York and, since, moreover, canvassers are voluntary workers who are not paid. Further, the oldest of them was twenty, which was not voting age, and none of them knew anything about the Progressive Party, nor did they care much.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  But the fact is not that the Negro has no tradition but that there has as yet arrived no sensibility sufficiently profound and tough to make this tradition articulate. For a tradition expresses, after all, nothing more than the long and painful experience of a people; it comes out of the battle waged to maintain their integrity or, to put it more simply, out of their struggle to survive. When we speak of the Jewish tradition we are speaking of centuries of exile and persecution, of the strength which endured and the sensibility which discovered in it the high possibility of the moral victory. This sense of how Negroes live and how they have so long endured is hidden from us in part by the very speed of the Negro’s public progress, a progress so heavy with complexity, so bewildering and kaleidoscopic, that he dare not pause to conjecture on the darkness which lies behind him; and by the nature of the American psychology which, in order to apprehend or be made able to accept it, must undergo a metamorphosis so profound as to be literally unthinkable and which there is no doubt we will resist until we are compelled to achieve our own identity by the rigors of a time that has yet to come. Bigger, in the meanwhile, and all his furious kin, serve only to whet the notorious national taste for the sensational and to reinforce all that we now find it necessary to believe. It is not Bigger whom we fear, since his appearance among us makes our victory certain. It is the others, who smile, who go to church, who give no cause for complaint, whom we sometimes consider with amusement, with pity, even with affection—and in whose faces we sometimes surprise the merest arrogant hint of hatred, the faintest, withdrawn, speculative shadow of contempt—who make us uneasy; whom we cajole, threaten, flatter, fear; who to us remain unknown, though we are not (we feel with both relief and hostility and with bottomless confusion) unknown to them. It is out of our reaction to these hewers of wood and drawers of water that our image of Bigger was created.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Roy was tying flies at the kitchen table. I was drinking a Pepsi and watching him. He bent close to his work, grunting with concentration. He said, in an offhand way, “What do you think about a little brother?” “A little brother?” He nodded. “Me and your mom’ve been thinking about starting a family.” I didn’t like this idea at all, in fact it froze me solid. He looked up from the vise. “We’re already pretty much of a family when you think about it,” he said. I said I guessed we were. “We have a lot of fun.” He looked down at the vise again. “A lot of fun. We’re thinking about it,” he said. “Nothing like a little guy around the house. You could teach him things. You could teach him to shoot.” I nodded. “That’s what we were thinking too,” he said. “I don’t know about names, though. What do you think of Bill as a name?” I said I liked it. “Bill,” Roy said. “Bill. Bill.” He turned silent again, staring down at the fly in the vise, his hands on the table. I finished off my Pepsi and went outside. While my mother and I ate breakfast the next morning Roy carried fishing gear and camping equipment out to the Jeep. He was lashing down something in back when I left for school. I yelled “Good luck!” and he waved at me, and I never saw him again either. My mother was in the apartment when I got home that day, folding clothes into a suitcase that lay open on her bed. Two other suitcases were already packed full. She was singing to herself. Her color was high, her movements quick and sure, everything about her flushed with gaiety. I knew we were on our way the moment I heard her voice, even before I saw the

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  It seemed to me, since what I regarded as the high point—the procès-verbal —had been passed and since the hotel-keeper was once again in possession of his sheet, that we might reasonably expect to be released from police custody in a matter of hours. We had been detained now for what would soon be twenty-four hours, during which time I had learned only that the official charge against me was receleur. My mental shifting, between lunch and dinner, to say nothing of the physical lack of either of these delights, was beginning to make me dizzy. The steady chatter of my friend from New York, who was determined to keep my spirits up, made me feel murderous; I was praying that some power would release us from this freezing pile of stone before the impulse became the act. And I was beginning to wonder what was happening in that beautiful city, Paris, which lived outside these walls. I wondered how long it would take before anyone casually asked, “But where’s Jimmy? He hasn’t been around”—and realized, knowing the people I knew, that it would take several days. Quite late in the afternoon we were taken from our cells; handcuffed, each to a separate officer; led through a maze of steps and corridors to the top of the building; fingerprinted; photographed. As in movies I had seen, I was placed against a wall, facing an old-fashioned camera, behind which stood one of the most completely cruel and indifferent faces I had ever seen, while someone next to me and, therefore, just outside my line of vision, read off in a voice from which all human feeling, even feeling of the most base description, had long since fled, what must be called my public characteristics—which, at that time and in that place, seemed anything but that. He might have been roaring to the hostile world secrets which I could barely, in the privacy of midnight, utter to myself. But he was only reading off my height, my features, my approximate weight, my color—that color which, in the United States, had often, odd as it may sound, been my salvation—the color of my hair, my age, my nationality. A light then flashed, the photographer and I staring at each other as though there was murder in our hearts, and then it was over.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Time had become something one had to wade through, like glue. And beneath the layers of heavy, turgid fug in my brain was a throbbing, high-pitched tension that no drug ever touched. And then there were the problems of institutional life. It brought it all back: the way rules became absolute and could not be adapted to particular cases. I was sharing a room with a pretty, bulimic girl from Switzerland. Our beds were made up so that our heads were only inches away from a huge old-fashioned radiator, which gave off a thick, suffocating heat, smelling strongly of paint. Each night I turned the bedclothes around, so that my feet were beside the radiator and my head near the door. And each night a nurse would shake me awake and put me firmly back in the original position. Each morning I woke with a headache. Although I was supposed to be in hospital for a rest, I was yanked out of bed each morning at six, hustled down the corridor, and weighed with the other anorexic girls—and then told to go back to sleep. It was no use protesting; you were simply humored by the ward staff and rarely saw your doctors, who disappeared behind a phalanx of nurses and registrars. Both times, because I was so heavily drugged, it took me days to work out what to do. I would pretend to swallow the pills that the nurses gave me, spit them out, and then wait until my brain gradually cleared. When I had regained the necessary lucidity, I slipped out of the ward and ran down the corridors to my doctor’s office. Both times, fortunately, she was there and was good enough to see me at once. “I can’t stay here,” I told her. “No, Karen,” she agreed, adding, the second time around, “Hospitals are not for intelligent people.” After that I never went back again. Each time, the color, vibrancy, and sheer energy of the outside world greeted me like a gift. Food tasted better, the air smelled sweeter, and ordinary little privacies seemed the greatest of privileges. I would wake early each day, filled with anticipation. True, nothing had really changed. I would probably suffer from these anxiety attacks all my life, but at least I wasn’t in a psychiatric ward. And as my doctor had reminded me, I had talents. I was intelligent—more intelligent, perhaps, than the nurses who had seemed omnipotent in the hospital. Maybe this was not the kind of intelligence that was of interest to the University of Oxford, but it was a potentially powerful tool, a weapon that would help me to fight my way out of this apparent impasse.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  asked. “I’m supposed to wait,” I told her. She looked at me. I could see she was curious, but she didn’t ask any questions. The priest came out soon after. He was old and very tall and walked with a limp. He stood close beside me, and when I looked up at him I saw the white hair in his nostrils. He smelled strongly of tobacco. “We had a little trouble getting started,” he said. “Yes, Father?” “He’s just a bit nervous is all,” the priest said. “Needs to relax. Nothing like a glass of milk for that.” She nodded. “Why don’t we try again a little later. Say twenty minutes?” “We’ll be here, Father.” Sister James and I went to the rectory kitchen. I sat at a steel cutting table while she poured me a glass of milk. “You want some cookies?” she asked. “That’s all right, Sister.” “Sure you do.” She put a package of Oreos on a plate and brought it to me. Then she sat down. With her arms crossed, hands hidden in her sleeves, she watched me eat and drink. Finally she said, “What happened, then? Cat get your tongue?” “Yes, Sister.” “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” “I know.” “Maybe you’re just thinking of it wrong,” she said. I stared at my hands on the tabletop. “I forgot to give you a napkin,” she said. “Go on and lick them. Don’t be shy.” She waited until I looked up, and when I did I saw that she was younger than I’d thought her to be. Not that I’d given much thought to her age. Except for the really old nuns with canes or facial hair they all seemed outside of time, without past or future. But now—forced to look at Sister James across the narrow space

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  And this question, since a what can get by with skill but a who demands resources, was my first real intimation of what humility must mean. In the morning it was still raining. Between nine and ten o’clock a black Citroën took us off to the Ile de la Cité, to the great, gray Préfecture. I realize now that the questions I put to the various policemen who escorted us were always answered in such a way as to corroborate what I wished to hear. This was not out of politeness, but simply out of indifference—or, possibly, an ironical pity—since each of the policemen knew very well that nothing would speed or halt the machine in which I had become entangled. They knew I did not know this and there was certainly no point in their telling me. In one way or another I would certainly come out at the other side—for they also knew that being found with a stolen bedsheet in one’s possession was not a crime punishable by the guillotine. (They had the advantage over me there, too, for there were certainly moments later on when I was not so sure.) If I did not come out at the other side—well, that was just too bad. So, to my question, put while we were in the Citroën—“Will it be over today?”—I received a “ Oui, bien sûr. ” He was not lying. As it turned out, the procès-verbal was over that day. Trying to be realistic, I dismissed, in the Citroën, all thoughts of lunch and pushed my mind ahead to dinner. At the Préfecture we were first placed in a tiny cell, in which it was almost impossible either to sit or to lie down. After a couple of hours of this we were taken down to an office, where, for the first time, I encountered the owner of the bedsheet and where the procès-verbal took place. This was simply an interrogation, quite chillingly clipped and efficient (so that there was, shortly, no doubt in one’s own mind that one should be treated as a criminal), which was recorded by a secretary. When it was over, this report was given to us to sign. One had, of course, no choice but to sign it, even though my mastery of written French was very far from certain. We were being held, according to the law in France, incommunicado, and all my angry demands to be allowed to speak to my embassy or to see a lawyer met with a stony “ Oui, oui. Plus tard. ” The procès-verbal over, we were taken back to the cell, before which, shortly, passed the owner of the bedsheet. He said he hoped we had slept well, gave a vindictive wink, and disappeared. By this time there was only one thing clear: that we had no way of controlling the sequence of events and could not possibly guess what this sequence would be.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  We focus here on the innermost circle of Paul’s narrowing focus on unity, on that between Jewish Christians and gentile Christians within the several Roman assemblies (12:1–15:21). Recall that, as Paul writes this letter, Claudius has just died in 54 CE and the teenaged Nero has become the new emperor. It was a moment, as we saw earlier, when the poet Calpurnius Siculus could tell his Romans: “Amid untroubled peace, the Golden Age springs to a second birth…while he, a very God, shall rule the nations” ( Eclogue 1.42, 46). It was also a moment when Paul could tell his Romans: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds” (12:2), but still, “If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (12:18). That would be, under Nero, a very big “if,” indeed. What strikes you immediately about 12:1–15:21 is Paul’s admonitions not only to external peace, but especially to internal peace. “Live in harmony with one another,” he says in 12:16 and 15:5. Furthermore, Paul advises the Roman communities “not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned” in 12:3. Later, he tells them, “The faith that you have, have as your own conviction before God” in 14:22. Harmony is required, it would seem, because God has granted them divergences within Christian faith or differences of Christian faith. What, then, was the exact situation inside and outside Roman Christianity that required such a long plea for peaceful unity? The weak and the strong. There were clearly two opposing viewpoints within those Roman Christian assemblies, and Paul attempts to bring their proponents together into one overall community for worship. What was causing the two groups not to “welcome one another” (15:7)? Paul—somewhat tendentiously—calls one group the “weak” and the other group the “strong.” The “weak” are those for whom Jewish observance of kosher dietary laws and the religious calendar was still important. These could, of course, be either Christian Jews or Christian God-worshipers. The “strong” are those for whom such observance was unnecessary. “Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables…. Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike” (14:2, 5). With regard to theory and his own position, Paul is quite clear: “I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean” (14:14). He puts himself, therefore, among the “strong,” who do not consider Jewish observances necessary for either Christian Jews, Christian God-worshipers, or Christian Gentiles. “ We who are strong.” he says in 15:1, “ought to put up with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This was sensible advice. After all, I wasn’t a believer, so why let my career be hamstrung by this religious stuff? The book on the Crusades had been a disaster and the dismal sales figures would not endear me to a future publisher. Better to make it clear that I had turned over a new leaf and abjured my unprofitable past. Yet despite the lack of encouragement, I refused to relinquish the project. Why? It was not as though I were passionately in love with the subject. I had rarely read a book about God that was not, at least in part, abstract and dull. Why should my own be any different? I had no training in philosophy or metaphysics, and might write something hopelessly naïve. And why go on producing religious books in Britain, where only about 6 percent of the population attended a service on a regular basis? It seemed a doomed and even a self-destructive project. Many found the very idea hilarious. “Hi, Karen—how’s God?” they would ask, as though inquiring about a mutual acquaintance. Others raised their eyebrows in mild disapproval. “Do you think you can find anything new to say? Do we really need yet another book about God?” After the fiasco of the Crusades, my confidence was at such low ebb that these objections really struck home. I could already hear the ridicule and scorn of the reviewers. The general assumption was that nobody in the late twentieth century should take God seriously—least of all me. After all, this wretched God had lured me into a convent; his mythical perfection had made me chronically dissatisfied with myself; and his apparent indifference toward me had left me feeling spurned and hopeless. Who needed him? I had often declared that I had finished with God, and was much the better for it. Yet still, despite all the evidence I had so painfully amassed to the contrary, at some inchoate, unconscious level, I felt that God and I had unfinished business—even though I didn’t believe that he existed.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  In the convent, I had spent most of my time in silence, but it had been too busy—noisy with tension and anxiety, anger and irritation. The constant reprimands made me hyperconscious of my own performance, and so instead of getting rid of self, I had become embedded in the egotism that I was supposed to transcend. Now I was beginning to understand that a silence that is not clamorous with vexation and worried self-regard can become part of the texture of your mind, can seep into you, moment by moment, and gradually change you. The study of texts for A History of God had become very different from the research I had done during my years in television, when I had been reading and amassing information at breakneck speed to keep one step ahead of the production team. At that time, I had remained trapped on the cerebral level, as though I were reading a guidebook or an instruction manual. Instead of allowing these images and dogmas to percolate slowly, drop by drop, into the deeper, unconscious levels of my mind, I had grasped prematurely at what I thought they meant. I had also been engaged in a crusade during my time in television. I use that word deliberately because, however well intentioned, my work had had an aggressive edge. I had wanted to show that religion was indeed bonkers, partly in order to free myself once and for all from a system that had exerted such a baleful influence on my life. I had read in order to debunk. Egged on by colleagues and friends who found the very idea of faith risible, I had too often reached for the witty, deflationary phrase or the sparkling put-down while explicating a theological point. And instead of losing myself in my work, I had been engaged in what amounted to constant self-advertisement. Even in Muhammad, when I had deliberately inhibited this habit of superficial cleverness, I had been writing a polemic and had an agenda. True, it had been a benevolent polemic, one that tried to build up rather than demolish, but an argument had constantly been in progress in my head as I anticipated the hostile point of view that I wanted to counter. I had not let the ideas speak quietly for themselves or to come to me in their own good time.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “I’ve nothing against you personally,” Joel explained, while John was out of the room, “but you have no experience. Nobody knows you—you are not even—” He broke off, gesturing hopelessly at me but saying nothing. “Pretty” was clearly the word that, with a restraint that I would later realize to be quite uncharacteristic, he had managed to bite back. The only thing that gave him any hope at all was that I had once been a nun. “Perhaps we can make some scandal out of that,” he sighed, blowing the blue cigarette smoke out from his nostrils like a disconsolate dragon. In fact, the only person who had any faith in the project was John. “It’s going to be wonderful, darling!” he told me repeatedly. “You’re going to be a big hit. I’m going to make you a star!” I took all that with a pinch of salt. But for some reason, I wanted to make this film. I sensed instinctively that this was what I had been waiting for. It was odd that I should feel this. For years I had wanted nothing to do with religion; the thought of reading anything remotely theological had filled me with visceral disgust. But this was different. The reading I was doing now in preparation for the series was not devotional. It would have no bearing on my life, after all, but would be a purely academic exercise. The slight quickening of spiritual interest that I had experienced while writing Through the Narrow Gate had been submerged. In the robustly secularist atmosphere of Channel 4, any form of faith seemed absurd, and my early life an aberration. Where Nick found religion faintly upsetting, John hated it with the passion of a zealot. This, I was told, was one of the reasons why Jeremy Isaacs, the controller of Channel 4, had put him in charge of religion. This new channel had a remit to be different from the other three. There was to be no “God slot,” no Songs of Praise, no edifying discussions for the devout. “I want to open up religion and discuss it as critically as any other subject,” John was fond of saying. And he did, conducting his mandate as an antireligious crusade. “They’re all bonkers, darling!” he would exclaim incredulously when yet another pious broadcaster came to talk to him about the possibility of a commission. He had also decided to put on a highly provocative series called Jesus: The Evidence, designed to explode the Christian myth once and for all. Indeed, as he gleefully explained, the director actually intended to blow up a statue of Jesus at the very beginning of the first program. “Blast it to smithereens!” John predicted exultantly. “That’ll show the bastards!”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It was John Ranelagh, the commissioning editor for religion at Channel 4. He had seen my pilot film, The Body of Christ, and loved it. He was going to commission Opinions and looked forward to working with me in the future. Would I, for example, like to write and present a six-part documentary series on Saint Paul? It would take about a year; there wouldn’t be much money in it; and it would mean working with an Israeli film company in Jerusalem. Of course I said yes. I had, after all, nothing else to do. So that was how I came to be sitting on a British Airways flight to Tel Aviv at the end of January 1983. The months that had elapsed since John’s phone call had been strange. To my surprise, June, my agent, was dismayed by the project. This was not what she wanted for me at all. She had seen me as a popular novelist, writing block-busters with a vaguely religious theme, along the lines of The Thorn Birds. Religion was a dead end, she argued. I would never make a living by writing about theology, and she didn’t trust the people at Channel 4. She also scolded me severely for responding to John’s invitation with such obvious delight. “Now they know you want to do it,” she snapped, “and we can’t possibly get you a good deal.” June was not alone. Nick, the producer of Opinions, told me that if I had any doubts about this project, I should walk away from it. Right now. “It sounds a rum setup to me,” he said. Nobody knew anything about these Israelis, and Channel 4 was giving them a quite unrealistically tiny budget. The proposed schedule looked impossibly tight. I would be filming in the Middle East, Italy, and Greece for about three weeks; there was no way anybody could complete a six-part series in that time! “I know how frustrating it is to work on a program that never gets screened,” Nick said. “So if you’re not happy—don’t do it! John will find you something else.” Then there were the Israelis themselves, who had arrived in London shortly before Christmas and gazed at me in frank dismay. Joel, the director, a large bear of a man, slumped morosely in a corner of John’s office, chain-smoking and glaring in my direction. He wanted a big name to be his presenter. Conor Cruise O’Brien had been his first choice, but John had made it clear that either they settled for me or the deal was off. In any case, in view of the miserable fee, nobody with a name would have touched this project with a barge pole.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  Not a physical hybrid merely: in every aspect of his living he betrays the memory of the auction block and the impact of the happy ending. In white Americans he finds reflected—repeated, as it were, in a higher key—his tensions, his terrors, his tenderness. Dimly and for the first time, there begins to fall into perspective the nature of the roles they have played in the lives and history of each other. Now he is bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh; they have loved and hated and obsessed and feared each other and his blood is in their soil. Therefore he cannot deny them, nor can they ever be divorced. The American Negro cannot explain to the African what surely seems in himself to be a want of manliness, of racial pride, a maudlin ability to forgive. It is difficult to make clear that he is not seeking to forfeit his birthright as a black man, but that, on the contrary, it is precisely this birthright which he is struggling to recognize and make articulate. Perhaps it now occurs to him that in this need to establish himself in relation to his past he is most American, that this depthless alienation from oneself and one’s people is, in sum, the American experience. Yet one day he will face his home again; nor can he realistically expect to find overwhelming changes. In America, it is true, the appearance is perpetually changing, each generation greeting with short-lived exultation yet more dazzling additions to our renowned façade. But the ghetto, anxiety, bitterness, and guilt continue to breed their indescribable complex of tensions. What time will bring Americans is at last their own identity. It is on this dangerous voyage and in the same boat that the American Negro will make peace with himself and with the voiceless many thousands gone before him. Notes of a Native Son A Question of Identity The American student colony in Paris is a social phenomenon so amorphous as to at once demand and defy the generality. One is far from being in the position of finding not enough to say—one finds far too much, and everything one finds is contradictory. What one wants to know at bottom, is what they came to find: to which question there are—at least—as many answers as there are faces at the café tables. The assumed common denominator, which is their military experience, does not shed on this question as much light as one might hope. For one thing, it becomes impossible, the moment one thinks about it, to predicate the existence of a common experience. The moment one thinks about it, it becomes apparent that there is no such thing. That experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair is the principal truth, perhaps, to which the colony under discussion bears witness—though the aggressively unreadable face which they, collectively, present also suggests the more disturbing possibility that experience may perfectly well be meaningless.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  No matter, I needed that rosary around my neck, massaging its history into my heathen skin. The rosaries led me to the saints. By age eighteen, I was reading voraciously about them all—Francis, Thomas, Jerome, the two Teresas—but I then honed in on the women who starved, who bled, who beat themselves with birch branches, who licked the oozing wounds of lepers, who woke up screaming in the middle of the night, pierced by God’s love. This was really interesting stuff. I briefly entertained the idea of switching professions from ballet dancing—already rather nunlike in its dedications—to being a saint. Certainly nothing seemed more worthwhile, and sainthood appeared to demand the disciplines with which I already had substantial experience: self-control and self-denial. Just how much pain and suffering could I endure, could I choose, could I cause for myself? Testing my strength in this way sounded immensely attractive. But after considerable consideration, I reconsidered: becoming a saint would entail even more pain than I could imagine. And what if one suffered all that pain and still didn’t see God, still didn’t have that mystical union? The risk was very high indeed. Besides, I didn’t want to suffer just to suffer. Dancing had taught me about pain for gain, pain for beauty. Pain for pain was self-indulgent, whereas my youthful masochism was both ambitious and realistic. Saint Teresa of Avila would have no competition from me. Instead, I would stick to dancing and continue plunging my toes into the beautiful, tight, shiny sheaths called pointe shoes. And there was the miracle, made manifest daily on my very own feet. Despite blistered and bloody evidence to the contrary, my feet didn’t hurt at all while ensconced in the shoes, while dancing. They only hurt when the shoes came off, when my foot was released from its satin prison. This curious experience, the ironic marriage of physical discomfort and euphoria, taught me the power of transcendence. My pink pointe shoes became my fetishistic ally, my crown of thorns, my bed of nails. I adored my toe shoes. Alongside my saint obsession, I developed a passion for reading. This passion, I came to believe, detracted from my ultimate success as a dancer by luring me from the circumscribed, nonverbal world of movement to the limitless plains of thought.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  However we shift the light which beats so fiercely on his head, or prove, by victorious social analysis, how his lot has changed, how we have both improved, our uneasiness refuses to be exorcized. And nowhere is this more apparent than in our literature on the subject—“problem” literature when written by whites, “protest” literature when written by Negroes—and nothing is more striking than the tremendous disparity of tone between the two creations. Kingsblood Royal bears, for example, almost no kinship to If He Hollers Let Him Go, though the same reviewers praised them both for what were, at bottom, very much the same reasons. These reasons may be suggested, far too briefly but not at all unjustly, by observing that the presupposition is in both novels exactly the same: black is a terrible color with which to be born into the world. Now the most powerful and celebrated statement we have yet had of what it means to be a Negro in America is unquestionably Richard Wright’s Native Son. The feeling which prevailed at the time of its publication was that such a novel, bitter, uncompromising, shocking, gave proof, by its very existence, of what strides might be taken in a free democracy; and its indisputable success, proof that Americans were now able to look full in the face without flinching the dreadful facts. Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle. Such a book, we felt with pride, could never have been written before—which was true. Nor could it be written today. It bears already the aspect of a landmark; for Bigger and his brothers have undergone yet another metamorphosis; they have been accepted in baseball leagues and by colleges hitherto exclusive; and they have made a most favorable appearance on the national screen. We have yet to encounter, nevertheless, a report so indisputably authentic, or one that can begin to challenge this most significant novel. It is, in a certain American tradition, the story of an unremarkable youth in battle with the force of circumstance; that force of circumstance which plays and which has played so important a part in the national fables of success or failure.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  I was petrified. My male dilemma was personified in these two men before me: the Boyfriend was dependable in life but not in sex, while the Young Man was dependable in sex but not in life. Can’t a woman win? My experiments so far said no. The Boyfriend was too safe, too arrogant, too possessive. But the Young Man was too dangerous, too sexy, too young, too not here. But I had Rule #3 at my disposal, so at least he was legal, technically. In fact, the decision to see the Young Man the very afternoon he called was surprisingly easy. Earlier that day, the Boyfriend had juiced up my anger to the point of murderous rage by pontificating about “our” relationship—he was in “our” relationship alone, as far as I was concerned. And so it was arranged. It was three, the Young Man would be over at four. Love in the afternoon, like Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn. Well, not quite. I didn’t have a cello. With one hour to prepare, I had no time to think. Just as well, because there was no sense in it. But the ones who made sense drove me crazy. I had already caught several men desiring matrimony—and married the best of them—and had found misery to spare. Catching a man and hauling him to the altar was not what I wanted. I had a creepy suspicion that all those “proposals” were more about insecurities and jealousies than about love, more about tying me down emotionally when I needed tying down physically. I didn’t want a lifetime commitment; I wanted a sexual commitment. For a few hours, anyway. Trembling, I got on my knees, not knowing what else to do, and prayed to my unknown God to allow me to surrender to this man, in this moment, for this afternoon only. No more. I could not imagine more. I can only fuck one fuck at a time. Could I have the courage to not be afraid of the beauty of the Young Man just this once? To go all the way in with him, not knowing if there was a way out? I got up off my knees and turned on the bath. I bathed, shaved my legs, powdered my whole body with honey dust, set up the music, closed the curtains, fed the cat, lit the incense and candles, and then—very excited, very apprehensive—I put myself into a black thong, a black bra, and a long black velvet gown. The doorbell rang, late. I opened the door and he stepped inside and then stepped inside of me. He folded me into his big arms, no words, and pressed me close. I was his from that moment forth. I allowed it, and then it took on a life of its own. For the next three hours, I melted into this man in a way I never had with any man before.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I was shaken when I put down the phone, and angry. How many times had I been told that nuns were never shocked, any more than Jesus had been? You can say anything to a nun; nothing about human nature surprises them. That was the theory, but it was not true, of course. It is probably not the case with anyone; and now, almost thirty years later, I cannot say that I blame that superior. I probably frightened her half to death. She would have remembered me as a timid little novice, unable to say “boo” to a goose, and here I was apparently deranged and dangerously suicidal. It was indeed a mad idea to imagine that I could go back to the convent to convalesce, and the fact that I had thought it feasible showed how confused I really was, despite my studied calm. But at the time the rejection seemed a slap in the face. And that too was salutary. It made me realize that I could not keep looking back to the past; I had to move on. I repeated my new mantra: “We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind.” It was not so easy to be positive, however, when, a few hours later, I found myself sitting on a lumpy sofa waiting to be checked into a ward in the Littlemore Hospital, watching another patient making her slow, crablike progress down the corridor. Her limbs splayed in all directions, so that she looked disjointed. On her face was an expression of exaggerated terror as she took each painful step forward. While both her hands and feet made contact with the wall, she was all right, but each time she inched forward, she broke her sole link with concrete reality. “Come along, Mrs. Saunders, you can do it!” a nurse said encouragingly every thirty seconds. But could she? And could I? My mantra seemed absurd in this context: it was, to put it mildly, difficult to find a source of strength in the psychiatric ward of my worst nightmares. True, there was no padded cell and this was not a locked ward. I had been breezily told that I would be able to come and go as I chose, just as long as I kept the nurses informed. But as I looked around the room at these other broken people, I feared that this was where I really belonged. I too had intimations of the kind of terror that was paralyzing Mrs. Saunders, making it impossible for her, try as she would, to take the next step. I stared glumly around the ward. There was a strong smell of sickness and disinfectant. Two brave souls were playing table tennis, but most were simply sitting on the ancient chairs and sofas, gazing at the walls or into space.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  As the year progressed, I sometimes felt that life was leaving me behind. Everybody else seemed to be moving on. Even Charlotte had decided to break out of her tranced existence in the moated grange of the Iffley Road, waiting for the lover to show up. “I’m getting out,” she had told me one evening. “I’m going to go to London, breaking with Mike. I’ll get a job there.” I had looked at her with respect. Charlotte’s decision was, in its way, heroic. She was dismantling the prison she had made for herself and was going out into a completely unknown, empty, Mike-less future. She was renouncing everything that had given her life meaning. She did not hope to turn again. But why had I felt so uncomfortable when she asked, “Why don’t you come too?” I had shaken my head. “I have to finish my thesis,” I said, “and my grant is running out. I’ll need to stay on at the Harts’, at least until I finish the degree.” Charlotte had looked skeptical. “You see, I don’t think you should be doing this academic stuff. It’s all too confined for you, love. I don’t know how you can bear it. You’re just putting yourself in another kind of convent, cut off from the world—” “—with limited horizons, and a lofty conviction of belonging to an elite,” I capped. Was that why I yearned so toward it? Was I really seeking to escape yet again from the confusions and ambiguities of my time and enter another safe and separate world? Trying to be above it all? Perhaps I was, after all, hoping to turn again. “Well what do you think I should do?” I demanded, somewhat fretfully . “Oh, you should write,” Charlotte replied, as though it were so obvious that it was scarcely worth mentioning. “Not this thesis— that’s just an exercise in writing what other people want, but something of your own. You’re a writer: that’s what you should do.” “Write!” I repeated incredulously. I, who could not string a paragraph together unless I had found somebody else’s ideas to act as a framework? To face the empty page every day and—still worse—the inner vacuum that would ensure that it would remain blank? “No, Charlie,” I said firmly. “You’re the writer. And anyway, surely you’re not suggesting that I should abandon the thesis? After three years of hard work?” “No, you probably should finish it,” Charlotte conceded, as she got up to refill our glasses. “But after that . . . You really should do something that will free you up a bit—take you out of the straitjackets that you keep tying yourself up in. Not yet awhile, perhaps. But soon.” I was reminded uneasily of that conversation when I visited Rebecca in the London convent a few weeks later. “I’m leaving,” she said. The words fell heavily into the room.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval; for it is God’s servant for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience. For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, busy with this very thing. Pay to all what is due them—taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due. (13:1–7) Scholarship has given several responses to that question. Here are two of them, and, although we appreciate their validity, we wish to suggest a third interpretation of Paul’s intention. First, insofar as this could and would be taken as a general and unqualified principle, it is one of the most imprudent passages in all of Paul’s letters. Looking back on how it has been used throughout Christian history, Paul might surely wish he had never written it. Second, it was written to Rome in the mid-50s during the rather disturbed context after the death of Claudius and the ascendancy of the teenaged Nero. Its general, opening statements were intended to ground its specific, closing statements about taxes and revenues. It intends, in other words, to avoid martyrdom for wrong or inadequate reasons. A modern example is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words to Eberhard Bethge when all in their cafe stood for the Nazi salute at news of the surrender of France on June 17, 1940. “Raise your arm!” said Bonhoeffer. “Are you crazy? We shall have to run risks for very different things now, but not for that salute.” One dies a martyr not for salutes—or taxes and revenues—but for the deeper things of God in Christ. Finally, however, we propose another interpretation of Paul’s purpose, and it may well be the most important one. Remember, by the way, that the earliest manuscripts of Paul’s letter to the Romans were written—like all other New Testament texts—without any division into our chapters or verses. Notice, then, how easily we tend to ignore immediate context—both before and after—in focusing on 13:1–7 as if it were necessarily and obviously a completely unified section of Paul’s thought. But watch what happens when we start Paul’s conceptual section at 12:14 and then continue it through 13:1–7 to 13:10, when, in other words, that (in)famous section in 13:1–7 is read and interpreted within the Pauline context of 12:14–13:10.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  It is neither—but something much more radical. Paul continues: I am sending him, that is, my own heart, back to you. I wanted to keep him with me, so that he might be of service to me in your place during my imprisonment for the gospel; but I preferred to do nothing without your consent, in order that your good deed might be voluntary and not something forced. (12–14) So Paul is certainly not asking Philemon to leave Onesimus—enslaved or freed—with him at Ephesus. He sends him back as his “own heart.” First, notice the bite in the phrase “in your place.” Paul might as well be saying, “Onesimus was here to help me, and where were you, dear Philemon? Oh!”—with sarcasm—“Maybe he was here as your representative?” Second, as you might expect by now, it is a good time for another mention of “my imprisonment for the gospel”—literally, “in my chains of the gospel.” That is the same deliberate ambiguity seen twice already—has Rome put Paul in chains because of the gospel or has the gospel put Paul in chains because of Rome? Finally, notice also, the phrase about Philemon’s “good deed” being “voluntary and not something forced.” That takes us deep into the Pauline theology that insists on faith-with-works against works-without-faith . Do not confuse that, by the way, with the Reformation’s pseudo-problem (yes, pseudo-problem) of faith -against- works, so useful for its polemical treatises on Christians against Jews and Protestants against Catholics. Philemon must free Onesimus freely as a work proceeding intrinsically from faith and not as a work proceeding extrinsically from enforced obedience to Paul. That is the reason for Paul’s roller-coaster, up-and-down, praise-and-blame, good cop–bad cop rhetoric in this letter. Paul continues: Perhaps this is the reason he was separated from you for a while, so that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother—especially to me but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord. (15–16) There we finally have it—the “duty” and “good deed” is to free Onesimus freely. Philemon is not to free him out of necessity so that he can remain permanently with Paul; rather, Onesimus is to go home to voluntary liberation (manumission) from Philemon. Maybe, says Paul to Philemon, that is why this all happened—Onesimus was “separated” (does the passive voice here indicate agency by God?) from Philemon in slavery, so that he could return to him for freedom. The phrase “both in the flesh and in the Lord” is a crucial element for understanding Paul’s meaning.