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 Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  I got Dad his knife with the carved bone handle and the blade of blue German steel, and he gave me a pipe wrench, and we went looking for Demon. We looked under my bed, where I had seen it, but it was gone. We looked all around the house—under the table, in the dark corners of the closets, in the toolbox, even outside in the trash cans. “C’mere, you sorry-ass old Demon!” Dad called out in the desert night. “Come out and show your butt-ugly face, you yellow-bellied monster!” “Yeah, c’mon, you old mean Demon!” I said, waving the pipe wrench in the air. “We’re not scared of you!” There was only the sound of the coyotes in the distance. “This is just like that chickenshit Demon,” Dad said. He sat down on the front step and lit up a cigarette, then told me a story about the time Demon was terrorizing an entire town, and Dad fought it off in hand-to-hand combat, biting its ears and sticking his fingers in its eyes. Old Demon was terrified because that was the first time it had met anyone who wasn’t afraid of it. “Damned old Demon didn’t know what to think,” Dad said, shaking his head with a chuckle. That was the thing to remember about all monsters, Dad said: They love to frighten people, but the minute you stare them down, they turn tail and run. “All you have to do, Mountain Goat, is show old Demon that you’re not afraid.” • • • Not much grew around Midland other than the Joshua tree, cacti, and the scrubby little creosote bushes that Dad said were some of the oldest plants on the planet. The great granddaddy creosote bushes were thousands of years old. When it rained, they let off a disgusting musty smell so animals wouldn’t eat them. Only four inches of rain fell a year around Midland—about the same as in the northern Sahara—and water for humans came in on the train once a day in special containers. The only animals that could survive around Midland were lipless, scaly creatures such as Gila monsters and scorpions, and people like us. A month after we moved to Midland, Juju got bitten by a rattlesnake and died. We buried him near the Joshua tree. It was practically the only time I ever saw Brian cry. But we had plenty of cats to keep us company. Too many, in fact. We had rescued lots of cats since we tossed Quixote out the window, and most of them had gone and had kittens, and it got to the point where we had to get rid of some of them. We didn’t have many neighbors to give them to, so Dad put them in a burlap sack and drove to a pond made by the mining company to cool equipment. I watched him load the back of the car with bobbing, mewing bags. “It doesn’t seem right,” I told Mom. “We rescued them.

• From Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021)

  Masters and Johnson were no self-declared feminists; they located their findings firmly within a traditional framework of heterosexual monogamy and marriage. Nonetheless, they were pushing against past orthodoxies that had hemmed in women’s sexuality. In the first half of the twentieth century, myriad experts advanced a view of women’s sexuality as profoundly – almost metaphysically – different from men’s. From the 1910s especially, a new generation of marriage experts was writing guidance for couples – guidance that emphasized pleasure in the cementing of marital and social bonds. These texts invoked a stark difference in men and women’s sexualities. ‘A man’s sex feelings are easily and quickly aroused, and quickly satisfied,’ wrote Helena Wright in 1930 in The Sex Factor in Marriage, while ‘a woman’s desires, on the contrary are neither quickly aroused nor quickly satisfied’ – and clumsy and traumatic wedding nights could stunt a woman’s sexual potential forever. The role of female pleasure was fragile and dangerous; authors worked hard to find a balance between female sexuality as liberated (and potentially disruptive and unbridled), and as domesticated (and potentially stifled). A wife has ‘the potentiality of a keen sexual appetite’, wrote one sexologist in 1937, which it is the husband’s ‘privilege to arouse and maintain’ with patience and tenderness. A woman’s pleasure had to be elicited by a skilled, attentive husband; he had to coax female desire out carefully, leading his wife through the choppy waters of desire – he the teacher, she the disciple. These books allowed for, indeed celebrated, female sexual pleasure – but they sought to contain it within norms of heterosexuality, femininity and motherhood. Without due care, frigidity and nymphomania were the two potential results. A conservative neo-Freudianism intensified this anxiety about the potential extremes of female sexuality. Freud often figures as the culprit in accounts of this landscape, but he himself did not see heterosexuality as either normal or inevitable. For Freud, reproductive heterosexuality was not a biological inevitability, but a complex developmental process. In both men and women, he argued, heterosexual desire was acquired rather than inborn – and it was acquired with difficulty, as well as always provisionally. Freud’s female sexuality was unstable, and suffused with ambiguity. The difficult transition from clitoral to vaginal sexuality, and the struggle to disengage libidinally from the mother to the father and to men, was not inevitable, nor was it something Freud unequivocally or consistently urged, unlike some of his later followers. In his account of this unstable moment, he represented the girl as standing, for some unsteady time, outside of sexual categories. A young woman exists for a time, as Jane Gerhard puts it in Desiring Revolution, ‘between sexual identities’; neither purely masculine or feminine, neither homosexual or heterosexual, but potentially all at once.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Welcome to the Monkey House , he said, had been a seminal influence for him. No one on the end of the couch seemed to know what he was talking about. Gorman was in some kind of import/export business, which Hood figured meant drugs. And sure enough, as Gorman spoke he was lighting a flaccid little marijuana cigarette. Hood had never tried the stuff though it turned up at the margins of New Canaan parties—to the consternation of the older generation, those who had been established in town for some time. But soon the joint came his way. Gorman leaned into Janey and Hood’s sullen truce: —Benjamin, give it a try, why don’t you? This stuff will make some sense out of those larger questions. Promise you. Do yourself a favor. Gorman grinned. —Thanks for the advice, Dave, Hood said, waving the joint away affably. But then some carelessness overcame him, and he took up that tiny, aromatic cigarette and clamped it between his lips. He tugged on it, holding the smoke in his lungs, as he had seen it done on film and television. —Good shit, he cackled, hacking and erupting with smoke as he passed it to Janey. —Sure is good shit, Gorman said. It’s opiated. I had it in my chamber for a while. I was smoking this other— —It’s what? Hood said. —Don’t fret, Benj, it’s— —Darn it, Dave. Hood rose unsteadily, clapped his hand on the top of the modular sofa to steady himself, and stumbled, because it was nothing more than a piece of polyurethane mush, that sofa, steadied himself by grabbing hold of Janey, and then hastened to the bar, to preempt his new intoxication. In the white noise of American conversation he picked up voices the way one discerns a particular orchestral instrument—the triangle, the viola d’amore—in the grand narrative sweep of a concerto or symphony. As he filled his drink, one name kept reappearing, like a leitmotiv. Milton Friedman. Across the room there was this extravagant praise for this economist who was violently opposed to the wage-and-price freezes of Nixon, who advocated such locally popular measures as the abolition of Social Security, the elimination of governmental aid to education, and the end of the minimum wage. —Washington’s solution to a problem is a problem, too, said a voice as Hood loaded his glass using the impressively ample ice tongs. Take the control of airfares. Friedman said this in an interview. This is how the whole thing works. If you didn’t have this price fixing, airfares would be probably half of what they are now. Look at California. California has got its own airline within the state, and that’s an airline that’s not subject to the fare guidelines. None at all. Compare Sacramento to L.A. on Pacific Northwest with the price-fixed fares from L.A. to Reno—same distance more or less. Just look at the difference!

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  Now we know that with jets flying at excessive speed, and guided missiles, we may have no time at all. We must be on our toes at all times, as though the enemy would strike with the next breath.” 31 The city has a war memorial given to it by the Marine Corps in 1956, a souvenir of Korea. It is a Douglas F-3D fighter painted above and below in the gray and white of a shark. In the mid-1950s, the Marine Corps donated gutted fighters to cities if they would haul one away to a public place and have the plane repainted at intervals. Douglas Aircraft, the region’s biggest employer, called the F-3D the Skyknight . There is the head of an Indian painted on the side of our Skyknight . The Indian may be a Navajo. He looks like the Indian on a Navajo Freight Lines truck. Both Indians have blue eyes. The Marines gave the city the jet fighter, lacking any operating gear, as a pure husk, as a toy. And it was, for a time. The city had the shell of the jet brought here from the next county and laid it belly down, with no landing gear, flat on the scraped ground in a new park. Children played on it. For two years the F-3D lay as if its pilot had made an oddly successful, wheels-up landing between the jungle gym and the swing set. [image "Image" file=Image00004.jpg] 32 Almost at once, the F-3D began to hurt children, who broke arms and legs jumping from its wings. To protect the children, the city put its jet on a twelve-foot high, white, concrete pylon that swept the F-3D forward, like a mid-1950s hood ornament. Up there is where the future lay safely. The county construction crew fixed the plane in a gentle climb. It does not look ridiculous or particularly military. Besides, sycamore trees obscure it from the boulevard. The pylon was marked with one plaque—a dedication to the Korean War dead of the city. The plaque has the names of city council members on it and no one else’s. 33 Every Memorial Day, we go out to the park and honor our dead. We gather under the wings of the war memorial with some members of the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Disabled American Veterans. The women’s auxiliaries participate. The mix of men and women is about equal. In recent years the number of those attending has grown. About 150 veterans and the wives and widows of veterans attend. A unit from the high school Navy ROTC presents the colors. The Legion post commander says a few words. The mayor says a few words. A guest speaker chosen by the Legion makes a patriotic speech. They read the names of all the old men of the Legion, VFW, and DAV who have died in the past year. It is a fairly long list.

• From Real Sex for Real Women (2008)

  Multi-tasking and sexWomen take longer to become aroused and achieve orgasm because we are not as goal-oriented as men. Women’s brains have evolved to be more adapted to multitasking, and this means we cannot zoom from zero to 50 in under five minutes. While our multitasking skills allow us to be superwomen for our families, it also means that enjoying sex can be a bit of a struggle for us. It is harder for us to detach from our worries and simply enjoy sex. More often than not, we are thinking about the kids’ homework, the laundry, the dishes, or the big meeting at work the next day. Men find it easier to disengage from their worries and revel in the pleasures of sex, which is why it is important for our partners to understand that we need foreplay and extra time to enjoy sex. These different sexual needs can sometimes lead to relationship problems, primarily because neither partner understands the other’s needs. It helps to be honest about your differences. Be straightforward and tell your lover you crave more foreplay, a new position, or more sex—and then ask him what he craves. He probably has a few needs of his own that aren’t being met. The gender-switch generationChanging gender roles challenge many couples to rethink their place in the relationship. For instance, men who earn less than their partner, or men who work as the homemaker, can have a hard time finding their footing in the bedroom. In addition, one of the most significant trends is gender confusion among women. In today’s corporate world the last thing women want to show is any type of weakness or emotion. This attitude can carry over into her personal relationships. But too much control in the bedroom is not a good thing for your sex life. Men need to feel sexually in charge some of the time, just as you do. An empowered woman is confident enough in her own mind to allow her man to make some of the decisions and share in the control. As gender roles in our society shift and evolve, couples should be prepared for a little backlash in the bedroom—but with compromise and equality on both sides of the relationship, sex can actually improve in these empowered waters. Sex and IntimacyIntimacy is the fiber that binds us to the people we love, and is built on time, investment, and honest communication. In a healthy long-term relationship, intimacy increases with time and many men and women are fortunate to have a lover who is also their best friend. Sex and romance are crucial for long-term intimacy. The stronger the sexual connection, the stronger the emotional intimacy will be. It is important to nurture and feed your relationship both emotionally and sexually.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  Since all members are expected to idolize the leader, so are the children. Children either identify with the leader's power and dominance or capitulate and become passive, dependent, obedient, and often emotionally subdued and flattened. Children adopt the cult's right-wrong, good-bad, sinner-saint starkly polarized value system. They are taught that a divided world exists-"we" are inside; "they" are outside. We are right, they are wrong. We are good, they are bad. In this us-against-them world, children (like the rest of the members) are taught to feel paranoid, about nonmembers and the outside society. Cult children have no opportunity to observe the compromising, negotiating, and meeting on middle ground demonstrated in ordinary families. They do not see people resolving disputes or adjusting to the wants and desires of others, the trade-offs that are so central to learning how to play, work, and live in a family or in groups that have been socialized in democratic ways. Cult children do not see adults having input in decision making or making ideas and plans together. Instead, they witness and are taught that critical, evaluative thinking; new ideas; and independent ideas get people in trouble. From this, they learn simply to obey. In many cults, normal aggressiveness, liveliness, and assertiveness in children are labeled as sinful or as signs of demons, and often warrant severe punishment and suppression. Thus like their parents, children learn to be dependent on the leader and his system. As a result, anxious-dependent personality traits can be built into cult children's developing character.4 Sometimes serious or even fatal consequences result from idiosyncratic cult beliefs about medical, dental, or nutritional care; education; upbringing and socialization; or intimacy and sexual roles. Even if a group doesn't live communally, cult leaders tend to extend their influence and control into mem- bers'-homes and families. Nearly everyone becomes infected with the leader's obsessions, bizarre beliefs, and need for secrecy. And children particularly become part of the cult-created family disorder, as Chazz's poem so eloquently expresses. Lorna Goldberg writes about the cult leader's interference into parents' lives: As a result of the leader's narcissistic need to be the most important relationship in the members' lives, as well as the fact that the parents' involvement with their children detracts from the cult business, cult leaders often discourage parents from involvement with their children. Parents may be separated from their children and have to spend long periods of time involved in cult activities. Children might be placed in dormitories or sent away to cultrelated boarding schools. Often, the members who are in charge of those schools have no training in child education and no understanding of the emotional needs of the children. Even those cults in which parents are allowed to raise their children in their homes, there usually is interference.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  “I have a date,” he explained. “This is an emergency.” He paused to catch his breath. “Do you know”—breath—“how to iron?” I walked over to the pink shirt. It was wrinkled like an old woman who’d spent her youth sunbathing. If only the Colonel didn’t ball up his every belonging and stuff it into random dresser drawers. “I think you just turn it on and press it against the shirt, right?” I said. “I don’t know. I didn’t even know we had an iron.” “We don’t. It’s Takumi’s. But Takumi doesn’t know how to iron, either. And when I asked Alaska, she started yelling, ‘You’re not going to impose the patriarchal paradigm on me .’ Oh, God, I need to smoke. I need to smoke, but I can’t reek when I see Sara’s parents. Okay, screw it. We’re going to smoke in the bathroom with the shower on. The shower has steam. Steam gets rid of wrinkles, right? “By the way,” he said as I followed him into the bathroom, “if you want to smoke inside during the day, just turn on the shower. The smoke follows the steam up the vents.” Though this made no scientific sense, it seemed to work. The shower’s shortage of water pressure and low showerhead made it all but useless for showering, but it worked great as a smoke screen. Sadly, it made a poor iron. The Colonel tried ironing the shirt once more (“I’m just gonna push really hard and see if that helps”) and finally put it on wrinkled. He matched the shirt with a blue tie decorated with horizontal lines of little pink flamingos. “The one thing my lousy father taught me,” the Colonel said as his hands nimbly threaded the tie into a perfect knot, “was how to tie a tie. Which is odd, since I can’t imagine when he ever had to wear one.” Just then, Sara knocked on the door. I’d seen her once or twice before, but the Colonel never introduced me to her and didn’t have a chance to that night. “Oh. My God. Can’t you at least press your shirt?” she asked, even though the Colonel was standing in front of the ironing board. “We’re going out with my parents .” Sara looked awfully nice in her blue summer dress. Her long, pale blond hair was pulled up into a twist, with a strand of hair falling down each side of her face. She looked like a movie star—a bitchy one. “Look, I did my best. We don’t all have maids to do our ironing.” “Chip, that chip on your shoulder makes you look even shorter.” “Christ, can’t we get out the door without fighting?” “I’m just saying. It’s the opera . It’s a big deal to my parents. Whatever.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  She was chewing on her bottom lip, and I asked whether she was nervous. “Well, yeah. Listen, just sit tight and don’t talk,” she told me. “You don’t need to be nervous. But this is the seventh time I’ve been caught smoking. I just don’t want — whatever. I don’t want to upset my dad.” “Does your mom smoke or something?” I asked. “Not anymore,” Alaska said. “It’s fine. You’ll be fine.” I didn’t start to worry until it got to be 4:50 and the Colonel and Takumi were still unaccounted for. The members of the Jury filed in one by one, walking past us without any eye contact, which made me feel worse. I counted all twelve by 4:56, plus the Eagle. At 4:58, the Colonel and Takumi rounded the corner toward the classrooms. I never saw anything like it. Takumi wore a starched white shirt with a red tie with a black paisley print; the Colonel wore his wrinkled pink button-down and flamingo tie. They walked in step, heads up and shoulders back, like some kind of action-movie heroes. I heard Alaska sigh. “The Colonel’s doing his Napoleon walk.” “It’s all good,” the Colonel told me. “Just don’t say anything.” We walked in—two of us wearing ties, and two of us wearing ratty T-shirts—and the Eagle banged an honest-to-God gavel against the podium in front of him. The Jury sat in a line behind a rectangular table. At the front of the room, by the blackboard, were four chairs. We sat down, and the Colonel explained exactly what happened. “Alaska and I were smoking down by the lake. We usually go off campus, but we forgot. We’re sorry. It won’t happen again.” I didn’t know what was going on. But I knew my job: sit tight and shut up. One of the kids looked at Takumi and asked, “What about you and Halter?” “We were keeping them company,” Takumi said calmly. The kid turned to the Eagle then and asked, “Did you see anyone smoking?” “I only saw Alaska, but Chip ran away, which struck me as cowardly, as does Miles and Takumi’s aw-shucks routine,” the Eagle said, giving me the Look of Doom. I didn’t want to look guilty, but I couldn’t hold his stare, so I just looked down at my hands. The Colonel gritted his teeth, like it pained him to lie. “It is the truth, sir.” The Eagle asked if any of us wanted to say anything, and then asked if there were any more questions, and then sent us outside. “What the hell was that?” I asked Takumi when we got outside. “Just sit tight, Pudge.” Why have Alaska confess when she’d already been in trouble so many times? Why the Colonel, who literally couldn’t afford to get in serious trouble? Why not me? I’d never been busted for anything. I had the least to lose. After a couple minutes, the Eagle came out and motioned for us to come back inside.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  bringing any accusation against him, because he is “a brand plucked from the fire.” In view of the precarious situation of the Jewish community after the exile, the high priest must be affirmed and supported, not criticized. So the Lord invests Joshua with clean garments, thereby forestalling any further accusations. The investiture is followed by an oracle that makes a twofold promise to Joshua. First, if he observes the Lord’s requirements, he will be confirmed in the high priesthood, and given access “among those who are standing here,” that is, the divine council. The requirements are not spelled out. We should expect that they would include both cultic and moral provisions. Access to the heavenly council is a privilege granted to prophets in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Jer 23:18). Here it is extended to the high priest, who becomes the dominant religious functionary in Second Temple Judaism. The access is temporary, as it was in the case of the prophets. The apocalyptic literature of the Hellenistic period (Daniel, 1 Enoch, Dead Sea Scrolls) will extend this privilege to the righteous after death, in the form of eternal life, but this is not yet the case in Zechariah. The second promise is that God is about to bring “my servant the Branch.” The word “branch” (Hebrew tsemach ) occurs in Jer 23:5 and 33:15, where it refers explicitly to the Davidic line: “The days are surely coming, says the L ORD , when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall exercise justice and righteousness in the land” (Jer 23:5). The term is also found with reference to the legitimate heir to the throne in a Phoenician inscription from the third century B.C.E. A different term, but essentially the same image, is used in Isaiah 11, which refers to a shoot from the stump of Jesse. There is no doubt then that Zechariah is predicting a restoration of the Davidic line. Many scholars think that the choice of image, a branch, is a play on the name Zerubbabel, which means “seed of Babylon.” In the context of Zechariah, the branch who is expected can only be Zerubbabel. The objection that the Persians would not allow Zerubbabel to become king is beside the point. The prophet is not giving a realistic assessment of Persian policy, but expecting a miraculous divine intervention. The colleagues of Joshua mentioned in v. 8 are taken as a sign of the coming of the messianic king. Unfortunately, it is not at all clear just who these people are or why they function as a sign.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  I am not interested in delivering judgments on what distinguishes the subversive from the unsubversive. Not only do I believe that such judgments cannot be made out of context, but that they cannot be made in ways that endure through time (“contexts” are themselves posited unities that undergo temporal change and expose their essential disunity). Just as metaphors lose their metaphoricity as they congeal through time into concepts, so subversive performances always run the risk of becoming deadening cliches through their repetition and, most importantly, through their repetition within commodity culture where “subversion” carries market value. The effort to name the criterion for subversiveness will always fail, and ought to. So what is at stake in using the term at all? What continues to concern me most is the following kinds of questions: what will and will not constitute an intelligible life, and how do presumptions about normative gender and sexuality determine in advance what will qualify as the “human” and the “livable”? In other words, how do normative gender presumptions work to delimit the very field of description that we have for the human? What is the means by which we come to see this delimiting power, and what are the means by which we transform it?

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  There it was, the program, on a huge sheet of wrapping paper, tacked up on the wall. Beside it was another big sheet of paper on which were listed the exotic words I was endeavoring to annex to my vocabulary. The problem was how to hitch these words to my texts without having them stick out like sore thumbs. Often I tried them out beforehand, in letters to my friends, in letters to “all and sundry.” The letter writing was for me what shadow boxing is to a pugilist. But imagine a pugilist spending so much time fighting his shadow that when he hooks up with a sparring partner he has no fight left! I could spend two or three hours writing a story, or article, and another six or seven explaining them to my friends by letter. The real effort was going into the letter writing, and perhaps it was best so, now that I look back on it, because it preserved the speed and naturalness of my true voice. I was far too self-conscious, in the early days, to use my own voice. I was the literary man through and through. I made use of every device I discovered, employed every register, assumed a thousand different stances, always confusing the mastery of technique with creation. Experience and technique, those were the two goads that drove me on. To triumph in the world of experience, as I formulated it, I would have to live at least a hundred lives. To acquire the right, or shall I say the complete, technique, I would have to live to be a hundred, not a day less. My Two Lives—Plexus“I feel in myself a life so luminous,” says Louis Lambert, “that I might enlighten a world, and yet I am shut up in a sort of mineral.” This statement, which Balzac voices through his double, expresses perfectly the secret anguish of which I was then a victim. At one and the same time I was leading two thoroughly divergent lives. One could be described as “the merry whirl,” the other as the contemplative life. In the role of active being everybody took me for what I was, or what I appeared to be; in the other role no one recognized me, least of all myself. No matter with what celerity and confusion events succeeded one another, there were always intervals, self-created, in which through contemplation I lost myself. It needed only a few moments, seemingly, of shutting out the world for me to be restored. But it required much longer stretches—of being alone with myself—to write. As I have frequently pointed out, the business of writing never ceased. But from this interior process to the process of translation is always, and was then very definitely, a big step.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  I had lost even the right to become ill—because “they” needed me. I wasn’t allowed to remain inactive. Had I died I think they would have galvanized my corpse into a semblance of life. “I stood before a mirror and said fearfully: ‘I want to see how I look in the mirror with my eyes closed.’” These words of Richter’s, when I first came upon them, made an indescribable commotion in me. As did the following, which seems almost like a corollary of the above—from Novalis: “The seat of the soul is where inner world and outer world touch each other. For nobody knows himself, if he is only himself and not also another one at the same time.” “To take possession of one’s transcendental I, to be the I of one’s I, at the same time,” as Novalis expressed it again. There is a time when ideas tyrannize over one, when one is just a hapless victim of another’s thoughts. This “possession” by another seems to occur in periods of depersonalization, when the warring selves come unglued, as it were. Normally one is impervious to ideas; they come and go, are accepted or rejected, put on like shirts, taken off like dirty socks. But in those periods which we call crises, when the mind sunders and splinters like a diamond under the blows of a sledge-hammer, these innocent ideas of a dreamer take hold, lodge in the crevices of the brain, and by some subtle process of infiltration bring about a definite, irrevocable alteration of the personality. Outwardly no great change takes place; the individual affected does not suddenly behave differently; on the contrary, he may behave in more “normal” fashion than before. This seeming normality assumes more and more the quality of a protective device. From surface deception he passes to inner deception. With each new crisis, however, he becomes more strongly aware of a change which is no change, but rather an intensification of something hidden deep within. Now when he closes his eyes he can really look at himself. He no longer sees a mask. He sees without seeing, to be exact. Vision without sight, a fluid grasp of intangibles: the merging of sight and sound: the heart of the web. Here stream the distant personalities which evade the crude contact of the senses; here the overtones of recognition discreetly lap against one another in bright, vibrant harmonies. There is no language employed, no outlines delineated. When a ship founders it settles slowly; the spars, the masts, the rigging float away. On the ocean floor of death the bleeding hull bedecks itself with jewels; remorselessly the anatomic life begins. What was ship becomes the nameless indestructible. Like ships, men founder time and again. Only memory saves them from complete dispersion.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Sexuality is besieged by quantification that provides statistics against which we can compare our own relationships to see if we measure up. Newsweek magazine tells us that the experts currently define a sexless marriage as one in which couples have sex no more than ten times a year. Those who have sex eleven times in a twelve-month period can breathe a sigh of relief. The rest must count themselves among the 15 to 20 percent of normative sexless couples. We’ve become exceedingly preoccupied with frequency of sexual activity and number of orgasms. How much sex? How intense is the sex? What’s the level of performance? The more diffuse and uncrunchable aspects of sexual expression—love, intimacy, power, surrender, sensuality, and excitement—rarely make it to the front page of a newspaper or the cover of a magazine. Eroticism as an immeasurable quality of aliveness and imagination is reduced to what the French author Jean-Claude Guillebaud calls une arithmétique physiologique—a physiological arithmetic. But when we reduce sex to a function, we also invoke the idea of dysfunction. We are no longer talking about the art of sex; rather, we are talking about the mechanics of sex. Science has replaced religion as the authority; and science is a more formidable arbiter. Medicine knows how to scare even those who scoff at religion. Compared with a diagnosis, what’s a mere sin? We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt. In my experience, a treatment that places a premium on performance and reliability often exacerbates the very problems it purports to solve. The “sexual performance perfection industry” generates its own inhibitions and anxieties. More often than not, the beauty and flow of a sexual encounter unfurl in a safe, noncompetitive, and non-result-oriented atmosphere. Sensuality simply doesn’t lend itself to the rigors of scorekeeping. This is not to say that practical advice and expert solutions are never useful or necessary. If you have poor communication, of course you should work at it; if you’re too busy for sex, you’re too busy. If you lack knowledge, inform yourself. If you have a problematic physical condition—age, hormonal changes, diabetes, prostate cancer, hysterectomy—find a doctor who can offer medical support. There are many books that offer sound help in this area. But while the problem-solving model addresses important aspects of our sexual contretemps, it fails to take on the quixotic and fundamentally existential issues of human eroticism that are far beyond any neat technical fix. When Work Doesn’t Work

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Much better than Havelock Ellis, the grandfather of sexual studies, who was big on examples from country life—hairpins removed from teenaged girls’ vaginas, accounts of couples unable to uncouple afterward—but short on the pathos of unhappy marriages. Much better than Kinsey, that precursor, with his quaint, polite view of sexuality—mouth-genital contact may not be, after all, a strictly homosexual practice—or Krafft-Ebing’s monumental Psychopathia Sexualis: the hallucinatory and dangerous cousin to Reich’s Function of the Orgasm . There were some sensational pictures in here. Like the diagram of the penis, scrotum, anus, and prostate. All neatly inked in. The prostate intrigued her—that little walnut the urologist was always wringing out. Men sheltered it away. So much, in the end, was done in deference to the prostate. When it strangled off the urethra in older men, it struck the famous and unknown with the equanimity of a plague. They all stood shaking out meager drops at the urinal. And there were graphs, too, graphs that rendered, in seconds, the likelihood of nipple-stiffening and muscle-shuddering and labia-moistening. This was up-to-the-minute stuff. For example: in New Canaan, suddenly, women were familiar with the term labia . They had strong opinions on the vaginal orgasm. She could recall any number of recent afternoons when she had overheard Dot Halford and Denise Blackmun—or somebody—trading theories over a glass of carrot juice: Dot, I’m aware of how the clitoris functions when I climax, but I’m just not sure, when he’s wombing me, that my vagina has a role in it. I’m just not sure . Anxiety etched in their faces. Elena and her husband were not truly middle-aged. They hadn’t sagged that far yet, but they had experienced the initial trauma of impotence . They had felt its clean incision. Both of them. Yes, she had felt it, too: “The inhibitions of the upper-level female,” as the experts had it, “are more extreme than those of the average male.” It was something like eighteen months. Eighteen months since then. Whether Ben’s drinking had brought on his impotence, which had in turn brought on the drought in their connubial relations, she couldn’t say. But when she saw his penis now, as he showered or dressed for work, she felt no more for it than she felt for any plucked and headless game bird. It was a quaint reminder of another time, an antique, a curio. A reminder of Ike’s stroke or the Berlin crisis. And the worst thing about it was she felt the same way about herself. The fertile spot in her, the mandala in her belly was shut down, stored away. The way she saw it, the drought led straight to Benjamin’s unfaithfulness. Masters and Johnson had no good advice here. The plain facts hadn’t dawned on Elena suddenly. There had been no painful encounter with evidence—stained shorts or lipsticked collars or perfumed envelopes.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  To sum up, when we feel awkward we’re quick to blame our skills. And while sometimes our skills seem to escape us, it’s inhibition that gets in our way, but that can be changed. In an old study from 1976, researchers asked forty socially anxious undergrads to role-play situations where they had to be assertive, like asking for a raise or requesting a neighbor turn down their stereo. Half the participants were instructed to respond as they would in real life, while the other half were asked to respond as assertively as they believed the most assertive person would. (Stage whisper: Hey, that sounds like playing a role from chapter 8.) Participants were able to improve their performance on demand, turning their assertiveness up and down like a dimmer switch. Again, counter to the myth of I have lousy social skills, we don’t need more skills, we just need less inhibition. But guess what? You already know what to do to lower your inhibition: Like the assertive study participants, play a role—give yourself a mission. Dare to be average. Fake it until you are it. And finally, drop your safety behaviors. Step away from the body spray. * * * Looking back, Derrick realized the new gym wasn’t full on opening day for the simple reason that businesses don’t get up to speed overnight. After a while, he also realized business success wasn’t just a cult of personality, as he had assumed. His father’s success wasn’t due only to his social skills. Instead, it was a combination of location, marketing, hard work, time, and luck. The problem wasn’t Derrick’s social skills at all. If anything held him back, it was his anxiety, which kept him from accessing his skills. A year or so after the empty opening, Derrick surveyed the no-longer-new gym one Saturday morning. The place was packed. Guys in long athletic shorts drubbed the punching bags. Two blond women, one with pink gloves, sparred nearby. A dozen people gathered in the central ring for the start of a fundamentals class. The kids’ class Derrick had started was under way. The kids’ program was Derrick’s pride and joy. “Shy kids learn confidence. Cocky kids learn to tone it down. There’s a wait list for this class.” Just then a prospective member walked up to the desk, and Derrick went over to greet him. Derrick didn’t try to be his father. He didn’t try to have someone else’s skills. He could be himself. As Derrick discovered, he already had it in him. 15 The Myth of Hope in a Bottle

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  The structure you choose might be formal and defined. For example, at a wedding you might create structure by offering to round up guests for photos or volunteering to ask attendees to sign the guest book. If you’re part of an organization, you might take on a leadership position so you have a reason to talk to every member, even if just to collect dues or verify their email address. If you’re a parent, you might volunteer to work the checkout stand at your kid’s school’s book fair, bake sale, or auction in order to practice talking to everyone who comes through the line. Even if there’s no predetermined job, you can still create structure by giving yourself an assignment. At a networking event, assign yourself the task of introducing yourself to three people. At the company holiday party, give yourself the job of chatting with your boss, your two closest colleagues, and the office manager. Or, like the women in the study, challenge yourself to get to know a new acquaintance as well as you can in five minutes. “But wait,” you say. “I get the general idea, but if I’m just playing a role, will any of it rub off on the real me? How can I get comfortable being myself if I set up all these constraints?” Good question. To answer, let’s go back to Johnny Carson. As a boy, Johnny was obsessed with magic—he would follow his family around the house, hounding them to “pick a card, any card!” He practiced his sleight-of-hand tricks in front of a mirror for hours. As a teenager, he started performing around his hometown of Norfolk, Nebraska, and he was good, good enough to earn three dollars—a monumental sum for a kid in the late 1930s—for his first performance at the local Rotary Club. But he wasn’t in it for the money. In another old Tonight Show segment, Johnny is ostensibly interviewing actress Bea Arthur. But for a moment, the roles reverse and he shares his own past. “I took up magic when I was young because I was somewhat shy and within myself,” he says. “And I thought that was a good way to go to parties. I read those ads: Be the life of the party! And get girls. Mainly I did it to get girls. Neither one worked well. But lots of people do that. They like to get up and perform. You can be the center of attention without being yourself, as such.” You can be the center of attention without being yourself. As Laurence Leamer, Johnny’s biographer, said in the documentary Johnny Carson: King of Late Night, “Johnny liked to be in control. Being a performer allowed him to do that. He was always performing, always learning, always developing his character, who was anyone but Johnny Carson.”

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Those who hold the opposite opinion resemble generals, who would like to expose their raw recruits to the heat of battle. Those who live in the world and keep the Commandments can make greater progress in virtue if they become religious. For we must remember that if, on the one hand, a secular life spent in obedience to the Commandments is a good preparation for the practice of the Counsels, yet, on the other hand, a life in the world presents a great obstacle to the observance of the Counsels. Hence St. Gregory says in the beginning of his Morals: “When my conscience was urging me to leave the world, many secular cares began to press upon me, as if I were to be detained in the world, not from love of its beauty, but by that which was more serious, viz. anxiety of mind. But at length, escaping eagerly from all such cares, I sought the monastery gate.” CHAPTER 7

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  it into a disintegrating mess of sub-Hellenic cults, so the charismatics might submerge the Church’s unitary voice under a Babel of ‘prophecies’. The moment was judged to have come about 170 when Montanus, a successful charismatic who described himself as the Paraclete, was declared an enemy of the Church. Many of his closest followers were women, and they clearly played an outstanding role in his movement – as, indeed, they did in one or two of the Pauline congregations. Montanus was attacked by his enemies for breaking up marriages and then giving these inspired matrons who flocked to join him ecclesiastical offices. Montanism, or rather the efforts to combat it, played a conclusive role in persuading the orthodox to ban the ministry to women. Tertullian, while still an orthodox propagandist, snarled at this subversion of Church order: ‘The impudence of the heretics’ women! They dare to teach, to dispute, to carry out exorcisms, perform cures – perhaps they even baptize.... Of course, nowhere is promotion easier than in a camp of rebels: the mere fact of being there is meritorious!’ In his tract On Baptism and the Veiling of Virgins, he emphatically denied that women could exercise any ministerial functions. There were two lines of attack on the Montanists. On the one hand, they were accused of excessive austerity; thus Hippolytus, putting the orthodox case in his Refutatio omnium haeresium : ‘They introduced novelties in the shape of special fasts and ceremonies, and diets of radishes which they adopted on the inspired advice of their womenfolk.’ But Montanus was also attacked for handling large sums of money, for moving about in an ostentatious manner and for paying stipends to his chief followers. Some of the orthodox smears on him are manifest inventions. Eusebius repeats a tale that Montanus and his chief woman-prophet died as a result of a suicide pact, but he indicates that this is fiction. Many of the accusations levelled merely suggest that the Montanists were behaving like the Church, were in fact the Church in large areas – thus they raised money, paid their clergy and so forth. The best indication of the moral worthiness of the movement is that Tertullian, the scourge of heretics, eventually joined it. He could not continue to endorse an orthodoxy which denied any independent role to the Spirit and insisted that all communication with the deity should be through the regular ecclesiastical channels. So profound was his conviction of the reality of direct spiritual intervention that he accepted aspects of it he had hitherto regarded as quite repugnant; especially after he had witnessed their efficacy. Thus, as a Montanist, he wrote in De Anima at the end of his life: ‘We have now among us a sister who has been granted gifts of revelations,

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  one half in P, Exod 30:11-16). Since taxation tends to increase rather than decrease, this is probably another indication that the Priestly legislation had not reached its final form in the time of Ezra. Nonetheless, it remains true that the law of Ezra corresponds substantially to the Torah as we know it, including both Deuteronomy and some form of the Priestly code. According to the account of Ezra-Nehemiah, the people of Jerusalem had no knowledge of the book of the law before Ezra’s arrival. In fact, the prophetic oracles of Haggai, Zechariah, and Third Isaiah, which date to the period before Ezra, never appeal to such a book. Yet at some point, the book of the Torah was recognized as the law of Judah. Ezra is the person credited with this momentous innovation in the biblical tradition. The Problem of Intermarriage The dominant issue in Ezra’s time in Jerusalem, however, is not the cultic calendar but intermarriage. According to Ezra 9:1-2, after Ezra had arrived in Jerusalem and presented his credentials, “the officials approached me and said, ‘The people of Israel, the priests, and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands with their abominations, from the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. For they have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and for their sons. Thus the holy seed has mixed itself with the peoples of the lands, and in this faithlessness the officials and leaders have led the way.’ ” We do not know exactly who the officials were who made the complaint. They were evidently not identical with the officials who led the way “in this faithlessness.” The practice of intermarriage was evidently a cause of some division within the community even before Ezra arrived. The “peoples of the lands” are identified in traditional biblical terms (cf. the lists in Gen 15:19-21; Exod 3:8, 17; Deut 7:1; et al.). Some of the names on this list were of immediate relevance (Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites), while others were obsolete, as the peoples no longer existed (Jebusites, Hittites). We must assume, however, that

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Like fossil fuels or political capital, attention is a limited resource. We have only so much we can allocate before it is used up. For Diego, all his attention is focused on himself and the management of his anxiety, a phenomenon aptly called self-focused attention. Self-focused attention eats up our bandwidth by focusing on our bodies (I look weird, don’t I?), emotions (I’m freaking out here), performance (Why did I say that? I sound like an idiot), or management (I should smile at her. But maybe that looks creepy. But not smiling is creepier, isn’t it? Argh, I probably look like I want to stuff her in my car trunk). Thus, we come away from social encounters with very little information about how things actually went. And where do we look to fill in the gaps? Unfortunately, we ask our anxiety, which is about as credible as asking the used-car salesman which model we should buy. Or we ask the Inner Critic, which is even worse. In short, we look inside to see how things outside are going. Whether at a high school dance or our annual performance review we use our discomfort to determine how we are coming off to others. This is called the felt sense. We feel like an idiot, so we must be spouting nonsense. We feel like a loser, so everyone must be secretly signing an L on their foreheads when we turn around. Again, it feels true, so we ask our anxiety, arguably the least credible source of information, for reassurance. No wonder it’s not working. To top it off, this self-absorption reverberates far beyond just our anxious moments. Researchers from Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario asked socially anxious undergrads to have a five-minute getting-to-know-you conversation with a lab assistant (as you probably noticed by now, social anxiety researchers love the five-minute getting-to-know-you conversation). In order to induce self-focused attention, half the participants were instructed to pay close attention to their own feelings, thoughts, actions, and body sensations during the conversation. By contrast, the other half were asked to pay close attention to their partners’ words and facial expressions. After the conversation, the researchers let them stew for twenty-four hours. The next day, the self-focused group reported lashing themselves with criticism more harshly and more often than the partner-focused group. Indeed, the first myth of social anxiety—I must always monitor myself and my anxiety—set in motion a twenty-four-hour-long ripple effect of negativity. For Diego, the myth kept him trapped in the closed circuit of social anxiety as well. He desperately wanted things to go well, which made him anxious, which made him monitor his performance. But all the management limited his attention and, ironically, made things go poorly. His Inner Critic’s forecasts about poor performance became a self-fulfilling prophecy. * * * So if monitoring is getting in our way, what do we do instead? How do we get out of our heads? The answer is your next tool: turn your attention inside out.