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 Girls & Sex (2016)

  Performing oral sex could make girls feel like the more active partner in an encounter. By contrast, they described cunnilingus and intercourse as passive, like something that was being done to them, leaving them vulnerable. Those empowered feelings about fellatio, though, coexisted with their opposites: a lack of control, pressure to comply, the unspoken threat of danger. Sam commented that while her male peers had been warned not to coerce girls into intercourse, pushing for oral was fair game. Because of that, while she had “plenty of guy friends,” she preferred not to be alone with them (which would, it seems, be an obstacle to true friendship). “In my social world, if you’re hanging out alone with a guy, the usual expectation is that you’re going to hook up with him,” she explained. “And if you decide not to, he might try to pressure you. So I’ll hang out with a guy at school, but I would never go to his house or to a movie or do anything that could be construed as more than ‘just friends’ unless I wanted that to happen. It’s not that they’d force themselves on you; it’s that there would be pressure. There would be disappointment. And there might be tension in our relationship if it didn’t happen.” I want to be clear here. Sam was not a pushover, not a meek or mousy girl. She was an honor student, an editor on her school paper, a varsity tennis player. She identified as a feminist and casually bandied about terms such as slut shaming, gender binary, and rape culture. She was applying to top-tier colleges. She was an astute observer of her world. She was also, most definitely, immersed in it. Nearly all the girls I interviewed were bright, assertive, ambitious. If I had been interviewing them about their professional dreams or their attitudes toward leadership or their willingness to compete with boys in the classroom, I might have walked away inspired. A sophomore at an Ivy League college, a lacrosse player whose mother was a partner in a large law firm, bragged to me about the “strong women” in her family. “My grandmother is a firecracker at eighty-eight, and my mom is crazy, and my sister and I are going to be as crazy as they are,” she said. “In my family, you have to have a personality and be loud. That’s how we interact. It’s like a form of feminine power and knowing yourself.”

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  You won’t read the words ‘flying weight’ in antiquarian falconry books because the old falconers didn’t use scales. They assessed the condition of their hawks by feeling their muscles and breastbones and observing their behaviour with sharp and experienced eyes. This is not an easy thing to do, and it is almost impossible for a novice falconer to grasp the subtleties involved in bringing a hawk into flying condition. White had no weighing machine and no mentor to teach him: he had to learn the old methods the hard way. I know that in one sense the weighing of hawks is a falling-off, a brute measure compared to the intuitive understanding that comes from really knowing your hawk. Still, I would not train a hawk without a set of scales. When I used to fly merlins, tiny falcons with needle talons and frames so voracious and delicate they resemble heated Meissen porcelain, I weighed them three times a day. I fussed interminably over the relative calorific value of quail and chicken and mouse; I could tell you how much weight my hawk would lose in an hour, in two hours, in three. Even an eighth of an ounce would make a difference to how my merlins flew. It is a grosser calculation with a goshawk, because Mabel is huge compared to a merlin. But still it is not easy to judge how much food, and of what kind, will bring her into perfect flying condition. Scraps of paper litter the kitchen table, jotted with weights and question marks. I am convinced I have these calculations pat, and I am out to prove it. At four o’clock we set off for my college cricket pitch and her first calling-off lessons. ‘It’ll be fine Mabel. It’s the long vacation. The place will be deserted. No dogs, no cows, no people. No one will bother us there.’

• From Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939)

  But Janet has given us what he could: he is too uncertain, divided between a finality that is spontaneous and a mechanism on principle. It is not to him that we look for an exposition of this pure theory of emotional behaviour. We find it in outline among the disciples of Kohler and notably in Lewin1 and Dembo.2 Here is what P. Guillaume writes upon this subject in his Psychologie de la Forme:3 'Let us take the simplest example: we ask a subject to reach for an object placed upon a chair, but without putting a foot outside a circle traced upon the ground: the distances are so calculated as to make the act very difficult or impossible by direct means, but the problem can be resolved by indirect means.... Here, the force directed towards the object takes on a clear, concrete meaning. On the other hand, these problems present an obstacle to the direct execution of the action, an obstacle that may be either material or moral - for instance, a rule one has undertaken to observe. Thus, in our example, the circle that one must not overstep presents, to the perception of the subject, a barrier - from which there emanates a force directly in opposition to the former. The conflict between the two forces sets up a tension in the phenomenal field. If the solution is found, the successful action puts an end to the tension. . . . There is a whole psychology of the act of replacement or substitution, of the ersatz to which the school of Lewin has made an interesting contribution. Its form is very variable; the partial results achieved may help to fix it. Sometimes the subject facilitates the act by freeing himself from some of the imposed conditions of quantity, quality, speed or duration, and even by modifying the nature of his task; in other cases he performs unreal, symbolic actions; one makes an obviously useless gesture in the direction of the act; another describes the action instead of performing it, or imagines chimerical, Active procedures (if only I had . . . one would need . . .) outside the real or imposed conditions for its accomplishment. If acts of substitution are impossible, or do not produce an adequate solution, the tension persists, manifested by a tendency to abandon the problem, to wander away, or to withdraw into one's own thoughts in an attitude of passivity. As we have said, indeed, the subject finds himself subjected to the positive attraction of the end in view and to the negative, repellent influence of the barrier: furthermore, the fact that he has consented to undergo the trial has conferred a negative value upon all the other objects in the field, in the sense that all diversions irrelevant to the task are ipso facto impossible. The subject is thus imprisoned, as it were, in a space fenced in on every side: there is only one positive way out, and that is closed by the specific barrier. This situation corresponds to the diagram below:

• From Confessions

  Now then, O my Helper, hadst Thou loosed me from those fetters: and I sought "whence is evil," and found no way. But Thou sufferedst me not by any fluctuations of thought to be carried away from the Faith whereby I believed Thee both to be, and Thy substance to be unchangeable, and that Thou hast a care of, and wouldest judge men, and that in Christ, Thy Son, Our Lord, and the holy Scriptures, which the authority of Thy Catholic Church pressed upon me, Thou hadst set the way of man's salvation, to that life which is to be after this death. These things being safe and immovably settled in my mind, I sought anxiously "whence was evil?" What were the pangs of my teeming heart, what groans, O my God! yet even there were Thine ears open, and I knew it not; and when in silence I vehemently sought, those silent contritions of my soul were strong cries unto Thy mercy. Thou knewest what I suffered, and no man. For, what was that which was thence through my tongue distilled into the ears of my most familiar friends? Did the whole tumult of my soul, for which neither time nor utterance sufficed, reach them? Yet went up the whole to Thy hearing, all which I roared out from the groanings of my heart; and my desire was before Thee, and the light of mine eyes was not with me: for that was within, I without: nor was that confined to place, but I was intent on things contained in place, but there found I no resting-place, nor did they so receive me, that I could say, "It is enough," "it is well": nor did they yet suffer me to turn back, where it might be well enough with me. For to these things was I superior, but inferior to Thee; and Thou art my true joy when subjected to Thee, and Thou hadst subjected to me what Thou createdst below me. And this was the true temperament, and middle region of my safety, to remain in Thy Image, and by serving Thee, rule the body. But when I rose proudly against Thee, and ran against the Lord with my neck, with the thick bosses of my buckler, even these inferior things were set above me, and pressed me down, and no where was there respite or space of breathing. They met my sight on all sides by heaps and troops, and in thought the images thereof presented themselves unsought, as I would return to Thee, as if they would say unto me, "Whither goest thou, unworthy and defiled?" And these things had grown out of my wound; for Thou "humbledst the proud like one that is wounded," and through my own swelling was I separated from Thee; yea, my pride-swollen face closed up mine eyes.

• From Opening Up by Writing It Down (2016)

  As Wolff, Wolf, and a generation of psychosomatic researchers asserted, psychological conflicts are sometimes linked to specific changes in our bodies. One person’s blood pressure may increase when he is forced to discuss the death of his parents, whereas another might respond to the same topic with the beginnings of a migraine headache. A third person may not show any biological changes in response to the death topic but may react selectively to issues surrounding sexuality. That many, perhaps most, illnesses have a psychosomatic component is not surprising. More peculiar is that we rarely see the relationship between psychological events and illness in ourselves. When we do, however, the course of the illness often changes for the better. Why are we blind to many of the psychological precursors to illness? One problem lies in our abilities to perceive cause–effect relationships. When we see something happen, we naturally look for something that preceded the event by no more than a few seconds or, at most, hours. If our car doesn’t start because of a dead battery, we might blame the battery’s demise on last night’s cold weather or our failure to turn off the headlights. It makes no sense to think back to the way we drove the car two weeks ago. Our body is a different story. If we come down with a cold, it probably has nothing to do with last night’s weather or what we had for breakfast. It could be that our immune system was compromised by the breakup of a significant relationship a week or two earlier. Another reason for our inability to see the links between our own psychological issues and illness concerns denial. Virtually all of us have actively avoided thinking about unpleasant experiences. Some issues are so painful that we deceive ourselves into thinking that they don’t exist. Sigmund Freud persuasively argued that we employ an arsenal of defense mechanisms, such as denial, compulsive behaviors, and even dwelling on physical symptoms to screen out anxiety and psychological pain. Wheezing when around parents or headaches in sexual situations can safely be attributed to purely physical causes (e.g., pollen or caffeine). Admitting to personal struggles concerning one’s autonomy or feelings of sexual anxiety is a far less pleasant strategy when less threatening alternative explanations are available.

• From Open (2009)

  AS POWERFUL AS Ivanisevic’s serve is under normal circumstances, today it’s a work of art. He’s acing me left and right, monster serves that the speed gun clocks at 138 miles an hour. But it’s not just the speed, it’s the trajectory. They land at a 75-degree angle. I try not to care. I tell myself that aces happen. Each time he serves a ball past me, I say under my breath that he can’t do that every time. Just walk to the other side and get ready, Andre. The match will be decided on those few second serves. He wins the first set, 7–6. I don’t break him once. I concentrate on not overreacting, on breathing in, breathing out, remaining patient. When the thought crosses my mind that I’m on the verge of losing my fourth slam final, I casually set that thought aside. In the second set Ivanisevic gives me a few freebies, makes a few mistakes, and I break him. I take the second set. Then the third. Which makes me feel almost worse, because once again I’m a set away from a slam. Ivanisevic rises up in the fourth set and destroys me. I’ve made the Croat mad. He loses only a handful of points in the process. Here we go again. I can see tomorrow’s headlines as plain as the racket in my hand. As the fifth set begins I run in place to get the blood flowing and tell myself one thing: You want this. You do not want to lose, not this time. The problem in the last three slams was that you didn’t want them enough, and therefore you didn’t bring it, but this one you want, so this time you need to let Ivanisevic and everyone else in this joint know you want it. At 3–3, I’m serving, break point. I haven’t been able to make a first serve this entire set, but now, mercifully, I make one. He returns it to the center of the court, I hit to his backhand, he hits a chip lob. I have to back up two steps. The overhead is one of the easiest shots you can play. It’s also the epitome of my struggles at slams, because it’s too easy. I don’t like things too easy. It’s there for the taking—will I take it? I swing, hit a textbook overhead, and win the point. I go on to hold serve.

• From Escape (2007)

  A storm had moved into the valley and it was starting to snow on top of the few feet of snow we already had. I called the welfare office and said I had a handicapped child and a toddler and I couldn’t do this in twenty-four hours by myself. I asked for an extension. I was told there was no way. If I didn’t make the deadline, my case would be closed. Then I would have to reapply. I figured it would take months to get my benefits again. The next day I cancelled every appointment I had and headed out into the snowstorm with Bryson, Harrison, and Harrison’s wheelchair to make my rounds. I was still struggling with PTSD. My five-minute plan wasn’t much help on a day like this. Harrison’s immune system was compromised from his hormone therapy. I worried that he would get sick. It was blindingly cold. At each school I had to take the wheelchair out, set it up, settle Harrison into it and bundle him up, and then get Bryson from his car seat. When I got to my brother’s to fax in the paperwork, I was shivering so much my teeth would not stop chattering. When I woke up the next morning I had a hard time breathing. I had a fever and knew I had pneumonia. I couldn’t get out of bed. LuAnne started taking care of Harrison once she realized how seriously sick I was. Betty even started making meals and doing some dishes. For the first time, my kids were worried. By Monday morning, I was still burning up with fever. I was too sick to call anyone and too afraid that if I did, someone might find out about my PTSD. Merril was already accusing me of being mentally ill. I knew that some women who tried to flee polygamy ended up locked into mental institutions and had their children taken away from them. I would risk anything to avoid that fate. I told my children I was too sick to take them to school. I didn’t even have the strength to call and cancel my appointments. Amazingly, Betty and LuAnne started bringing me tea. I was able to sip the tea, but I couldn’t eat. Tuesday morning was no different. But Betty didn’t want to miss any more school. She was worried about keeping her grades up and called Mitzi, the PTA president who had taken Merrilee, Patrick, and Andrew under her wing. Mitzi took the children to school and said she’d do so as long as I needed help. Then she made me a big batch of chicken soup. I tried to sip some every two hours. Mitzi also bought me some over-the-counter medicine and a vaporizer, all of which helped. By the time the weekend was over I knew I was strong enough to take my children back to school.

• From Escape (2007)

  Now what? There I was sitting alone in a car with a strange man. What a weird feeling. I had never felt so shy in my entire life. Ever. I was thirty-six years old and on my third date. (My first two dates were awkward non-starters.) This was the first date I’d ever had with someone I found really attractive. Brian mentioned something about his son. I looked at him and said, “Oh, you have a son?” “I do. Two boys, in fact. What about you? Any kids?” he asked. “Yes, I have eight.” Brian started laughing. He thought I was joking. I looked at him because I didn’t get what was so funny. Then it was his turn to look surprised. “You have eight children?” I nodded. Brian looked like he was choking on something. “Seriously, you do not look like you even have any kids. I thought you were joking. Is a sports bar okay for lunch?” I’d never been to a sports bar in my life. I said that sounded great. The mention of my eight children broke the ice. Brian came from a family of six. He said his mother was very beautiful. “Like you. You remind me of my mother in a lot of ways,” he said. Well, that seemed all right. Brian admitted that he had begged off having lunch with the dean so he could try to catch me after class. He said if that had failed, he would have called me with the number he had from the study guide sheet. “You made up the study guide thing just to get my number?” I said, shocked. “No, not exactly. I’m e-mailing everyone a study guide. I just didn’t need their phone numbers.” He smiled. Over lunch I told Brian how I’d ended up with eight children and about my escape and the seemingly never-ending custody battle I’d finally won. Talking to him suddenly felt as easy as breathing and as natural as blinking. No man had ever listened to me as intently as he had. Brian had just gone through a divorce, and in talking we realized we’d both been married for seventeen years, almost to the day—he was married three weeks before I married Merril and divorced two weeks before my escape. Both of us had been divorced for eighteen months, and neither of us had dated seriously since. Brian later said he realized at lunch he wanted to have a relationship with me even though he knew it would turn his life upside down. He was scared but didn’t let that stop him from saying, “Do you want to go see a movie tonight?” “Sure,” I said. “I work in San Francisco but I come to Salt Lake every two weeks to see my sons. I’d like to date you when I’m not seeing my two boys.” I smiled. “Sounds good to me.” He took me back to my car and kissed me goodbye. Really kissed me.

• From Confessions

  Then in this great contention of my inward dwelling, which I had strongly raised against my soul, in the chamber of my heart, troubled in mind and countenance, I turned upon Alypius. "What ails us?" I exclaim: "what is it? what heardest thou? The unlearned start up and take heaven by force, and we with our learning, and without heart, lo, where we wallow in flesh and blood! Are we ashamed to follow, because others are gone before, and not ashamed not even to follow?" Some such words I uttered, and my fever of mind tore me away from him, while he, gazing on me in astonishment, kept silence. For it was not my wonted tone; and my forehead, cheeks, eyes, colour, tone of voice, spake my mind more than the words I uttered. A little garden there was to our lodging, which we had the use of, as of the whole house; for the master of the house, our host, was not living there. Thither had the tumult of my breast hurried me, where no man might hinder the hot contention wherein I had engaged with myself, until it should end as Thou knewest, I knew not. Only I was healthfully distracted and dying, to live; knowing what evil thing I was, and not knowing what good thing I was shortly to become. I retired then into the garden, and Alypius, on my steps. For his presence did not lessen my privacy; or how could he forsake me so disturbed? We sate down as far removed as might be from the house. I was troubled in spirit, most vehemently indignant that I entered not into Thy will and covenant, O my God, which all my bones cried out unto me to enter, and praised it to the skies. And therein we enter not by ships, or chariots, or feet, no, move not so far as I had come from the house to that place where we were sitting. For, not to go only, but to go in thither was nothing else but to will to go, but to will resolutely and thoroughly; not to turn and toss, this way and that, a maimed and half-divided will, struggling, with one part sinking as another rose.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  It wasn’t as if I had any answers. I, too, was just trying my best to raise a healthy daughter at a time when celebrities presented self-objectification as a source of strength, power, and independence; when looking desirable seemed a substitute for feeling desire; when Fifty Shades of Grey, with its neurasthenic lip-chewing heroine and creepy stalker billionaire, was being hailed as the ultimate feminine fantasy; when no woman under the age of forty appeared to have pubic hair. Sure, as a girl I wore out songs such as “Sexual Healing” and “Like a Virgin,” but they were Disney Channel fodder compared to L’il Wayne’s “bitch” whose “strict diet” in the song “Love Me” consists of nothing but “dick”; or Maroon 5’s promise to hunt a woman down and eat her alive in “Animals.” (In the video, lead singer Adam Levine stalks the object of his obsession while dressed as a butcher wielding a meat hook, then has sex with her in a blood-drenched finale.) It’s enough to make me apologize to Tipper Gore for the way my friends and I mocked her in the ’90s. Meanwhile, study after study has revealed a shocking prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses; the problem is so dire that the president of the United States (himself the father of two teen girls) has become involved. Even as girls outnumbered boys in college, as they “leaned in” to achieve their academic and professional dreams, I had to wonder: Were we moving forward or backward? Did today’s young women have more freedom than their mothers to shape their sexual encounters, more influence and more control within them? Were they better able to resist stigma, better equipped to explore joy? And if not, why not? Girls now live in a culture where, increasingly, unless both parties agree unequivocally to a sexual encounter, there is no consent—only “yes means yes.” All well and good, but what happens after yes?

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  The girls watching the video giggled and occasionally gasped in shock. Weirdly, though, I found myself agreeing with Stenzel, if not with her conclusions or her effort to shame and terrorize her audience. Our definition of “sex” is too narrow. I realize that it’s idealistic to call for a dismantling of virginity for the sake of girls’ health, but even questioning the implications of our assumptions about it has value. It is worth asking how putting this one act into a separate category is keeping girls (and boys) safer from disease, coercion, betrayal, assault; whether it gives them more control over their sexual experience; whether it encourages mutuality and caring; how it affects their perception of other kinds of sexual interactions; what it means for gay teens, who can have multiple sex partners without heterosexual intercourse. Again, this is not because that form of intercourse is no big deal, but because it’s not the only big deal. I’d rather young people think of sex more horizontally, as Dennis Fortenberry suggested, as a way to explore intimacy and pleasure, than as this misguided vertical race to a goal. What if your first kiss were a form of virginity loss? The first time you had oral sex? What if it was first love? What if, as Jessica Valenti suggests in The Purity Myth, a girl didn’t lose her virginity until she’d had her first orgasm with a partner? Before leaving Christina and her friends, I asked how she would raise her own daughter if she had one. She pondered that for a moment. “There are huge holes in my sex education that I can’t ignore,” she finally said, “but at the risk of losing the other lessons that benefited me, I wouldn’t wish to have done it differently. Still, I really want to have a more open discussion with my children. I can’t quite imagine being at a level of saying, ‘Okay, so this is what your clitoris is,’ but then again, I’d want that for them if that would make them more comfortable in the world. “I guess I would have to tell my daughter, ‘It’s totally your decision,’” she continued. “‘It’s whatever you feel comfortable with. But you have to be safe: there are these bad things that can happen in sex, but there are also benefits.’ I would have to tell her, ‘It’s very much up to you and how you feel.’ Because I think, in the end, it is the most personal of all decisions.”

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Protestant states tended to be the chief beneficiaries of this international series of religious movements. They might have state religions but they tended to be more tolerant. They rarely persecuted systematically. They had no equivalent to the Inquisition. They were not clericalist. They permitted books to circulate more freely. They did not burden commerce with canon law. They accepted ‘private’ religion, and placed marriage and the family at the centre of it. They were thus more congenial to the capitalist community. As a result, Protestant societies appeared far more successful than Catholic ones as the capitalist system developed. The point was noted as early as 1804 by Charles de Viller in his Essai sur l’esprit et l’influence de la réformation de Luther. In the nineteenth century it became a commonplace to link economic success and industrialization with the Protestant creed, particularly when it was observed that, in Catholic countries like France, Belgium and Austria, the entrepreneurial lead was taken by members of the Protestant minority. Catholic leaders, and the Vatican in particular, grew very alarmed at Protestant propaganda which harped on this theme; it was one chief reason why the Vatican tended to damn all forms of ‘modernism’ and to detect Protestant heresy behind any kind of innovation. Yet both the Protestant propagandists and the frightened Vatican were really missing the point. What inhibited the growth of the economic freedom necessary to allow capitalism to develop was not a particular theology but Christian institutionalism. Capitalism could not expand in a total Christian society, whether it were Catholic or Calvinist. The emigrant capitalists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were fleeing not from particular dogmas but from the institutions which insisted that dogmas should control life. They took the Erasmian view that what Christianity needed was a change in morals, not in theology. Capitalism benefited from the observance of the Ten Commandments; but it regarded a society dominated by an expensive and arrogant institutional Church as a hostile environment. Capitalism, in its religious aspect, was a retreat from public to private Christianity. It was a movement towards the freedom of the will and the individual, and against collective enforcement. The strength of clericalism varied greatly in Protestant countries, but it was everywhere weaker than in Catholic ones. Hence it was in Protestant societies that capitalism first took strong root. But as the institutional power of the Catholic church has declined, in the twentieth century, capitalism has spread into the once-clericalist states. The different theories of salvation are thus seen

• From The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700) (1984)

  The Holy Church 85 was true of the church in the mind of God and in the eschatological light of eternity, but unity constituted the condition within which the church and its members strove toward an ever greater measure of empirical holiness. It was the breakdown of this Augustinian solution to the paradox of grace and perfection as ap- plied to the church that made the schism of the four- teenth century and the reform movement of the fifteenth century the major crisis they were for the doctrine of the church as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. The Holy Church The scandal of a divided church served to aggravate the widespread sense of outrage over violations of the church's holiness, and it reminded at least some ob- servers of the "abomination of desolation" predicted by the prophet Daniel and by Christ himself. Early in the third decade of the fifteenth century Peter Chel- cicky wrote a book with the title The Holy Church, whose opening paragraph affirmed the Hussite in- sistence on the church as the company of the predes- tinated, because "it is only with these words that we may speak of a 'holy' church" without any explana- tions or additions; for "in the saints, the righteousness commanded by God and predestination go together, and if a predestinated person keeps the righteousness commanded by God, he is then a member of the holy church." He returned to this definition in his later sermons, as he also protested against the equation of "apostolic" with "Roman" in the definition of the church. The recognition that unity and holiness were in- separable was by no means an exclusively Hussite emphasis. According to the Emperor Sigismund, who convoked it, the very council that condemned Hus was to have the purpose of achieving both unity and holiness, as well as the defense of true doctrine, since "there cannot be true union without reformation, nor true reformation without union," and "minor mat- ters" like the case of John Hus would not be allowed to interfere with this purpose. A later council, at which the Hussites were once more an issue, had the task, according to Sigismund, of "changing morals for the better and bringing the whole people to the way of

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  It’s no big deal, her father said. I should be home in a few days. Conversations with her father were always so strained. Well, here’s some good news that’s sure to cheer you up, she said. I’m expecting again! Her fourth baby in five years. Silence. You’re nuts, my grandfather told her shortly before hanging up. The operation was not as harmless as he had let on. Midway through the procedure, he started hemorrhaging on the operating table. Doctors said they tried their best to stop the bleeding, but years of hard drinking had damaged my grandfather’s circulatory system. A few minutes later, he was dead at the age of fifty-six. I was born the following August. Though I never met this mysterious grandfather with his slicked-back hair, dimpled chin, and deep-set brown eyes, I often wondered what he would have thought if he knew that my mother was only halfway through her baby-production operation. Patty came a year and a half after me, then Billy then Danny. By the time Molly arrived, Holmer had grown so weary of driving my mother to the maternity ward, he told her to just take a cab. 3 Secret Hiding Places [image file=Image00008.jpg] Me, my mother with Patty, and Jake on the front porch of our first house in Wilmette, Illinois, 1959. Here’s the first clue I had that something strange was going on in my family that no one was willing to discuss: In late July 1963, a few weeks shy of my sixth birthday, I dashed downstairs for breakfast to discover that my mother was gone. No warning. No explanation. She was just gone. I looked everywhere for her. We had just moved back to Wilmette, a suburb of Chicago, after an eleven-month stint in New Canaan, Connecticut, and our new house was full of unpacked boxes. Maybe she fell into one of the crates with all our winter coats, I thought. I checked the attic, then the basement, then the garage. By lunchtime, I was panicking. No one would tell me where our mother had gone or when she’d be back. She would be back, right? Get in the car, Holmer barked at me early that afternoon. Patty and I climbed into the back seat of the station wagon with a red vinyl suitcase between us. We had no idea where we were going or why. We watched out the windows as the elm trees lining the streets of our new neighborhood morphed into the sororities and fraternities of Northwestern University’s campus in Evanston, the jazz clubs and carryout joints of Rogers Park, and then the skyscrapers of downtown Chicago. Patty, who was four years old, growled a little, as she often did when she got nervous. Cut that out! Holmer snapped from the driver’s side as I absentmindedly kicked the back of his seat. I could see his eyes darting back and forth in the mirror as his fingers tapped the steering wheel.

• From Escape (2007)

  Merril and Barbara were on their way to his motel in Caliente when the news reached them. Merril didn’t want to drive all the way back to St. George, so he called his son Leroy and told him to go to the hospital, check on Luke, and call him back. Leroy, who was in his twenties, found his brother, who told him he was okay and had nothing more than a bad bump on his head. When this was reported back to Merril, he wondered why he’d been told Luke was in critical condition. A bump on the head was no big deal. That night Leroy stopped by our house on his way home from work. Ruth had prepared the meal that night and was serving up soup and hot bread when he arrived. “I just stopped by the hospital to check on Luke like Father asked,” Leroy said. “He seems to be doing just fine.” Ruth looked shocked. “What? Why is Luke in the hospital?” “Didn’t Father tell you Luke was in an accident with his dirt bike today?” She shook her head. “No, I haven’t talked to Father today. When did Luke get a dirt bike?” “I think Father let him get it quite a while ago. But he’s doing fine. I’m sure Father would have told you if there was anything to worry about,” Leroy said Ruth cared deeply for her children when she was stable. She picked up the phone in the kitchen and immediately called Merril. “Father, Leroy is telling me that Luke is in the hospital and that he had an accident on his dirt bike.” There was silence while Ruth absorbed whatever Merril had to say. She continued. “But Father, I think I better go to the hospital tonight and check on Luke. I want to make sure he’s really all right.” Ruth listened some more and then hung up. I could see that her hands were shaking. She finished the dishes and told us how worried she was about Luke. “But Father doesn’t think that if I go there will be anything to do there anyway. He thinks it’s important for me to stay home and take care of the family.” Ruth seemed to be trying hard to convince herself that this was something she wanted to do—even though there were four other wives at home. She was clearly upset and complained the next morning that she had not been able to sleep. Merril and Barbara decided to go to Las Vegas the following day on business. Merril thought he might make it to the hospital later that day. Meanwhile, at the hospital, the surgeon monitoring Luke couldn’t understand why no parent had yet arrived on the scene. She couldn’t operate until the forms were signed. If there was an emergency, Luke’s life could be in jeopardy because of his parents’ negligence.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  (thus developing in economic terms habits of industry and capitalism). Good works were useless as a means of attaining salvation, since that was already determined, but they were indispensible as a sign of election, to get rid of the fear of damnation, and induce what Luther called ‘the feeling of blessed assurance’ – an inner conviction that you were saved. Weber thought that Calvinism was an anxiety-inducing ideology that drove its victims to seek self-control and confidence in methodical work and worldly success. But there is no evidence that Calvinism, or other powerful forms of Protestantism, induced anxiety. The anxiety was already there. It always had been. Origen, with his theory of universal salvation, had always represented a minority trend in Christianity. Vast numbers of Christians had feared Hell and its fires at all periods. These anxieties naturally tended to generate work. Anxious men assuaged their worries, in medieval society, by paying for masses to be said for them, or by buying indulgences. They had to work to get this salvation money. But profit thus generated was creamed off by the Church, and used in display buildings, masses and charitable foundations. It was not available for entrepreneurial investment. To this extent medieval society was not a saving society; or, rather, it banked its treasure in Heaven. It had a wealthy Church, rather than capitalist enterprises, to show for its industry. Again, medieval merchants were less inclined to bequeath large sums in cash to their heirs than their successors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Huge bequests went to purposes which Protestantism later ruled to be futile or anti- Christian. A comparatively small percentage change in such habits could effect, over a period, a major transformation in economic life. This does not mean that passionate Protestants, especially Calvinists, were more likely to be successful in business. It has not been, and probably cannot be, demonstrated that, for instance, Englishmen who actually became Puritans and lived through the ‘salvation panic’ then became entrepreneurial businessmen or significantly changed their commercial habits as a result. The evidence from individual diaries, letters and memoirs suggests that the most significant expression of their new faith was in the cultural and political field rather than the economic. It is true that the Puritan spirit did tend to make good organizers; but, as such, it operated on both sides of the religious divide – Loyola and Borromeo were both brilliant organizers, as indeed had been the early Benedictines and Cistercians, quite independent of any particular Salvationist theology. Thus, though it is true that the commercial instinct tended to turn men against

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  This exchange happened so smoothly that none of the seminar members, perhaps not even Dr. Werner himself, was conscious of his switch into his seductive professional voice—or, it seemed, of Ernest’s eagerness to snuggle into the warmth of the therapeutic comforter. “You said there’s something of your mother in it,” remarked Barbara. “I never got much good stuff from her either.” “Does her ghost influence your feelings toward Myrna?” “It was different with my mother. I was the one who kept pulling away. I was embarrassed by her. I didn’t like thinking I was born of her. When I was young—maybe eight, nine—I felt suffocated when my mother got too close to me. I remember telling my analyst that my mother ‘sucked up all the oxygen in the room.’ That phrase became a slogan, a major motif, of my analysis: my analyst referred to it again and again. I used to look at my mother and think, I have to love her as my mother, but if she were a stranger I’d dislike everything about her.” “So,” said Dr. Werner, “now we know something important about your countertransference. Although you invite your patient to come closer, you unintentionally give her a simultaneous ‘don’t get too close’ message. She’ll intrude too far, suck up all the oxygen. And without a doubt she’s perceiving this second message and accommodating you. Again, let me repeat, we can’t hide these feelings from patients. I’ll say it once again: we can’t hide these feelings from patients. It’s the lesson for today. I cannot emphasize the point too strongly. No experienced therapist can possibly doubt the existence of unconscious empathy.” “Lot of ambivalence too,” said Barbara, “in your sexual feelings toward her. I’m struck by your response to her breasts—both longing and repulsion. You like those blouse buttons popping, but they bring up unpleasant memories of Mother.” “Yes,” added Tom, another of Ernest’s close friends, “and then you get self-conscious, start to question whether you may have unwittingly been staring at her breasts. Happens to me often.” “And your sexual attraction to her coupled with a wish to get away? What do you make of it?” asked Barbara. “Some dark primitive vagina dentate fantasy in me, no doubt,” replied Ernest. “But still there’s something in this patient that particularly ignites that fear.” Just before drifting off to sleep, Ernest wondered again whether he should stop seeing Myrna. Maybe she needs a female therapist, he thought. Maybe my negative feelings are too deep, too entrenched. But when he had raised that question in the seminar group, everyone, including Dr. Werner, said, “No, stay the course.” Myrna’s major problems, they felt, were with men and could best be addressed with a male therapist. Too bad, Ernest thought: he really wanted out.

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

  Several important questions have been posed to this doctrine, and one seems especially noteworthy to mention here. The view that gender is performative sought to show that what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body. In this way, it showed that what we take to be an “internal” feature of ourselves is one that we anticipate and produce through certain bodily acts, at an extreme, an hallucinatory effect of naturalized gestures. Does this mean that everything that is understood as “internal” about the psyche is therefore evacuated, and that internality is a false metaphor? Although Gender Trouble clearly drew upon the metaphor of an internal psyche in its early discussion of gender melancholy, that emphasis was not brought forward into the thinking of performativity itself.9 Both The Psychic Life of Power and several of my recent articles on psychoanalytic topics have sought to come to terms with this problem, what many have seen as a problematic break between the early and later chapters of this book. Although I would deny that all of the internal world of the psyche is but an effect of a stylized set of acts, I continue to think that it is a significant theoretical mistake to take the “internality” of the psychic world for granted. Certain features of the world, including people we know and lose, do become “internal” features of the self, but they are transformed through that interiorization, and that inner world, as the Kleinians call it, is constituted precisely as a consequence of the interiorizations that a psyche performs. This suggests that there may well be a psychic theory of performativity at work that calls for greater exploration.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  “Courtship” practices had formed around them. Doubtless these practices did not have the complexity found in other arts of loving such as those that would be developed in the Middle Ages. But by the same token, they were something quite different from the formalities that one observed in order to qualify for the hand of a young lady. They defined a whole set of conventional and appropriate behaviors, making this relation a culturally and morally overloaded domain. These practices—the reality of which has been amply documented by K. J. Dover20—defined the mutual behavior and the respective strategies that both partners should observe in order to give their relations a “beautiful” form; that is, one that was aesthetically and morally valuable. They determined the role of the erastes and that of the eromenos. The first was in a position of initiative—he was the suitor—and this gave him rights and obligations; he was expected to show his ardor, and to restrain it; he had gifts to make, services to render; he had functions to exercise with regard to the eromenos; and all this entitled him to expect a just reward. The other partner, the one who was loved and courted, had to be careful not to yield too easily; he also had to keep from accepting too many tokens of love, and from granting his favors heedlessly and out of self-interest, without testing the worth of his partner; he must also show gratitude for what the lover had done for him. Now, this courtship practice alone shows very well that the sexual relation between man and boy did not “go without saying”: it had to be accompanied by conventions, rules of conduct, ways of going about it, by a whole game of delays and obstacles designed to put off the moment of closure, and to integrate it into a series of subsidiary activities and relations. In other words, while this type of relation was fully accepted, it was not a matter of “indifference.” One would be missing the essential thing if one regarded all these precautions that were taken and the interest that was shown merely as the proof that this love was freely engaged in; it would be to ignore the distinction that was made between this sexual behavior and all the others whose recommended modalities were of little concern. All these preoccupations make it clear that pleasure relations between men and adolescent boys already constituted a delicate factor in society, an area so sensitive that one could not fail to be concerned about the conduct of the participants on both sides. 3. But we may note at once a considerable difference in comparison with that other focus of interest and inquiry, matrimonial life: in the case of relations between men and boys, we are dealing with a game that was “open,” at least up to a certain point.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Nobody expected religion to be a challenge or to provide an answer to the meaning of life. People turned to philosophy for that kind of enlightenment. In the Roman empire of late antiquity, people worshipped the gods to ask for help during a crisis, to secure a divine blessing for the state and to experience a healing sense of continuity with the past. Religion was a matter of cult and ritual rather than ideas; it was based on emotion, not on ideology or consciously adopted theory. This is not an unfamiliar attitude today: many of the people who attend religious services in our own society are not interested in theology, want nothing too exotic and dislike the idea of change. They find that the established rituals provide them with a link with tradition and give them a sense of security. They do not expect brilliant ideas from the sermon and are disturbed by changes in the liturgy. In rather the same way, many of the pagans of late antiquity loved to worship the ancestral gods, as generations had done before them. The old rituals gave them a sense of identity, celebrated local traditions and seemed an assurance that things would continue as they were. Civilization seemed a fragile achievement and should not be threatened by wantonly disregarding the patronal gods, who would ensure its survival. They would feel obscurely threatened if a new cult set out to abolish the faith of their fathers. Christianity, therefore, had the worst of both worlds. It lacked the venerable antiquity of Judaism and had none of the attractive rituals of paganism, which everybody could see and appreciate. It was also a potential threat, since Christians insisted that theirs was the only God and that all the other deities were delusions. Christianity seemed an irrational and eccentric movement to the Roman biographer Gaius Suetonius (70–160), a superstitio nova et prava, which was “depraved” precisely because it was “new.”31