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 Little Women (1868)

  I like to know all about the—the boys," said Jo eagerly. "That is so kind, I gladly tell you. My friends find for me a place in a college, where I teach as at home, and earn enough to make the way smooth for Franz and Emil. For this I should be grateful, should I not?" "Indeed you should. How splendid it will be to have you doing what you like, and be able to see you often, and the boys!" cried Jo, clinging to the lads as an excuse for the satisfaction she could not help betraying. "Ah! But we shall not meet often, I fear, this place is at the West." "So far away!" and Jo left her skirts to their fate, as if it didn't matter now what became of her clothes or herself. Mr. Bhaer could read several languages, but he had not learned to read women yet. He flattered himself that he knew Jo pretty well, and was, therefore, much amazed by the contradictions of voice, face, and manner, which she showed him in rapid succession that day, for she was in half a dozen different moods in the course of half an hour. When she met him she looked surprised, though it was impossible to help suspecting that she had come for that express purpose. When he offered her his arm, she took it with a look that filled him with delight, but when he asked if she missed him, she gave such a chilly, formal reply that despair fell upon him. On learning his good fortune she almost clapped her hands. Was the joy all for the boys? Then on hearing his destination, she said, "So far away!" in a tone of despair that lifted him on to a pinnacle of hope, but the next minute she tumbled him down again by observing, like one entirely absorbed in the matter... "Here's the place for my errands. Will you come in? It won't take long." Jo rather prided herself upon her shopping capabilities, and particularly wished to impress her escort with the neatness and dispatch with which she would accomplish the business. But owing to the flutter she was in, everything went amiss. She upset the tray of needles, forgot the silesia was to be 'twilled' till it was cut off, gave the wrong change, and covered herself with confusion by asking for lavender ribbon at the calico counter. Mr.

• From Little Women (1868)

  It looks like rain," said her mother, observing that she had on her new bonnet, but not alluding to the fact. "Yes, Marmee, do you want anything in town? I've got to run in and get some paper," returned Jo, pulling out the bow under her chin before the glass as an excuse for not looking at her mother. "Yes, I want some twilled silesia, a paper of number nine needles, and two yards of narrow lavender ribbon. Have you got your thick boots on, and something warm under your cloak?" "I believe so," answered Jo absently. "If you happen to meet Mr. Bhaer, bring him home to tea. I quite long to see the dear man," added Mrs. March. Jo heard that, but made no answer, except to kiss her mother, and walk rapidly away, thinking with a glow of gratitude, in spite of her heartache, "How good she is to me! What do girls do who haven't any mothers to help them through their troubles?" The dry-goods stores were not down among the counting-houses, banks, and wholesale warerooms, where gentlemen most do congregate, but Jo found herself in that part of the city before she did a single errand, loitering along as if waiting for someone, examining engineering instruments in one window and samples of wool in another, with most unfeminine interest, tumbling over barrels, being half-smothered by descending bales, and hustled unceremoniously by busy men who looked as if they wondered 'how the deuce she got there'. A drop of rain on her cheek recalled her thoughts from baffled hopes to ruined ribbons. For the drops continued to fall, and being a woman as well as a lover, she felt that, though it was too late to save her heart, she might her bonnet. Now she remembered the little umbrella, which she had forgotten to take in her hurry to be off, but regret was unavailing, and nothing could be done but borrow one or submit to a drenching. She looked up at the lowering sky, down at the crimson bow already flecked with black, forward along the muddy street, then one long, lingering look behind, at a certain grimy warehouse, with 'Hoffmann, Swartz, & Co.' over the door, and said to herself, with a sternly reproachful air... "It serves me right! what business had I to put on all my best things and come philandering down here, hoping to see the Professor? Jo, I'm ashamed of you! No, you shall not go there to borrow an umbrella, or find out where he is, from his friends.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  And he would, because Brands understood the bargain he was striking. In exchange for possibly losing every dual match his team had all season, Brands was giving himself and the program a chance to be very, very good in the winter of 2007 and for the three seasons beyond that. Brands wasn’t thinking about mere improvement; he was thinking about national contention for a program that had produced four All-Americans in its previous 84 years of existence. He was going to come roaring out of the gate a year from now with this group, Borschel and LeClere and Metcalf and Slaton and Leet. His wrestlers—by then they would be called “redshirt freshmen,” meaning they were in their second year of college but only their first year of NCAA athletic eligibility—were going to be ready in 2007 not just to wrestle, but to win. Virginia Tech suddenly was going to jump into the national spotlight, and Tom Brands was going to be the coach who had made that happen. It was worth the humiliation of sustained losing that might very well have to precede it. Brands had foreseen this possibility, and had said as much during the recruiting process, in conversations with Jim and Carol Borschel, and Doug and Mary LeClere, and Joey’s dad, Matt Shaver. Even the Metcalfs, who knew Brent initially had wanted to wrestle as a true freshman, came to see the value in keeping everybody together, training as a group and waiting for the fall of 2006 and winter of 2007 to debut in unison. It could be one of the great coming-out parties in college wrestling, but for it to happen, everyone had to agree to spend this first year on the redshirt list—and Brands would have to resist the competitive temptation to activate any of them, no matter how dire it got out there. Jay, having thought it over, was on board. He didn’t mind the wait. The redshirt season was simply another year spent in the wrestling room with Brands, learning how to compete at a national and international level. Dan felt the same way. He saw in Brands a person who could make Dan better than he was, and Dan didn’t need to be wearing an official Virginia Tech singlet for that to be the case. The same was true for Joey, and for Metcalf and Leet. They all ultimately agreed it was the right call, in part because they had so little problem envisioning the payoff. In the end, not one of them, not even Tom Brands, would be around to see it through. By the winter of 2006, Doug LeClere was his usual nervous wreck. The Iowa State High School Wresting Tournament had made its move out of the Barn and into the new Wells Fargo Arena, but the old wolverines still gnawed at Doug’s insides as he watched his team, and his kids, hit the mat.

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  If you are in agreement, then go for it. But go slowly, and keep giving feedback! Feedback can be verbal or physical. It is often easier to explain where you want to be touched by taking your partner’s hand and placing it there than struggling with a verbal explanation. Ideally your partner will be watching you carefully and reading your nonverbal signals before you need to make them verbal. But it can be very tricky to read another person’s body language correctly, so never rely only on your or your partner’s ability to do so. Check things out on a verbal level at an appropriate time. And remember, it is fine to ask your partner to stop at any time; don’t wait until you hate what is happening before speaking up. There may be times when you just need your lover to pause for a moment or two and stop the stimulation, perhaps to let the energy gather itself. Don’t expect your partner to know automatically what you want. At the moment of orgasm I always want my partner to hold absolutely still inside me. Take a Risk, But Don’t Take It Seriously Being graceful is neither realistic nor important—this is sex, not ballet. Resign yourself: you are going to have to take initiative. You don’t need to be brazen about it; if shy is what you feel, then it’s fine to let that show. Don’t hold yourself tightly—let your feelings be clear to your partner, especially if you are turned on. Allow yourself to be responsive. It’s hard for me to come when my partner is not clearly turned on and desiring me. Are you nervous about taking the initiative? Then ask your partner, “Is this okay?” But don’t let your fear of making a mistake stop you. No doubt you will occasionally make mistakes. We all do, in all areas of life. The important thing is to learn and move on. Don’t let yourself be paralyzed. What if your partner gets so nervous while trying something new that he can’t maintain an erection? Well, as any lesbian will tell you, that shouldn’t matter in the least because it is generally easier to pleasure a woman manually or orally. In any case, why should intercourse be the sole focus of your play? What if your body starts shaking or you find yourself sweating with a combination of nervousness and desire? If it’s really too frightening, have your partner hold you and stroke you gently. Go ahead and cry if it helps. Learn to laugh at yourself; gentle laughter can be enormously healing. You will never do everything perfectly. There will always be times when you accidentally pull your partner’s hair or do something clumsy and embarrassing. Being graceful is neither realistic nor important—this is sex, not ballet.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  And yet, in the immediate analytic (or pundit-driven) aftermath, it was class all the way. Going against the grain, in a widely cited op-ed, Columbia University professor Mark Lilla wrote in the New York Times just after the election that it was not class at all that lay at the root of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump. He blamed her defeat on a Left-friendly version of identity politics. Trump’s rise was not about class-inflected racism or “whitelash,” he insisted, but served instead to expose liberals’ obsessive need to grant anyone who wanted it membership in a disadvantaged group: black, gay, female, and others. He argued that the Democrats, by their reductionist tendency, had caused “white, rural, religious Americans” to see themselves as ignored, even threatened. The liberal agenda was fueling a hostility toward political correctness; therefore, if the Democratic Party wished to do better, it would have to recover a “pre-identity” politics and reemphasize Americans’ shared values. 4 Once again, it was a narrowly defined view of voting, and of identity. Owing to Trump’s eccentricities, blaming Clinton was inevitable. But the flaws in Professor Lilla’s logic run deeper. His assumption that there was a time when democratic politics was “pre-identity” reflects the larger problem of many respected commentators: attachment to an idealized conception of American democracy. American party politics has exploited the rhetoric of identity at least as far back as Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson. Given the resilience of the white trash slur, rural working-class whites hardly needed liberal lingo to feel alienated. Illogically, Lilla uses Bill Clinton’s candidacy as one of his examples of identity-free politics. Yet as I detail in these pages, Clinton was a poster child of self-marketing. At the time, Republicans engaged in an unrelenting campaign to challenge Clinton’s legitimacy as president, making every effort to label him a southern bumpkin. In response, Clinton cleverly refashioned himself as the “Arkansas Elvis” and admitted, at times, to being a beer-drinking “Bubba.” He played “Heartbreak Hotel” on the saxophone and posed with a mule on the campaign trail. For the poor white kid from Hope, Clinton’s public image conjured nostalgia for the 1950s Elvis. No one was more skilled than the “comeback kid” in constructing an identity for himself that bridged North and South and in repackaging his personality so as to make him acceptable to working-class white men. The Yale liberal wore blue suede shoes. If a serious scholar such as Lilla could get Bill Clinton wrong, it’s no surprise that Trump would succeed in confounding so many smart people, too. Journalists throughout 2016 scrambled to figure out what the attraction was to

• From The Myth Made Fact: Reading Greek and Roman Mythology through Christian Eyes (2020)

  Why is it so hard to let things go and trust in God?Why did Lot’s wife look back at Sodom (see Genesis 19:26), even though she was warned not to do so? Why did the freed Jews want to go back to Egypt (see Exodus 16:3) where they were slaves? Why is it so hard to press on and stay the course and not look back?To help older students understand how a Christian writer such as Boethius could write a book from a pre-Christian point of view, discuss The Hobbit and/or The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. Explain to them that Tolkien was a Christian who imbued his fantasy books with a Christian understanding of good and evil, virtue and vice, but who chose to set his epic fantasy stories, as he explains in his October 14, 1958, letter to Rhona Beare, in an earlier age of the earth, 6,000 years before our own time. What that means is that Tolkien’s novels take place before God revealed himself to Abraham: in an age that is, therefore, both pre-Christian and pre-Jewish.Discuss why Tolkien would choose such a setting for his novels. How can Tolkien incorporate Christian ideas into a world in which God has not yet revealed himself to the Jews or the Christians? Remind students how Gollum is corrupted by the evil Ring, and then discuss what lessons Christian readers can learn from this. Seek out and discuss other Christian elements in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings .If the students are old enough to have read Beowulf , explain to them that Beowulf was written by an anonymous Christian monk who, like Tolkien after him, chose to set his epic in a pre-Christian world in which none of the characters know about Jesus or the Bible. Although the hero is brave and good, the author cannot give him the Christian consolation of heaven. He can only give him the highest reward that his pagan people knew—a glorious Viking funeral.Discuss what Christian elements emerge in Beowulf’s struggles with Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon. What elements does the hero lack because he is a pagan rather than a Christian hero? What can Christians nevertheless learn from his heroism?If students are interested in reading other works by Christians that are written in a pre-Christian mode and setting, consider recommending “The Knight’s Tale” from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales , Shakespeare’s King Lear , Milton’s Samson Agonistes , and C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces . (Note: No one really knows what Shakespeare believed, but he certainly wrote from within the Christian tradition.) Note 1: Origen (c. AD 185–c. 253) was an early church father who tried to reconcile Plato’s teachings about the soul, justice, and spiritual growth with the Bible and to build a bridge from pagan learning to Christian truth.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  Even if the conclusion had been a brief yes, which it never had, this fact would stop me: The lust would wear off. The sheen would dull. I knew it would. I’d still be me, just with a different set of problems. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Each afternoon when the judge dismisses us, I bolt from the building, fast-walk down the hill to the bus stop. My sandals slap the pavement on the downslope, left right left right, who am I, who am I. Who am I? The vinyl bench seats of the bus are sticky with summer heat. I sit down, poke in my earbuds, think about what to make for dinner. I’ve missed June. We’ve had to get extra babysitting this week, a cost we hadn’t budgeted for. I’ve hardly been around. Even in the evenings, I’ve hardly been around. Do I remember anything we’ve done, me and June? Me and June and Brandon? I’ve been thinking about the woman in the suit. That’s what I remember. I have to stop. I know the answers to the questions. They will end this. Do I want to be someone who cheats? No. Am I willing to do that to Brandon? No. The sheen will wear off, and you know it. Do I? I’ve never been with a woman. Does that make a difference? Maybe it does. What if it does? You’d still be you, wouldn’t you? Would I? The bus is too hot. The fabric under my arms is damp, and I can smell myself. Something is wrong with me. But I don’t have to tell anyone. Brandon doesn’t have to know, remember? The woman in the men’s suit doesn’t either. She has no idea that a single glance in my direction, her eyes on my skin, would keep me awake all night, fantasizing. It’s my secret. I’ll keep it here, with me. I can visit my secret whenever I want. Knowing this feels luxurious. That’s the word for it. Luxurious. The place where I keep this secret is padded and dim, the feeling when you lie back in the bath and the water covers your ears. I can climb inside it anytime I want, anywhere—on the bus, in a swiveling chair in the jury box—and I can think of her. No one has to know. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] The trial takes a week and ends on a Wednesday. The verdict comes down to minutia, and we are unanimous; the defendant is not guilty. I am certain that my vote to acquit has nothing to do with the fact that I’ve been watching the defense attorney in the men’s suit. I know that my desire to assert this certainty has everything to do with the same fact. But I can go home now, put it behind me. Across the room, I watch the defendant light up with relief. I wonder if, at some point in the near future, I will feel relief like that.

• From Three Women (2019)

  Say she gives him forty percent—no, thirty percent, he can handle that. And of that thirty percent he will fuck up precisely half. He might buy the wrong dog food. He might forget to tick-spray the kids. He will get the cow milk but not the almond milk. So say he does the list and he fucks up half of it, but he’s proud of himself regardless, and if Sloane says, Look thanks for buying the dog food, but it’s the wrong food, and anyway we have no dog, he will be upset, and something will freeze inside his urethra, it will turn into a little icicle, his urine and his semen in there, and he will feel bad about himself. So she can’t say that. She can’t say anything. She could say, Thank you, but even that is wrong, because Thank you means that Sloane assumes he wouldn’t have done it otherwise, and even though he will never do something on his own, he thinks he would. Of course eventually he would do something. Like, if she were dead. And anyway Sloane doesn’t want to be a nag. There are women who excel at nagging but Sloane hates the sound of her own voice as it forms a question. So what’s the fantasy? It’s nothing, really, if you have to ask. Sure, yes, the fantasy is he did the stuff she didn’t even know she needed, like cleaning his amber drops off the rim of the toilet, getting the kids’ clothes ready for the following morning, putting the scissors back where the scissors go, he did a bunch of things before the thought of them even entered Sloane’s head. Invisible service, the kind she likes the waiters to practice in her restaurant. He cleared the room in her brain so that she might be able to get sexually excited in that now wide-open field up there where the to-dos aren’t scrolling and the boxes next to each task are checked—but that overwhelming list didn’t even get written up because he did it before she thought about it. He even walked the dog. Ha, she thinks. Come on. That’s crazy. After all, we don’t even have a fucking dog. But mainly, she knew, she could not tell Jenny that on top of all these things she wanted from her husband, the thing she wanted most was for him to say it was his fault. That Sloane was not a demon whore. That he liked to watch her get fucked by other men. That he chose Wes for a variety of reasons that, maybe, had nothing to do with what Sloane liked or wanted or needed. And this woman, Sloane was suddenly realizing, did not understand any of it. She thought it was up to Sloane. She thought— I mean, really, what the fuck is wrong with you? Jenny repeated.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  of the saying. "BMT 74, 85. The tense therefore conveys an appeal to their memory of the utterance. This reference to the existing result of the saying can not be expressed in English except by an interjected clause, "as we told you and you remember," and inasmuch as the use of the English perfect in such a connection suggests a recent action—- in this case most naturally an utterance just made in the preceding sentence— the best translation is the simple past, which though it, leaves unexpressed a part of the meaning of the Greek, has at least the advan- tage of not expressing anything not conveyed by the Greek, IW7' 8*. The strict force of xa£ before $ptt is doubtless adverbial, "also/* but English idiom in such a case prefers the simple "so." Cf. Jn. 6W itf* i Cor. is49- The fuller and more definitely comparative expression oBwix; xaf occurs i Cor. 15" Gal, 4", etc, fipts, frequent in papyri, of strictly present time (M. and M. Voc. $. *.), is cited by NggcH, Wort" schatz, p. 78, as a word of the unliterary Kocv% yet, acts numerous classical exx. in L, & S. €t W v/Aa? €vay<y€\l%€Tat, Trap1 U 7r«peX^/?€T€, &v<i&€fui lirmi, "If any one is preaching to you a gosjwl not in accordance with that which ye received, let him be accursed." This sentence dif- fers from that of v.Mn two respects which affect the thought: (i) the element of concession and improbability disappears in the omission of ^A**fc ^ ayj€\®g «ff o&pawv; (j) flu* form of the condition that suggests future possibility is <!isplarcc! by that which expresses simple present sup(H>sitionf and which js often used when the condition is known to In1 actually fulfilled. result Is to bring the supposition closer home to the actual and since it was known both to Paul and his readers that the condition <?? «9 . . „ irap*\d/3ert wan at that very ttmr in process of fulfilment, to apply the dlrartly to those who were then preaching in GabUm., 10* apri j&p Ai^pctbrow w$lt)^ $ r^v u For am I seeking the favour of men, or of Ckwl ? ** <3pri, m»w, /, r ., in utterances. The evidently t« t that on previous or in other utterance ha fiiti words so as to win the favour of men, A made by Ms at Corinth, a Cor. io$* 11 to win the favour of," "to conciliate," as in * 4^ Mt <*H*« Acts 12*. The by of the of the word «td the of In by I, 9-10 31 the tense, has the meaning, " to seek the favour of." EMT ill GMT 25.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles28 28 first part by saying that he writes in the hope of strengthening them so that they will be “blameless before our God and father at the arrival of our lord Jesus with all his holy ones” (3:13). He then responds to three concerns that have come up after his departure, presumably conveyed via Timothy. For the first and third of these, Paul can only restate what he already told them when he was present. What should you do while waiting for Christ’s return? Do what I told you, only more (4:1–2): pursue holiness and abstain from sexual sin, especially, each preserving your “vessel” and avoiding lust, while loving each other and minding your business (4:3–12). You ask me, “When will it happen?” As I told you, we don’t know (5:1–2). Just watch, wait, and be prepared, because we aim to be rescued and not face wrath (5:9; cf. 1:10). The only substantial insight Paul explicitly adds deals with their concern about believers who die before the consummate event. Here he provides information that he claims to have received from the risen Christ (4:15): anyone who dies beforehand will follow Christ’s own path, of death followed by resurrection. In fact, the “dead in Christ” will precede us, who remain alive, and we shall follow to meet them in the clouds. This news should console them (4:16–18). Paul closes the letter by reaffirming the main point (5:23–24): their spirit, mind, and body must be preserved “blamelessly intact at the arrival of our lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is trustworthy. He will do this!” The entire letter, brief as it is, thus aims to consolidate Paul’s bond with those in Thessalonica who have trusted The Announcement. Having worried that their trust might have faltered, in the face of abuse from their townsfolk (2:17–3:5), he expresses joy at Timothy’s good report (3:1–12) and reassures them. What does this first letter say about Paul’s ethnos, its laws and customs? Nothing noticeable: no Torah, circumcision, covenant, scripture citations, Judaean tradition, calendar, or diet. It is not clear that anything in that vein would have been relevant to The Announcement. Scholars today know that Christos originates from Hebrew Mashiach or Messiah, but no such knowledge was necessary to understand this letter’s use of Christos. 49 Indeed, nothing that Paul says about Christ in this letter requires biblical knowledge. He does not speak in Septuagintal tones about “idols” as a self-evident evil, or mention the second commandment in 1:9–10. He frames his followers’ move from mere “representations” (εἴδωλα) to the “living and true” God, in language perfectly intelligible to Greeks. Philosophers had long since contemplated the true God as against mere representations. Greeks also knew about children of gods being restored after their death or removal to the underworld (Dionysus-Osiris, Attis, Persephone). Paul had only to convince such audiences that God had raised the crucified Jesus Christ from death and made him their lord who would soon return for them—a belief that Lucian would ridicule as compelling only to the gullible in his Passing of Peregrinus. This Paul succeeded in doing, with at least a few followers, and the claim formed the heart of The Announcement. Although 1 Thess makes no call on biblical knowledge, its incidental reference to Judaeans is revealing. Expatiating on the abuse that Christ-followers in Hellas must endure before Christ calls them to heaven (1:6; 2:1; 3:3–4), Paul consoles them with

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  One method might have been to run the same experiment while her subjects masturbated. That way, their eyes would more surely seek out what carried an erotic jolt. But there was little chance that she could get this kind of study approved by the university’s review board and, even if she could, too high a chance that research with masturbating women would bring Meana the outraged scorn of Las Vegas’s conservative press—condemnation that could, in turn, endanger all of her explorations. Las Vegas was a paradoxical place, with nearly all its advertising based on titillation and with prostitutes waiting at licensed ranches down the highway and yet with a prudish strain in the atmosphere, a resistance to the animal impulses that made people flock to the city. This divided psyche seemed an extreme version of a split that ran throughout the country. It left the erotic as hard to study as it was omnipresent. This was partially why Chivers, who had earned her PhD and done the first of her plethysmographic experiments in the States, had returned home to Canada after graduate school to continue. During her years in the United States, her research had been the target of ridicule. The Washington Times had protested the American government dollars that helped to pay for her work. “Federally Funded Study Measures Porn Arousal,” the headline had read. A congressman had demanded an investigation. The outcry over her small project soon faded, but she worried about an acute American aversion to looking too closely, too carefully, at the sexual. Meana was going slowly with the review board. She was designing a study that would use eye-tracking and X-rated videos. The films would turn on her subjects more than the soft-porn photos could. In this more heightened state—a state less conducive to cognition and comparison—would the women’s eyes become less drawn to female body parts and more compelled by everything male? She didn’t think so. She expected that the pattern from her earlier experiment would hold, that when it came to bodies, the female figure would prove full of electricity. As she developed the new study and hoped for the review board’s approval, she didn’t yet know about Chivers’s research with the pictures of isolated genitals. Those results might have led her to wonder if, in her video experiment, women would seek—as well as female bodies—Deen-like erections, pure declarations of male desire. Meana’s ideas grew not only from her lab but also from her work as a clinician, some of it trying to help women besieged with dyspareunia, genital pain during intercourse. The condition is not, in itself, caused by an absence of lust, yet her patients reported less pain if their desire increased. So part of her challenge was how to enhance desire, and despite prevailing wisdom, the answer, she said, had “little to do with building better relationships,” with fostering communication between patients and their partners.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  But as far as Hanno Buddenbrook was concerned, even the great Heinrich, who beat everyone, could not make up his mind to lay hands on him for dandruff and cowardice, for vague fear of the softness of his hair, of the delicacy of his limbs, of his dull, shy and cold gaze... "I'm scared," said Hanno to Kai, stopping at one side wall of the yard, leaning against the wall and pulling his jacket tighter with a shivering yawn... "I'm terribly scared, Kai, it hurts all over me Body. Is Mr. Mantelsack the man to be so afraid of? Say it yourself! If only this disgusting Ovid hour were over! If I had my reprimand in the class register and stayed seated and everything was in order! I'm not afraid of it , I'm afraid of the scandal that entails..." Kai fell into thought. "This Roderich Usher is the most wonderful character ever invented!" he said quickly and abruptly. "I've just read the whole lesson... If I could ever write a story that good!" The thing was that Kai busied himself with writing. That was also what he meant this morning when he said he had better things to do than doing his homework, and Hanno must have understood him. From the love of storytelling he had shown as a young boy, attempts at writing had developed, and recently he had completed a poem, a fairy tale, a ruthlessly fantastic adventure in which everything glowed in a dark glow that lay beneath Metals and mysterious embers in the deepest and most sacred workshops on earth and at the same time in those of the human soul played, and in which the elemental forces of nature and the soul were mixed, turned, transformed and purified in a strange way - written in an inner, meaningful, a little exuberant and longing language of tender passion ... Hanno knew this story well and loved it very much; but he didn't feel like talking about Kai's work or Edgar Poe now. He yawned again and then sighed, all the while singing to himself a motif he had recently invented on the grand piano. This was his habit. He used to sigh often, breathing deeply in the urgent need to get his inadequately working heart into a somewhat more lively pace, and he had become accustomed to letting the exhalation happen after a musical theme, some piece of melody of his own or someone else's invention... "Look, here comes the good Lord!" said Kai. "He's strolling in his garden." "A nice garden," said Hanno and burst out laughing. He laughed nervously and couldn't stop, held his handkerchief to his mouth and looked over it at the one Kai had called "Dear God".

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  He sat down next to Hanno Buddenbrook, smiled softly and a little slyly and bade the neighbor a good morning, accommodating the prevailing jargon which distorted the word into a bold and careless tone. Then, while everyone around him was chattering, getting ready, yawning and laughing, he began to work silently on the class register, manipulating the pen in an incomparably correct way with slender and straight fingers. After the lapse of two minutes footsteps were heard outside, the occupants of the front pews rose unhurriedly from their seats, and further back this and that followed their example, while others did not let themselves be disturbed in their occupations and hardly noticed that Mr Headteacher Ballerstedt came into the room, hung his hat on the door and went to the lectern. He was in his forties with a likeable embon point, with a large bald head, a reddish-yellow, short beard, a rosy complexion and a mixed expression of unction and comfortable sensuality about his moist lips. He picked up his notebook and leafed through it in silence; but as the quiet in the class left much to be desired, he raised his head, stretched out his arm on the desk, and, while his face slowly swelled so dark red that his beard appeared bright yellow, he flexed his weak and white fist several times, feebly up and down, his lips working convulsively and fruitlessly for half a minute, finally uttering nothing but a short, tight, and groaning "Well , swelled and was satisfied. This was Ballerstedt's way. He had once wanted to be a preacher, but his tendency to stutter and his penchant for worldly well-being made him prefer to turn to education. He was a bachelor, had some fortune, wore a small diamond on his finger and was fond of food and drink. He was the senior teacher who only socialized with his peers on official business, but otherwise mainly with the unmarried commercial life of the city, even with the officers of the garrison, ate twice a day in the first inn and was a member of the "club". If it met larger students anywhere in town at two or three o'clock in the morning, it would swell, never asked from him. The head teacher had gotten together with his uncle Christian too often in a purely human way for him to be happy to get into official conflicts with his nephew... "Well..." he said again, looking around the class, flexing his weakly clenched fist with the small diamond again, and glancing at his notebook. »Perleman. The overview." Somewhere in the class, Perlemann stood up. One hardly noticed that he was climbing up. It was one of the small, advanced ones.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  We are heartfelt friends and brothers in arms!” Kai was visibly relieved. "I'm in exactly the same position," he explained cheerfully. "I didn't work on Saturday because tomorrow was Sunday, and not on Sunday, out of respect... No, nonsense... mainly because I had something better to work on, of course," he said with sudden seriousness, his face flushing slightly flew over. "Yes, today can be fun, Hanno." "If I get another reprimand," said little Johann, "I'll stay where I am; and I'm sure I'll get that if he takes me on in Latin. It's the letter B's turn, Kai, there's no getting rid of it..." “Let's wait and see! Ha, Caesar is going out. Dangers in my back have always only threatened me; when they see Caesar's forehead...' But Kai didn't finish his declamation. He also felt very bad. He went to the lectern, sat on it, and began rocking in the armchair, scowling. Hanno Buddenbrook still let his forehead rest on his crossed arms. So they sat in silence for a while. Suddenly, somewhere in the distance, a dull humming sounded, which quickly became a roar and within half a minute it was threatening to roll over... "The people," Kai said bitterly. 'Lord, my God, how quickly they are finished! Less than ten minutes shortened the hour..." He descended from the lectern and went to the door to mingle with those who came. As for Hanno, he raised his head for just a moment, grimaced, and just sat there. It came, with slurping, pounding and a tangle of male voices, trebles and overturning alternating organs, flooded up the stairs, spilled over the corridor and also streamed into this room, which was suddenly filled with life, movement and noise. They came in, the young people, Hanno's and Kai's comrades, the junior high school students, about twenty-five in all, strolled to their places with their hands in their pockets or swinging their arms and opened their Bibles. There were pleasant and confiscated physiognomies, some that looked well and healthy and others that looked precarious, tall, strong rascals who soon wanted to be merchants or even go to sea and didn't care about anything anymore, and little ones above her old age advanced nerds, who excelled in subjects requiring memorization. But Adolf Todtenhaupt, the leader, knew everything; he had never owed an answer in his lifetime. This was partly because of his quiet, passionate industry, partly because the teachers were careful not to ask him anything he might not have known. It would have hurt and shamed her, it would have shaken her belief in human perfection to see Adolf Todtenhaupt fall silent... He had a strangely hunched skull, to which blond hair was glued smooth as a mirror, grey, black-rimmed eyes and long, brown ones Hands sticking out of the too-short sleeves of his neatly brushed jacket.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  But I had made many firm friends among them and I hardly believed that I should be able to avert an open rupture. When they had assembled at about a hundred yards in front of our camp, Safeni and I walked up towards them and sat down midway. Some half-dozen of the Mowa people came near, and the shauri began.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Post-hypnotic, or deferred, suggestions are such as are given to the patients during trance, to take effect after waking. They succeed with a certain number of patients even when the execution is named for a remote period—months or even a year, in one case reported by M. Liégeois. In this way one can make the patient feel a pain, or be paralyzed, or be hungry or thirsty, or have an hallucination, positive or negative, or perform some fantastic action after emerging from his trance. The effect in question may be ordered to take place not immediately, but after an interval of time has elapsed, and the interval may be left to the subject to measure, or may be marked by a certain signal. The moment the signal occurs, or the time is run out, the subject, who until then seems in a perfectly normal waking condition, will experience the suggested effect. In many instances, whilst thus obedient to the suggestion, he seems to fall into the hypnotic condition again. This is proved by the fact that the moment the hallucination or suggested performance is over he forgets it, denies all knowledge of it, and so forth; and by the further fact that he is 'suggestable' during its performance, that is, will receive new hallucinations, etc., at command. A moment later and this suggestibility has disappeared. It cannot be said, how-ever, that relapse into the trance is an absolutely necessary condition for the post-hypnotic carrying out of commands, for the subject may be neither suggestible nor amnesic, and may struggle with all the strength of his will against the absurdity of this impulse which he feels rising in him, he knows not why. In these cases, as in most cases, he forgets the circumstance of the impulse having been suggested to him in a previous trance; regards it as arising within him-self; and often improvises, as he yields to it, some more or less plausible or ingenious motive by which to justify it to the lookers-on. He acts, in short, with his usual sense of personal spontaneity and freedom; and the disbelievers in the freedom of the will have naturally made much of these cases in their attempts to show it be an illusion.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Against this impulse we have the dread of the irrevocable, which often engenders a type of character incapable of prompt and vigorous resolve, except perhaps when surprised into sudden activity. These two opposing motives twine round whatever other motives may be present at the moment when decision is imminent, and tend to precipitate or retard it. The conflict of these motives so far as they alone affect the matter of decision is a conflict as to when it shall occur. One says 'now,' the other says 'not yet.' Another constant component of the web of motivation is the impulse to persist in a decision once made. There is no more remarkable difference in human character than that between resolute and irresolute natures. Neither the physiological nor the psychical grounds of this difference have yet been analyzed. Its symptom is that whereas in the irresolute all decisions are provisional and liable to be reversed, in the resolute they are settled once for all and not disturbed again. Now into every one's deliberations the representation of one alternative will often enter with such sudden force as to carry the imagination with itself exclusively, and to produce an apparently settled decision in its own favor. These premature and spurious decisions are of course known to everyone. They often seem ridiculous in the light of the considerations that succeed them. But it cannot be denied that in the resolute type of character the accident that one of them has once been made does afterwards enter as a motive additional to the more genuine reasons why it should not be revoked, or if provisionally revoked, why it should be made again. How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness, we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to 'change our mind.' FIVE TYPES OF DECISION.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The process of deliberation contains endless degrees of complication. At every moment of it our consciousness is of an extremely complex object, namely the existence of the whole set of motives and their conflict, as explained on p. 275 of Vol. I. Of this object, the totality of which is realized more or less dimly all the while, certain parts stand out more or less sharply at one moment in the foreground, and at another moment other parts, in consequence of the oscillations of our attention, and of the 'associative' flow of our ideas. But no matter how sharp the foreground-reasons may be, or how imminently close to bursting through the dam and carrying the motor consequences their own way, the background, however dimly felt, is always there; and its presence (so long as the indecision actually lasts) serves as an effective check upon the irrevocable discharge. The deliberation may last for weeks or months, occupying at intervals the mind. The motives which yesterday seemed full of urgency and blood and life to-day feel strangely weak and pale and dead. But as little to-day as to-morrow is the question finally resolved. Something tells us that all this is provisional; that the weakened reasons will wax strong again, and the stronger weaken; that equilibrium is unreached; that testing our reasons, not obeying them, is still the order of the day, and that we must wait awhile, patient or impatiently, until our mind is made up 'for good and all.' This inclining first to one then to another future, both of which we represent as possible, resembles the oscillations to and fro of a material body within the limits of its elasticity. There is inward strain, but no outward rapture. And this condition, plainly enough, is susceptible of indefinite continuance, as well in the physical mass as in the mind. If the elasticity give way, however, if the dam ever do break, and the currents burst the crust, vacillation is over and decision is irrevocably there. The decision may come in either of many modes. I will try briefly to sketch the most characteristic types of it, merely warning the reader that this is only an introspective account of symptoms and phenomena, and that all questions of causal agency, whether neural or spiritual, are relegated to a later page. The particular reasons for or against action are of course infinitely various in concrete cases. But certain motives are more or less constantly in play. One of these is impatience of the deliberative state; or to express it otherwise, proneness to act or to decide merely because action and decision are, as such, agreeable, and relieve the tension of doubt and hesitancy. Thus it comes that we will often take any course whatever which happens to be most vividly before our minds, at the moment when this impulse to decisive action becomes extreme.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In all this the determining condition of the unhesitating and resistless sequence of the act seems to be the absence of any conflicting notion in the mind. Either there is nothing else at all in the mind, or what is there does not conflict. The hypnotic subject realizes the former condition. Ask him what he is thinking about, and ten to one he will reply 'nothing.' The consequence is that he both believes everything he is told, and performs every act that is suggested. The suggestion may be a vocal command, or it may be the performance before him of the movement required. Hypnotic subjects in certain conditions repeat whatever they hear you say, and imitate whatever they see you do. Dr. Féré says that certain waking persons of neurotic type, if one repeatedly close and open one's hand before their eyes, soon begin to have corresponding feelings in their own fingers, and presently begin irresistibly to execute the movements which they see. Under these conditions of 'preparation' Dr. Féré found that his subjects could squeeze the hand-dynamometer much more strongly than when abruptly invited to do so. A few passive repetitions of a movement will enable many enfeebled patients to execute it actively with greater strength. These observations beautifully show how the mere quickening of kinæsthetic ideas is equivalent to a certain amount of tension towards discharge in the centres.[481] We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital principle within us protests against the ordeal. Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we say, "I must get up, this is ignominious," etc.; but still the warm couch feels too delicious, the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of bursting the resistance and passing over into the decisive act. Now how do we ever get up under such circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs; we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some revery connected with the day's life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, "Hollo! I must lie here no longer"—an idea which at that lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects It was our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the cold during the period of struggle, which paralyzed our activity then and kept our idea of rising in the condition of wish and not of will. The moment these inhibitory ideas ceased, the original idea exerted its effects.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "Does it not seem as if the excitations of the bodily nerves met the ideas half way, in order to raise the latter to the height of emotions? [Note how justly this expresses our theory!] That they do so is proved by the cases in which particular nerves, when specially irritable, share in the emotion and determine its quality. When one is suffering from an open wound, any grievous or horrid spectacle will cause pain in the wound. In sufferers from heart-disease there is developed a psychic excitability, which is often incomprehensible to the patients themselves, but which comes from the heart's liability to palpitate. I said that the very quality of the emotion is determined by the organs disposed to participate in it. Just as surely as a dark foreboding, rightly grounded on inference from the constellations, will be accompanied by a feeling of oppression in the chest, so surely will a similar feeling of oppression, when due to disease of the thoracic organs, be accompanied by groundless forebodings. So small a thing as a bubble of air rising from the stomach through the œsophagus, and loitering on its way a few minutes and exerting pressure on the heart, is able during sleep to occasion a nightmare, and during waking to produce a vague anxiety. On the other hand, we see that joyous thoughts dilate our blood-vessels, and that a suitable quantity of wine, because it dilates the vessels, also disposes us to joyous thoughts. If both the jest and the wine work together, they supplement each other in producing the emotional effect, and our demands on the jest are the more modest in proportion as the wine takes upon itself a larger part of the task."[427] Second Objection. If our theory be true, a necessary corollary of it ought to be this: that any voluntary and cold-blooded arousal of the so-called manifestations of a special emotion ought to give us the emotion itself. Now this (the objection says) is not found to be the case. An actor can perfectly simulate an emotion and yet be inwardly cold; and we can all pretend to cry and not feel grief; and feign laughter without being amused.