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

  He remained about a month, and then intended to leave for Zürich. He asked his host to hire a boat to convey him over the lake some distance eastward. But before his departure he attended church, on Sunday, the 13th of August. He was recognized and arrested by an officer of the police in the name of the Council.1165 Calvin was responsible for this arrest, as he frankly and repeatedly acknowledged.1166 It was a fatal mistake. Servetus was a stranger and had committed no offence in Geneva. Calvin ought to have allowed him quietly to proceed on his intended journey. Why then did he act otherwise? Certainly not from personal malice, nor other selfish reasons; for he only increased the difficulty of his critical situation, and ran the risk of his defeat by the Libertine party then in power. It was an error of judgment. He was under the false impression that Servetus had just come from Venice, the headquarters of Italian humanists and sceptics, to propagate his errors in Geneva, and he considered it his duty to make so dangerous a man harmless, by bringing him either to conviction and recantation, or to deserved punishment. He was determined to stand or fall with the principle of purity of doctrine and discipline. Rilliet justifies the arrest as a necessary measure of self-defence. "Under pain of abdication," he says, "Calvin must do everything rather than suffer by his side in Geneva a man whom he considered the greatest enemy of the Reformation; and the critical position in which he saw it in the bosom of the Republic, was one motive more to remove, if it was possible, the new element of dissolution which the free sojourn of Servetus would have created … . To tolerate Servetus with impunity at Geneva would have been for Calvin to exile himself … He had no alternative. The man whom a Calvinist accusation had caused to be arrested, tried, and condemned to the flames in France, could not find an asylum in the city from which that accusation had issued."1167 § 150. State of Political Parties at Geneva in 1553.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  CONCLUSIONS When I began this discussion, I stated that the various issues I was raising had little logical connection, but were simply diverse challenges. As I have worked over the material, I do see—from my own bias, I am sure—a certain unity to the questions I have raised. I am far from sure that I have raised the most important issues. I may be greatly deceived in the way I perceive these challenges. But let me try to restate them in fresh ways and then indicate the thread that, for me, binds them together. I have raised the question of whether psychology will remain a narrow technological fragment of a science, tied to an outdated philosophical conception of itself, clinging to a security blanket of observable behaviors only; or whether it can possibly become a truly broad and creative science, rooted in subjective vision, open to all aspects of the human condition, worthy of the name of a mature science. I have raised the question of whether we dare to turn from being a past- oriented remedial technology to focusing on future-oriented planning, taking our part in a chaotic world to build environments where human beings can choose to learn, where minorities can choose to remake the establishment through relating to it, where people can learn to live cooperatively together. Will psychologists continue to be peripheral to our society, or will we risk the dangers of being a significant social factor? I have pointed out that perhaps the safety, the prestige, the vestments of traditionalism that can be earned through certification and licensure may not be worth the cost. I have wondered aloud if we would dare to rest our confidence in the quality and competence we have as persons, rather than the certificates we can frame on our walls. I have questioned—a bit despairingly, I fear—whether we could possibly see the day when faculty and students and psychologists in general could function as whole persons—not as minds walking around on stilts, or headless feelings muttering wild cries to one another. Could we accept ourselves as total organisms, with wisdom in every pore—if we would but hear and be aware of that wisdom? I have hesitantly pointed out that the reality we are so sure of, the reality so plainly shown to us by our senses, may not be the only reality open to

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  Right now, I have a partner who wants me to explore anal sex and this has never come up for me before. In my typical fashion, I bought a book and am doing some reading and self-exploration to see if this is something I might reach some comfort with or, hopefully, desire for. I don’t have any great moral issue with it, I just haven’t had it as a need or desire. She is being really patient with me. Not everyone will dive right into a new adventure. And even if you’re well experienced in the sexual arts, there are a lot of reasons you may be hesitant to pick up on your partner’s desires. • What if I don’t like it? You may be afraid you’ll erupt with a resounding “ewwww!”—which will make your partner think twice about entrusting her precious desires to you in the future. • You want what!? You may simply not understand your partner’s desire. (OK, you understand that she wants you to put a 6-inch acrylic plug in her butt—but you don’t get why she wants that.) • Why do I feel this way? You may be utterly confused about your feelings. Your immediate reaction may be one of strangeness or even revulsion. It’s not comfortable to look at things that disturb us and that we don’t understand. • What if I’m no good at it? Why expect yourself to be smooth with an activity you’ve never tried? • I just can’t see her as a Top. Are you OK with the activity—but not with this particular partner? (Are you willing to be convinced?) • What if I bust up laughing? Uh-huh. Think you’ll feel ridiculous with a silicone dildo strapped to your pelvis? Can’t imagine pulling off a repairman-and-housewife role-play scenario? Well, maybe you will fall into a heap of giggles—maybe she will, too, and you’ll have a wonderful (albeit not-so-sexy) time together. Having gotten the giggles out of your system, next time you may collapse in a heap of sexual exhaustion instead. • What if she changes? Well, she may be changing—in fact, she may be undergoing a profound transformation in gender or sexual identity. Or she may be revealing to you a part of herself she has never shown to anyone before. She may also just want to dress up and fuck you silly, OK? • That’s just wrong! Do you think that lesbians shouldn’t like penetration, watch gay male porn, engage in age-related role play, or fantasize about having a penis? What judgments like these do you hold for yourself? How much sexual delight are these ideas costing you? • This freaks me out. Are you fearing abandonment if this doesn’t work out? Do you feel jealous (or fear you’ll feel jealous)? Are you in competition with your partner?

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Ovulation takes place on the fourteenth day: the walls of the follicle disintegrate (sometimes causing a slight hemorrhage); the egg falls into the fallopian tubes while the opening evolves into the yellow body. Then begins the second or corpus luteum phase characterized by the secretion of the hormone progesterone that acts on the uterus. The uterus changes in that the wall’s capillary system swells, creases, and waffles, forming a kind of lacework; this is the construction of a cradle in the womb meant to receive the fertilized egg. As these cellular transformations are irreversible, this construction is not reabsorbed in cases where there is no fertilization: in other mammals the useless debris is possibly carried off by the lymph vessels. But for woman when the endometrial lace collapses, there is an exfoliation of the lining, the capillaries open up, and a bloody mass seeps out. Then, while the corpus luteum is reconstituted, a new follicular phase begins. This complex process, whose details are still quite mysterious, sets the whole body in motion as it is accompanied by hormonal secretions that act on the thyroid and pituitary glands, the central and peripheral nervous systems, and thus on all the organs. Almost all women—more than 85 percent—show signs of distress during this period. Blood pressure rises before the beginning of the flow of blood and then falls; the pulse rate and often the temperature increase; there are frequent cases of fever; the abdomen is painful; there is often constipation and then diarrhea, an increase in the liver volume, urea retention, albumin deficiency, or micro albumin; many women have hyperemia of the pituitary gland (sore throat), and others complain of auditory and visual problems; there is a rise in perspiration secretions accompanied by a sometimes strong sui generis odor at the beginning of and often throughout the menstrual period. Basal metabolism increases. The number of red blood cells decreases; however, the blood carries substances usually kept in reserve in the tissues, in particular calcium salts; these salts act on the ovary, on the thyroid that is overactive, and on the pituitary gland that regulates the metamorphosis of the activated uterine tissue; this glandular instability weakens the nervous system: the central nervous system is affected, often causing headaches, and the peripheral nervous system overreacts: the automatic control by the central nervous system is reduced, which relaxes the reflexes and the convulsive complexes and is manifested in great mood changes: woman is more emotional, nervous, and irritable than usual and can manifest serious psychological problems. This is when she feels most acutely that her body is an alienated opaque thing; it is the prey of a stubborn and foreign life that makes and unmakes a crib in her every month; every month a child is prepared to be born and is aborted in the flow of the crimson tide; woman is her body as man is his,7 but her body is something other than her.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Later on, at New Canaan High, Maundy apparently dallied with a retarded girl in one of the lavatories. It was that girl Sarah Joe Holmes. Here’s what they said: that Maundy had pissed on her , held her down and pissed on her. That was the alleged crime. Held her down, exposed himself, pissed on her, and then smoked a cigarette. Maybe it was just a story someone concocted to explain a horrible situation. But maybe, on the other hand, the miracle of inheritance had produced a guy who felt comfortable in this crime. Paul went over the story again and again. How did Sarah Joe account for that moment, that moment when the urine splashed across her face and smock, puddling around her? Was Skip sad about it, afterward, the way Paul was sad about Libbets? Paul didn’t know. It was a story that didn’t lead anywhere. Just something that happened. Just something to think about in the locked vault of familial regrets. III Okay, the time has come in this account for a characterization of the mind of God. Just briefly, for thematic reasons. Happily there’s no need to concern ourselves with this mind as it has expressed itself directly—because it hasn’t, really. Therefore this story can be content with indirect examples, with metaphor and with evidence from nature. For example: Benjamin Hood, who was on Saturday morning asleep on the floor of the Halfords’ bathroom, had a dream—an uncomfortable dream in the midst of a grueling hangover. Dreams retold are a burden, so this will be brief. In Hood’s dream, a special tax had been levied against him because of fruit-bearing trees growing in his yard on Valley Road. He learned of this tax while taking a drive with Jim Williams (in a station wagon with simulated wood paneling, though Williams actually drove a Cadillac). Hood was trying to explain the presence of government inspectors in his yard, those inspectors in white, lead-lined suits, measuring the size and yield of his plum trees and then blowtorching them. —The thing I can’t figure out, he told Jim Williams, is whether this is happening in 1973 or in 1991. —Well, pal, Williams said, the past and the future happen in the present moment. That’s just how it is . That’s it. That’s the dream. And the amazing thing about this dream is that Benjamin’s son would dream it, too. Years later. Really. In Hoboken, New Jersey. Paul Hood. With his father as the main character and everything. Benjamin, however, as he lay on the floor of the bathroom dreaming uncomfortably, couldn’t know—would never know—that his son would dream this very dream, that his son would wake and retell it and in the retelling become his father’s imaginer as well as his father’s son. His father’s narrator. This congruency—between Paul and his dad—is sort of like the congruency between me, the narrator of this story, the imaginer of all these consciousnesses of the past, and God.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Yale managed to say, “Thanks for doing this.” He tried to remember if he’d seen Richard since the night of the memorial. Yes, several times. At the fundraiser, for instance. Still, Richard seemed to have walked straight out of Yale’s nightmares. The man had done nothing wrong. He’d thrown a great party. He’d made a beautiful slide show. Richard didn’t talk as he worked, didn’t require Yale’s conversation, and soon the Sharps were in the doorway, grinning like parents about to meet their adopted child. Bill made introductions—Esmé, Allen, Richard Campo, Allen, Esmé—and shut the door behind them all. He said, “Truly, this is the most extraordinary find of my career, and I can say right now that I’ll retire happy. We could get this up next fall, is what I’m hoping. Well, maybe that’s a bit optimistic. But a spectacular show.” Bill showed them the Foujita, still on the table. “That’s her,” Yale said. “That’s Nora.” “She’s lovely!” Esmé leaned over the paper, entranced. Bill opened the cover of the giant portfolio he’d moved the smaller pieces to, and Esmé held her husband’s arm. Richard looked, too, from behind. Yale said to him, quietly, “It’s Nico and Fiona’s great-aunt.” The portfolio was open to one of the blue-crayon Modiglianis, not that it looked much like anyone at all. Richard laughed, delighted. “Spectacular genes in that family.” Maybe he could ask Richard, after all, for a bed tonight. A different bed. Would that be so terrible? Allen said, “I don’t want to wake up and find I’ve invested in restoring some frauds.” “Well,” Yale said, “we could hold off till authentication comes through.” His voice was made of tin. “But we have strong corroboration for provenance, and we’d love to get restoration started to prevent further damage.” A painting was a thing to which you could prevent further damage. You could restore it, protect it, hang it on a wall. Bill looked at Yale expectantly. There was something else he was supposed to say, but he was blank. Bill cleared his throat and said, “One option is, we could wait for the first authentication to come through. Let’s say the Pascin people verify his work, for instance.” He flipped to the nude Pascin sketch. “Wouldn’t that reassure us about the rest as well?” Allen bobbled his head side to side. Noncommittal. Bill said, “Well, go get Roman! Go get the copies!” And so Yale did, and as Richard continued working at Bill’s desk, the rest of them gathered around the chair where Roman deposited the stack of papers. Yale half listened as Roman read them a letter Nora had written home about Soutine and his wretched table manners. Bill, meanwhile, had come up behind Richard, who was putting white gloves back on, ready to pull one of Ranko Novak’s cows out of the portfolio. Bill whispered: “Not those.” It wasn’t as if there were some Ranko Novak expert out there to mail the photos to.

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

  Constitution who, as it happens, did not even address the prospect of the formation of organized political parties. (The original “Greatest Generation” was not composed of as many geniuses as we’ve been taught.) One of the reasons why the pollsters are often wrong is the widespread failure to account for the ways in which voters are convinced by what they are hearing. Selective belief, preference for one “truth” over another, explains, for instance, how someone can dismiss the vast majority of scientists who see incontrovertible evidence of dangerous trends in climate change. Political choices are hardly rational choices. An unconscious linguistic relationship forms between candidate and voter, and choice metaphors preoccupy a voter’s thoughts. Presidential elections are battles over worldviews. The symbols that mattered most to Trump voters were about class, but the metaphoric meaning played out in a more expansive rhetoric that divided constituencies by competing markers of identity. The unspoken and spoken themes of the political contest were: Clinton Democrats Trump Republicans Pedigreed Elites Disinherited Urban Insider Rural Outsider Cosmopolitan Provincial Professionals Working Stiffs Meritocracy Hard Work Faith in Upward Mobility Fear of Losing Class Status Both Trump at his inaugural and President Obama in his farewell remarks called for solidarity, but their visions of what constitutes togetherness are completely at odds. President Obama and Hillary Clinton celebrated American exceptionalism, which for them was bound up in education and economic opportunity, cultural diversity, and the promise that “all men are created equal.” Democrats, in general, endorse the liberal ideal of meritocracy, in which talent is rewarded through the acquisition of earned academic credentials. Yet this dream is not possible for all Americans. Only 32.5 percent of Americans today graduate

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  In fact, she was pretty stupid for having failed to put it together before. Myers was, of course, the new rector of the Episcopalian church, at St. Mark’s. The church nobody liked. And though Myers was distasteful, though he looked like the sort of minister who might fondle a choirboy or -girl, or both, and though he had agreed to meet her on a couple of occasions for these furtive luncheons that were certainly testing-the-water types of things, and though he had never even—on these occasions—admitted that he was a minister, she felt bad for him. After each pronouncement of his search for grace in this community, she imagined, after each interpretation of the readings, after each admonition, the people of New Canaan rewarded him with silence, with that gloomy barometer of Episcopal failure: the empty coffee hour. In the weeks following he would reach further into his bag of incantations and prayers and critical exegeses to placate them, only to hear the same silence again. —Breakfast of Champions is a failure. A flawed, questing work, not at all the work of the man who produced Slaughterhouse-Five , Myers was saying to Neil. Read those earlier books. The sustained period of creativity from Mother Night to Slaughterhouse-Five is.… Well, it’s sustained. Neil was smiling broadly at this display of hipness from Myers. There weren’t too many New Canaanites who could talk to him in his own brutish tongue. When Dot Halford came into the room a few minutes later—at twenty past eleven—the three of them, Elena, Neil Conrad, and Wesley Myers, had lapsed into an awkward party silence. The Wesley Myers Elena had met in the diner downtown, several months ago, was gone now. Myers seemed weary and preoccupied. Self-pitying, even. When Dot turned off the television set, it became clear, in fact, that no one in the room was talking, that silence had settled on the room as a whole, one of those statistical silences. The key party was going into its next phase. Elena noticed the modern art on the wall—a couple squiggles of red and yellow on a white canvas. And the rug pattern—reptiles on pebbles. Pebbles under water. —Well, Dot said, slurring faintly, teetering on her pumps. Well, we have a little business to attend to now. So if you’re going to stay, let’s please gather in the living room now. And she led the way. The key party lacked a comprehensive system of manners. There were things still to be negotiated. No one knew quite what to do, how to follow. Most of those who had no intention of playing had already left. George Clair and his wife had left, most of the old families of New Canaan—the Benedicts, the Bootons, the Carters, et al.—had left. Yet from the rigid uncertainty that swept the room, Elena could tell that Dot’s anxiety and her drunkenness extended to her remaining guests.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I had a phone consultation that morning with a divorce lawyer, a man recommended by our corporate attorney. We talked for exactly eleven minutes, and it felt oddly straightforward, maybe too easy. He said it sounded like Brandon and I agreed upon most everything, which made us good candidates for an uncontested divorce. I wondered when it would feel real, the concept of our divorce. I went to therapy. I wanted to feel giddy still from my night with Ash, but by afternoon I did not. My head jangled, an almost audible rattle. As soon as I’d put down the phone, I said, I felt critical of Ash. It was almost like my vision changed: I pulled up a photo of Ash on my phone, giddy to study the face of “my girlfriend,” and now it had no impact at all. Yesterday it would have made my eyes roll back with pleasure. I hate this feeling, I told him. I remember it from when I was dating Brandon. It scares me. Of course it does, my therapist said. It’s like I can let myself be open going in, and then it gets harder just at the point when I always thought it would get easier. Like, I can’t hold on to the glee of it. Well, let’s look at Nora, he said. You made yourself busy trying to do everything the right way, trying to win her love. That might have given you, in a sense, a feeling of control. That’s not the case with Ash. Ash is clear: they are telling you who they are and what they want. Ash met your ex-husband at a dance party, and Ash still wants you. Maybe they even want all of you, what about that? Maybe they even want the parts you don’t want them to see. 27My mother turned seventy in late November, and to celebrate, she and I took June to New York City for three days. Brandon flew separately to his parents’ house in New Jersey, and we all met there for Thanksgiving. Upon our arrival I broke out in hives. At least by now I knew which antihistamine to buy. My mother and I slept downstairs in the guest room that Brandon and I used to sleep in, and he took his childhood bedroom upstairs. June was thrilled for a slumber party with her grandparents. His mother commended us on the whole situation, said how glad she was that we’d come. But I don’t know how you think you’ll do this, she added, once you have other people in your lives.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  Brandon had been on some dates. He’d kissed someone. I knew he loved me and I loved him, and I wanted him to have a good time. But he was more conflicted, caught up in how odd it felt to be with someone else. We’d told a handful of friends about our open relationship, but we both fretted about being seen. The restaurant industry is small and close-knit: Where could we go in this town without running into someone? I wished I felt proud, maybe even indignant—this is normal, what’s the fuss, etc.—but mostly I felt sheepish. Taking a stab at transparency, we told the manager at Delancey what we were up to, in case she heard whispers. A couple of weeks later, having fielded a torrent of gossip, she advised us to tell the entire staff. In a surreal scene, we assembled our employees in the Delancey dining room and, after outlining a new policy on paid leave, I formally announced our open marriage. We’d tried to convince ourselves that our marriage was strong enough, loving enough, flexible enough to accommodate the stretch we asked of it. Something about me had changed, but people are always changing, aren’t they? Just look at Brandon: when we met, he was going to be a music professor, and now he was a chef with three restaurants. We’d changed. So what? What we were doing was natural, no more ill-considered than monogamy. But it almost never felt that way. Most days I wanted to puke. I watched Brandon try not to worry as I set off to see Nora. We were terrified. He could admit it before I could, because I was busy falling in love. I remember sitting next to him on the sofa in our living room, the sofa where I’d made out with Nora. He’d come home for lunch, and we had a date to talk. Outside the window the sky was clear and unflinching, the color of a blue raspberry popsicle. I think I’m falling in love with her, I said. The refrigerator motor gurgled. I didn’t mean to, I added. I know that doesn’t help, but it’s true. He was silent. A couch spring squeaked. I wanted to see what his face looked like, but I was afraid to turn my head. It doesn’t have to change anything, I said, not sure if I believed it. We’d always been ourselves, hadn’t we? We’d been like this for a long time. We were discrete bodies, separate stars, but from the right vantage point, we’d aligned. We were a shape that made sense. We’d made a home for ourselves next to each other. But we’d never stood still, not really. We were always gliding, gradually, steadily, on our own trajectories.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Would anyone in this town really spend the night with Maria Conrad’s teenaged son, initiating him into the joy of sex? —Well, what shall the order be? Dot Halford said with exaggerated calm. Alphabetical? In order of appearance? —Golf handicap! bellowed Pierce Sawyer. Lowest handicap does the honors. HA! HA! HA! HA! Nervous laughter. —Golf handicap? Dot said. Ladies? Isn’t it up to you? —Oh, I’ll go first, dammit, Maria Conrad said. Let’s just line up and get it over with. The bowl went around like the wine at Eucharist. The men stood hovering behind Dot’s circle of women. A solemn pall overtook the room as Maria reached for that first set of keys. A dark, leather key chain dangled at the end of the prize she selected—an Alfa Romeo key chain. Stephan Earle. Elena realized how weak Stephan Earle must have felt as he came forward, how womanly and weak. He had had someone else in mind. On the other hand, who knew really? Maybe he felt real affection. Everyone applauded as Maria smilingly returned the keys to him and then, taking his arm, proceeded to the guest room, where the coats were piled. Just like that. Even Stephan’s wife, Marie, wished them good luck . She watched her husband leave the way in the Middle Ages wives must have watched ships leave for the spice trade. And what about Neil? Neil didn’t even seem to notice his mother’s grand exit. And still not a single adult had questioned his presence there. No one had told him to run along. Well, he was, what? Nineteen? Of majority, almost. Dot Halford was already on to the next couple. Her husband was standing off to one side rattling a drink with a sleepy smile on his face. They soldiered on, these pretenders to the Tribal Love Rock Event, like it was a civic duty. Marie Earle herself went next and took up with Dan Fuller, whose wife then followed (a sort of order was elaborated in this way—the aggrieved party was next in line), taking up with the divorced Chuck Spofford, and this sent the narrative of adultery off on a digression, through the wilds of the divorced. After Chuck, June Devereaux picked Tommy Finletter, who thereafter tossed the baton to his neighbor of long standing, Elise Gorman, who took up with her husband’s old golfing partner, Pierce Sawyer. And Sawyer’s wife picked Tony Boyle, etc. One couple, the Gadds, managed to select each other, and rather than sporting the disappointment Elena might have suspected, they seemed greatly relieved. The key party proceeded as flawlessly as a bank line. When Elena confronted again her own decision to participate, when she began to think of the practical issues—which house, how would she get a ride back, what if somebody’s children found out—the room was no more crowded than a small dinner party. Mark Boland, Neil Conrad, Janey and Jim Williams, Rob and Dot Halford, Sari Steele, and Benjamin.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self (1984)

  First, on the positive side, there is the valorization of semen, of sperm—that precious substance which Nature, when she designed the human body, took so many precautions in forming. It gathers up all that is powerful in life and transmits it, thereby enabling us to cheat death. It is in the male that it reaches its greatest strength and its highest perfection. And it is this substance that gives him his superiority. It contributes “to health, strength, courage, and generation.”1 The male is preeminent because he is the spermatic animal par excellence. There is also a valorization of the act for which, in both sexes, the organs were so carefully arranged. Sexual union is a fact of nature; it cannot be considered bad. Rufus of Ephesus expresses a general opinion when he says that sexual intercourse is a natural act, and that consequently it cannot be harmful in itself.2 But in a sense it is only the possibility and the principle of the act that are validated in this way. For as soon as the act takes place, it is, in its unfolding, regarded as intrinsically dangerous. Dangerous because it is a wasting of that precious substance whose accumulation nevertheless incites one to commit it—it allows all the life force that the semen has concentrated to escape. Dangerous, too, because its very unfolding makes it akin to a disease. Aretaeus had a meaningful phrase for this: the sexual act, he said, “bears the symbola” of epilepsy.3 Caelius Aurelianus compared, term by term, the unfolding of the sexual act and the development of an epileptic seizure, finding exactly the same phases in both: “various parts are subjected to spasms, and at the same time there occur panting, sweating, rolling of the eyes and flushing of the face, and finally a feeling of malaise along with pallor, weakness, or dejection.”4 Such is the paradox of the sexual pleasures: the high function Nature assigned them, the value of the substance they have to transmit and therefore lose—this is the very thing that relates them to sickness. The physicians of the first and second centuries were not the first nor the only ones to formulate this ambivalence. But around it, they described an entire pathology, more developed, more complex, and more systematic than that attested in the past. 1. The pathology of sexual activity itself is constructed around two elements by which the dangers of the sexual act are usually characterized: an involuntary violence of tension and an indefinite, exhausting expenditure.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 1 (1000 BCE – 100 CE) (2009)

  of directly contradicting Job and Qoheleth, with calls to activism in leading a morally upright life, such as those in the Book of Proverbs, whose cosy assertions of the value of everyday goodness have provided material for settled Jewish or Christian societies ever since. Writers seeking to rebuild Israel gave unambiguous answers to the great question aroused by Jewish experiences after 586. They created new sets of laws and careful restorations and extensions of past ceremonial practice in the Temple, taking care that most of it was represented as a return to ancient decrees of the Lord from before the Exile. They stated in ever more extreme terms the message of separation which had been the centrepiece of the Deuteronomistic reform movement; now they had the catastrophe of the Babylonian captivity to ram home the point that Yahweh wanted obedience to his law and had severely punished the nation for not providing that obedience. Never again should Israel make the same mistake. On this principle was founded the continuing existence and development of Judaism. Like its daughter religion, Christianity, Judaism has often fostered the idea that it has an exclusive approach to the divine. Yet this claim to exclusivity was coupled with a remarkable new feature of Yahweh’s religion – or perhaps really a return to its miscellaneous origins amid the displaced people of the Habiru. From this period under Persian rule comes an acceptance that it was not necessary to be born a Jew to enter the Jewish faith: what was necessary was to accept fully the customs of the Jews, including the rite of genital circumcision performed on all Jewish males. One could then be accepted as a convert (‘proselyte’, from a Greek word meaning ‘stranger’ or ‘foreigner living in the land’). It was enough to accept the story which Judaism told: so in theory, Judaism could become a universal religion. Jews did not generally take that logical step of thought. It was left first to Christianity and then to Islam to make it a great theme of their faith.36 In the centuries after the return from Babylon, the Jews in Palestine were repeatedly faced with the same prospect of more powerful cultures overwhelming their own and overpowering them. Most disturbing was the coming of Hellenistic kingdoms, after Alexander the Great burst into the eastern Mediterranean in the 330s (see pp. 37–40). First, the Ptolemaic Pharaohs of Egypt ruled the land, and then (from 198 BCE) the Seleucids of Syria. The worst confrontation between Jewish identity and the Greek world surrounding it exploded into open violence when their second Seleucid overlord, King Antiochos IV (who boastfully called himself Epiphanēs or ‘Manifestation’), tried to force Greek customs on to the Jews and attacked the religious life centred on the Temple in Jerusalem. From 167 BCE the Jews rebelled against him, first under the leadership of Judas Maccabeus. With the unpromising

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  We have seen how important these three points—persistence of images, spontaneous movements of thought, and illusions and resemblances—were in spiritual direction. Basil gives a justification, a model, and a sanction for this degree of vigilance in regard to these points, by emphasizing the principle of total visibility of the soul. A visibility that is “materialized” by the table where all movements produced in the soul are inscribed in durable marks, but a visibility that is actualized in three ways: in the future, death will deliver the soul’s truth and reveal it on the day of eternal light; but God can always see into the depths of our soul—no movement, no matter how secret, can elude him;21 and the guardian angel is also always watching over the soul: for the [virgin*1] he is always the guide that will lead the soul to the Bridegroom.22 And beyond him, one must think of the armies of all the angels and the spirits of all the fathers. They are all watching everything, everywhere. Down to its least folds, therefore, the soul is not only visible but actually seen. This gaze, or rather these countless gazes, are not its own. The soul will ensure its virginity if, to the extent possible, it strives to see itself and watch over everything that takes place within it, in the same manner as all the other gazes that scan its secrets without obstruction. During the period when Basil of Ancyra is writing, the monastic institutions are in full development; but in a more general way, a whole regulated, carefully designed, and controlled practice of asceticism has spread. It is hard to say whom exactly the treatise he addresses to Letoius is meant for. But the advice he gives and the unsystematic prescriptions he proposes focus on the same essential points as the spiritual direction and examination of conscience that will appear in slightly later texts. Through this treatise, one sees the practice of virginity, which had been extricated from the principle of continence and defined as a positive spiritual experience, being organized as a type of relation to the self that concerns not just the body, but also the relations of the body and the soul, the opening of the senses, the movement of pleasures through the body, the agitation of thoughts. One also sees it open onto a domain of internal knowledge where it is a question of sensation, of images and their persistence, of everything in the soul that can escape others or oneself through the effect of delusion or the subtlety of the process. Finally, one sees it being inscribed in a relation to the power of the other and to the gaze that marks the individual’s subjugation and an objectification of their inner being.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  Christians had searched the Tanakh in their anxiety to find pre-echoes of their own passionate convictions about the God-Man Jesus Christ. Now even more self-consciously, in quotations in its literature and in the reading of sacred texts in communal worship, the Church vigorously reaffirmed the worth of what it called the Old Testament alongside the New. Nevertheless the new episcopal guardians of doctrine were still faced with the problem of presenting their faith in an urban culture which stretched all round the Mediterranean and beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, dominated by highly literate elites steeped in Greek learning, literature and ways of thinking. Paul of Tarsus had probably not experienced a conventional advanced education; there is certainly no trace of it in his literary style or the content or shape of his writings. He does not even bother mentioning philosophy; indeed, it attracts precisely one mention in the New Testament, where, in the words of Paul’s admirer who wrote Colossians, it is dismissed as ‘empty deceit’.72 A hundred years later, such a cavalier approach would not do. A good education was becoming more common among prominent Christians and that would affect their view of their faith. They had now accepted many of the social values of this world; they had also rejected some of the more extreme ways in which gnostics had adapted the Christian message to other systems of thought. That left large questions about the relationship of the Catholic Church to Greek and Roman high culture, which in the work of a series of authors from the later years of the first century CE reached a new peak of literary creativity and self- conscious pride in the Greek cultural past, conventionally now called the ‘Second Sophistic’. It was not surprising that thoughtful Christians who listened to the self-confident voices which dominated cultured conversations in the world around them went on to find ways of drawing on the best of this culture for their own purposes. But the problems were great. Could one call on Plato or Aristotle or their new interpreters in contemporary society to help in preaching the Gospel? The Second Sophistic offered wisdom which owed nothing to the Christian revelation in scripture; was its wisdom then worthless? A series of highly intelligent and thoughtful Christians thought that the answers to these questions were obvious: the Greek inheritance was indispensable to the Church. In their efforts to harness it to the Christian message, they can be said to have created or manufactured Christian teaching on a heroic scale, and for good or ill the Church universal has never ceased to look back at and build on what they achieved. JUSTIN, IRENAEUS, TERTULLIAN

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  I was furious. I spent my whole life being vigilant, trying to preserve my mother’s tenuous sanity and hold together their marriage. So this felt almost insulting. How could my father be so careless? Still, I had this under control. I made myself the primary account holder on AOL and changed his parental controls. Now he could only look at content appropriate for a thirteen-year-old boy. A couple of days later, my mother came storming into my room. “What happened to all of our money?” she screamed. She slapped me across the face. Why couldn’t my father access his online bank account? What had I done? Had I lost all of our money? How were we going to pay bills? Pay the mortgage? What the fuck did I do? Oops. I hadn’t accounted for this. Had I really erased all of our money? My breath grew frantic. But I couldn’t tell her why I’d done what I’d done. “I think I can fix it, if you give me five minutes,” I stammered. “I was just trying something. I’m sorry—” “I don’t want you to fix it. You’re never using the internet again. You can’t use the phone for six months. You’re grounded for six months. You can’t see any friends. You can’t watch television or movies. All you are going to do from now on is study instead of wasting”—she slapped me across the face again—“your time”—she kicked my knee in so I collapsed—“on stupid bullshit!”—she kicked me in the stomach as I lay on the floor. “Give me your password right now!” The internet was my only refuge from this. I didn’t know what I’d do if she took it away. I’d already taken to fingering our knife blades late at night, wondering how much it would hurt to slit a wrist and whether my mother would notice in the morning if I slipped one into my backpack to take to school. I once snuck out of the house to buy a copy of The National Enquirer that contained a picture of Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s dead bodies, and sometimes when everything seemed like too much, I stared at it and fantasized about suicide as a last-ditch option. I figured I’d rather die than have my only comfort taken from me. So for the first time, I went cold and said, “No.” “WHAT?” my mother hollered. “You disrespectful—You aren’t worth anything. You ugly, hideous monster. I don’t know why I ever gave birth to you!” She continued to land blows on me—on my body, my face, the top of my head. Then she grabbed my hair and pulled me out of my room, down the stairs, and around a corner. She threw me into the office, where my dad was sitting at the computer, fuming. He looked up. “She won’t tell me the password,” my mother said.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  In this way the essential role of the notion of temptation appears. Here again, it wasn’t monastic spirituality that introduced the complex idea it constitutes. But monasticism certainly assigned it a very important function and organized some of the most decisive elements of its technology around it. Temptation is not in any way a juridical category: it is neither a transgression, nor the beginning of a transgression, nor even the intention to commit one. First, it is a dynamic element in the relations between the exterior and the interior of the soul. It is the insinuation into the soul of a thought that comes to it from a power other than itself. There is a temptation only because this thought is already present in the soul, a thought belonging to the soul; but in the soul it is the trace of a movement that comes from elsewhere, the effect of an alien will, which in the soul consists of a path laid down by an other. Next, it is a dramatic episode in the conflict, a battle or a phase of the battle that can be won or lost: the temptation can bring the desire along with it, or on the contrary give rise to the fervent will to neutralize it and distance oneself from it. Finally, it is the object of a necessary analysis: for if temptation is indeed an attack against the soul, whether violent or imperceptible, frontal or insidious, this attack may come from the devil (not without God providing that the Enemy can thereby lose his grip on the soul) or it may come from God (not without God seeking in this way to test the soul, to exercise and strengthen it, hence to save it). There is always at the heart of the temptation a secret to be uncovered: Satan may conceal himself under the guise of the good, by employing the evil ruses of illusion, but God, his will, and his beneficence are always present in the dangers that the soul risks, even if the soul in its blindness does not perceive this presence. In actual fact, and it’s an important fact, in the formation of the Christian ethic Christianity did not develop the technologies of the soul or the self around the category of sin, even in its broader or internalized sense, but around the notion of temptation, which is at the same time a dynamic element in the self’s relations with the exterior, a tactical element of withdrawal or rejection, of generation or expulsion, an element of analysis that demands, in the reflection of oneself on oneself, a recognition of the other and of the interior figures that mask it.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  So a specific effort of purification is necessary, in addition to all the abstentions, separations, and closures required by the purification of the body. Basil first raises the question of the persistence of images: objects that strike the senses may very well disappear, but their image remains in the soul. They are like those flaming javelins that carry fire to the target where they stay stuck, or they imprint a trace that remains, as if on wax. Therefore, since it’s not possible to keep the eyes of the body always closed, one must take care not to retain such images. It wouldn’t serve any purpose to fast if one continued to cultivate those thoughts. What soul could be called virgin if it kept the one that it loves in an embrace “with the incorporeal hands of thought”? The body, which is always mingled with the soul and which follows its movements, would thus be corrupted by it and would accompany it in its dreams.17 So it’s necessary to work constantly to erase such images and replace them, on the wax of the soul, with meditations on holy things with their figures or “characters.”18 But one must also consider that acts can be committed in the soul. An act is not necessarily done by the body. However, here Basil is not referring to a juridical conception that would make the complete intention equivalent to the implementation of the idea itself. He is utilizing a physiology of the soul according to which thoughts will be inscribed on the soul’s “table,” where they will not be erased, even if forgetfulness or inattention shrouds them in darkness. Every thought is an act, and remains an act in the soul, inasmuch as its pattern subsists there. Basil resorts to a comparison with the signs of writing: one who learns them inscribes them in one’s soul and doesn’t need to actually write in order for the words to remain there. Without this inscription, how could one write what one desires to write? In the same way, thoughts are entered like so many marks in the soul. And when death comes, and the soul is set free, then all this abbreviated writing of thoughts, which had remained veiled, will appear in the light of day. And none of the acts of thought, even the most secret ones, will escape the eyes of the one who sees all. The soul that wishes to remain virgin must continually watch over even the most secret activity of its thought.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  Sometime after midnight, the phone rang. The patient was crashing. With the complacency of bureaucratic work suddenly torn away, I sat up in bed and spat out orders: “One liter bolus of LR, EKG, chest X-ray, stat—I’m on my way in.” I called my chief, and she told me to add labs and to call her back when I had a better sense of things. I sped to the hospital and found Mrs. Harvey struggling for air, her heart racing, her blood pressure collapsing. She wasn’t getting better no matter what I did; and as I was the only general surgery intern on call, my pager was buzzing relentlessly, with calls I could dispense with (patients needing sleep medication) and ones I couldn’t (a rupturing aortic aneurysm in the ER). I was drowning, out of my depth, pulled in a thousand directions, and Mrs. Harvey was still not improving. I arranged a transfer to the ICU, where we blasted her with drugs and fluids to keep her from dying, and I spent the next few hours running between my patient threatening to die in the ER and my patient actively dying in the ICU. By 5:45 A.M., the patient in the ER was on his way to the OR, and Mrs. Harvey was relatively stable. She’d needed twelve liters of fluid, two units of blood, a ventilator, and three different pressors to stay alive. When I finally left the hospital, at five P.M. on Tuesday evening, Mrs. Harvey wasn’t getting better—or worse. At seven P.M., the phone rang: Mrs. Harvey had coded, and the ICU team was attempting CPR. I raced back to the hospital, and once again, she pulled through. Barely. This time, instead of going home, I grabbed dinner near the hospital, just in case. At eight P.M., my phone rang: Mrs. Harvey had died. I went home to sleep. I was somewhere between angry and sad. For whatever reason, Mrs. Harvey had burst through the layers of paperwork to become my patient. The next day, I attended her autopsy, watched the pathologists open her up and remove her organs. I inspected them myself, ran my hands over them, checked the knots I had tied in her intestines. From that point on, I resolved to treat all my paperwork as patients, and not vice versa. In that first year, I would glimpse my share of death. I sometimes saw it while peeking around corners, other times while feeling embarrassed to be caught in the same room. Here were a few of the people I saw die: An alcoholic, his blood no longer able to clot, who bled to death into his joints and under his skin. Every day, the bruises would spread. Before he became delirious, he looked up at me and said, “It’s not fair—I’ve been diluting my drinks with water.”

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

  I’d try and try and try to stay with my sexual desire until he came, for his sake, but then I’d hit a wall and I’d start crying, because I just couldn’t go on any more. Other women say that the sensation of being penetrated can become too much quite abruptly, without any sensation of orgasm. Sometimes with penetration, the excitement can build and then I’ll suddenly feel satiated, or that I just can’t take any more. The feeling of “stop now!” is not necessarily connected with orgasm at all. Instead, it may be a sense of anxiety that surfaces without warning from the unconscious, rather than any physically based reaction. It may be prompted by a buried memory of past abuse. Anorgasmic Women How many women really don’t have orgasms? Probably many more than we realize, since it’s hard for a woman to admit she doesn’t have them. I received completed questionnaires from ninety-five women, and I personally spoke with thirty more women. Of these one hundred twenty-five, six of them (aged twenty-three, twenty-eight, thirty-six, forty-one, forty-seven, and fifty-nine) were anorgasmic, one (aged sixty-two) wasn’t sure, and one didn’t have an orgasm till she was forty-one. Several women said they were dissatisfied with their sexual responses: one said she didn’t think she was experiencing her full potential of orgasm; another was frustrated because she could only have orgasms on her own, not with her boyfriend. It is notable that the majority of women who filled in the questionnaire were in their thirties and forties. I think there are many teenagers who don’t have orgasms, and they aren’t going to talk about it. I only heard from three women under twenty, all of whom were orgasmic. Although there is far more real information available about sex these days than there was twenty or thirty years ago, people have to want to find it, and in some ways there is less encouragement to look for it than there was ten years ago (perhaps because of fear of AIDS, perhaps because of the backlash against the sexual revolution of the seventies). A lot of women who are not having satisfactory sex don’t know how to address that, or want to avoid addressing it. There are probably also a number of older women who are not having orgasms because they are from a generation that didn’t experiment much, due to fewer options and less efficient methods of birth control. Uncooperative partners may always be a problem. My husband didn’t appreciate my need for clitoral stimulation during intercourse. I think he felt like vaginal stimulation from him should be sufficient. He said I was too demanding. On the other hand, some older women are having better sex than they were earlier on in life. Now that I’m fifty I expect to have orgasms when I’m making love, even multiple orgasms. But I wouldn’t have expected to have an orgasm with my lover in my twenties.