Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The 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.

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  Reviewing the piece in 1980, Germano Celant wrote, “All art is pornography if it assumes the right to impose on others personal pleasures and ideas. It is at this philosophic moment that Acconci removes himself from the scene and goes into exile; he intuits that the artist is an obscene exhibitionist who enjoys himself by entrapping others.” Perhaps Acconci is equal opportunity with his entrapment: he traps the viewer into participating, but only after he ensnares himself, caught within an underground web of his own making. In her 1972 review of the work, April Kingsley asked, “How intimate or self-revelatory can art be, and still be art and not life?” Asked by Prince what he found pornographic, Acconci answered, “A conversation in which a man keeps touching a woman’s arm, a man on the street looking back at a woman who’s just walked by; a man kissing goodbye a woman he’s just met … and probably a woman doing the same. I don’t know if these things are pornographic, but they’re probably obscene.” What Acconci describes as pornographic are largely boundary violations. Prince doesn’t ask him if he considers his own work pornographic, but he does ask if he’s ever wanted to create something “but thought, ‘Even I couldn’t get away with that?’” to which Acconci elides the adult entirely: “There have been pieces I didn’t know how to do, so I never worked them out far enough to put out. In the early days, there was an idea of some performance on a floor filled with babies.” Perverse; genius. Last night, I dreamed that I performed a masturbation piece at MoMA. I was in a lobby of some kind, with a cot and a Hitachi magic wand. A gallerist organized the performance for me; it was as though we were renting a booth at a museum, as though museums were like barber shops, or commercial art fairs. A famous lesbian painter visited the installation and offered tacit approval. After everyone walked around, photographing and inspecting the set-up, I got in position to perform, half covering myself with a blanket. At some point the floors caved in and we all fell onto subway tracks filled with several feet of water as the museum’s foundation gave way. Amid the rush of water, I approached my gallerist: “I don’t know why I’m doing this performance for free,” I told her. “What is the point? Can I charge people $100 if they want to watch me, and then take them to a private room? Even the bathroom would be fine.” She mulled it over, said she’d ask the museum.

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

  This preoccupation with the environment, with places and times, called for a constant attention to oneself, to the state one was in and to the acts that one performed. Addressing that category of people considered to be especially fragile, the city-dwellers, and above all, those who devote themselves to study (litterarum cupidi), Celsus prescribes a keen vigilance: if one has digested well, one should rise early; if one has digested poorly, one should continue to rest, and in case one is obliged to get up all the same, one should go back to sleep; and if no digestion has taken place, one should remain completely inactive, and “neither work nor take exercise nor attend to business.” One will know if one is in good health “if his morning urine is whitish, later reddish; the former indicates that digestion is going on, the latter that digestion is complete.” When one is kept busy all day by one’s affairs, one should nevertheless set aside a little time for the curatio corporis. The exercises that should be practiced are “reading aloud, drill, handball, running, walking; but this is not by any means most useful on the level, since walking up and down hill varies the movement of the body, unless indeed the body is thoroughly weak; but it is better to walk in the open air than under cover; better, when the head allows it, in the sun than in the shade; better under the shade of a wall or of trees than under a roof; better a straight than a winding walk.… The proper sequel to exercise is: at times an anointing, whether in the sun or before a brazier; at times a bath, which should be in a chamber as lofty, well lighted and spacious as possible.”9 In a general way, all these themes of dietetics had remained remarkably continuous since the classical period. It is clear that the general principles stayed the same; at most, they were developed, given more detail, and refined. They suggested a tighter structuring of life, and they solicited a more constantly vigilant attention to the body. The evocations of their everyday life that one can find in the letters of Seneca or in the correspondence between Marcus Aurelius and Fronto testify to this mode of attention to the self and to one’s body. An intensification, much more than a radical change; an increase of apprehension and not a disparagement of the body; a change of scale in the elements to which one needed to direct one’s attention and not a different way of perceiving oneself as a physical individual. It was in this overall context, so strongly marked by concern for the body, health, environment, and circumstances, that medicine framed the question of sexual pleasures: the question of their nature and their mechanism, that of their positive and negative value for the organism, that of the regimen to which they ought to be subjected.10

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  When they should be realer, more intense than life. And I am prepared for nothing else. Am dead already. Pretend an interest in astrology, botany, which I never follow up. When I go home I must teach myself the tarot pack, the stars, German conversation. Add French to my studying. This comes so natural to some people. Ted is my salvation. He is so rare, so special, how could anyone else stand me! Of course, otherwise I might get a Ph.D., teach in New York, or work at a career. It is hard, with our unplanned drifting, to do much in this way. Another thing that horrifies me is the way I forget: I once knew Plato well, James Joyce, and so on and so on. If one doesn’t apply knowledge, doesn’t review, keep it up, it sinks into a Sargasso and encrusts with barnacles. A job that would plunge me in other lives would be a help. A reporter, a sociologist, anything. Maybe in England I will have some luck. They are, in a sense, less “professional” than we are here. More open to the amateur. At least I think so. I can’t reconcile myself to the small time. How easy it is to get ten dollars here and there from The Christian Science Monitor for poems and drawings. Two poems accepted this morning: my “exercises” on Yaddo and Magnolia Shoals. Yet I hunger after nebulous vision of success. Publication of my poetry book, my children’s book. As if the old god of love I hunted by winning prizes in childhood has grown more mammoth and unsatiable still. Must stop this. Grow enamored of the orange toadstool, the blue mountain, and feel them solid, make something of them. Keep away from editors and writers: make a life outside the world of professionals from which I work. … Take a lesson from Ted. He works and works. Rewrites, struggles, loses himself. I must work for independence. Make him proud. Keep my sorrows and despairs to myself. Work and work for self-respect: study language, read avidly. Work, not expect miracles to follow on a hastily written nothing. * * * October 19, 1959, Monday . Most of my trouble is a recession of my old audacity, unself-conscious brazenness. A self-hypnotic state of boldness and vigor annihilates my lugubrious oozings of top-of-the-head matter. I tried Ted’s “exercise”: deep-breathing, concentration on stream-of-conscious objects, these last days, and wrote two poems that pleased me. One a poem to Nicholas,w and one the old father-worship subject. But different. Weirder. I see a picture, a weather, in these poems.… The main thing is to get rid of the idea [that] what I write now is for the old book. That soggy book. So I have three poems for the new, temporarily called The Colossus and Other Poems . Involvement with Mavis Gallant. Her novel on a daughter-mother relation, the daughter committing suicide.

• From The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967)

  The objective nomos is internalized in the course of socialization. It is thus appropriated by the individual to become his own subjective ordering of experience. It is by virtue of this appropriation that the individual can come to “make sense” of his own biography. The discrepant elements of his past life are ordered in terms of what he “knows objectively” about his own and others’ condition. His ongoing experience is integrated into the same order, though the latter may have to be modified to allow for this integration. The future attains a meaningful shape by virtue of the same order being projected into it. In other words, to live in the social world is to live an ordered and meaningful life. Society is the guardian of order and meaning not only objectively, in its institutional structures, but subjectively as well, in its structuring of individual consciousness. It is for this reason that radical separation from the social world, or anomy, constitutes such a powerful threat to the individual (26). It is not only that the individual loses emotionally satisfying ties in such cases. He loses his orientation in experience. In extreme cases, he loses his sense of reality and identity. He becomes anomic in the sense of becoming world-less. Just as an individual’s nomos is constructed and sustained in conversation with significant others, so is the individual plunged toward anomy when such conversation is radically interrupted. The circumstances of such nomic disruption may, of course, vary. They might involve large collective forces, such as the loss of status of the entire social group to which the individual belongs. They might be more narrowly biographical, such as the loss of significant others by death, divorce, or physical separation. It is thus possible to speak of collective as well as of individual states of anomy. In both cases, the fundamental order in terms of which the individual can “make sense” of his life and recognize his own identity will be in process of disintegration. Not only will the individual then begin to lose his moral bearings, with disastrous psychological consequences, but he will become uncertain about his cognitive bearings as well. The world begins to shake in the very instant that its sustaining conversation begins to falter.

• From The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967)

  Man’s world-building activity is always a collective enterprise. Man’s internal appropriation of a world must also take place in a collectivity. It has by now become a social-scientific platitude to say that it is impossible to become or to be human, in any empirically recognizable form that goes beyond biological observations, except in society. This becomes less of a platitude if one adds that the internalization of a world is dependent on society in the same way, because one is thereby saying that man is incapable of conceiving of his experience in a comprehensively meaningful way unless such a conception is transmitted to him by means of social processes. The processes that internalize the socially objectivated world are the same processes that internalize the socially assigned identities. The individual is socialized to be a designated person and to inhabit a designated world. Subjective identity and subjective reality are produced in the same dialectic (here, in the etymologically literal sense) between the individual and those significant others who are in charge of his socialization (20). It is possible to sum up the dialectic formation of identity by saying that the individual becomes that which he is addressed as by others. One may add that the individual appropriates the world in conversation with others and, furthermore, that both identity and world remain real to himself only as long as he can continue the conversation. The last point is very important, for it implies that socialization can never be completed, that it must be an ongoing process throughout the lifetime of the individual. This is the subjective side of the already remarked-upon precariousness of all humanly constructed worlds. The difficulty of keeping a world going expresses itself psychologically in the difficulty of keeping this world subjectively plausible. The world is built up in the consciousness of the individual by conversation with significant others (such as parents, teachers, “peers”). The world is maintained as subjective reality by the same sort of conversation, be it with the same or with new significant others (such as spouses, friends, or other associates). If such conversation is disrupted (the spouse dies, the friends disappear, or one comes to leave one’s original social milieu), the world begins to totter, to lose its subjective plausibility. In other words, the subjective reality of the world hangs on the thin thread of conversation. The reason why most of us are unaware of this precariousness most of the time is grounded in the continuity of our conversation with significant others. The maintenance of such continuity is one of the most important imperatives of social order.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  My family was kind. I knew the conversation wasn’t easy for anyone in it. But I hated the questions they asked me, the fact that they thought they could. One asked how Brandon was doing “with it all.” I seethed, though the question was understandable. Brandon’s okay, I said; we still care a lot for each other. All I can say, replied my family member, is that Brandon is an unusually good man. When I was straight, I did not have to come out. Like my white skin, my being straight was a convenient default. There was a nice slip to it, an absence of friction. There was also privacy: when straight, I rarely had to disclose anything about my sex life. Even pregnancy, the visible fact of a baby protruding from my abdomen, unavoidable evidence of sexual activity, didn’t say anything about my sexuality. Only those who don’t fit norms have to put a name to their difference. The world has gay politicians and legal same-sex marriage, but there is still a thing called coming out. Now there would be endless occasions to out myself, whether I wanted to or not. Like at my dermatologist’s office one afternoon, when he inquired about my preferred method of birth control. Oh, I don’t need any, I said. Why not? he asked, swiveling abruptly from his computer and peering at me over his reading glasses. I’m dating a woman, I said. Ah! He laughed, visibly relieved. He’d worried that I would extoll the virtues of the rhythm method or prayer. I was glad for his mirth. I wondered how this conversation might go in a less progressive town. I knew I was fortunate to have other concerns. I was afraid people would think I’d been hiding it, that I’d been faking my way through life. I was afraid people would think that everything I’d been and done was a lie. I had written two memoirs featuring Brandon, our courtship, and our marriage. I built my career as a writer on a certain image, because that image had been true. But now the story I have to tell seems to undo all the ones that came before, the ones people have come to know me by. How does a person write truthfully about their life, when it isn’t finished? I wanted to be believed, though I struggled to explain myself. And if they—family, friends, readers—did believe me, wasn’t it almost worse? Then they’d see me as some kind of a contagious illness, something they or their spouses could catch. I’d seen the thought pass over friends’ faces as I spoke. I was a harbinger of unwelcome news: Look out, straight people! This could happen to you AT ANY TIME. On a weekend getaway, a friend confessed to me that her husband had joked that she would “go off into the woods with Molly and come back gay.” We both laughed. What else was I supposed to do.

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

  In view of these changes in matrimonial practice and in the political game, one can see how the conditions under which the traditional ethics of self-mastery asserted itself were transformed. Self-mastery had implied a close connection between the superiority one exercised over oneself, the authority one exercised in the context of the household, and the power one exercised in the field of an agonistic society. It was the practice of superiority over oneself that guaranteed the moderate and reasonable use that one could and ought to make of the two other superiorities. Henceforth one was in a world where these relations could no longer operate in the same way: the relation of superiority exercised in the household and over the wife had to be associated with certain forms of reciprocity and equality. As for the agonistic game by which one sought to manifest and ensure one’s superiority over others, it had to be integrated into a far more extensive and complex field of power relations. Consequently, the principle of superiority over the self as the ethical core, the general form of “heautocratism,” needed to be restructured. Not that it disappeared; but it had to make room for a certain balance between inequality and reciprocity in married life. In social, civic, and political life, it had to bring a certain dissociation into play between power over the self and power over others. The importance given to the problem of “oneself,” the development of the cultivation of the self in the course of the Hellenistic period, and the apogee it experienced at the beginning of the Empire manifested this effort of reelaboration of an ethics of self-mastery. The reflection on the use of pleasure that was so directly linked to the close correlation between the three types of authority (over oneself, over the household, and over others) was modified in the very course of this elaboration. A growth of public constraints and prohibitions? An individualistic withdrawal accompanying the valorization of private life? We need instead to think in terms of a crisis of the subject, or rather a crisis of subjectivation—that is, in terms of a difficulty in the manner in which the individual could form himself as the ethical subject of his actions, and efforts to find in devotion to self that which could enable him to submit to rules and give a purpose to his existence. * See also the passage in which Plutarch says that one must be able to entrust certain specific tasks to subordinates.21 * The treatise on exile is thought to be addressed to the same personage as the Praecepta gerendae reipublicae.

• From Three Women (2019)

  The nieces nodded, deep careful nods. Nervously, they looked away. Their father was in the distance. But he wasn’t watching. maggieThe morning of the verdict, one of the female jurors is hospitalized. At first, there are no details. Judge Steven McCullough gathers the remaining eleven jurors in a room and asks, Have you or have you not come to a verdict on any of the five counts against Aaron Knodel? The judge tells the news outlets what everyone already can divine—that it’s unusual for a juror to be rushed to the hospital during deliberations. He asks both counselors how they would like to handle the situation. Byers asks for a mistrial. Maggie says she is willing to testify in another trial. Hoy says, Please, no. “Everybody has got a great deal of time, effort, energy, and life poured into this case at this time and I would really hate to see a mistrial declared if that can be avoided,” Hoy says, and proceeds to read from a rulebook that says a jury of fewer than twelve can come to a verdict in a criminal case. “The State may not like the ultimate verdict that came out, but the reality is everybody has tried the case fully and fairly and this jury spent a lot of their time and effort trying to reach a verdict.” Byers refuses to agree to let the jury of fewer than twelve come to a verdict for all of the counts, so the judge moves forward with the motions for a mistrial on some of them. He asks the eleven jurors to come in and present what they had decided before the twelfth was hospitalized. They had agreed on a verdict for three of the counts—one, two, and five. Count one cites Aaron Knodel penetrating Maggie Wilken’s vulva with his fingers in his classroom. This instance allegedly lasted between five and ten minutes. She was faced away from him, he had his hands down the front of her waistband and she describes the way he was also dry-humping her from behind. It ended when a teacher wiggled the handle of the door and Aaron jumped back, snatched his hand up and out, and handed her a quiz with the exaggerated slickness of a sitcom. Count two cites a separate incident similar to count one and includes the way that Aaron allegedly brought Maggie’s hand to his penis in his classroom. According to Maggie, he was kissing her and then he moved her hand to his chest and said, “Feel how fast my heart is beating.” And then he moved her other hand onto the protuberance in his pants and said, “Feel how hard you make me.” This happened at the table by the cupboards.

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

  3. Political activity and personal destiny. The precariousness of good fortune—too much success provokes the jealousy of the gods, or the people are fond of withdrawing favors they once granted—was clearly a traditional theme of meditation. In reflection on political activity, during the first centuries of the Empire, this precariousness inherent in the exercise of power is associated with two other themes. First, it is perceived as being linked to the dependence that one experiences in relation to others. It is not so much the particular cycle of good and bad fortune that explains this fragility, but the fact that one is placed under what Seneca calls the potentia aliena or the vis potentioris.28 In the complex network of power, one is never alone facing one’s enemies. One is exposed on all sides to influences, intrigues, conspiracies, losses of favor. To be secure, one will have to be careful not to “give offence. It is sometimes the people that we ought to fear; or sometimes a body of influential oligarchs in the Senate … and sometimes individuals equipped with power by the people and against the people. It is burdensome to keep the friendship of all such persons; it is enough not to make enemies of them.” Between the prince, the Senate, and the populace giving and taking away their favors according to circumstances, the exercise of power depends on an unstable conjuncture: “You have held the highest offices; but have you held any as great, as unlooked for, as comprehensive as those of Sejanus? Yet on the day on which the Senate played the escort, the people tore him to pieces! Of the man who had heaped upon him all that gods and men were able to bestow, nothing was left for the executioner to drag to the river!”29 For these reversals and for the anxiety that they cause, one must prepare oneself by setting a prior limit on the ambitions that one entertains: “Nothing can free us from these mental waverings so effectively as always to establish some limit to advancement and not leave to Fortune the decision of when it shall end, but halt of our own accord.”30 And if the occasion presents itself, it is good to withdraw from these activities when they become disturbing and prevent one from attending to oneself. If misfortune suddenly strikes, if one falls from favor and is exiled, one ought to tell oneself—this is the advice Plutarch addresses no doubt to the same Menemachus whom he had encouraged, several years before, to enter politics “by free choice”*—that one is finally free from obedience to governors, from liturgies that are too costly, from services to render, from ambassadorial missions to accomplish, and from taxes to pay.31 And to Lucilius, who is not under any threat, however, Seneca gives the advice to disengage himself from his duties, gradually and at the right time, just as Epicurus counseled, so as to be able to place himself at his own disposal.32

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

  find a truth which would satisfy him? He was brought up in the 350s and 360s in small-town North Africa. His father, Patricius (of whom he says little), was a non-Christian; his mother, Monica, a deeply pious if not very intellectual member of the Catholic Church. The relationship of mother and son was intense and often conflicted. Augustine reacted against her unsophisticated religion, and after his parents had scrimped and saved to send him to the School of Carthage, he was increasingly drawn by the excitements of university life to the philosophy and literature of Rome. The world was at his feet; he settled down with a mistress and she bore him a son whose name, Adeodatus (‘Given by God’), may have been a reflection of the fact that the baby’s arrival was evidently unplanned.29 But even as Augustine began an exceptionally promising career as a teacher of rhetoric (the language study which lay at the heart of Latin culture, a ticket to success and perhaps a political career), he was becoming tormented by anxieties which remained his theological preoccupations all his life.What was the source of evil and suffering in this world? This was the ancient religious question which the gnostics had tried to answer by picturing existence as an eternally dualistic struggle, and it was the gnostic religion of Augustine’s day, Manichaeism, which first won his allegiance and held it for nine years. Yet increasingly he was dissatisfied by Manichaean belief, and as he pursued academic success in Rome and Milan he was haunted by doubts and anxieties about the nature of truth, reality and wisdom. As he ceased to find Manichaeism of use, he turned to Neoplatonist belief, but in Milan he also became fascinated by Bishop Ambrose. Here, for the first time, he met a Christian whose self- confident culture he could respect and whose sermons, sonorous and rich in their language, made up for the crudity and vulgarity of the Bible which had distressed the young Augustine. Even though he remained embarrassed by his mother’s demonstrative piety (she had followed him to Milan), he now contemplated a faith which united the imperious nobleman in the pulpit with the elderly woman from a provincial backwater. The contradictory influences of career and Christian renunciation came to tear him apart and made him disgusted with his ambitions. To add to his pain, on his mother’s urging, in 385 he broke with his mistress in order to make a good marriage. The woman went back to Africa, swearing to remain faithful to him – in the middle of his narrative of worldly renunciation in the Confessions, Augustine at least had the grace to record her resolution, even though he could not bring himself to name her. We may wonder what she felt as she slipped out of the life of the man who had been her companion for fifteen years, leaving behind her charming and talented teenage son to her lover’s care.30 In a state bordering on nervous breakdown, and physically unwell, Augustine