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 Decameron (1353)

  But when they had finished talking, Masetto began to consider what steps he ought to take so that he could go and stay with them. Knowing himself to be perfectly capable of carrying out the duties mentioned by Nuto, he had no worries about losing the job on that particular score, but he was afraid lest he should be turned down because of his youth and his unusually attractive appearance. And so, having rejected a number of other possible expedients, he eventually thought to himself: ‘The convent is a long way off, and there’s nobody there who knows me. If I can pretend to be dumb, they’ll take me on for sure.’ Clinging firmly to this conjecture, he therefore dressed himself in pauper’s rags and slung an axe over his shoulder,1 and without telling anyone where he was going, he set out for the convent. On his arrival, he wandered into the courtyard, where as luck would have it he came across the steward, and with the aid of gestures such as dumb people use, he conveyed the impression that he was begging for something to eat, in return for which he would attend to any wood-chopping that needed to be done. The steward gladly provided him with something to eat, after which he presented him with a pile of logs that Nuto had been unable to chop. Being very powerful, Masetto made short work of the whole consignment, and then the steward, who was on his way to the wood, took Masetto with him and got him to fell some timber. He then provided Masetto with an ass, and gave him to understand by the use of sign-language that he was to take the timber back to the convent. The fellow carried out his instructions so efficiently that the steward retained his services for a few more days, getting him to tackle various jobs that needed to be done about the place. One day, the Abbess herself happened to catch sight of him, and she asked the steward who he was. ‘The man is a poor deaf-mute, ma’am, who came here one day begging for alms,’ said the steward. ‘I saw to it that he was well fed, and set him to work on various tasks that needed to be done. If he turns out to be good at gardening, and wants to stay, I reckon we would do well out of it, because we certainly need a gardener, and this is a strong fellow who will always do as he’s told. Besides, you wouldn’t need to worry about his giving any cheek to these young ladies of yours.’ ‘I do believe you’re right,’ said the Abbess. ‘Find out whether he knows what to do, and make every effort to hold on to him. Provide him with a pair of shoes and an old hood, wheedle him, pay him a few compliments, and give him plenty to eat.’

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  scholarship came. And it was accompanied by new theological approaches and insights which in fact provided a way out of the dilemma. In the 1820s and 1830s, Friedrich Schleiermacher made the first real reappraisal of Christian theology since Calvin. He thought it possible to devise a theology valid for all time, subject to continual renewal through experience. Dogma, he argued, was not so much knowledge as the result of history; revelation was the sum total of individual conceptions of God; articles of Christian belief were not proofs so much as expressions furthering piety. What was essential to Christianity was the redemption, dependent on Jesus, who did not need to be redeemed. Heresies were departures from these affirmations; but the doctrine of two natures in Christ, and three persons in God, he believed to be misleading, and the resurrection, ascension and return in judgment inessential. The Church was a fellowship of believers. Election was determined by God’s good pleasure, but not necessarily to exclude permanently a part of the human race. This analysis made it possible, in theory at least, to recruit Lutherans and Calvinists, and it opened the way for Christian theology to reconcile itself to science, modern biblical scholarship, and other disciplines more or less indefinitely. Indeed, it was in the tradition of ‘minimum theology’ established by Erasmus and continued by Locke. Nevertheless, it was a line of defence few Protestants, at least initially, were prepared to adopt. The Evangelical fundamentalists simply averted their gaze both from science and German ‘higher criticism’, as it was termed. Others peered – and lost their faith. In 1835, almost coincidental with the most devastating revelations of geology, the German biblical scholar David Friedrich Strauss published the first volume of his Leben Jesus, which analysed the gospel narratives like any other collections of sources, and sought to detect the element of myth. Strauss argued that ‘the supernatural birth of Christ, his miracles, his resurrection and ascension, remain eternal truths, whatever doubts may be cast on their reality as historical facts’, and he claimed that ‘the dogmatic significance of the life of Jesus remains inviolate’; yet the impact of the book was overwhelmingly to emphasize the contradictions, and minimize the accuracy, of the New Testament. One of the new agnostics, Arthur Hugh Clough, noted the event in his poem Epi-Straussium: Matthew and Mark and Luke and Holy John Evanished all and gone. . . .

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  45 Table 1.1: Similarities Between Fear and Anxiety Presence or anticipation of danger or discomfort Tense apprehensiveness and uneasiness Elevated arousal Negative affect Accompanied by bodily sensations Based on Table 1.1 in Rachman (2004) Table 1.2: Differences Between Fear and Anxiety FEAR ANXIETY Threat is present and identifiable yes no Evoked by specific cues yes no Connection to threat is reasonable yes no Usually episodic (specific onset and offset) yes no Overall quality of an emergency yes no Overall quality of sustained vigilance no yes Based on Table 1.2 in Rachman (2004) and Table 1.2 in Zeidner and Matthews (2011) How are we to deal with the semantic complexity of these terms and the implications of linguistic imprecision for our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of fear and anxiety? Some emotion researchers treat all (or at least many) of the terms as measures of intensity of varying degrees of fear: On the low end are concerned, nervous, jittery, apprehensive, and worried , with threatened, scared, and frightened in the middle, and panicked and terrified at the other end. 46 Another approach retains the centrality of fear and anxiety as categories of aversive experience and identifies specific members of these two families. Frightened, panicked, scared, and terrified are viewed as states that have an objective cause and an imminent consequence and thus are considered forms of fear, whereas anguish, worry, dread, nervousness, concern, trepidation, and troubled are viewed as variants of anxiety because the source, or cause, is more amorphous and the consequences less certain. Figure 1.3 : The Lexicon of Fear and Anxiety. Figure 1.4 : Some Variations on the Themes of Fear and Anxiety. (FROM MAKARI [2012].) But even this simple solution hints at a source of confusion in the study of fear and anxiety. While these terms are sometimes used to define categories (families) of experience, they are also often used more specifically to refer to distinct types of experience: In this context “fear” is considered as only one particular form of fearful experience among many possible others, whereas “anxiety” is likewise one particular form in the range of anxious experiences. It is also unclear the extent to which the examples in each category are truly distinct states of fear or anxiety or just slight variations, or even synonyms, of the identical states. But in spite of such complications, we at least have guidelines to help us separate the two broad categories: Fear states occur when a threat is present or imminent; states of anxiety result when a threat is possible but its occurrence is uncertain. DEFINING FEAR AND ANXIETY While we can often separate fear from anxiety conceptually on the basis of the nature of the threat, in our daily lives fearful and anxious states are not completely independent. It is probably impossible to feel fear without also being anxious—as soon as you are afraid of something, you begin to worry about what the consequence of the danger at hand will be.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  in death by violence. The spirit of the early Church was well conveyed by Paul’s epistles, which suggest doctrinal bitterness and unresolved controversy. There was no calm period in the history of the Church. In its first generation it was very nearly reabsorbed by Judaism. Then, for at least a century, there was a risk it would become an other-worldly religion, inflexibly ordering life by superhuman standards, or a complicated mystery cult for intellectual connoisseurs. There was no long-term future in either direction. The Church survived, and steadily penetrated all ranks of society over a huge area, by avoiding or absorbing extremes, by compromise, by developing an urbane temperament and erecting secular-type structures to preserve its unity and conduct its business. There was in consequence a loss of spirituality or, as Paul would have put it, of freedom. There was a gain in stability and collective strength. By the end of the third century Christianity was able to confront and outface the most powerful corporation in ancient history – the Roman empire. PART TWO From Martyrs to Inquisitors (AD 250–450) I N 313, from the great imperial city of Milan, Constantine and his co-emperor Licinius despatched a series of flowery letters to provincial governors. The two rulers thought it ‘salutary and most proper’ that ‘complete toleration’ should be given by the State to anyone who had ‘given up his mind either to the cult of the Christians’ or any other cult ‘which he personally feels best for himself’. All previous anti-Christian decrees were revoked; Christian places of worship and other property seized from them were to be restored; and compensation provided where legally appropriate. The new policy was to be ‘published everywhere and brought to the notice of all men’. The so-called ‘Edict of Milan’, by which the Roman Empire reversed its policy of hostility to Christianity and accorded it full legal recognition was one of the decisive events in world history. Yet the story behind it is complicated and in some ways mysterious. Christian apologists at the time and later portrayed it as the consequence of Constantine’s own conversion, itself brought about by the miraculous intervention of God before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge outside Rome, where Constantine defeated the usurper Maxentius. This was the story Constantine liked to tell himself, later in life. Bishop Eusebius, who informs us gloatingly that he was ‘honoured with the Emperor’s acquaintance and society’, says he heard from Constantine’s own lips that ‘a most incredible sign appeared to him from heaven.’ But there is a conflict of evidence about the exact time, place and details of this vision, and there is some doubt about the magnitude of Constantine’s change of ideas. His father had been pro-Christian. He himself appears to have been a sun-worshipper, one of a number of late-pagan cults which had observances in common with the

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  CHAPTER 24 Every Five Minutes For months, my friends have been keeping me occupied on Saturday nights when Georgia is with Michael, taking me out to scream Alanis Morissette songs at karaoke bars or glam it up at fancy Upper East Side hotel lounges or sing show tunes around pianos at kitschy dive bars. Although I throw cash at the bill when it arrives, these friends always put the money back in my purse, saying let us do this for you, it’s all we can do, please let us. Now, it’s time for these friends to get back to their own lives and husbands and for me to start finding my way on my own on Saturday nights. I don’t want to lie to Hudson as to my whereabouts, so I brace myself to confess to him that I’m dating. Late Saturday afternoon, I pop my head into his room, where I find him lying in bed with the lights off, watching a movie on his laptop. “What are you doing tonight? Hitting the town with the ladies?” he asks. “No, they’re all busy tonight. Actually,” I say, taking a deep breath, then pausing for too long. He turns away from the screen to look at me. “Actually, I have to talk to you for a minute.” I climb up the ladder to his loft bed and perch at the edge. “Am I in trouble?” he asks. “No, no, nothing like that. It’s just ... oh boy, this is awkward. I’m dating. I want you to know. I have a date tonight. He lives in Long Island. So, I’m going to Long Island. On the train. For my date,” I sputter out. “OK, Mama Bear, live your life,” he says, turning his eyes back to his computer screen. I ask him to look at me and he complies, his expressive gray eyes turning up to me. “It’s time for me to get myself back out there. It doesn’t mean Dad and I are getting divorced. I just need to figure stuff out. It’s very weird for me to be dating and even weirder for me to be talking to you about it. I don’t want to sneak around and lie to you, but I also don’t want to upset you,” I say. “You do you, Mom. I want you to be happy,” he says. I choke out a thank you, knowing his words are genuine but also worrying that I am the cause of his being in this dark room in the middle of a bright day.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  If it’s not, then we shouldn’t see each other anymore.” I am not sure what to say, flattered on the one hand that he likes me enough to want me all to himself, but rankled by being given an ultimatum. I quickly hang up, telling him I have to finish cooking dinner and need some time to think, and immediately text Lauren that I need help ASAP. She writes back that she’s at a school meeting and can’t talk. “I’m in a state of panic,” I write to her. “#5 says he doesn’t want to see me anymore unless I am exclusive with him! I have a date Friday that I don’t want to cancel and I don’t want to be monogamous and I don’t want someone else calling the shots.” “So tell him that’s not what you want and move on,” she writes. “But I like him. And the sex is amazing,” I write. She reminds me that this is not a marriage proposal, that it’s not binding, but for me at this moment it may as well be, that’s how serious it feels. “Then say you can’t be exclusive.” “No,” I write back, defiantly. “Then give it a try? Remember, you owe him nothing. If it works for you, great. If it doesn’t, walk away. I have to go now, I’m getting dirty looks from the teacher.” I call #5 after the kids go to sleep and accept his marriage proposal – I mean, exclusivity ultimatum. On a rational level, I recognize how absurd it is that his request is causing me to feel genuine panic. Something as quaint as going steady should not make me feel like I am entering a long and intense state of commitment, but I have been so intent on maintaining control of my dating situation that the idea I am allowing someone else to force my hand into a decision I would not make on my own is throwing me for a significant loop. The truth is, although I tell #5 that I have cancelled my date with another man who is inconveniently also named Scott, I have not. I feel tremendous angst that I have lied, my heart racing and keeping me awake for much of the night, but I can neither bring myself to cancel the date nor tell #5 about it. I would rather lie than allow someone else to construct the walls of a box around me. It may be the biggest act of rebellion in my otherwise follow-the-dotted-lines path in life. When Scott #2 cancels on me at the last minute on Friday afternoon, I do not reschedule, relieved that I don’t have to continue to lie, and also that I haven’t let someone else make this decision for me.

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  Although the hippocampus is best known for its role in memory, it is also associated with relational processing, including spatial relations, in which it is responsible for creating a map of the environment. 111 This accounts for the involvement of the hippocampus in the contextual regulation of threat conditioning mentioned above. Environmental mapping is also a key component of risk assessment in situations of conflict and uncertainty. In assessing risk, the hippocampus obviously has to draw upon memory, though attention and other executive functions of prefrontal areas are likely to make their own contributions to the estimation of the value of possible behaviors and their outcomes. The contribution of the hippocampus is especially interesting in light of Gray and McNaughton’s behavioral inhibition theory, which proposes that the hippocampus, together with the septal region, is a major player in anxiety. 112 The so-called septohippocampal system has received renewed interest in light of new studies showing that anxiety-like behaviors can be increased or decreased by genetic manipulations of neural activity in the hippocampus. 113 The septum has also been implicated in Pavlovian threat conditioning and other defensive bahaviors. 114 Another important set of inputs to the BNST comes from the amygdala: Connections from the BA and CeA give the BNST access to the amygdala’s processing of specific threat cues. The BNST also connects back to the amygdala. Recent studies exploring the function of different components of the BNST add further insight into its role in aversively motivated behavior. 115 For example, subregions of the BNST have cells that respond differently in situations of uncertainty and risk, with cells in one region triggering (and in others suppressing) risk assessment. 116 Earlier I described the role of connections from the basal amygdala (BA) to the nucleus accumbens in defensive actions such as avoidance. Like the BNST, the NAcc is part of the extended amygdala (as well as being part of the striatum—brain terminology is not always consistent) and has connections with both the amygdala and BNST. Connections of the NAcc with the BNST may contribute to action control in situations where threat is uncertain. The emergence of the BNST in various aversive behavioral tests that involve uncertainty suggests a way to integrate Gray and McNaughton’s behavioral inhibition system with the defensive (freeze-flight-fight) system. The BNST sits at the crossroads between defensive circuits involving the amygdala and accumbens and risk-assessment circuitry involving the septohippocampal circuitry and prefrontal cortex.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  weakness. It could, so easily, lose its Christian character completely and topple over into mere deism. For some it did so. The risk, indeed, had existed before Locke. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, brother of the Anglican divine and poet, George Herbert, had reduced Christianity to five simple propositions; and this contraction was tightened by Charles Blount, who treated most of Revelation as superstition and Christ as little better than a pagan wonder-worker. Latitudinarian clergymen, of course, did not go so far. But the sermons of men like Tillotson stressed ethics and duties, and pleaded reason, while ignoring theology almost altogether. Quite early in the eighteenth century, thanks largely to Locke, what were essentially non-Christian forms of belief, attached, of course, to rationalized ethical systems, began to inch towards the area of toleration and respectability; and the process tended to go much faster in France (as we shall see shortly) where there was no roomy Anglican hotel to accommodate religious travellers. Then again, Locke’s system, as a working ethic for a modern society, was made absolutely dependent on rewards and punishments. Supposing belief in the rewards and punishments waned, as it was already doing in other departments of theology? The insistence on reason made this interpretation of eternity particularly vulnerable. The concept of Heaven could not easily be subjected to rational attack simply because theologians had never been able to define it in a concrete manner. On the other hand, because it lacked definition, it lacked real plausibility in the rewards-and- punishment mechanism. And then, supposing eternity itself were denied? Within a generation of Locke’s death, this is precisely what some thinkers were doing, and getting away with it. David Hume was outstanding: he was not unique. The real danger, however, came from the use of rational argument to undermine the effectiveness of Hell as a deterrent. The carefully imagined vision of Hell had been a very early Christian accretion, and it had always been regarded by the authorities as an essential element in maintaining Christian morality. Even those thinkers who were sceptical about the part played by physical punishment in Hell, or even about its existence, thought it right that the generality of believers should be encouraged to fear it. Origen, as we have already noted, thought it possible that all might ultimately be saved, but added (in Contra Celsum) that ‘to go beyond this is not expedient for the sake of those who are with difficulty restrained, even by fear of eternal punishment, from plunging into any degree of wickedness, and into the floods of evil that result from sin’. The Church later ruled that Origen’s scepticism

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  automatically solve all religious disputes and controversies. Hence it was important that men of goodwill and intelligence should work together. But it might also be dangerous, so there was a need for secrecy. One idea which constantly crops up is the ‘invisible college’ of learned men – an international network of scholars and humanists. Secret societies as such probably originated among fifteenth-century Italian intellectuals, and may have been brought to northern Europe by the Hermetic philosopher Giordano Bruno. He certainly formed a circle of like-minded men in Lutheran Germany. In the Netherlands, the secret society or college took the form of the so-called Family of Love. Its members were eirenic Christians, who ostensibly conformed to the practice of whichever Christian sect was in power in the area where they lived, but privately subscribed to ecumenical doctrines and owed their true allegiance to the Christian unity of the Family itself. These men found themselves impotent to prevent the horrors of religious strife, or to still the doctrinal passions on both sides, and were forced back on their inner resources. Like the burgeoning capitalists, they believed in a private, Erasmian religion. They were, in fact, Stoics: the demands of reason were necessarily ineffective, so the educated must take refuge in private morality, while externally conforming and doing their best to serve the common weal. One such circle, in Antwerp, revolved around Philip II’s typographer royal, Christopher Plantin, and included natural scientists, botanists, geographers, cartographers, antiquarians, linguists, Hebrew and oriental scholars, and many artists and engravers. Some of these Christian humanists actively proselytized for the third force and travelled extensively, evangelists for a religion which was scholarly and pietist, rather than doctrinal. Giordano Bruno travelled from Germany to England, where he was in touch with Sir Philip Sidney, his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, and their intellectual circle. To men like Bruno and Sidney, there was no absolute distinction between Christian and secular knowledge, or between theology and the natural sciences. As Sidney put it, all forms of knowledge ‘lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey longings, can be capable of... all, one and other, having this scope – to know, and by knowledge to lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying of his own divine essence’. Just as Roger Bacon had advised the Pope to combine mystical prophetic exploration with biblical exegesis and scientific research, to discover religious truth, so

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  I take my glass of wine and nestle into the faux suede chocolate brown sofa, noting that the huge TV is on in the background. He calls from the kitchen that he will be just one more minute, and soon after appears with two plates bearing pencil-thin spears of asparagus and what I want to call crab-balls for their profoundly large and round shape. I am impressed – a man who can simply get food on a plate still blows me away, and I mentally give him bonus points for the vegetable. He smiles and sets each plate down on small foldout tables he had already set with checkered cloth napkins and silverware. He pulls one table in front of where I am sitting on the sofa and the other beside it. I thank him and wait for him to sit next to me before eating, but he is standing in front of the TV, flipping through channels until he settles on The Graduate, which has just started. “I love this movie,” I say just to say something, but I’m taken aback that he seems to be watching it attentively as if I’m not here. I don’t know if I’m supposed to talk or if I will be interrupting the movie if I attempt conversation, so I concentrate on nibbling the unwieldy crab cake. I am poking the food around my plate and anxiously contemplating how to deal with this television- versus-talking situation when suddenly he is pressed against me from behind, kissing my neck. I glance over and note his empty plate. “Oh, OK, I guess lunch is over?” I say with an awkward laugh, attempting to be cheeky but mostly sounding child-like and confused. It is now clear that he invited me here to have sex and that the crab cakes were a polite ruse. How I have gotten all the way to #8 without instinctively understanding the dynamics of these situations astounds me, and I realize assigns a certain naïveté to me that I am no longer entitled to. I have inexplicably managed to retain an innocence, even a demurity, that should have been tossed aside many numbers ago. “Yes, Laura, lunch is over,” he says, reaching his arm around me so that his hand can inch its way along my neckline and then down to the edge of my bra. I can feel his hardness against the small of my back as he leans into me. I feel enveloped by him, his kisses against the back of my neck becoming breathier, his hands working their way deeper down before finding my nipple. He is not physically threatening but he is moving quickly and persistently, and for a fleeting moment I wonder, if I wanted to stop now, would he let me?

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  I want to turn it off completely, but I don’t like the kids not being able to reach me whenever they need to and dread the recriminations when I am accused of not being available because God forbid, I didn’t come right to the phone. Fresh in my mind is my most recent debacle when Daisy’s shower backed up with her alone at home, leaving inches of water that seeped into the carpet in her bedroom in the 45 minutes it took for me and #6 to have quick afternoon shake-off-Thanksgiving sex at his apartment. By the time I turned my phone over to find ten missed calls from her, a few from Michael and a couple more from the building’s super, the shake-off sex was rendered null and void and my parenting acumen was on the line. “OK, sexy bath scene take two,” I say, jumping in without attempting grace this time. I lie back, closing my eyes and pressing my feet into his thighs to keep myself from sliding down. “I love the look on your face when I enter you,” he says, shifting toward me and watching me. He moves his hips as the water rises above us like ocean waves until I push him away so that he is lying against the tub and I am leaning forward to straddle him. “Ah yes, so Laura is in control now,” he says, raising his eyebrows. I am still not used to talking during sex. I know that #6 finds it incredibly sexy, needs it even, my voice as tantalizing as the rest of my body, but I’m at a loss as to what to say. Giving words to my physical desire is like learning an entirely new language. When I try to talk dirty and use words like “cock” or “pussy”, I pause before saying the words, uncomfortable and certain that my reluctance is more of a game-stopper than a turn-on. I visibly cringe when he uses the word “tits”, finding it crass and demeaning, so that now he apologizes and corrects himself when he says it. He’s asked what word I like in place of it and that perplexes me too: “boobs” sound childlike and “breasts” sound clinical. Is there another choice? The words “cock” and “pussy” are, surprisingly, growing on me when he says them, but when I use them they catch in my throat. Then again, using the words “penis” and “vagina” makes me feel like I’m giving an anatomy lesson, which is a turn-off even to me. Hasn’t anyone come up with anything better yet? A world full of wordsmiths and the best we’ve got is a male rooster and a cat to describe our most intimate and mysterious body parts? When I had sex in my married life, I wanted to come quickly so I could call it a night and go to sleep, but now I want sex to last as long as it can.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Oh, yes, this home-coming was as friendly and happy as good will and warm Breton hearts could make it. Yet Stephen was oppressed by a sense of restraint when she took Mary up to the charming bedroom overlooking the garden, and she spoke abruptly. ‘This will be your room.’ ‘It’s beautiful, Stephen.’ After that they were silent, perhaps because there was so much that might not be spoken between them. The dinner was served by a beaming Pierre, an excellent dinner, more than worthy of Pauline; but neither of them managed to eat very much—they were far too acutely conscious of each other. When the meal was over they went into the study where, in spite of the abnormal shortage of fuel, Adèle had managed to build a huge fire which blazed recklessly half up the chimney. The room smelt slightly of hothouse flowers, of leather, of old wood and vanished years, and after a while of cigarette smoke. Then Stephen forced herself to speak lightly: ‘Come and sit over here by the fire,’ she said, smiling. So Mary obeyed, sitting down beside her, and she laid a hand upon Stephen’s knee; but Stephen appeared not to notice that hand, for she just let it lie there and went on talking. ‘I’ve been thinking, Mary, hatching all sorts of schemes. I’d like to get you right away for a bit, the weather seems pretty awful in Paris. Puddle once told me about Teneriffe, she went there ages ago with a pupil. She stayed at a place called Orotava; it’s lovely, I believe—do you think you’d enjoy it? I might manage to hear of a villa with a garden, and then you could just slack about in the sunshine.’ Mary said, very conscious of the unnoticed hand: ‘Do you really want to go away, Stephen? Wouldn’t it interfere with your writing?’ Her voice, Stephen thought, sounded strained and unhappy. ‘Of course I want to go,’ Stephen reassured her, ‘I’ll work all the better for a holiday. Anyhow, I must see you looking more fit,’ and she suddenly laid her hand over Mary’s.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She would turn away, asking no questions about Morton. Oh, yes, Puddle felt old and actually frightened, both of which sensations she deeply resented; so being what she was, an indomitable fighter, she thrust out her chin and ordered a tonic. She struggled along through the labyrinths of Paris beside the untiring Stephen and Brockett; through the galleries of the Luxembourg and the Louvre; up the Eiffel Tower—in a lift, thank heaven; down the Rue de la Paix, up the hill to Montmartre—sometimes in the car but quite often on foot, for Brockett wished Stephen to learn her Paris—and as likely as not, ending up with rich food that disagreed badly with the tired Puddle. In the restaurants people would stare at Stephen, and although the girl would pretend not to notice, Puddle would know that in spite of her calm, Stephen was inwardly feeling resentful, was inwardly feeling embarrassed and awkward. And then because she was tired, Puddle too would feel awkward when she noticed those people staring. Sometimes Puddle must really give up and rest, in spite of the aggressive chin and the tonic. Then all alone in the Paris hotel, she would suddenly grow very homesick for England—absurd of course and yet there it was, she would feel the sharp tug of England. At such moments she would long for ridiculous things; a penny bun in the train at Dover; the good red faces of English porters—the old ones with little stubby side-whiskers; Harrods Stores; a properly upholstered arm-chair; bacon and eggs; the sea front at Brighton. All alone and via these ridiculous things, Puddle would feel the sharp tug of England. And one evening her weary mind must switch back to the earliest days of her friendship with Stephen. What a lifetime ago it seemed since the days when a lanky colt of a girl of fourteen had been licked into shape in the schoolroom at Morton. She could hear her own words: ‘You’ve forgotten something, Stephen; the books can’t walk to the bookcase, but you can, so suppose that you take them with you,’ and then: ‘Even my brain won’t stand your complete lack of method.’ Stephen fourteen—that was twelve years ago. In those years she, Puddle, had grown very tired, tired with trying to see some way out, some way of escape, of fulfilment for Stephen. And always they seemed to be toiling, they two, down an endless road that had no turning; she an ageing woman herself unfulfilled; Stephen still young and as yet still courageous—but the day would come when her youth would fail, and her courage, because of that endless toiling. She thought of Brockett, Jonathan Brockett, surely an unworthy companion for Stephen; a thoroughly vicious and cynical man, a dangerous one too because he was brilliant.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  solve the problem by reformulating the doctrine of marriage; and Pope John set up an advisory committee of specialists. Some of the shrewder members were anxious that the Church should not get involved in giving detailed judgment in a field where medical science was moving fast, but should stick, like the Anglicans, to the safe ground of ‘right intention’. As Cardinal Suenens of Brussels put it: ‘I beg of you, let us avoid a new “Galileo Affair”. One is enough for the church.’ In fact, despite the papal veto, the topic necessarily arose when the Council discussed marriage and the family as part of the schema on ‘The church and the modern world’ during the fourth and final session in Autumn 1965. The debate was interrupted on 24 November by a message from the Secretary of State insisting on the Pope’s orders that certain changes in the text be made, that it should include explicit mention of Casti Connubii and the address of Pius XII to the midwives, and that ‘it is absolutely necessary that the methods and instruments of rendering conception ineffectual – that is to say, the contraceptive methods which are dealt with in the encyclical letter Casti Connubii – be openly rejected; for in this matter admitting doubts, keeping silence, or insinuating opinions that the necessity of such methods is perhaps to be admitted, can bring about the gravest dangers to the general opinion.’ The text of four amendments on which the Pope insisted were attached. The conservatives were delighted; one of them, Cardinal Browne, exclaimed: ‘Christus ipse locutus est – Christ himself has spoken.’ This peremptory intervention, of course, made nonsense of the whole principle of the Council; and in fact after much behind-the-scenes negotiations, the Pope’s message was itself amended, and the changes he proposed were relegated to a footnote in the final text of the schema. Here was a case of a pope willing to assert his authority, but also willing to withdraw it again under pressure: the pattern of a weak autocrat. The Council thus ended and dispersed with both the contraception issue, and the larger one of sovereignity within the Church, wholly unresolved. Nor has either been resolved since. In July 1968, Pope Paul finally made up his mind on contraception, ignored the majority view of his advisory commission, and published his encyclical Humanae Vitae, which stated that, while ‘natural’ contraception was licit, ‘None the less the church calling men back to the observance of the norms of the natural law, as interpreted by her constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life’ – thus ruling out artificial methods of birth-control. The encyclical aroused widespread criticism among the international Catholic community, not merely among laymen and women, but

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  A few blocks later, he says, “Actually, we can make coffee at my place to take to the park, my apartment is right here.” “Oh,” I say, pausing. “Um, no, you don’t have to bother, we can just pick it up.” “It’ll just take a minute and we’re here already,” he says, pointing to a street- level door at the base of a brownstone. I reluctantly agree. This is my first Tinder date and he seems so self-assured that I try to ignore the red flag being waved directly in front of me. I don’t want to seem nervous or suspicious as that would be a huge turn-off, but entering his apartment seems like a frankly bad idea. I feel trapped and unsure what to do, still more concerned with how I appear than with my own safety, but I try to exude nonchalance, following him as he slides the key into the iron gate leading to the front door. Inside, the apartment is dark and drab – the natural light is dim and his room-length bookshelves are filled with bulky hardcovers, CDs and DVDs. There is an abundance of art and cumbersome sculptural objects hanging on the wall. The kitchen is an open area between the living room and the bedrooms in the back, and true to his promise, he starts filling the coffee pot and dumping scoops of coffee from a huge tub of Folgers into the filter. I hate when I recognize myself being a snob but nonetheless note the Folgers with disdain, thinking a writer in Brooklyn who insists on making his own coffee should have some artisanal blend that he makes in a special coffee filtration system only the most coffee-educated could appreciate – not Folgers in a Mr. Coffee pot. As the coffee brews, he suggests that when it’s done, we take it to his backyard instead of to the park. I hesitate and then quietly agree again, admonishing myself for not saying what I want to say, which is that I feel uncomfortable and would prefer a walk in a public space.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  I suppose he was really in love with me then, anyhow I thought it was wonderful of him—I thought he was very broad-minded and noble. Good God! He’s had his pound of flesh since; it gave him the hold over me that he wanted. We were married before we sailed for Europe. I wasn’t in love, but what could I do? I’d nowhere to turn and my health was crocking; lots of our girls ended up in the hospital wards—I didn’t want to end up that way. Well, so you see why I’ve got to be careful how I act; he’s terribly and awfully suspicious. He thinks that because I took a lover when I was literally down and out, I’m likely to do the same thing now. He doesn’t trust me, it’s natural enough, but sometimes he throws it all up in my face, and when he does that, my God, how I hate him! But oh, Stephen, I could never go through it all again—I haven’t got an ounce of fight left in me. That’s why, although Ralph’s no cinch as a husband, I’d be scared to death if he really turned nasty. He knows that, I think, so he’s not afraid to bully—he’s bullied me many a time over you—but of course you’re a woman so he couldn’t divorce me—I expect that’s really what makes him so angry. All the same, when you asked me to leave him for you, I hadn’t the courage to face that either. I couldn’t have faced the public scandal that Ralph would have made; he’d have hounded us down to the ends of the earth, he’d have branded us, Stephen. I know him, he’s revengeful, he’d stop at nothing, that weak sort of man is often that way. It’s as though what Ralph lacks in virility, he tries to make up for by being revengeful. My dear, I couldn’t go under again—I couldn’t be one of those apologetic people who must always exist just under the surface, only coming up for a moment, like fish—I’ve been through that particular hell. I want life, and yet I’m always afraid. Every time that Ralph looks at me I feel frightened, because he knows that I hate him most when he tries to make love—’ She broke off abruptly. And now she was crying a little to herself, letting the tears trickle down unheeded.

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  We aren’t selling a product; we are trying to understand and explain how things work. THE LOGIC OF DRUG DISCOVERY RESEARCH To illustrate some of the problems that arise from viewing anxiety as something other than what it is for scientific purposes, we will examine how researchers seeking biologically based treatments through animal research conceptualized anxiety. As we will see, the success of such approaches has been limited. I argue that a big part of the problem is the way fear and anxiety have been conceived. Research attempting to identify new drugs to treat problems involving fear and/or anxiety has traditionally measured behaviors (including innate responses, such as freezing or flight, and learned responses, such as escape and avoidance) and/or physiological changes in the body (including autonomic nervous system responses and endocrine responses) and brain (brain arousal or more specific brain activity). This approach fit well with Lang’s response-based concept of anxiety because it focused on objectively accessible behavioral and physiological responses rather than thorny questions about feelings. But in contrast to Lang’s emphasis on anxiety as a collation of response measures rather than an actual entity in the brain (Lang noted that anxiety does not reflect some single entity in the brain that can be manipulated), drug discovery work has often treated anxiety as a singular central state that could be pharmaceutically controlled and assumed that the effects of the treatment could be measured by behavioral and physiological responses. And because the central state was, for many, a physiological one, rather than a conscious feeling, efforts to find drugs that would alter the central state could be pursued through animal studies without having to wrestle with the consciousness problem. Recall Jeffrey Gray’s notion of anxiety as a central state of behavioral inhibition, which was very influential in drug discovery research. But here’s the problem: The central state itself is never actually measured in such research—it is simply assumed to exist. Then a further assumption, even more troubling, is made: The central physiological state of anxiety, though viewed as a way of studying anxiety without having to solve the problem of consciousness in animals, is assumed to be one and the same as the conscious feeling of anxiety. Therefore, drugs that reduce behavioral or physiological responses thought to be indicative of the central state should make rats or mice—and, by implication, people—feel less anxious.

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  As I explained in Synaptic Self , 5 while all human brains are similar in overall structure and function, they are wired differently in subtle, micro scopic ways that make us individuals. These differences come about both because of the unique combination of genes we get from our two parents and because of the experiences we have as we go through life. Nature and nurture are partners in shaping who we are, and that partnership is played out in each of our brains. ANXIETY: ANCIENT YET NEW 6 The English word “anxiety” and its European equivalents (e.g., angoisse in French, angoscia in Italian, angustia in Spanish, Angst in German, and angst in Danish) come from the Latin anxietas , which, in turn, has roots in the ancient Greek angh. 7 Although angh was sometimes used by the Greeks to mean burdened or troubled (i.e., ang uished), it was primarily employed in reference to physical sensations, such as tightness, constriction, or discomfort. For instance, the word “angina,” a medical condition in which chest pains occur in relation to heart disease, comes from angh . 8 Literary and religious writings and works of art over the ages reveal that people have always recognized the mental state we commonly refer to as anxiety today, even though they did not typically label it using angh or its linguistic descendants . 9 For example, the famous Greek sculpture Laocoön and His Sons, shown in Figure 1.1, illustrates anxiety (anguish, worry, and/or dread) in faces of Laocoön and his offspring, who are entwined with and are being bitten by snakes as punishment by the gods for having attempted to expose the ruse of the Trojan horse. 10 Ares, the Greek god of war, had two sons, Phobos (the god of fear) and Deimos (the god of dread), who accompanied him into battle to spread their namesake emotions. 11 In the New Testament, the reader is told in Matthew 6:27, “You cannot add any time to your life by worrying about it.” The philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas noted in the thirteenth century, “When a man dreads the punishment which confronts him for his sin and no longer loves the friendship of God which he has lost, his fear is born of pride, not of humility.” 12 Indeed, in the Christian world, anxiety was often connected with sin and redemption. 13 In the 1800s, for example, Søren Kierkegaard, who at the time was a little-known Danish theologian and philosopher, conceived of anxiety as the key to human existence: a sense of dread over our freedom to choose. It began, Kierkegaard said, when Adam struggled between Eve’s apple and God, and remains a factor in every choice that humans make. 14 Figure 1.1: The Anguish of Laocoön and His Sons. In spite of its long history, however, the word “anxiety” was not primarily thought of as a troubled, worried state of mind and a source of psychopathology until the early twentieth century.

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  A tone that has not been paired with the US will typically elicit much less freezing than the tone paired with the CS. The effects of conditioning can be undone, or, more accurately, suppressed, by extinction: repeated exposure to the CS without the US following 41 ( Figure 3.7 ). If the rabbit visits the watering hole a few times and nothing happens, the cues there will, through extinction, lose their potency as threatening stimuli. Extinction is not memory erasure but instead a form of new learning in which the original memory that indicated that the CS is dangerous is inhibited by new information indicating that the CS is safe. Just as the initial learning of threat conditioning is said to involve a CS-US association, the learning of extinction is said to depend on a “CS–no US” association. However, the original memory, which is still present, is susceptible to being revived in various ways, such as by the passage of time, returning to the place (context) where the conditioning experience occurred, or by pain and stress. 42 As we will see later in the book, extinction plays a key role in exposure therapy , which is a mainstay in the treatment of anxiety, and the fragility of extinction is a problem for treatment. 43 Figure 3.6: Pavlovian Threat Conditioning: Contextual Conditioning. In context conditioning, an unconditioned stimulus (US), such as footshock, occurs in a certain chamber but its occurrence is not signaled by a phasic cue conditioned stimulus (CS). The context itself is a continuously present CS. Conditioned responses are then elicited when the subject is returned to the conditioning context, and are considerably weaker in a different context. Another important variant of threat conditioning is safety learning 44 ( Figure 3.8 ). People with anxiety disorders often are impaired in detecting the difference between threat and safety. 45 Laboratory studies of safety conditioning typically involve two CSs, one that is paired with shock and one that is not. 46 The unpaired stimulus is the safety signal. Obviously, it is very useful to learn to discriminate safety from danger. However, sometimes people become overly reliant on safety cues. For example, if one can only feel safe in a social situation when accompanied by a friend, this can become a problem since it’s not always possible to call upon these kinds of support. One goal of therapy is to help “wean” the anxious person from the use of safety signals. 47 Figure 3.7: Extinction of Threat Conditioning. Extinction is a process by which repeated presentation of the conditioned stimulus (CS) without the unconditioned stimulus (US) weakens the ability of the CS to elicit conditioned responses. When extinction is successful, the conditioned responses tested some time after extinction training are weaker. However, a variety of conditions can result in the return of previously extinguished responses. A key advantage of Pavlovian threat conditioning as a research tool is that it can be used very similarly in humans and animals.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And now there were times when, serving two masters, her passion for this girl and her will to protect her, Stephen would be torn by conflicting desires, by opposing mental and physical emotions. She would want to save herself for her work; she would want to give herself wholly to Mary. Yet quite often she would work far into the night. ‘I’m going to be late—you go to bed, sweetheart.’ And when she herself had at last toiled upstairs, she would steal like a thief past Mary’s bedroom, although Mary would nearly always hear her. ‘Is that you, Stephen?’ ‘Yes. Why aren’t you asleep? Do you realize that it’s three in the morning?’ ‘Is it? You’re not angry, are you, darling? I kept thinking of you alone in the study. Come here and say you’re not angry with me, even if it is three o’clock in the morning!’ Then Stephen would slip off her old tweed coat and would fling herself down on the bed beside Mary, too exhausted to do more than take the girl in her arms, and let her lie there with her head on her shoulder. But Mary would be thinking of all those things which she found so deeply appealing in Stephen—the scar on her cheek, the expression in her eyes, the strength and the queer, shy gentleness of her—the strength which at moments could not be gentle. And as they lay there Stephen might sleep, worn out by the strain of those long hours of writing. But Mary would not sleep, or if she slept it would be when the dawn was paling the windows. 4 One morning Stephen looked at Mary intently. ‘Come here. You’re not well! What’s the matter? Tell me.’ For she thought that the girl was unusually pale, thought too that her lips drooped a little at the corners; and a sudden fear contracted her heart. ‘Tell me at once what’s the matter with you!’ Her voice was rough with anxiety, and she laid an imperative hand over Mary’s. Mary protested. ‘Don’t be absurd; there’s nothing the matter, I’m perfectly well—you’re imagining things.’ For what could be the matter? Was she not here in Paris with Stephen? But her eyes filled with tears, and she turned away quickly to hide them, ashamed of her own unreason. Stephen stuck to her point. ‘You don’t look a bit well. We shouldn’t have stayed in Paris last summer.’ Then because her own nerves were on edge that day, she frowned. ‘It’s this business of your not eating whenever I can’t get in to a meal. I know you don’t eat—Pierre’s told me about it. You mustn’t behave like a baby, Mary! I shan’t be able to write a line if I feel you’re ill because you’re not eating.’ Her fear was making her lose her temper. ‘I shall send for a doctor,’ she finished brusquely. Mary refused point-blank to see a doctor. What was she to tell him?