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 Another Country (1962)

  They all dropped abruptly into silence. Vivaldo thought of his spade chick, his dark girl, his beloved Ida, his mysterious torment and delight and hope, and thought of his own white skin. What did she see when she looked at him? He dilated his nostrils, trying to smell himself: what was that odor like for her? When she tangled her fingers in his hair, his “fine Italian hair,” was she playing with water, as she claimed, or was she toying with the notion of uprooting a forest? When he entered that marvelous wound in her, rending and tearing! rending and tearing! was she surrendering, in joy, to the Bridegroom, Lord, and Savior? or was he entering a fallen and humiliated city, entering an ambush, watched from secret places by hostile eyes? Oh, Ida, he thought, I’d give up my color for you, I would, only take me, take me, love me as I am! Take me, take me, as I take you. How did he take her, what did he bring to her? Was it his pride and his glory that he brought, or his shame? If he despised his flesh, then he must despise hers—and did he despise his flesh? And if she despised her flesh, then she must despise his. Who can blame her, he thought, wearily, if she does? and then he thought, and the thought surprised him, who can blame me? They were always threatening to cut the damn thing off, and what were all those fucking confessions about? I have sinned in thought and deed. I have sinned, I have sinned, I have sinned—and it was always better, to undercut Hell’s competition, to sin, if you had to sin, alone. What a pain in the ass old Jesus Christ had turned out to be, and it probably wasn’t even the poor, doomed, loving, hopheaded old Jew’s fault. Harold was watching him. He asked, “You want to turn on now or you want another drink first?” His voice was extremely rough, and he was scowling and smiling at the same time. “Oh, I don’t care,” Vivaldo said, “I’m with the crowd.” He thought of making another phone call, but realized that he was afraid to. The hell with it. It was one-fifteen. And he was, at last, thank heaven, at least a little drunk. “Oh, let’s split,” said Lorenzo. “We’ve got beer at home.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I had now narrowed down my expenditure dramatically, so that I spent only about two pounds a week on food. I bought one small carton of eggs, which had to last six days. I was also learning to make my own yogurt in a thermos flask, which was a great deal cheaper but an uncertain process. Hence the tub I had permitted myself tonight. For lunch I consumed two pieces of crispbread covered with cottage cheese (again, one carton had to last the week). So I never actually stopped eating—just cut it back, and the results were gratifying. I had really started to lose weight. This had begun quite deliberately. I knew that I was not anorexic like Rebecca, because that was an illness that was beyond one’s conscious control. I, however, was choosing of my own free will not to eat. I was often ravenously hungry, and would sometimes allow myself a piece of real toast and butter, which, if I had been truly anorexic, I told myself, would have been quite impossible. And I was not driven by any ulterior or unconscious motive. My purpose was, I believed, simple and pragmatic: I wanted to save money. Money had become a major issue. I had never handled money much before. In the convent, we had owned nothing but everything had been provided, and the same had been true while I had lived in St. Anne’s as an undergraduate. At the beginning of each term, when we received our grant checks from the government, we paid a fixed sum to the college for bed and board. Our rooms were cleaned for us and meals were served three times a day. But now I had to buy my own food and manage my own budget, and I found this obscurely frightening. I had started to panic about the future. Academic jobs were notoriously hard to get and my present scholarship would last for only three years. What would happen then? If I couldn’t get a post as a university teacher, whatever would become of me? I was trained for nothing else, and at twenty-six, I was really too old to start again. There was school teaching, of course, but I knew that I did not want to do that. There was one precaution that I could take, however: I could save money. If I built up a reserve fund, I could perhaps hang on for a few years until I finished my doctorate and was eligible for the coveted academic post. Then I would be set up for life and could eat and spend whatever I wanted.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  June looked at him reflectively. “Actually, that’s not bad . . .” She was just about to leave publishing and set up her own literary agency. “Remember,” she said at the end of the evening, “if ever you decide to write that book, let me know.” Things were moving a little too fast for me. The only major piece of writing I had attempted was my ill-fated thesis, and the kind of book that June had in mind was something very different. It would mean that I would have to reveal myself at my most vulnerable. It would be like stripping naked before hundreds of strangers. And writing books was something that other people did—people like Charlotte. The whole process seemed daunting. How would I know what incidents to select? How could I shape the material so that it made a point without imposing an artificial pattern that would distort it? How would I know what kind of style to use? I could see from Charlotte’s typescripts that she would sometimes put a line right through a paragraph: how did she know that it hadn’t worked? And besides, I didn’t really enjoy writing. I had always rather dreaded the moment when I had to write a chapter of my thesis or an essay. It had never been easy. Writing was a grim, exacting, frustrating process because you never said exactly what you wanted to. How on earth could I embark on a whole book? Especially since, with my track record, it was bound to be yet another failure. I might have dithered indefinitely, but Sally intervened. It was a summer evening in 1979, and I was staying overnight in her flat in Dulwich. I quite often did this, since it saved me having to do the grueling journey to Highbury every night. “Now, look here.” Sally led me into her sitting room, where we usually had a glass of sherry to celebrate the end of another school day. But on this particular evening, Sally had other plans. She had cleared her little white desk in the corner of the room. Her father had made it himself; indeed, he had sat at that desk struggling with the calculations that had led to the discovery of radar. “This is a historic desk,” Sally said. “It will bring you luck.” She had already laid out an exercise book and a new felt-tipped pen. “I’m going to go out now for an hour,” she continued. “I’m going to go for a walk, do some shopping—maybe I’ll call on Brigid. But I’m going to be away for a whole hour. So get started. Just sit down now and write the first two pages of your book. Just two pages, that’s all! And then, when I get back, we’ll have a drink to celebrate.” She pulled back the chair, turned on the desk lamp, looked at me firmly, and left the flat. And so there was nothing for it. I sat down and started to write.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Spencer, twenty, was sitting on an office chair in the bedroom of the off-campus apartment he shared with three other guys; I was on the bed, leaning against a cinder-block wall. He wore a backward baseball cap, baggy shorts (although it was December), and Top-Siders. He would describe himself—repeatedly—as short, though I hadn’t noticed. I’m five seven and change, and when I stood to leave, the two of us saw eye to eye, which, while making him slightly under the average height of an American man, was hardly freakish. Plus, his broad shoulders, muscled neck, and athletic frame projected a much larger presence. Spencer was a member of a frat whose reputation when he joined was, he said, “kind of douchebag-ish: people who didn’t care about other people and wanted to have a good time was the vibe.” Personally, he felt that was unfair: he’d found his brothers to be “genuinely good guys” who seemed to legitimately care about him, a lot nicer than the other frats he’d rushed, which he described as “druggy” or “sketchy.” He made a point, too, of telling me that twice in the past two years when complaints of sexual misconduct were lodged against members—both times for nonconsensual digital penetration of girls on the dance floor—the boys were immediately kicked out. On the other hand, that was still at least two cases of sexual misconduct in a relatively short time. As was the case for many white boys I met, then, Spencer’s social life revolved around his sports team and Greek life. On a typical weekend, assuming he wasn’t in training, he’d pregame with his frat brothers, knocking back six or seven drinks: one of their favorite pastimes was making one another take a shot every time they died while playing the video game League of Legends. If the night’s main event was at their own house, Spencer would keep going, playing beer pong, doing more shots with friends—downing maybe another eight or nine drinks. If they went to a party elsewhere, where his access to higher-shelf liquor might be limited, his total for the night would be lower, closer to ten. Either way, it was a lot of booze, especially for someone who claimed to hate the taste of alcohol. But Spencer didn’t see the point of drinking if you weren’t going to get fucked up, and the faster you threw them back, the easier they went down. He’d only blacked out twice, he said, and he tried to stop before he puked, though he couldn’t always recognize when he passed that limit. “I’m just a lot more confident when I’m drunk,” he explained. “All the positive sides of me come out. I’m very outgoing. I talk a lot. I guess I find myself more fun to be around.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Like Xavier, Aidan dropped out of the party scene, partly because of its reliance on alcohol. “As a black man, it feels like a threat to my life in the most basic way to be intoxicated if I hook up. That has been drilled into my head by my mother and by what I saw in high school. “I don’t want to make it sound like I don’t take the same precautions or care as much when I’m with African American girls,” he added. “That’s not it. But in that case there’s a common understanding of where I’m coming from when I say, ‘Is this okay? Is this okay?’ With white girls, they get impatient. They’re like, ‘Go ahead. Just do it already. Stop asking!’ And that raises my anxiety. Because you can’t begin to understand what happens if I just ‘go ahead.’” Coloring the Place Up “To this day, I’m still very thankful to my high school, though,” Xavier told me. “It would be very ungrateful and overprivileged if I wasn’t. They definitely prepared me for college, academically and even social justice–wise. I think I still would have rather had that than any alternative. My time in high school was definitely . . .” Xavier paused and smiled warmly. “It was nice.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  For much of his freshman year, Wyatt had a girlfriend—his parents had just separated, which had been a huge shock, and he clung to the security and emotional support of a relationship—but since that ended he described himself as being “on the prowl.” Every weekend he would have sex with a different girl (in one-offs, he said, he “nearly always” wore condoms). As soon as it was over, he’d be back on Tinder or stalking someone on Instagram, thinking about who to pursue next. “The number of women I’ve slept with is unbelievable,” he said. “I can’t even begin to count them. I don’t dare.” Sex made him feel good: good about himself, good in general. It eased anxiety, numbed depression, distracted him from and substituted for any true feeling. And, of course, it was fun. “I like that hookups are not this huge emotional thing,” he said. “We can just be primal.” But he was starting to worry that he might be investing too much of his self-worth in sexual conquest. “My actual attraction to the person almost doesn’t matter,” he told me. “If she is assertive enough, there’s a very good chance I’ll just say yes.” I’d met Wyatt through one of his former high school teachers, who’d told me that he led workshops on consent for men on his campus. That was true, he said, although he found other guys were not always so keen on the message. “They’ll say, ‘It’s just not how it’s supposed to be.’ Or they offer up all these very specific circumstances like, ‘Let’s say this girl starts grinding on me and kissing me. Do I still have to ask her?’ They pick away at it. So I find myself explaining, ‘Why would you take the risk?’ Just deal with the fact that it’s awkward and maybe you don’t think it’s sexy. I’d rather have something not be sexy than be accused of rape.” Personally, Wyatt saw establishing consent as erotic, part of the buildup and play of sex. His MO was pretty straightforward: after hanging out and talking to a girl for a while—maybe drinking at a party, though sometimes sober—he’d make his “big move.” “I’ll say, ‘Hey, I think you’re really pretty. Can I kiss you?’ It’s direct, and I don’t want to do that thing where I lean in and get rejected like in the movies. And as things progress, I ask, ‘Do you think that you’re sober enough? Do you want some water?’ Stuff like that. Things that I would want someone to do with me.”

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Such accusations would not come as a surprise to many writers, especially to those who have attempted to pay homage, in their writing, to a beloved. Wayne Koestenbaum tells an instructive story on this account: “Some psycho girlfriend of mine (decades ago!) answered a long rhapsodic letter I’d written her with this terse, humiliating rebuff: ‘Next time, write to me.’ That one command, on a tiny slip of paper, tucked into an envelope. I remember thinking, ‘Wasn’t I writing to her? How could I know, when writing to her, that I secretly wasn’t writing to her?’ At that point, Derrida hadn’t yet written The Post Card, so I didn’t know what to do with my befuddled, wounded sense of being a rhapsodic narcissist of a letter-writer weirdly instructed to ‘relate,’ to speak to someone instead of to the nothingness at the end of writing.” The inexpressible may be contained (inexpressibly!) in the expressed, but the older I get, the more fearful I become of this nothingness, this waxing lyrical about those I love the most (Cordelia). I finish a first draft of this book and give it to Harry. He doesn’t have to tell me that he’s read it: when I come home from work, I can see the pile of ruffled pages sticking out of his knapsack, and I can feel his mood, which one might describe as quiet ire. We agree to go out for lunch the next day to talk about it. At lunch he tells me he feels unbeheld—unheld, even. I know this is a terrible feeling. We go through the draft page by page, mechanical pencils in hand, with him suggesting ways I might facet my representation of him, of us. I try to listen, try to focus on his generosity in letting me write about him at all. He is, after all, a very private person, who has told me more than once that being with me is like an epileptic with a pacemaker being married to a strobe light artist. But nothing can substantively quell my inner defense attorney. How can a book be both a free expression and a negotiation? Is it not idle to fault a net for having holes? That’s just an excuse for a crappy net, he might say. But it’s my book, mine! Yes, but the details of my life, of our life together, don’t belong to you alone. OK, but no mind can take the same interest in his neighbor’s me as in his own. The neighbor’s me falls together with all the rest of the things in one foreign mass, against which his own me stands out in startling relief. A writer’s narcissism. But that’s William James’s description of subjectivity itself, not narcissism. Whatever—why can’t you just write something that will bear adequate witness to me, to us, to our happiness? Because I do not yet understand the relationship between writing and happiness, or writing and holding.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  The location was perfect: the large, white house in Manor Place was just minutes away from the English Faculty Library. Mrs. Hart was somewhat alarming; her pupils told fearsome tales of her low boredom threshold and her impatience with anything that she regarded as stupidity. She was also famously left wing, and one of the most radical of the dons. When I had met her in her college suite, I had felt boring, conventional—and religious, something I sensed immediately would be incomprehensible to her. But to my surprise, she had responded eagerly to my inquiries about the room and had been very keen—even desperate—that I should join the household. Had I been of a more suspicious nature, I might have smelled a rat. My own tutors’ reactions to the plan had been less than reassuring. “Lodging with Jenifer Hart? Oh Lord!” Miss Griffiths had cried in obvious dismay. Dorothy Bednarowska had been more restrained, but even she had been unable to suppress the characteristic rictus of the facial muscles that she made involuntarily when confronted with something alarming. “Well, I don’t suppose it will do you any harm,” she had said reluctantly. “For a while, anyway.” So I went to view the room with some misgivings, and when Mrs. Hart had opened her front door, I was greeted by rather a startling spectacle. The hall was painted scarlet, the dining room a violent purple, and the kitchen an electric turquoise—this at a time when white was almost de rigueur in interior decor. And it was clear that housekeeping was not one of my prospective landlady’s priorities. The walls had not seen a lick of paint for years, and were scuffed, scarred, and slightly grubby. Dust coated every object and had accumulated on shelves and skirting boards in peaceful, undisturbed drifts. There was clutter everywhere. As I walked into the hall and followed Mrs. Hart into the drawing room, I almost tripped over a duffle coat, which lay spread- eagled across the floor. There were some perfectly serviceable hooks just inside the front door, but they seemed to be supporting a grime-laden conglomeration of tennis rackets, umbrellas, and walking sticks, which were wedged tightly together against the wall. There were piles of books and papers on almost every shelf, interspersed with mugs, in which, I later learned, lurked fossilized dregs of Nescafé. When we went upstairs to view the room, it became apparent that something had happened to the banister, because a thick rope was slung along the wall instead, and at the top of the stairs we both had to step over a large pile of dirty sheets and underwear, which uninhibitedly blocked our path. The loud unconventional colors and the mess did not repel me, however.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But I was not allowed to remain on the sidelines. The college had appointed a new dean of discipline. For years Dorothy Bednarowska, my literature tutor, whose approach had been liberal and relaxed, had filled this post. The new dean was Emily Franklin, a large, bovine woman who, I learned with some astonishment, was only a few years older than I. Her pupils told me that she was a fine teacher, if a trifle dull. But despite her relative youth, Miss Franklin had no time for student protest and had decreed not only that there would be no change in the current gate hours, but that the gates would be locked an hour earlier. Furthermore, she had increased the fines for offenders, and as her pièce de résistance, a barbed-wire hedge had appeared, without warning, underneath the favorite climbing-in spot. The college was in an uproar. “Of course, this is quite absurd,” Mrs. Bednarowska said, drawing me aside one day in the corridor. “The silly woman is out of her mind. The virgin vote will be delighted, but it won’t wash.” “The virgin vote?” I asked. “Oh—the conservative wing on the college governing body,” Mrs. Bednarowska replied. “You know who they are! They’re not all virgins, of course, but they might as well be. Anyway, the point is, my dear, what is the Common Room going to do about this?” “We’re sending a deputation to the dean, asking her to reconsider,” I said, a little dazed by my tutor’s assumption that I would take the liberal line. Mrs. Bednarowska gave her characteristic yelp of laughter. “ That won’t work—though it’s very correct, of course,” she opined as she strode off with her curiously splay-footed gait to her rooms. What I had not realized was that, as secretary, I was expected to go with the president of the JCR to put our views to Miss Franklin. Maureen Mackintosh, a clever girl with masses of long red hair, was one of the most politically radical students in college, and I found her distinctly alarming. I always expected her to treat me with disdain, and dreaded lest she strike up a conversation about Vietnam and Cambodia, in which I would certainly not be able to hold my own. And what on earth was an ex-nun doing campaigning for students to spend illicit nights together? To my relief, however, Maureen seemed untroubled by my presence as we set off for Miss Franklin’s apartment. We sat together, side by side, on a sofa in the dean’s room, drinking tiny glasses of sherry in an atmosphere that was distinctly chilly, while the champion of the virgin vote sat with her back to the window, her cat, Smokey, purring noisily on her knee. “No more concessions!” she replied when we formally requested that the new measures be withdrawn and the wire fence removed. She repeated the phrase like a mantra at intervals during the ensuing discussion, almost chanting it in a strangely expressionless falsetto. “No more concessions!”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There was a knife on the mantel that I used to slice my bread; I seized it, and applied it to the stitches. Soon the jacket was its old, masculine self again. With my hair trimmed, I thought, and a pair of proper boy’s shoes upon my feet, anyone - even Kitty herself! - might meet me on the streets of London, and never know me for a girl, at all. There were one or two obstacles to be overcome, of course, before I could begin to put my daring plan into practice. Firstly, I must properly reacquaint myself with the city: it took another week of wandering every day about the streets of Farringdon and St Paul’s, before I could accept the jostling and the roars, and the stares of the men, without smarting.Then there was the problem of where - if I really was to stroll about in costume - I should change. I did not want to live as a boy full-time; nor did I want, just yet, to give up my room at Mrs Best’s. I could imagine that lady’s face, however, if I presented myself before her one day in a pair of trousers. She would think that I had lost my mind, entirely; she might call for a doctor or a policeman. She would certainly throw me out - and then I would be homeless again. I didn’t want that, at all.I needed somewhere, away from Smithfield; I needed, in fact, a dressing-room. But so far as I knew, there were no such places for hire. The gay girls of the Haymarket, I believe, transformed themselves in the public lavatories of Piccadilly - put their make-up on at the wash-hand basins, and changed into their gaudy frocks while the latch on the door said Occupied. This seemed to me a sensible scheme - but hardly one that I could copy, since it would blue my project, rather, to be seen emerging from a ladies’ lavatory in a suit of serge and velvet and a boater.It was indeed amidst the gay life of the West End, however, that I at last found the answer to the problem. I had begun to walk, each day, as far as Soho; and I had noticed there the tremendous number of houses bearing signs that advertised Beds Let By The Hour. In my naivety I wondered at first, who would want to sleep there, for an hour? Then, of course, I realised that no one would: the rooms were for the girls to bring their customers to; to lie abed in, certainly - but not to sleep.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  “The sex can feel like two people having two very distinct experiences,” observed Andrew, a second-semester freshman in Los Angeles who had hooked up with ten girls since school began and had intercourse with five. “There’s not much eye contact. Sometimes you don’t even say anything. And it’s weird to be so open with a stranger.” He paused, searching for a way to encapsulate the experience. “It’s like you’re acting vulnerable, but not actually being vulnerable with someone you don’t know and don’t care very much about. It’s not a problem for me. It’s just—odd. Odd, and not even really fun.” To gird against disappointment—as well as a near-fanatic generational fear of the “awkward”—it’s crucial to get hammered. Hence, the pregame. To say that hookup culture is lubricated by alcohol would be a gross understatement: it is dependent on binge-drinking to create what Wade calls the “compulsory carelessness” necessary for a hookup. Alcohol is, above all, what establishes a couple’s indifference: hooking up sober is almost by definition serious. Inebriation itself—“I was so drunk”—can even become the reason (or the excuse) for an encounter, as opposed to, say, attraction, interest, or connection. “In the stairwells of my dorm,” Andrew told me, “people will talk about how if you didn’t black out, you didn’t go out.” Most of the guys I met were acutely aware that sex with an incapacitated person is assault. Yet, since you need to be drunk in order to hook up, the trick becomes being (and finding someone who is) wasted enough to want to do it but sober enough to be able to express a credible “yes.” And who is to be the judge of that? “I’m very careful about not doing anything if I’m super drunk,” a college freshman in North Carolina told me. “I don’t want to make decisions I’d regret. So I usually limit it to six or seven drinks. But sometimes more.” Even so, he woke up one morning about a month into his first semester with no memory of the night before and a strange girl’s number entered into his phone. “I was freaking out, but I texted her and she said she’d had fun, so luckily it was all right.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  No, she thought, it’s more like I’m not looking for a relationship with you. But of course she didn’t say that out loud. Instead, she smiled and headed for the basement to dance with her friends. Sameer eventually joined them, and they began dancing together. Face-to-face swing turned to blues, but as that turned to grinding and then kissing up against a wall, Anwen grew uneasy. Sameer grabbed her hand and led her to an adjacent room, where he pulled her onto his lap. Being held in someone’s arms felt good, but Anwen didn’t want that someone to be Sameer, and she wasn’t sure how to gracefully disengage. She caught the eye of a guy she knew, hoping he’d sense her distress and intervene. He didn’t. Eventually, she told Sameer she needed to get her things and go home. But it turned out that the room where she’d left her jacket, along with her phone, her ID, and the key card for her dorm—basically everything except a tube of ChapStick—was locked, its occupant nowhere to be found. Sameer got the guy’s number from someone and tried to call him, but the phone went straight to voice mail. They searched the house to see if he’d stashed Anwen’s things someplace else: nothing. What’s more, her friends, the ones she’d asked to keep her from leaving with Sameer, had vanished.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But I decided to answer the simple question by putting together, layer upon layer, in as simple a fashion as I could, what I thought might help someone who really wanted to find the way to Jesus, to Jesus as he really was, and so to find the way through Jesus both to God himself and to a life in which “following Jesus” would make sense. The book then falls, more or less, into three parts. Part One consists of the first five chapters, in which I try to explain what the key questions are, why they matter, and why we today find them difficult to answer. Then, in the central part of the book, Part Two (Chapters 6–14), I try, as simply as I can, to say what I think Jesus’s public career was all about, what he was trying to accomplish, and how he went about it. At this point, to be honest, the material is so rich and dense that I have found myself, like a gardening expert given half an hour to guide a visitor around the Chelsea Flower Show, both spoiled for choice as to what to talk about and anxious about maintaining some shape and direction to the conducted tour. I found it necessary, here and there, to indulge in the cinematic technique of “flashbacks,” and indeed “flash-forwards,” taking readers away from Jesus for a moment to remark on other leaders or would-be leaders in Jewish movements of the period. (I didn’t want to put those up front, or readers might have become tired, and might have despaired of ever arriving at Jesus himself. By placing them where I have, I trust they illuminate Jesus rather than distract attention from him.) In this section I ask readers to try various thought experiments. This is absolutely necessary, because first-century Jews thought very differently from the way we do now—and, indeed, from the ways in which other first-century people such as the Greeks and the Romans thought. We have to make a real effort to see things from a first-century Jewish point of view, if we are to understand what Jesus was all about. All this brings us, in the end, to Jesus’s death, resurrection, and ascension and the meaning of those events. Throughout the whole book, as will quickly become apparent, I have done my best to explore the meaning of the phrase Jesus used as the great slogan for his whole project, the “kingdom of God.”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Isn’t it time we got rid of these old superstitions once and for all?” But as that storm whistles in from the west, watch the skies darken to the north, as other voices clamor for our attention. “Of course Jesus did it! The Bible is the word of God, and we have to believe it! Anyway, he was the Son of God, so he could do that kind of stuff. Miracles were his stock-in-trade. We have to stand up for the truth of the gospels against the blasts of modern skepticism. We can’t let the atheists and the nay-sayers have it all their own way. It’s time to roll back the climate of suspicion and once again learn to trust—to trust the canon of scripture, to trust the great traditions of the church, to trust the God of miracles, to trust Jesus himself. Even to ask the historical question shows that you’ve sold out to the rationalists before you go any farther.” It’s not comfortable being out on an open boat when these two winds strike from their different directions. Believe me—it’s where I’ve lived for the last forty years. The winds are howling around you, you can hardly hear yourself think, and you suspect that neither side can hear too well either. It’s a dialogue of the deaf. If the western wind here stands for the rationalistic skepticism of the last two hundred years and the high-pressure system to the north stands for the “conservative” Christian reaction to that sneering modernist denial, what is the tropical hurricane? We’ll come to that presently. For the moment, let’s examine these first two storm systems a bit more closely. The Distortions of Skepticism and Conservatism The two violent winds of skepticism and conservatism have picked up extra energy from massive social, political, and cultural storms that have raged across the Western world over the last two or three hundred years and that seem, as we speak, to be coming to something of a climax. If you are an American, you will guess that a lot of people taking the “skeptical” position vote Democrat, and a lot of people taking the “trusting” position vote Republican. I could introduce you to several people who buck those trends, but the picture is nonetheless worryingly accurate. Can it really be the case that our judgment about who to vote for and what policies are best for a country and for the world can be mapped so easily onto questions of whether or not to believe a strange set of stories from the first century?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  (Luke 22:31) The devil had already put the idea of betraying him into the heart of Judas, son of Simon Iscariot. . . . After the bread, the satan entered into him. (John 13:2, 27) Many modern writers, understandably, have tried to marginalize this theme, but we can’t expect to push aside such a central part of the tradition and make serious progress. It is, of course, difficult for most people in the modern Western world to know what to make of it at all; that’s one of the points on which the strong wind of modern skepticism has done its work well, and the shrill retort from “traditionalists,” insisting on seeing everything in terms of “supernatural” issues, hardly helps either. As C. S. Lewis points out in the introduction to his famous Screwtape Letters, the modern world divides into those who are obsessed with demonic powers and those who mock them as outdated rubbish. Neither approach, Lewis insists, does justice to the reality. I’m with Lewis on this. Despite the caricatures, the obsessions, and the sheer muddle that people often get themselves into on this subject, there is such a thing as a dark force that seems to take over people, movements, and sometimes whole countries, a force or (as it sometimes seems) a set of forces that can make people do things they would never normally do. You might have thought the history of the twentieth century would provide plenty of examples of this, but many still choose to resist the conclusion—despite the increasing use in public life of the language of “force” (economic “forces,” political “forces,” peer “pressure,” and so on). In recent scholarship, Walter Wink in particular has offered a sharp and compelling analysis of “the powers” and the way they function in today’s world as much as in yesterday’s. The psychotherapist Scott Peck wrote a book, People of the Lie, about the small but significant number of his clients who had, it seemed, bought so deeply into unreality that they appeared to have been taken over by dark forces beyond themselves. The post-Enlightenment idea that such language reeks of medieval superstition is too simplistic by half. Granted the split-level world of Enlightenment thought, we should perhaps expect that we wouldn’t have very good language for talking about a reality that is neither divine nor reducible to terms of the ordinary material world. But this should not stop us trying to come to grips with the reality in question.

• From Another Country (1962)

  And he laughed. “It might happen, my dear,” said Cass, “you’ve got great presence on the screen.” “The movie’s not so much,” said Vivaldo, “but you were terrific.” “I didn’t really have anything to do,” said Eric. “No,” said Ida, “you didn’t. But you sure did the hell out of it.” They walked in silence for a few moments. “I’m afraid I can only have one drink with you,” Cass said, “and then I’ll have to go home.” “That’s right,” Ida said, “let’s don’t be hanging out with these cats until all hours of the morning. I got too many people to face tomorrow. Besides”—she glanced at Vivaldo with a small smile—“I don’t believe they’ve seen each other alone one time since Eric got off the boat.” “And you think we better give them an evening off,” Cass said. “If we don’t give it to them, they going to take it. But, this way, we can make ourselves look good—and that always comes in handy.” She laughed. “That’s right, Cass, you got to be clever if you want to keep your man.” “I should have started taking lessons from you years ago,” Cass said. “Now, be careful,” said Eric, mildly, “because I don’t think that’s very flattering.” “I was joking,” Cass said. “Well, I’m insecure,” said Eric . They walked into Benno’s, which was half-empty tonight, and sat, in a rather abrupt and mysterious silence, at one of the tables in the back. This silence was produced by the fact that each of them had more on their minds than they could easily say. Their sexes, so to speak, obstructed them. Perhaps the women wished to talk to each other concerning their men, but they could not do this with the men present; and neither could Eric and Vivaldo begin to unburden themselves to each other in the presence of Ida and Cass. They made small-talk, therefore, about the movie they had seen and the movie Eric was to make. Even this chatter was constricted and cautious, there being an unavowed reluctance on Eric’s part to go to Hollywood. The nature of this reluctance Vivaldo could not guess; but a certain thoughtfulness, a certain fear, played in Eric’s face like a lighthouse light; and Vivaldo thought that perhaps Eric was afraid of being trapped on a height as he had previously been trapped in the depths. Perhaps he was afraid, as Vivaldo knew himself to be afraid, of any real change in his condition. And he thought, The women have more courage than we do. Then he thought, Maybe they don’t have any choice. After one drink, they put Ida and Cass in a cab, together. Ida said, “Now don’t you wake me up when you come falling in,” and Cass said, “I’ll call you sometime tomorrow.” They waved to their women and watched the red lights of the cab disappear.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “Is it all right?” Jenifer Hart, my new landlady, sounded nervous. She was the tutor in modern history at St. Anne’s, and I had often seen her in college, striding round in flamboyant clothes, which never quite matched and which seemed to make a defiant statement against age and convention. She must have been in her midfifties, but her straight, shoulder-length hair, which she wore pushed behind her ears, was still golden red, though like so many things in her house, it was beginning to fade. Her tanned face was lined—she wore little makeup—and she gave off a rather fierce, uncompromising aura. Yet now she looked anxious and even vulnerable. I had approached her about the room with some trepidation. Word had gone round that she was offering free lodging in return for rather unusual baby-sitting. This was attractive, since my state grant, though adequate, was not princely. The location was perfect: the large, white house in Manor Place was just minutes away from the English Faculty Library. Mrs. Hart was somewhat alarming; her pupils told fearsome tales of her low boredom threshold and her impatience with anything that she regarded as stupidity. She was also famously left wing, and one of the most radical of the dons. When I had met her in her college suite, I had felt boring, conventional—and religious, something I sensed immediately would be incomprehensible to her. But to my surprise, she had responded eagerly to my inquiries about the room and had been very keen—even desperate—that I should join the household. Had I been of a more suspicious nature, I might have smelled a rat. My own tutors’ reactions to the plan had been less than reassuring. “Lodging with Jenifer Hart? Oh Lord!” Miss Griffiths had cried in obvious dismay. Dorothy Bednarowska had been more restrained, but even she had been unable to suppress the characteristic rictus of the facial muscles that she made involuntarily when confronted with something alarming. “Well, I don’t suppose it will do you any harm,” she had said reluctantly. “For a while, anyway.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Emmett has thought about joining one of the handful of historically black frats at the university but isn’t sure the time he’d need to put in as a pledge or what he described as “a more intense hazing process” would be worth the effort. None of those frats have houses on the row, either, which is fairly typical for black Greek institutions—they tend to be underfunded—nor do they have the equivalent hookup scene. African American students are, in general, less likely to drink to excess than whites and more likely to endorse gender equality, negating two essential preconditions for casual campus sex. Additionally, while members of both black and white fraternities objectify female classmates, a comparative study found that they diverged when it came to values regarding dating and intimacy: black Greeks were more likely to say companionship, sharing, and love were the main benefits of a serious relationship; white Greeks cited regular sex and being able to skip the condom. The black men also believed that “respecting women on campus” meant “[treating] a woman the way I would want to be treated” (though some health educators would say that is still the wrong standard—you should treat someone the way they want to be treated); the white guys said such things as “We won’t take advantage of them if they’re wasted,” or “I’ll never ask if she needs a ride home after we hook up. I’ll let her bring it up or let her spend the night.” The contrast was not solely a function of race; the researchers believed their findings might have been different had they also interviewed men at a historically black institution. They concluded that the small size, insularity, and visibility of the black community on a predominantly white campus had contributed, at least in part, to the sense of personal accountability that was largely absent for white men: black Greeks were more conscious of their position as leaders and role models, and that extended to better treatment of women. Emmett had hooked up with a few girls this semester, again almost all of them white. “But I’ve stayed in pretty safe situations,” he said. “The only real out-of-the-blue approaches I’ve had at parties were drunk white women who I guess are extremely horny for some reason, and I’m like, ‘No, this is not okay. Maybe you can hook up with a white guy, but if you’re intoxicated, I’m not going to.’”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  My new shoes looked quaint and girlish, like a principal boy’s in a pantomime. The trousers were shorter, their line rather spoiled. The jacket flared a little, above and below the waist, quite as if I had hips and a bosom - but it felt tighter than before, and not a half as comfortable. My face, of course, I could not see: I had to turn and squint into a picture over the hearth, and saw it reflected there - all eyes and lips - over the red nose and whiskers of ‘Rackity Jack’.I looked at the others. Mrs Dendy and the Professor smiled, Kitty did not look at all nervous, now. Walter was flushed, and seemed awed by his own handiwork. He folded his arms.‘Perfect,’ he said. After that - clad not exactly as a boy but, rather confusingly, as the boy I would have been, had I been more of a girl - my entry into the profession was rather rapid. The very next day Walter sent my costume to a seamstress, and had it properly re-sewn; within a week he had borrowed a hall and a band from a manager who owed him a favour, and had Kitty and I, in our matching suits, practising upon the stage. It was not at all like singing in Mrs Dendy’s parlour. The strangers, the dark and empty hall, disconcerted me; I was stiff and awkward, quite unable to master the few simple strolling steps that Kitty and Walter tried patiently to teach me. At last Walter handed me a cane, and said I should just stand and lean upon it, and let Kitty dance; and that was better, and I grew easier, and the song began to sound funny again. When we had finished and were practising our bows, some of the men in the orchestra clapped us.Kitty sat and took a cup of tea, then; but Walter led me off to a seat in the stalls, away from the others, and looked grave.‘Nan,’ he began, ‘I told you when all this started that I would not press you, and I meant it; I would give up the business altogether before I forced a girl upon the stage against her will. There are fellows who do that sort of thing, you know, fellows who think of nothing but their own pockets. But I am not one of them; and besides, you are my friend. But -’ he took a breath. ‘We have come this far, the three of us; and you are good - I promise you, you are good.’‘With work, perhaps,’ I said doubtfully.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  And his followers really believed it had happened. Talking about someone new being in charge was dangerous talk in Jesus’s day, and it’s dangerous talk still. Someone behaving as if they possess some kind of authority is an obvious threat to established rulers and other power brokers. Perhaps that’s why, particularly in the last two or three hundred years, this side of Jesus hasn’t been explored too much. Our culture has become used to thinking of Jesus as a “religious” figure rather than a “political” one. We have seen those two categories as watertight compartments, to be kept strictly separate. But it wasn’t like that for Jesus and others of his time. What would happen if we took the risk of going back into his world, into his vision of God, and asking, “Suppose it really is true?” What would it look like, in other words, if Jesus not only was in charge then, but is in charge today as well? A ridiculous idea, you might say. It’s blindingly obvious that Jesus isn’t in charge in our world. Murder, misery, and mayhem still continue, as they always have. Even Jesus’s own so-called followers contribute their fair share. (As I write this, a “Christian” mob is vowing to take violent revenge on adherents of another religion who have bombed a packed church.) What could we possibly mean by saying, “Jesus is in charge”? Well, we’ll come to that later. But before we can even get going, we have to face a problem that is peculiarly our own. Behind the three historical puzzles ( Jesus’s world, Jesus’s God, and Jesus’s behavior—acting as if he was in charge) are additional difficulties that, like the elements of a perfect storm, have come together to pose severe challenges for anyone trying to address the questions about Jesus, let alone to do so simply. Part Two Part Three Further Reading I T WOULD BE possible to compile a bibliography for the present book that would be almost as long as a chapter. An annotated bibliography could easily be as long as the book itself. Instead, I content myself here with noting some recent books that I regard as supplementing (and quite often challenging) the work I set out in Jesus and the Victory of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996) and The Challenge of Jesus (London: SPCK; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000). They remain basic for my own account of Jesus, standing firmly on the foundations laid (not least in regard to Second Temple Judaism) in The New Testament and the People of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992). For the resurrection, one may cite The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003). A team of scholars has engaged with my work in the recent symposium Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T.