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 Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  She told us she’d never been big on conflict. “I expect my employees to do their jobs without hand-holding,” she said in our first session. In 360s with her team, we heard several complaints that her new employees didn’t know where they really stood with her. Everything was hinted at. “Become a better coach” and “become more assertive” were the two leadership skills we worked with her on over the coming months. Executive coach Peter Bregman had a similar experience with two of his clients. One of them was seen as the apparent successor to the CEO, but he had a problem. “Several of his direct reports were close friends, and he didn’t hold them accountable in the same way he held his other direct reports,” said Bregman. “They didn’t do what he asked and weren’t delivering the results expected. It was hurting his business and his reputation.” Bregman said the other members of this team saw the problem clearly enough and they admitted it was affecting their own motivation because of the unfairness. The leader, on the other hand, had blinders on. He didn’t see it. Bregman’s other client was CEO of a fast-growing billion-dollar enterprise. “He’s warm, gregarious, and authentic,” said the coach. “He’s learned, the hard way, that having friends when you’re the boss can be complicated.” He used to have work friends come to his house for dinner and get to know his family. “But then I had to make hard calls for the good of the business, including firing one of them, and it became too painful. I became hesitant to make decisions because of it. So no, I’m not looking for friends at work.” Bregman explained that this second leader doesn’t avoid friendships with employees because he is a bad guy. He avoids them because he is a good guy. Indeed, it can be hard for leaders to have close friends in the employee ranks, either because they can’t separate friendships from business decisions, or because they have to make tough calls that may destroy those relationships. “There’s plenty of research supporting the idea that having friends at work makes you happier and more engaged,” Bregman adds. “But the research doesn’t address that friendships at work are tricky, especially when you’re the boss.” This means for those who are promoted from individual contributor to manager, or from manager to a manager-of-managers, they can choose to be proactive. Says Professor Art Markman of the University of Texas at Austin, “Make an effort to take some of your [work] friends out and talk to them about some of the stresses and responsibilities of the new position. Help them understand some of the tensions you’re feeling. You may assume that your friends will implicitly understand the tensions you have, but they are much more likely to be sympathetic if you have an open conversation.”

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  While there were no doubt occasional outbreaks of infectious diseases in prehistory, it’s unlikely they spread far, even with high levels of sexual promiscuity. It would have been nearly impossible for pathogens to take hold in widely dispersed groups of foragers with infrequent contact between groups. The conditions necessary for devastating epidemics or pandemics just didn’t exist until the agricultural revolution. The claim that modern medicine and sanitation save us from infectious diseases that ravaged pre-agricultural people (something we hear often) is like arguing that seat belts and air bags protect us from car crashes that were fatal to our prehistoric ancestors. Stressed to Death If an infectious virus doesn’t get you, a stressed-out lifestyle and high-fat diet probably will. Cortisol, the hormone your body releases when under stress, is the strongest immunosuppressant known. In other words, nothing weakens our defenses against disease quite like stress. Even something as seemingly unimportant as not getting enough sleep can have a dramatic effect on immunity. Sheldon Cohen and his colleagues studied the sleep habits of 153 healthy men and women for two weeks before putting them in quarantine and exposing them to rhinovirus, which causes the common cold. The less an individual slept, the more likely he or she was to come down with a cold. Those who slept less than seven hours per night were three times as likely to get sick. 19 If you want to live long, sleep more and eat less. To date, the only demonstrably effective method for prolonging mammalian life is severe caloric reduction. When pathologist Roy Walford fed mice about half of what they wanted to eat, they lived about twice as long—the equivalent of 160 human years. They not only lived longer, but stayed fitter and smarter as well (as judged by—you guessed it—running through mazes). Follow-up studies on insects, dogs, monkeys, and humans have confirmed the benefits of going through life hungry. Intermittent fasting was associated with more than a 40 percent reduction in heart disease risk in a study of 448 people published in the American Journal of Cardiology reporting that “most diseases, including cancer, diabetes and even neurodegenerative illnesses, are forestalled” by caloric reduction. 20 These studies lead to the slacker-friendly conclusion that in the ancestral environment, where our predecessors lived hand-to-mouth, a certain amount of dietary inconsistency—perhaps exacerbated by sheer laziness interrupted by regular aerobic exercise—would have been adaptive, even healthy. To put it another way, if you hunt or gather just enough low-fat food to forestall serious hunger pangs, and spend the rest of your time in low-stress activities such as telling stories by the fire, taking extended hammock-embraced naps, and playing with children, you’d be engaged in the optimal lifestyle for human longevity. 21 Which brings us back to the eternal question asked by foragers offered the chance to join the “civilized” world and adopt farming: Why?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Despite the omnipresence of billboards and bus stops featuring semi-naked barely pubescent fashion models, significant parts of American society remain adamantly opposed to any suggestion that sexual activity may commence before the law allows. 6 In 2003, seventeen-year-old honor student and homecoming king Genarlow Wilson was caught having consensual oral sex with his girlfriend, who had not yet turned sixteen. He was convicted of aggravated child molestation, sentenced to a minimum of ten years in a Georgia prison, and forced to register as a sex offender for life. If Wilson and his girlfriend had just enjoyed good old-fashioned intercourse, as opposed to oral sex, their “crime” would have been a misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum of a year in prison and no sex-offender status. 7 The previous year, Todd Senters videotaped consensual sex with his girlfriend, who was over the age of consent. No problem, right? Wrong. According to Nebraska state law, although the sex itself was perfectly legal, taping it constituted “manufacturing child pornography.” The seventeen-year-old was legally permitted to have sex, but images of her doing so are illegal. Go figure. Adolescents all over the country are getting into serious trouble for sexting one another: snapping a risqué photo of themselves with their cell phone and sending it to a friend. Turns out, in many states, these kids can be sent to prison (where sexual abuse is rampant) for photographing their own bodies (manufacturing child pornography) and sharing the photos (distributing child pornography). They’re being forced to register as sex offenders despite the fact that they themselves are the “victims” of their own “crimes.” 8 Just Say What? A 2005 survey of 12,000 adolescents found that those who had pledged to remain abstinent until marriage were more likely to have oral and anal sex than other teens, less likely to use condoms, and just as likely to contract sexually transmitted diseases as their unapologetically nonabstinent peers. The study’s authors found that 88 percent of those who pledged abstinence admitted to failing to keep their pledge. 9 If our distorted relationship with human sexuality is the source of much of this frustration, confusion, and ignorance, societies with less conflicted views should confirm the causal connection. Developmental neuropsychologist James Prescott found that bodily pleasure and violence seem to have an either/or relationship—the presence of one inhibits development of the other. In 1975, Prescott published a paper in which he argued that “certain sensory experiences during the formative periods of development will create a neuropsychological predisposition for either violence-seeking or pleasure-seeking behaviors later in life.” On the level of individual development, this finding seems obvious: adults who abuse children were almost always victims of childhood abuse themselves, and every junkyard owner knows that if you want a mean dog, beat the puppy.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Why work so hard when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world? Why stress over weeding the garden when there are “plenty fish, plenty fruits, and plenty birdies”? We are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different. K URT V ONNEGUT, J R. In 1902 the New York Times carried a report headlined “Laziness Germ Discovered.” It seems one Dr. Stiles, a zoologist at the Department of Agriculture, had discovered the germ responsible for “degenerates known as crackers or poor whites” in the “Southern States.” But in fact, our laziness seems less in need of explanation than our frenzied industry. How many beavers die in dam-construction accidents? Are birds subject to sudden spells of vertigo that send them falling from the sky? How many fish drown to death? Such events are all rather infrequent we’d wager, but the toll exacted upon humans by the chronic stress many consider a normal part of human life is massive. In Japan, there’s a word for it, : death from overwork. Japanese police records indicate that as many as 2,200 Japanese workers committed suicide in 2008 due to overwhelming work conditions, and five times that number died from stress-induced strokes and heart attacks, according to Rengo, a labor union federation. But whether our language contains a handy term for it or not, the devastating effects of chronic stress are not limited to Japan. Heart disease, circulatory problems, digestive disorders, insomnia, depression, sexual dysfunction, and obesity—behind every one of them lurks chronic stress. If we really did evolve in a Hobbesian ordeal of constant terror and anxiety, if our ancestors’ lives truly were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, why, then, are we still so vulnerable to stress? 22 Who You Calling a Starry-Eyed Romantic, Pal? Many otherwise reasonable people seem to have a burning need to locate the roots of war deep in our primal past, to see self-sufficient foragers as poor, and to spread the misbegotten gospel that three or four decades was a ripe old age for a human being in pre-agricultural times. But this vision of our past is demonstrably false. ¿Que pasa? If prehistoric life was a perpetual struggle that ended in early death, if ours is a species motivated almost exclusively by self-interest, if war is an ancient, biologically embedded tendency, then one can soothingly argue, as Steven Pinker does, that things are getting better all the time—that, in his Panglossian view, “we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on Earth.” That would be encouraging news, indeed, which is what most audiences want to hear, after all. We all want to believe things are getting better, that our species is learning, growing, and prospering. Who refuses congratulations for having the good sense to be alive here and now?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Prehistoric humans did not habitually store food, but this doesn’t mean they lived in chronic hunger. Studies of prehistoric human bones and teeth show ancient human life was marked by episodic fasts and feasts, but prolonged periods of starvation were rare. How do we know our ancestors weren’t living at the brink of starvation? When children and adolescents don’t get adequate nutrition for as little as a week, growth slows in the long bones in their arms and legs. When their nutritional intake recovers and the bones begin to grow again, the density of the new bone growth differs from before the interruption. X-rays reveal these telltale lines in ancient bones, known as Harris lines. 10 Periods of more prolonged malnutrition leave signs on the teeth known as hypoplasias—discolored bands and small pits in the enamel surface, which can still be seen many centuries later in fossilized remains. Archaeologists find fewer Harris lines and dental hypoplasias in the remains of prehistoric hunter-gatherer populations than they do in the skeletons of settled populations who lived in villages dependent on cultivation for their food supply. Being highly mobile, hunter-gatherers were unlikely to suffer from prolonged starvation since in most cases, they could simply move to areas where conditions were better. Approximately eight hundred skeletons from the Dickson Mounds in the lower Illinois Valley have been analyzed. They reveal a clear picture of the health changes that accompanied the shift from foraging to corn farming around 1200 AD. Archaeologist George Armelagos and his colleagues reported that the farmers’ remains show a 50 percent increase in chronic malnutrition, and three times the incidence of infectious diseases (indicated by bone lesions) compared with the foragers who preceded them. Furthermore, they found evidence of increased infant mortality, delayed skeletal growth in adults, and a fourfold increase in porotic hyperostosis, indicating iron-deficiency anemia in more than half the population. 11 Many have noted the strangely cavalier approach to food among foragers, who have nothing in the freezer. French Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune, who spent some six months among the Montagnais in present-day Quebec, was exasperated by the natives’ generosity. “If my host took two, three, or four Beavers,” wrote Le Jeune, “whether it was day or night, they had a feast for all neighboring Savages. And if those people had captured something, they had one also at the same time; so that, on emerging from one feast, you went to another, and sometimes even to a third and a fourth.”

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Steger and his wife have a net worth of roughly $3.5 million, he still typically works twelve-hour days plus another ten hours on weekends. “A few million,” explains Steger, “doesn’t go as far as it used to.” Gary Kremen (estimated net worth: $10 million), founder of Match.com, an online dating service, explains, “Everyone around here looks at the people above them.” He continues to work sixty to eighty hours per week because, he says, “You’re nobody here at $10 million.” Another executive gets right to the point, saying, “Here, the top 1 percent chases the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and the top one-tenth of 1 percent chases the top one-one-hundredth of 1 percent.” 17 This sort of thinking isn’t limited to Silicon Valley. A BBC report from September 2003 reported, “Well-off is the new poor.” Dr. Clive Hamilton, a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, set out to study the “suffering rich” and found that four of every ten people earning over £50,000 (roughly $80,000 at the time) felt “deprived.” Hamilton concluded, “The real concerns of yesterday’s poor have become the imagined concerns of today’s rich.” Another recent survey in the United States found that 45 percent of those with a net worth (excluding their home) over $1 million were worried about running out of money before they died. Over one-third of those with more than $5 million had the same concern. 18 “Affluenza” (a.k.a. luxury fever) is not an eternal affliction of the human animal, as some would have us believe. It is an effect of wealth disparities that arose with agriculture. Still, even in modern societies, we sometimes find echoes of the ancient egalitarianism of our ancestors. In the early 1960s, a physician named Stewart Wolf heard about a town of Italian immigrants and their descendants in northeast Pennsylvania where heart disease was practically unknown. Wolf decided to take a closer look at the town, Roseto. He found that almost no one under age fifty-five showed symptoms of heart disease. Men over sixty-five suffered about half the number of heart problems expected of average Americans. The overall death rate in Roseto was about one-third below national averages. After conducting research that carefully excluded factors such as exercise, diet, and regional variables like pollution levels, Wolf and sociologist John Bruhn concluded that the major factor keeping folks in Roseto healthier longer was the nature of the community itself.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  When they were left alone, Katavasov addressed him. 'What different positions they come from, all those fellows who are going off there,' Katavasov said vaguely, not wishing to express his own opinion, and at the same time anxious to find out the old man's views. The old man was an officer who had served on two campaigns. He knew what makes a soldier, and judging by the appearance and the talk of those persons, by the swagger with which they had recourse to the bottle on the journey, he considered them poor soldiers. Moreover, he lived in a district town, and he was longing to tell how one soldier had volunteered from his town, a drunkard and a thief whom no one would employ as a labourer. But knowing by experience that in the present condition of the public temper it was dangerous to express an opinion opposed to the general one, and especially to criticise the volunteers unfavourably, he too watched Katavasov without committing himself. 'Well, men are wanted there,' he said, laughing with his eyes. And they fell to talking of the last war news, and each concealed from the other his perplexity as to the engagement expected next day, since the Turks had been beaten, according to the latest news, at all points. And so they parted, neither giving expression to his opinion. Katavasov went back to his own carriage, and with reluctant hypocrisy reported to Sergey Ivanovitch his observations of the volunteers, from which it would appear that they were capital fellows. At the big station at a town the volunteers were again greeted with shouts and singing, again men and women with collecting-boxes appeared, and provincial ladies brought bouquets to the volunteers and followed them into the refreshment-room; but all this was on a much smaller and feebler scale than in Moscow. IV W HILE the train was stopping at the provincial town, Sergey Ivanovitch did not go to the refreshment-room, but walked up and down the platform. The first time he passed Vronsky's compartment he noticed that the curtain was drawn over the window; but as he passed it the second time he saw the old countess at the window. She beckoned to Koznishev. 'I'm going, you see, taking him as far as Kursk,' she said. 'Yes, so I heard,' said Sergey Ivanovitch, standing at her window and peeping in. 'What a noble act on his part!' he added, noticing that Vronsky was not in the compartment. 'Yes, after his misfortune, what was there for him to do?' 'What a terrible thing it was!' said Sergey Ivanovitch. 'Ah, what I have been through! But do get in. . . . Ah, what I have been through!' she repeated, when Sergey Ivanovitch had got in and sat down beside her. 'You can't conceive it! For six weeks he did not speak to anyone, and would not touch food except when I implored him.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Again, just as at the first moment of hearing of her rupture with her husband, Vronsky, on reading the letter, was unconsciously carried away by the natural sensation aroused in him by his own relation to the betrayed husband. Now while he held his letter in his hands, he could not help picturing the challenge, which he would not likely find at home today or tomorrow, and the duel itself, in which, with the same cold and haughty expression that his face was assuming at this moment, he would await the injured husband's shot, after having himself fired into the air. And at that instant there flashed across his mind the thought of what Serpuhovskoy had just said to him, and what he had himself been thinking in the morning—that it was better not to bind himself—and he knew that this thought he could not tell her. Having read the letter, he raised his eyes to her, and there was no determination in them. She saw at once that he had been thinking about it before by himself. She knew that whatever he might say to her, he would not say all he thought. And she knew that her last hope had failed her. This was not what she had been reckoning on. 'You see the sort of man he is,' she said, with a shaking voice; 'he . . . ' 'Forgive me, but I rejoice at it,' Vronsky interrupted. 'For God's sake, let me finish!' he added, his eyes imploring her to give him time to explain his words. 'I rejoice, because things cannot, cannot possibly remain as he supposes.' 'Why can't they?' Anna said, restraining her tears, and obviously attaching no sort of consequence to what he said. She felt that her fate was sealed. Vronsky meant that after the duel—inevitable, he thought—things could not go on as before, but he said something different. 'It can't go on. I hope that now you will leave him. I hope'—he was confused, and reddened—'that you will let me arrange and plan our life. Tomorrow…' he was beginning. She did not let him go on. 'But my child!' she shrieked. 'You see what he writes! I should have to leave him, and I can't and won't do that.' 'But, for God's sake, which is better?—leave your child, or keep up this degrading position?' 'To whom is it degrading?' 'To all, and most of all to you.' 'You say degrading . . . don't say that. Those words have no meaning for me,' she said in a shaking voice. She did not want him now to say what was untrue. She had nothing left her but his love, and she wanted to love him. 'Don't you understand that from the day I loved you everything has changed for me?

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  XXXIV B EFORE the end of the course of drinking the waters, Prince Shtcherbatsky, who had gone on from Carlsbad to Baden and Kissingen to Russian friends—to get a breath of Russian air, as he said—came back to his wife and daughter. The views of the prince and of the princess on life abroad were completely opposed. The princess thought everything delightful, and in spite of her established position in Russian society, she tried abroad to be like a European fashionable lady, which she was not—for the simple reason that she was a typical Russian gentlewoman; and so she was affected, which did not altogether suit her. The prince, on the contrary, thought everything foreign detestable, got sick of European life, kept to his Russian habits, and purposely tried to show himself abroad less European than he was in reality. The prince returned thinner, with the skin hanging in loose bags on his cheeks, but in the most cheerful frame of mind. His good-humour was even greater when he saw Kitty completely recovered. The news of Kitty's friendship with Madame Stahl and Varenka, and the reports the princess gave him of some kind of change she had noticed in Kitty, troubled the prince and aroused his habitual feeling of jealousy of everything that drew his daughter away from him, and a dread that his daughter might have got out of the reach of his influence into regions inaccessible to him. But these unpleasant matters were all drowned in the sea of kindliness and good-humour which was always within him, and more so than ever since his course of Carlsbad waters. The day after his arrival the prince, in his long overcoat, with his Russian wrinkles and baggy cheeks propped up by a starched collar, set off with his daughter to the spring in the greatest good-humour. It was a lovely morning: the bright, cheerful houses with their little gardens, the sight of the red-faced, red-armed beer-drinking German waitresses, working away merrily, did the heart good. But the nearer they got to the springs the oftener they met sick people; and their appearance seemed more pitiable than ever among the everyday conditions of prosperous German life. Kitty was no longer struck by this contrast.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  And in the whole arsenal of his convictions, so far from finding any satisfactory answers, he was utterly unable to find anything at all like an answer. He was in the position of a man seeking food in toy-shops and tool-shops. Instinctively, unconsciously, with every book, with every conversation, with every man he met, he was on the lookout for light on these questions and their solution. What puzzled and distracted him above everything was that the majority of men of his age and circle had, like him, exchanged their old beliefs for the same new convictions, and yet saw nothing to lament in this, and were perfectly satisfied and serene. So that, apart from the principal question, Levin was tortured by other questions too. Were these people sincere? he asked himself, or were they playing a part? or was it that they understood the answers science gave to these problems in some different, clearer sense than he did? And he assiduously studied both these men's opinions and the books which treated of these scientific explanations. One fact he had found out since these questions had engrossed his mind, was that he had been quite wrong in supposing from the recollections of the circle of his young days at college, that religion had outlived its day, and that it was now practically non-existent. All the people nearest to him who were good in their lives were believers. The old prince, and Lvov, whom he liked so much, and Sergey Ivanovitch, and all the women believed, and his wife believed as simply as he had believed in his earliest childhood, and ninety-nine hundredths of the Russian people, all the working-people for whose life he felt the deepest respect, believed. Another fact of which he became convinced, after reading many scientific books, was that the men who shared his views had no other construction to put on them, and that they gave no explanation of the questions which he felt he could not live without answering, but simply ignored their existence and attempted to explain other questions of no possible interest to him, such as the evolution of organisms, the materialistic theory of consciousness, etc. Moreover, during his wife's confinement, something had happened that seemed extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into praying, and at the moment he prayed, he believed. But that moment had passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that moment fit into the rest of his life. He could not admit that at that moment he knew the truth, and that now he was wrong; for as soon as he began thinking calmly about it, it all fell to pieces. He could not admit that he was mistaken then, for his spiritual condition then was precious to him, and to admit that it was a proof of weakness would have been to desecrate those moments.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  (These latter days she used these names almost alternately.) 'I didn't expect you! I'm going through my wardrobe to see what's for whom . . . ' 'Oh! that's very nice!' he said gloomily, looking at the maid. 'You can go, Dunyasha, I'll call you presently,' said Kitty. 'Kostya, what's the matter?' she asked, definitely, adopting this familiar name as soon as the maid had gone out. She noticed his strange face, agitated and gloomy, and a panic came over her. 'Kitty, I'm in torture. I can't suffer alone,' he said with despair in his voice, standing before her and looking imploringly into her eyes. He saw already from her loving, truthful face, that nothing could come of what he had meant to say, but yet he wanted her to reassure him herself. 'I've come to say that there's still time. This can all be stopped and set right.' 'What? I don't understand. What is the matter?' 'What I have said a thousand times over, and can't help thinking . . . that I'm not worthy of you. You couldn't consent to marry me. Think a little. You've made a mistake. Think it over thoroughly. You can't love me. . . . If . . . better say so,' he said, not looking at her. 'I shall be wretched. Let people say what they like; anything's better than misery…. Far better now while there's still time….' 'I don't understand,' she answered, panic-stricken; 'you mean you want to give it up . . . don't want it?' 'Yes, if you don't love me.' 'You're out of your mind!' she cried, turning crimson with vexation. But his face was so piteous, that she restrained her vexation, and flinging some clothes off an armchair, she sat down beside him. 'What are you thinking? tell me all.' 'I am thinking you can't love me. What can you love me for?' 'My God! what can I do? .. .' she said, and burst into tears. 'Oh! what have I done?' he cried, and kneeling before her, he fell to kissing her hands. When the princess came into the room five minutes later, she found them completely reconciled. Kitty had not simply assured him that she loved him, but had gone so far—in answer to his question, what she loved him for—as to explain what for. She told him that she loved him because she understood him completely, because she knew what he would like, and because everything he liked was good. And this seemed to him perfectly clear. When the princess came to them, they were sitting side by side on the chest, sorting the dresses and disputing over Kitty's wanting to give Dunyasha the brown dress she had been wearing when Levin proposed to her, while he insisted that that dress must never be given away, but Dunyasha must have the blue one. 'How is it you don't see? She's a brunette, and it won't suit her. .. .

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'What an inclination we all have, though, for these cruel spectacles!' he said. 'I observe …' 'Eh? I don't understand,' said Anna contemptuously. He was offended and at once began to say what he had meant to say. 'I am obliged to tell you,' he began. 'So now we are to have it out,' she thought, and she felt frightened. 'I am obliged to tell you that your behaviour has been unbecoming today,' he said to her in French. 'In what way has my behaviour been unbecoming?' she said aloud, turning her head swiftly and looking him straight in the face, not with the bright expression that seemed covering something, but with a look of determination, under which she concealed with difficulty the dismay she was feeling. 'Mind,' he said, pointing to the open window opposite the coachman. He got up and pulled up the window. 'What did you consider unbecoming?' she repeated. 'The despair you were unable to conceal at the accident to one of the riders.' He waited for her to answer, but she was silent, looking straight before her. 'I have already begged you so to conduct yourself in society that even malicious tongues can find nothing to say against you. There was a time when I spoke of your inward attitude, but I am not speaking of that now. Now I speak only of your external attitude. You have behaved improperly, and I would wish it not to occur again.' She did not hear half of what he was saying; she felt panic-stricken before him, and was thinking whether it was true that Vronsky was not killed. Was it of him they were speaking when they said the rider was unhurt, but the horse had broken its back? She merely smiled with a pretence of irony when he finished, and made no reply, because she had not heard what he said. Alexey Alexandrovitch had begun to speak boldly, but as he realised plainly what he was speaking of, the dismay she was feeling infected him too. He saw the smile, and a strange misapprehension came over him. 'She is smiling at my suspicions. Yes, she will tell me directly what she told me before; that there is no foundation for my suspicions, that it's absurd.' At that moment, when the revelation of everything was hanging over him, there was nothing he expected so much as that she would answer mockingly as before that his suspicions were absurd and utterly groundless. So terrible to him was what he knew that now he was ready to believe anything. But the expression of her face, scared and gloomy, did not now promise even deception. 'Possibly I was mistaken,' said he. 'If so, I beg your pardon.' 'No, you were not mistaken,' she said deliberately, looking desperately into his cold face. 'You were not mistaken. I was, and I could not help being in despair.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Twenty minutes had passed. 'By now he has received the note and is coming back. Not long, ten minutes more.. . . But what if he doesn't come? No, that cannot be. He mustn't see me with tear-stained eyes. I'll go and wash. Yes, yes; did I do my hair or not?' she asked herself. And she could not remember. She felt her head with her hand. 'Yes, my hair has been done, but when I'did it I can't in the least remember.' She could not believe the evidence of her hand, and went up to the pier-glass to see whether she really had done her hair. She certainly had, but she could not think when she had done it. 'Who's that?' she thought, looking in the looking-glass at the swollen face with strangely glittering eyes, that looked in a scared way at her. 'Why, it's I ! ' she suddenly understood, and looking round, she seemed all at once to feel his kisses on her, and twitched her shoulders, shuddering. Then she lifted her hand to her lips and kissed it. 'What is it? Why, I'm going out of my mind!' and she went into her bedroom, where Annushka was tidying the room. 'Annushka,' she said, coming to a standstill before her, and she stared at the maid, not knowing what to say to her. 'You meant to go and see Darya Alexandrovna,' said the girl, as though she understood. 'Darya Alexandrovna? Yes, I'll go. 'Fifteen minutes there, fifteen minutes back. He's coming, he'll be here soon.' She took out her watch and looked at it. 'But how could he go away, leaving me in such a state? How can he live, without making it up with me?' She went to the window and began looking into the street. Judging by the time, he might be back now. But her calculations might be wrong, and she began once more to recall when he had started and to count the minutes. At the moment when she had moved away to the big clock to compare it with her watch, some one drove up. Glancing out of window, she saw his carriage. But no one came upstairs, and voices could be heard below. It was the messenger who had come back in the carriage. She went down to him. 'We didn't catch the count. The count had driven off on the lower city road.' 'What do you say? What! . ..' she said to the rosy, good-humoured Mihail, as he handed her back her note. 'Why, then, he has never received it!' she thought. 'Go with this note to Countess Vronsky's place, you know? and bring an answer back immediately,' she said to the messenger. 'And I, what am I going to do?' she thought. 'Yes, I'm going to Dolly's, that's true, or else I shall go out of my mind.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Where were you meaning to spend the evening?' 'Oh, nowhere specially. I promised Sviazhsky to go to the Society of Agriculture. By all means, let us go,' said Levin. 'Very good; come along. Find out if my carriage is here,' Stepan Arkadyevitch said to the waiter. Levin went up to the table, paid the forty roubles he had lost; paid his bill, the amount of which was in some mysterious way ascertained by the little old waiter who stood at the counter, and swinging his arms he walked through all the rooms to the way out. IX 'O BLONSKY' S carriage!' the porter shouted in an angry bass. The carriage drove up and both got in. It was only for the first few moments, while the carriage was driving out of the club-house gates, that Levin was still under the influence of the club atmosphere of repose, comfort, and unimpeachable good form. But as soon as the carriage drove out into the street, and he felt it jolting over the uneven road, heard the angry shout of a sledge-driver coming towards them, saw in the uncertain light the red blind of a tavern and the shops, this impression was dissipated, and he began to think over his actions, and to wonder whether he was doing right in going to see Anna. What would Kitty say? But Stepan Arkadyevitch gave him no time for reflection, and, as though divining his doubts, he scattered them. 'How glad I am,' he said, 'that you should know her! You know Dolly has long wished for it. And Lvov's been to see her, and often goes. Though she is my sister,' Stepan Arkadyevitch pursued, 'I don't hesitate to say that she's a remarkable woman. But you will see. Her position is very painful, especially now.' 'Why especially now?' 'We are carrying on negotiations with her husband about a divorce. And he's agreed; but there are difficulties in regard to the son, and the business, which ought to have been arranged long ago, has been dragging on for three months past. As soon as the divorce is over, she will marry Vronsky. How stupid these old ceremonies are, that no one believes in, and which only prevent people being comfortable!' Stepan Arkadyevitch put in. 'Well, then their position will be as regular as mine, as yours.' 'What is the difficulty?' said Levin. 'Oh, it's a long and tedious story! The whole business is in such an anomalous position with us. But the point is she has been for three months in Moscow, where everyone knows her, waiting for the divorce; she goes out nowhere, sees no woman except Dolly, because, do you understand, she doesn't care to have people come as a favour. That fool Princess Varvara, even she has left her, considering this a breach of propriety. Well, you see, in such a position any other woman would not have found resources in herself.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Only during the first day of his stay in Moscow Levin had been struck by the expenditure, strange to one living in the country, unproductive but inevitable, that was expected of him on every side. But by now he had grown used to it. That had happened to him in this matter which is said to happen to drunkards—the first glass sticks in the throat, the second flies down like a hawk, but after the third they're like tiny little birds. When Levin had changed his first hundred-rouble note to pay for liveries for his footmen and hall-porter, he could not help reflecting that these liveries were of no use to anyone—but they were indubitably necessary, to judge by the amazement of the princess and Kitty when he suggested that they might do without liveries,—that these liveries would cost the wages of two labourers for the summer, that is, would pay for about three hundred working days from Easter to Ash-Wednesday, and each day of hard work from early morning to late evening—and that hundred-rouble note did stick in his throat. But the next note, changed to pay for providing a dinner for their relations, that cost twenty-eight roubles, though it did excite in Levin the reflection that twenty-eight roubles meant nine measures of oats, which men would with groans and sweat have reaped and bound and threshed and winnowed and sifted and sown,—this next one he parted with more easily. And now the notes he changed no longer aroused such reflections, and they flew off like little birds. Whether the labour devoted to obtaining the money corresponded to the pleasure given by what was bought with it, was a consideration he had long ago dismissed. His business calculation that there was a certain price below which he could not sell certain grain was forgotten too. The rye, for the price of which he had so long held out, had been sold for fifty kopecks a measure cheaper than it had been fetching a month ago. Even the consideration that with such an expenditure he could not go on living for a year without debt, that even had no force. Only one thing was essential: to have money in the bank, without inquiring where it came from, so as to know that one had the wherewithal to buy meat for tomorrow. And this condition had hitherto been fulfilled; he had always had the money in the bank. But now the money in the bank had gone, and he could not quite tell where to get the next instalment. And this it was which, at the moment when Kitty had mentioned money, had disturbed him; but he had no time to think about it. He drove off, thinking of Katavasov and the meeting with Metrov that was before him. III L EVIN had on this visit to town seen a great deal of his old friend at the university, Professor Katavasov, whom he had not seen since his marriage.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Sport has, in my opinion, a great value, and as is always the case, we see nothing but what is most superficial.' 'It's not superficial,' said Princess Tverskoy. 'One of the officers, they say, has broken two ribs.' Alexey Alexandrovitch smiled his smile, which uncovered his teeth, but revealed nothing more. 'We'll admit, princess, that that's not superficial,' he said, 'but internal. But that's not the point,' and he turned again to the general with whom he was talking seriously; 'we mustn't forget that those who are taking part in the race are military men, who have chosen that career, and one must allow that every calling has its disagreeable side. It forms an integral part of the duties of an officer. Low sports, such as prizefighting or Spanish bull-fights, are a sign of barbarity. But specialised trials of skill are a sign of development.' 'No, I shan't come another time; it's too upsetting,' said Princess Betsy. 'Isn't it, Anna?' 'It is upsetting, but one can't tear oneself away,' said another lady. 'If I'd been a Roman woman I should never have missed a single circus.' Anna said nothing, and keeping her opera-glass up, gazed always at the same spot. At that moment a tall general walked through the pavilion. Breaking off what he was saying, Alexey Alexandrovitch got up hurriedly, though with dignity, and bowed low to the general. 'You're not racing?' the officer asked, chaffing him. 'My race is a harder one,' Alexey Alexandrovitch responded deferentially. And though the answer meant nothing, the general looked as though he had heard a witty remark from a witty man, and fully relished la pointe de la sauce. 'There are two aspects,' Alexey Alexandrovitch resumed: 'those who take part and those who look on; and love for such spectacles is an unmistakable proof of a low degree of development in the spectator, I admit, but . . . ' 'Princess, bets!' sounded Stepan Arkadyevitch's voice from below, addressing Betsy. 'Who's your favourite?' 'Anna and I are for Kuzovlev,' replied Betsy. 'I'm for Vronsky. A pair of gloves?' 'Done!' 'But it is a pretty sight, isn't it?' Alexey Alexandrovitch paused while there was talking about him, but he began again directly. 'I admit that manly sports do not . . .' he was continuing. But at that moment the racers started, and all conversation ceased. Alexey Alexandrovitch too was silent, and everyone stood up and turned towards the stream. Alexey Alexandrovitch took no interest in the race, and so he did not watch the racers, but fell to listlessly scanning the spectators with his weary eyes. His eyes rested upon Anna. Her face was white and set. She was obviously seeing nothing and no one but one man. Her hand had convulsively clutched her fan, and she held her breath.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Do I try and catch them? I don't try to catch them in the least. A young man, and a very nice one, has fallen in love with her, and she, I fancy . . . ' 'Oh yes, you fancy! And how if she really is in love, and he's no more thinking of marriage than I am! . . . Oh, that I should live to see it! . . . Ah! spiritualism! Ah! Nice! Ah! the ball!' And the prince, imagining that he was mimicking his wife, made a mincing curtsey at each word. 'And this is how we're preparing wretchedness for Kitty; and she's really got the notion into her head…' 'But what makes you suppose so?' 'I don't suppose; I know. We have eyes for such things, though women-folk haven't. I see a man who has serious intentions, that's Levin; and I see a peacock, like this featherhead, who's only amusing himself.' 'Oh, well, when once you get an idea into your head! . . .' Anna Karenina 'Well, you'll remember my words, but too late, just as with Dolly.' 'Well, well, we won't talk of it,' the princess stopped him, recollecting her unlucky Dolly. 'By all means, and good-night!' And signing each other with the cross, the husband and wife parted with a kiss, feeling that they each remained of their own opinion. The princess had at first been quite certain that that evening had settled Kitty's future, and that there could be no doubt of Vronsky's intentions, but her husband's words had disturbed her. And returning to her own room, in terror before the unknown future, she too, like Kitty, repeated several times in her heart, 'Lord, have pity; Lord, have pity; Lord, have pity!' XVI V RONSKY had never had a real home-life. His mother had been in her youth a brilliant society woman, who had had during her married life, and still more afterwards, many love-affairs notorious in the whole fashionable world. His father he scarcely remembered, and he had been educated in the Corps of Pages. Leaving the school very young as a brilliant officer, he had at once got into the circle of wealthy Petersburg army men. Although he did go more or less into Petersburg society, his love-affairs had always hitherto been outside it. In Moscow he had for the first time felt, after his luxurious and coarse life at Petersburg, all the charm of intimacy with a sweet and innocent girl of his own rank, who cared for him. It never even entered his head that there could be any harm in his relations with Kitty. At balls he danced principally with her. He was a constant visitor at their house. He talked to her as people commonly do talk in society—all sorts of nonsense, but nonsense to which he could not help attaching a special meaning in her case.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'Kindly consider,' he began, 'cases of that kind are, as you are aware, under ecclesiastical jurisdiction; the reverend fathers are fond of going into the minutest details in cases of the kind,' he said with a smile, which betrayed his sympathy with the reverend fathers' taste. 'Letters may, of course, be a partial confirmation; but detection in the fact there must be of the most direct kind, that is, by eye-witnesses. In fact, if you do me the honour to intrust your confidence to me, you will do well to leave me the choice of the measures to be employed. If one wants the result, one must admit the means.' 'If it is so . . .' Alexey Alexandrovitch began, suddenly turning white; but at that moment the lawyer rose and again went to the door to speak to the intruding clerk. 'Tell her we don't haggle over fees!' he said, and returned to Alexey Alexandrovitch. On his way back he caught unobserved another moth. 'Nice state my rep curtains will be in by the summer!' he thought, frowning. 'And so you were saying? . . . ' he said. 'I will communicate my decision to you by letter,' said Alexey Alexandrovitch, getting up, and he clutched at the table. After standing a moment in silence, he said: 'From your words I may consequently conclude that a divorce may be obtained? I would ask you to let me know what are your terms.' 'It may be obtained if you give me complete liberty of action,' said the lawyer, not answering his question. 'When can I reckon on receiving information from you?' he asked, moving towards the door, his eyes and his varnished boots shining. 'In a week's time. Your answer as to whether you will undertake to conduct the case, and on what terms, you will be so good as to communicate to me.' 'Very good.' The lawyer bowed respectfully, let his client out of the door, and, left alone, gave himself up to his sense of amusement. He felt so mirthful that, contrary to his rules, he made a reduction in his terms to the haggling lady, and gave up catching moths, finally deciding that next winter he must have the furniture covered with velvet, like Sigonin's. VI A LEXEY A LEXANDROVITCH had gained a brilliant victory at the sitting of the Commission of the 17th of August, but in the sequel this victory cut the ground from under his feet. The new commission for the inquiry into the condition of the native tribes in all its branches had been formed and despatched to its destination with an unusual speed and energy inspired by Alexey Alexandrovitch. Within three months a report was presented.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Besides, they're received everywhere, and I '—she laid special stress on the I— 'have never been strict and intolerant. It's simply that I haven't the time.' 'No; you don't care, perhaps, to meet Stremov? Let him and Alexey Alexandrovitch tilt at each other in the committee—that's no affair of ours. But in the world, he's the most amiable man I know, and a devoted croquet-player. You shall see. And, in spite of his absurd position as Liza's lovesick swain at his age, you ought to see how he carries off the absurd position. He's very nice. Sappho Shtoltz you don't know? Oh, that's a new type, quite new.' Betsy said all this, and, at the same time, from her good-humoured, shrewd glance, Anna felt that she partly guessed her plight, and was hatching something for her benefit. They were in the little boudoir. 'I must write to Alexey though,' and Betsy sat down to the table, scribbled a few lines, and put the note in an envelope. 'I'm telling him to come to dinner. I've one lady extra to dinner with me, and no man to take her in. Look what I've said, will that persuade him? Excuse me, I must leave you for a minute. Would you seal it up, please, and send it off?' she said from the door; 'I have to give some directions.' Without a moment's thought, Anna sat down to the table with Betsy's letter, and, without reading it, wrote below: 'It's essential for me to see you. Come to the Vrede garden. I shall be there at six o'clock.' She sealed it up, and, Betsy coming back, in her presence handed the note to be taken. At tea, which was brought them on a little tea-table in the cool little drawing-room, the cosy chat promised by Princess Tverskoy before the arrival of her visitors really did come off between the two women. They criticised the people they were expecting, and the conversation fell upon Liza Merkalov. 'She's very sweet, and I always liked her,' said Anna. 'You ought to like her. She raves about you. Yesterday she came up to me after the races and was in despair at not finding you. She says you're a real heroine of romance, and that if she were a man she would do all sorts of mad things for your sake. Stremov says she does that as it is.' 'But do tell me, please, I never could make it out,' said Anna, after being silent for some time, speaking in a tone that showed she was not asking an idle question, but what she was asking was of more importance to her than it should have been: 'do tell me, please, what are her relations with Prince Kaluzhsky, Mishka, as he's called? I've met them so little. What does it mean?' Betsy smiled with her eyes, and looked intently at Anna. 'It's a new manner,' she said. 'They've all adopted that manner.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She did not answer, and, bending her head a little, she looked inquiringly at him from under her brows, her eyes shining under their long lashes. Her hand shook as it played with a leaf she had picked. He saw it, and his face expressed that utter subjection, that slavish devotion, which had done so much to win her. 'I see something has happened. Do you suppose I can be at peace, knowing you have a trouble I am not sharing? Tell me, for God's sake,' he repeated imploringly. 'Yes; I shan't be able to forgive him if he does not realise all the gravity of it. Better not tell; why put him to the proof?' she thought, still staring at him in the same way, and feeling the hand that held the leaf was trembling more and more. 'For God's sake!' he repeated, taking her hand. 'Shall I tell you?' 'Yes, yes, yes . . . ' 'I'm with child,' she said, softly and deliberately. The leaf in her hand shook more violently, but she did not take her eyes off him, watching how he would take it. He turned white, would have said something, but stopped; he dropped her hand, and his head sank on his breast. 'Yes, he realises all the gravity of it,' she thought, and gratefully she pressed his hand. But she was mistaken in thinking he realised the gravity of the fact as she, a woman, realised it. On hearing it, he felt come upon him with tenfold intensity that strange feeling of loathing of someone. But at the same time, he felt that the turning-point he had been longing for had come now; that it was impossible to go on concealing things from her husband, and it was inevitable in one way or another that they should soon put an end to their unnatural position. But, besides that, her emotion physically affected him in the same way. He looked at her with a look of submissive tenderness, kissed her hand, got up, and, in silence, paced up and down the terrace. 'Yes,' he said, going up to her resolutely. 'Neither you nor I have looked on our relations as a passing amusement, and now our fate is sealed. It is absolutely necessary to put an end'—he looked round as he spoke—'to the deception in which we are living.' 'Put an end? How put an end, Alexey?' she said softly. She was calmer now, and her face lighted up with a tender smile. 'Leave your husband and make our life one.' 'It is one as it is,' she answered, scarcely audibly. 'Yes, but altogether; altogether.' 'But how, Alexey, tell me how?' she said in melancholy mockery at the hopelessness of her own position. 'Is there any way out of such a position? Am I not the wife of my husband?'