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

  It’s not for the weak, sustaining this,” I say shrugging, my voice tight. “OK, and tell me what you’ve been up to. You’re having sex, are you using condoms?” she asks. “Yes, for the most part. I’m not going to lie and tell you I’ve used a condom every time, and now that I’m exclusive with one man, we aren’t using condoms.” She jots down notes in my chart and says she will do a full STD screening just to be on the safe side. I suggest that while she’s at it, she also check for a UTI as I think I may have one. “I’ll run a test, but in the meantime I’m going to start you on an antibiotic so it doesn’t get worse. I’m sure you do have one with the amount of sexual activity you’re having,” she says. She is direct and forthright, which is fine, but is she judging me? As I walk home after the appointment, I call #5. He asks me how it was and I tell him I’m fine minus an infection. I barely have the words out before he announces definitively that the infection is not from him because he doesn’t have any diseases. “Neither do I. It’s an infection. Women get them all the time. I don’t even know for sure if I have one. Anyway, thanks for your concern,” I say sarcastically. A few days later, he calls as I leave the nail salon with freshly painted bright pink fingernails, asking me my plans for the evening since Georgia is with Michael. When I tell him that I am going to dinner with my friend Danny, an old college friend, he sounds dejected. “I’m disappointed. I was going to come downtown and surprise you, take you out,” he says. I thank him, but since I’ve had these plans for a while I don’t offer to change them. “I find it a little odd that you’re having dinner with a man I’ve never heard about and that you didn’t tell me sooner,” he says. It’s not odd at all as I have a lot of friends he doesn’t know about yet, but he continues, “I don’t believe that men and women can be platonic friends because it’s impossible to be attracted to someone as a friend and not eventually be curious about what else could be there.” “Is this one of those moments in which you’re arguing with me for argument’s sake or are you serious?” I say.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  “Slower,” I said, to give myself time to get into it. He teased me over my underpants for a second. Then he put his fingers inside and started fingering me. My lips kept getting caught and rubbing against his fingers in an irritated way. I felt like they were puffing up like balloons. I kept trying to ask him questions. I wanted to hear that he wanted me. “What do you think of the lingerie?” “Hot, baby.” “The garters?” “So sexy.” I guess he could feel that I wasn’t super wet, because he got down on his knees in front of the sink where I was spread-eagle, pushed the undies to the side, and started to lick my clit. I moaned some more, not altogether fake, because I enjoyed hearing myself. But fake in the sense that I knew I was suddenly too self-conscious to be aroused. I slid down off the sink and got down on my knees. Then I unzipped his pants and started to suck his dick. His dick was long and skinny. I felt like it could stab me. Usually I very much enjoy dick sucking and I’m pretty intuitive at it. I like to lick it first and tease it—really prepare the dick before I suck. But he was impatient. He grabbed the back of my hair and pushed my head closer to his body, as I’ve seen people do in porn. I gagged a little on his dick, pulled back, then continued, my mouth super wet. He moaned and it was hot. Just hearing the moan come up from the depth of his belly, looking up and seeing that jaw I liked, made me feel wetter. My juices stung my irritated labia. He grabbed the back of my hair and pushed his dick into the back of my throat again, then palmed my forehead away. “Get up here,” he said. My bra and underwear were still on when he hoisted me by the waist back up onto the sink. Then he ripped open a condom wrapper with his teeth and fumbled to put it on. He pulled off my underwear and spread my legs. I gasped when he put his cock in and began to thrust. It felt good, but also too much, like he was hitting a wall in the back of my vagina. Like a muscle ache. My thighs were chafing on the counter. My back banged against the faucet and I kept getting caught on the sink bowl.

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

  We are trying to nail down a date to get together when he tells me he needs to run something by me before we meet in person and that he hopes it won’t scare me away. “I’m intrigued,” I write back to him, code for “I’m terrified.” He responds that he had been married for many years to a woman who did not enjoy oral sex and that he needs to know not only that I am open to it but also that I will allow him to spend uninterrupted hours exploring my pussy with his tongue. After dropping my phone and washing my hands, I politely decline, letting him know that while I am indeed open to oral sex, I cannot say what I would want or for how long in advance of it actually happening and thus would not want to waste the precious time he could spend with another woman’s pussy. He writes back that he is disappointed as I seem so great, and am I certain? Indeed, I am. The gorgeous, 30something bachelor with the perfect teeth and killer six- pack? He asks if I’ve ever had sex with a married man and I answer that I would NEVER not EVER have sex with another woman’s husband because that DESTROYS lives and causes heartache and misery, and why would I want to be with a man so selfish and deceptive? Suffice to say, I did not hear from him again. The chiseled, bald dad-of-two who loves to cook, does yoga, reads voraciously and does the NYTimes crossword puzzle every day? He needs to know before he meets me what my feelings are on anal sex. “My feelings are,” I respond, “that as much as I appreciate your candor, I am preserving intimate conversations like this for men with whom I’m actually intimate, so I suspect we are not a good match.” Another unmatch and moment in which I ask myself, how do men move the conversation from favorite novels or restaurants to the details of the kind of sex they are hoping to have with such dizzying speed? I’m pretty easy to get into bed and in fact will probably get to the bed faster than you, but still, certain niceties must be met.

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

  In The Concept of Anxiety, published in 1844, before Freud was born, Kierkegaard made a distinction between fear, which has a specific object (similar to Freud’s Furcht, or primary anxiety), and anxiety, a kind of unfocused, objectless, future-oriented fear (comparable to Freud’s Angst and signal anxiety but with much less emphasis on pathology and a greater focus on consciousness). 26 Because of its lack of an objective focus, Kierkegaard argued that anxiety (dread) was caused by “nothingness”: the despair that comes from the realization that we are not grounded in the world and are defined only by the practices in which we engage. It is through choice that we prevent the return to nothingness. 27 Kierkegaard became well known only after the existentialists adopted him, and Freud apparently was not aware of his writings when developing psychoanalytic theory. 28 Kierkegaard believed that experiencing anxiety was essential for a successful life, for without it one could not advance. As he noted, “Whoever is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility.” 29 The well-adjusted person faces anxiety and moves ahead. 30 His emphasis on the importance of anxiety to success is borne out by research showing that there is an optimal relation between cognition and anxiety in performing life’s tasks; with too little anxiety, one is not motivated, but with too much, impairments result. 31 As pointed out by leading anxiety researcher David Barlow, without anxiety, “[t]he performance of athletes, entertainers, executives, artisans, and students would suffer; creativity would diminish; crops might not be planted. And we would all achieve that idyllic state long sought after in our fast-paced society of whiling away our lives under a shade tree. This would be as deadly for the species as nuclear war.” 32 Therapies arose from both the Freudian and existentialist camps but with different goals. Freud’s psychoanalysis sought to rid the person of unconscious psychic conflict caused by past experiences; he viewed the analyst as an archeologist digging through layers to uncover the past. Existential therapy viewed anxiety and other sources of inner strife as a condition of human life that is best coped with by using our freedom to make choices about our actions as we go forward in life. Mainstream psychiatry today is biologically oriented and in this sense more aligned with Freud’s view that anxiety can become a pathological condition for which treatment is required to heal the troubled brain. Yet, while contemporary biological psychiatry recognizes the importance of Freud’s seminal contributions, 33 it is divorced from his psychoanalytic theory. 34 Figure 1.2 : Anxiety in Popular Culture of the Mid-Twentieth Century. (Clockwise, from upper left) W. H. Auden’s 1947 poem, The Age of Anxiety; Leonard Bernstein’s 1947–1949 Symphony, The Age of Anxiety; the cover of Mad magazine from 1956, introducing Alfred E.

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

  Cognitive-behavioral therapy combines cognitive interventions with methods that seek to reduce fear and anxiety through exposure to the threats. Acceptance and commitment therapy, a variant on cognitive therapy, attempts to teach people to accept rather than change their emotions and make decisions within the context of what they value, as opposed to letting negative feelings control their behavior. 10 The various cognitive therapies are by far the most common psychotherapeutic approaches in use today. Table 10.1: Some Common Types of Psychotherapy Psychoanalysis and Psychodynamic Therapies Humanistic Therapy Behavior Therapy Cognitive Therapy Integrative/Eclectic Therapies Alternative/Complementary Therapies Based on http://www.apa.org/topics/therapy/psychotherapy-approaches.aspx There is growing interest in alternative approaches to the treatment of anxiety, though their effectiveness has not been evaluated in all cases. Mindfulness-based methods use relaxation, breathing exercises, meditation, yoga, and other techniques to focus on the present and reduce tension and worry. 11 Although each of these can be used on its own to reduce stress and anxiety, they can also be incorporated into other psychotherapeutic approaches. For example, behavioral and cognitive therapies often include relaxation training, whereas acceptance and commitment cognitive therapy employ mindfulness and meditation. 12 Hypnosis, one of the first methods used by Freud but later dismissed by him, is gaining popularity. 13 Another approach, called eye movement desynchronization reprocessing (EMDR), uses visual stimuli to induce patterns of eye movements as part of a treatment that helps the client reprocess troubling events and acquire new coping skills. 14 PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE BRAIN, CIRCA 2002 In Synaptic Self I drew a broad distinction between therapies based on talk and those based on exposure therapy ( Figure 10.1 ). I went on to argue that these approaches are fundamentally different because they depend on different brain circuits. Talk therapy requires conscious retrieval of memories and thinking about their origins and/or implications and thus depends on working memory circuits of the lateral prefrontal cortex. By contrast, therapies involving exposure depend on medial prefrontal areas that contribute to extinction, the process on which exposure is modeled. I suggested that the fact that the medial frontal areas connect with the amygdala, whereas the lateral areas do not, might account for why it is easier and faster to treat fears, phobias, and anxiety with exposure-based approaches (behavioral or cognitive-behavioral therapy) than with psychoanalytic or humanist approaches based on talk. Figure 10.1: Psychotherapy and the Brain as Portrayed in Synaptic Self in 2002. In retrospect, this neural hypothesis got some things right but was overly simplistic in other respects.

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

  After a short audience with the cardinals, the prisoner was taken away by a guard of soldiers, and within a week he was securely immured in the dungeon of the Dominican convent. Preparations had been going on for several days to provide the place with locks, bolts and other strong furnishings. In this prison, Huss languished for three months. His cell was hard by the latrines. Fever and vomiting set in, and it seemed likely they would quickly do their dismal work. John XXIII. deserves some credit for having sent his physician, who applied clysters, as Huss himself wrote. To sickness was added the deprivation of books, including the Bible. For two months we have no letters from him. They begin again, with January, 1415, and give us a clear insight into the indignities to which he was exposed and the misery he suffered. These letters were sent by the gaoler. What was Sigismund doing? He had issued the letter of safe-conduct, Oct. 18. On the day before his arrival in Constance, Dec. 24th, John of Chlum posted up a notice on the cathedral, protesting that the king’s agreement had been treated with defiance by the cardinals. Sigismund professed to be greatly incensed, and blustered, but this was the end of it. He was a time-serving prince who was easily persuaded to yield to the arguments of such ecclesiastical figures as D’Ailly, who insisted that little matters like Huss’ heresy should not impede the reformation of the church, the council’s first concern, and that error unreproved was error countenanced.674 All good churchmen prayed his Majesty might not give way to the lies and subtleties of the Wycliffists. The king of Aragon wrote that Huss should be killed off at once, without having the formality of a hearing. During his imprisonment in the Black Friars’ convent, Huss wrote for his gaoler, Robert, tracts on the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, Mortal Sin and Marriage. Of the 13 letters preserved from this time, the larger part were addressed to John of Chlum, his trusty friend. Some of the letters were written at midnight, and some on tattered scraps of paper.675 In this correspondence four things are prominent: Huss’ reliance upon the king and his word of honor, his consuming desire to be heard in open council, the expectation of possible death and his trust in God. He feared sentence would be passed before opportunity was given him to speak with the king. "If this is his honor, it is his own lookout," he wrote.676 In the meantime the council had committed the matter of heresy to a commission, with D’Ailly at its head. It plied Huss with questions, and presented heretical articles taken from his writings. Stephen Paletz, his apostate friend, badgered him more than all the rest. His request for a "proctor and advocate" was denied. The thought of death was continually before him.

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

  Calm down? I just got a call from a man telling me they’ll call the police if I don’t immediately get my son off premises in a foreign country in which I know no one and don’t speak the language!” I scream. “I know,” he says. “I’m really sorry. But please, I need you to help me.” I breathe deeply to suppress my internal squall and let the silence instead speak between us. Finally, I hear his voice again, humbled and softer now. “I’m so depressed,” he says. “What’s happening with you and Dad is killing me. I can’t get away from it. The only time I feel good is when I’m high.” I suck my breath in. This is the worst possible response he could have given me. All I hear is blame for a situation I didn’t cause and an acknowledgement of the obvious fact that I can’t make it better. Fixing things has always been one of my most important roles as a mother: problems with friends, problems at school, problems sleeping or eating or with health – fix, fix, fix. Without my maternal superpower, I am unrecognizable to him and to myself. But is our separation the cause of his ruin or is it an easy excuse? I am incensed, but I refuse to be the only one carrying the burden of responsibility. When I get home an hour later, I chug the remains of an open bottle of white wine straight from the bottle and get to work, calling the airline – which I learn is now closed for Shabbat – and the mothers of the other boys. I am usually the take-charge mother, the one who easily manages logistics, and I’m attempting to do so now but without grace or presence of mind. The other mothers beseech me to calm down, reminding me that the boys are safe and there’s no need to panic. I don’t know how to relay the root of my hysteria, that my beautiful family is crumbling before my eyes and I am powerless to stop it. Getting him home from Israel? That’s the easy part, requiring phone calls and money. Getting him out of this vast pit of unhappiness? No phone calls or handfuls of money will help. I text #3 to tell him I have to cancel our weekend plans as I will be returning to the city to receive Hudson, who will arrive at 5am on Sunday. As angry as I’ve been at Michael these past months, it’s got nothing on the fury I’ve turned toward myself. I have been foolishly pouring time and effort into rebuilding my life. What right did I have to turn any of my attention away from my kids? I believed I might have a relationship?

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

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

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

  Fortuitously (or, as it turns out, unfortunately), the next week Hudson asks if he can go with a friend to his country house for the weekend and I ask Michael if he can take Georgia for an extra night. I have become maximally efficient with my windows of free time, so I offer #7 Friday night for the dinner and sleepover he has requested and save my Saturday night for #6. All week, #7 texts me with updates to his menu, verifying what I like to eat and what wine I would like with it and telling me how excited he is. On Friday afternoon, he texts me as he counts down the hours until my arrival, telling me he’s at the butcher asking for a special cut of meat for a special date and at the wine store asking for a special bottle of wine. I am both touched by his extravagant preparations and put off by his enthusiasm. I want to be wanted, but this feels too easy, like there’s no chase at all. Also, I’m perplexed, wondering if he really likes me or just likes the idea of me, needing someone special in his life at all times. I ask him where his daughter will be for the night and he tells me she’s going to hang out with a friend and will be home very late. I worry that she will feel uncomfortable with my staying over, as I wouldn’t dare do the reverse and have a man stay in my home with my kids around, but he insists she’s fine with it, that she hated his ex-wife and thinks I’m really sweet. I admire his openness with his daughter but also wish he would protect her from having to know so much about his private life. Also, there’s a level of investment he’s putting into my sticking around that is starting to make me feel like a cornered animal. When I arrive at his apartment that evening, he opens the door with a broad smile and instructs me to sit at the small kitchen table and pour myself a glass of wine while he finishes cooking. He bustles from the stove to the refrigerator, explaining he’s not quite used to this kitchen yet. Finally, he presents me with a plate of sliced steak with grilled mushrooms, roasted potatoes and steamed asparagus. I tell him that I am impressed and appreciative and he beams. Having a man cook me a meal with such care, being taken care of by being served dinner – that will never grow old for me.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  That Boccaccio is adopting a polemical stance in relation to the literature of profane love – a position, moreover, that is diametrically opposed to that of Dante, whose poetry he greatly admired – cannot seriously be doubted. His passionate, eloquent, and occasionally mischievous defence of the Decameron in the Introduction to the Fourth Day, as well as the remarks he appends in the work’s concluding pages, are indicative of the need he experienced to defend the genre within which he was working. And it is characteristic of Boccaccio’s realistic view of the human condition that he should have seized upon the possibilities afforded by the great natural calamity of the Black Death to furnish his stories (many of which were doubtless already written before 1348) with a plausible raison d’être. The framework of the Decameron, and the circumstances in which the hundred tales are alleged to have been told, have already been discussed in some detail. What needs to be emphasized at this juncture is that the description of the plague, and of the moral and social upheaval to which it gave rise, is first and foremost a powerful instrument for ensuring that a hitherto neglected or despised literary genre will attract due recognition. Boccaccio’s defensive posture is at once apparent in the opening paragraph of the Introduction to the First Day, where, referring to his description of the plague, he apologizes to his readers in advance for the work’s irksome and ponderous opening (grave e noioso principio), and assures them that they will be affected no differently by this grim beginning than hikers confronted by a steep and rugged hill beyond which there lies a fair and delectable plain. The delectable plain is of course the main body of the work, the hundred stories themselves, but so aware is Boccaccio of the possible opprobrium that may accrue to him from his narration of the tales that he constructs an elaborate justificatory framework within which the stories are told, in a particular set of historical circumstances, by a group of ten fictitious narrators. By using this ingenious device, which, as already noted above, is not original to Boccaccio, but is rather a sophisticated form of a technique used by compilers of earlier collections of tales, not only does he distance himself from his material, but he also provides it with a valid aesthetic and historical raison d’être.

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

  67 People who suffer from them are hypersensitive to threats, which seize and hold their attention, a condition sometimes called hypervigilance. They are also impaired in distinguishing things that are dangerous from those that are safe and overestimate the significance of perceived threats. Even when threats are not present, they worry excessively that threats will occur and constantly scan the environment to try to understand why they feel distressed. They go to extremes to escape from or avoid threats, so much so that these avoidance strategies interfere with daily life. Figure 1.7: Alterations of Threat Processing Occur in Many Psychiatric Disorders. SHOWING MY HAND Any understanding of fear and anxiety presumes an understanding of emotion. So before we go further, I want to make clear what my own view of the subject is, using the emotion fear for illustrative purposes. In many ways my core view of emotion has not changed since the 1980s. 68 But recently I have begun to discuss it somewhat differently in an effort to sharpen the conceptualization of this complex psychological function and its relation to brain mechanisms. 69 Traditionally, emotion theories have focused on conscious feelings. 70 For example, in the late nineteenth century, William James, the father of American psychology, proposed that fear is a conscious feeling that occurs when we find ourselves responding to danger; the feeling of fear, for him, was the perception of body signals that are unique to defending against danger. 71 Not all theorists have agreed with James about how conscious feelings come about, but many have concurred that the feeling is the emotion. Freud, as mentioned above, said that anxiety is “something felt” and also noted, “It is surely the essence of an emotion that we should feel it.” 72 More recently, the Dutch psychologist Nico Frijda claimed that emotions are primarily “hedonic experiences.” Lisa Barrett, James Russell, Andrew Ortony, and Gerald Clore, and others, emphasize that emotions are psychologically constructed conscious experiences. 73 Clore notes that “emotions are never unconscious.” 74 Other theorists, though, have found conscious experience to be unnecessary, or even a detriment, to understanding emotion. For example, in the early twentieth century, behaviorists argued strongly that consciousness, being unobservable, had no place in psychology; they insisted that behavior alone should be the focus of inquiry. 75 This led to the idea that fear was a relation between stimuli and responses rather than a specific feeling. 76 When behavioral psychologists later turned to physiology in an effort to understand how stimuli and responses are connected in the brain, fear became a central motivational state—a physiological state of the brain that organized responses to dangerous stimuli.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  position. This had to be a gradual process. It was always to some extent ambiguous. He radiated authority – it was, from the very start, the most conspicuous thing about him. But of what kind? He was anxious to show that he was not a priest-general, performing a military role against a foreign oppressor. He was not the Messiah in that sense. On the other hand, he was not just the articulator of suffering and sacrifice: he had come to found a new kind of kingdom and to bring a message of joy and hope. How to convey that his triumph had to be achieved through his death? It was not an idea which appealed to the ancient world; or any world. Then, too, there was the central paradox that the mission had to be vindicated by its failure. A great many people found Jesus impossible to accept or follow. He was repudiated by his family, at least for a time. His native district did not accept him. There were certain towns where his teaching made no impact. In some places he could not work miracles. In others they caused little stir or were soon forgotten. He made many enemies and at all times there were a large number of people who ridiculed his claims and simply brushed aside his religious ideas. He could assemble a crowd of supporters, but it was always just as easy to collect a mob against him. Once he began to operate openly in the Temple area he became a marked man for both Roman and Jewish authorities, and an object of suspicion. His refusal to make his claims explicit and unambiguous was resented, and not only by his enemies. His followers were never wholly in his confidence and some of them had mixed feelings from time to time about the whole enterprise. What had they involved themselves in? There is a hint that Judas’s betrayal may have been motivated less by greed – an easy and unconvincing apostolic smear – than by shock at the sudden fear he might be serving an enemy of religion. By the time of his trial and passion Jesus had succeeded in uniting an improbable, indeed unprecedented, coalition against him: the Roman authorities, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, even Herod Antipas. And in destroying him, this unnatural combination appears to have acted with a great measure of popular approval. What conclusions can we draw from this? The actual execution was carried out by Romans under Roman law. Crucifixion was the most degrading form of capital punishment, reserved for rebels, mutinous slaves and other unspeakable enemies of society; and it was also the most prolonged and painful, though Jesus escaped its full horrors by his unusually rapid death. Pilate, the Judean procurator, is presented in the canonical gospels as a reluctant executioner, the beginnings of an imaginative early Christian

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  more terrifying in the Qumran texts. But there is no mandate in Paul for the Calvinist insistence on the eternal predestination of the individual to salvation or damnation. Paul saw damnation as the shadow that was cast by election from grace; it ensures the purity of the gospel message; he did not put forward a theory about God’s system of selection, but an explanation of what happens to a man when he hears the gospel – he chooses, and so he is chosen. This tremendous attack on the whole Judaic concept of man’s relationship with God, and its replacement by a new salvationist system, was summarized in Paul’s great essay in determinist theology, the epistle to the Romans. What an extraordinary document to be received by a young congregation who had never met the apostle! No one has ever fully understood Romans. No one can remain undisturbed by it, either. It is the most thought-provoking of all the Christian documents. It has a habit of forcing men to reconsider their whole understanding of religion even when they have spent many years in theological inquiry. Thus Romans profoundly changed Augustine’s thinking in the last years of his life. It was the detonator to Luther’s explosion. It has been used again and again to demolish and reconstruct systems of theology, most recently by Schweitzer, Bultmann and Barth. Most theological revolutions begin with Romans, as indeed did Paul’s own. Romans is an imperfect document, the work of a man not wholly satisfied with his case: that is its merit as a key. The circular form of the argument, its return again and again to the same starting points and conclusions, betray the anxiety of a man who still saw, and knew he saw, through a glass darkly. The imperfection of his vision was, indeed, implicit in the majesty of his conception of God, the distancing he achieves between God and man, and time and eternity. Paul was the beneficiary of a vision. We must accept his sincerity on this: it was clearly the most important event in his whole life. But, as a man who demanded the whole truth, he recognized that his vision had been incomplete. The difference between the theology of Jesus and Paul is not merely that one is implicit, the other explicit; it is that Jesus saw as a God, Paul thought as a man. But the process of trying to think through the theological problem made Paul into a very formidable figure. On the one hand he presents an insuperable obstacle to any humanist rescue-operation on Jesus – any presentation of him as the greatest and noblest of all human beings, stripped of his divine attributes. Paul insisted he was God: it is the only thing about him which really matters, otherwise the Pauline theology collapses, and with it Christianity. But equally, Paul is an obstacle to those

• From The Decameron (1353)

  SEVENTH STORY The Sultan of Babylon sends his daughter off to marry the King of Algarve. Owing to a series of mishaps, she passes through the hands of nine men in various places within the space of four years. Finally, having been restored to her father as a virgin, she sets off, as before, to become the King of Algarve’s wife. The young ladies, who were feeling very sorry for Madonna Beritola, would possibly have dissolved into tears if Emilia’s recital of the lady’s woes had continued for very much longer. When, finally, the tale was finished, it was the queen’s wish that Panfilo should take up the storytelling, and being very obedient he began forthwith as follows: Delectable ladies, it is no easy matter for a man to decide what is in his best interests. For as we have often had occasion to observe, there are many who have considered that only their poverty stood between themselves and a secure, trouble-free life, and they have not only prayed to God for riches, but sought deliberately to acquire them, sparing themselves neither effort nor danger in the process. And no sooner have they succeeded, than the prospect of a substantial legacy has frequently caused them to be murdered by people who, before they had become rich, had never dreamed of doing them any harm. Others have risen from low estate to the dizzy heights of kingship through a thousand dangerous battles, spilling the blood of their nearest and dearest as they went along, thinking sovereign power represented the peak of happiness. But as they could have seen and heard for themselves, it was a happiness fraught with endless fear and worry, and at the cost of their lives they came to realize that the chalice at a royal table may sometimes be poisoned, even though it is made of gold. Again, there have been many people who have ardently yearned for bodily strength and beauty, whilst others have longed with equal intensity for bodily ornaments, only to discover too late that the very things they so unwisely desired were the cause of their death or unhappiness. But in order not to become involved in a detailed review embracing the whole range of human desires, I will merely affirm that no man can, with complete confidence, elect any one of them as being wholly immune from the accidents of Fortune. For if we were to proceed at all times in a correct manner, we would have to resign ourselves to the acquisition and possession of whatever has been granted to us by the One who alone knows what we need and has the power to provide it for us.

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

  PENGUIN BOOKS ANXIOUS Joseph LeDoux is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at New York University, where he is a member of the Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology. He directs the Emotional Brain Institute at New York University and at the Nathan Kline Institute, and he is the author of Synaptic Self and The Emotional Brain . A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the rock band The Amygdaloids, LeDoux lives in Brooklyn, New York. * * * WINNER OF THE WILLIAM JAMES BOOK AWARD Praise for Anxious “Every age believes itself to be the age of anxiety . . . but in his new book, Anxious , LeDoux suggests that that has never been a stronger claim to make than it is now. . . . If this is the age of anxiety, LeDoux is our Lewis and our Clark: It was LeDoux who laid down the first map of what is called the brain’s ‘fear circuit.’ . . . With his new book, he wants to redraw that map.” —Casey Schwartz , New York Magazine “LeDoux presents a rigorous, in-depth guide to the history, philosophy, and scientific exploration of this widespread emotional state. . . . LeDoux’s charming personal asides give an impression of having a conversation with a world expert. LeDoux ends on a high note, describing how cutting-edge research on the neural substrates of anxiety is being translated into new approaches for psychiatric treatment.” —Susanne Ahmari, Nature “LeDoux is not only a pioneer in the neurobiological analysis of fear in animals but also a scholarly and accessible writer. . . . Anxious is a significant and important departure from the author’s earlier views on the neural underpinnings of fear. . . . In Anxious , LeDoux challenges the reader to think differently about the neural origins of fear and its disorders. In doing so, he offers a masterful synthesis of animal and human work and a novel road map for future work in both the laboratory and the clinic.” —Stephen Maren, Science “ Anxious is an extraordinarily ambitious, provocative, challenging, and important book. Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience . . . LeDoux provides explanations of the origins, nature, and impact of fear and anxiety disorders.” —Glenn Altschuler, Psychology Today “Impressive . . . LeDoux persuades us with reason and the power of critical thinking. He is a true scientist, and here, in his third book, there is maturity, there is breadth. You will know more than you did, and you will start to think differently about what it means to be afraid.” —Tristan A. Bekinschtein, Times Higher Education Literary Supplement (London) “LeDoux believes fear and anxiety are not innate, prepackaged states, simply waiting to be unleashed in the brain.

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

  Even if all the corrections described above were made, though, there would still be a problem. As described later in this chapter, it’s a conceptual problem. LOOKING FOR ANXIOUS GENES Alongside drug research, effort has been directed to finding a genetic basis for psychiatric disorders. If faulty genes could be identified, drugs that compensate for the malfunctioning genes might be useful in treatment. The search for anxious genes proceeds on two fronts. I mentioned earlier efforts using selective breeding or gene targeting to produce animals that show anxiety-like behaviors. The other approach is to search for genes that correlate with anxiety symptoms in people with these disorders. If anxious genes can be identified in people, they can in turn be targeted in animals, which will, in principle, make it possible to conduct mechanistic studies of the malfunctioning of those genes in the genesis of pathological anxiety. We don’t need scientific evidence to tell us that some people are more anxious than others, and anecdotal evidence also suggests that nervousness runs in families. The latter suggests that individual differences in anxiety may have a genetic component, which is supported by studies that have shown that anxious tendencies in early life tend to be carried into adulthood, as though anxiety were a stable (and therefore perhaps genetically inherited) characteristic of the individual. 49 The traditional approach to relating genes to psychiatric disorders starts with comparing the trait in question in people with similar and different genetic backgrounds. Such studies are most powerful when comparisons are made between identical and fraternal twins raised together, and between identical twins raised apart. Because identical twins have identical genes but fraternal twins do not, such studies allow the estimation of the influence of genetic versus nongenetic (especially environmental) factors on a given trait. For example, twin studies of anxiety have revealed that genetic factors account for roughly 30 percent to 50 percent of an individual’s tendency to be generally anxious or to have a specific anxiety disorder. 50 Once a genetic component has been established, the search for the genes involved can begin. This is a time-consuming and complex process that has recently been greatly facilitated by the information obtained by the Human Genome Project. 51 The success of genetic studies in neurological diseases, such as Huntington’s disease, the familial form of Parkinson’s disease, and a few others, led to hopes that similar advances could be made for psychiatric conditions. But unlike these neurological diseases, psychiatric disorders are not inherited following the simple laws of Mendelian genetics, in which traits are controlled by a single gene and result in a few standard inheritance patterns of being dominant or recessive. 52 Heritability in psychiatric disorders typically involves complex inheritance patterns controlled by multiple genes that interact with environmental factors to produce their results. With the rise of molecular genetics, it has become possible to search for possible changes (mutations, polymorphisms) in target genes.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Empire means for us . . . when we pray for its postponement we assist the continuance of Rome. . . . I have a right to say, Caesar is more ours than yours, appointed as he is by our God.’ By Tertullian’s time (c . 200), as he pointed out, the Christians were numerous enough to overthrow the Empire, had their intentions been hostile; ‘We are but of yesterday, and we fill everything you have – cities, tenements, forts, towns, exchanges, yes! and camps, tribes, palace, senate, forum. All we leave you with are the Temples!’ Christians were, he urged, a docile as well as a loyal element in society. And of course for the most part they were left alone. As a rule, the Christians, like the Jews, enjoyed complete freedom from persecution. The impression that they lived and worshipped underground is a complete fallacy, arising from the name (Catacombus) of one of their earliest cemeteries. They had their own churches, as the Jews had synagogues. They made no secret of their faith. From the earliest times, Tertullian says, they identified themselves: ‘At every forward step and movement, at every going in and out, when we put on our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we light the lamps, on couch, on seat, in all the ordinary actions of daily life, we trace upon the forehead the sign of the cross.’ There seems to have been no attempt at concealment, strangers being invited to attend part of the Christian service, and to present themselves for instruction. Yet there was from the start considerable prejudice, a form of anti-semitism which persisted even after Roman conformists had learnt to distinguish between Christians and Jews. Thus an anti-Christian writer c. 180 calls them ‘people ignorant of learning, unlettered and unskilled in the meanest arts’. They were ‘a gang of discredited and proscribed desperadoes’, formed from ‘the lowest dregs of the population, ignorant men and credulous women’. At their ‘nocturnal gatherings, solemn feasts and barbarous meals, the bond of union is not a sacred rite but crime’. They were ‘a secret tribe that lurks in darkness and shuns the light, silent in public, chattering in corners . . . and these vicious habits are spreading day by day. . . . These conspirators must be utterly destroyed and cursed.’ In this atmosphere of ignorance and prejudice, Christians became objects of suspicion and the victims of wild rumour. The Christians automatically placed themselves outside the law by refusing divine honours to emperors. Under weak and vulnerable rulers, like Caligula, Nero and Domitian, they became scapegoats for failure or disaster. As Tertullian put it: ‘If the

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  In Spain, the Catholic crown, through its instrument the Inquisition, exterminated Protestantism in the 1550s. In the Italian states, Protestantism made little headway among the aristocracy, and the question really did not arise, except in Venice. But in France, under a Catholic monarchy, the aristocracy became divided. Great families like the Guises and the Montmorencys were strongly Catholic, and controlled Lorraine. Cities like Paris, Bordeaux and Toulouse were also Catholic. But the Prince of Condé was a Calvinist Protestant, or Huguenot; so was Coligny, the High Admiral; and so were the Bourbons of Navarre. The Huguenots numbered about one-tenth to one-fifteenth of the total population, but they were in the majority in parts of the Orléanais, Normandy, Navarre, the Dauphiné and many towns. How, then, could the principle be applied to France? There was a fierce debate among the Protestants as to whether they were justified in taking up arms against the lawful ruler. Beza, writing to the King of Navarre, thought it was ‘the lot of the Church of God’ to ‘endure blows and not to strike them’; but, he added, ‘remember that it is an anvil which has broken many hammers’. One Huguenot lawyer, awaiting execution in 1559, argued that any monarch who forced his subjects to live against the will of God must be illegitimate. But who was to define ‘the will of God’? Therein lay the whole argument. Calvin, consulted, ruled that resistance to persecution was permissible if led by the chief magistrate or prince of the blood. Hence the importance in France of such figures as Condé, Coligny and Navarre, who made possible a rebellion which Protestants could regard as theologically legitimate: the 2,000 Huguenot consistories in France became a civil and military organization, as well as a religious one. This new principle was made to apply elsewhere. In 1559 in Scotland the predominant section of the nobility, goaded on by Calvin’s pupil, John Knox, raised arms against the Catholic administration. The English crown, after much hesitation, decided that this rebellion, too, was legitimate and lawful, and assisted it. Again, in the 1560s, the Spanish Netherlands rose against the persecuting Catholic Habsburgs, using in justification their ancient constitutional machinery, and in defence of their traditional laws, customs and charters. Their leader was a blood-prince, William the Silent, Prince of Orange, and when he was assassinated their ‘governorship’ was offered to the anointed Protestant Queen of England. Thus the theories determining the religious division of Europe, though springing from the same root-concept – the priestly power of the prince – were increasingly divergent and conflicting. The result was a drift towards civil war within states, and

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

  I try to exude calm, as if condoms regularly fall off inside of me, and say, “Just give me a sec.” It doesn’t take long for my finger to alight on the rubber, and I pull it, long and slippery, out of me. Blaze sorts through the pile of clothing until he finds his shorts. He spills out the contents of his pockets and I hear coins and keys falling, but he soon holds up another condom, announcing that it is his last one. He enters me from behind and I brace my hands on the back of the chair as his indefatigable thrusting continues. We both hear voices at the same time, a small group of people, and their voices get louder as they approach the area where we are. He pauses, saying “Shhhhh” to me. We are suspended in motion, silent, listening to the voices rise and fall and the ocean waves gently break on the sand a few feet away. I am squeezing my eyes shut, praying we can’t be seen in the dark since we are mostly covered by a canopy anyway, and eventually the voices fade away. When Blaze gently turns me around again to get back on top of me, I hear him curse under his breath. “What?” I ask. He points sheepishly down at his penis, which is dark and erect and once again missing its rubber sheath. I wordlessly reach inside myself and pull it out again, this time handing it back to him so he can resume using it, and note that I should probably march myself back into my gynecologist’s office and ask for yet another STD panel, even if I am chastened by the mere thought of it. Our bodies are slick with sweat and when he clamps his hips against mine and lets out a surprisingly high-pitched coyote-like yelp, I am relieved, as I am physically spent. He collapses on top of me, panting, and then rolls to the side. Suddenly curious about his age, I ask him how old he is, guessing that he’s 35, but he’s actually only 31. “Oh wow. A baby,” I say. “You like older women, huh?” “I like beautiful women,” he says. “How often do you sleep with guests at this hotel?” I ask. “Never. You’re my first one,” he says, unconvincingly. I give him a skeptical look and he continues, “Sometimes three women in a month and then nothing for a few months.” I ask an improbably naïve question then, needing to know if these women have all been single. He laughs. “Married women proposition you?” I ask, unable to keep the shock out of my voice. “I guess they can’t stay away – you exude sex.” “So do you,” he says. He starts putting his clothes back on, reaching in the dark for a collection of money, keys, matches and joints which had fallen from his pockets.

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

  I blamed Michael for encouraging this and was further angry that I had to be the one to figure out what to do with every accident. When they arrived home later with Hudson’s broken hand in a cast, I had warm bowls of chicken tortilla soup waiting for them. As we ate dinner, I tried to catch Michael’s eye, but he wouldn’t look at me. I kept my eyes on him as he stared down at his bowl of soup resolutely. As strained as things had become between us, this felt egregiously harsh, as if he couldn’t bear the sight of me. It was at that moment that the gravity of what he had been trying to tell me weeks earlier clicked and I realized with growing alarm that something in our home had gone terribly awry. After dinner, Michael said he was exhausted and would put Georgia to sleep in our bed and go to sleep with her. I eyed his phone on the counter; I understood at that moment that I would have to scroll through it that night for a clue as to what was happening. I offered to charge it in the kitchen for him, but he grabbed the phone and closed our bedroom door behind him. If he refused to share the real reason behind his unhappiness, I would dig for it myself. I felt like I had just walked through a doorway to another planet – this was my family, my home, my marriage, my forever, my safe ground I walked on no matter what was whirling around in the world outside, and yet suddenly there was a chasm in the ground. I could sense it, but I couldn’t find its source; I was terrified that when I did, I would plunge through it. I cleaned the kitchen, then tiptoed into our bedroom and took his phone from his nightstand. My heart pounded as I walked to the chair at our desk off the hallway and sank down onto it. I easily opened his phone since he and I used the same passwords. I had no idea what I was looking for, so I read his texts, wading through hundreds of business-related texts and finding only one text of note. I didn’t recognize the sender; when I googled him, I saw that he was a therapist. Why wouldn’t Michael tell me if he was seeing a therapist? I then skimmed through hundreds of emails, still coming up empty-handed. I was starting to feel foolish about my paranoia and guilty that I was invading his privacy, but I knew something was amiss and I wasn’t going to know exactly what it was unless I found it out on my own: Michael had closed himself to me.