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.

Page 80 of 501 · 20 per page

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  This is the first time we hear of the doctrine of “action” (karma), which was about to become crucial to Indian spirituality. In Yajnavalkya’s time, however, it was a new and controversial idea. When his Brahmin friend Artabhaga asked Yajnavalkya what happened to a person after death, he replied, “We cannot talk about this in public. Take my hand, Artabhaga, let’s go and discuss this in private.”20 The new doctrine of karma seemed subversive. Sacrifice was supposed to ensure permanent residence in heaven, but some people were losing faith in the efficacy of ritual. Yajnavalkya and the other Upanishadic sages were beginning to believe that, however many perfectly executed sacrifices he performed, a person might have to return to this world of pain and death again and again. He would not only have to undergo a traumatic death once, but would have to endure sickness, old age, and mortality repeatedly, with no hope of final release. He would be liberated from this ceaseless cycle (samsara) of rebirth and redeath only by the ecstatic knowledge of the self, which would free him of the desire for ephemeral things here below. But to become free of desire and attachment is extremely difficult. We instinctively cling to this life and to our personal survival. We think that our individuality is worth preserving, but, the sages insisted, this is an illusion. Once a person became aware that his or her self was identical with the brahman, which contained the whole universe, it became crystal clear that there was nothing to be gained by hanging on to this present, limited existence. Some of the sages were convinced that the best way to attain this liberating knowledge was to become a renouncer, giving up worldly gain, and eliminating desire by a life of austerity. This was not yet considered obligatory, but eventually Yajnavalkya embraced the life of a “striver” (shramana), leaving his wife, departing from the court, and going into “homelessness” in the forest.21

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  This is where the money gets made. VORP may be heartless, but it works. Halligan never lets up the pressure. Then again, Halligan is under pressure himself. He has taken $100 million from venture capital firms and is expected to deliver a return. His investors include Sequoia Capital, a firm with a reputation for throwing out founders who fail to meet expectations. HubSpot needs to pull off a big IPO, and to do that, the company must keep growing. By the strange rules of bubble economics, companies do not have to generate a profit before they can go public, but they do have to demonstrate revenue growth. Every month, every quarter, HubSpot’s sales must keep rising. A start-up that stops growing is like a shark that stops swimming: dead in the water. Unfortunately that is what has been happening at HubSpot in the autumn of 2013, when I arrive in the spider monkey room. Our growth rate has dropped. Nobody is panicking, but Halligan is concerned. One day in October he calls a come-to-Jesus meeting for everyone in sales and marketing, and he makes a big announcement—he’s booting out Karl, the guy who runs sales, and has started searching for a replacement. Karl is not being fired; he is being moved onto a special project. Still, this is a huge deal. Karl was one of Halligan’s first hires. He’s practically a co-founder. He is also one of HubSpot’s top executives. Halligan runs through a litany of problems. The biggest one is growth. HubSpot’s sales grew more than 80 percent in each of the past two years, but in 2013 the growth rate has slowed to about 50 percent. That’s still a lot but apparently it’s not enough. Our rivals are growing faster than we are, Halligan says. We’ve just hit the end of the third quarter, which means results are in for the first nine months of the year and management can estimate what full-year 2013 results will be. My guess is that Halligan and his board of directors have looked at the numbers and are not pleased—and the board has told Halligan to do something about it. That’s the second big piece of news: Halligan says that until he finds a new head of sales he is going to run the sales department himself. He makes it sound like he’s coming back ready to kick ass and take names. “I don’t want to get up in everyone’s shorts, but I’m going to be taking the wheel here for a couple of months,” he says. “The machine is just not working that well.” Slowing growth is only one problem. Our churn rate is too high, meaning too many customers fail to renew. Our close rate is too low, meaning we generate a lot of leads but don’t turn enough of them into customers. Zendesk, a software company on the West Coast that HubSpot’s executives recently visited, has a close rate that is far better than ours.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  All one could do was cultivate friendship and peace of mind; because truth was relative, discussion inevitably led to acrimony and should be avoided. Ajita, another teacher, was a materialist, who denied the doctrine of rebirth: since all humans were wholly physical creatures, they would simply return to the elements after their death. The way you behaved was therefore of no importance, because everybody had the same fate, but it was probably better to foster goodwill and happiness by doing as you pleased and performing only karma that fostered these ends. 107 These teachings all showed a determination to find a way out of the samsaric impasse of rebirth and redeath: some believed that they could achieve this by performing formidable austerities, others by avoiding hostility and unpleasantness. The goal was not to find a metaphysical truth but to obtain peace of mind. Unlike Sophocles, these sages did not think that they had to accept their pain with dignity. They were convinced that it was possible to find a way out. One of the most important of these teachers was Makkhali Gosala (d. c. 385). A taciturn man and a severe ascetic, he preached religious fatalism: “Human effort is ineffective.” People were not responsible for their behavior. “All animals, creatures, beings and souls lack power and energy. They are bent this way and that by fate, by the necessary condition of their class, and by their individual nature.” 108 He founded a school called Ajivaka (“Way of Life”). Gosala believed that all human beings without exception were destined to live through a fixed number of lives before they attained moksha, so their actions could not affect their fate one way or the other. And yet, paradoxically, the Ajivakas adopted a harsh regime. They wore no clothes, begged for their food, and observed such strict dietary rules that some of them starved to death. They also inflicted intense pain on their bodies. When he was initiated into the sect, for example, the new member was buried up to his neck and had his hairs pulled out one by one. They did not perform these penances because they believed that they would help them, but simply because they had reached that stage in their personal cycle when it was their lot to practice austerity. It is a sign of the intense anxiety of this period that this bleak dharma was very popular. Gosala’s rivals attacked him more vehemently than any other guru, because they feared his success. Inscriptions show that kings sent him gifts and donated property to Ajivaka ascetics, and the sect survived in India until the tenth century CE. We may not have the full picture. Gosala probably taught an especially effective form of meditation that was kept secret from outsiders.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  If I ask for a chair, I risk looking like an old fart who doesn’t know how to sit on a bouncy ball or like a prima donna demanding some kind of special treatment. But if I do sit on this thing I’m pretty sure that I will immediately fall off. I imagine myself, age fifty-two, toppling off an orange bouncy ball and onto the floor, as a bunch of young women look on and try not to laugh. Some awkwardness ensues as I ask Zack if it might be possible to find an actual desk chair. We scavenge a chair from a desk in another room. The crisis is averted. Zack goes to his desk and gets to work on whatever it is that Zack does, while I take my seat at my little desk, which is empty save for a new MacBook Air. Is this really it? Is this my job? Will I really go to work every day and sit at this shitty little desk in this shitty little room? Are these people now my colleagues? Will I have to sit in meetings with them and listen to them talk? What exactly is my actual job? Once I finish doing all the first-day paperwork, once I have my picture taken and get my ID badge and set up my parking garage pass, what am I supposed to do? Zack seems to have no idea. He’s so new that he hasn’t even figured out what his job is, let alone mine. I spend the day filling out paperwork and trying not to freak out. Surely, Halligan and Shah would not have hired me and then just stuck me in a room, working for Zack. There must be some kind of mistake. When Cranium gets here, he will sort things out. Then again, is it a bad sign that Cranium made such a big deal out of hiring me and then wasn’t here to meet me on my first day? Stay calm, I tell myself. Take deep breaths. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t block out the sound of that little fuck-fuck-fuck voice, which keeps telling me that I’ve made a very big mistake. Soon I will discover that the little voice is correct. One [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] Beached White MaleN ine months earlier, it’s the summer of 2012, and life is good. I’m fifty-one years old, happily settled into married life in a suburb of Boston, with two young kids and a job I love. At Newsweek , I get paid to meet amazing people and write about subjects that fascinate me: fusion energy, education reform, supercomputing, artificial intelligence, robotics, the rising competitiveness of China, the global threat of state-sponsored hacking. To me, Newsweek is more than a company—it’s an institution. And being a magazine writer seems like the very best job in the world. Then one day, without warning, it all just ends. It’s a Friday morning in June.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Surely, Halligan and Shah would not have hired me and then just stuck me in a room, working for Zack. There must be some kind of mistake. When Cranium gets here, he will sort things out. Then again, is it a bad sign that Cranium made such a big deal out of hiring me and then wasn’t here to meet me on my first day? Stay calm, I tell myself. Take deep breaths. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t block out the sound of that little fuck-fuck-fuck voice, which keeps telling me that I’ve made a very big mistake. Soon I will discover that the little voice is correct. One Beached White Male Nine months earlier, it’s the summer of 2012, and life is good. I’m fifty-one years old, happily settled into married life in a suburb of Boston, with two young kids and a job I love. At Newsweek, I get paid to meet amazing people and write about subjects that fascinate me: fusion energy, education reform, supercomputing, artificial intelligence, robotics, the rising competitiveness of China, the global threat of state-sponsored hacking. To me, Newsweek is more than a company—it’s an institution. And being a magazine writer seems like the very best job in the world. Then one day, without warning, it all just ends. It’s a Friday morning in June. The kids are at school. I’m sitting with my wife, Sasha, at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and going over the plans for our upcoming vacation, a three- week trip to Austria. It’s a bit of a splurge for us, but by using frequent flyer miles and staying in modest hotels we can just about afford it. Our kids—twins, a boy and a girl—are turning seven in a few weeks, and they’re finally old enough to handle an adventure. Sasha has just left her teaching job, because she’s been suffering from chronic migraines and spending too much time in emergency rooms. She needs time off to take care of herself. A few weeks in the Alps seems like a good way to start. We’ll miss her paycheck, and her insurance, which is first-rate, but I can get decent insurance from Newsweek, and in addition to my salary I’ve been making some money on the side by giving speeches. So we’re good. Sasha can quit her job and we can still afford the vacation. It’s all going to be great. That’s what we’re telling each other as we pull up the website for one place where we’ll be staying, a cluster of chalets perched on a hillside in a remote village surrounded by mountains. A local guide takes tourists on day hikes and offers a rock-climbing class for kids. A nearby stable offers trail rides on sturdy little Haflinger horses with shaggy blond manes. We leave in three weeks. My phone beeps. It’s an email from my editor, Abby.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Now he’s coming to HubSpot, and although he’s arriving late to the party, he has taken a small salary and loaded up on stock options. He doesn’t need to be super rich. He just wants to make enough money to pay off his mortgage, buy a vacation house, and “put enough money in the bank that I just don’t have to take shit from anyone,” he says. Trotsky is a wildcatter. Hire him, and he’ll work your oil field and see if he can strike it rich. If he doesn’t, he’ll move on. Silicon Valley is filled with people like this who spend their careers jumping from one tiny dysfunctional company to another, chasing a pot of gold. “I was stunned when I was doing recruiting in the Valley,” a former software executive recalls. “Everyone is a mercenary. Every resume you’d look at had all these stints of a year here, a year there. Like if they didn’t hit the jackpot in a year, they’d go place a new bet.” I think of this as a kind of mental disorder—the Start-up Disease. I know the symptoms, because I am suffering from them myself. But Trotsky has an even more severe case, and he’s been afflicted for a lot longer. Trotsky says the clock is ticking down on him and his career. He’s already too old to be working in tech. If he doesn’t strike it rich at HubSpot he’ll get one more chance, maybe two. By then he will be fifty, and nobody will hire him. He tells me that his first impression of HubSpot is that it reminds him of Logan’s Run, the dystopian sci-fi movie where people are killed when they reach the age of thirty, in order to prevent overpopulation. Even Trotsky has never worked in a place that is so exaggeratedly young. He tells me how Penny, the receptionist, who is twenty-three but looks seventeen, told him when she first met him, “I think it’s cool that they’re starting to hire some older people now.” Trotsky was startled both by the sentiment and by her lack of tact. Bemused, he asked Penny what age she considers old. Where is the cutoff between young people and old people? “I guess about thirty,” she said. I tell Trotsky that if he thinks HubSpot feels weird to him, imagine working there at my age. A few months ago I turned fifty-three. When I was fifty-two I could almost deal with HubSpot, because the average employee is twenty-six, and so I was exactly double the average. Now I’m more than twice the average, and somehow this feels worse. “It seems like a line you don’t want to cross,” I say. I tell him about Zack and his crazy memos in ALL CAPS about CONQUERING THE WORLD. I kvetch about Cranium’s latest management innovation, a service called TINYpulse that bombards us with weekly happiness surveys.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The philosophy of the period reflected the agonistic quality of political life, as well as the Greek yearning for poise and harmony. This was especially evident in the work of Heraclitus (540–480), a member of the royal family of Ephesus, who was known as the “riddler” because he presented his ideas in lapidary, baffling maxims. “Nature,” he once said, “loves to hide”; things were the opposite of what they seemed.72 The first relativist, Heraclitus argued that everything depended upon context: seawater was good for fish, but potentially fatal for men; a blow was salutary if delivered as a punishment, but evil if inflicted by a murderer.73 A restless, unsettling man, Heraclitus believed that even though the cosmos seemed stable, it was in fact in constant flux and a battlefield of warring elements. “Cold things grow hot, the hot cools, the wet dries, the parched moistens.”74 He was especially fascinated by fire: a flame was never still; fire transformed wood into ash, and water into steam. Fire was also a divine force that preserved order by preventing any one of the competing elements from dominating the rest—in rather the same way as the clash of opinions in the council maintained the equilibrium of the polis. Yet beneath this cosmic turbulence, there was unity. Flux and stability, which seemed antithetical, were one and the same; night and day were two sides of a single coin; the way up was also the way down, and an exit could serve as an entrance.75 You could not rely on the evidence of your senses, but must look deeper to find the logos, the ruling principle of nature. And that also applied to human beings. Heraclitus had discovered introspection, a new activity for the Greeks. “I went in search of myself,” he said.76 You could learn a little about human nature by studying dreams, emotions, and people’s individual qualities, but it would always remain an enigma: “You will not find out the limits of the soul by travelling, even if you travel over every pole.”77 In their political reform, the Greeks had found that it was possible to jettison traditional institutions without calling down the wrath of the gods, and some began to question other time-honored assumptions. Xenophanes (560–480), another philosopher from the Ionian coast, rejected the Olympian gods as hopelessly anthropomorphic. People thought that gods “are born, and have clothes and speech and shape like our own.” They were guilty of theft, adultery, and deception. It was clear that people had simply projected their own human form onto the divine. Horses and cows would probably do the same.78 But, he believed, there was only “one god, greatest among gods and men,” who transcended all human qualities.79 Beyond time and change, he governed everything with his mind (nous); no sooner did he think of something than it was done.80

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  We’re marketing people. We need to do marketing! We need to create an email campaign and send spam to thousands of people urging them to click on a link and subscribe to the podcast. If enough people do that, we can trick Apple into thinking that we have a huge audience, and Apple will put our podcast near the top of its ratings. Numbers: We need them! How many listeners will we have in six months, and in a year? Where will the podcast rank in the iTunes Store? How soon will we get into the top ten? At what point can I promise that this will be the number- one business podcast in the entire world? These are projections that I need to make, and once I make them, I have to hit them—or else! As far as my career at HubSpot goes, everything is riding on the podcast. “It’s a very simple situation,” Trotsky says. “If the podcast succeeds, you keep your job.” “And if it doesn’t, then what? I get fired?” Trotsky scowls. “Just make sure it’s a success,” he says. Left unspoken is how we will define success. My guess is success is whatever Trotsky and Cranium decide it will be, and no matter what I do, I will never achieve it. Meanwhile, Trotsky rides me. Constantly. Why haven’t I scheduled meetings with a dozen different people across the marketing department to get them on board with the podcast? Why have I not solicited their help? So I do have those meetings. The question then becomes, Why didn’t I do that sooner? When is our deadline? When do we go live? Why can’t we start sooner? Do I not realize that I am now a project manager, responsible for every step of this project? Why have I not sent Trotsky a full report on my progress, in writing? Why have I not created a full podcast marketing campaign document and shared it via Google Docs with everyone in the marketing department so they can read the marketing plan and add comments? Once I do create that document, why am I not responding to comments immediately? Where are my responses to the list of comments that Trotsky has placed into the document? We’re creating a dedicated web page for the podcast. It looks great, but the designers miss their deadline and ask for a few extra days. I tell them that’s fine. Why did I do that? Why did I tell them they could have those days? Why did they miss the deadline in the first place? Did I fail to communicate the deadlines clearly enough to them? There’s a person I think would be great as a guest on the show. I send an email to Cranium asking him what he thinks. Trotsky leaps in: Why am I writing directly to Cranium? Why am I asking him to get involved in minor details like this?

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In fact, he believed that a martyr could be a “witness” to divine truth even if he died peacefully in bed. 11 Azzam’s classical jihadism was condemned by some scholars, but it had strong appeal for young Sunnis who were embarrassed by the success of the Shii revolution in Iran. Yet not all the volunteers were devout; some were not even observant, although in Peshawar many would be influenced by such hard-line Islamists as Zawahiri, who had suffered arrest, torture, and imprisonment in Egypt for alleged involvement in the Sadat assassination. And so Afghanistan became a new Islamist hub. Young militants from East Asia and North Africa were sent to the front to increase their commitment, and the government of Saudi Arabia actually encouraged its own young to volunteer. 12 To understand the Saudi influence, one must reckon with what may seem a contradiction. On the one hand, after the Iranian Revolution, the kingdom had become one of America’s chief regional allies. On the other hand, it subscribed to an extremely reductive form of Islam, which had been developed in the eighteenth century by the Arabian reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92). Ibn Abd al- Wahhab had preached a return to the pristine Islam of the Prophet and repudiated such later developments as the Shiah, Sufism, Falsafah, and the jurisprudence (fiqh) on which all other Muslim ulema depended. He was particularly distressed by the popular veneration of holy men and their tombs, which he condemned as idolatry. Even so, Wahhabism was not inherently violent; indeed, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab had refused to sanction the wars of his patron, Ibn Saud of Najd, because he was fighting simply for wealth and glory. 13 It was only after his retirement that Wahhabis became more aggressive, even to the point of destroying Imam Husain’s shrine in Karbala in 1802 as well as monuments in Arabia connected with Muhammad and his companions. At this time too, the sect insisted that Muslims who did not accept their doctrines were infidels (kufar). 14 During the early nineteenth century, Wahhabis incorporated the writings of Ibn Taymiyyah into their canon, and takfir, the practice of declaring another Muslim an unbeliever, which Ibn Abd al-Wahhab himself had rejected, became central to their practice. 15 The oil embargo imposed by the Gulf States during the 1973 October War had sent the price soaring, and the kingdom now had all the petrodollars it needed to find practical ways of imposing Wahhabism on the entire ummah. 16 Deeply disconcerted by the success of the Shii revolution in Iran, which threatened their leadership of the Muslim world, the Saudis intensified their efforts to counter Iranian influence and replaced Iran as the chief ally of the United States in the region.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In 258, however, Valerian was the first emperor to target the Church specifically, ordering that its clergy be executed and the property of high-ranking Christians confiscated. Once again, not many people seem to have been killed, and two years later Valerian was taken prisoner by the Persians and died in captivity. His successor, Galienus, revoked the legislation, and Christians enjoyed forty years of peace. Clearly Valerian had been troubled by the Church’s organizational strength rather than by its beliefs and rituals. The Church was a new phenomenon. Christians had exploited the empire’s improved communications to create an institution with a unity of structure that none of the traditions we have discussed so far had attempted. Each local church was headed by a bishop, the “overseer” who was said to derive his authority from Jesus’s apostles, and was supported by presbyters and deacons. The network of such near-identical communities seemed almost to have become an empire within the empire. Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons (c. 130–200), who was anxious to create an orthodoxy that excluded aggressive sectarians, had claimed that the Great Church had a single Rule of Faith, because the bishops had inherited their teaching directly from the apostles. This was not only a novel idea but a total fantasy. Paul’s letters show that there had been considerable tension between him and Jesus’s disciples, and his teachings bore little relation to those of Jesus. Each of the Synoptics had his own take on Jesus, and the Johannines were different again; there were also a host of other gospels in circulation. When Christians finally established a scriptural canon—between the fourth and sixth centuries—diverse visions were included side by side. Unfortunately, however, Christianity would develop a peculiar yearning for intellectual conformity that would not only prove to be unsustainable but that set it apart from other faith traditions. The rabbis would never attempt to create a single central authority; not even God, much less another rabbi, could tell another Jew what to think. 130 The Buddha had adamantly rejected the idea of religious authority; the notion of a single rule of faith and a structured hierarchy was entirely alien to the multifarious traditions of India; and the Chinese were encouraged to see merit in all the great teachers, despite their disagreements. Christian leaders would make the Church even more threatening to the authorities during the forty peaceful years after Valerian’s death. When Diocletian finally established his palace in Nicomedia in 287, a Christian basilica was clearly visible on the opposite hill, seeming to confront the imperial palace as an equal. He made no move against the Church for sixteen years, but as a firm believer in the Pax Deorum at a time when the fate of the empire hung in the balance, Diocletian would find the Christians’ stubborn refusal to honor the gods increasingly intolerable.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  She sends us this email: We’ve got a brilliant team and, at times, it can be hard to innovate due to fear of failure and the pressure of our day-to-day goals. That’s why we’re creating this day to exist in total isolation to work on ANY project that you’re passionate about. The only goal: Be Fearless. I read the email and forget about it. A couple weeks later, on a Thursday afternoon, I’m sitting at my desk when Ashley from the blog team suddenly asks me, “So what are you going to do for Fearless Friday?” “Oh,” I say, “when is that?” “It’s tomorrow!” Her big eyes widen with alarm. “Did you not sign up? You were supposed to sign up! Each team is doing a different project.” “I think I’m going to skip it.” “You can’t skip it! You have to pick one of the activities.” “What are the choices?” I say, filled with dread. “It’s all on the wiki,” she said. “I’ll send you a link.” “No, look, you can just tell me.” She is, after all, sitting right next to me. “No, I’ll send it to you,” she says. I guess she thinks it will be good for me to learn how to do these things by myself. I pull up the link. The idea of Fearless Friday is that we will break into small teams and spend the day doing something fearless . That can be anything we want, but there is one thing we cannot do, which is our actual job. No matter how busy you are, the prime directive is this: No working on your actual job. There’s no getting out of this. There are no exceptions. I have no idea by whose authority we are commanded to do these things. Jordan is not my boss, but here she is, making us all stop work for a day. After doing some research, I discover that Jordan was one of Cranium’s first hires, and that in fact he knew her before he came to HubSpot. They worked together at a software company where Cranium was a marketing manager and Jordan was a college intern. At that company, Jordan’s uncle was the VP of marketing. He was the one who hired Cranium. He’s also a longtime HubSpot customer. In other words, at HubSpot Jordan can do anything she wants. In this case, I believe Jordan wants to demonstrate her leadership abilities by appointing herself the leader of our whole group for a whole day. Marketing people are obsessed with leadership. Attend any marketing conference and you will find someone giving a speech to an auditorium full of glassy-eyed marketing drones, telling them that they are all leaders. Jordan has added a clever twist by attaching her exercise to Sandberg’s feminist manifesto. Tech companies like HubSpot are sensitive, and rightfully so, about having so few women in top positions.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  We could live in the Rocky Mountains! We should make a list of the best places to live, rent a Winnebago, visit each one, and then decide. We could spend the whole summer traveling around the country! We could see the Grand Canyon, and Zion, and Yellowstone, and Yosemite. In a way this whole thing is a gift. Because now we have all this free time! When are we ever going to have a chance like this again? Sasha knows that I’m full of shit, and she also knows I’m panicking, because this is what I do when I’m panicking—I talk and talk and talk. But even as I’m reeling through my list of fantasy mountain towns where I can wear plaid shirts and drive a pickup truck and grow a beard, Sasha has arrived at the truth of our situation, which she feels the need to explain to me, as if by speaking the words out loud she might feel more in control of the situation. “Let’s just talk about where we are right now,” she says. She’s working hard to remain calm. “The reality is that I just quit my job, and I can’t get that job back. They’ve already hired someone else. And now you’ve been fired.” “Laid off,” I say, because that sounds better. “Point is, we’re both unemployed, and we have six-year-old twins, and no health insurance, and no income. And we’re about to go on a really expensive vacation.” “Well,” I say, “when you put it like that.” “How else would you put it?” I launch back into my spiel about moving to the mountains, but she cuts me off. None of that is going to happen, and we both know it. We’re not going to spend the summer cruising around the United States in a Winnebago like the Griswolds on some zany adventure. “Look,” I say, “I’ll get another job. I’m going to start hitting the phone today. Right now. I’m going to email everyone I know. I’ve got a bunch of speeches booked, which should keep us going into the fall. And I can pick up some freelance work.” I’m trying to sound confident. But the truth is that I’m fifty-one years old and I have never gone looking for a job before. I’ve always had a job and then moved to a better one. I’ve never had to call my friends and ask them to keep me in mind if they hear of anything. I’ve always been the guy on the other end of that call, and I’ve always felt bad for those friends who were calling me. Sure, I told them, I’ll pass the word around. I’ll keep an eye open. I’m sure you’ll find something. But we all know the reality of our situation. Every year there are fewer jobs in journalism. It’s a game of musical chairs, with a bunch of laid-off old hacks running around and fighting over the few remaining seats.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  As Wundt and others agree with Helmholtz here, and as their conclusions, if true, are irreconcilable with all the sensationalism which I have been teaching hitherto, it clearly devolves upon me to defend my position against this new attack. But as this chapter on Space is already so overgrown with episodes and details, I think it best to reserve the refutation of their general principle for the next chapter, and simply to assume at this point its untenability. This has of course an arrogant look; but if the reader will bear with me for not very many pages more, I shall hope to appease his mind. Meanwhile I affirm confidently that the same outer objects actually FEEL different to us according as our brain reacts on them in one way or another by making us perceive them as this or as that sort of thing. So true is this that one may well, with Stumpf,[221] reverse Helmholtz's query, and ask: "What would become of our sense-perceptions in case experience were not able so to transform them?" Stumpf adds: "All wrong perceptions that depend on peculiarities in the organs are more or less perfectly corrected by the influence of imagination following the guidance of experience." If, therefore, among the facts of optical space-perception (which we must now proceed to consider in more detail) we find instances of an identical organic eye-process, giving us different perceptions at different times, in consequence of different collateral circumstances suggesting different objective facts to our imagination, we must not hastily conclude, with the school of Helmholtz and Wundt, that the organic eye-process pure and simple, without the collateral circumstances, is incapable of giving us any sensation of a spatial kind at all. We must rather seek to discover by what means the circumstances can so have transformed a space-sensation, which, but for their presence, would probably have been felt in its natural purity. And I may as well say now in advance that we shall find the means to be nothing more or less than association—the suggestion to the mind of optical objects not actually present, but more habitually associated with the 'collateral circumstances' than the sensation which they now displace and being imagined now with a quasi-hallucinatory strength. But before this conclusion emerges, it will be necessary to have reviewed the most important facts of optical space-perception, in relation to the organic conditions on which they depend. Readers acquainted with German optics will excuse what is already familiar to them in the following section.[222] Let us begin the long and rather tedious inquiry by the most important case. Physiologists have long sought for a simple law by which to connect the seen direction and distance of objects with the retinal impressions they produce. Two principal theories have been held of this matter, the 'theory of identical points', and the 'theory of projection'—each incompatible with each other, and each beyond certain limits becoming inconsistent with the facts. The Theory of Identical Points.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  I masturbate with the regularity of a civil servant. When I wake, or during the day, with my back up against a wall, my legs spread and slightly bent, never at night. I take just as much pleasure in doing it when I am well shafted for real. In those instances, it takes me longer to come; I find it more difficult concentrating on my fantasy narrative, because the organ lodged inside me does not exclude the one I imagine. The real one stands ready, motionless and patient until I give the signal, a ‘yeh’ of total acquiescence or a toss of my head, and the spasms that I have provoked meet the charges of the penis at its most powerful. Can I really be bringing together two such very different forms of pleasure, the one that is felt so distinctly that I can almost feel my internal space expanding in the same way that I would watch the tide rising over the beach, and the other far more diffuse pleasure, as if my body were reverberating like a muted gong because, like when we suffer extreme pain, the mind distances itself from it? I have never identified the contractions of my vagina when making love. I have remained completely ignorant on that subject. Is it because I don’t recognise that sort of orgasm in those circumstances? Is it because, filled by my partner’s organ, my own does not have the same elasticity? Still, happily, I did eventually realise that it was one manifestation of the female orgasm. I was over thirty when a male friend and I had one of those intimate conversations which are very rare in life. He was worrying about how one could tell when a woman had come. ‘Is it when she has spasms? Is that the only proof?’ he asked me. Hesitantly, but not wanting to look a fool, I said yes. I kept to myself the fact that I was thinking: ‘so that’s what it is.’ Until then, when my body had emitted these sorts of signals, I had not identified them as such, even if it was while I was masturbating with the precision I have described. Having not knowingly striven for the thing they signified, I could not recognise them as signs. Some caresses made me feel good, some positions were better than others, and that was it. I now understand that that laconic conversation (with a man – and this is not a coincidence – with whom I hadn’t had a sexual relationship) must have sown in me the seed of an anxiety which took many long years to develop into the state of dissatisfaction which came up at the end of the first chapter of this book.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Under the Zhou, the Chinese had made great progress in clearing the land, cutting down woods and forests, and developing more land for cultivation. But this positive development had a worrying consequence. 93 There was now less territory available for hunting and the breeding of sheep and cattle. By destroying the natural habitat of many species, deforestation was also decimating the rich wildlife of the region. In the eighth century, the Chinese returned from their hunting expeditions with far fewer animals than in the old days of plenty. Sheep and cattle breeding had also greatly diminished. The Shang and the early Zhou had slaughtered hundreds of beasts at their lavish sacrifices without giving the matter a second thought, convinced that their resources were inexhaustible. They gave generous gifts and consumed copious amounts of meat at their banquets, without a flicker of anxiety. But the new scarcity seems to have made people look askance at this extravagance. There were no more mass killings of sacrificial victims; the number of animals was now strictly controlled by ritual law. The ritualists also attempted to regulate hunting, trying to limit it to a carefully defined season. By 771, funerals were already more tightly controlled, and the old ostentation was frowned upon. A new spirit of moderation was gradually transforming the lives of the noble families in the cities. Because there was less game and fewer cattle, their wealth now depended upon agriculture rather than on hunting and raiding. The aristocrats remained warriors at heart, but as we shall see in the next chapter, their wars became more ritualized and less violent than before. Because there were fewer military and hunting expeditions, the junzi (“the gentleman”) spent more time at court, increasingly preoccupied with protocol, etiquette, and the minutiae of ritual. 94 Restraint, control, and moderation were now the watchwords. Life had to be more carefully regulated. In place of the old orgy of gift giving, potlatch style, there must be a minutely organized system of exchange, supported by documentary evidence of precedent. 95 All the activities of the noble class were transformed into an elaborate ceremony. Whatever you did, there was a correct way of doing it. Over time, the nobility in the Zhou cities had evolved customs designed to promote social harmony and the welfare of the group. As in all societies, these traditions had developed more by trial and error than by conscious deliberation. These patterns of behavior had probably taken centuries to evolve, and were passed from one generation to another. 96 The junzi lived by an elaborate code of manners: there were some things that he did and other things that he did not do. Now, during the Spring and Autumn period, this customal law began to be written down and made into a coherent system. In this time of transition and uncertainty, people wanted clear directives. They had to rethink their religion.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Not quite at the Scientology point along the influence continuum, Shambala’s exit costs didn’t threaten her physical safety or all-out decimate her life; in a way, her departure felt anticlimactic, like a balloon idly trickling to the floor. She moved to Los Angeles to pursue a master’s in social work, and now she practices a less hierarchical form of Buddhism. Abbie attends a variety of meditation groups and then goes home to her own apartment, which she shares with three roommates (“so I still get the communal aspect,” she laughs). She has a mini altar in her room, and sometimes privately draws on teachings she learned in Vermont. “I try to take what I liked and leave the rest,” she said. “I’m still figuring out what to make of everything that happened.” Cathy Schenkelberg, too, dabbles in alternative spirituality, keeping a healthy distance from Scientology and all her old relationships from that time. After leaving the organization, she had to replace everyone in her life—her friends, her agent, her manager, her accountant, her dentist, her chiropractor—because they were all in the church. But sometimes, when she least expects it, Cathy will overhear a Scientology term out in the world, and those pangs of paranoia she felt for so many years suddenly crackle through her nervous system. “I have a visceral reaction when fellow ex-Scientologists use the terminology. It’s PTSD to me,” Cathy confessed. “I say, ‘Out of respect, could you please not use Scientology language? It upsets me.’ Here, I’ll use a word: It enturbulates me.” My old Scientology confrère Mani and I haven’t seen each other much since our personality test “kidnapping” nearly ten years ago, but I reached out to her as soon as I began writing this chapter. She’s still in LA, doing the acting thing. I realized I’d never gotten her take on that day’s events. I started to fear that maybe my amygdala had caricatured the memory and she’d long ago forgotten it. “Do you ever think about that experience?” I texted her. Her response arrived quickly, in all caps: “I DO ALL THE TIME.” My most crystallized recollection from the ordeal was Mani’s inexplicable calm and endurance. She just cheerfully went along with the whole thing for hours, like fully committing to a hammy acting bit—with me, the wet blanket foil, begging to bail. But Mani recalls being far more distressed. “I remember how they kept us separated,” she messaged back. “I remember a woman telling me (sternly) that it would be very quick (it wasn’t), not to be afraid to be truthful with myself as this was the only way they could properly assess what I would need, and that ‘me and my friend would be back together before we knew it.’” Mani revealed that over the past decade, she’s had other, more frightening Scientology encounters.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  The more sociable I became, the better I cultivated my innate pragmatism in all aspects of sexual exchanges. Having, in the early days, tested various partners’ receptivity to triangular games, I adapted the words I used. A faint, luxurious aura around me was enough for some whereas others, as I have illustrated, wanted to enjoy by proxy every last fingering. Added to this is the fact that even the most truthful speech is obviously never absolute, is always indexed by the way feelings have evolved. I was very talkative with Jacques at first but then I had to cope, more or less well and anyway belatedly, with the ban imposed on sexual adventures and accounts of these adventures the moment our relationship was perceived and lived as one of love, even though more than once I read descriptions of erotic scenes in Jacques’ books which could only have been reworkings of anecdotes I had told him. Of all the men that I saw for any length of time, only two brought my panoramic exposés to an abrupt halt. And even then I am pretty sure that these details they didn’t want to know, and which were therefore not mentioned, still formed a central part of our exchanges.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  I met Éric when I was twenty-one, not before his existence had been ‘announced’ to me; some mutual friends had frequently assured me that, given my predispositions, he was just right for me. After the holiday in Lyon I had continued having group sex with Claude. With Éric, the regime intensified, not only because he took me to places where I could, as I have just shown, make myself available to an incalculable number of hands and penises, but more particularly because the sessions were well organised. To my way of thinking, there has always been a clear-cut difference between, on the one hand, the more or less improvised situations which lead a group of people to redistribute themselves amongst the beds and sofas after a dinner, or which induce an excited gang of friends to drive around the porte Dauphine in their car until they make contact with other cars and all the passengers end up intermingling in a large apartment, and, on the other hand, the soirées curated by Éric and his friends. I preferred the inflexible sequence of the latter, and their exclusive goal: there was no rush and no tension: there were no outside factors (alcohol, demonstrative behaviour…) to impede the flow mechanics of bodies. Their comings and goings never strayed from their insect-like determination. Victor’s birthday parties impressed me the most. At the entrance to his property there were guards with dogs, talking into walkie-talkies, and I was intimidated by the crowds of people. Some women had dressed for the occasion, they wore transparent blouses or dresses, I was envious of them, and as people arrived and met up, sipping their champagne, I stood to one side. In fact, I only really relaxed once I had removed my dress or my trousers. My true clothing was my nudity, which shielded me.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  The reason for the difference is only too plain. You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it? The same with people. For years I would have said that I had perfect confidence in B.R. Then came the moment when I had to decide whether I would or would not trust him with a really important secret. That threw quite a new light on what I called my ‘confidence’ in him. I discovered that there was no such thing. Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief. Apparently the faith—I thought it faith—which enables me to pray for the other dead has seemed strong only because I have never really cared, not desperately, whether they existed or not. Yet I thought I did. [image file=image_rsrcBM.jpg] But there are other difficulties. ‘Where is she now?’ That is, in what place is she at the present time? But if H. is not a body—and the body I loved is certainly no longer she—she is in no place at all. And ‘the present time’ is a date or point in our time series. It is as if she were on a journey without me and I said, looking at my watch, ‘I wonder is she at Euston now.’ But unless she is proceeding at sixty seconds a minute along this same timeline that all we living people travel by, what does now mean? If the dead are not in time, or not in our sort of time, is there any clear difference, when we speak of them, between was and is and will be? Kind people have said to me, ‘She is with God.’ In one sense that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  My telephoto points across the small bay to her house, perched on a rock outcropping at the north end. Behind me, the graveyard’s haphazard, angled headstones look as if they erupt from the mounded earth, not as if human hands lodged them there. The jungle creeps nearly to the ocean here, and the strange trees that lurk around the graves creak and groan as the branches rub together. Strangler Figs, requiring sacrificial host trees of a different species to wrap themselves around. I had asked my hotel proprietress about the peculiar, tentacled trunks. The host tree eventually dies, mummified in the arms of the Strangler. The Stranglers’ dry leaves whisper in the sibilant wind. Crones chattering, clicking their tongues, tsk tsking. They scuff their gnarled toes, shy and tall ladies wallflowered behind me, waiting to be asked to dance. They skulk and scuttle. But when I turn to face them, they haven’t moved. Their canopy blends together, like schoolgirls holding hands overhead, singing “Ring Around the Rosy”. A massive Strangler towers over the others, most likely the mother of 88 ¥. D. Munro all the other trees, sending out vines that snake down doomed host trees; the aerial roots encircle the helpless tree and fuse together to become daughter Stranglers. I lean against a coarse, latticed trunk; my hand comes away sticky with a dark pus. Wasps cluster around the bitter fruit. Hummingbirds levitate near low bushes, pollinating as they suck up oleander dew that would kill a man three thousand times their size, click click clicking, mocking me as I wait for her. Even before dawn like this, the hot pumice air grinds me down. A dry scraping hasps at my ankle, a skeletal caress. The roots form into fleshless hands, winding around my Achilles heel and up my shin. I start awake, kicking. I must have dozed standing-up, leaning against a Strangler. A small branch snags my sleeve, and another scratches down my collar. A prehistoric-looking beast, the size of a newborn baby, crawls over my foot. It hisses at me, frantic pulse visible in its corded neck, then thrashes away through the underbrush. Just an iguana, mistaking me for a tree in my khakis and camo vest. I swipe at the prickles left by its thick hide and move to the tideline, washing him away with the sting of salt water. It makes its ungainly way up the shore of Moth Bay, Bahia de Polilla. I follow it in my viewfinder until it disappears beneath the sudden onyx of her skirts close in my sights.