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 Austerlitz (2001)

  before us as we turned a corner, every facade, every flight of steps looked to me both familiar and utterly alien. I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind, which I could not explain either to myself or to Marie, not on this first walk we took through the deserted park nor in the late afternoon, when we sat in the dimly lit kavarna of the Mésto Moskva under a picture of pink water lilies measuring at least four square yards. I remember, said Austerlitz, that we ordered an ice cream, or rather, as it turned out, a confection resembling an ice cream, a plaster- like substance tasting of potato starch and notable chiefly for the fact that even after more than an hour it did not melt. Apart from us the only customers in the Mésto Moskva were two old gentlemen playing chess at one of the tables at the back. The waiter who was standing by the net curtains, which were discolored with smoke, his hands behind his back and looking out, lost in thought, at the rubbish dump overgrown with giant hogweed on the other side of the road, was himself advanced in age. His white hair and moustache were carefully trimmed, and although he too wore one of those mouse-gray nylon coats it was easy to imagine him in deep black, well-cut tails, with a velvet bow tie above a starched shirtfront radiant with supernatural cleanliness, wearing shiny patent-leather shoes which reflected the lamplight of a grand hotel lobby. When he brought Marie a flat pack of forty Cuban cigarettes displaying a pretty palm-frond motif, and then gave her a light with an elegantly executed gesture, I could see that she greatly admired him. The Cuban tobacco smoke hung in blue drifts in the air between us, and some time went by before Marie asked what was in my mind, why I was so abstracted, so lost in thought; how could I have lapsed so suddenly from the happy mood which she had sensed in me yesterday? And all I could say was that I didn’t know. I think, said Austerlitz, I tried to explain that something or other unknown wrenched at my heart here in Marienbad, something very obvious like an ordinary name or a term which one cannot remember for the sake of anyone or anything in the world. I do not now recall in detail how we spent those few days in Marienbad, said Austerlitz. I know that I often lay for hours in the bubbling mineral baths and the retiring rooms, which did me good in one way but in another may have weakened the resistance I had put up for so many years against the emergence of memory. Once we went to a concert at the Gogol Theater, where a Russian pianist called Bloch played the Papillons and Kinderszenen to an audience of half a dozen. On the way back to the hotel Marie spoke, almost as a warning, so it seemed to me, said Austerlitz, of the clouding of Schumann’s mind as his madness came on and how at last, in the middle of

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  And straight away, looking at the threads of fire cutting up the cloud, he began to ask that lightning strike Yeshua’s post. Repentantly looking into the clear sky that had not yet been devoured by the cloud, and where the vultures were veering on one wing to escape the storm, Levi thought he had been insanely hasty with his curses: now God was not going to listen to him. Turning his gaze to the foot of the hill, Levi fixed on the place where the strung-out cavalry regiment stood, and saw that considerable changes had taken place there. From above, Levi was able to distinguish very well the soldiers bustling about, pulling spears out of the ground, throwing cloaks on, the horse-handlers trotting towards the road leading black horses by their bridles. The regiment was moving off, that was clear. Spitting and shielding himself with his hand from the dust blowing in his face, Levi tried to grasp what it might mean if the cavalry was about to leave. He shifted his gaze further up and made out a little figure in a crimson military chlamys climbing towards the place of execution. And here a chill came over the heart of the former tax collector in anticipation of the joyful end. The man climbing the mountain in the fifth hour of the robbers’ sufferings was the commander of the cohort, who had come galloping from Yershalaim accompanied by an aide. At a gesture from Ratslayer, the file of soldiers parted, and the centurion saluted the tribune. The latter, taking Ratslayer aside, whispered something to him. The centurion saluted him a second time and moved towards the group of executioners, who were sitting on stones at the foot of the posts. The tribune meanwhile directed his steps towards the one sitting on the three-legged stool, and the seated man politely rose to meet the tribune. The tribune also said something to him in a low voice, and the two went over to the posts. They were joined by the head of the temple guard. Ratslayer, casting a squeamish sidelong glance at the dirty rags lying on the ground near the posts, rags that had recently been the criminals’ clothing, and which the executioners had rejected, called two of them and ordered: ‘Follow me!’ From the nearest post came a hoarse, senseless song. Gestas, hanging on it, had lost his mind from the flies and sun towards the end of the third hour, and was now quietly singing something about grapes, but his head, covered with a turban, occasionally swayed all the same, and then the flies rose sluggishly from his face and settled on it again. Dysmas, on the second post, suffered more than the other two because he did not lose consciousness, and he swung his head constantly and rhythmically, right and left, so that his ears struck his shoulders. Yeshua was more fortunate than the other two.

• From The Girls (2016)

  They spoke rapidly to each other in serious Asiatic voices, with sober, rational inflection, like the conversation of two little sages. Breaking into sudden hysterical laughter. —It was late in the day. We drank the dirty wine they sold by the gallon in town, sediment staining our tongues, a nauseous heat. Mitch had gotten to his feet, ready to head home. “Why don’t you go with Mitch?” Russell suggested. Squeezing my hand in submerged code. Had a look passed between him and Mitch? Or maybe I am imagining that I witnessed that exchange. The logistics of the day were shrouded in confusion, so that somehow it was dusk and Suzanne and I were driving Mitch back to his house, hurtling along the back roads of Marin in his car. Mitch was sitting in the backseat, Suzanne driving. I was up front. I kept catching sight of Mitch in the mirror, lost in an aimless fog. Then he’d jolt back into himself, staring at us with wonderment. I didn’t fully understand why we’d been chosen to take Mitch home. Information passed through selectively, so all I knew was that I got to be with Suzanne. All the windows open to the smell of summer earth and the secret flash of other driveways, other lives, along that narrow road in the shadow of Mount Tam. The loops of garden hoses, the pretty magnolia. Suzanne drove in the wrong lane sometimes, and we shrieked with happy and confused terror, though there was a flatness to my yelling: I did not believe anything bad could ever happen, not really. —Mitch changed into a white pajama-like suit, a souvenir from a three-week sojourn in Varanasi. He handed us each a glass—I caught the medical whiff of gin and something else, too, a tinge of bitterness. I drank it easily. I was almost pathologically stoned, and I kept swallowing, my nose getting stuffy. I laughed a little to myself. It seemed so odd to be in Mitch Lewis’s house. Among his cluttered shrines and new-looking furniture. “The Airplane lived here for a few months,” he said. He blinked heavily. “With one of those dogs,” he continued, staring around at his house. “The big white ones. What are they called? Newfoundlands? It tore up the lawn.” He didn’t seem to care that we were ignoring him. He was out of it, glazing over with silence. Abruptly he got to his feet, putting a record on. Turning the volume up so loud I startled, but Suzanne laughed, urging him to make it louder. It was his own music, which embarrassed me. His heavy belly pressed against his long shirt, as flowing as a dress. “You’re fun girls,” he said dimly. Watching Suzanne start to dance. Her dirty feet on the white carpet. She’d found chicken in the refrigerator and had torn off a piece with her fingers, chewing while she moved her hips. “Kona chicken,” Mitch remarked.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  of this cold and damp day, as the fog drifted over the fields, they were forced to wait, guarded by armed police, and not permitted to step out of line even for a minute, for the SS men to arrive, as they eventually did on their motorbikes at three o’clock, to carry out the count of heads and then repeat it twice before they could feel convinced that the final result, including those few still within the walls, did in fact tally with the expected number of forty thousand one hundred and forty-five, whereupon they rode away again in some haste, entirely forgetting to give any orders for the inmates’ return, so that this great crowd of many thousands stood out in the Bohusevice basin on that gray tenth of November drenched to the skin and increasingly distressed until well after dark, bowed and swaying like reeds in the showers that now swept over the countryside, before finally, driven to it by a wave of panic, they poured back into the town from which most of them had never emerged except for this one time since their transfer to Theresienstadt, where soon after the beginning of the new year, said Austerlitz, what was described as a Verschénerungsaktion or general improvement campaign was undertaken, with an eye to the imminent visit in the early summer of 1944 of a Red Cross commission, an event regarded by those authorities of the Reich responsible as a good opportunity to dissimulate the true nature of their deportation policy, and consequently it was decided to organize the ghetto inmates under the command of the SS for the purpose of a vast cleaning-up program: pathways and a grove with a columbarium were laid out, park benches and signposts were set up, the latter adorned in the German fashion with jolly carvings and floral decoration, over a thousand rosebushes were planted, a children’s nursery and créche or Kriechlingskrippe, as it was termed, said Austerlitz, in one of those perverse formulations, were adorned with pretty fairy-tale friezes and equipped with sandboxes, paddling pools, and merry-go- rounds, whilst the former OREL cinema, which until now had served as a dumping ground for the oldest inmates of the ghetto and where a huge chandelier still hung from the ceiling in the dark space inside, was converted within a few weeks into a concert hall and theater, and elsewhere shops stocked with goods from the SS storehouses were opened for the sale of food and household utensils, ladies’ and gentlemen’s clothing, shoes, underwear, travel requisites, and suitcases; there were also a convalescent home, a chapel, a lending library, a gymnasium, a post office, a bank where the manager’s office was furnished with a sort of field marshal’s desk and a suite of easy chairs, not to mention a coffeehouse with sun umbrellas and folding chairs outside it to suggest the agreeable atmosphere of a resort inviting all passersby to linger for a while, and indeed there was no end to the improvements and embellishments, with much sawing, hammering, and painting until the time of the visit itself

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  When it’s two o’clock in the morning, and you’re manic, even the UCLA Medical Center has a certain appeal. The hospital—ordinarily a cold clotting of uninteresting buildings—became for me, that fall morning not quite twenty years ago, a focus of my finely wired, exquisitely alert nervous system. With vibrissae twinging, antennae perked, eyes fast-forwarding and fly faceted, I took in everything around me. I was on the run. Not just on the run but fast and furious on the run, darting back and forth across the hospital parking lot trying to use up a boundless, restless, manic energy. I was running fast, but slowly going mad. […] My colleague, fortunately, was thinking far better than I was and managed to reach down into some deeply intuitive part of his own and the world’s collective unconscious and said, “We’re both on the faculty in the psychiatry department.” The policeman looked at us, smiled, went back to his squad car, and drove away. Being professors of psychiatry explained everything.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  further, the grating over the drain in the middle of it and the metal pail standing beside the drain, a picture of our laundry room at home in W. rose from the abyss and with it, suggested perhaps by the iron hook hanging on a cord from the ceiling, the image of the butcher’s shop I always had to pass on my way to school, where at noon Benedikt was often to be seen in a rubber apron washing down the tiles with a thick hose. No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open. But I do remember that there in the casemate at Breendonk a nauseating smell of soft soap rose to my nostrils, and that this smell, in some strange place in my head, was linked to the bizarre German word for scrubbing brush, Wurzelbuirste, which was a favorite of my father’s and which I had always disliked. Black striations began to quiver before my eyes, and I had to rest my forehead against the wall, which was gritty, covered with bluish spots, and seemed to me to be perspiring with cold beads of sweat. It was not that as the nausea rose in me I guessed at the kind of third-degree interrogations which were being conducted here around the time I was born, since it was only a few years later that I read Jean Ameéry’s description of the dreadful physical closeness between torturers and their victims, and of the tortures he himself suffered in Breendonk when he was hoisted aloft by his hands, tied behind his back, so that with a crack and a splintering sound which, as he says, he had not yet forgotten when he came to write his account, his arms dislocated from the sockets in his shoulder joints, and he was left dangling as they were wrenched up behind him and twisted together above his head: la pendaison par les mains liées dans le dos jusqu’a évanouissement—this is how it is described in the book Le Jardin des Plantes, in which Claude Simon descends once more into the storehouse of his memories, and on page 235 begins to tell the fragmentary tale of a certain Gastone Novelli who, like Améry, was subjected to this particular form of torture. The passage opens with an entry of 26 October 1943 from General Rommel’s diary, in which Rommel comments that in view of the total powerlessness of the police in Italy one must now take charge oneself. As a result of the measures thereupon introduced by the Germans, says Simon, Novelli was arrested and taken to Dachau. Novelli, Simon continues, never mentioned what happened to him there except on one occasion, when he said that after his liberation from the camp he found the sight of a German, or indeed any so-called civilized being, male or female, so intolerable that, hardly recovered, he embarked on the first ship he could find, to make his living prospecting for diamonds and gold in South America. For some time Novelli lived in the green jungle with a tribe of small people who had gleaming, coppery skins and had emerged beside him as if out of nowhere one day, without moving

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

  Literature: The Chronicles of Salimbene, Villani, etc.: Gerson: Contra sectam flagellantium, 1417, Du Pin’s ed., Antwerp, 1706. Gerson’s letter to Ferrer and his address to the council of Constance concerning the Flagellants are given by Van der Hardt: Constant. concilium, Frankf., 1700, III. 92–104.—J. Boileau: Hist. Flagel., Paris, 1700, new ed., 1770.—*E. G. Förstemann: D. christl. Geisslergesellschaften, Halle, 1828.—W. M. Cooper: Flagellation and the Flagellants, A Hist. of the Rod in all Countries, Lond., 1877; new ed., 1896.—Fredericq, in Corpus doc. inquis., etc. gives reports of their trials in Holland, I. 190 sqq., etc.—*F. Neukirch: D. Leben d. P. Damiani, Gött., 1875.—Lea: Hist. of Inq., I. 72 sqq., II. 381 sqq.—Artt. Geissler and Geisselung in Wetzer-Welte by Knöpfler, IV. 1532 sqq. and in Herzog by Haupt, VI. 432 sqq. For the older lit., see Förstemann, pp. 291–325. A genuine indication of popular interest in religion within orthodox circles was the strange movement represented by the Flagellants. Gregorovius has gone so far as to pronounce their appearance "one of the most striking phenomena of the Middle Ages."2116 Although they started within the Church and are not to be classed with the mediaeval sectaries, the Flagellants in a later age came to be regarded with suspicion, were formally condemned by the council of Constance, and were even the object of ecclesiastical prosecution. They appeared first in 1259, then in 1333, 1349, 1399, and last at the time the council of Constance was sitting. The most notable appearance was in 1349, at the time the Black Death was raging in Europe. The movement had no compact organization, as is shown from its spasmodic character. It grew out of discontent with the Church and a longing for true penitence and amendment of life. The prophecies of Joachim, who set 1260 as the time for the appearance of anti-christ, probably had something to do with stirring up unrest; perhaps also the famine in Italy, of 1258, which was followed by a strange physical malady, characterized by numbness of the bodily organs. Salimbene reports that the bells were left untolled for funerals, lest the sick should be terrified. The enthusiasm took the form of processions, scourgings, and some novel and strange ceremonies. It was a species of evangelism, and attempted a campaign against physical and other sins, as the Crusades did against the Saracens of the East. It sought to make popular the discipline of flagellation, which was practised in the convent, and to secure penitential results, such as the monk was supposed to reach.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  You may rest. Right now a storm is coming, the last storm, it will complete all that needs completing, and we’ll be on our way.’ ‘Very well, Messire,’ the two buffoons replied and disappeared somewhere behind the round central tower, which stood in the middle of the terrace. The storm of which Woland had spoken was already gathering on the horizon. A black cloud rose in the west and cut off half the sun. Then it covered it entirely. The air became cool on the terrace. A little later it turned dark. This darkness which came from the west covered the vast city. Bridges and palaces disappeared. Everything vanished as if it had never existed in the world. One fiery thread ran across the whole sky. Then a thunderclap shook the city. It was repeated, and the storm began. Woland could no longer be seen in its gloom. CHAPTER 30: It’s Time! It’s Time!, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 30 It’s Time! It’s Time! ‘You know,’ said Margarita, ‘just as you fell asleep last night, I was reading about the darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea . . . and those idols, ah, the golden idols! For some reason they never leave me in peace. I think it’s going to rain now, too. Do you feel how cool it’s getting?’ ‘That’s all well and good,’ replied the master, smoking and breaking up the smoke with his hand, ‘and as for the idols, God be with them . . . but what will happen further on is decidedly unclear!’ This conversation occurred at sunset, just at the moment when Matthew Levi came to Woland on the terrace. The basement window was open, and if anyone had looked through it, he would have been astonished at how strange the talkers looked. Margarita had a black cloak thrown directly over her naked body, and the master was in his hospital underwear. The reason for this was that Margarita had decidedly nothing to put on, because all her clothes had stayed in her house, and though this house was very near by, there was, of course, no question of going there to take her clothes. And the master, whose clothes were all found in the wardrobe as if he had never gone anywhere, simply did not want to get dressed, developing before Margarita the thought that some perfect nonsense was about to begin at any moment. True, he was clean-shaven for the first time since that autumn night (in the clinic his beard had been cut with clippers). The room also had a strange look, and it was very hard to make anything out in its chaos. Manuscripts were lying on the rug, and on the sofa as well.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  A symptomatic after-effect of Rome’s fall was the Pinian affair (411) in Hippo. The highborn and wealthy Albina, a devout Christian, left Italy with her daughter Melania and her son-in-law Pinian. They went to an estate in Thagaste, Augustine’s birthplace, where his friend Alypius was now bishop. Albina wrote to Augustine hoping he would someday visit them. Since Augustine said he was unable to leave his church, Alypius took the three famous people to Hippo—where the congregation tried to induct the wealthy Christian celebrity Pinian as their priest, though Augustine had pledged that the visitor would not be pressured into that service. When Alypius tried to get his endangered guest out of the church, the people charged him with keeping Pinian to himself so he could control his vast holdings for Thagaste. Augustine told his congregation it could gain Pinian as priest only by losing him as its bishop. But his congregation was frenzied and he could not quiet it. He withdrew to the apse and drew its curtain shut. Pinian sent word to him that he would not be ordained, but that he would take an oath to live in Hippo and not to accept ordination elsewhere. After tense negotiations over the terms, Pinian took this oath—only to skip town the next day (L 126). Alypius took the view that a coerced oath is not binding, but Augustine’s strict line on deception, especially where religion was involved, made him write that Pinian must return to Hippo according to his word (L 125). Hard feelings all around were later assuaged, and Pinian went to the Holy Land, where he became a monk and Melania became an abbess. The story shows what a touchy matter it was for Augustine to control his volatile community, even after that early showdown over the drunken celebration of a martyr’s day. Augustine was a judge over property and other disputes, since the empire “farmed out” as much of its administrative tasks as it could, letting bishops hold ecclesiastical courts even for civil matters. These hearings were a time-consuming distraction for Augustine, but he felt obliged to conduct them daily (VDM 259–65), since they gave him a chance to teach moral principles of equity and social concord. They also let him set an example of leniency in punishment, something he was always preaching to Roman officials. He was, he hoped, saving some people from the imperial judges, of whom he had a low opinion: “Ignorance in the judge is often doom to the defendant” (CG 19.6).

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  How many hours of sleep had I been getting? Did I have any problems in concentrating? Had I been more talkative than usual? Did I talk faster than usual? Had anyone told me to slow down or that they couldn’t make sense out of what I was saying? Had I felt a pressure to talk constantly? Had I been more energetic than usual? Were other people saying that they were having difficulty keeping up with me? Had I become more involved in activities than usual, or undertaken more projects? Had my thoughts been going so quickly that I had difficulty keeping track of them? Had I been more physically restless or agitated than usual? More sexually active? Had I been spending more money? Acting impulsively? Had I been more irritable or angry than usual? Had I felt as though I had special talents or powers? Had I had any visions or heard sounds or voices that other people probably hadn’t seen or heard? Had I experienced any strange sensations in my body? Had I ever had any of these symptoms earlier in my life? Did anyone else in my family have similar sorts of problems? I realized that I was on the receiving end of a very thorough psychiatric history and examination; the questions were familiar, I had asked them of others a hundred times, but I found it unnerving to have to answer them, unnerving not to know where it all was going, and unnerving to realize how confusing it was to be a patient. I answered yes to virtually all of his questions, including a long series of additional ones about depression, and found myself gaining a new respect for psychiatry and professionalism. Gradually, his experience as a physician, and self-confidence as a person, began to take effect, much in the same way that medications gradually begin to take hold and calm the turmoil of mania. He made it unambivalently clear that he thought I had manic-depressive illness and that I was going to need to be on lithium, probably indefinitely. The thought was very frightening to me—much less was known then than is known now about the illness and its prognosis—but all the same I was relieved: relieved to hear a diagnosis that I knew in my mind of minds to be true. Still, I flailed against the sentence I felt he had handed me. He listened patiently. He listened to all of my convoluted, alternative explanations for my breakdown—the stress of a stressed marriage, the stress of joining the psychiatry faculty, the stress of overwork—and he remained firm in his diagnosis and recommendations for treatment. I was bitterly resentful, but somehow greatly relieved. And I respected him enormously for his clarity of thought, his obvious caring, and his unwillingness to equivocate in delivering bad news.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  He is humane and simply wants to comfort me. I don’t deny, however, that I’m much better now. Yes, so where did I leave off? Frost, those flying trams . . . I knew that this clinic had been opened, and set out for it on foot across the entire city. Madness! Outside the city I probably would have frozen to death, but chance saved me. A truck had broken down, I came up to the driver, it was some three miles beyond the city limits, and to my surprise he took pity on me. The truck was coming here. And he took me along. I got away with having my left toes frostbitten. But they cured that. And now this is the fourth month that I’ve been here. And, you know, I find it not at all bad here. One mustn’t make grandiose plans, dear neighbour, really! I, for instance, wanted to go all around the globe. Well, so it turns out that I’m not going to do it. I see only an insignificant piece of that globe. I suppose it’s not the very best there is on it, but, I repeat, it’s not so bad. Summer is coming, the ivy will twine up on to the balcony. So Praskovya Fyodorovna promises. The keys have broadened my possibilities. There’ll be the moon at night. Ah, it’s gone! Turning cool. It’s falling past midnight. Time to go.’ ‘Tell me, what happened afterwards with Yeshua and Pilate?’ Ivan asked. ‘I beg you, I want to know.’ ‘Ah, no, no,’ the guest replied with a painful twitch. ‘I cannot recall my novel without trembling. And your acquaintance from the Patriarch’s Ponds would do it better than I. Thank you for the conversation. Goodbye.’ And before Ivan could collect his senses, the grille closed with a quiet clang, and the guest vanished. CHAPTER 14: Glory to the Cock!, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 14 Glory to the Cock! His nerves gave out, as they say, and Rimsky fled to his office before they finished drawing up the report. He sat at his desk and stared with inflamed eyes at the magic banknotes lying before him. The findirector’s wits were addled. A steady hum came from outside. The audience poured in streams from the Variety building into the street. Rimsky’s extremely sharpened hearing suddenly caught the distant trill of a policeman. That in itself never bodes anything pleasant.

• From The Girls (2016)

  streambeds or clustered at cliff bases, picked off as easily as peaches. I had heard my mother tell Sal that Frank was still married but wouldn’t be for long. I didn’t know if that was true. Frank didn’t seem the type to leave his family. He wore a shirt with creamy buttons, peonies embroidered in raised red thread on the shoulders. My mother was acting nervous, touching her hair, slipping her fingernail between her front teeth. She looked from me to Frank. “Evie’s a very smart girl,” she said. She was talking too loud. Still, it was nice to hear her say it. “She’ll really blossom at Catalina.” This was the boarding school I’d attend, though September seemed years away. “Big brains,” Frank boomed. “Can’t go wrong there, can you?” I didn’t know if he was joking or not, and my mother didn’t seem to know either. We ate a casserole in silence in the dining room, and I picked out the blats of tofu and built a pile on my plate. I watched my mother decide not to say anything. Frank was good-looking, even if his shirt was strange, too fussy and feminine, and he made my mother laugh. He was not as handsome as my father, but still. She kept reaching out to touch his arm with her fingertips. “Fourteen years old, huh?” Frank said. “Bet you have a ton of boyfriends.” Adults always teased me about having boyfriends, but there was an age where it was no longer a joke, the idea that boys might actually want you. “Oh, heaps,” I said, and my mother perked to attention, hearing the coldness in my voice. Frank didn’t seem to notice, smiling widely at my mother, patting her hand. She was smiling, too, in a masklike way, her eyes bouncing from me to him across the table. Frank had gold mines in Mexico. “No regulations down there,” he said. “Cheap labor. It’s pretty much a sure thing.” “How much gold have you found?” I asked. “So far, I mean.” “Well, once all the equipment is in place, I’ll be finding a ton.” He drank from a wineglass, his fingers leaving ghosts of grease. My mother went soft, in his glance; her shoulders relaxing, her lips parting. She was young looking that night. I had a queer twinge of motherly feeling for her,

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Many of these concerns carry over into my research and writing. I have written extensively in medical and scientific journals about manic-depressive illness. Will my work now be seen by my colleagues as somehow biased because of my illness? It is a discomforting thought, although one of the advantages of science is that one’s work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not. Biases, because of this, tend to be minimized over time. I worry, however, about my colleagues’ reactions once I am open about my illness: if, for example, I am attending a scientific meeting and ask a question, or challenge a speaker, will my question be treated as though it is coming from someone who has studied and treated mood disorders for many years, or will it instead be seen as a highly subjective, idiosyncratic view of someone who has a personal ax to grind? It is an awful prospect, giving up one’s cloak of academic objectivity. But, of course, my work has been tremendously colored by my emotions and my experiences. They have deeply affected my teaching, my advocacy work, my clinical practice, and what I have chosen to study: manic-depressive illness in general and, more specifically, suicide, psychosis, psychological aspects of the disease and its treatment, lithium noncompliance, positive features of mania and cyclothymia, and the importance of psychotherapy. Most important, however, as a clinician, I have had to consider the question that Mouseheart so artfully managed to slip into our lunchtime conversation in Malibu: Do I really think that someone with mental illness should be allowed to treat patients? When I left the University of California in the winter of 1986 to return to Washington, I was eager to continue teaching and to obtain an academic appointment at a university medical school. Richard, who had gone to medical school at Johns Hopkins, thought I would love it. At his suggestion, I applied to the Department of Psychiatry for a faculty appointment, and I started teaching at Hopkins within a few months of moving back East. Richard was right. I loved Hopkins straightaway. And, as he predicted, one of the many pleasures I found in being on the Hopkins faculty was the seriousness with which teaching obligations are taken. The excellence of clinical care was another. It was only a matter of time. The issue of clinical privileges was bound to come up.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  CHAPTER 9: Koroviev’s Stunts, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 9 Koroviev’s Stunts Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, chairman of the tenants’ association 1 of no. 302-bis on Sadovaya Street in Moscow, where the late Berlioz used to reside, had been having the most terrible troubles, starting from that Wednesday night. At midnight, as we already know, a commission of which Zheldybin formed a part came to the house, summoned Nikanor Ivanovich, told him about the death of Berlioz, and together with him went to apartment no. 50. There the sealing of the deceased’s manuscripts and belongings was carried out. Neither Grunya, the daytime housekeeper, nor the light-minded Stepan Bogdanovich was there at the time. The commission announced to Nikanor Ivanovich that it would take the deceased’s manuscripts for sorting out, that his living space, that is, three rooms (the former study, living room and dining room of the jeweller’s wife), reverted to the disposal of the tenants’ association, and that the belongings were to be kept in the aforementioned living space until the heirs were announced. The news of Berlioz’s death spread through the whole house with a sort of supernatural speed, and as of seven o’clock Thursday morning, Bosoy began to receive telephone calls and then personal visits with declarations containing claims to the deceased’s living space. In the period of two hours, Nikanor Ivanovich received thirty-two such declarations. They contained pleas, threats, libels, denunciations, promises to do renovations at their own expense, references to unbearable overcrowding and the impossibility of living in the same apartment with bandits. Among others there were a description, staggering in its artistic power, of the theft from apartment no. 31 of some meat dumplings, tucked directly into the pocket of a suit jacket, two vows to end life by suicide and one confession of secret pregnancy. Nikanor Ivanovich was called out to the front hall of his apartment, plucked by the sleeve, whispered to, winked at, promised that he would not be left the loser. This torture went on until noon, when Nikanor Ivanovich simply fled his apartment for the management office by the gate, but when he saw them lying in wait for him there, too, he fled that place as well. Having somehow shaken off those who followed on his heels across the asphalt-paved courtyard, Nikanor Ivanovich disappeared into the sixth entrance and went up to the fifth floor, where this vile apartment no. 50 was located. After catching his breath on the landing, the corpulent Nikanor Ivanovich rang, but no one opened for him. He rang again, and then again, and started grumbling and swearing quietly. Even then no one opened. His patience exhausted, Nikanor Ivanovich took from his pocket a bunch of duplicate keys belonging to the house management, opened the door with a sovereign hand, and went in. ‘Hey, housekeeper!’

• From The Girls (2016)

  poverty. The cold, dark sand, a bonfire, Mitch on a break between records. Someone in a porkpie hat tending a pot of steamed clams. Mitch, I’d learn, had been having a crisis—money disputes with a manager who’d been a childhood friend, a marijuana arrest that had been expunged, but still—and Russell must have seemed like a citizen of a realer world, stoking Mitch’s guilt over the gold records, the parties where he covered the pool in Perspex. Russell offered up a mystic salvation, buttressed by the young girls who cast their eyes down in adoration when Russell spoke. Mitch invited the whole group back to his house in Tiburon, letting them gorge on the contents of his refrigerator, crash in his guest room. They drained bottles of apple juice and pink champagne and tracked mud onto the bed, thoughtless as an occupying army. In the morning, Mitch gave them a lift back to the ranch: by then Russell had seduced Mitch, speaking softly of truth and love, those invocations especially potent to wealthy searchers. I believed everything the girls told me that day, their buzzy, swarming pride as they spoke of Russell’s brilliance. How pretty soon he wouldn’t be able to walk down the street without getting mobbed. How he’d be able to tell the whole world how to be free. And it was true that Mitch had set up a recording session for Russell. Thinking maybe Mitch’s label would find Russell’s vibe interesting and of the moment. I didn’t know it until much later, but the session had gone badly, the failure legendary. This was before everything else happened. — There are those survivors of disasters whose accounts never begin with the tornado warning or the captain announcing engine failure, but always much earlier in the timeline: an insistence that they noticed a strange quality to the sunlight that morning or excessive static in their sheets. A meaningless fight with a boyfriend. As if the presentiment of catastrophe wove itself into everything that came before. Did I miss some sign? Some internal twinge? The bees glittering and crawling in the crate of tomatoes? An unusual lack of cars on the road? The question I remember Donna asking me in the bus—casually, almost as an afterthought. “You ever hear anything about Russell?” The question didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand that she was trying to gauge how many of the rumors I’d heard: about orgies, about frenzied acid trips and teen runaways forced to service older men. Dogs sacrificed on moonlit beaches, goat heads rotting in the sand. If I’d had friends besides Connie, I might’ve heard chatter of Russell at parties, some hushed gossip in the kitchen. Might’ve known to be wary. But I just shook my head. I hadn’t heard anything.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Now and again, despite my strong commitment to the scientific efforts that are being made to track down the genes for manic-depressive illness, I have concerns about what finding the genes might actually mean. Clearly, if better and earlier diagnosis and more specific, less troublesome treatments result from the ongoing genetic research, then the benefits to individuals who have manic-depressive illness, to their families, and to society will be extraordinary. It is, in fact, only a matter of time until these benefits will be available. But what are the dangers in prenatal diagnostic testing? Will prospective parents choose to abort fetuses that carry the genes for manic-depressive illness, even though it is a treatable disease? (Interestingly, a recent study done at Johns Hopkins, which asked manic-depressive patients and their spouses whether or not they would abort an affected fetus, found that very few said that they would.) Do we risk making the world a blander, more homogenized place if we get rid of the genes for manic-depressive illness—an admittedly impossibly complicated scientific problem? What are the risks to the risk takers, those restless individuals who join with others in society to propel the arts, business, politics, and science? Are manic-depressives, like spotted owls and clouded leopards, in danger of becoming an “endangered species”? These are very difficult ethical issues, particularly because manic-depressive illness can confer advantages on both the individual and society. The disease, in both its severe and less severe forms, appears to convey its advantages not only through its relationship to the artistic temperament and imagination, but through its influence on many eminent scientists, as well as business, religious, military, and political leaders. Subtler effects—such as those on personality, thinking style, and energy—are also involved because it is a common illness with a wide range of temperamental, behavioral, and cognitive expression. The situation is yet further complicated by the fact that additional genetic, biochemical, and environmental factors (such as exposure to prolonged or significant changes in light, pronounced sleep reduction, childbirth, drug or alcohol use) may be at least in part responsible for both the illness and the cognitive and temperamental characteristics associated with great achievement. These scientific and ethical issues are real ones; fortunately, they are being actively considered by the federal government’s Genome Project and other groups of scientists and ethicists. But they are immensely troubling problems and will remain so for many years to come. Science remains quite remarkable in its ability to raise new problems even as it solves old ones. It moves quickly, often beautifully, and as it moves it brings high expectations in its wake.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  He had no sooner uttered the words: ‘Tell me, please . . .’ when the woman behind the counter exclaimed: ‘Citizen, your head is cut all over!’ Some five minutes later the barman was bandaged with gauze, knew that the best specialists in liver diseases were considered to be professors Bernadsky and Kuzmin, asked who was closer, lit up with joy on learning that Kuzmin lived literally across the courtyard in a small white house, and some two minutes later was in that house. The premises were antiquated but very, very cosy. The barman remembered that the first one he happened to meet was an old nurse who wanted to take his hat, but as he turned out to have no hat, the nurse went off somewhere, munching with an empty mouth. Instead of her, there turned up near the mirror and under what seemed some sort of arch, a middle-aged woman who said straight away that it was possible to make an appointment only for the nineteenth, not before. The barman at once grasped what would save him. Peering with fading eyes through the arch, where three persons were waiting in what was obviously some sort of anteroom, he whispered: ‘Mortally ill . . .’ The woman looked in perplexity at the barman’s bandaged head, hesitated, and said: ‘Well, then . . .’ and allowed the barman through the archway. At that same moment the opposite door opened, there was the flash of a gold pince-nez. The woman in the white coat said: ‘Citizens, this patient will go out of turn.’ And before the barman could look around him, he was in Professor Kuzmin’s office. There was nothing terrible, solemn or medical in this oblong room. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Professor Kuzmin asked in a pleasant voice, and glanced with some alarm at the bandaged head. ‘I’ve just learned from reliable hands,’ the barman replied, casting wild glances at some group photograph under glass, ‘that I’m going to die of liver cancer in February of this coming year. I beg you to stop it.’ Professor Kuzmin, as he sat there, threw himself against the high Gothic leather back of his chair. ‘Excuse me, I don’t understand you . . . you’ve, what, been to the doctor? Why is your head bandaged?’ ‘Some doctor! . . .

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  While the secretary was gathering the conference, the procurator met, in a room shielded from the sun by dark curtains, with a certain man, whose face was half covered by a hood, though he could not have been bothered by the sun’s rays in this room. The meeting was a very short one. The procurator quietly spoke a few words to the man, after which he withdrew and Pilate walked out through the colonnade to the garden. There, in the presence of all those he had desired to see, the procurator solemnly and drily stated that he confirmed the death sentence on Yeshua Ha-Nozri, and officially inquired of the members of the Sanhedrin as to whom among the criminals they would like to grant life. Having received the reply that it was Bar-Rabban, the procurator said: ‘Very well,’ and told the secretary to put it into the record at once, clutched in his hand the clasp that the secretary had picked up from the sand, and said solemnly: ‘It is time!’ Here all those present started down the wide marble stairway between walls of roses that exuded a stupefying aroma, descending lower and lower towards the palace wall, to the gates opening on to the big, smoothly paved square, at the end of which could be seen the columns and status of the Yershalaim stadium. As soon as the group entered the square from the garden and mounted the spacious stone platform that dominated the square, Pilate, looking around through narrowed eyelids, assessed the situation. The space he had just traversed, that is, the space from the palace wall to the platform, was empty, but before him Pilate could no longer see the square—it had been swallowed up by the crowd, which would have poured over the platform and the cleared space as well, had it not been kept at bay by a triple row of Sebastean soldiers to the left of Pilate and soldiers of the auxiliary Iturean cohort to his right. And so, Pilate mounted the platform, mechanically clutching the useless clasp in his fist and squinting his eyes. The procurator was squinting not because the sun burned his eyes—no! For some reason he did not want to see the group of condemned men who, as he knew perfectly well, were now being brought on to the platform behind him. As soon as the white cloak with crimson lining appeared high up on the stone cliff over the verge of the human sea, the unseeing Pilate was struck in the ears by a wave of sound: ‘Ha-a-a . . .’

• From The Girls (2016)

  I threw the rest away, but my hands scudded with the residue, even after I wiped them on my shorts. I moved among the crowd, in and out of shade. I saw kids I knew, but they were the background fill from school, no one I had ever spent concentrated time with. Still, I incanted their first and last names helplessly in my head. Norm Morovich. Jim Schumacher. Farm kids, mostly, whose boots smelled of rot. Their soft-spoken answers in class, speaking only when specifically called upon, the humble ring of dirt I saw in the upturned cowboy hats on their desks. They were polite and virtuous, the trace of milk cows and clover fields and little sisters on them. Nothing at all like the ranch population, who would pity boys who still respected their father’s authority or wiped their boots before entering their mother’s kitchen. I wondered what Suzanne was doing—swimming in the creek, maybe, or lying around with Donna or Helen or maybe even Mitch, a thought that made me bite my lip, working a ruff of dry skin with my teeth. —I’d have to stay at the carnival only a little while longer and then I could go back home, Frank and my mother satisfied with my healthy dose of sociable activity. I tried to make my way toward the park, but it was packed—the parade had started, the pickup beds heavy with crepe-paper models of town hall. Bank employees and girls in Indian costumes waving from floats, the noise of the marching band violent and oppressive. I weaved out of the crowd, scuttling along the periphery. Sticking to the quieter side streets. The sound of the marching band grew louder, the parade winding down East Washington. The laughter I heard, pointed and performative, cut through my focus: I knew, before I looked up, that it was aimed at me. It was Connie, Connie and May, a netted bag stretching from Connie’s wrist. I could make out a can of orange soda and other groceries straining inside, the line of a swimsuit under Connie’s shirt. Encoded within was their whole simple day—the boredom of the heat, the orange soda going flat. The bathing suits drying on the porch. My first feeling was relief, like the familiarity of turning into my own driveway. Then came an uneasiness, the clicking together of the facts. Connie was mad at me. We were not friends anymore. I watched Connie move past her initial surprise. May’s bloodhound eyes squinted, eager for drama. Her braces thickening her mouth. Connie and May exchanged a few whispered words, then Connie edged forward. “Hey,” she said cautiously. “What’s going on?” I had expected anger, derision, but Connie was acting normal, even a little glad to see me. We hadn’t spoken in almost a month. I looked at May’s face for a clue, but it was insistently blank. “Nothing much,” I said.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  the same form in all German cities. The first thing that caught my eye on this excursion was the great number of gray, brown, and green loden coats and hats, and how well and sensibly everyone was dressed in general, how remarkably solid were the shoes of the pedestrians of Nuremberg. I avoided looking closely at the faces coming towards me, and thought it odd that few of these people raised their voices as they moved quietly through the city. Looking up at the facades on both sides of the street, even those of the older buildings which, judging by their style, must date from the sixteenth or fifteenth century, I was troubled to realize that I could not see a crooked line anywhere, not at the comers of the houses or on the gables, the window frames or the sills, nor was there any other trace of past history. I remember, said Austerlitz, that the paving under my feet sloped slightly downhill, that once, looking over the parapet of a bridge, I caught sight of two snow-white swans swimming on black water, and then, high above the rooftops, of the castle, somehow miniaturized and in postage-stamp format, so to speak. I could not bring myself to go into a café or buy anything from one of the many stalls and booths. When I turned to go back to the station after about an hour, I felt increasingly as if I had to struggle against a current growing ever stronger, perhaps because I was now going uphill, or maybe there were in fact more people moving one way than the other. In any case, said Austerlitz, I felt more panic-stricken with every passing minute, so that at last, although I was not at all far from the station, I had to stop under the red sandstone arch of a window displaying the pages of the local Nuremberg newspaper, where I waited until the crowds of shoppers had to some extent thinned out. I cannot now say for certain how long I stood there, my senses dazed, on the outer edge of this flood of Germans moving endlessly past me, said Austerlitz, but I think it was four or five o’clock by the time an elderly woman wearing a kind of Tyrolean hat with a cockerel’s feather in it stopped beside me, probably taking me for one of the homeless because of my old rucksack, fetched a one-mark coin out of her purse with arthritic fingers, and carefully handed it to me as alms. I was still holding this coin, minted in 1956 with the head of Chancellor Adenauer on it, when I was finally in the train again late that afternoon, traveling towards Cologne, said Austerlitz. I stood in the corridor looking out of the window almost throughout this part of the journey. I think it was between Wiirzburg and Frankfurt that the line ran through a densely forested region with leafless stands of oak and beech trees, and mile upon mile of conifers. As I gazed out, a distant memory came to me of a dream I often had both in the manse at Bala and later, a dream of a nameless land without borders and entirely overgrown by dark forests, which I had to cross without any idea where I was going, and it dawned upon me, said Austerlitz, that what I now saw