Confusion

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 The Master and Margarita (1966)

  A heavy bell was booming in that head, brown spots rimmed with fiery green floated between his eyeballs and his closed eyelids, and to crown it all he was nauseous, this nausea, as it seemed to him, being connected with the sounds of some importunate gramophone. Styopa tried to recall something, but only one thing would get recalled—that yesterday, apparently, and in some unknown place, he had stood with a napkin in his hand and tried to kiss some lady, promising her that the next day, and exactly at noon, he would come to visit her. The lady had declined, saying: ‘No, no, I won’t be home!’, but Styopa had stubbornly insisted: ‘And I’ll just up and come anyway!’ Who the lady was, and what time it was now, what day, of what month, Styopa decidedly did not know, and, worst of all, he could not figure out where he was. He attempted to learn this last at least, and to that end unstuck the stuck-together lids of his left eye. Something gleamed dully in the semi-darkness. Styopa finally recognized the pier-glass and realized that he was lying on his back in his own bed—that is, the jeweller’s wife’s former bed—in the bedroom. Here he felt such a throbbing in his head that he closed his eyes and moaned. Let us explain: Styopa Likhodeev, director of the Variety Theatre, had come to his senses that morning at home, in the very apartment which he shared with the late Berlioz, in a big, six-storeyed, U-shaped building on Sadovaya Street. It must be said that this apartment—no. 50—had long had, if not a bad, at least a strange reputation. Two years ago it had still belonged to the widow of the jeweller de Fougeray. Anna Frantsevna de Fougeray, a respectable and very practical fifty-year-old woman, let out three of the five rooms to lodgers: one whose last name was apparently Belomut, and another with a lost last name. And then two years ago inexplicable events began to occur in this apartment: people began to disappear 1 from this apartment without a trace. Once, on a Sunday, a policeman came to the apartment, called the second lodger (the one whose last name got lost) out to the front hall, and said he was invited to come to the police station for a minute to put his signature to something. The lodger told Anfisa, Anna Frantsevna’s long-time and devoted housekeeper, to say, in case he received any telephone calls, that he would be back in ten minutes, and left together with the proper, white-gloved policeman.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  WHEN AUGUSTINE RETURNED from school in Madauros, he entered the stage of life, earlier mentioned (from age sixteen to thirty), that Romans called adulescentia. He was supposed to go on to higher education in rhetoric, but his father did not, at the moment, have enough money to support such studies in Carthage. So Augustine spent his crucial sixteenth year in his hometown, where he initiated the sexual activity his father saw he was capable of and his mother warned him against. His mother was practical about it, hoping he would keep entirely chaste, but telling him at the least not to have affairs with married women (T 2.6). It has always amazed people that, in this year of burgeoning sexual desire, the sin he concentrated on—spending over half of book 2 of The Testimony on an introspective analysis of it—is the theft of some pears. Why spill so many words on what many dismiss as a child’s petty theft? It was more than that to Augustine. In fact, he had dismissed with passing mention earlier thefts of food from his family larder, food used to to bribe others into letting him play with them (T 1.30). That theft had a motive. The pear theft seemed not to. He specifically says he had legitimate access to more and better pears (probably on Romanian’s estate). He did not want to eat or use the stolen goods. He and his fellows in the raid carted the fruit off and dumped it before pigs. Why did they do it? Augustine goes down and down into the mystery of this apparent acte gratuit: “Simply what was not allowed allured us” (eo liberet quo non liceret, T 2.9). He tries out and rejects an explanation from his school readings, one fresh in mind at that time. Sallust, one of the four canonical authors in the grammar studies he had just completed, was a favorite author in Africa, because he wrote the history of an African conflict (The Jugurthine War). In another book, The Conspiracy of Catiline, Sallust said that Catiline led a gang of young men in senseless criminal exercises because he was “gratuitously evil” (16). But Augustine remembers that Sallust, in the very same place, contradicts himself, admitting that the “pointless” crimes did have a point. They were indulged in “lest hand or heart lose edge for lack of practice.” Little meannesses were like the finger exercises of a pianist. Catiline was using them to prepare for the great criminal concerto of his attempt to take over the republic.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Was there anything similar in the act of Augustine’s fellows? If not, Augustine would have to think that humans can choose evil for its own sake. In writing The Testimony, he recognizes that people always do bad things in pursuit of apparent good. But what possible good was there in the pear theft, an act as silly as it was mean-spirited? He lists all the reasons for committing other sins. Those who have suspected a sexual symbolism behind Augustine’s horror at his vandalism ignore Augustine’s own statement that the act would not have been mysterious if sex were discoverable in it: The beauty of physical things is appealing (gold, silver and the rest), and we sway in response to what touches the flesh or affects any of the senses by its fitness to them. There is a dignity in worldly respect, in the power to order others about or to persuade them (whence comes the appetite for subduing them). Yet to gain even these good things we should not give up you, God, nor wander from your law. Our life in this world is tempting because it accommodates us to its order, patterned to beautiful (if lower) things. Friendship, for instance, forms a sweet bond because it creates a harmony of the several souls. Sin arises from this, and from things like this, only if a disordered fastening on lowest goods makes us fall from higher goods, from the highest of all, you my God, my lord, your truth, your law. . . . When the motive for a crime is sought, none is accepted but the desire to get goods of the lower sort just mentioned, or to avoid their loss. For they are beautiful, they do please, even if they must be abandoned for, or subordinated to, higher and more fulfilling goods. A murder is committed. Why? To get another’s wife or wealth, or to get the necessities of life. Or for fear another would deprive the murderer of such things. Or from a sense of wrong burning for redress. Who murders with no cause but to enjoy the mere murdering? Who would credit such a motive? (T 2.10)

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  30 Lecture 4: The Jesus movement and the Birth of Christianity • The problem was not only for outsiders; those who came to believe in Jesus were also “Greeks and Jews,” bringing their cultural perceptions with them. o The earliest Christians experienced what sociologists call “cognitive dissonance”: the apparent contradiction between their symbolic world and their experience. Such dissonance must be resolved through denial of the convictions, denial of the experience, or reinterpretation of the convictions in light of experience. o Within the symbolic world of the early Christians, Jesus ought not to have been the source of life because of the manner of his death. But their experience of the Holy Spirit’s power in their lives—a power that manifested itself in new capacities and that they saw as deriving from Jesus—made them call him both “Lord” and “Christ.” o To maintain both their experience and their symbolic world, the early Christians had to reinterpret their symbols in light of experience. o In order to get on with their own story, then, they had to come to grips with Jesus’s story, especially his death; thus, the process of reinterpretation that began at once led to the construction of the Passion accounts—the story of Jesus’s suffering—as the first part of the Jesus story to reach set form. A Complex and Tense Religion • From the time of its birth and earliest growth, Christianity was a complex and tension-filled religion. • Sociologically, it was underdetermined and parasitic: Beginning as a sect of Judaism, it was expelled from the synagogue and became a Gentile association (an intentional community) without obvious boundaries. 31 • Culturally, it was mixed, with a symbolic world shaped by a Judaism that was already Hellenized and with steady success among Gentiles rather than Jews. • Religiously, it made claims to an experience of ultimate power through the Holy Spirit that were cosmic but disproportionate to the actual situation of believers in the world. • Conceptually, the founding figure of Jesus presented a set of major challenges to understanding: Was he cursed or the source of blessing? If he was Lord, then what does that mean for monotheism? • Many of the subsequent issues faced by Christians would involve the same tensions that marked the entry of the religion into the world and its first expansion. Johnson, The Real Jesus. ———, The Writings of the New Testament, especially pp. 83–136. 1. Discuss the ways in which the “founder” of Christianity differs from the founders of Buddhism and Islam. 2. How does the concept of cognitive dissonance help explain the necessity of Christians to reinterpret their symbolic world? Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  But there was a contract drawn up with him? ‘I suppose so,’ the agitated Vassily Stepanovich replied. ‘And if one was drawn up, it had to go through bookkeeping?’ ‘Most assuredly,’ responded the agitated Vassily Stepanovich. ‘Then where is it?’ ‘Not here,’ the bookkeeper replied, turning ever more pale and spreading his arms. And indeed no trace of the contract was found in the files of the bookkeeping office, nor at the findirector’s, nor at Likhodeev’s or Varenukha’s. And what was this magician’s name? Vassily Stepanovich did not know, he had not been at the séance yesterday. The ushers did not know, the box-office girl wrinkled her brow, wrinkled it, thought and thought, and finally said: ‘Wo . . . Woland, seems like . . .’ Or maybe not Woland? Maybe not Woland. Maybe Faland. It turned out that in the foreigners’ bureau they had heard precisely nothing either about any Woland, or for that matter any Faland, the magician. The messenger Karpov said that this same magician was supposedly staying in Likhodeev’s apartment. The apartment was, of course, visited at once—no magician was found there. Likhodeev himself was not there either. The housekeeper Grunya was not there, and where she had gone nobody knew. The chairman of the management, Nikanor Ivanovich, was not there, Bedsornev was not there! Something utterly preposterous was coming out: the whole top administration had vanished, a strange, scandalous séance had taken place the day before, but who had produced it and at whose prompting, no one knew. And meanwhile it was drawing towards noon, when the box office was to open. But, of course, there could be no talk of that! A huge piece of cardboard was straight away posted on the doors of the Variety reading: ‘Today’s Show Cancelled’. The line became agitated, beginning at its head, but after some agitation, it nevertheless began to break up, and about an hour later no trace of it remained on Sadovaya. The investigation departed to continue its work elsewhere, the staff was sent home, leaving only the watchmen, and the doors of the Variety were locked. The bookkeeper Vassily Stepanovich had urgently to perform two tasks. First, to go to the Commission on Spectacles and Entertainment of the Lighter Type with a report on yesterday’s events and, second, to visit the Finspectacle sector so as to turn over yesterday’s receipts—21,711 roubles. The precise and efficient Vassily Stepanovich wrapped the money in newspaper, criss-crossed it with string, put it in his briefcase, and, knowing his instructions very well, set out, of course, not for a bus or a tram, but for the cab stand.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  It was about three-thirty when I finally left Mochas. I wasn’t drunk, but I had a damn good buzz going on. Max and Hog were gonna shoot down to the Strand to get a bite to eat with some chicks that they had met. One of them was a fine, light-skinned girl that was looking at me like she’d suck the life out of my dick. They wanted me to tag along, but I had to decline. The dog in me had wagged its tail enough for one day, and I was anxious to get back to my boo. It took me about thirty minutes to get to Keita’s. She lived in a nice little two-story house, right off of West Fordham. I let myself in, using the key she had given me two months prior. My boys thought I was tripping for giving her keys to my pad too, but that was just the hater in them coming out. If I loved her enough to give her the keys to my heart, it was nothing for me to give her the keys to my pad. Keita wasn’t home from the club yet so I decided to doll myself up for her while I waited. I took another shower, scrubbing my skin with some scented wash that Keita had bought me. My boys would clown me for using those kinds of products, but fuck that. I was a pretty nigga and liked to smell good too. After my shower I slipped on a pair of thong underwear, another gift from Keita. They were the kind of joints that had the tubular pouch that your dick slides into on the front. When all that was done, I settled down in front of the bedroom television to wait. Halfway though whatever dry-ass movie I was watching, the television and lights blinked out. I tried to cut them back on but they weren’t working. The fuse must’ve blown, I thought to myself. Grabbing the flashlight from Keita’s closet, I made my way down to the basement to replace the fuse. Keita was one of those people that didn’t believe in throwing shit away, so the basement served as a makeshift storage facility. Bags of clothes were strewn throughout the basement and every wall was lined with boxes. The fuse box was located in the far corner, just above a stack of storage bins. To reach the box I had to stretch over the bins, and even then I was still barely able to reach it. I guess that’s why Keita called me every time one of the damn things blew. I had successfully removed the burnt-out fuse and was about to put the other one in when it slipped out of my hand. I tried to catch it, but it bounced behind the bins.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  “Fuck!” I shouted. That was the last fuse in the house, so that meant that I’d have to move the bins and retrieve it. After a bit of struggling I had finally managed to move the bins enough to squeeze behind them. As I was shining the flashlight back there I noticed a space in the floorboards. It was so small that I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been looking for the fuse. It might’ve been nothing, but my curiosity wouldn’t let it go. I slid the bins away from the wall entirely and crawled behind them to investigate the space. That shit was barely the width of my pinky finger, but I could see something underneath. Using an old paint stick, I pried the floorboard loose and found what appeared to be several hatboxes hidden under the floor. I had no idea why the hell Keita would be hiding hatboxes under the floor, but best believe I was about to find out. One at a time, I removed the hatboxes and sat them in the corner. After replacing the fuse, I turned on the basement light and sat down on the floor. When I opened the first box I was surprised to find that there were clothes in it. The box was filled with thongs and bikini tops made from all different kinds of materials. There was even a small whip curled up at the bottom of the box. At first I thought that it might be old shit, but nothing felt dry-rotted. Upon further inspection, I could smell the faint scent of Keita’s perfume and musk. This sparked my interest and prompted me to move on to the next box. Like the first, this box with filled with items that I couldn’t understand why Keita was hiding. There were things ranging from handcuffs, to different-sized vibrators. I even came across a leather mask. My mind reeled trying to figure out what was going on, but it would be the last box that would alter my life forever. The third box was filled with adult movies. I knew Keita watched porn because we often watched the films together, but this was some hard-core shit. There was everything from guy-on-guy movies to animal snuff films. In addition to these, there were mini DVDs, with dates on the labels. Determined to see what the fuck was going on with my boo, I carried the box upstairs.

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

  I had started off studying experimental psychology, especially the more physiological and mathematical sides of the field, but after several months of clinical studies at the Maudsley Hospital in London—which I had completed just prior to meeting my husband—I decided to switch to clinical psychology. I had an increasing personal, as well as professional, interest in the field. My course work, which had focused on statistical methods, biology, and experimental psychology, now switched to psychopharmacology, psychopathology, clinical methods, and psychotherapy. Psychopathology—the scientific study of mental disorders—proved enormously interesting, and I found that seeing patients was not only fascinating but intellectually and personally demanding. Despite the fact that we were being taught how to make clinical diagnoses, I still did not make any connection in my own mind between the problems I had experienced and what was described as manic-depressive illness in the textbooks. In a strange reversal of medical-student syndrome, where students become convinced that they have whatever disease it is they are studying, I blithely went on with my clinical training and never put my mood swings into any medical context whatsoever. When I look back on it, my denial and ignorance seem virtually incomprehensible. I noticed, though, that I was more comfortable treating psychotic patients than were many of my colleagues. At that time, in clinical psychology and psychiatric residency programs, psychosis was far more linked to schizophrenia than manic-depressive illness, and I learned very little about mood disorders in any formal sense. Psychoanalytic theories still predominated. So for the first two years of treating patients, I was supervised almost entirely by psychoanalysts; the emphasis in treatment was on understanding early experiences and conflicts; dreams and symbols, and their interpretation, formed the core of psychotherapeutic work. A more medical approach to psychopathology—one that centered on diagnosis, symptoms, illness, and medical treatments—came only after I started my internship at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. Although I have had many disagreements with psychoanalysts over the years—and particularly virulent ones with those analysts who oppose treating severe mood disorders with medications, long after the evidence clearly showed that lithium and the antidepressants are far more effective than psychotherapy alone—I have found invaluable the emphasis in my early psychotherapy training on many aspects of psychoanalytic thought. I shed much of the psychoanalytic language as time went by, but the education was an interesting one, and I’ve never been able to fathom the often unnecessarily arbitrary distinctions between “biological” psychiatry, which emphasizes medical causes and treatments of mental illness, and the “dynamic” psychologies, which focus more on early developmental issues, personality structure, conflict and motivation, and unconscious thought.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  So agitated that his heart started leaping like a bird under a black cloth, Judas asked in a faltering whisper, for fear passers-by might overhear: ‘Where are you going, Niza?’ ‘And what do you want to know that for?’ replied Niza, slowing her pace and looking haughtily at Judas. Then some sort of childish intonations began to sound in Judas’s voice, he whispered in bewilderment: ‘But why? . . . We had it all arranged . . . I wanted to come to you, you said you’d be home all evening . . .’ ‘Ah, no, no,’ answered Niza, and she pouted her lower lip capriciously, which made it seem to Judas that her face, the most beautiful face he had ever seen in his life, became still more beautiful. ‘I was bored. You’re having a feast, and what am I supposed to do? Sit and listen to you sighing on the terrace? And be afraid, on top of it, that the serving-woman will tell him about it? No, no, I decided to go out of town and listen to the nightingales.’ ‘How, out of town?’ the bewildered Judas asked. ‘Alone?’ ‘Of course, alone,’ answered Niza. ‘Let me accompany you,’ Judas asked breathlessly. His mind clouded, he forgot everything in the world and looked with imploring eyes into the blue eyes of Niza, which now seemed black. Niza said nothing and quickened her pace. ‘Why are you silent, Niza?’ Judas said pitifully, adjusting his pace to hers. ‘Won’t I be bored with you?’ Niza suddenly asked and stopped. Here Judas’s thoughts became totally confused. ‘Well, all right,’ Niza finally softened, ‘come along.’ ‘But where, where?’ ‘Wait . . . let’s go into this yard and arrange it, otherwise I’m afraid some acquaintance will see me and then they’ll tell my husband I was out with my lover.’ And here Niza and Judas were no longer in the bazaar, they were whispering under the gateway of some yard. ‘Go to the olive estate,’ Niza whispered, pulling the veil over her eyes and turning away from a man who was coming through the gateway with a bucket, ‘to Gethsemane, beyond the Kedron, understand?’ ‘Yes, yes, yes . . .’ ‘I’ll go ahead,’ Niza continued, ‘but don’t follow on my heels. Keep separate from me. I’ll go ahead . . . When you cross the stream . . . you know where the grotto is?’ ‘I know, I know . . .’ ‘Go up past the olive press and turn to the grotto. I’ll be there. Only don’t you dare come after me at once, be patient, wait here,’ and with these words Niza walked out the gateway as though she had never spoken with Judas. Judas stood for some time alone, trying to collect his scattering thoughts.

• From The Girls (2016)

  I was confused, in these moments, but translated them into further proof: Suzanne was prickly with other people because they didn’t understand her like I did. I didn’t say it out loud to myself or even think about it too much. Where things were heading with Suzanne. The dredge of discomfort I got when she disappeared with Russell. How I didn’t know what to do without her, seeking out Donna or Roos like a lost kid. The time she came back smelling of dried sweat and roughly wiped herself between the legs with a washcloth, like she didn’t care I was watching. I got up when I saw how nervously Caroline fingered the bracelet I’d given her. “I’ll take a cigarette,” I said, smiling at Caroline. Suzanne hooked her arm in mine. “But we’re gonna feed the llamas,” Suzanne said. “Don’t want them to starve, do you? Waste away?” I hesitated, and Suzanne reached out to play with a part of my hair. She was always doing that: picking burrs off my shirt, once wedging a fingernail between my front teeth to dislodge a bit of food. Breaching the boundaries to let me know they didn’t exist. Caroline’s desire to be invited was so blatant that I felt almost ashamed. But it didn’t stop me from following Suzanne outside, shrugging an apology at Caroline. I could feel her watching us go. The hooded attentions of a child, that wordless understanding. I saw that disappointment was already something familiar to Caroline. —I was scanning the contents of my mother’s refrigerator, the glass jars mortared with dried spills. The fumes of cruciferous vegetables, roiling in plastic bags. Nothing to eat, as usual. Little things like this reminded me why I’d rather be somewhere else. When I heard my mother shuffling in the front door, the razzle of her heavy jewelry, I tried to slink off without crossing paths. “Evie,” she called, coming into the kitchen. “Wait up a minute.” I was out of breath from the bike ride from the ranch and at the tail end of being stoned. I tried to blink an ordinary number of times, to present a blank face that would give her nothing. “You’re getting so tan,” she said, lifting my arm, and I shrugged. She idly brushed the hair on my arm back and forth, then paused. There was an uncomfortable moment between us. It occurred to me: she’d finally caught on to the trickle of money that had been disappearing. The thought of her anger didn’t scare me. The act had been so preposterous that it took on the safety of the unreal. I’d almost started to believe that I had never really lived here, so strong was the feeling of disassociation as I crept through the house on my errands for Suzanne. My excavation of my mother’s underwear drawer, sifting through the tea-colored silks and pilly lace until I closed in on a roll of bills banded with a hair tie.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  been disused for years. I felt, said Austerlitz, like an actor who, upon making his entrance, has completely and irrevocably forgotten not only the lines he knew by heart but the very part he has so often played. Minutes or even hours may have passed while I stood in that empty space beneath a ceiling which seemed to float at a vertiginous height, unable to move from the spot, with my face raised to the icy gray light, like moonshine, which came through the windows in a gallery beneath the vaulted roof, and hung above me like a tight-meshed net or a piece of thin, fraying fabric. Although this light, a profusion of dusty glitter, one might almost say, was very bright near the ceiling, as it sank lower it looked as if it were being absorbed by the walls and the deeper reaches of the room, as if it merely added to the gloom and were running down in black streaks, rather like rainwater running down the smooth trunks of beech trees or over the cast concrete facade of a building. When the blanket of cloud above the city parted for a moment or two, occasional rays of light fell into the waiting room, but they were generally extinguished again halfway down. Other beams of light followed curious trajectories which violated the laws of physics, departing from the rectilinear and twisting in spirals and eddies before being swallowed up by the wavering shadows. From time to time, and just for a split second, I saw huge halls open up, with rows of pillars and colonnades leading far into the distance, with vaults and brickwork arches bearing on them many-storied structures, with flights of stone steps, wooden stairways and ladders, all leading the eye on and on. I saw viaducts and footbridges crossing deep chasms thronged with tiny figures who looked to me, said Austerlitz, like prisoners in search of some way of escape from their dungeon, and the longer I stared upwards with my head wrenched painfully back, the more I felt as if the room where I stood were expanding, going on for ever and ever in an improbably foreshortened perspective, at the same time turning back into itself in a way possible only in such a deranged universe. Once I thought that very far away I saw a dome of openwork masonry, with a parapet around it on which grew ferns, young willows, and various other shrubs where herons had built their large, untidy nests, and I saw the birds spread their great wings and fly away through the blue air. I remember, said Austerlitz, that in the middle of this vision of imprisonment and liberation I could not stop wondering whether it was a ruin or a building in the process of construction that I had entered. Both ideas were right in a way at the time, since the new station was literally rising from the ruins of the old Liverpool Street; in any case, the crucial point was hardly this speculation in itself, which was really only a distraction, but the scraps of memory beginning to drift through the outlying regions of my mind: images, for instance, like the recollection of a late November afternoon in 1968 when I stood with Marie de

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Let’s take your day yesterday.’ Here he turned and Ivan’s chart was immediately handed to him. ‘In search of an unknown man who recommended himself as an acquaintance of Pontius Pilate, you performed the following actions yesterday.’ Here Stravinsky began holding up his long fingers, glancing now at the chart, now at Ivan. ‘You hung a little icon on your chest. Did you?’ ‘I did,’ Ivan agreed sullenly. ‘You fell off a fence and hurt your face. Right? Showed up in a restaurant carrying a burning candle in your hand, in nothing but your underwear, and in the restaurant you beat somebody. You were brought here tied up. Having come here, you called the police and asked them to send out machine-guns. Then you attempted to throw yourself out the window. Right? The question is: can one, by acting in such fashion, catch or arrest anyone? And if you’re a normal man, you yourself will answer: by no means. You wish to leave here? Very well, sir. But allow me to ask, where are you going to go?’ ‘To the police, of course,’ Ivan replied, no longer so firmly, and somewhat at a loss under the professor’s gaze. ‘Straight from here?’ ‘Mm-hm . . .’ ‘Without stopping at your place?’ Stravinsky asked quickly. ‘I have no time to stop anywhere! While I’m stopping at places, he’ll slip away!’ ‘So. And what will you tell the police to start with?’ ‘About Pontius Pilate,’ Ivan Nikolaevich replied, and his eyes clouded with a gloomy mist. ‘Well, how very nice!’ the won-over Stravinsky exclaimed and, turning to the one with the little beard, ordered: ‘Fyodor Vassilyevich, please check Citizen Homeless out for town. But don’t put anyone in his room or change the linen. In two hours, Citizen Homeless will be back here. So, then,’ he turned to the poet, ‘I won’t wish you success, because I don’t believe one iota in that success. See you soon!’ He stood up, and his retinue stirred. ‘On what grounds will I be back here?’ Ivan asked anxiously. Stravinsky was as if waiting for this question, immediately sat down, and began to speak: ‘On the grounds that as soon as you show up at the police station in your drawers and tell them you’ve seen a man who knew Pontius Pilate personally, you’ll instantly be brought here, and you’ll find yourself again in this very same room.’ ‘What have drawers got to do with it?’ Ivan asked, gazing around in bewilderment. ‘It’s mainly Pontius Pilate. But the drawers, too. Because we’ll take the clinic underwear from you and give you back your clothes. And you were delivered here in your drawers. And yet you were by no means going to stop at your place, though I dropped you a hint. Then comes Pilate . . . and that’s it.’ Here something strange happened with Ivan Nikolaevich.

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

  One of my friends, prior to being discharged from a psychiatric hospital after an acute manic episode, was forced to attend a kind of group therapy session designed as a consciousness-raising effort, one that encouraged the soon-to-be ex-patients not to use, or allow to be used in their presence, words such as “squirrel,” “fruitcake,” “nut,” “wacko,” “bat,” or “loon.” Using these words, it was felt, would “perpetuate a lack of self-esteem and self-stigmatization.” My friend found the exercise patronizing and ridiculous. But was it? On the one hand, it was entirely laudable and professional, if rather excessively earnest, advice: the pain of hearing these words, in the wrong context or the wrong tone, is sharp; the memory of insensitivity and prejudice lasts for a long time. No doubt, too, allowing such language to go unchecked or uncorrected leads not only to personal pain, but contributes both directly and indirectly to discrimination in jobs, insurance, and society at large. On the other hand, the assumption that rigidly rejecting words and phrases that have existed for centuries will have much impact on public attitudes is rather dubious. It gives an illusion of easy answers to impossibly difficult situations and ignores the powerful role of wit and irony as positive agents of self-notion and social change. Clearly there is a need for freedom, diversity, wit, and directness of language about abnormal mental states and behavior. Just as clearly, there is a profound need for a change in public perception about mental illness. The issue, of course, is one of context and emphasis. Science, for example, requires a highly precise language. Too frequently, the fears and misunderstandings of the public, the needs of science, the inanities of popularized psychology, and the goals of mental health advocacy get mixed together in a divisive confusion.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  knew himself was that the Eliases had taken me into their house at the beginning of the war, when I was only a little boy, so he could tell me no more. He was sure it would all be settled once Elias’s condition improved. As far as the other boys are concerned, said Penrith-Smith, you remain Dafydd Elias for the time being. There’s no need to let anyone know. It’s just that you will have to put Jacques Austerlitz on your examination papers or else your work may be considered invalid. Penrith-Smith had written the name on a piece of paper, and when he handed it to me I could think of nothing to say, said Austerlitz, but “Thank you, sir.” At first, what disconcerted me most was that I could connect no ideas at all with the word Austerlitz. If my new name had been Morgan or Jones, I could have related it to reality. I even knew the name Jacques from a French nursery rhyme. But I had never heard of an Austerlitz before, and from the first I was convinced that no one else bore that name, no one in Wales, or in the Isles, or anywhere else in the world. And since I began investigating my own history some years ago, I have never in fact come upon another Austerlitz, not in the telephone books of London or Paris, Amsterdam or Antwerp. But not long ago, turning on the wireless, I happened upon an announcer saying that Fred Astaire, of whom I had previously known nothing at all, was born with the surname of Austerlitz. Astaire’s father, who according to this surprising radio program came from Vienna, had worked as a master brewer in Omaha, Nebraska, where Astaire was born, and from the veranda of the Austerlitz family’s house you could hear freight trains being shunted back and forth in the city’s marshaling yard. Astaire is reported to have said later that this constant, uninterrupted shunting sound, and the ideas it suggested of going on a long railroad journey, were his only early childhood memories. And just a couple of days after I chanced in this way upon the story of a man entirely unknown to me, Austerlitz added, a neighbor who describes herself as a passionate reader told me that in Kafka’s diaries she had found a small, bow-legged man of my own name who, as Kafka recorded, had been called in to circumcise his nephew. I feel it is unlikely that these trails lead anywhere, nor do I entertain any hopes of a note I found some time ago in a file on the practice of euthanasia, mentioning one Laura Austerlitz who made a statement to an Italian investigating judge on 28 June 1966 about the crimes committed in a rice mill on the peninsula of San Saba near Trieste in 1944. At least, said Austerlitz, I haven’t yet succeeded in tracking down this namesake of mine. I don’t even know if she is still alive, thirty years after making her statement. But personally, as I was saying, I had never heard the name Austerlitz before that April day in 1949 when Penrith- Smith handed me the piece of paper on which he had written it. I couldn’t work out the spelling, and read the strange term which sounded to me like some

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  And yet nobody has the courage to lay down his arms, to say, “I’m fed up with it… I’m through.” No, there’s fifteen francs somewhere, which nobody gives a damn about any more and which nobody is going to get in the end anyhow, but the fifteen francs is like the primal cause of things and rather than listen to one’s own voice, rather than walk out: on the primal cause, one surrenders to the situation, one goes on butchering and butchering and the more cowardly one feels the more heroically does he behave, until a day when the bottom drops out and suddenly all the guns are silenced and the stretcher-bearers pick up the maimed and bleeding heroes and pin medals on their chest. Then one has the rest of his life to think about the fifteen francs. One hasn’t any eyes or arms or legs, but he has the consolation of dreaming for the rest of his days about the fifteen francs which everybody has forgotten. It’s exactly like a state of war—I can’t get it out of my head. The way she works over me, to blow a spark of passion into me, makes me think what a damned poor soldier I’d be if I was ever silly enough to be trapped like this and dragged to the front. I know for my part that I’d surrender everything, honor included, in order to get out of the mess. I haven’t any stomach for it, and that’s all there is to it. But she’s got her mind set on the fifteen francs and if I don’t want to fight about it she’s going to make me fight. But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if he hasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that you can’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death. We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don’t live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind. My mind is on the peace treaty all the time. I can’t forget that it was the fifteen francs which started all the trouble. Fifteen francs! What does fifteen francs mean to me, particularly since it’s not my fifteen francs? Van Norden seems to have a more normal attitude about it. He doesn’t care a rap about the fifteen francs either now; it’s the situation itself which intrigues him. It seems to call for a show of mettle—his manhood is involved. The fifteen francs are lost, whether we succeed or not. There’s something more involved—not just manhood perhaps, but will.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  With his pineal eye he sees his silhouette projected on a screen of incommensurable size. His voice, synchronized to the shadow of a pinhead, intoxicates him. He hears a roar where others hear only a squeak. There is his mind. It is an amphitheater in which the actor gives a protean performance. Moldorf, multiform and unerring, goes through his roles—clown, juggler, contortionist, priest, lecher, mountebank. The amphitheater is too small. He puts dynamite to it. The audience is drugged. He scotches it. I am trying ineffectually to approach Moldorf. It is like trying to approach God, for Moldorf is God—he has never been anything else. I am merely putting down words. … I have had opinions about him which I have discarded; I have had other opinions which I am revising. I have pinned him down only to find that it was not a dung-beetle I had in my hands, but a dragonfly. He has offended me by his coarseness and then overwhelmed me with his delicacy. He has been voluble to the point of suffocation, then quiet as the Jordan. When I see him trotting forward to greet me, his little paws outstretched, his eyes perspiring, I feel that I am meeting. … No, this is not the way to go about it! “Comme un œuf dansant sur un jet d’eau.” He has only one cane—a mediocre one. In his pocket scraps of paper containing prescriptions for Weltschmerz . He is cured now, and the little German girl who washed his feet is breaking her heart. It is like Mr. Nonentity toting his Gujarati dictionary everywhere. “Inevitable for everyone” —meaning, no doubt, indispenensable . Borowski would find all this incomprehensible. Borowski has a different cane for each day in the week, and one for Easter. We have so many points in common that it is like looking at myself in a cracked mirror. I have been looking over my manuscripts, pages scrawled with revisions. Pages of literature . This frightens me a little. It is so much like Moldorf. Only I am a Gentile, and Gentiles have a different way of suffering. They suffer without neuroses and, as Sylvester says, a man who has never been afflicted with a neurosis does not know the meaning of suffering. I recall distinctly how I enjoyed my suffering. It was like taking a cub to bed with you. Once in a while he clawed you—and then you really were frightened. Ordinarily you had no fear—you could always turn him loose, or chop his head off. There are people who cannot resist the desire to get into a cage with wild beasts and be mangled. They go in even without revolver or whip. Fear makes them fearless. … For the Jew the world is a cage filled with wild beasts. The door is locked and he is there without whip or revolver. His courage is so great that he does not even smell the dung in the corner.

• From The Girls (2016)

  do that with McGinley, Sam, all those retards.” They were drunk, the three of them, and maybe I was, too, the ceiling drab with expired smoke. We’d shared a burly joint, a sexual droop descending on Zav. A pleased, overcome squint. Sasha had drawn further into herself, though she’d unzipped her sweatshirt, her chest sunless and crossed with faint blue veins. Her eye makeup was heavier than it had been: I didn’t know when she’d put more on. I got to my feet when we finished eating. “I’ve got to do a few things,” I said. They made halfhearted efforts to get me to stay, but I waved them off. I closed the door to the bedroom, though bits of their conversation slipped through. “I respect you,” Julian was saying to Zav, “I always have, man, ever since Scarlet was like, You have to meet this guy.” Performing an extravagant admiration, the stoned person’s tendency toward optimistic summary. Zav responded, resuming their practiced volley. I could hear Sasha’s silence. — When I passed through later, nothing had really changed. Sasha was still listening to their conversation like she’d be tested someday. Julian’s and Zav’s intoxication had passed into a strenuous state, their hairlines wet with sweat. “Are we being too loud?” Julian asked. That weird politeness again, how easily it clicked in. “Not at all,” I said. “Just getting some water.” “Sit with us,” Zav said, studying me. “Talk.” “That’s okay.” “Come on, Evie,” Julian said. The odd intimacy of my name in his mouth surprised me. The table was stamped with rings from the bottles, the litter of dinner. I started to clear the dishes. “You don’t have to do that,” Julian said, scooting back so I could reach

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  9 A year later our father came to Stamps without warning. It was awful for Bailey and me to encounter the reality one abrupt morning. We, or at any rate I, had built such elaborate fantasies about him and the illusory mother that seeing him in the flesh shredded my inventions like a hard yank on a paper chain. He arrived in front of the Store in a clean gray car (he must have stopped just outside of town to wipe it in preparation for the “grand entrance”). Bailey who knew such things, said it was a De Soto. His bigness shocked me. His shoulders were so wide I thought he'd have trouble getting in the door. He was taller than anyone I had seen, and if he wasn't fat, which I knew he wasn't, then he was fat-like. His clothes were too small too. They were tighter and woolier than was customary in Stamps. And he was blindingly handsome. Momma cried, “Bailey, my baby. Great God, Bailey.” And Uncle Willie stuttered, “Bu-Buh-Bailey.” My brother said, “Hot dog and damn. It's him. It's our daddy.” And my seven-year-old world humpty-dumptied, never to be put back together again. His voice rang like a metal dipper hitting a bucket and he spoke English. Proper English, like the school principal, and even better. Our father sprinkled ers and even errers in his sentences as liberally as he gave out his twisted-mouth smiles. His lips pulled not down, like Uncle Willie's, but to the side, and his head lay on one side or the other, but never straight on the end of his neck. He had the air of a man who did not believe what he heard or what he himself was saying. He was the first cynic I had met. “So er this is Daddy's er little man? Boy, anybody tell you errer that you er look like me?” He had Bailey in one arm and me in the other. “And Daddy's baby girl. You've errer been good children, er haven't you? Or er I guess I would have er heard about it er from Santa Claus.” I was so proud of him it was hard to wait for the gossip to get around that he was in town. Wouldn't the kids be surprised at how handsome our daddy was? And that he loved us enough to come down to Stamps to visit? Everyone could tell from the way he talked and from the car and clothes that he was rich and maybe had a castle out in California. (I later learned that he had been a doorman at Santa Monica's plush Breakers Hotel.) Then the possibility of being compared with him occurred to me, and I didn't want anyone to see him. Maybe he wasn't my real father. Bailey was his son, true enough, but I was an orphan that they picked up to provide Bailey with company.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Not long ago, on the verge of waking from sleep, I found myself looking into the interior of one of these Terezin barracks. It was filled from floor to ceiling with layer upon layer of the cobwebs woven by those ingenious creatures. I still remember how, in my half-conscious state, I tried to hold fast to my powdery gray dream image, which sometimes quivered in a slight breath of air, and to discover what it concealed, but it only dissolved all the more and was overlaid by the memory, surfacing in my mind at the same time, of the shining glass in the display windows of the ANTIKOS BAZAR on the west side of the town square, where I had stood for a long time around midday in what proved to be the vain hope that someone might arrive and open this curious emporium. As far as I could see, said Austerlitz, the ANTIKOS BAZAR is the only shop of any kind in Terezin apart from a tiny grocery store. It occupies the entire facade of one of the largest buildings, and I think its vaults reach back a long way as well. Pa ashes , 2 ——" a =z Of course I could see nothing but the items on display in the windows, which can have amounted to only a small part of the junk heaped up inside the shop. But even these four still lifes obviously composed entirely at random, which appeared to have grown quite naturally into the black branches of the lime trees standing around the square and reflected in the glass of the windows, exerted such a power of attraction on me that it was a long time before I could tear myself away from staring at the hundreds of different objects, my forehead pressed against the cold window, as if one of them or their relationship with each other must provide an unequivocal answer to the many questions I found it impossible to ask in my mind. What was the meaning of the festive white lace tablecloth hanging over the back of the ottoman, and the armchair with its worn brocade cover? What secret lay behind the three brass mortars of different sizes, which had about them the suggestion of an oracular utterance, or the cut-glass bowls, ceramic vases, and earthenware jugs, the tin advertising sign bearing the words Theresienstddter Wasser, the little box of seashells, the miniature barrel organ, the globe-shaped paperweights with wonderful marine flowers swaying inside their glassy spheres, the model ship (some kind of corvette under full sail), the oakleaf-embroidered jacket of light, pale, summery linen, the staghorn buttons, the outsize Russian officer’s cap and the olive-green uniform tunic with gilt epaulettes that went with it, the fishing rod, the hunter’s bag, the Japanese fan, the endless landscape painted round a lampshade in fine brushstrokes, showing a river running quietly through perhaps Bohemia or perhaps Brazil?

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  This time she dragged him to another place, a place where she was still better known and where there would be no trouble in cashing a check, as she said. Everybody was in evening clothes and there was more spine-breaking, hand-kissing nonsense as the waiter escorted them to a table. In the middle of a dance she suddenly walks off the floor, with tears in her eyes. “What’s the matter?” he said, “what did I do this time?” And instinctively he put his hand to his backside, as though perhaps it might still be wiggling. “It’s nothing,” she said. “You didn’t do anything. Come, you’re a nice boy,” and with that she drags him on to the floor again and begins to dance with abandon. “But what’s the matter with you?” he murmured. “It’s nothing,” she repeated. “I saw somebody, that’s all.” And then, with a sudden spurt of anger—“why do you get me drunk? Don’t you know it makes me crazy?” “Have you got a check?” she says. “We must get out of here.” She called the waiter over and whispered to him in Russian. “Is it a good check?” she asked, when the waiter had disappeared. And then, impulsively: “Wait for me downstairs in the cloakroom. I must telephone somebody.” After the waiter had brought the change Fillmore sauntered leisurely downstairs to the cloakroom to wait for her. He strode up and down, humming and whistling softly, and smacking his lips in anticipation of the caviar to come. Five minutes passed. Ten minutes. Still whistling softly. When twenty minutes had gone by and still no princess he at last grew suspicious. The cloakroom attendant said that she had left long ago. He dashed outside. There was a nigger in livery standing there with a big grin on his face. Did the nigger know where she had breezed to? Nigger grins. Nigger says: “Ah heerd Coupole, dassall sir!” At the Coupole, downstairs, he finds her sitting in front of a cocktail with a dreamy, trancelike expression on her face. She smiles when she sees him. “Was that a decent thing to do,” he says, “to run away like that? You might have told me that: you didn’t like me. …” She flared up at this, got theatrical about it. And after a lot of gushing she commenced to whine and slobber. “I’m crazy,” she blubbered. “And you’re crazy too. You want me to sleep with you, and I don’t want to sleep with you.” And then she began to rave about her lover, the movie director whom she had seen on the dance floor. That’s why she had to run away from the place. That’s why she took drugs and got drunk every night. That’s why she threw herself in the Seine. She babbled on this way about how crazy she was and then suddenly she had an idea. “Let’s go to Bricktop’s!” There was a man there whom she knew… he had promised her a job once.