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.

Page 18 of 112 · 20 per page

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  440, his actual formulation was as follows: ‘If the Father begat the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence; hence it is clear that there was a time when the Son was not. It follows then of necessity that he had his existence from the non-existent.’ The intrinsic difficulty of the problem lay in the lack of room for manoeuvre for a middle course. A right-thinking theologian, anxious to remain orthodox, tended to smash his ship on Charybdis while trying to avoid Scylla. Thus Apollinaris, Bishop of Laodicea (d. 392), in his efforts to demonstrate his anti-Arianism, emphasized the divinity of the Lord at the expense of his manhood and ended by creating a heresy of his own which denied that Christ had a human mind. Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople 428–31, reacting from Apollinarianism, reasserted the manhood of Christ to the extent of questioning the divinity of the infant Jesus and thus denying Mary her title of theotokos or ‘God-bearer’. He, too, found himself a reluctant heresiarch. In turn, Eutyches, a learned monk from Constantinople, in his anti-Nestorian fervour, swung too far in the direction of Apollinarianism and came to grief over Constantine’s compulsory word ‘consubstantial’. Summoned to recant before a council in 448, he gave up in despair: ‘Hitherto I have always avoided the phrase “consubstantial after the flesh” [as tending to confusion]. But I will use it now, since your holiness demands it.’ What room for manoeuvre there was consisted in verbal manipulations behind which lay nebulous concepts. ‘Consubstantial after the flesh’ was, indeed, such a device. But a clever formula might, in solving an old problem, raise an entirely new one and a compromise meaningful and satisfactory to one generation of fathers was often interpreted in rival ways by the next. The Church’s collective memory was an imperfect instrument. By the third century, for instance, it had forgotten the origins of the old Jewish-Christian Ebionites and assumed they were the followers of a heresiarch called Ebion; not only was he denounced by orthodox writers but sentences from his works were produced for refutation. All kinds of subsequent constructions were placed upon the Nicene formula, and the motives of those who approved it. Then there were language difficulties. Greek lent itself to complexity of religious discussion. This was one important reason why the great Christological rows were all of eastern origins and were mere imports in Latin-speaking areas. Our word ‘essence’ can be used in a general or a particular sense. The Greeks had two, hypostasis and ousia, each of which could be used in either sense. Some of the leading fourth-century Greek theologians began to employ ousia in the general sense and hypostasis in the particularist – ‘person’ or ‘character’. But the Latin for both words is substantia – which in fact is the exact equivalent of hypostasis. The Latin essentia, the equivalent of ousia, never gained currency. The Latins did, however, have the word persona, which they employed for the particularist sense.

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

  He’s gentle and kind, has a twinkle in his eye and is clearly a history buff, as he keeps peppering our conversation with stories about ancient noblemen and bits of Russian history. I concentrate on following what he’s saying – it’s noisy and I’m on my second drink and the stories seem to randomly appear without context. I don’t think he’s showing off for me, but maybe citing historical facts is a kind of nervous tic. When I stand to use the restroom, I totter for a moment in my high heels and hold onto the edge of the table to get my bearings. In the awkward lulls of our conversation, I consumed two drinks at lightning speed. When I return to the table, he has already paid the bill and is ready to go. I wonder if he’s anxious to get this date to its end, but he walks with me toward home and on the way suggests that we should stop for dessert. I doubt we will be able to get a table at the crowded restaurant he points to, but he says he knows the host and we will get in, no problem. Walking next to him, I note that we are eye-level, though in all fairness I’m wearing heels. Still, it feels weird to me and I realize that I’ve always been diminutive compared to men I’ve been with. If I’m being honest – even though I admit this with regret that I care – I like being the smaller one and feeling protected by a larger man at my side. I think of a friend who always dates men who are her height, with whom she can even share jeans – I shudder at the thought. I’ve often teased her that she likes men to be petite so she can tuck them in her pockets when she’s out and about and keep them close by. I have always conformed to gender stereotypes of physicality, feeling that masculinity is defined in part by physical prowess, but I also fully embrace the concept of metrosexuality. Michael had been more interested in fashion and shopping than I had ever been, and arguments we had about spending too much money on clothes, accessories or fancy toiletries were due to his bills, not mine. I didn’t like how much money he spent, but I liked that he cared about what he wore and how he looked.

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

  The study was published in Science, whose website led with the headline “Anxious Crayfish Can Be Treated Like Humans.” The New York Times announced, “Even Crayfish Get Anxious,” while the BBC, slightly more tempered, noted, “Crayfish May Experience a Form of Anxiety.” The theory of behavioral inhibition could, in fact, easily account for motivational conflict, behavioral arrest, and risk assessment in animals (including crayfish, rats, and people) without requiring the conscious experience of anxiety. Unfortunately, just as the meaning of defensive motivation gets tied up with subjective feelings when the motivational state and its brain system are labeled with the term “fear,” the meaning of behavioral inhibition becomes entangled with subjective states when it or its brain system is labeled with the term “anxiety.” Defensive motivation and behavioral inhibition are not the same as the conscious experience of fear and anxiety. That is not to say that the defensive motivation and behavioral inhibition states are unrelated to fear and anxiety, as they do make important contributions, but more is required to feel afraid or anxious. In June 2014, a psychology website’s headline read: “Fear Center in Brain Larger Among Anxious Kids.” 65 The story that followed described a study that measured the level of anxiety in a large group of children based on a questionnaire answered by their parents. 66 The brains of these children were then imaged and the findings related to the parents’ assessments. The results showed that the larger the amygdala of the child, the higher the level of anxiety rated by the parents. Let’s consider what this actually means. In this study the parents did what animal researchers often do: They based a conclusion about anxiety, an inner feeling, on observations of behavior—their child seemed nervous, edgy, or had trouble concentrating or sleeping. Thus, although the size of the amygdala might well correlate with certain behaviors, whether it was related to feelings of anxiety was not tested. The website’s headline was inaccurate in three respects: (1) What was being measured was behavioral activity, not the feeling of anxiety; (2) the kids were not anxious in the clinical sense, in spite of some being described as “anxious” in the story; and (3) the amygdala is not the fear center (and certainly not the anxiety center) if by fear or anxiety we mean a conscious feeling. Fear and anxiety are hardly the only emotions that are viewed in these inaccurate and confusing ways. As we saw above, a number of emotions, including anger, sadness, joy, and disgust, are often considered to be wired into brain circuits.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Why did the Baptist make secret inquiries about Jesus’s mission and receive mysterious replies? The exotic story of the Baptist’s end, shorn of its romantic details, places him in a highly political posture and it is interesting that Herod Antipas did not like Jesus either. Was there, then, a political connection between these two religious innovators? Our ignorance of the Baptist inevitably clouds our view of the uniqueness of Jesus. Indeed, the historical problem of the Baptist, baffling as it is, serves merely as an introduction to the much greater problem of Jesus. There can, at least, be absolutely no doubt about his historical existence. Unfortunately, the Antiquities of Josephus (published about AD 93), so useful about other related topics, is virtually silent on the point. Josephus was a Hellenized Jew, a Romanophile, indeed a Roman general and historian whose work received imperial subsidies. The manuscript chain coming down to us inevitably passed through Christian control. Since Josephus was strongly opposed to Jewish irredentism, or any other sectarian movement which gave trouble to the authorities, he clearly adopted an anti-Christian posture. But this has been tampered with. Thus, he mentions the judicial murder of James by the high priest Ananias in AD 62, and calls James the brother ‘of Jesus, the so-called Christ’, in a way to suggest that he has already given an account of Jesus and his mission. But what has actually come down to us is a passage which describes Jesus as a wise man, a lover of truth, much beloved by his followers; it accepts his miracles and resurrection and hints strongly at his divinity. The passage is plainly a non-too-ingenious Christian invention and what Josephus actually wrote has gone. Attempts to reconstruct it have not so far won general acceptance. The inference from Josephus is that Jesus was a Jewish sectarian with messianic claims and a substantial following which had survived his extinction: a nuisance to the empire, in fact. This view is reflected in other non-Christian references, which are few but clearly confirm Jesus’s historicity. Tacitus, in his Annals, writing of the fire of Rome in 64, refers to ‘the detestable superstition’ of Christianity, to ‘Christus, the founder of this sect’, and to his crucifixion ‘in the reign of Tiberius by the Procurator Pontius Pilate’ – though it is not clear whether he got this last from Christian or official sources. Pliny the Younger, writing in 112, says the sect ‘sang a hymn to Christ as a God’, and refused to curse Christ; only renegades were willing to do so. The earliest reference, by Suetonius, which implies that Christians were known at Rome even in the reign of Claudius, AD 41–54, is unfortunately garbled: he writes of Jews being expelled from Rome because ‘they were constantly rioting at the instigation of Chrestus’. Did he think ‘Chrestus’ was still alive at the time? Anyway, he, and every other source referring to earliest Christianity, treat Jesus Christ as an actual, historical person.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  primarily to the gentile or diaspora mission. Luke, in the Acts, does not tell us what rights or duties or privileges were enjoyed by ‘the twelve’ or by ‘the apostles’. Indeed, when he gets to Paul’s work he forgets all about them, and thenceforth refers to him as ‘the apostle’. Only with Peter can we trace any activity; with John it is barely possible, though we can assume it since he was martyred. And it is quite impossible with the rest. James, Jesus’s brother, is an identifiable personality, indeed an important one. But he is not an ‘apostle’, nor one of ‘the twelve’. It is thus misleading to speak of an ‘apostolic age’, and equally misleading to speak of a primitive pentecostal Church and faith. The last point is important, because it implies Jesus left a norm, in terms of doctrine, message, and organization, from which the Church subsequently departed. There was never a norm. Jesus held his following together because he was, in effect, its only spokesman. After Pentecost, there were many; a Babel of voices. If the famous Petrine text in Matthew is genuine and means what it is alleged to mean, Peter was a very unsteady rock on which to found a Church. He did not exercise powers of leadership and seems to have allowed himself to be dispossessed by James and other members of Jesus’s family, who had played no part in the original mission. Finally, Peter went on foreign mission and left the Jerusalem circle altogether. The impression we get is that the Jerusalem Church was unstable, and had a tendency to drift back into Judaism completely. Indeed, it was not really a separate Church at all, but part of the Jewish cult. It had no sacrifices of its own, no holy places and times, no priests. It met for meals, like the Essene groups, and had readings, preaching, prayers and hymns; its ecclesiastical personality was expressed solely in verbal terms. Thus, we are told, it attracted a good many people. Many of them must have regarded it as little more than a pious and humble Jewish sect, keen on charity, sharing goods, revering an unjustly treated leader, and with an apocalyptic message. This view was also shared by some in authority. A number of priests became members. So did some of the Pharisees. How did this participation square with the execution of Jesus? That, it was now admitted in some quarters, had been a mistake; just as, later, the execution of James in 62 would be denounced subsequently as a blunder by one man acting ultra vires. Of course, there were Jewish establishment elements who were opposed to the Jesus movement all along, and attacked it whenever opportunity offered, as they attacked other religious ‘troublemakers’. But with the penetration of the Jerusalem circle by priests and scribes, there were always

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

  I am hurt, but I am also confused, as maybe I don’t want him further enmeshed in my life either. I don’t want a boyfriend, I don’t want to be married again, I don’t want to live with a man, so do I just want a man who wants to meet my kids and be a bigger part of my life without actually meeting my kids or being a bigger part of my life? Why am I so terrified to want more than that? * I go back on Tinder and Hinge. I’ve let the dating apps sit dormant on my phone these past months while I’ve been spending time with #6, but now I’m hankering again to see what kind of single men are out there, and I want to get back to the simple, fun part of dating that involved a lot of sex without a lot of complicated feelings. A couple of weeks after the unfortunate slime conversation, as #6 and I are lounging in my bed early on a Sunday morning, I know that I have to address my recent wounds, unburden myself and clear the air. I would rather scare him away than keep him around while I harbor resentment and insecurity. I tell him how stung I was by his response to me. “Oh boy,” he says, sighing and staring up at the ceiling. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, it’s just the last thing I want to do after an exhausting week of work is hang out with a couple of eight-year-old girls.” “You’re not making it better,” I say quietly. “You’ve basically repeated the exact thing that offended me to begin with, just taking out the bit about making slime.” “You’re right, I’m sorry. You caught me off guard when you asked me and I had a million things distracting me at work. That’s a classic example of a moment when I should have hit the pause button and asked you if I could think about it and get back to you,” he says. “Fair enough, but the part that’s bothering me is not that you didn’t think about it but that you seemed so genuinely horrified by the suggestion of it. It was hard for me to work up the courage to ask you and being shot down like that really hurt and frankly confused me.” “Laura, at this point in my life I don’t want to play daddy to other people’s kids. I don’t see myself standing on the sidelines of Georgia’s soccer games, cheering her on.” “She doesn’t play soccer and I didn’t suggest that you play daddy. Georgia already has a father.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  sermons in the native language; and ten years later a further synod forbade the Indians access to the scriptures, in any language. We come here to some of the central problems which confronted mission work, which indeed have always bedevilled efforts to spread Christianity. To what extent should Christianity, in penetrating new societies and cultures, take on a native coloration and adapt its presentation of the essential truth? There is very good reason to believe, as we have seen, that the earliest Christian missionaries, spreading in Africa, Asia Minor and southern Europe, developed modulations and varieties which assisted the rapid dissemination of Christian ideas, and which were only later, in the course of three centuries, reconciled to a standard. It is hard not to believe that this was the apostles’ intention; it is certainly adumbrated in Paul’s Epistles. But by the sixteenth century, a millenium and a half of increasingly narrow doctrinal definition had deprived Christianity of its flexibility and ambiguities. And then, in its homeland, Christianity itself was locked in dispute over points of doctrine which had come to seem momentous. Any divergence was held to entail torture and death in this world and eternal horror in the next. Moreover, arrogant and insistent state power was involved: Christianity was identified with a national culture whose export was the whole point of the conquest. In Spanish and Portuguese America, the missionary friars (and later the Jesuits) were far too closely supervised by state and church authorities to attempt, or permit, a marriage between Christian and local culture. They did what seemed to them the next best thing: attempted to effect a separation between the native Christians and the Spanish settlers and half-castes; and this was made possible because it was both official and ecclesiastical policy to gather the Indians in new villages. In Mexico all the orders, but especially the Augustinians, were enthusiastic founders of new villages and towns. This reorganization and separation of the people allowed the friars to impress their leadership on the Indians in their own way. Thus the Franciscan Antonio de Roa went barefoot, wore nothing but a coarse robe and slept on boards, took no wine, meat or bread, and in the sight of the Indians, threw himself on burning coals, had himself singed with a torch, and scourged himself every time he saw a cross. By such methods the Franciscans, says Suarez de Peralta, ‘were almost worshipped by the Indians’. Scourging was one of the aspects of Christianity the Indians seem to have adopted eagerly. Missionaries were asked: ‘Why do you not order me to be whipped?’, after confession; and natives adopted the custom of

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

  Within seconds his mouth is on my wugget, my bald monkey, my shaved pussy. I am definitely in some kind of weird clinical mindset because I am evaluating all that is happening to me without feeling any physical arousal. Am I just flat-out having too much sex so that I can’t even be bothered to feel anything anymore? Why does this suddenly feel like work? I always feel like I should reciprocate – and I use the word “should” here as frankly, even though my blow job skills are improving, I still don’t totally get the appeal – but honestly, he is so well-endowed, I can’t fathom putting him in my mouth. I am wholly intimidated by it, sheepish even, not confident that I have the skills yet to tackle this particular one. For the moment, I am off the hook as he reaches across me into his night table drawer for a condom. With the condom on, he aggressively thrusts inside of me and I can barely catch my breath before he has single-handedly flipped me onto my stomach. I raise myself to my hands and knees so that he can enter me from behind. It feels like he is propelling himself into me and I am too focused on not clumsily toppling over to really feel much excitement myself. It’s not unpleasant exactly, but it is decidedly athletic and more physical than erotic. Soon he wraps his arm around my waist from behind and flips me onto my back again, taking one of my legs high in the air and placing it on his shoulder and continuing his energetic penetration. A physical sensation builds in me quite suddenly and when I come a moment later, the tightening of my muscles is so intense that when they release, it feels like every single muscle in my body goes slack and I jolt upright, squeezing my legs tightly together to stop myself from peeing on his bed. I am appalled and too scared to see if I really did pee or if I just felt like I was going to, but he doesn’t seem to take notice. What just happened? I wonder with alarm. I felt absolutely nothing and then this? Did I not just pee in his bathroom ten minutes ago? On top of having to worry about sagging boobs and spider veins on my legs, am I now going to have to add incontinence to my list of middle-aged indignities? After subtly verifying that there is in fact not a wet spot on the sheets beneath me, I lie back and within seconds, he is inside me again, vigorously pumping. I feel like a contortionist, with my legs high in the air while he presses my thighs back even further toward my head. Suddenly, I feel so tired, physically spent. I don’t want to lie dormant like a rag doll, but I cannot match his vigor and size. I have, for better or for worse, been outmatched.

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

  Johnny comes to my rescue, pushing the dog’s paws from where they landed on my stomach, and we head up a short flight of stairs to the kitchen. His house is tidy and comfortable with a few attempts at decor thrown in – a vase with a sprig of fake flowers, a scented candle, a ‘Bless This House’ print framed on the wall – though I am surprised to see a dozen bath mats scattered all over the kitchen. I am tempted to mention that inexpensive rag rugs can easily be purchased online, but I remind myself that I’m here for a few hours, I’m not moving in, and instead gladly accept the glass of wine he offers me. He takes me on a quick tour of the living area and I feel confused; I don’t want to be rude so I express enthusiasm over the small details he proudly points out, but I’m not quite sure what we’re doing here. I was expecting the “You run to the bathroom and I’ll take all my clothes off and you’ll throw me on the bed” routine, but instead I’m admiring the wood floor he just laid in his enclosed porch. I nestle into the couch with my glass of wine and curl my feet underneath me, trying to exude availability. He perches next to me for a second before he pops back up again saying something about needing to check on the state of affairs upstairs. It finally dawns on me: he’s nervous! I’ve been so focused on how new I am to this that it hasn’t occurred to me how strange it must be for this man, who knew me as a client and has seen me in my element with my husband and kids, to have me invite myself over and present myself on his sofa, scantily clad and there for the taking. He has been upstairs a few minutes when I accept that nothing is going to happen unless I make it happen. I climb the stairs and find him down a carpeted hallway in his bedroom, taking clothes off the bed and smoothing down the blankets. “Hey,” I say, poking my head in. “Just seeing what’s going on up here.” “Sorry,” he says. “I wanted to straighten up a bit.” “No need to do it for my sake,” I say and take a quick inventory: queen-sized bed, shiny mahogany dresser set, Floyd standing at the end of the bed. I place my glass of wine on a coaster on the dresser and sit on the edge of the bed.

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

  I thank him and wait for him to sit next to me before eating, but he is standing in front of the TV, flipping through channels until he settles on The Graduate , which has just started. “I love this movie,” I say just to say something, but I’m taken aback that he seems to be watching it attentively as if I’m not here. I don’t know if I’m supposed to talk or if I will be interrupting the movie if I attempt conversation, so I concentrate on nibbling the unwieldy crab cake. I am poking the food around my plate and anxiously contemplating how to deal with this television-versus-talking situation when suddenly he is pressed against me from behind, kissing my neck. I glance over and note his empty plate. “Oh, OK, I guess lunch is over?” I say with an awkward laugh, attempting to be cheeky but mostly sounding child-like and confused. It is now clear that he invited me here to have sex and that the crab cakes were a polite ruse. How I have gotten all the way to #8 without instinctively understanding the dynamics of these situations astounds me, and I realize assigns a certain naïveté to me that I am no longer entitled to. I have inexplicably managed to retain an innocence, even a demurity, that should have been tossed aside many numbers ago. “Yes, Laura, lunch is over,” he says, reaching his arm around me so that his hand can inch its way along my neckline and then down to the edge of my bra. I can feel his hardness against the small of my back as he leans into me. I feel enveloped by him, his kisses against the back of my neck becoming breathier, his hands working their way deeper down before finding my nipple. He is not physically threatening but he is moving quickly and persistently, and for a fleeting moment I wonder, if I wanted to stop now, would he let me? There is something about the urgency of his movements, coupled with my tepid response, that unnerves me. The power here is most decidedly not in my court. As for the paucity of my physical feedback, I am more than a little distracted – by Dustin Hoffman’s bumbling machinations across the room, by the sun beaming through the windows which affords no darkness in which to hide, by the crab cake congealing on my plate in front of me. My mind is wandering so much that I start to panic – am I losing my interest in sex, have I used up my post-divorce allotment? I am attracted to him, so why do I feel like I can take this or leave it right now? He pushes back from me, swings his legs around to the floor, and takes my hand to lead me to the back of the apartment.

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

  Within seconds I am a bundle of contradictions as I tell him that what I really want is to be fucked. I’ve never used these words before and I’m fairly certain that according to how I would define what it means to be fucked – the vulgarity of the word, the lack of love and warmth and intimacy that comes with the transactional nature of it, the idea that something is literally being banged out of you – I never have been. If the opposite of being fucked is being made love to – a phrase that always makes me recoil with its cheesy evocation of ’70s love songs, giving me an image of a couple pouring enduring love and tenderness into each against the backdrop of a setting sun – I’m not certain I’ve ever been made love to either. I’ve simply had sex, the safest, most banal term I can think of; slightly clinical, devoid of all emotion, whether loving or intense, middle of the road. He hesitates and says, “First, you asked me to be gentle and now you’re telling me you want to be fucked. I’m confused by what you want.” “You and me both,” I say, attempting a light-hearted tone, trying to get back the bravado I felt a few minutes earlier when I undressed. “How about you proceed without me giving further directions and I’ll let you know if it’s too much?” It occurs to me for a fleeting moment that I don’t know this man and no one knows I’m here. I don’t even know if Jack is his real name. I’ve spent more time worrying about how this will all play out and the state of what I now know is called my pussy and maybe not enough time worrying about who this stranger is and if he reels women in by claiming to be a lonely widower. But, against my nature, I’ve boldly jumped into the deep end and I’m damned if I’m not going to swim. I may have lost my virginity thirty years earlier, but this experience feels remarkably similar. All that’s missing is the worry that I will be found out by my parents in their bedroom two flights up from the basement and the nubby wool of the plaid sofa.

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

  Measuring is an objective procedure that involves physical objects and their features. Grading, in contrast, “is carried out by means of categories that are external and reside not in the object itself (i.e., they are not internal to it) but in the eye of the evaluator.” When categorizing the subjects’ verbal responses using emotion labels (“fear,” “pleasure,” etc.), researchers are grading, not measuring. Thus, in Heath’s studies, descriptions about sex are categorized as feelings of pleasure, whereas those about entering dark passages become instances of fearful or anxious feelings. Such “data” thus can reflect biases of the researcher. The vague and variable nature of Heath’s patients’ descriptions of their subjective experiences elicited by brain stimulation suggests an alternative to the idea that feelings are genetically wired into subcortical emotion-operating systems. It seems equally possible that electrical stimulation of the brain creates a state of ambiguity or confusion. Artificial delivery of electric current (especially the relatively high levels used in the older studies) nonspecifically activates many neurons and causes them to fire action potentials that in turn activate the various areas to which the stimulated neurons are connected. The stimulations, for example, often produced increases in physiological arousal in the brain. Increased arousal enhances information processing widely, increasing vigilance and attention to the environment 95 (this is discussed further in Chapter 8 ). In situations in which people experience something unusual or unexpected, such as a sudden state of heightened arousal and vigilance, they often try to make sense of it. 96 This is a well-known phenomenon in psychology: Unexplained experiences create states of dissonance that motivate the conscious mind to explain, as best as it can, what might be happening. People gather as much information as possible and, in an effort to attribute a cause to the experience, verbally label the experience using common terms. 97 For example, in a famous study Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer found that when arousal was artificially induced by giving experimental participants a shot of adrenalin, the participants looked to their social environment for cues to explain their state of arousal in order to label it—if they were in a room full of happy people, they felt happy; with sad people, they felt sad. 98 That this may well have taken place in Heath’s stimulation studies is suggested by his own observations. After delivering an electrical stimulus to the brain of one of his patients, she smiled. When Heath asked her why she was doing so, she replied: “I don’t know. . . . Are you doing something to me? [Giggles.] I don’t usually sit around and laugh at nothing. I must be laughing at something.” 99 Her conclusion about what she was consciously experiencing built up over time and was more like a rationalization that she slowly constructed than a report of a feeling that was directly and immediately unleashed by stimulation of a brain site.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Henry IV, and the goldencased tooth of John the Baptist. But the net effect of the excommunications and counter-excommunications, the hurling of spiritual power into the mundane battle, was to produce a certain confusion in the participants, especially the minor agents or the innocent, who did not know which to fear most – an armed imperialist or a cursing papalist cleric. And then, legitimate spiritual power so often appeared to fail. Thus the anti-imperialist troops of Milan, mysteriously beaten at Cortenuovo by the excommunicate troops of Frederick II, ‘raised their heels against God’ in consequence; they turned the crucifixes upside down in their churches, hurled sewage on the altars, threw out the clergy, and gorged themselves on meat throughout Lent. In an increasing number of ways, the contest appeared to be subversive of the whole natural and moral order. Thus, to devalue the emperor, Innocent III built up the power of the German princes, especially the ecclesiastical ones; they ceased to be one of the chief supports of the central authority and looked, instead, to the selfish advancement of their principalities. Again, other monarchs and powers were brought into papal coalitions, the humbling of the imperial authority being considered to justify any arrangement, however artificial. But then, the theory of papal plenary power meant that all moral or written laws were suspended, inoperative, in the Pope’s case, since he was subject only to heavenly judgment. Thus Gregory IX, who became Pope in 1227, and persecuted heretics, antinomians and deviants with relentless ferocity, said that the moral law did not apply to his anti-imperial campaign: his conduct towards Frederick II could not be judged as immoral or unethical, his methods being unrelated to the standards of conduct common to mankind since they were subject only to God’s estimation of their acceptability. To emphasize the point, in 1239 he produced the relics of the two unassailable guardians of the papal city: ‘the heads of the apostles Peter and Paul’ were carried ‘in solemn procession’ through Rome, and in front of a huge crowd Gregory removed his tiara and placed it on the head of St Peter. 1 The Pope was acting on Peter’s instructions – and how could Peter do wrong? A few years later, in 1246, Gregory’s successor, Innocent IV, was almost certainly a party to the attempted murder of the Lord’s Anointed, Frederick II; the plot misfired – the conspirators were blinded, mutilated and burned alive – but there was no let-up in the papal campaign. Observers, participants indeed, saw it as an eschatological conflict, as in the apocalyptic books of the Old Testament; Antichrist was loose on

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

  I recall curling into a booth at a Japanese restaurant with my sister while my mother and Larry got acquainted, her soulful blue eyes flickering back and forth from her date to her children. She brought us coloring books and invisible ink pads, and if we were well-behaved, saucer-sized black and white cookies from Zaro’s Bakery, leading me to believe that her dating life was a fortunate turn of events for me personally. The first man she conceded to go alone on a date with was reluctantly invited inside our apartment to await the arrival of our always-late grandmother, who was to babysit. She had warned him that we might ignore him, that we weren’t used to having men in the apartment with us, but within minutes, we had marched out our ample collection of stuffed animals to put on a play for him and sobbed when our grandmother showed up and they left for their adult-only date. We had given our immediate approval, which was the incentive my mother needed to take us downtown a few weeks later to jump on his waterbed while they packed up his studio apartment so that he could move in with us. Even as she moved on in her romantic life with her soon-to-be husband, I understood implicitly that we would always come first: it was the ultimate act of maternal devotion, attending to her needs only after ours were managed. In books and movies I run through in my memory, it seems women who move on from their spouse’s death or from divorce are often able to seamlessly fold their new husbands into the mix – after a bumpy start, the dust settles and the kids accept it as a given that their mother has moved on. Sometimes the dust endlessly floats through space and the kids hate their stepfathers forever, but this rarely stops the mother. Why does this challenge have me flummoxed when other women seem to manage it without such intense turmoil and inner strife? My kids aren’t rebelling against anyone at this point and they’re not the ones throwing up roadblocks – I am. I cannot wrap my head around how logistically this is supposed to work. If I am to continue to be a good mother in the way I perceive good mothers to be, it means abrogating myself outside of my maternal duties.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And he knew that she had discovered the truth, while she in her turn perceived that he knew this, yet neither of them spoke—in a deathly silence she watched, and in silence he endured her watching. It was rather a terrible summer for them all, the more so as they were surrounded by beauty, and great peace when the evening came down on the snows, turning the white, unfurrowed peaks to sapphire and then to a purple darkness; hanging out large, incredible stars above the wide slope of the Roseg Glacier. For their hearts were full of unspoken dread, of clamorous passions, of bewilderment that went very ill with the quiet fulfilments, with the placid and smiling contentment of nature—and not the least bewildered was Mary. Her respite, it seemed, had been pitifully fleeting; now she was torn by conflicting emotions; terrified and amazed at her realization that Martin meant more to her than a friend, yet less, oh, surely much less than Stephen. Like a barrier of fire her passion for the woman flared up to forbid her love of the man; for as great as the mystery of virginity itself, is sometimes the power of the one who has destroyed it, and that power still remained in these days, with Stephen. Alone in his bare little hotel bedroom, Martin would wrestle with his soul-sickening problem, convinced in his heart that but for Stephen, Mary Llewellyn would grow to love him, nay more, that she had grown to love him already. Yet Stephen was his friend—he had sought her out, had all but forced his friendship upon her; had forced his way into her life, her home, her confidence; she had trusted his honour. And now he must either utterly betray her or through loyalty to their friendship, betray Mary. And he felt that he knew, and knew only too well, what life would do to Mary Llewellyn, what it had done to her already; for had he not seen the bitterness in her, the resentment that could only lead to despair, the defiance that could only lead to disaster? She was setting her weakness against the whole world, and slowly but surely the world would close in until in the end it had utterly crushed her. In her very normality lay her danger. Mary, all woman, was less of a match for life than if she had been as was Stephen.

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

  The fuss concerned the surprising finding that a woman with bilateral amygdala damage could still experience “feelings of fear.” 62 But the only reason this would be considered surprising was if one believed that the amygdala is the primary wellspring of fearful feelings and that amygdala-controlled responses are reliable markers of these feelings. As I’ve said, and will explain in detail later, amygdala-controlled responses are not unequivocal signatures of fearful feelings. When we scientists use the term “fear” to refer to the neural mechanisms underlying both conscious feelings and nonconsciously elicited responses, we are inviting confusion. The problem is not limited to fear. Jeffrey Gray’s behavioral inhibition theory is a prominent animal model of human anxiety. 63 According to Gray and Neil McNaughton, the behavioral inhibition system of the brain is activated when goals are in conflict—for example, the need for food versus the risk of being exposed to predators. This conflict causes one’s brain to attribute more risk, more harm potential, to stimuli and situations than we otherwise would, thus leading to a central state of behavioral inhibition that promotes risk avoidance rather than food seeking. Gray and McNaughton equated this brain state with anxiety because rats took more risk in conflict situations when treated with drugs, such as benzodiazepines, that relieve anxiety in people. But were they referring to a conscious feeling of anxiety that involves dread, foreboding, and worry? Or were they scientifically defining anxiety to mean a nonconscious brain state of behavioral inhibition that leads to motivational conflict and behavioral arrest? Gray and McNaughton sometimes claimed the latter (the central state version) but also often wrote in ways that could be interpreted the other way (in terms of conscious feelings). Certainly many followers of this approach, and there are legions, believe that the anxious feelings are direct products of the behavioral inhibition system. A recent study showed that benzodiazepines relieved a so-called behavioral inhibition response in crayfish 64 (as a Cajun, I am always momentarily surprised when this is not spelled as “crawfish”). After receiving electric shock in a certain location, the crayfish remained immobile for an extended period (a behavior that was viewed as risk assessment) and then avoided the shock area, whereas the drugged crayfish were less inhibited (more exploratory). The authors claim that their results may lead to a new view of the emotional status of invertebrates.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  But what was she? Her thoughts slipping back to her childhood, would find many things in her past that perplexed her. She had never been quite like the other small children, she had always been lonely and discontented, she had always been trying to be some one else—that was why she had dressed herself up as young Nelson. Remembering those days she would think of her father, and would wonder if now, as then, he could help her. Supposing she should ask him to explain about Martin? Her father was wise, and had infinite patience—yet somehow she instinctively dreaded to ask him. Alone—it was terrible to feel so much alone—to feel oneself different from other people. At one time she had rather enjoyed this distinction—she had rather enjoyed dressing up as young Nelson. Yet had she enjoyed it? Or had it been done as some sort of inadequate, childish protest? But if so against what had she been protesting when she strutted about the house, masquerading? In those days she had wanted to be a boy—had that been the meaning of the pitiful young Nelson? And what about now? She had wanted Martin to treat her as a man, had expected it of him. . . . The questions to which she could find no answers, would pile themselves up and up in the darkness; oppressing, stifling by sheer weight of numbers, until she would feel them getting her under; ‘I don’t know—oh, God, I don’t know!’ she would mutter, tossing as though to fling off those questions.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  But Stephen was never able to decide whether Jonathan Brockett attracted or repelled her. Brilliant he could be at certain times, yet curiously foolish and puerile at others; and his hands were as white and soft as a woman’s—she would feel a queer little sense of outrage creeping over her when she looked at his hands. For those hands of his went so ill with him somehow; he was tall, broad-shouldered, and of an extreme thinness. His clean-shaven face was slightly sardonic and almost disconcertingly clever; an inquisitive face too—one felt that it pried into everyone’s secrets without shame or mercy. It may have been genuine liking on his part or mere curiosity that had made him persist in thrusting his friendship on Stephen. But whatever it had been it had taken the form of ringing her up almost daily at one time; of worrying her to lunch or dine with him, of inviting himself to her flat in Chelsea, or what was still worse, of dropping in on her whenever the spirit moved him. His work never seemed to worry him at all, and Stephen often wondered when his fine plays got written, for Brockett very seldom if ever discussed them and apparently very seldom wrote them; yet they always appeared at the critical moment when their author had run short of money. Once, for the sake of peace, she had dined with him in a species of glorified cellar. He had just then discovered the queer little place down in Seven Dials, and was very proud of it; indeed, he was making it rather the fashion among certain literary people. He had taken a great deal of trouble that evening to make Stephen feel that she belonged to these people by right of her talent, and had introduced her as ‘Stephen Gordon, the author of The Furrow.’ But all the while he had secretly watched her with his sharp and inquisitive grey eyes. She had felt very much at ease with Brockett as they sat at their little dimly lit table, perhaps because her instinct divined that this man would never require of her more than she could give—that the most he would ask for at any time would be friendship.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Pauline theology. The divinity of Christ gave Christianity its tremendous initial impact and assisted its universality. But it left Christian theologians with a dilemma: how to explain the divinity of Christ while maintaining the singularity of God. Were there not two Gods? Or, if the concept of the Spirit were introduced as a separate manifestation of divinity, three? The point became an irritant at a very early stage of Christian history. One possible solution was to regard Christ as a manifestation of a monolithic God and therefore not a man at all. This was the line followed, in general, by the gnostics. Thus Valentinus wrote: ‘Jesus ate and drank in a peculiar manner, not evacuating his food. So much power of continence was in him that in him his food was not corrupted, since he himself had no corruptibility.’ This weird theory invalidated most of the gospels, devalued the resurrection and made nonsense of the eucharist. The Docetists, who also belonged to this school, faced the issue squarely: as Christ’s human body was phantasm, his sufferings and death were mere appearance: ‘If he suffered, he was not God. If he was God, he did not suffer.’ Christianity thus presented lost much of its attraction. There were attempts to meet this objection by more sophisticated definitions. The Monarchianists, while emphasizing the unity of God, suggested that the Father himself descended into the Virgin Mary and became Jesus Christ, a formulation also known as Patripassionism. The Sabellianists put it a slightly different way: Father, Son and Holy Ghost were one and the same being, that is the body, the soul and the spirit of one substance – one God in three temporary manifestations. These were intellectually digestible concepts but they were still incompatible with the historical Jesus who was now an integral part of the canonical scriptures. A second line of solution was to stress the manhood of Christ. This, of course, had been preferred all along by the Judaizing elements in Christianity and was the essence of the heresy maintained by the Ebionites, the displaced rump of the Jerusalem Church. The objection, of course, was that it was then difficult to differentiate Christianity from Judaism and impossible to retain Pauline theology or (among other canonical texts) the gospel of St John. The halfway stage along this line was to deny Christ’s pre-existence as God and this is more or less what Arius, the most important of the Christological Trinitarian heresiarchs, tried to do. As he put it himself: ‘We are persecuted because we say that the Son had a beginning, but God is without beginning. . . and this we say because he is neither part of God nor derived from any

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Ruggieri slept for a very long time, but eventually he digested the potion, its effects wore off, and just before matins he woke up. But although he had emerged from sleep and recovered the use of his senses, his mind was still blurred, and in fact it was some days before he shook off his state of bewilderment. On opening his eyes and finding that he could not see anything, he groped about with his hands and discovered that he was inside this trunk, whereupon he began to ponder and mutter to himself, saying: ‘What’s all this? Where am I? Am I asleep, or awake? I have a clear recollection of entering my lady’s bedchamber this evening, and now I appear to be inside some sort of chest. What does it mean? Can it be that the doctor returned home, or that something equally unexpected happened, causing my mistress to conceal me here whilst I was asleep? Why of course, that’s the explanation, that’s it exactly.’ And so he kept quiet and listened to see whether he could hear anything. But after remaining stock-still for some considerable time, feeling rather uncomfortable inside the trunk, which was none too big, and getting a pain in the side on which he was lying, he decided to turn over. This operation he performed with such a degree of skill that in pressing his back against one of the sides of the trunk, which had not been placed on an even keel, he caused it to topple over and fall with a resounding crash, waking up the women who were asleep in the adjoining room and giving them such a fright that they hardly dared to breathe, let alone open their mouths. Ruggieri received quite a shock when the trunk toppled over, but on finding that it had burst open in falling, he preferred to clamber out rather than stay where he was, just in case anything worse was about to happen to him. Being at his wits’ end, and not knowing where he was, he began to fumble his way round the premises in order to see whether he could find a door or a staircase that would offer him a means of escape. The women heard these fumbling sounds as they lay there awake, and they began calling out: ‘Who’s there?’ Being unable to recognize their voices, Ruggieri offered no reply, and so the women started calling to the two young men, who, because they had gone to bed so late, were soundly asleep and had heard nothing of all the racket. Feeling more frightened than ever, the women got out of bed and ran to the windows, shouting: ‘Burglars! Burglars!’ And so several of their neighbours rushed into the house from various directions, some by way of the roof, some by the front-door, and others by the entrance at the rear. And the noise reached such a pitch that even the young men woke up and scrambled out of bed.