Despair

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 Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Against the odds, I had persevered, had shaped an idea and argued it through—like any other doctoral student. During these last few months, all the different themes had come together and fallen elegantly into place, almost of their own volition. My supervisor was pleased, and two professors whom I had consulted were impressed. Another, it was true, had been extremely rude about it, but my supervisor assured me that he did not approve of the close linguistic study of literature that I had attempted. Because he was known to have this bias, he would not be my examiner. So it all seemed hopeful. Here at least there had been no disaster. My mind still boiled with visions and paralyzing panic attacks, but this piece of sustained work was a guarantee of its ultimate integrity. The thesis was my passport to a job and a career, an earnest of my survival in a world that had once seemed so impossibly alien. I watched the girl behind the post office grille slap on the stamps and the registration forms. Then she put the parcel in a pile at the end of the room, whence they would be conveyed to Oxford. In some bewilderment, I stared around the art gallery. A student was copying William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay, and one or two other people were strolling round the Tate’s Pre-Raphaelite exhibits. I was stiff, as though I had been sitting for some time in an uncomfortable position. I got up and stretched. In front of me, John William Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott reared up in her fragile little boat. Her tapestry, the fruit of so much dedicated toil, floated away downstream, waterlogged, stained, and ruined. The lady’s face had already assumed the pallor of death and her skin looked as gray as the sky behind her— Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, who for so long had been my alter ego. She had tried to break out of her prison, as I had mine, but the effort had destroyed her. Waterhouse had caught the lady at the moment when she realized the folly of her rebellion. I shook my head hard and looked around the room again. On the other side of the gallery was John Millais’s Ophelia, who lay supine in the water. Having succumbed to madness, she too was about to die. Her hands were lifted slightly, as though she welcomed her fate; her expression was one of surrender. They were disturbing pictures, but that was not what was bothering me. My head was aching and my mind was foggy. I groped through the mists and suddenly—there it was. What on earth was I doing in the Tate? I was supposed to be in Greenwich with Richard and Jackie. We were taking a group of students to a matinee performance of Jean Genet’s The Maids. I looked at my watch. Too late: the play had started almost an hour ago.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I protested vehemently. “It’s my mind, not my body, that’s the problem.” Dr. Piet shook his head dismissively, as he usually did when I referred to my panic attacks. “Same difference,” he said. “Those hallucinations, those eruptions of fear are simply the symptoms of a repression, similar to Rebecca’s suppression of the passionate little girl she once was. The feelings have got to come out somehow. It’s the only way you can allow yourself to feel anything at all.” “But Rebecca’s starving herself to death!” “It’s just a matter of degree.” Dr. Piet doodled on his blotter. “True, you’re not as physically ill as your friend. You weigh—what is it?—ninety pounds to her seventy? But you have an eating disorder, all the same. You and Rebecca are both anorexics.” “But it’s different. I feel it’s different,” I said again, stubbornly. My refusal to eat was a cry for help, surely, rather than anorexia proper. The refusal of food and the weight loss were—surely?— the result of conscious choice and never a compulsion that I could not control. “Well, neither of you is doing much living at the moment,” Dr. Piet continued. “You have that in common. You stay alone in your room, afraid to go out in case you have an anxiety attack; you’ve never been in love; you don’t want to look like a woman, so you are deliberately getting rid of your breasts, your shape, your periods, and becoming an androgynous figure. You’re still to an extent living in a convent, one of your own making. Both you and Rebecca are using all these repressed emotions to punish yourselves.” “But what can I do about it?” I wailed. “I don’t want to be like this.” “We’ve got to get to the root of all that pent-up emotion,” Dr. Piet replied calmly. “Until we do that, you’ll remain stuck in that ivory tower you’ve built round yourself as a kind of prison. It’s time now, Karen. It’s time to come out.” But this was easier said than done. I was still locked inside my own head, in rather the same way as Charlotte was imprisoned in her bed-sitting-room and Rebecca in her hospital bed. I couldn’t be like Jane, who seemed instinctively to know how to reach out and have a good time. She and Mark would often invite me to join them for a drive and lunch in the country, or she would descend upon me in the library and sweep me off to the pub. Jane knew how things worked and was at home in the world in a way I feared I would never be. And (I was becoming aware) she was obviously going to succeed professionally, and (it seemed increasingly clear) I was not. Jane and I had both sailed through the qualifying examinations for the doctoral program with distinction.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But there were other things that I had given up—or perhaps it was truer to say that they had given up on me. It appeared now that I could “not hope to know again” what Eliot called “the infirm glory of the positive hour.” I no longer had a healthy mind that could contemplate the world in a wholly cheerful light. I had found that any such vision was indeed infirm and weak, because I had experienced the horror that lay just beneath our ordinary waking consciousness. Nothing could change that. Even if I never had another panic attack, I would never be able to forget what I had seen. And God had gone too. True, I had never known “the blessèd face,” but (I had now concluded) that was because there was nothing to know. When I had embarked upon the religious life, I had been certain that if only I tried hard enough, I would see the world transfigured by the presence of God and that I would, as the Bible promised, soar like an eagle. But now the world had shrunk, and I found that such wings as I had hoped to possess were “merely vans to beat the air,” which had become “small and dry.” My hope of discovering eternity had died, and instead I knew that all we have is now; that “time is always time” and place “is always and only place.” What Wordsworth had called “the glory and the dream” had faded, and the only joy to which I could aspire lay “in what remains behind.” But what thrilled me most about Eliot’s poem were the words “because” and “consequently.” There was nothing depressing about this deliberate acceptance of reduced possibilities. It was precisely “because” the poet had learned the limitations of the “actual” that he could say: “I rejoice that things are as they are.” Because I cannot hope to turn again Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something Upon which to rejoice The sudden clumsiness of the syntax and language showed that this was no easy solution. It was not something that came naturally. The new joy demanded effort. It would have to be constructed as laboriously and carefully as I put together a chapter of my thesis or as engineers and aeronautical experts built an airplane. It would be a lifelong task, requiring alert attention to the smallest detail, dedication, and unremitting effort; but as I listened to Dame Helen that day, I knew that it could be done. My confidence sprang from the fact that the process had already started. I had resolved to stop fighting my malady, to accept what my life had become, and—“consequently”—for the first time in years I had responded spontaneously and with my whole being to a poem, just as I had before I had incurred this damage. It was a sign of life, a shoot that had suddenly broken through the frozen earth. This must be the way that human life worked.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Herod tried to set his sails by the great high-pressure system of ancient Jewish narrative, while cleverly trimming them so as to avoid the impact of the gale blowing increasingly from Rome. However much his aspirations had shrunk, by the time of his death, to a thin, shrivelled little parody of his original hopes, we can still see in Herod a glimpse of the story that might make sense of it all, the story that stretched back to the ancient scriptures and on into a future that, to the eye of faith and hope, might yet produce the true king who would succeed where others had failed. Simon Bar-Giora The other failed king was Simon bar-Giora. He appeared at yet another time of social and political chaos, near the start of the great revolt against Roman rule that lasted from AD 66 to 70 and that ended with total catastrophe and the Temple’s destruction. There were plenty of other would-be leaders, prophets, and so on at the time, some emerging from families long associated with anti-Roman activity. But it was Simon who was ruling Jerusalem as the Romans closed in. Simon gained popular support, and then actual power, by announcing freedom for slaves. That was always a good move, not only in itself, but because the ancient memory of being set free from slavery in Egypt has always been central to Jewish self-understanding. Faced with other warlords and troublemakers, many of the leading men in Jerusalem were happy to give Simon power and to line up behind him. He instituted martial law, executing and imprisoning people he suspected might be traitors. Anyone who has tried to make sense of what was going on in Jerusalem in those years knows that it was a highly confusing period, and if that is so for us as historians, it must have been even more so for the people there at the time. Simon’s agenda, clearly, would have been the usual one: defeat the enemy, cleanse the Temple, and establish his own kingdom. But Simon did none of these things. Instead, as the Romans destroyed the Temple and defeat became inevitable, he surrendered in spectacular fashion. He dressed himself in white, with a purple cloak on top, and emerged from hiding all of a sudden on the Temple Mount. Whether he was hoping to frighten people and make his escape or whether he was just putting on a final show of bravado, we cannot tell.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  How was I going to explain this to Richard and Jackie? Dazed, I got up and walked groggily through the other galleries. My colleagues’ reaction, I told myself grimly, was the least of my problems. Nothing ever got better. My mind was as infirm and as unreliable as ever. I seemed quite unable to function as a normal human being. Again I glimpsed the locked ward, the padded cell. I felt sick, and had a strong desire to lie down on one of the long benches and sleep for hours. Outside the midwinter rain cut into my face and the wind penetrated to my bones. As I walked toward Pimlico station, the white, peeling houses, decayed relics of a splendid past, looked blank and shuttered. As soon as I opened the envelope, I knew that it was hopeless. The terse official letter from Oxford told me that my academic career was over. The professor who had been so hostile to the very idea of my thesis had been appointed as my examiner. Friends, family, and colleagues told me that I was despairing too soon. I wondered how they could be so certain about this, but after a while I realized that their remarks were not really considered statements, but were more in the nature of denial. It had to be all right, because the alternative was unthinkable. “Let’s face it, Karen,” Jane exclaimed cheerfully on the phone, “if you fail, there’s no hope for any of us.” So for the next three months, while I waited for the viva that was to be held—a cruel irony, this— on Valentine’s Day, most people refused to discuss the matter. “It will be fine!” they said airily. “Don’t even think about it!” Even my supervisor seemed unconcerned. “It’s such a lovely piece of work,” she assured me. “It simply cannot fail.” Mind you, she admitted, there were irregularities. She had protested against the appointment of the hostile professor—let us call him Alastair Courtney—who had long been on the Oxford faculty but now occupied a chair in a provincial university. She had pointed out to the Academic Board that I now had two external examiners. The other examiner, who was favorably disposed to my work but not nearly such a big shot as Courtney, was at the University of Birmingham. “It’s against the regulations for Miss Armstrong to have two external examiners,” she had complained. “Oxford should also be represented.” She herself had taken her first degree at Birmingham and, in the patrician climate of Oxford, felt at a permanent disadvantage. “My dear,” Dame Helen Gardner had replied suavely, “Alastair is much more internal than somebody like you!”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  And dimly, as I sank into oblivion, I heard Jane’s tart rejoinder, which would later tell me what had happened. “She didn’t think she’d need a sponge bag in the hereafter! When you’re trying to kill yourself, sponge bags are not uppermost in your mind.” I don’t want to make too much of this. When I woke up the next day, and gradually pieced it all together, I felt ashamed and could understand the scarcely veiled contempt of the nurses. When you are caring for people who are mortally ill and struggling desperately to live, it must be almost insupportable to have to deal with people who want to throw it all away. But I did not believe that I had really wanted to die, and as I pondered the events of that night, I became more and more certain that it was not death that I had sought. The pills that I had swallowed were not lethal; I could have downed any number of them without doing myself irreparable damage. And I was almost certain that I was aware of that. This strange act had been another cry for help. What I was unconsciously trying to do that night was to make clear the depths of my desperation. I did not know how to live any longer. And nobody seemed to realize just how frightened I was. Nobody was willing to listen. The trouble is that when people decide that what looks like a suicide attempt is “only” a cry for help, they sometimes conclude that this appeal need not be answered. Indeed, they even decide that it is better not to respond, because the patient must not be encouraged to give way to such neurotic exhibitionism. He or she must learn to express pain simply and directly, without resorting to such outlandish symbolism. But I had tried to explain my fears and bewilderment as clearly as I was able, and no aid was forthcoming.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But the Accuser is wrong to imagine that this is the creator’s last word. What we see throughout Jesus’s public career is that he himself is being accused—accused of being a blasphemer by the self-appointed thought police, accused of being out of his mind by his own family, even accused by his followers of taking his vocation in the wrong direction. All the strands of evil throughout human history, throughout the ancient biblical story, come rushing together as the gospels tell the story of Jesus, from the demons shrieking at him in the synagogue to the sneering misunderstanding of the power brokers to the frailty and folly of his own friends and followers. Finally, of course—and this is the point in the story to which the evangelists are drawing our attention—he is accused in front of the chief priests and the council and in the end by the high priest himself. He is accused of plotting against the Temple; he is accused of forbidding the giving of tribute to Caesar (a standard ploy of revolutionaries); he is accused of claiming to be king of the Jews, a rebel leader; he is accused of blasphemy, of claiming to be God’s son. Accusations come rushing together from all sides, as the leaders accuse Jesus before Pilate; and Pilate finally does what all the accusations throughout the gospel have been demanding and has him crucified. Jesus, in other words, has taken the accusations that were outstanding against the world and against the whole human race and has borne them in himself. That is the point of the story the way the evangelists tell it. Albert Schweitzer, one of the greatest human beings of the twentieth century, suggested that Jesus had glimpsed his own role within the long biblical story of what Schweitzer called “the messianic woes.” Many prophets and subsequent Jewish writers spoke of the suffering that would come upon God’s people—wave upon wave of suffering, reaching a climax at the time of the Messiah, a climax of horror and despair in which evil did its worst, only so that its defeat could pave the way to the redemption God had in mind. Jesus, in Schweitzer’s vision, grasped this idea and believed it was his vocation to go to the point where this great “woe,” this great “time of testing,” would burst in with its full force. That is why he told his disciples to pray that they would be spared the time of testing. He had to go into it himself, but they must not. There are signs, particularly in the Garden of Gethsemane, that Jesus was indeed thinking this way. Schweitzer then used the image of the great wheel of history. Jesus had hoped that it would begin to turn in the opposite direction, and when it refused, he threw himself upon it. It crushed him; but it did indeed start to move in the opposite direction.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  In the summer of 1982, as the school year came to an end, Through the Narrow Gate came out in paperback, so that meant more talk shows and more publicity. I was expected to be positive with my interviewers, and confident about the future, but I felt as though I were heading into an abyss. One evening, after a day in school, I got onto the bus and found tears rolling down my cheeks. I could not stop them, but sat throughout the long journey home to North London weeping quietly. There seemed no hope at all. The next morning I woke up feeling empty and hollow. Looking into the mirror, I winced. Not a pretty sight. And today, as ill luck would have it, I had an appointment with a television crew. Perhaps I could get out of it! I could always ring up and say that I wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t as though this project would do anything for the book; in fact, it seemed I would simply be doing the film company a favor. “Don’t feel you have to do this, Karen,” Jacqui, my publicist, had said when she had included it on the schedule. “It’s only a pilot for Channel Four, the new television channel starting this autumn. The film company is doing a few programs to persuade the channel’s editor to give them a commission for a series. So nothing may come of it. If you don’t want to do this, please feel free to say no.” But I had agreed to go along and had spoken with the producer. He asked me to think of a topic on any subject that I felt I could talk about. As long as it was punchy and controversial, it didn’t matter what it was. I had not given the program a thought, and spending the morning in a hot studio was the last thing I felt like. All I wanted to do was crawl under the bedclothes and shut out the world. I even dialed the office of the production company, but of course there was no reply. They would all be waiting for me at the studio, setting up, as they called it. A car was coming to collect me in forty-five minutes. I often wonder how my life would have turned out if I had managed to get through to the producer, offered my excuses, and pulled out.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  As Tennyson put it, I saw myself as a ghost in a world of ghosts. I had existed for so long in this twilight state that nothing seemed quite real any longer, and therefore nothing seemed to matter very much. I could also see that Dr. Piet was no longer quite so dismissive of my amnesia, however. “It would have been much easier, Karen, if you had made an extra appointment and told me that you were feeling this depressed,” he said, with a certain exasperation. “I’m your doctor and I should know if you are feeling suicidal.” “But I wasn’t,” I snapped, stung momentarily out of my frozen calm. “I didn’t know that I was going to take the wretched pills. It was like the other times. I didn’t know what I was doing.” He sighed. “And I have been telling you how bad I’ve been feeling,” I went on, hopelessly. “I’ve told you again and again.” “But don’t you see that this is another evasive tactic?” Dr. Piet shook his head. “We’re going to have to work really hard now on the underlying causes of all this.” My heart sank. “But you do need a bit of a rest, I think,” Dr. Piet continued more kindly. “You’re going to need looking after. The hospital will let you out tomorrow. Where do you intend to go?” “I can’t go back to the Harts’,” I said. This was one aspect of the whole debacle that I could not contemplate with equanimity. They had been so kind, and how had I repaid them? “No.” I waved away Dr. Piet’s next question. “I can’t ask them; it would put them in an intolerable position! How could they decently say no?” We ran through my options. My parents were away on holiday, and I did not want them to know about any of this. I could not bear to think of their distress if they realized how bad things were. And whatever Dr. Piet thought, this was not their fault. If they had had their way I would never have set foot in the convent. Nobody had forced me into the religious life; nobody had compelled me to stay there for so long. I had been responsible for the damage of my own mind. “Well, you can’t live by yourself,” Dr. Piet said testily. “We’ll have to keep an eye on you now.” The only alternative that I could come up with was Cherwell Edge. The nuns there had made a few wan overtures to me, implying that if I needed anything, I had only to ask. It was by no means an ideal solution, and I could see that Dr. Piet was not entirely happy about it, but it was better than being admitted to a psychiatric hospital, which was the only other option. So we left it that I would ring the nuns and ask if I might stay in the convent for a while.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Because I do not hope to know again The infirm glory of the positive hour Because I do not think Because I know I shall not know The one veritable transitory power Because I cannot drink There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again Because I know that time is always time And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And only for one place I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessèd face And renounce the voice Because I cannot hope to turn again Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something Upon which to rejoice And pray to God to have mercy upon us And I pray that I may forget These matters that with myself I too much discuss Too much explain Because I do not hope to turn again Let these words answer For what is done, not to be done again May the judgement not be too heavy upon us Because these wings are no longer wings to fly But merely vans to beat the air The air which is now thoroughly small and dry Smaller and dryer than the will Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Pray for us now and at the hour of our death. 1. Ash Wednesday I was late. That in itself was a novelty. It was a dark, gusty evening in February 1969, only a few weeks after I had left the religious life, where we had practiced the most stringent punctuality. At the first sound of the convent bell announcing the next meal or a period of meditation in the chapel, we had to lay down our work immediately, stopping a conversation in the middle of a word or leaving the sentence we were writing half finished. The rule which governed our lives down to the smallest detail taught us that the bell should be regarded as the voice of God, calling each one of us to a fresh encounter, no matter how trivial or menial the task in hand. Each moment of our day was therefore a sacrament, because it was ordained by the religious order, which was in turn sanctioned by the church, the Body of Christ on earth. So for years it had become second nature for me to jump to attention whenever the bell tolled, because it really was tolling for me. If I obeyed the rule of punctuality, I kept telling myself, one day I would develop an interior attitude of waiting permanently on God, perpetually conscious of his loving presence. But that had never happened to me.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  How was I going to explain this to Richard and Jackie? Dazed, I got up and walked groggily through the other galleries. My colleagues’ reaction, I told myself grimly, was the least of my problems. Nothing ever got better. My mind was as infirm and as unreliable as ever. I seemed quite unable to function as a normal human being. Again I glimpsed the locked ward, the padded cell. I felt sick, and had a strong desire to lie down on one of the long benches and sleep for hours. Outside the midwinter rain cut into my face and the wind penetrated to my bones. As I walked toward Pimlico station, the white, peeling houses, decayed relics of a splendid past, looked blank and shuttered. As soon as I opened the envelope, I knew that it was hopeless. The terse official letter from Oxford told me that my academic career was over. The professor who had been so hostile to the very idea of my thesis had been appointed as my examiner. Friends, family, and colleagues told me that I was despairing too soon. I wondered how they could be so certain about this, but after a while I realized that their remarks were not really considered statements, but were more in the nature of denial. It had to be all right, because the alternative was unthinkable. “Let’s face it, Karen,” Jane exclaimed cheerfully on the phone, “if you fail, there’s no hope for any of us.” So for the next three months, while I waited for the viva that was to be held—a cruel irony, this— on Valentine’s Day, most people refused to discuss the matter. “It will be fine!” they said airily. “Don’t even think about it!” Even my supervisor seemed unconcerned. “It’s such a lovely piece of work,” she assured me. “It simply cannot fail.” Mind you, she admitted, there were irregularities. She had protested against the appointment of the hostile professor—let us call him Alastair Courtney—who had long been on the Oxford faculty but now occupied a chair in a provincial university. She had pointed out to the Academic Board that I now had two external examiners. The other examiner, who was favorably disposed to my work but not nearly such a big shot as Courtney, was at the University of Birmingham. “It’s against the regulations for Miss Armstrong to have two external examiners,” she had complained. “Oxford should also be represented.” She herself had taken her first degree at Birmingham and, in the patrician climate of Oxford, felt at a permanent disadvantage. “My dear,” Dame Helen Gardner had replied suavely, “Alastair is much more internal than somebody like you!”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  That had been the end of the matter, though when Mother wasn’t looking, Sister Mary Jonathan had winked at me and pulled a face. With hindsight, that complicity had been prophetic. She had left the order shortly before I had. She had fallen in love with a young Jesuit with whom she was studying at London University. Somehow she had held on to herself better than I. I was quite sure that she would not find it difficult to tell anybody what she thought. My problem, as I wrestled with my highly unsatisfactory essay for Dr. Brentwood Smyth, was that I had no thoughts of my own at all. Every time the frail shoots of a potentially subversive idea had broken ground, I had stamped on them so firmly that they tended not to come anymore. True, at the very end of my religious life I had argued with Mother Praeterita, my Oxford superior, but the ideas I used against her had not been mine. I was simply parroting books and articles that I had read. It seemed that I could no longer operate as an intellectual free agent. You can probably abuse your mind and do it irrevocable harm, just as you can damage your body by feeding it the wrong kind of food, depriving it of exercise, or forcing your limbs into a constricting straitjacket. My brain had been bound as tightly as the feet of a Chinese woman, and I had read that when the bandages were taken off, the pain was excruciating. The restraints had been removed too late and she would never walk normally again. I knew that a good nun must be ready to give up everything and count the world well lost for God. But what had happened to God? My life had been turned upside down, but God should still be the same. It seemed that without realizing it, I had indeed become like Saint Ignatius’s dead body or old man’s stick. My heart and my mind both seemed numb and etiolated, but God seemed to have gone too. In the place that he had occupied in my mind there was now a curious blank. Or perhaps it was only now that I could admit to this God-shaped gap in my consciousness. One of the most painful failures of my convent life had been my inability to pray. Our whole existence had had God as its pivotal point. The silence of our days had been designed to enable us to listen to him. But he had never spoken to me.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I only stepped to the door, laid my bag upon the step, and knocked. Behind me, in the cut of the railway, a train rumbled and hissed. As it passed, the step on which I rested gave a shake.My knock was answered by a pale little girl who stared hard at me while I enquired after the vacant rooms, then turned and called into the darkness behind her. After a second, a lady came; and she, too, looked me over. I thought then of how I must appear, in my expensive dress but hatless and gloveless, and with red eyes and a running nose. But I considered this image of myself rather listlessly, as if it did not much concern me; and the lady at last must have thought me harmless enough. She said her name was Mrs Best, that she had one room left for rent; that the charge was five shillings a week - or seven, with attendance; and that she liked her rent in advance.Would the terms suit me? I gave a quick, half-hearted show of calculation - I felt quite incapable of serious thought - then said that they would.The room to which she led me was cramped and mean and perfectly colourless; everything in it - the wallpaper, the carpets, even the tiles beside the hearth - having been rubbed or bleached or grimed to some variety of grey. There was no gas, only two oil-lamps with cracked and sooty chimneys. Above the mantel there was one small looking-glass, as cloudy and as speckled as the back of an old man’s hand. The window faced the Market. It was all about as different from our house at Stamford Hill as it was possible for any room to be: that, at least, gave me a dreary kind of satisfaction and relief. All I really saw, however, was the bed - a horrible old down mattress, yellow at the edges and blackened in the middle with an ancient bloodstain the size of a saucer - and the door. The bed, for all its rankness, seemed at that moment wonderfully inviting. The door was solid, and had a key in it.I told Mrs Best therefore that I should like to take the room at once, and drew out the envelope that held my money. When she saw that, she sniffed - I think she took me for a gay girl. ‘It is only fair to tell you now,’ she said, ‘that the house I keep here is a tidy one; and I like my lodgers ditto.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But of course you have the same illness as Rebecca.” Dr. Piet pushed back his chair from the desk and looked at me, eyebrows raised. This was one of our better sessions, and the panic of my response showed that he had scored a bull’s-eye. “No, we’re different!” I protested vehemently. “It’s my mind, not my body, that’s the problem.” Dr. Piet shook his head dismissively, as he usually did when I referred to my panic attacks. “Same difference,” he said. “Those hallucinations, those eruptions of fear are simply the symptoms of a repression, similar to Rebecca’s suppression of the passionate little girl she once was. The feelings have got to come out somehow. It’s the only way you can allow yourself to feel anything at all.” “But Rebecca’s starving herself to death!” “It’s just a matter of degree.” Dr. Piet doodled on his blotter. “True, you’re not as physically ill as your friend. You weigh—what is it?—ninety pounds to her seventy? But you have an eating disorder, all the same. You and Rebecca are both anorexics.” “But it’s different. I feel it’s different,” I said again, stubbornly. My refusal to eat was a cry for help, surely, rather than anorexia proper. The refusal of food and the weight loss were—surely?— the result of conscious choice and never a compulsion that I could not control. “Well, neither of you is doing much living at the moment,” Dr. Piet continued. “You have that in common. You stay alone in your room, afraid to go out in case you have an anxiety attack; you’ve never been in love; you don’t want to look like a woman, so you are deliberately getting rid of your breasts, your shape, your periods, and becoming an androgynous figure. You’re still to an extent living in a convent, one of your own making. Both you and Rebecca are using all these repressed emotions to punish yourselves.” “But what can I do about it?” I wailed. “I don’t want to be like this.” “We’ve got to get to the root of all that pent-up emotion,” Dr. Piet replied calmly. “Until we do that, you’ll remain stuck in that ivory tower you’ve built round yourself as a kind of prison. It’s time now, Karen. It’s time to come out.”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I washed my hair and cleaned the muck from my eyes; the flesh beneath my ears and behind my knees, in the crooks of my arms and between my legs, I rubbed till it was red and stinging.At last I think I dozed; and as I did so I had a strange, unsettling vision.I remembered a woman from Whitstable - an old neighbour of ours - of whom I had not thought in years. She had died while I was still a child, quite unexpectedly, and of a peculiar condition. Her heart, the doctors said, had hardened. The outer skin of it had grown leathery and tough; its valves had turned sluggish, then had begun to falter in their pumping, then ceased entirely. Save a little tiredness and breathlessness there had been no warning; the heart had worked away on its private, fatal, project, at its own secret pace - then stopped.This story had thrilled and terrified my sister and me, when we first heard it. We were young and well cared for; the idea that one of our organs - our most vital organ, at that - might baulk at its natural role, might conspire with itself to choke, rather than to nurture, us, seemed an appalling one. For a week after the woman’s death we talked of nothing else. At night, in bed, we would lie trembling; we would rub and worry at our ribs with sweating fingers, conscious of the unemphatic pulse beneath, terrified that the flimsy rhythm would falter or slow, certain that - like hers, our poor, dead, unsuspecting neighbour’s - our hearts were stealthily hardening, hardening, in the tender red cavities of our breasts.Now, waking to the reality of the cooling tub, the colourless room, the photograph upon the wall, I found my fingers once again upon my breast-bone, probing and chafing, searching for the thickening organ behind it. This time, however, it seemed to me that I found it. There was a darkness, a heaviness, a stillness at the very centre of me, that I had not known was growing there, but which gave me, now, a kind of comfort. My breast felt tight and sore - but I didn’t writhe, or sweat, beneath the pain of it, rather, I crossed my arms over my ribs, and embraced my dark and thickened heart like a lover.Perhaps, even as I did it, Walter and Kitty were walking together, on a street in France or Italy; perhaps he leaned to touch her, as I touched myself; perhaps they kissed; perhaps they lay in a bed ... I had thought such things a thousand times, and wept and bitten my lips to think them; but now I gazed at the photograph and felt my misery stiffen, as my heart had stiffened, with rage and frustration.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  We too were told that we were to die to our old selves and to our worldly, secular way of looking at things. Of course, we were not buried alive in a tomb or anything of that sort, but we were constantly undermined, belittled, publicly castigated, or ordered to do things that were patently absurd. As Ignatius’s Rule put it, we were to become utterly pliable to the will of God, as expressed through our superiors, in the same way as “a dead body allows itself to be treated in any manner whatever, or as an old man’s stick serves him who holds it in every place and for every use alike.” Dead to ourselves, we would live a fuller, enhanced existence, as Jesus had promised in a text that we liked to quote: “Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it will remain nothing but a grain of wheat. But if it dies, it will bear much fruit.” On our profession day, while the choir sang the litany of the saints, we lay under a funeral pall, symbolically dead to the world and to our greedy, needy selves that clung, infantlike, to ordinary, worthless consolations. Now it seemed to me that I had indeed died, but I was certainly not bringing forth much fruit. I felt as though I had entered a twilight zone between life and death, and that instead of being transfigured, as I had hoped, I had got the worst of all worlds. Instead of being full of courage, fearless, active, and protective of others, like the initiate of a tribal rite of passage, I was scared stiff. Unable to love or to accept love, I had become less than human. I had wanted to be transformed and enriched; instead I was diminished. Instead of becoming strong, I was simply hard. The coldness and frequent unkindness, designed to toughen us up, had left me feeling merely impaired, like a piece of tough steak. The training was designed to make us transcend ourselves, and go beyond the egotism and selfishness that hold us back from God. But now I seemed stuck inside myself, unable either to escape or to reach out to others. An initiation prepares you for life in the community; I had left the community that I was supposed to serve and was inhabiting a world that I had been trained, at a profound level, to reject.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Agong claimed he once ate sparrows for an entire year, back when fullness was foreign to his body, and some of the sparrows were all bone. We took him to a monk in the neighborhood to be blessed, a former soldier who told us that the only cure for forgetting was to approach your own future like a fort. Say: Surrender. That night, I walked to the kitchen and touched the cleaver hanging above the sink, my face foreign in its reflection. My mother said gegu hadn’t worked for Agong because the toes she’d fed him were only marrow: The meat had quit their bones long ago, and only meat could cure a father of his forgetfulness. But my tail was as much meat and tendon as bone. If I severed it, if I fed it to Agong, maybe I could give it a purpose that wasn’t hurt. My tail behaved like a flipper, frantic between my legs, knowing what I wanted of it. I called Ben in the morning, told her: I have something that needs to be cleaved. In the morning the sky was milk, already mourning me. Ben met me in the yard, the 口 breathing at our feet, exhaling moths that flew toward the light inside the house, clattering against the windows, attracted to ache. Turning to me, Ben stroked the skin behind my ears where no light lived. Cleave it from me, I said, sliding the tail out of my waistband. It hummed in my hand, thinner, reshaped by Ama’s fist. I told her how Ama had used it as a leash, how I’d lost the ability to steer it. Ben said there were two definitions of cleave. I said she knew which one I meant. My brother had been right to say my tail was a liability. Having a body is a liability, Ben said. And I like your body. My tail went still. I used to think stillness would save me, the way some animals choose stillness so they won’t be seen as moving prey. I turned around to show her the way it dangled, almost to the floor now, its weight like an anchor. Soon it would drown me and I’d have to evacuate from my body. Standing behind me, Ben pressed her belly against my back. She combed my hair with her fingers, pulled it back from my shoulders. I pretended I was a tree and her hands in my hair were perching birds. I tried to be a place she could stay. What would you be without this tail, she said, reaching down to grasp it. Free, I said, but I knew it wasn’t true. It was my umbilical cord, and I’d never been freer than inside my mother’s belly, Ama’s blood braiding into me. My body multiplied by theirs. Ben nudged her nose into my neck. The 口 squinted at our feet, watching us through hyphen-shaped eyes.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I would spend whole evenings in tears and days in a state of sheer panic. I simply did not know what to do and could see no solution. As the doctor had pointed out, there seemed little point in applying for another teaching job, and I could not imagine how I could finance any training for an alternative career. Friends assumed that I had made a lot of money from Through the Narrow Gate, but that was not the case. Because of the recession, the advance royalties had been very modest. The money might tide me over for a year or, if I was very frugal, even two, but what then? “Well, you must write, of course!” was the continual response. But write what? The publishers had commissioned a sequel and I used this fallow year to write Beginning the World, but I obviously could not continue to write volumes of autobiography. As it was, I was struggling hard with this second memoir and realized that I had not begun to assimilate these last difficult years. In the summer of 1982, as the school year came to an end, Through the Narrow Gate came out in paperback, so that meant more talk shows and more publicity. I was expected to be positive with my interviewers, and confident about the future, but I felt as though I were heading into an abyss. One evening, after a day in school, I got onto the bus and found tears rolling down my cheeks. I could not stop them, but sat throughout the long journey home to North London weeping quietly. There seemed no hope at all. The next morning I woke up feeling empty and hollow. Looking into the mirror, I winced. Not a pretty sight. And today, as ill luck would have it, I had an appointment with a television crew. Perhaps I could get out of it! I could always ring up and say that I wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t as though this project would do anything for the book; in fact, it seemed I would simply be doing the film company a favor. “Don’t feel you have to do this, Karen,” Jacqui, my publicist, had said when she had included it on the schedule. “It’s only a pilot for Channel Four, the new television channel starting this autumn. The film company is doing a few programs to persuade the channel’s editor to give them a commission for a series. So nothing may come of it. If you don’t want to do this, please feel free to say no.” But I had agreed to go along and had spoken with the producer. He asked me to think of a topic on any subject that I felt I could talk about. As long as it was punchy and controversial, it didn’t matter what it was. I had not given the program a thought, and spending the morning in a hot studio was the last thing I felt like.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I disliked how strange I must be appearing to her. She said, “While we were making love, you reached in these pants and pulled out a piece of electrical equipment and held on to it? Why ?” Now she was sitting up, wanting very much to get an explanation from me that would clear everything up. Her breasts looked aggrieved. “It’s hard to explain,” I said. “I guess I wanted to imagine that I was an android.” I laughed sheepishly to confirm my fabrication. “An invincible hard-body android. It’s stupid, I know.” I felt despair at how ridiculous this explanation sounded, but I couldn’t bring myself to launch into the truth, fearing that she would take it poorly. “I hate these stupid condoms,” I said fussily, tying a knot in the one we had just used. Rhody shook her head. “I’m not very comfortable with this, Arno. I really didn’t plan to be fucked by an electric motor this afternoon.” “I know. I’m sorry.” I hugged her guiltily. She lay on her back, thinking. “Let me ask you this,” she then said. “Is your idea of the perfect life to be able to stop time anytime you want and take off women’s clothes on the subway and feel their breasts?” “I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “You think that I’m turning out to be some kind of techno-sex nutcase.” “Well? No, I’m just a little surprised at all this. First you tell me this long story about a piano chord, insisting that I must find aspects of the idea sexually exciting, and now you hold this thing in your hand—what is it?” “It’s just a plain-vanilla on-off switch, a rocker-switch,” I said. I tried mild indignation. “It’s nothing! Forget it. It’s just a little sixteen-amp rocker-switch.” “Well, it seems a very strange thing to bring into the bedroom. You should have told me beforehand. If it excites you to make love to me pretending you’re a machine, fine. But you have to include me in it. What I don’t like is discovering that you’re doing this somewhat odd thing literally behind my back.” “You’re right, I should have included you,” I said. “But you know—I tried to include you in something fairly important to me when I told you about the fermata chord, and I must say I got a pretty lukewarm reception.” “Well, right, it was a loveless fantasy. It had no love in it.” “But I meant it as an act of love to tell it to you!” “No,” said Rhody. “What that fantasy says is that your idea of heaven is being able to hit the PLAY button on a Walkman and take off women’s clothes and feel their breasts. Right?” “I don’t think it’s my idea of heaven, exactly,” I said, with some awkwardness.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  At the time, however, I simply grabbed at the idea as a pragmatic expedient. I was desperate to get to work on something— anything—to convince myself that I still had a future. I expected this new book to follow the somewhat skeptical line of its predecessors. God, of course, did not exist, but I would show that each generation of believers was driven to invent him anew. God was thus simply a projection of human need; “he” mirrored the fears and yearnings of society at each stage of its development. Jews, Christians, and Muslims had all produced the same kind of God because they had similar desires and insecurities, but increasingly, in the clear light of rational modernity, people were learning how to do without this divine prop. That was my idea at the outset, but even then I expected some surprises. By this time I had enough experience to know that the finished work was always different from my original proposal. And I was also determined not to fall into the trap of making the book merely a clever, shallow rebuttal of God’s existence. That would be not only boring and predictable, but also inappropriate. This could not be a wholly cerebral book, because images of God had, surely, much to tell us about the pathos of human aspiration. Nobody thought much of the idea, however, and it was a long time before my new agent found a publisher. “It can’t be done,” said one of the editors who saw my synopsis. “It’s impossible to condense such a huge idea into a single volume.” “Who’s going to read it?” asked another. “Religious people won’t want to hear that their God is on a par with the gods of other faiths, and unbelievers won’t be interested.” “It’s so religious!” sighed a friend who worked in one of the houses that had rejected the book. “Karen, don’t write this book now! You need to do something more mainstream.” More secular, she meant. “You read English at college. Perhaps you could do something literary? A new biography of Fanny Burney or George Eliot.” “What about a travel book?” Charlotte asked. “You enjoyed the travel you did with the Israelis, didn’t you? Why not go on a journey to somewhere important. Japan, for instance. What about a look at modern Japan?” Anything, it seemed, would be better than God.