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)

  In Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, we watch the poet painfully climbing a spiral staircase. This image is reflected in the twisting sentences of the verse, which often revolves upon itself, repeating the same words and phrases, apparently making little headway, but pushing steadily forward nevertheless. My own life has progressed in the same way. For years it seemed a hard, Lenten journey, but without the prospect of Easter. I toiled round and round in pointless circles, covering the same ground, repeating the same mistakes, quite unable to see where I was going. Yet all the time, without realizing it, I was slowly climbing out of the darkness. In mythology, stairs frequently symbolize a breakthrough to a new level of consciousness. For a long time I assumed that I had finished with religion forever, yet in the end, the strange and seemingly arbitrary revolutions of my life led me to the kind of transformation that—I now believe—was what I was seeking all those years ago, when I packed my suitcase, entered my convent, and set off to find God.2 T. S. ELIOT, Ash-Wednesday, I Because I do not hope to turn again Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things (Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?) Why should I mourn The vanished power of the usual reign? 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

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

  “You’re looking very smart indeed.” He did, too: white jersey, brown cord trousers, and hair brushed and curly. “Now, Jacob, you look at the papers while I make our toast.” “Karen.” He put his head round the door. “You won’t be angry, will you, if I spill coffee all the way down the front of my white jersey?” “Not if it’s an accident, no.” “But if I do it on purpose?” “Then I’ll be very angry indeed.” “Because, Karen, I’m going to do it!” He picked up his mug and regarded me hopefully. “Don’t you dare!” I thundered predictably. “Oh, don’t be severe!” Jacob beamed. “I shall be very severe indeed, if you’re not sitting in your place in two seconds flat!” “Oh, don’t be displeased!” As he returned to the dining room, I heard him mutter: “Karen was extremely oppressive with Jacob. ‘Don’t you dare do it!’ she cried angrily . . . Jacob looked crestfallen and pleaded with Karen. ‘Oh, don’t be displeased,’ he begged wistfully.” When, an hour later, Mass began, Jacob behaved beautifully. He stood with his eyes closed and his hands joined, fingers pointing heavenward. He must have learned this in school. “You don’t have to stand like that all the time,” I whispered. He nodded gravely. During the hymns and music, he listened intently, head averted, a strange half smile of approval on his lips. Rapturously, he flung his head back and inhaled the incense. “Karen,” he whispered luxuriantly between sniffs, “I like coming to Blackfriars, I really do!” Well, Jenifer had been right. Jacob really was getting something from this. But what was it doing for me? This morning, the ritual seemed remote, arbitrary, and to have nothing to do with my own perplexities. This was the new vernacular Mass, the creation of the Second Vatican Council. It was lively, fresh, and cheerful— perhaps a little too cheery for my taste. It was all so sensible and matter-of-fact. It suggested that God was well disposed toward us and could be approached in a casual, confident spirit, as though he were a congenial boss. But God was not my friend. I could see now that he never had been. And this service was so wordy. The old liturgy, punctuated by singing that gave the congregation time for reflection, had had a silent, contemplative core. But we now seemed afraid to stop talking, and were reminding God insistently that he had created the world and redeemed us, as though he were too absentminded to recall these deeds. I cast my mind back to Mrs. Moore in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, confronted by the abysmal echo of the Marabar caves and finding no help in “poor, talkative little Christianity.” Perhaps we were afraid that if we stopped chattering to God in this way, the empty silence would cause him to vanish. As perhaps he had.

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

  Jacob beamed. “I shall be very severe indeed, if you’re not sitting in your place in two seconds flat!” “Oh, don’t be displeased!” As he returned to the dining room, I heard him mutter: “Karen was extremely oppressive with Jacob. ‘Don’t you dare do it!’ she cried angrily . . . Jacob looked crestfallen and pleaded with Karen. ‘Oh, don’t be displeased,’ he begged wistfully.” When, an hour later, Mass began, Jacob behaved beautifully. He stood with his eyes closed and his hands joined, fingers pointing heavenward. He must have learned this in school. “You don’t have to stand like that all the time,” I whispered. He nodded gravely. During the hymns and music, he listened intently, head averted, a strange half smile of approval on his lips. Rapturously, he flung his head back and inhaled the incense. “Karen,” he whispered luxuriantly between sniffs, “I like coming to Blackfriars, I really do!” Well, Jenifer had been right. Jacob really was getting something from this. But what was it doing for me? This morning, the ritual seemed remote, arbitrary, and to have nothing to do with my own perplexities. This was the new vernacular Mass, the creation of the Second Vatican Council. It was lively, fresh, and cheerful— perhaps a little too cheery for my taste. It was all so sensible and matter-of-fact. It suggested that God was well disposed toward us and could be approached in a casual, confident spirit, as though he were a congenial boss. But God was not my friend. I could see now that he never had been. And this service was so wordy. The old liturgy, punctuated by singing that gave the congregation time for reflection, had had a silent, contemplative core. But we now seemed afraid to stop talking, and were reminding God insistently that he had created the world and redeemed us, as though he were too absentminded to recall these deeds. I cast my mind back to Mrs. Moore in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, confronted by the abysmal echo of the Marabar caves and finding no help in “poor, talkative little Christianity.” Perhaps we were afraid that if we stopped chattering to God in this way, the empty silence would cause him to vanish. As perhaps he had. When we stood for the creed, Jacob looked around expectantly, hoping for more incense. I listened to the familiar words: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth . . . in Jesus Christ . . . begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father. . . .” The congregation repeated these extraordinary propositions without surprise, as I had done so often in the past, but now I felt that I could not longer join them. I remembered a Jesuit telling us once during a retreat that faith was not really an intellectual assent but an act of will.

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

  Christians could accept their essentially incredible tradition only by making a deliberate choice to believe. You could not prove or disprove these doctrines, but you could consciously decide to take them on trust. They might even turn out to be true. But somewhere along the line, I had given up. I could no longer summon up the emotional or spiritual energy to make that choice. I felt tired out, drained, and slightly repelled by it all. I was finished with God; and God—if he existed at all—had long ago finished with me. “Karen! Will you bring me to Blackfriars again next week?” Jacob asked as we crossed St. Giles and hurried past the Lamb and Flag. He had had a wonderful morning. After Mass, I had taken him into the coffee room, and again he had behaved beautifully, standing quietly beside me with his cup and listening as usual with averted face to the people who had come over to say hello. Geoffrey Preston had made a point of talking to Jacob and had asked him if he would like to serve on the altar one day. That had seemed a little too ambitious to me, but as Geoffrey pointed out, Bernard, who had Down’s syndrome, regularly assisted at Mass and carried the cross at the head of the procession. Jacob did not answer Geoffrey directly, of course, but he looked thoughtful and smiled to himself. He clearly felt at ease in Blackfriars, and the community there had generously taken him in. “Karen!” Jacob tugged at my arm and put his face close to mine, so that our noses almost touched. I smiled at him. “Karen, we will be going to Blackfriars again next week, won’t we?” It seemed that Jacob’s religious life was beginning as mine was ending. And if I didn’t take him to Mass, nobody would. “Of course we’ll be going!” I replied, and, satisfied, Jacob broke away and trotted ahead in the lopsided gait that was so like his father’s, looking back occasionally to see that I was still there. Yes, I would continue to take him to Blackfriars. I did not believe in any of it anymore; God had finally departed from my life; but it would do me no harm to sit for a while every week with those good people. And giving Jacob this new chance would be a positive thing to do. He had so few pleasures, and when he had found something that he so clearly relished, it would be cruel to take it away from him. It wasn’t as though I had anything else to do on Sunday mornings. In fact, I really didn’t have anything else to do in my life at all. 4.

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

  A couple of hours later, the attending doctor in the A and E department of the Middlesex Hospital told me that I had suffered an epileptic seizure, and arranged an appointment for me in the neurology department. I truly did not know whether to laugh or cry. I was an ex-nun, a failed academic, mentally unstable, and now I could add epileptic to this dismal list. Every time I thought I had turned a corner, I seemed to get knocked back. Even God, for whom I had searched so long, was simply the product of a faulty brain, a neurological aberration. I went to bed that night in despair. So it is epilepsy, then?” I asked Dr. Wolfe, the consultant, some weeks later. “Yes, I’m afraid it certainly looks that way.” He nodded briskly, a lean, elegant man with a sharply intelligent face. His eyes held mine kindly. “The electroencephalograph shows a small but definite abnormality.” A few days earlier, I had had a preliminary EEG, during which numerous small electrodes had been inserted into my scalp to measure the brain rhythms. “But we didn’t find anything very terrible,” Dr. Wolfe continued. “That’s good news. Epilepsy isn’t the end of the world, you know. It is even curable, if we get it in time. We can do a lot nowadays with drugs and you can learn how to avoid unnecessary risks.” “How did I get this?” I asked wearily, expecting to be told that my unstable nerves had brought me to this sorry pass. Dr. Wolfe shrugged. “We can’t be sure, but I would suspect some kind of brain injury. It could have been a bad knock on the head, or a birth trauma, which has left some scarring on the brain. Are you aware of anything like that?” I shook my head, but later my mother recalled that my birth had been difficult. When the contractions had become severe, she had been given a shot of morphine and had passed out. It seems likely that I was deprived of oxygen for a few critical moments and suffered mild brain damage. I am lucky that I was not as badly injured as Jacob. “There are one or two questions I would like to ask you,” Dr. Wolfe went on, “just to give me a clearer idea of what part of the brain has been damaged and what kind of epilepsy you have. Epilepsy is a generic term, you know; it covers a multitude of very different conditions.” I nodded vaguely, though I had little idea of what he meant. For me, epilepsy meant the grand mal seizures that I had seen in Jacob. I did not know that there could be any other kind. “Tell me, I know this was your first grand mal attack, but are you ever prone to fainting? Loss of consciousness—anything of that sort?”

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

  There were plenty of events in my external life, but I cannot— at least at present—find a narrative there. The real story was unfolding, at first imperceptibly and by slow degrees, within myself. When I entered my convent, I thought I had embarked on a mystical adventure like that of Percival and the other knights of the Grail, but instead of finding my own path, I had to follow somebody else’s. Instead of striking out on my own, I had conformed to a way of life and modes of thought that had often seemed alien. As a result, I found myself in a wasteland, an inauthentic existence, in which I struggled mightily but fruitlessly to do what I was told. Even after I left the convent, I continued to follow goals that were not right for me, “desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope.” I had too clear a preconceived idea of what I was supposed to be, and was not open to new possibilities. So again I got lost in the wasteland. I had been repeatedly warned, for example, that I was not suited to the academic life, yet I had plowed stubbornly on. I longed to be like everybody else, with a warm family life and a successful career. But I was no more suited to university or school teaching than to the glitzy lifestyle of the television personality. No wonder each of these enterprises had ended in disaster. These were professions that brought fulfillment to other people, but they were not for me. Now circumstances had forced me to find my own track and enter the forest at a point that I myself had chosen, where there was no established path. I cannot pretend, however, that at the time I felt like an intrepid knight, striding heroically into the darkness. Instead, it seemed to me that I was being driven away from “the usual reign” against my will, and I kept turning back resentfully, casting envious glances at the receding world. I had no idea that I was about to “turn again” and experience what the Greeks call metanoia, or conversion. That was the last thing I wanted, and if anybody had told me that it was in the cards, I would probably have abandoned the God book immediately and started forthwith on that biography of Fanny Burney. It is only now, after more than a decade of study, that I can understand what happened. Hyam Maccoby had given me a clue when we sat together, six years earlier, eating egg-and-tomato sandwiches in the little café near Finchley Central tube station. He had told me that in most traditions, faith was not about belief but about practice. Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  So-called tube sites are the pornographic equivalent of YouTube, where users upload video clips they have made, bought or stolen, creating vast online libraries that contain more free pornographic video than even the most obsessive addict could conceivably watch in a lifetime. Tube sites are gutting the profits of the adult industry, and are one of the main reasons why so many insiders are pessimistic. They feel as though the industry is being devoured by the very technology it helped create. Mainstream online content providers contend with the same issues as the adult world, but not to the same degree. Adult sites are more likely than mainstream sites to be hacked, have passwords stolen or face fraudulent chargebacks. This could be a result of the same motivation that prompts honest people to pay more money for pornographic content than anything else— hackers pay a different kind of premium, allocating more time and energy to attacking porn sites than they do other targets. Another oft-bandied theory is that people simply perceive the porn industry as a more justifiable mark for theft and mischief. Because pornographers are seen as morally questionable to begin with, stealing their content has just a touch of twenty-first-century Robin Hood feel about it. Regardless of the reasons why pornographic web businesses face so many challenges, they have no choice but to deal with them. (Particularly so given that credit card companies and banks actually hold adult companies to a higher standard than the mainstream when it comes to fraud and chargebacks. Financial institutions find the adult industry so distasteful to deal with that a relatively small problem is enough justification to revoke an account. In 2000, American Express opted not to deal with adult sites at all. Though it claimed this was a business decision, pornographers viewed it as a moral judgment.) Adult webmasters often seek technological solutions to their problems, and many of the results have application beyond the world of porn. The entire web is a more secure place thanks to the by-products of the ongoing contest between would-be scammers and those who work to stymie them.

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

  “I couldn’t make religion work for me,” I explained. “I really tried. I tried to pray, to meditate, but I never got anywhere. Oh yes, I know the ritual was wonderful—I remember how much it meant to you—but don’t you see? That was just an aesthetic response. The real test is when you try to find God on your own, without props, without beautiful music, singing, and spectacle—when there is just you on your knees. And I could never do that.” “Have you lost your faith, then?” Jane asked sharply. “I don’t know that I ever had any faith, not true faith. I wanted to believe it all; I wanted to have an encounter with God. But I never did. God was never a reality for me, never a genuine presence in my life as he was for the other sisters.” “And what about now?” Jane went on. “I mean, suicide’s a mortal sin, right? Are you feeling guilty?” “No,” I said slowly. “No. Of course, I’m sorry to have caused so much trouble. But I’m not feeling guilty because I’ve offended God. No. I just don’t believe that God is there.” “Join the club.” Jane smiled dourly. “If there is a God, he’s doing a spectacularly bad job of running the world, that’s all I can say. But anyway”—she seemed mentally to shake herself back into a more positive frame of mind—“I really think you should reconsider this mad idea of going back to the convent. And I think you’re wrong about the Harts. I’m certain they would have you back. They’re awfully fond of you, in their own way, you know—though they’d rather die than admit it. Jenifer rang up the hospital this morning to find out how you were.” “That was kind.” I was touched, but determined. “No. I just can’t roll up tomorrow at Manor Place as though nothing had happened. I just can’t.” As it turned out, Jane need not have worried. When I rang up Cherwell Edge and spoke to the superior, she at first sounded genuinely pleased to hear from me. She had replaced Mother Praeterita, with whom I had clashed so stridently during my last year in the religious life, and was a kindly woman, whom I had known distantly in Sussex. But when I told her my story, she retreated at once. What I had done was truly terrible; she would have to take advice, and pray about it, but she really didn’t think that the community could accept this responsibility.

• From Wild (2012)

  I sang cool songs as I walked, the sun beating me as if it had an actual physical force that consisted of more than heat. Sweat collected around my sunglasses and streamed into my eyes, stinging them so I had to stop and wipe my face every now and then. It seemed impossible that I’d been up in the snowy mountains wearing all of my clothes only the week before, that I’d awakened to a thick layer of frost on my tent walls each morning. I couldn’t rightly remember it. Those white days seemed like a dream, as if all this time I’d been staggering north in the scorching heat into this, my fifth week on the trail, straight through the same heat that had almost driven me off the trail in my second week. I stopped and drank again. The water was so hot it almost hurt my mouth. Sagebrush and a sprawl of hardy wildflowers blanketed the wide plain. As I walked, scratchy plants I couldn’t identify grazed my calves. Others I knew seemed to speak to me, saying their names to me in my mother’s voice. Names I didn’t realize I knew until they came so clearly into my mind: Queen Anne’s lace, Indian paintbrush, lupine—those same flowers grew in Minnesota, white and orange and purple. When we passed them as we drove, my mother would sometimes stop the car and pick a bouquet from what grew in the ditch. I stopped walking and looked up at the sky. The birds of prey still circled, hardly seeming to flap their wings. I will never go home, I thought with a finality that made me catch my breath, and then I walked on, my mind emptying into nothing but the effort to push my body through the bald monotony of the hike. There wasn’t a day on the trail when that monotony didn’t ultimately win out, when the only thing to think about was whatever was the physically hardest. It was a sort of scorching cure. I counted my steps, working my way to a hundred and starting over again at one. Each time I completed another set it seemed as if I’d achieved a small thing. Then a hundred became too optimistic and I went to fifty, then twenty-five, then ten. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten. I stopped and bent over, pressing my hands to my knees to ease my back for a moment. The sweat dripped from my face onto the pale dirt like tears.

• From Wild (2012)

  I was twenty-two, the same age she was when she’d been pregnant with me. She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought. For some reason that sentence came fully formed into my head just then, temporarily blotting out the Fuck them prayer. I almost howled in agony. I almost choked to death on what I knew before I knew. I was going to live the rest of my life without my mother. I pushed the fact of it away with everything in me. I couldn’t let myself believe it then and there in that elevator and also go on breathing, so I let myself believe other things instead. Such as if a doctor told you that you were going to die soon, you’d be taken to a room with a gleaming wooden desk. This was not so. We were led into an examining room, where a nurse instructed my mother to remove her shirt and put on a cotton smock with strings that dangled at her sides. When my mother had done so, she climbed onto a padded table with white paper stretched over it. Each time she moved, the room was on fire with the paper ripping and crinkling beneath her. I could see her naked back, the small curve of flesh beneath her waist. She was not going to die. Her naked back seemed proof of that. I was staring at it when the real doctor came into the room and said my mother would be lucky if she lived a year. He explained that they would not attempt to cure her, that she was incurable. There was nothing that could have been done, he told us. Finding it so late was common, when it came to lung cancer. “But she’s not a smoker,” I countered, as if I could talk him out of the diagnosis, as if cancer moved along reasonable, negotiable lines. “She only smoked when she was younger. She hasn’t had a cigarette for years.” The doctor shook his head sadly and pressed on. He had a job to do. They could try to ease the pain in her back with radiation, he offered. Radiation might reduce the size of the tumors that were growing along the entire length of her spine. I did not cry. I only breathed. Horribly. Intentionally. And then forgot to breathe. I’d fainted once—furious, age three, holding my breath because I didn’t want to get out of the bathtub, too young to remember it myself. What did you do? What did you do? I’d asked my mother all through my childhood, making her tell me the story again and again, amazed and delighted by my own impetuous will. She’d held out her hands and watched me turn blue, my mother had always told me. She’d waited me out until my head fell into her palms and I took a breath and came back to life. Breathe.

• From Bold Move

  My mom will think something is wrong with me . . . What if they’re right? What if something is wrong with me? I’m ruined, just broken . . . By this point, there were tears streaming down Sara’s face. I looked at my desk’s clock: not ten minutes had passed since the beginning of our session, and Sara was already sobbing. I couldn’t imagine how she had been holding all of this inside her for the duration of our appointment, let alone her entire life. “So,” I asked her, “what if you are indeed broken? What happens then?” Sara looked at me in despair. “It means that I’ll always be alone, that no one will ever love me.” Damn , I thought. This is why I do what I do! It’s a weird thing to enjoy talking with people when they’re in crisis, but I imagine it’s the same feeling a Formula 1 racer gets when they nail a corner at 150 miles per hour. We continue. “So, the idea of coming out for you goes from my parents will hate me to I am broken to I am unlovable , is that so?” “Yes,” she said with shame written all over her face. “Well, no wonder you are saying to yourself that you will never come out! It sounds like the thoughts spiral so fast that the moment you consider sharing something deeply personal and important with your family, you suddenly end up in your imagination alone and unworthy of love. Of course that feels unbearable!” I could tell that she was feeling totally isolated, so I told Sara that she is not, in fact, alone and that I’ve seen this in many patients before. I told her how thought spirals, just like the one she’d just shared with me, lead to such strong and often unpleasant feelings that we end up moving away from the things that matter the most to us, instead of toward them. Fearing she would lose her parents, Sara had allowed herself to be unknowable to her parents. The distance she feared was actually being created by her avoidance of telling them the truth. Peeling the Layers of the OnionIf you were to say to yourself, “My dad will never speak with me again,” just like Sara was saying to herself, how would you feel? Anxious? Sad? Upset? I bet it depends on your relationship with your dad. But for a second, imagine that you have a good relationship. How would not speaking with your dad again make you feel? For Sara, that brought on tears, sadness, and fear. However, as I worked further into what she was saying to herself, it turned out that Sara had an even deeper belief that scared her even more: I am unlovable .

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

  There was one precaution that I could take, however: I could save money. If I built up a reserve fund, I could perhaps hang on for a few years until I finished my doctorate and was eligible for the coveted academic post. Then I would be set up for life and could eat and spend whatever I wanted. I made it sound rational, at least to myself, but this was a crazy scheme and a telling indication of the state I was in. Compared with most students, I was well off. My grant more than covered my needs and I also had five hundred pounds on deposit, a not inconsiderable sum in those days. The order had given me a hundred pounds on my departure, my grandmother had left me a small legacy, and I had won an academic prize worth another hundred guineas. But saving and hoarding had become an obsession, so much so that when I came to buy my first apartment in 1976, I had squirreled away enough money to put down a deposit and furnish the entire flat. I can still see the astonishment on the face of the building society representative when I told him that I had saved this money from my student grant: he agreed to allow me a mortgage without further demur. Money is not a neutral factor, but is highly symbolic. I had convinced myself that I was not going to be able to earn my own living, and I simply could not make myself believe that this was a ridiculous assumption. What I was really saying was that I did not have a future. I was just not making it out here as a secular. I could not, as that perceptive Basque consultant had noted, attach myself to anything. How could I engage with life when my heart was dead? How could I become an academic when I was no longer able to respond spontaneously to literature? How could I function when I was increasingly subject to “weird seizures”? When I looked ahead, the only possible future I could see for myself was a locked ward or a padded cell. My years as a nun had somehow made me unfit for the world, had broken something within me, and now I seemed unable to put myself together again. And I did not want to nourish myself. What was the point of feeding my body when my mind and heart had been irreparably broken? And yet, in a way, I also felt that by starving myself I was reaching out to the world. I was asking for help. People kept telling me that I was fine and congratulating me on how well I was doing.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  ESCHATOLOGY 21 3 Greek states by which the citizens might have been pro- tected, hadbeen put under safe control. Revolt was useless. If we imagine a single empire todayperma- nently holding theseas and continents inits grip, and enriching its aristocracy fromthe industry of others, with every way of escape barred, we shall understand the apathy ofmenunder the Roman Empire. The escape into immortality was the only way to freedom left to all. This social condition left deep traces in Christian eschatology. Thus socialcauses contributed to the origin of escha- tological ideas. Other social causes ledto their disap- pearance. Amid thedoctrinal changes of the Protestant Reformation eschatology remained unchanged except that purgatory was cut out.It had no support in the canonical Scriptures. That was one motive. But, also, the belief in purgatory had become a prolific source of income for theChurch. Hellwas unalterable; no gifts or indulgences could unlock its gates. The penalties to be absolved in purgatory could be lightened by in- dulgence, andshortened by the prayers and pious works of friends. The indulgence system was built on this belief, and innumerable endowments were provided for masses to be read for the repose of thesouls in purga- tory. Now, the income bearingproperty of the Church and the clergy living on it constituted the greatest social and economic problem of the age before the Reforma- tion. Wherever the Reformation received the support of government, church property was "secularized" or confiscated. When Protestant theology denied the

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  PART TWO Chapter 8 [image "011" file=wate_9781101078198_oeb_011_r1.jpg] I walked for something like an hour before I rested again; but the course I took was a random one that sometimes doubled back upon itself: my aim was less to run from Kitty than to hide from her, to lose myself in the grey anonymous spaces of the city. I wanted a room — a small room, a mean room, a room that would prove invisible to any pursuing eye. I saw myself entering it and covering my head, like some burrowing or hibernating creature, a wood-louse or a rat. So I kept to the streets where I thought I should find it, the grim and uninviting streets where there were lodging-houses, doss-houses, houses with cards in the window saying Beds-to-Rent. Any one of them, I suppose, might have suited me; but I was looking for a sign to welcome me.And at last it seemed to me I found it. I had strayed through Moorgate, wandered towards St Paul’s, then turned and finished up almost at Clerkenwell. Still I had given no thought to the people about me - to the men and the children who stared, or sometimes laughed, to see me trudging, blank-faced, with my sailor’s load. My head was bowed, my eyes half-closed; but I became aware now that I had entered some kind of square - grew conscious of a bustle, a hum of business close at hand; grew conscious, too, of a smell: some rank, sweet, sickening odour I vaguely recognised but could not name. I walked more slowly, and felt the road begin to pull, a little stickily, at the soles of my shoes. I opened my eyes: the stones I stood upon were red and running with water and blood. I looked up, and saw a graceful iron building filled with vans and barrows and porters, all bearing carcases.I was at Smithfield, at the Dead Meat Market.I gave a kind of sigh to know it. Close at hand there was a tobacconist’s booth: I went to it and bought a tin of cigarettes and some matches; and when the boy handed me my change I asked him if there were any lodging-houses nearby, that might have rooms to spare. He gave me the names of two or three - adding, in a warning sort of way: ‘They ain’t werry smart, miss, the lodgings round these parts.’ I only nodded, and turned away; then walked on, to the first address that he had mentioned.It turned out to be a tall, crumbling house in an unswept row, very close to the Farringdon Street railway. The front yard had a bedstead in it, and a dozen rusty cans and broken-down crates; in the yard next door there was a group of barefoot children, stirring water into pails of earth. But I hardly raised my eyes to any of it.

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

  We were coming to the end of the penitential season of Lent and were all looking forward to the magical liturgy that evening: the lighting of the new fire, the strange unearthly chant of the Exsultet (the great theological hymn of the Easter mystery), the blessing of the baptismal waters, and the triumphant Mass at midnight. The ritual reenacted the passage from darkness to light, from death to life. There were also the simple earthly joys of Easter Sunday to look forward to: we had boiled eggs for breakfast, could talk all day long, and would read our Easter mail. When the attack had happened, I was feeling nothing but pleasurable anticipation. Where had it all come from: the smell, the fractured light, the sickness, and the slide into unconsciousness? Nobody ever thought that I should see a doctor. Fainting meant only one thing: hysteria. It had been the same at my school. When girls had fainted, they were subjected to a hostile inquisition and told in no uncertain terms to stop showing off. I had once watched my headmistress, Mother Katherine, grab a girl who had fainted during a seemingly interminable church service, seize her under the armpits, haul the inert body down the polished aisle, and dump it outside the chapel door, returning immediately, stony faced. Over the years, I had imbibed this ethos, and though I could not account for these attacks, I assumed that even though I might not be feeling especially upset, I was displaying some subconscious need for notice, love, or intimacy. The blackouts, I concluded, must be a bid for attention. And yet, I reflected wryly, my unconscious mind must be very slow on the uptake. You would think by now that it would learn that far from eliciting the tender concern I craved, the fainting simply inspired anger and disdain. So my fainting, we all agreed, was emotional self-indulgence. And in my last year in the order, my body did indeed seem to be staging a rebellion all its own. I wept uncontrollably, convulsed more by anger than grief. I found it impossible to keep my food down, suffered such severe nosebleeds that I had to have a vein cauterized, and . . . I fainted. It was as though my whole physical self had risen in protest and demanded that I take notice, telling me that however much I might want to stay in the convent, something was badly wrong. Finally, in the refectory of our convent in Harrogate, where I had been sent for the long vacation, I had given up the battle and succumbed to a breakdown. It was only logical to assume that there had been unconscious tension all along, which had finally and irrevocably surfaced and taken me out of the religious life. And now I was out in the world. I was no longer struggling to conform to a way of life for which I was not suited.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  5. New spiritual factors of the highest significance are disclosed by the realization of the super-personal forces, or composite personalities, in society. When these backslide and become combinations for evil, they add enormously to the power of sin. Theology has utilized the terminology and results of psychology to interpret the sin and regeneration of individuals. Would it stray from its field if it utilized sociological terms and results in order to interpret the sin and re- demption of these super-personal entities in human life? The solidaristic spiritual conceptions which have been discussed must all be kept in mind and seen together, in order to realize the power and scope of the doctrine to which they converge : the Kingdom of Evil. In some of our swampy forests the growth of ages has produced impenetrable thickets of trees and under- growth, woven together by creepers, and inhabited by things that creep or fly. Every season sends forth new growth under the urge of life, but always developing THE KINGDOM OF EVIL 79 from the old growth and. its seeds, and still perpetuat- ing the same rank mass of life. The life of humanity is infinitely interwoven, always renewing itself, yet always perpetuating what has been.- The evils of one generation are caused by the wrongs of the generations that preceded, and will in turn con- dition the sufferings and temptations of those who come after. Our Italian immigrants are what they are be- cause the Church and the land system of Italy have made them so. The Mexican peon is ridden by the Spanish past. Capitalistic Europe has fastened its yoke on the neck of Africa. When negroes are hunted from a Northern city like beasts, or when a Southern city de- grades the whole nation by turning the savage inhuman- ity of a mob into a public festivity, we are continuing to sin because our fathers created the conditions of sin by the African slave trade and by the unearned wealth they gathered from slave labour for generations. Stupid dynasties go on reigning by right of the long time they have reigned. The laws of the ancient Roman despotism were foisted by ambitious lawyers on mediaeval communities, to which they were in no wise fitted, and once more strangled liberty, and dragged free farmers into serfdom. When once the common land of a nation, and its mines and waters, have become the private property of a privileged band, nothing short of a social earthquake can pry them from their right of collecting private taxes. Superstitions which origi- nated in the third century are still faithfully cultivated by great churches, compressing the minds of the young with fear and cherished by the old as their most precious 8o A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL

• From Bold Move

  After all, to live boldly does not mean to live fearlessly or recklessly, but to face life’s challenges without being paralyzed by psychological avoidance, the real enemy that most of us face. I invite you to join me in becoming bold and living a “comfortably uncomfortable” life. I am humbled to be where I am today and sincerely hope that by the end of this book, you will have discovered your own recipe for becoming bold. Part IThe Stuff That Keeps Us Stuck Chapter OneAnxiety Is Painful but It Is Not What Is Keeping You StuckBeing human is hard. Sometimes it feels like we can’t even catch our breath before we’re pummeled with a new difficulty to address: impossible quotas at work, unexpected bills, a child struggling in school, a family health crisis, the same fights with our partners. All these things can make us want to just numb out at the end of a hard day. We all have our favorite ways to zone out. But would you say you’re satisfied with your life? Are you living your best, most authentic life? Do you even remember what your dreams are? Or does the thought of living a bold, fulfilling life sound impossible—and maybe even exhausting, anxiety-producing, and overwhelming? In moments of high anxiety, we often feel stuck. We get stuck in unhealthy relationships and in draining jobs. Some mornings we get stuck in bed, trying to find a reason to get up. And some nights we get stuck at home, binge-watching TV shows or scrolling on our phones instead of going out into the world. We all have moments when we feel trapped, and in those moments, we often feel as if we are skating on thin ice and that just a little extra weight will send us crashing into freezing-cold water of unimaginable depths. In these moments, being bold—living your best, most authentic life—can feel like a far-fetched dream. Who has the time or energy? We may believe boldness is a personality trait possessed by young people—those without piles of stress and responsibilities—or those with greater advantages, fewer problems, and more money to burn. But not us. Or we hear the term bold , and we think of people like Martin Luther King Jr., CEOs, or professional athletes—individuals with influence and the courage and confidence we don’t have. But what if boldness isn’t reserved for a lucky few with advantages, talents, or certain personalities? What if it is meant for us all? Bold Move: A 3-Step Plan to Transform Anxiety into Power will help you get unstuck so that you can start making moves toward the things you care about—your unique bold moves—despite discomfort or obstacles. In moments of stress and anxiety, you can rely on the three skills I present in this book to help you face whatever is preventing you from the life you want: your bold life.

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

  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. Quite simply, I wanted help, and I didn’t feel that I was getting it. That was probably what lay behind this unconsciously performed gesture. As I lay in bed that morning, amidst the confusion and the fear—what might I do next in this amnesiac state?—I was also aware of a definite sense of relief. I was sorry to have caused all this unnecessary bother, but on the other hand I was so weary and needy. I had spent years now fighting with demons, and the struggle had pushed me to an extreme. I felt exhausted, and it was good to have people looking after me, instead of telling me briskly that I was perfectly well and getting along just fine. I knew that this could only be a temporary respite, but it was not altogether unpleasant to give up the struggle for a while. And something in me had been calmed. Instead of the familiar turmoil within, there was a new stillness. I had tried my best, and to no avail. I had expressed my fear and despair, and I could do no more. I had come to the end, had given up hope, and there was a certain peace in that. Dr. Piet, who came to visit that afternoon, seemed to take it all rather personally. He had challenged me to surprise him, and I had taken him at his word. I was, he told me, clearly angry with him— and that, in his view, was a step forward. Even in my becalmed state, I felt faintly annoyed that he had placed himself so squarely in the center of my personal drama. He seemed to believe that I had done all this just to grab his attention—whereas, in reality, he was by no means as crucial to me as he seemed to imagine. He had decided that the things that truly distressed me were peripheral, and had thus become a rather marginal figure in my emotional life. If a doctor had failed to respond in this way to Rebecca, I would have been furious. But you get angry only with people who are important to you in a way that Dr. Piet was not. For months— indeed, for years now—I had felt increasingly insubstantial.

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

  But in real life, things are never as neat as they appear in a book. Inevitably in the coming months, there were setbacks, times when I seemed to have slipped right back to the beginning. When Dr. Piet left Oxford, I saw other psychiatrists, who did no good, but by this time I had no great expectations and was not so disappointed when their treatment did not work. And that brief visit to the Littlemore was not my only sojourn in a psychiatric hospital. On two other occasions I was admitted to the Warneford, its counterpart in Oxford, not because of a further suicide bid but because I was simply worn out by the struggle—heartsick, discouraged, and needing the kind of rest that, I was told, could be induced only by chemicals. I cannot remember very much about these visits because I was so heavily drugged, nor—probably for the same reason—can I recall the particular events leading up to them. What they taught me was that, in my case at least, the kind of heavy medication designed to allay anxiety was worse than useless. I do remember sitting one day in the recreation room of my ward: it had once been a magnificent drawing room. Huge French windows looked out onto a terrace; walls and ceilings, decorated with elaborate cornices, were painted a gleaming white; and the doors were perfectly proportioned. But there the elegance ended. At floor level, the institutional armchairs, the floral hide-all carpets, and the dismal stench of sickness were all in nightmarish counterpoint to the original Victorian splendor. My eyes were fixed on the clock. Never had I been so acutely aware of the infinite elasticity of time. The minutes seemed to have become a new element. Each second seemed a millennium. Time had become something one had to wade through, like glue. And beneath the layers of heavy, turgid fug in my brain was a throbbing, high-pitched tension that no drug ever touched.