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

  I was used to my mind being my best friend; of carrying on endless conversations within my head; of having a built-in source of laughter or analytic thought to rescue me from boring or painful surroundings. I counted upon my mind’s acuity, interest, and loyalty as a matter of course. Now, all of a sudden, my mind had turned on me: it mocked me for my vapid enthusiasms; it laughed at all of my foolish plans; it no longer found anything interesting or enjoyable or worthwhile. It was incapable of concentrated thought and turned time and again to the subject of death: I was going to die, what difference did anything make? Life’s run was only a short and meaningless one, why live? I was totally exhausted and could scarcely pull myself out of bed in the mornings. It took me twice as long to walk anywhere as it ordinarily did, and I wore the same clothes over and over again, as it was otherwise too much of an effort to make a decision about what to put on. I dreaded having to talk with people, avoided my friends whenever possible, and sat in the school library in the early mornings and late afternoons, virtually inert, with a dead heart and a brain as cold as clay. Each day I awoke deeply tired, a feeling as foreign to my natural self as being bored or indifferent to life. Those were next. Then a gray, bleak preoccupation with death, dying, decaying, that everything was born but to die, best to die now and save the pain while waiting. I dragged exhausted mind and body around a local cemetery, ruminating about how long each of its inhabitants had lived before the final moment. I sat on the graves writing long, dreary, morbid poems, convinced that my brain and body were rotting, that everyone knew and no one would say. Laced into the exhaustion were periods of frenetic and horrible restlessness; no amount of running brought relief. For several weeks, I drank vodka in my orange juice before setting off for school in the mornings, and I thought obsessively about killing myself. It was a tribute to my ability to present an image so at variance with what I felt that few noticed I was in any way different. Certainly no one in my family did. Two friends were concerned, but I swore them to secrecy when they asked to talk with my parents. One teacher noticed, and the parent of a friend called me aside to ask if something was wrong. I lied readily: I’m fine, but thank you for asking.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  He cursed himself, calling out meaningless words, growled and spat, abused his father and mother for bringing a fool into the world. Seeing that curses and abuse had no effect and nothing in the sun-scorched place was changed by them, he clenched his dry fists, raised them, squinting, to the sky, to the sun that was sliding ever lower, lengthening the shadows and going to fall into the Mediterranean, and demanded an immediate miracle from God. He demanded that God at once send Yeshua death. Opening his eyes, he became convinced that everything on the hill was unchanged, except that the blazing spots on the centurion’s chest had gone out. The sun was sending its rays into the backs of the executed men, who were facing Yershalaim. Then Levi shouted: ‘I curse you, God!’ In a rasping voice he shouted that he was convinced of God’s injustice and did not intend to believe in him any longer. ‘You are deaf!’ roared Levi. ‘If you were not deaf, you would have heard me and killed him straight away!’ Shutting his eyes, Levi waited for the fire that would fall from the sky and strike him instead. This did not happen, and Levi, without opening his eyes, went on shouting offensive and sarcastic things at the sky. He shouted about his total disappointment, about the existence of other gods and religions. Yes, another god would not have allowed it, he would never have allowed a man like Yeshua to be burnt by the sun on a post. ‘I was mistaken!’ Levi cried in a completely hoarse voice. ‘You are a god of evil! Or are your eyes completely clouded by smoke from the temple censers, and have your ears ceased to hear anything but the trumpeting noises of the priests? You are not an almighty god! You are a black god! I curse you, god of robbers, their soul and their protector!’ Here something blew into the face of the former tax collector, and something rustled under his feet. It blew once more, and then, opening his eyes, Levi saw that, either under the influence of his curses, or owing to other reasons, everything in the world was changed. The sun had disappeared before reaching the sea, where it sank every evening. Having swallowed it, a storm cloud was rising menacingly and inexorably against the sky in the west. Its edges were already seething with white foam, its black smoky belly was tinged with yellow. The storm cloud was growling, threads of fire fell from it now and again. Down the Jaffa road, down the meagre Hinnom valley, over the tents of the pilgrims, driven by the suddenly risen wind, pillars of dust went flying. Levi fell silent, trying to grasp whether the storm that was about to cover Yershalaim would bring any change in the fate of the unfortunate Yeshua.

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

  The other side of the coin was that the emperor was the o supreme benefactor of the church, enacting its decisions (when it agreed with him) and, as the Codex indicates, providing legal support for ecclesiastical policies. Mixed Results of Justinian’s Reign • As remarkable as the reign of Justinian was, the results of his efforts were mixed. • Certainly, his goal of restoration fell short: The expanded empire shrank back in size after brief success in the west. Further, the policies of Justinian set some bad precedents. The system of taxation was efficient but also oppressive and, o ultimately, not a real economic plan; as conquests failed and crops were poor, the resources of the empire were steadily drained over time. The increased use of mercenaries in the imperial army made o the empire reliant on others and was incredibly expensive, another drain on the imperial treasury. Finally, the policy of pacifying enemies through tribute o was shortsighted: It won temporary relief but could not be a permanent solution. • Even more devastating was the blow struck at the empire and Justinian himself by the “Plague of Justinian,” a health disaster that was unparalleled until the Black Death hit Europe in the 14th century. The plague was probably carried by rats on grain boats from Egypt. Its height in Constantinople occurred in 541–543, when it killed, according to Procopius, as many as 5,000 people a day. • Despite these negatives, Justinian’s lengthy and brilliant reign established an empire of great stability and endurance, within which the Christian religion continued to play a critical role to the end. 163 164 ytinaitsirhC enitnazyB dna nainitsuJ fo truoC ehT :22 erutceL Suggested Reading Diehl (Walford, trans.), Byzantium. Rosen, Justinian’s Flea. Questions to Consider 1. In light of Justinian’s rule, discuss the advantages and disadvantages to Christianity of having imperial protection and patronage. 2. Identify the ways that the Byzantine Empire continued the traditions of Rome and the ways in which it was something new.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  endless possibilities of language, to which I could once safely abandon myself, became a conglomeration of the most inane phrases. There was not an expression in the sentence but it proved to be a miserable crutch, not a word but it sounded false and hollow. And in this dreadful state of mind I sat for hours, for days on end with my face to the wall, tormenting myself and gradually discovering the horror of finding that even the smallest task or duty, for instance arranging assorted objects in a drawer, can be beyond one’s power. It was as if an illness that had been latent in me for a long time were now threatening to erupt, as if some soul-destroying and inexorable force had fastened upon me and would gradually paralyze my entire system. I already felt in my head the dreadful torpor that heralds disintegration of the personality, I sensed that in truth I had neither memory nor the power of thought, nor even any existence, that all my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world. If someone had come then to lead me away to a place of execution I would have gone meekly, without a word, without so much as opening my eyes, just as people who suffer from violent seasickness, if they are crossing the Caspian Sea on a steamer, for instance, will not offer the slightest resistance should someone tell them that they are about to be thrown overboard. Whatever was going on within me, said Austerlitz, the panic I felt on facing the Start of any sentence that must be written, not knowing how I could begin it or indeed any other sentence, soon extended to what is in itself the simpler business of reading, until if I attempted to read a whole page I inevitably fell into a state of the greatest confusion. If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up, and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who has been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl anymore, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge. The entire structure of language, the syntactical arrangement of parts of speech, punctuation, conjunctions, and finally even the nouns denoting ordinary objects were all enveloped in impenetrable fog. I could not even understand what I myself had written in the past—perhaps I could understand that least of all. All I could think was that such a sentence only appears to mean something, but in truth is at best a makeshift expedient, a kind of unhealthy growth issuing from our ignorance, something which we use, in the same way as many sea plants and animals use their tentacles, to grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us. The very thing which may usually convey a sense of purposeful intelligence—the exposition of an idea by means of a certain stylistic facility—now seemed to me

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  had fallen since she lay dying, said Austerlitz. Although I did not understand it at the time, as a boy of thirteen, I can see now that the unhappiness building up inside him had destroyed his faith just when he needed it most. When I came home again in the summer, it was weeks since he had been able to carry out his duties as a minister. He climbed into the pulpit once more, opened the Bible, and in a broken voice, as if reading to himself alone, announced his text from Lamentations: ‘He has made me dwell in darkness as those who have been long dead.’ Elias did not preach the sermon itself. He merely stood there for a while, looking out over the heads of his congregation, who were paralyzed by alarm, with what seemed to me the motionless eyes of one blinded. Then he slowly climbed down from the pulpit and left the chapel. He was taken away to Denbigh before the end of that summer. I visited him there only once, just before Christmas, with one of the elders of the congregation. The patients were accommodated in a large stone building, and I remember, said Austerlitz, that we had to wait in a room painted green. After quarter of an hour or so, an attendant came and took us up to Elias, who was lying in a bed with railings, his face to the wall. The attendant said: Your son’s here to see you, parech, but even when he was addressed a second and a third time Elias did not answer. When we left the ward again one of the other inmates, a gray little man with tangled hair, plucked my sleeve and whispered behind his hand: He’s not the full shilling, you know—which at the time, curiously enough, said Austerlitz, I felt was a reassuring diagnosis and made the whole wretched situation tolerable-—More than a year after my visit to the Denbigh asylum, at the beginning of the summer term of 1949, when we were just preparing for the exams which would determine our subsequent careers, said Austerlitz, resuming his narrative after a certain time, the headmaster Penrith-Smith summoned me to his study one morning. I can still see him in his frayed gown, wreathed in the blue tobacco smoke from his pipe, standing in the sunlight that slanted in through the small panes of the lead-glazed window and repeating several times in various ways, in his typically confused manner, that in the circumstances my conduct had been exemplary, truly exemplary, given the events of the last two years, and if in the next few weeks I came up to my teachers’ expectations of me, which were undoubtedly justified, the Stower Grange trustees would award me a sixth-form scholarship. First, however, it was his duty to tell me that I must put not Dafydd Elias but Jacques Austerlitz on my exam papers. It appears, said Penrith-Smith, that this is your real name. My foster parents, with whom he had discussed the matter at length when I entered the school, had meant to tell me about my origins in good time before the examinations, and if possible adopt me, but as matters now stood, said Penrith-Smith, that was unfortunately out of the question. All he

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Contrary to all statistical probability, then, there was an astonishing, positively imperative internal logic to his meeting me here in the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel, a place he had never before entered in his life. Having said this, Austerlitz fell silent, and for a while, it seemed to me, he gazed into the farthest distance. Since my childhood and youth, he finally began, looking at me again, I have never known who I really was. From where I stand now, of course, I can see that my name alone, and the fact that it was kept from me until my fifteenth year, ought to have put me on the track of my origins, but it has also become clear to me of late why an agency greater than or superior to my own capacity for thought, which circumspectly directs operations somewhere in my brain, has always preserved me from my own secret, systematically preventing me from drawing the obvious conclusions and embarking on the inquiries they would have suggested to me. It hasn’t been easy to make my way out of my own inhibitions, and it will not be easy now to put the story into anything like proper order. I grew up, began Austerlitz that evening in the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel, in the little country town of Bala in Wales, in the home of a Calvinist preacher and former missionary called Emyr Elias who was married to a timid- natured Englishwoman. I have never liked looking back at the time I spent in that unhappy house, which stood in isolation on a hill just outside the town and was much too large for two people and an only child. Several rooms on the top floor were kept shut up year in, year out. Even today I still sometimes dream that one of those locked doors opens and I step through it, into a friendlier, more familiar world. Several of the rooms that were not locked were unused too. Furnished sparsely with a bed or a chest of drawers, curtains drawn even during the day, they drowsed in a twilight that soon extinguished every sense of self- awareness in me. So I can recall almost nothing of my early days in Bala except how it hurt to be suddenly called by a new name, and how dreadful it was, once my own clothes had disappeared, to have to go around dressed in the English fashion in shorts, knee-length socks which were always slipping down, a string vest like a fishnet and a mouse-gray shirt, much too thin. I know that I often lay awake for hours in my narrow bed in the manse, trying to conjure up the faces of those whom I had left, I feared through my own fault, but not until I was numb with weariness and my eyelids sank in the darkness did I see my mother bending down to me just for a fleeting moment, or my father smiling as he put on his hat. Such comfort made it all the worse to wake up early in the morning and have to face the knowledge, new every day, that I was not at home now but very far away, in some kind of captivity. Only recently have I recalled how oppressed I felt, in all the time I spent with the Eliases, by the fact that they never opened a window, and perhaps that is why when I was out and about somewhere on a

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

  On occasion, these periods of total despair would be made even worse by terrible agitation. My mind would race from subject to subject, but instead of being filled with the exuberant and cosmic thoughts that had been associated with earlier periods of rapid thinking, it would be drenched in awful sounds and images of decay and dying: dead bodies on the beach, charred remains of animals, toe-tagged corpses in morgues. During these agitated periods I became exceedingly restless, angry, and irritable, and the only way I could dilute the agitation was to run along the beach or pace back and forth across my room like a polar bear at the zoo. I had no idea what was going on, and I felt totally unable to ask anyone for help.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  carnival crowds in Diisseldorf, he took a leap over the parapet of the bridge into the icy waters of the Rhine, from which he was pulled out by two fishermen. He lived for a number of years after that, said Marie, in a private asylum for the mentally deranged near Bonn or Bad Godesberg, where he was visited by Clara and the young Brahms at intervals, and since it was impossible to converse with him anymore, withdrawn from the world as he was and humming tunelessly to himself, they generally contented themselves with looking into his room for a while through a small trap in the door. As I listened to Marie and tried to imagine poor Schumann in his Bad Godesberg cell I had another picture constantly before my eyes, that of the pigeon loft we had passed on an excursion to K6nigswart. Like the country estate to which it belonged, this dovecote, which may have dated from the Metternich period, was in an advanced state of decay. The floor inside the brick walls was covered with pigeon droppings compressed under their own weight, yet already over two feet high, a hard, desiccated mass on which lay the bodies of some of the birds who had fallen from their niches, mortally sick, while their companions, surviving in a kind of senile dementia, cooed at one another in tones of quiet complaint in the darkness under the roof, and a few downy feathers, spinning round in a little whirlwind, slowly sank through the air. The torment inherent in both these images that came into my mind in Marienbad, the mad Schumann and the pigeons immured in that place of horror, made it impossible for me to attain even the lowest step on the way to self-knowledge. On the final day of our visit, Austerlitz continued at last, in the evening and as if to say goodbye, we walked through the park and down to the Auschowitz Springs. There is a prettily built and fully glazed pump room there, all painted white inside. In this pump room, illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, where, apart from the regular splashing of the water, silence reigned entirely, Marie moved closer to me and asked whether I had remembered that tomorrow was my birthday.

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

  The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful. In some strange way, I have tried to do that with manic-depressive illness. It has been a fascinating, albeit deadly, enemy and companion; I have found it to be seductively complicated, a distillation both of what is finest in our natures, and of what is most dangerous. In order to contend with it, I first had to know it in all of its moods and infinite disguises, understand its real and imagined powers. Because my illness seemed at first simply to be an extension of myself—that is to say, of my ordinarily changeable moods, energies, and enthusiasms—I perhaps gave it at times too much quarter. And, because I thought I ought to be able to handle my increasingly violent mood swings by myself, for the first ten years I did not seek any kind of treatment. Even after my condition became a medical emergency, I still intermittently resisted the medications that both my training and clinical research expertise told me were the only sensible way to deal with the illness I had. My manias, at least in their early and mild forms, were absolutely intoxicating states that gave rise to great personal pleasure, an incomparable flow of thoughts, and a ceaseless energy that allowed the translation of new ideas into papers and projects. Medications not only cut into these fast-flowing, high-flying times, they also brought with them seemingly intolerable side effects. It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered, that damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again, and that freedom from the control imposed by medication loses its meaning when the only alternatives are death and insanity. The war that I waged against myself is not an uncommon one. The major clinical problem in treating manic-depressive illness is not that there are not effective medications—there are—but that patients so often refuse to take them. Worse yet, because of a lack of information, poor medical advice, stigma, or fear of personal and professional reprisals, they do not seek treatment at all. Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it; an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  One could hear the wet sand crunch under his feet, then the stamp of his boots on the marble between the lions, then his legs were cut off, then his body, and finally the hood also disappeared. Only here did the procurator notice that the sun was gone and twilight had come. CHAPTER 26: The Burial, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 26 The Burial And perhaps it was the twilight that caused such a sharp change in the procurator’s appearance. He aged, grew hunched as if before one’s eyes, and, besides that, became alarmed. Once he looked around and gave a start for some reason, casting an eye on the empty chair with the cloak thrown over its back. The night of the feast was approaching, the evening shadows played their game, and the tired procurator probably imagined that someone was sitting in the empty chair. Yielding to his faint-heartedness and ruffling the cloak, the procurator let it drop and began rushing about the balcony, now rubbing his hands, now rushing to the table and seizing the cup, now stopping and staring senselessly at the mosaics of the floor, as if trying to read something written there . . . It was the second time in the same day that anguish came over him. Rubbing his temple, where only a dull, slightly aching reminder of the morning’s infernal pain lingered, the procurator strained to understand what the reason for his soul’s torments was. And he quickly understood it, but attempted to deceive himself. It was clear to him that that afternoon he had lost something irretrievably, and that he now wanted to make up for the loss by some petty, worthless and, above all, belated actions. The deceiving of himself consisted in the procurator’s trying to convince himself that these actions, now, this evening, were no less important than the morning’s sentence. But in this the procurator succeeded very poorly. At one of his turns, he stopped abruptly and whistled. In response to this whistle, a low barking resounded in the twilight, and a gigantic sharp-eared dog with a grey pelt and a gold-studded collar sprang from the garden on to the balcony. ‘Banga, Banga,’ the procurator cried weakly. The dog rose on his hind legs, placed his front paws on his master’s shoulders, nearly knocking him to the floor, and licked his cheek.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  the bottling of ink dust, or the silkworm-breeding station run under the aegis of the SS; or, alternatively, employed in one of the operations serving the ghetto’s internal economy, in the clothing store, for instance, in one of the precinct mending and darning rooms, the shredding section, the rag depot, the book reception and sorting unit, the kitchen brigade, the potato-peeling platoon, the bone-crushing mill, the glue-boiling plant, or the mattress department, as medical and nursing auxiliaries, in the disinfestation and rodent control service, the floor space allocation office, the central registration bureau, the self- administration housed in barrack block BV, known as “The Castle,” or in the transport of goods maintained within the walls of the fortress by means of a medley of carts of every conceivable kind and four dozen ancient hearses brought from the now defunct Jewish communities in the Bohemian countryside to Terezin, where they moved along the crowded streets with two men harnessed between the shafts and four to eight pushing or putting their weight against the spokes of the wheels of these oddly swaying conveyances, which were covered by ulcerations of peeling black varnish and from which, before long, the rickety superstructures, high-built coach boxes, and silver-bronzed canopies resting on turned columns had been roughly sawn away, so that the lower parts, on the sides of which rows of letters and numbers were coarsely painted in lime-wash, scarcely betrayed their former function, a function, said Austerlitz, for which they were still frequently employed even now, since much of the load carted round Theresienstadt every day was made up by the dead, of whom there were always a great many because the high population density and poor diet rendered it impossible for the course of such infectious diseases as scarlet fever, enteritis, diphtheria, jaundice, and tuberculosis to be stemmed, and because the average age of those brought from all regions of the German Reich to the ghetto was over seventy, and these people, who before they were sent away had been led to believe some tale about a pleasant resort in Bohemia called Theresienbad, with beautiful gardens, promenades, boardinghouses, and villas, and many of whom had been persuaded or forced to sign contracts, so-called Heimeinkaufsvertrdge, said Austerlitz, offering them, against deposits of up to eighty thousand Reichsmarks, the right of residence in what was described to them as a most salubrious place, these people, Austerlitz continued, had come to Theresienstadt, completely misled by the illusions implanted in their minds, carrying in their luggage all manner of personal items and mementoes which could be of no conceivable use in the life that awaited them in the ghetto, often arriving already ravaged in body and spirit, no longer in their right minds, delirious, frequently unable to remember their own names, surviving the procedure of being sluiced in, as it was termed, either not at all or only by a few days, in which latter case,

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  that your father, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, then in the utmost danger, did not leave until it was almost too late, on the afternoon of the fourteenth of March, by plane from Ruzyné to Paris. I still remember, said Vera, that when he said goodbye he was wearing a wonderful plum-colored double-breasted suit, and a black felt hat with a green band and a broad brim. Next morning, at first light, the Germans did indeed march into Prague in the middle of a heavy snowstorm which seemed to make them appear out of nowhere. When they crossed the bridge and their armored cars were rolling up the Narodni a profound silence fell over the whole city. People turned away, and from that moment they walked more slowly, like somnambulists, as if they no longer knew where they were going. What particularly upset us, so Vera remarked, said Austerlitz, was the instant change to driving on the right. It often made my heart miss a beat, she said, when I saw a car racing down the road on the wrong side, since it inevitably made me think that from now on we must live in a world turned upside down. Of course, Vera continued, it was much harder for Agata than for me to manage under the new regime. Since the Germans had issued their decrees on the Jewish population, she could go shopping only at certain times; she must not take a taxi, she could sit only in the last carriage of the tram, she could not visit a coffeehouse or cinema, or attend a concert or any other event. Nor could she herself appear onstage anymore, and access to the banks of the Vltava and the parks and gardens she had loved so much was barred to her. All my green places are lost to me, she once said, adding that only now did she truly understand how wonderful it is to stand by the rail of a river steamer without a care in the world. The ever-extended list of bans—before long it was forbidden for Jews to walk on the pavement on the side of the road next to the park, to go into a laundry or dry cleaner’s, or to make a call from a public telephone—all of this, I still hear Vera telling me, said Austerlitz, soon brought Agata to the brink of despair. I can see her now pacing up and down this room, said Vera, I can see her striking her forehead with the flat of her hand, and crying out, chanting the syllables one by one: I do not un der stand it! I do not un der stand it! I shall ne ver un der stand it!! Nonetheless, she went into the city as often as she could, applying to I don’t know how many or what authorities, she stood for hours in the sole post office which the forty thousand Jews in Prague were allowed to use, waiting to send a telegram; she made inquiries, pulled strings, left financial deposits, produced affidavits and guarantees, and when she came home she would sit up racking her brains until late into the night. But the more trouble she took, and the longer she went on trying, the further did any hope of her getting an emigration permit recede, so in the summer, when there was already talk of the forthcoming war and the likelihood of even harsher restrictions when it broke

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  One evening the mother said despairingly to her son: 'Dear Inosuke, we have nothing more to live on, and, indeed, to continue this existence is merely to prolong our suffering. I think that it is better to die than to remain in such a pitiable Sate. If I do not die a beautiful death by committing suicide, it is no shame; for I am an old woman. But you are a young samurai, and you must pass honourably. Be brave, my son, and go first. I shall follow you Straightway.' Inosuke calmly answered: 'Yes, mother.'He did up his hair, bared his breast, and serenely sat down on a mat. He was already holding the knife in his hand and preparing to kill himself, when there crept into the room a little dog which seemed to belong to some good family. It was white with some black spots, and had a collar with a little bell. Tied to its neck were two packets wrapped in paper. It wagged its tail very familiarly, and went up to Inosuke as if it wanted to speak to him. The astonished mother untied the packets and opened them. One contained some provisions, and a note on which was written this sentence: 'It is easy to die.'In the other packet were some comforts and another note with this sentence: 'But it is more difficult to live for honour's sake.' In this manner someone had sent them help just as they were despairing. Mother and son wondered who in the world this person could have been who wished them well. Someone at least knew of the injustice of their disgrace. They resolved to live a little longer, and delayed their death. They caressed the dog, who was very pleased with this and went out by a hole in the wall. After that, the faithful little beast came every morning and evening, bringing round his neck something for their subsistence. Two years passed in this way, and it was now five since the Lord had exiled them and con-fined them to their cottage. Inosuke was grieving to death, and indeed fell ill; but a kindly Heaven was watching over them. The Lord at last relented and delivered them from this long disgrace. Inosuke thanked him, and asked the reason for his punishment. The Lord showed him the paper telling of his scandalous conduct, and Inosuke at once guessed that another page, named Naminojyo Toyura, had plotted to denounce him to his master because he was jealous of him, and that he who had written the false and outrageous accusation was a certain fencing master of the people, named Kenpatji Iwasaka. Both of these men were put to a cruel death. The Lord regretted that he had punished Inosuke so long and so unjustly, and made him a samurai and Keeper of the Seals. Thus Inosuke's honour was ensured, and the people loved and honoured him more than before.

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  At that time the Lord of the Province of Izumi had a page named Inosuke Murola who was most beautiful and very brave. He was as graceful and delicate as the cherry flower, but his soul was as fearless as the god of war. At first sight you would have taken him for a charming Princess of royal blood. The Lord preferred him to all his other pages. But another page was jealous of the favours shown to Inosuke, and made a completely false and outrageous accusation against him, which he wrote on paper and left in the hall of the palace. The overseer of the palace found the paper and took it to his master, since it was his duty to report even the most insignificant thing to him; and the Lord was furious at his favourite's scandalous behaviour. He was so angry that he dismissed Inosuke from his service, without inquiring whether the accusation were well founded, and banished him from Fushimi without giving him any reason for his disgrace. He ordered his courtiers to keep a Strict watch over him, and not to let him Stir one Step from his house, Inosuke, the victim of false testimony, was confined in a little cottage with his old mother, and was Strictly guarded. The doors were locked, and not even his relatives were allowed to come to see him. His mother and he were completely ignorant of the cause of their disgrace; therefore Inosuke could not commit Hara-kiri, which would otherwise have been the only expedient for a samurai reduced to such a pass. All the servants, anxious for their own interest, abandoned him one after another, fearing to place themselves in the wrong by remaining with a samurai disgraced. Then came times of great hardship for Inosuke and his mother. Grieving for her son's sorrow, she cooked his meals, a thing which she had never done. And her son was pained to see his mother compelled to such base and menial labour. He used to go and fetch water from a well in the garden, and help her in the kitchen. In this miserable manner they dragged on their lives. The days passed, and the months; even the years went by and the Spring seasons returned. Mother and son were astonished by the quick passage of time. Then their means of existence grew scant, and they sold their last possessions. At last they were at the end of their resources.

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

  Fortunately, before my mania could become very public, this colleague—a man whom I had been dating during my separation from my husband, and someone who knew and understood me very well—was willing to take on my manic wrath and delusions. He confronted me with the need to take lithium, which was not a pleasant task for him—I was wildly agitated, paranoid, and physically violent—but it was one he carried out with skill, grace, and understanding. He was very gentle but insistent when he told me that he thought I had manic-depressive illness, and he persuaded me to make an appointment to see a psychiatrist. Together we tracked down everything we could find that had been written about the illness; we read as much as we could absorb and then moved on to what was known about treatment. Lithium had been approved for use in mania only four years earlier, in 1970, by the Food and Drug Administration, and was not yet in widespread use in California. It was clear from reading the medical literature, however, that lithium was the only drug that had any serious chance of working for me. He prescribed lithium and other antipsychotic medications for me, on a very short-term, emergency basis, only long enough to tide me over until I saw my psychiatrist for the first time. He put the correct number of pills out for me to take each morning and evening, and he spent hours talking with my family about my illness and how they might best handle it. He drew blood for several lithium levels and provided encouragement about the prognosis for my recovery. He also insisted that I take a short time off from work, which ultimately saved me from losing my job and my clinical privileges, and arranged for me to be looked after at home during those periods when he was unable to. I felt infinitely worse, more dangerously depressed, during this first manic episode than when in the midst of my worst depressions. In fact, the most dreadful I had ever felt in my entire life—one characterized by chaotic ups and downs—was the first time I was psychotically manic. I had been mildly manic many times before, but these had never been frightening experiences—ecstatic at best, confusing at worst. I had learned to accommodate quite well to them. I had developed mechanisms of self-control, to keep down the peals of singularly inappropriate laughter, and set rigid limits on my irritability. I avoided situations that might otherwise trip or jangle my hypersensitive wiring, and I learned to pretend I was paying attention or following a logical point when my mind was off chasing rabbits in a thousand directions. My work and professional life flowed. But nowhere did this, or my upbringing, or my intellect, or my character, prepare me for insanity.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  windows in desperation or found some other way of committing suicide. I sometimes thought I saw the windowless police cars racing through a city frozen with terror, the crowd of detainees camping out in the open in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, and the trains on which they were soon deported from Drancy and Bobigny; I pictured their journey through the Greater German Reich, I saw my father still in his good suit and his black velour hat, calm and upright among all those frightened people. Then again, I thought that Maximilian would surely have left Paris in time, had gone south on foot across the Pyrenees, and perished somewhere along his way. Or I felt, as I was saying, said Austerlitz, as if my father were still in Paris and just waiting, so to speak, for a good opportunity to reveal himself. Such ideas infallibly come to me in places which have more of the past about them than the present. For instance, if I am walking through the city and look into one of those quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades, I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time. And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak? For instance, one curiously gloomy morning recently I was in the Cimetiére de Montparnasse, laid out by the Hospitalers in the seventeenth century on land belonging to the Hétel de Dieu and now surrounded by towering office blocks, walking among the gravestones erected in a vaguely segregated part in memory of members of the Woelfflin, Wormser, Mayerbeer, Ginsberg, Franck, and many other Jewish families, and I felt as if, despite knowing nothing of my origins for so long, I had lingered among them before, or as if they were still accompanying me. I read all their euphonious German names and retained them in my mind—thinking of my landlady in the rue Emile Zola and of a certain Hippolyte Cerf who was born in Neuf-Brisach in 1807, probably as Hippolyt Hirsch, and according to the inscription had died in Paris on the eighth of March 1890, the sixteenth of Adar 5650, many years after his marriage to one Antoinette Fulda of Frankfurt. Among the children of these forebears who had moved from Germany to the French capital were Adolphe and Alfonse, together with Jeanne and Pauline, who had brought Messrs. Lanzberg and Ochs into the family as sons-in-law, and a generation later came Hugo and Lucie Sussfeld, née Ochs, who had a memorial plaque half-hidden by a dried-up asparagus fern inside the cramped mausoleum, informing visitors to the grave that the couple

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

  In order to keep the lithium from being vomited back up, I had gone to an emergency room and obtained a prescription for an anti-emetic medication. I then waited for a break in the informal “suicide watch” that my friends and family, in conjunction with my psychiatrist, had put into place. This done, I removed the telephone from my bedroom so I would not inadvertently pick it up—I could not take the phone off its hook entirely as I knew this would alert my keepers—and, after a terrible row, and in a very agitated and violent state, I took handful after handful of pills. I then curled up in my bed and waited to die. I hadn’t planned on the fact that one’s drugged brain acts differently from one’s alert brain. When the telephone rang I must have instinctively thought to answer it; thus I crawled, semi-comatose, to the telephone in the living room. My slurred voice alerted my brother, who was calling from Paris to see how I was doing. He immediately called my psychiatrist. It was not a pleasant way not to commit suicide. Lithium is used to teach coyotes to stop killing sheep: often a single experience with a lithium-treated sheep carcass will make a coyote sick enough to keep his teeth to himself. Although I had taken medication to keep me from vomiting up the lithium, I still ended up sicker than a coyote, sicker than a dog, sicker than I could ever wish anyone to be. I also was in and out of a coma for several days, which, given the circumstances, was probably just as well. For a long time both before and after I tried to kill myself, I was in the close care of a friend of mine, one who redefined for me the notion of friendship. He was a psychiatrist, as well as a warm, whimsical, and witty man who had a mind like a cluttered attic. He was intrigued by a variety of bizarre things, including me, and wrote fascinating articles about such topics as nutmeg psychoses and the personal habits of Sherlock Holmes. He was intensely loyal and spent evening after evening with me, somehow enduring my choleric moods. He was generous with both his time and money, and he stubbornly believed that I would make it through my depression and, ultimately, thrive.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Did he think anyone believed the things he said? He lied more than she did, lied for no reason. Alex had promised herself she wouldn’t see Dom again. Then he texted— someone who actually wanted to spend time with her, maybe the only person who wanted to spend time with her. She couldn’t quite conjure the reasons she’d ever been afraid of him. They had fun, didn’t they? He liked her, didn’t he? He was staying in an apartment he said belonged to a friend. They drank room-temperature ginger ale. Dom walked around barefoot, lowering all the shades. There was a line of whipped cream containers covered in stickers along a windowsill, empty seltzer cans in a CVS bag on top of the trash. He kept checking his phone. When the apartment buzzer rang, and kept ringing, he ignored it, giggling, until it finally stopped. He made an omelet at four a.m. that neither of them touched. They watched a reality show: The older women on-screen sat on the sunny outdoor patio of a restaurant, sucking violently at glasses of iced tea. The women’s conversations were heated, faces in a mask of drama. “I never said that,” the dark-haired woman bleated. “You seen this before?” Dom asked without looking away from the TV. He was cradling a stuff ed penguin in his arms, worrying its shiny button eyes. The woman on-screen stood up, knocking her chair over. “You’re toxic,” she screamed. “Toxic,” the woman repeated, her finger fucking the air. She stalked away, breathing hard, a cameraman backing up out of frame when she came barreling past. They watched another episode, and then another. Dom lay with his head on her knee, licking the drugs off his fingers. When he put his hand in her underwear, she didn’t move it away. Still they kept watching. All the women in the show hated each other, hated each other so much, just so they could avoid hating their husbands. Only their little dogs, blinking from their laps, seemed real: they were the women’s souls, Alex decided, tiny souls trotting behind them on a leash. How long had Alex stayed there with Dom? At least two days. And how soon, after she left, had Dom figured it out? Almost immediately. Dom called her four times in quick succession. He never called, only texted. So instantly Alex understood she had made a mistake. The texts came rapid-fire. Alex Are u fucking kidding me What the fuck Can you just fucking pick up Alex had been on hour ten of a nice, swimmy run of benzos when he’d called: a warm compress cooling on the last dregs of the stye, takeout stinking up the room but blessedly out of sight. The texts from Dom had seemed funny. But then Dom left a message the next day, almost crying, and he had been nice enough to her. Almost a friend, in his demented way. She finally responded with a text: I can’t talk rn.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Excuse me, where’s the telephone?’ ‘Let him use the telephone,’ the doctor told the orderlies. Ivan grabbed the receiver, and the woman meanwhile quietly asked Riukhin: ‘Is he married?’ ‘Single,’ Riukhin answered fearfully. ‘Member of a trade union?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Police?’ Ivan shouted into the receiver. ‘Police? Comrade officer, give orders at once for five motor cycles with machine-guns to be sent out to catch the foreign consultant. What? Come and pick me up, I’ll go with you . . . It’s the poet Homeless speaking from the madhouse . . . What’s your address?’ Homeless asked the doctor in a whisper, covering the receiver with his hand, and then again shouting into it: ‘Are you listening? Hello! . . . Outrageous!’ Ivan suddenly screamed and hurled the receiver against the wall. Then he turned to the doctor, offered him his hand, said ‘Goodbye’ drily, and made as if to leave. ‘For pity’s sake, where do you intend to go?’ the doctor said, peering into Ivan’s eyes. ‘In the dead of night, in your underwear . . . You’re not feeling well, stay with us.’ ‘Let me pass,’ Ivan said to the orderlies, who closed ranks at the door. ‘Will you let me pass or not?’ the poet shouted in a terrible voice. Riukhin trembled, but the woman pushed a button on the table and a shiny little box with a sealed ampoule popped out on to its glass surface. ‘Ah, so?!’ Ivan said, turning around with a wild and hunted look. ‘Well, then . . . Goodbye!’ And he rushed head first into the window-blind. The crash was rather forceful, but the glass behind the blind gave no crack, and in an instant Ivan Nikolaevich was struggling in the hands of the orderlies. He gasped, tried to bite, shouted: ‘So that’s the sort of windows you’ve got here! Let me go! Let me go! . . .’ A syringe flashed in the doctor’s hand, with a single movement the woman slit the threadbare sleeve of the shirt and seized the arm with unwomanly strength. There was a smell of ether, Ivan went limp in the hands of the four people, the deft doctor took advantage of this moment and stuck the needle into Ivan’s arm. They held Ivan for another few seconds and then lowered him on to the couch. ‘Bandits!’ Ivan shouted and jumped up from the couch, but was installed on it again. The moment they let go of him, he again jumped up, but sat back down by himself. He paused, gazing around wildly, then unexpectedly yawned, then smiled maliciously. ‘Locked me up after all,’ he said, yawned again, unexpectedly lay down, put his head on the pillow, his fist under his head like a child, and muttered now in a sleepy voice, without malice: ‘Very well, then . . . you’ll pay for it yourselves . . .

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  on account of the extreme psychopathic personality changes which they had undergone and which generally resulted in a kind of infantilism divorcing them from reality and entailing an almost total loss of the ability to speak and act, they were immediately sectioned in the casemate of the Cavalier Barracks, which served as a psychiatric ward and where they usually perished within a week under the dreadful conditions prevailing there, so that although there was no shortage of doctors and surgeons in Theresienstadt who cared for their fellow prisoners as well as they could, and in spite of the steam disinfection boiler installed in the malting kiln of the former brewery, the hydrogen cyanide chamber, and other hygienic measures introduced by the Kommandantur in an all-out campaign against infestation with lice, the number of the dead—entirely in line, said Austerlitz, with the intentions of the masters of the ghetto—rose to well above twenty thousand in the ten months between August 1942 and May 1943 alone, as a result of which the joiner’s workshop in the former riding school could no longer make enough deal coffins, there were sometimes more than five hundred dead bodies stacked in layers on top of each other in the central morgue in the casemate by the gateway to the Bohusevice road, and the four naphtha-fired incinerators of the crematorium, kept going day and night in cycles of forty minutes at a time, were stretched to the utmost limits of their capacity, said Austerlitz, and this comprehensive system of internment and forced labor which, in Theresienstadt as elsewhere, was ultimately directed, so he continued, solely at the extinction of life and was built on an organizational plan regulating all functions and responsibilities, as Adler’s reconstruction shows, with a crazed administrative zeal—from the use of whole troops of workers in building the branch railway line from Bohusevice to the fort, to the one man whose job it was to keep the clock mechanism in the closed Catholic church in order—this system had to be constantly supervised and statistically accounted for, particularly with respect to the total number of inmates of the ghetto, an uncommonly time-consuming business going far beyond civilian requirements when you remember that new transports were arriving all the time, and people were regularly weeded out to be sent elsewhere with their files marked R.n.e. for Riickkehr nicht erwiinscht, Return Not Desired, a purpose for which the SS men responsible, who regarded numerical accuracy as one of their highest principles, had a census taken several times, on one occasion, if I remember correctly, said Austerlitz, on 10 November 1943 outside the gates in the open fields of the Bohusevice basin, when the entire population of the ghetto —children, old people, and any of the sick at all able to walk not excepted—was marched out after assembling in the barracks yards at dawn to be drawn up in block formation behind numbered wooden boards, and there, through the whole