Exposure Dread

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 Story of O (1954)

  She did in fact dine by herself, still naked, in a sort of little cabin where an invisible hand passed the dishes to her through a small window in the door. Finally, when dinner was over, the two women came for her. In the bedroom, they fastened the two bracelet rings together behind her back. They attached a long red cape to the ring of her collar and draped it over her shoulders. It covered her completely, but opened when she walked, since, with her hands behind her back, she had no way of keeping it closed. One woman preceded her, opening the doors, and the other followed, closing them behind her. They crossed a vestibule, two drawing rooms, and went into the library, where four men were having coffee. They were wearing the same long robes as the first, but no masks. And yet O did not have time to see their faces or ascertain whether her lover was among them (he was), for one of the men shone a light in her eyes and blinded her. Everyone remained stock still, the two women flanking her and the men in front, studying her. Then the light went out; the women left. But O was blindfolded again. Then they made her walk forward—she stumbled slightly as she went—until she felt that she was standing in front of the fire around which the four men were seated: she could feel the heat, and in the silence she could hear the quiet crackling of the burning logs. She was facing the fire. Two hands lifted her cape, two others—after having checked to see that her bracelets were attached—descended the length of her back and buttocks. The hands were not gloved, and one of them penetrated her in both places at once, so abruptly that she cried out. Someone laughed. Someone else said: “Turn her around, so we can see the breasts and the belly.” They turned her around, and the heat of the fire was against her back. A hand seized one of her breasts, a mouth fastened on the tip of the other. But suddenly she lost her balance and fell backward (supported by whose arms?), while they opened her legs and gently spread her lips. Hair grazed the insides of her thighs. She heard them saying that they would have to make her kneel down. This they did. She was extremely uncomfortable in this position, especially because they forbade her to bring her knees together and because her arms pinioned behind her forced her to lean forward. Then they let her rock back a bit, so that she was half-sitting on her heels, as nuns are wont to do. “You’ve never tied her up?” “No, never.” “And never whipped her?” “No, never whipped her either. But as a matter of fact …” It was her lover speaking.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  She realized this fifteen minutes later and promptly returned to my office to retrieve the tape. The next week on her commute she listened to the tape of the session and was startled to hear my dictation of the hour, which I would hand to my secretary to transcribe. (I had been unaware the tape recorder had been left running.) Whenever I have told professional colleagues of this incident, they’ve gasped—it is a potential scenario for disaster. As things turned out in real life, however, it was a benign experience—my dictation contained nothing unset-ding and therapy continued unaffected. But what if? What if there had been something deeply disturbing in the dictation? Or, worse, what if there had been the most disturbing content imaginable—what if the therapist had been presenting her to a professional conference focusing on countertransference—that is, all the deeply personal, irrational, dark, rageful, lustful, nonprofessional feelings toward the patient? This “what if” is the fictional scaffolding upon which the events and dreams of this tale are draped. “Double Exposure” explores several themes including countertransference and the role of causality in the structure of psychotherapy theory. The concept of causality, the idea that an event following another chronologically is perceived as being caused by the prior event, is inherent in the neural apparatus through which we experience the world. Though such causal attributions vastly influence our explanations of behavior they are highly errorful. Double exposure explores the havoc caused to theory by the presence of intervening, invisible events in the causal chain. But these are minor themes: “Double Exposure” is primarily meant as a rhapsody on therapist transparency—a variation on the theme previously explored in my novel Lying on the Couch. In it I explore many questions which set therapists’ teeth on edge. If we hold that the ideal therapeutic relationship is one of genuineness and authenticity, then shouldn’t the therapist be a real person in the therapy process? As real in the therapy hour as outside of it? Should it be only the patient who self-discloses? What might happen if therapists were to reveal themselves more extensively? Or, an even more mischievous question, what might happen if that disclosure occurred in a particularly ill-starred situation? The uncomfortable question of therapist self-disclosure can be detoxified by analyzing the concept of self-disclosure. Three categories of therapist self-disclosure are particularly germane to the process of therapy: disclosure about the mechanism of therapy, disclosure about the here-and-now, and disclosure about the personal historical events of the therapist’s life. Disclosing about the mechanism of therapy presents no problem for Ernest Lash. He unhesitatingly lays bare the rationale behind his approach to therapy because he is persuaded that the psychotherapy process is so intrinsically robust that no mystification, no appeal to magic or authority, is required. Ernest Lash also discloses a great deal in the second category—the here-and-now. He openly reveals his own inner experience and his feelings toward his patient in the immediate moment.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  this,” he told me. I took it. It was silky to the touch, like cat’s fur. “Wait,” Mrs. Howard said when I began to put it on. She came over and held out her hands for the coat. With a feeling of bitterness I surrendered it. “Mmm,” she said. “Cashmere.” She turned me toward the mirror and settled the coat on my shoulders like a cape. She looked me up and down. She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she said, “A scarf.” “Something in navy,” Mr. Howard said. She shook her head. “He’d look like an undertaker. Claret.” Franz gave her a choice of three scarves. She moved her hand over them, wiggling her fingers like someone deciding on a chocolate, then picked one up and draped it around my neck. It had the same silky texture as the overcoat. Mrs. Howard arranged the scarf so it hung casually between the lapels of the overcoat. She glanced at me again and then stepped back so that I was alone before the mirror. The elegant stranger in the glass regarded me with a doubtful, almost haunted expression. Now that he had been called into existence, he seemed to be looking for some sign of what lay in store for him. He studied me as if I held the answer. Luckily for him, he was no judge of men. If he had seen the fissures in my character he might have known what he was in for. He might have known that he was headed for all kinds of trouble, and, knowing this, he might have lost heart before the game even got started. But he saw nothing to alarm him. He took a step forward, stuck his hands in his pockets, threw back his shoulders and cocked his head. There was a dash of swagger in his pose, something of the stage cavalier, but his smile was friendly and hopeful.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  While he cast an absent-minded glance at my bookshelves, I went to fetch my mother. She smoothed her henna-reddened hair with the palms of her hands, adjusted her apron, and followed me. I said to Poinsot: “This is my mother.” And to my mother, who could understand no French, I said in our dialect: “He’s one of my teachers, the most intelligent among them all.” Poinsot held out a kindly hand and said: “How do you do, madame.” Mother was not accustomed to shaking hands and caught hold of Poinsot’s fingers, much as one grasps a kitchen utensil. But she had understood his greeting and replied in the same words: “How do you do?” They were both smiling, my mother with curiosity, Poinsot with embarrassment. As the silence that ensued seemed infinite to me because there was no hope of its being filled from either side, I hastened to throw a bridge across it. “You see,” I said to Poinsot, looking toward my mother so as to keep her interested, through my gestures, in what I was saying, “She’s still young, isn’t she? But she has already had eight children.” “Yes, it’s rather surprising,” Poinsot replied as he looked her over. In dialect, I added hastily, for my mother’s benefit: “Monsieur Poinsot thinks you look very young.” At least this flattered her vanity. She gave him a look of gratitude and answered: “He looks like a nice man, your teacher.” I translated this comment at once for Poinsot. After that, they both remained silent and waited again. I was trying to find some other verbal link between them when I suddenly felt with real anguish how impossible any communication would be. It was like an access of vertigo. When I find myself at the foot of a wall and look up at the top and see it rising above me endlessly toward the sky, I feel this same vertigo, as if the sky had suddenly become an abyss. The two parts of my being spoke two different languages and would never understand each other. Thus, I allowed the conversation to die. My mother retired into her kitchen, accustomed to being excluded. Poinsot calmly filled his pipe and waited for the end of the storm, without asking me any questions about my nervousness and my sudden silence. It had always been his habit to wait for me to reveal my preoccupations to him. But an explanation, this time, was beyond me. I felt as if walled in. Besides, he would interpret my explanations as useless histrionics, believing that the obstacle could be overcome if one found out first what the whole problem really was. But would I ever be strong enough to survive this split in my being? I was beginning to understand that, however much I might want to become a second Poinsot, the chances were stronger that I would become but another Marrou.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  We’re already raw, and the prospect of having our wounds exposed is like getting an anxiety colonic. When I feel the need for protection, I make sure to have a few cocktail party responses in my back pocket, just in case someone asks me what is going on in my life. “I haven’t seen you in ages, what’s new?” What I want to say: “My dad’s dead, my dog’s dead, I feel dead!” What I actually say: “It’s been a rough few years, but I’m really looking forward to the holidays. Do you have any special plans?” When I don’t want to talk, I ask questions instead. It’s a stealthy way to take the focus off me and direct it toward the other person. Because, sometimes we’d rather eat way too many passed hors d’oeuvres than open a can of anguish—and that’s OK. If it’s not the time or place for a sensitive conversation, you can also just be honest and let the person know. My dad often handled this by saying, “Not right now.” That was his way of letting us know that talking about whatever topic wasn’t a no; it just wasn’t a yes at that very moment. And guess what? Not everyone needs to know your business. Distant colleagues, passing acquaintances, and anyone located several rungs outside your inner circle are on a need-to-know basis—meaning, you don’t need to go there, especially if you’re having a tender day. The deli guy, dry cleaner, mail carrier, and gal from accounting at your old job? Skip them. SAY IT LIKE IT IS There’s something really liberating and honest about telling someone you’re grieving. When they ask, “How are you?” you answer, “I’m sad.” People don’t admit that very often. But there’s something innately human and empowering about dropping the mask (aka the mascara) and telling the plain ol’ truth. Unfiltered honesty can feel like a dose of potent medicine for your healing. Don’t be surprised if your authenticity strikes a deep chord in the other person: “Me, too.” This is an undeniable silver lining of your world falling apart: you’re less inclined toward small talk, and more open to deeper intimacy. To recognizing that we’re all just walking around with an assortment of boo-boos, longing for a place to belong. Look, it’s impossible to get all of this right. So, if you’ve ever been on either end of any of the awkward or painful behavior I’ve described, try to have compassion for yourself. We’re all going to fumble and make mistakes, and that’s OK. Own it, forgive yourself (and others—no one needs more baggage, this flight is full), and just keep trying.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The last column was headed: “Reasons for which you are not already in the army.” I wrote: not subject to conscription. From the other side of the counter, the lieutenant read it upside down. “Please give details,” he said. “Why can’t you be conscripted? Are you a foreigner, or exempted, or rejected...” “Foreign,” I said. “Well, not exactly; native African Jew.” “Ah, then wait,” he said hurriedly, “wait, don’t write anything. It’s that... er... Would you mind enlisting under another name?” “But...“ “Of course,” he quickly added, “it’s simply a formality. We are very happy to have you; it’s just to avoid... you know, politics...” he stammered. Out of pity, I helped him. “You don’t want any Jews?” “Oh, not us. You know, we already have lots. They’re good fighters and good comrades at arms. That’s why General Giraud’s men say that the Gaullists are mostly Jews, which isn’t true and does us a great deal of harm; so, for the moment, well...” The demonstration was painful, so he shifted to safer grounds, those of his own enthusiasm. “The important thing is to fight, isn’t it? I mean the pleasure of smashing the Krauts! You know, when we took Bizerte, I wept tears of joy...” He tried to warm himself and us with the memory of his emotions. My face must have been fairly impassive. He shut up. Henry smiled pleasantly, as though he had a great liking for the lieutenant and perfectly understood his difficulties. But I knew his face too well. The poor officer glanced at the register again. “I’m so glad you’re a student. I too was a student, in pharmacy. You must understand, politics has nothing to do with...“ He lied clumsily. He must have known that I too wanted to fight my own war, and not just any war. War is either a personal affair or a swindle. His face lit up, and he seemed to have found an idea: “Look, leave your name and just add ‘Mohammed.’ There is no difficulty for Moslems.” He had spoken alone all the time. “I’m going to think this over,” I said at length. I looked at the register and at my name which was only the fourth: Alexandre Benillouche. As usual, I had forgotten to write Mordekhai. Benillouche could well be a Moslem name, since “Ben” is a prefix common to both Jews and Moslems. But why should the Moslems fight? In any case, I wanted to avoid any misunderstanding. Mordekhai, I was certainly Mordekhai Benillouche. Before leaving, I picked up the pen again and, without looking at the lieutenant, added “Mordekhai” in brackets. Fortunately, Henry was silent about his triumph. For a while, I tried to be calm and to reason.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  There is now a great tension between Fred and me; we cannot bear each other’s eyes. He wrote something about me so exact, so piercing that I felt invaded in the most secret precincts of my being. His writing about Henry also terrified me, as if he had come too close to my own fears and doubts. He writes occultly. I could barely talk after reading those pages. And he was reading my journal. He said, “You should not let me read this, Anaïs.” I asked why. He seemed stunned. He bowed his head, his mouth trembled. He is like a ghost of me. Why was he stunned? Did I reveal the similitude, the recognition? He is a part of me. He could understand my entire life. I would put all my journals in his hands. I do not fear him. He is so tender with me. Henry talks beautifully to me, in a cool, sagelike mood. He says, “I love you,” while I lie in his arms, and I say, “I do not believe you.” He realizes I am in a devilish mood. He insists: “Do you love me ?” And I answer vaguely. When we are sensually bound together I cannot believe that we are close only physically. When I awake from the deliriousness and we talk quietly, I am surprised that he should talk about our love so seriously. “Sunday night after you left I slept a while, then I went out for a walk, and I felt so happy, Anaïs, happier than I have ever felt before. I realized a terrible truth: that I don’t want June to come back. I need you terribly—absolutely. At certain moments I even feel that if June should come back and disappoint me and I should not care any more for her, I would be almost glad. Sunday night I wanted to send her a cablegram telling her I did not want her any more.” But my wisdom prevented me from believing. He, too, knows, because he adds, “I’m weak in June’s hands, Anaïs. If, when she comes back, I act exactly as she wants me to act, you must not feel that I disappoint you or fail you.” This surprises me, because it seems to me that when I first rushed into my passion, with characteristic intensity, and sensed the instability, the tragedy in the situation, I pulled back and diminished the importance of our relationship. I exhausted my capacity for tragedy with John Erskine. I suffered then to the limit. I don’t know if I can ever suffer as much again, and I believe Henry’s feelings are similar. I want to enjoy the present hour deeply, thoughtlessly. Henry bending over me, desirous, Henry’s tongue between my legs, Henry’s vigorous, torrential possessiveness. “You are the only woman I can be faithful to. I want to protect you.” When I see June’s photograph in Henry’s room, I hate June, because at this moment I love Henry.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  The sepia gloom of an arctic afternoon in midwinter invaded the rooms and was deepening to an oppressive black. A bronze angle, a surface of glass or polished mahogany here and there in the darkness, reflected the odds and ends of light from the street, where the globes of tall street lamps along its middle line were already diffusing their lunar glow. Gauzy shadows moved on the ceiling. In the stillness, the dry sound of a chrysanthemum petal falling upon the marble of a table made one’s nerves twang. My mother’s boudoir had a convenient oriel for looking out on the Morskaya in the direction of the Maria Square. With lips pressed against the thin fabric that veiled the windowpane I would gradually taste the cold of the glass through the gauze. From that oriel, some years later, at the outbreak of the Revolution, I watched various engagements and saw my first dead man: he was being carried away on a stretcher, and from one dangling leg an ill-shod comrade kept trying to pull off the boot despite pushes and punches from the stretchermen—all this at a goodish trot. But in the days of Mr. Burness’ lessons there was nothing to watch save the dark, muffled street and its receding line of loftily suspended lamps, around which the snowflakes passed and repassed with a graceful, almost deliberately slackened motion, as if to show how the trick was done and how simple it was. From another angle, one might see a more generous stream of snow in a brighter, violet-tinged nimbus of gaslight, and then the jutting enclosure where I stood would seem to drift slowly up and up, like a balloon. At last one of the phantom sleighs gliding along the street would come to a stop, and with gawky haste Mr. Burness in his fox-furred shapka would make for our door. From the schoolroom, whither I had preceded him, I would hear his vigorous footsteps crashing nearer and nearer, and, no matter how cold the day was, his good, ruddy face would be sweating abundantly as he strode in. I remember the terrific energy with which he pressed on the spluttering pen as he wrote down, in the roundest of round hands, the tasks to be prepared for the next day. Usually at the end of the lesson a certain limerick was asked for and granted, the point of the performance being that the word “screamed” in it was to be involuntarily enacted by oneself every time Mr. Burness gave a formidable squeeze to the hand he held in his beefy paw as he recited the lines: There was a young lady from Russia Who (squeeze) whenever you’d crush her She (squeeze) and she (squeeze) … by which time the pain would have become so excruciating that we never got any farther.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Now my eyes have become a part of me exposed quick risky and open to all the same dangers. I see much better now and my eyes hurt. But What Can You Teach My Daughter What do you mean no no no no you don’t have the right to know how often have we built each other as shelters against the cold and even my daughter knows what you know can hurt you she says her nos and it hurts she says when she talks of liberation she means freedom from that pain she knows what you know can hurt but what you do not know can kill. From Inside an Empty Purse Money cannot buy you what you want standing flatfooted and lying like a grounded chestnut unlovable and suspect I am trying to reach you on whatever levels you flow from treacherous growing water in a blind tongueless pond. I am the thread of your woman’s cloth the sexy prison that protects you deep and unspoken flesh around your freedom I am your enemy’s face. The money doesn’t matter so much as the lie telling you don’t know why in a dream I am trying to reach you before you fall in to me. A Small Slaughter Day breaks without thanks or caution past a night without satisfaction or pain. My words are blind children I have armed against the casual insolence of morning without you I am scarred and marketed like a streetcorner in Harlem a woman whose face in the tiles your feet have not yet regarded I am the stream past which you will never step the woman you can not deal with I am the mouth of your scorn. Sister Outsider We were born in a poor time never touching each other’s hunger never sharing our crusts in fear the bread became enemy. Now we raise our children to respect themselves as well as each other. Now you have made loneliness holy and useful and no longer needed now your light shines very brightly but I want you to know your darkness also rich and beyond fear. “Never Take Fire from a Woman” My sister and I have been raised to hate genteelly each other’s silences sear up our tongues like flame we greet each other with respect meaning from a watchful distance while we dream of lying in the tender of passion to drink from a woman who smells like love. Between Ourselves Once when I walked into a room my eyes would seek out the one or two black faces for contact or reassurance or a sign I was not alone now walking into rooms full of black faces that would destroy me for any difference where shall my eyes look?

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  This bar was practically in my quartier and I had many times had breakfast in the nearby workingman's cafe to which all the nightbirds of the neighborhood retired when the bars closed. Sometimes I was with Hella; sometimes I was alone. And I had been in this bar, too, two or three times; once very drunk, I had been accused of causing a minor sensation by flirting with a soldier. My memory of that night was, happily, very dim, and I took the attitude that no matter how drunk I may have been, I could not possibly have done such a thing. But my face was known and I had the feeling that people were taking bets about me. Or, it was as though they were the elders of some strange and austere holy order and were watching me in order to discover, by means of signs I made but which only they could read, whether or not I had a true vocation. Jacques was aware, I was aware, as we pushed our way to the bar—it was like moving into the field of a magnet or like approaching a small circle of heat— of the presence of a new barman. He stood, insolent and dark and leonine, his elbow leaning on the cash register, his fingers playing with his chin, looking out — 40 James Baldwin at the crowd. It was as though his station were a promontory and we were the sea. Jacques was immediately attracted. I felt him, so to speak, preparing himself for con- quest. I felt the necessity for tolerance. Tm sure,' I said, 'that you'll want to get to know the barman. So 111 vanish anytime you like.' There was, in this tolerance of mind, a fund, I knew something else:

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  All talk of pictures, impressions, etc., ceases because of the lack of all the conditions to give such figures any meaning. It is not even clear that we shall ever find our way out of the darkness into the world of light and reality again. We begin with complete trust in physics and the senses, and are forthwith led away from the object into a nervous labyrinth, where the object is entirely displaced by a set of nervous changes which are totally unlike anything but themselves. Finally, we land in the dark chamber of the skull. The object has gone completely, and knowledge has not yet appeared. Nervous signs are the raw material of all knowledge of the outer world according to the most decided realism. But in order to pass beyond these signs into a knowledge of the outer world, we must posit an interpreter who shall read back these signs into their objective meaning. But that interpreter, again, must implicitly contain the meaning of the universe within itself; and these signs are really but excitations which cause the soul to unfold what is within itself. Inasmuch as by common consent the soul communicates with the outer world only through these signs, and never comes nearer to the object than such signs can bring it, it follows that the principles of interpretation must be in the mind itself, and that the resulting construction is primarily only an expression of the mind's own nature. All reaction is of this sort; it expresses the nature of the reacting agent, and knowledge comes under the same head. this fact makes it necessary for us either to admit a pre-established harmony between the laws and nature of thought and the laws and nature of things, or else to allow that the objects of perception, the universe as it appears, are purely phenomenal, being but the way in which the mind reacts against the ground of its sensations." [212] The dualism of Object and Subject and their pre-established harmony are what the psychologist as such must assume, whatever ulterior monistic philosophy he may, as an individual who has the right also to be a metaphysician, have in reserve. I hope that this general point is now made clear, so that we may leave it, and descend to some distinctions of detail. There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: we may call them respectively knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about.

• From The Hours (1998)

  She runs from the room, out the door, which she leaves open behind her. She runs down the stairs. She thinks of calling for help, but doesn’t. The air itself seems to have changed, to have come slightly apart; as if the atmosphere were palpably made of substance and its opposite. She runs down the stairs and is aware (she will be ashamed of this later) of herself as a woman running down a set of stairs, uninjured, still alive. In the lobby she suffers through a moment of confusion over how to get to the air shaft where Richard lies, and she feels, briefly, as if she’s gone to hell. Hell is a stale yellow box of a room, with no exit, shaded by an artificial tree, lined with scarred metal doors (one bears a Grateful Dead decal, a skull crowned with roses). A door in the shadow of the stairwell, narrower than the others, leads outside, down a flight of broken cement stairs, to the place where Richard is. She knows even before she descends these last stairs that he is dead. His head is lost among the folds of the robe but she can see the puddle of blood, dark, almost black, that has formed where his head must be. She can see the utter stillness of his body, one arm extended at a peculiar angle, palm up, and both bare legs white and naked as death itself. He is still wearing the gray felt slippers she bought for him. She descends these last stairs, sees that Richard is lying amid shards of broken glass, and takes a moment to realize it is simply the remains of a shattered beer bottle that had been lying on the concrete already, and not some consequence of Richard’s fall. She thinks she must pick him up immediately, to get him off the glass. She kneels beside him, puts a hand on his inert shoulder. Gently, very gently, as if she fears waking him, she pulls the robe down from around his head. All she can make sense of in the glistening mass of red, purple, and white are his parted lips and one open eye. She realizes she has made a sound, a sharp exclamation of surprise and pain. She covers his head again with the robe. She remains kneeling at his side, uncertain about what to do next. She returns her hand to his shoulder. She does not stroke it; she simply rests her hand there. She tells herself she should go call the police, but doesn’t want to leave Richard alone. She waits for someone to call down to her. She glances up at the ascending rows of windows, the hanging laundry, the perfect square of sky bisected by one thin blue-white blade of a cloud, and begins to understand that no one knows yet. No one has seen or heard Richard fall.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  The summer of 1905 in Vyra had not yet evolved lepidoptera. The village schoolmaster took us for instructive walks (“What you hear is the sound of a scythe being sharpened”; “That field there will be given a rest next season”; “Oh, just a small bird—no special name”; “If that peasant is drunk, it is because he is poor”). Autumn carpeted the park with varicolored leaves, and Miss Robinson showed us the beautiful device—which the Ambassador’s Boy, a familiar character in her small world, had enjoyed so much the preceding autumn—of choosing on the ground and arranging on a big sheet of paper such maple leaves as would form an almost complete spectrum (minus the blue—a big disappointment!), green shading into lemon, lemon into orange and so on through the reds to purples, purplish browns, reddish again and back through lemon to green (which was getting quite hard to find except as a part, a last brave edge). The first frosts hit the asters and still we did not move to town. That winter of 1905–1906, when Mademoiselle arrived from Switzerland, was the only one of my childhood that I spent in the country. It was a year of strikes, riots and police-inspired massacres, and I suppose my father wished to keep his family away from the city, in our quiet country place, where his popularity with the peasants might mitigate, as he correctly surmised, the risks of unrest. It was also a particularly severe winter, producing as much snow as Mademoiselle might have expected to find in the hyperborean gloom of remote Muscovy. When she alighted at the little Siverski station, from which she still had to travel half-a-dozen miles by sleigh to Vyra, I was not there to greet her; but I do so now as I try to imagine what she saw and felt at that last stage of her fabulous and ill-timed journey. Her Russian vocabulary consisted, I know, of one short word, the same solitary word that years later she was to take back to Switzerland. This word, which in her pronunciation may be phonetically rendered as “giddy-eh” (actually it is gde with e as in “yet”), meant “Where?” And that was a good deal. Uttered by her like the raucous cry of some lost bird, it accumulated such interrogatory force that it sufficed for all her needs. “Giddy-eh? Giddy-eh?” she would wail, not only to find out her whereabouts but also to express supreme misery: the fact that she was a stranger, shipwrecked, penniless, ailing, in search of the blessed land where at last she would be understood.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Yet there is no alternative but to affirm that to perceive the universe we must construct it in thought, and that our knowledge of the universe is but the unfolding of the mind's inner nature. . . . By describing the mind as a waxen tablet, and things as impressing themselves upon it, we seem to get great insight until we think to ask where this extended tablet is, and how things stamp themselves on it, and how the perceptive act would be explained even if they did. . . . The immediate antecedents of sensation and perception are a series of nervous changes in the brain. Whatever we know of the outer world is revealed only in and through these nervous changes. But these are totally unlike the objects assumed to exist as their causes. If we might conceive the mind as in the light, and in direct contact with its objects, the imagination at least would be comforted; but when we conceive the mind as coming in contact with the outer world only in the dark chamber of the skull, and then not in contact with the objects perceived, but only with a series of nerve-changes of which, moreover, it knows nothing, it is plain that the object is a long way off. All talk of pictures, impressions, etc., ceases because of the lack of all the conditions to give such figures any meaning. It is not even clear that we shall ever find our way out of the darkness into the world of light and reality again. We begin with complete trust in physics and the senses, and are forthwith led away from the object into a nervous labyrinth, where the object is entirely displaced by a set of nervous changes which are totally unlike anything but themselves. Finally, we land in the dark chamber of the skull. The object has gone completely, and knowledge has not yet appeared. Nervous signs are the raw material of all knowledge of the outer world according to the most decided realism.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  An article, say a piece of pottery or glassware or cloth, might look all right in the dim recesses of the trader’s booth; but the wiser buyer would take it out into the street and hold it up and submit it to the judgment of the sunlight; and many a time the clear rays of the sun would reveal faults and flaws that would never have been noticed in the shadows of the shop. Theopylact must have been thinking of that when he spoke of ‘eilikrineia, purity of mind and guilelessness which have nothing concealed in the shadows and nothing lurking beneath the surface’. The question that this word asks is, Could our inmost thoughts stand being brought out into the full light of day? Could our inmost motives stand being dragged out into the full glare of revealing light? To put the matter at its highest, Could the inmost thoughts of our minds and motions of our heart stand the scrutiny of the light of God’s eye? The Christian purity is a purity which is sifted until the last admixture of evil is gone, a purity which has nothing to conceal and whose inmost thoughts and desires will bear the full glare of the light of day. EKKLĒSIA THE CHURCH OF GOD Ekklēsia is the NT word for ‘church’, and is, therefore, one of the most important of all NT words. Like so many NT words it has a double background. (i) Ekklēsia has a Greek background. In the great classical days in Athens the ekklēsia was the convened assembly of the people. It consisted of all the citizens of the city who had not lost their civic rights. Apart from the fact that its decisions must conform to the laws of the State, its powers were to all intents and purposes unlimited. It elected and dismissed magistrates and directed the policy of the city. It declared war, made peace, contracted treaties and arranged alliances. It elected generals and other military officers. It assigned troops to different campaigns and dispatched them from the city. It was ultimately responsible for the conduct of all military operations. It raised and allocated funds. Two things are interesting to note. First, all its meetings began with prayer and sacrifice. Second, it was a true democracy. Its two great watchwords were ‘equality’ (isonomia) and ‘freedom’ (eleutheria). It was an assembly where everyone had an equal right and an equal duty to take part. When a case involving the right of any private citizen was before it—as in the case of ostracism or banishment—at least 6,000 citizens must be present. In the wider Greek world ekklēsia came to mean any duly convened assembly of citizens. It is interesting to note that the Roman world did not even try to translate the word ekklēsia; it simply transliterated it into ecclesia and used it in the same way. There is an interesting bilingual inscription found in Athens (dated A.D. 103-4).

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  Along my wood-paneled walls are small, wood-paneled doors that open into attic space. I stuck a television inside one of these doors, and in the evenings I lie in bed and watch television. When you are a writer and a speaker, you aren’t supposed to watch television. It’s shallow. I feel guilty because for a long time I didn’t allow myself a television, and I used to drop that fact in conversation to impress people. I thought it made me sound dignified. A couple of years ago, however, I visited a church in the suburbs, and there was this blowhard preacher talking about how television rots your brain. He said that when we are watching television our minds are working no harder than when we are sleeping. I thought that sounded heavenly. I bought one that afternoon. So I’ve been watching Nightline with Ted Koppel lately. He isn’t as smart as Ray Suarez but he tries, and that counts. He’s been in the Congo, in Africa, and it has been terrible. I mean the show is fine, but the Congo isn’t doing so well. More than 2.5 million people have been killed in the last three years. Each of eight tribes is at war with the other seven. Genocide. As the images moved across the screen I would lie in bed feeling so American and safe, as if the Congo were something in a book or a movie. It is nearly impossible for me to process the idea that such a place exists in the same world as Portland. I met with Tony the Beat Poet the other day at Horse Brass and told him about the stuff on Nightline. “I knew that was taking place over there,” Tony said. “But I didn’t know it was that bad.” I call Tony a beat poet because he is always wearing loose European shirts, the ones that lace up the chest with shoestring. His head is shaved, and he has a long soul patch that stretches a good inch beneath his chin. He isn’t actually a poet. “It’s terrible,” I told him. “Two and a half million people, dead. In one village they interviewed about fifty or so women. All of them had been raped, most of them numerous times.” Tony shook his head. “That is amazing. It is so difficult to even process how things like that can happen.” “I know. I can’t get my mind around it. I keep wondering how people could do things like that.” “Do you think you could do something like that, Don?” Tony looked at me pretty seriously. I honestly couldn’t believe he was asking the question. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “Are you capable of murder or rape or any of the stuff that is taking place over there?” “No.” “So you are not capable of any of those things?” he asked again. He packed his pipe and looked at me to confirm my answer.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  4Charles Nantwich’s house was in a street off Huggin Hill, so narrow that it had been closed to traffic and was no longer marked in the London A-Z; it was a cobbled cul-de-sac obstructed at its open end by two dented aluminum bollards padlocked to the ground. Halfway down on the left rose the tall façade of purplish London brick, the dormers behind its upper parapet looking out over the roofs of the surrounding semi-derelict buildings. It was an elegant post-Fire merchant’s house, prosperously plain, the only ostentation the door-case, with its delicately glazed fanlight and heavy projecting hood, the richly scrolled brackets of which were clogged with generations of white gloss paint. Much of the glass in the tall windows appeared to be original: warped, glinting and nearly opaque. I waited opposite for a minute, surprisingly taken back, by its air of secrecy and exclusion, to the invalidish world of Edwardian ghost stories, to a world where people never went out. Though close to Cannon Street, Upper Thames Street and the approach to Southwark Bridge, this little knot of side streets was very quiet. Drivers avoided the narrow gauge of its alleyways, and much of it seemed to have been given over to somnolent trades—a bespoke tailor, a watch repairer. One or two of the premises were warehouses; some had battened-up windows or displayed bleached and cracked signs for businesses long defunct. Though the buildings were eighteenth- or seventeenth-century, the streets were medieval, and, sloping quite steeply towards the Thames, gave the unsettling feeling that they could not long avoid being swept away. Skinner’s Lane, ending in a wall topped with spikes like spurs, half hidden amid tufts of brilliant yellow alyssum, had a mortal mood to it, and gave Charles’s residence the eccentric rectitude of a colonial staying on, unflaggingly keeping up appearances. I rang the bell twice before the door was opened by a man in shirt-sleeves and an apron, who let me in and then seemed to think better of it. ‘His Lordship expecting you, is he?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘Yes, William Beckwith. He asked me to come for tea.’ ‘First I’ve heard of it,’ the man said unsmilingly. ‘You’d better wait here.’ He went off with an ambiguous tread, his sergeant-majorish bearing infected with an ambling carelessness.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  He will assume the role of the unpopular favorite, the kid from Iowa who won’t bow to an upset, who won’t stay in the state to go to college, who won’t let his own wobbly health and lack of stamina come into play for even one more moment’s worth of actual wrestling time. He has spent his life learning how to be a champion, and he will make the Iowans respect him, even if they never do wind up loving him. So they came to the Barn to see an upset? An upset they already have been given. And that is all they will get. By the time Jay takes the mat, that is, he has thought the whole thing through, and he has concluded that he is sick of feeling sick. His opponent is Chris Dunkin, from Knoxville. On this night, it couldn’t possibly matter less. At the opening whistle, Jim and Carol lean forward from their perches high up in the Barn to get a close look at the action, and then, as the early seconds of the match unwind themselves, Jim slowly leans back in his seat. He suddenly realizes that he doesn’t need to worry. Down there on the mat, his son has decided to go wild, and it’s the Jay of old. As Dunkin begins moving around, Jay just appears to lose all patience with the idea of being patient. He storms in, grabs Dunkin down low. He slams Dunkin to the mat before anyone has the slightest idea what is going on, and then, after a bit of scrambling and positioning, Jay simply locks up Dunkin’s arms and sits him up high and pins him. Just like that. The Vets crowd is barely focused on the mat before the whole thing ends. It’s over in 1 minute and 14 seconds. This was a state semifinal, and Jay has just made it look like a throwaway match from last fall. In reality, though, it’s the kind of match for which Jay seems to have prepped for years, an almost prototypical Borschel-dominated event. He gets bigger as the moment gets bigger, and that is the part of Jay that his father long ago came to understand. What Jim knows is what he has seen for most of Jay’s competitive life, which is that Jay is generally the most easily overlooked person in a wrestling room most of the time. “He doesn’t always walk like a wrestler, talk like a wrestler or even look like a wrestler,” Jim once said. It’s only when it is time to actually compete that the truth about Jay starts making itself apparent. On this night, there is nothing left to chance or circumstance, or hacking cough or rasping breath. There is no Mitch Mueller ending. It’s only Jay, in command.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  After everyone else had visited him in the evening Florida came, at the request of her husband himself, to see him, her mind made up to console him by a declara- tion of her affection, and to tell him, without disguise or reserve, that she was resolved to love him as much as honour could allow her. Seated beside the head of his bed, she began her consolations by weeping with him ; seeing which, Amadour fancied that in this great agitation of her mind he could the more easily accomplish his purpose, and he sat up in his bed. Florida, thinking he was too weak to do this, offered to prevent him. " Must I lose you forever.-'" he exclaimed, on his knees; and saying this he let himself fall into her arms like a man whose strength suddenly failed him. Poor Florida em- braced and supported him a long while, doing her best to comfort him ; but the remedy she applied to assuage his pain increased it greatly. Still counterfeiting the ap- pearance of one half dead, and saying not a word, he set himself in quest of what the honour of ladies prohibits. Florida, seeing his bad intention, but unable to believe it after the laudable language he had always addressed to her, asked him what he meant. Amadour, fearing to provoke a reply which he knew could not be other than chaste and virtuous, went straight to his mark without paymg a word. Florida's surprise was extreme, and go THE HEPTAMERON OF THE {Nozel iQ choosing rather to believe that his brain was turned than that he had a dehbcrate design upon her virtue, she called aloud to a gentleman who she knew was in the room ; whereupon Amadour, in an agony of despair, threw himself back on his bed so suddenly that the gen- tleman thought he was dead. Florida, who had risen from her chair, sent the gentleman to fetch some vinegar, and then said to Amadour, "Are you mad, Amadour? What is this you have thought of doing ? " " Do such long services as mine merit such cruelty ? " replied Amadour, who had lost all reason in the violence of his love. " And where is that honour you have so often preached to me .-* " she retorted.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  Almost all of the rooms were empty, but in a few there were solitary figures, old men or women, sometimes absorbed in some task but mostly just sitting and fanning themselves, staring at little televisions or simply staring, their faces turned to the windows I passed, so that our eyes met for a moment and I saw their vacancy liven and shift, like still water ruffled by a stone. It was a balm of which I was unaware, the safety I felt as I lay with my father, and it sustained me throughout his many absences, even, a few years later, when he left my mother and was unreachable for months, and then reappeared in a new home where we were welcome only on invitation. Even after my parents separated, though they occurred less and less frequently, I still had these moments of closeness with my father. Until I was eight or nine I enjoyed an access to his physical presence free of suspicion or doubt, even as I grew aware of the differences between his body and mine, aware of them and interested, troubled perhaps and drawn to that trouble, so that what had been our games (the race to the toilet after a long drive, pissing in the tight space pressed together) became occasions of greater and greater solemnity and unease, possessed of a mystery I couldn’t resolve. This was happening with my friends, too, the boys whose company I sought out with a new urgency, and though it was still slight and free of intention they could sense the added heat. They were starting to think of me as a kind apart, and what was a shadow of separation between us would become absolute, I felt it already with a terrible dread. I don’t remember how old I was when I realized the full measure of that separateness, I must have been nine or ten, still young enough to shower with my father, though it happened less often now and excited me more, in the mysterious way that would lead to the still unimagined breach I was already approaching. Though I can’t remember the season or year or anything that was said, I remember the room, the ornamental bulbs and the tile and the water already running, the mirror obscured with fog; and I remember my father, his body large and bare, the fascination of it and its availability in the small space where, laughing, we wrestled to stay beneath the hot stream of water.