Fear

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 Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  One day a Brahmin priest found him sitting meditating under a tree and was astonished by his strength, serenity, and composure. “Are you a god, sir?” he asked. “Are you an angel ... or a spirit?” No, the Buddha replied. The self that had held him in thrall had been “extinguished” by the cultivation of compassion, revealing a new potential in human nature by activating parts of his being that normally lay dormant. “Remember me,” he told the priest, “as one who is awake.” 20 A skeptic will dismiss these claims as delusory. But the only way to prove or disprove them is to put the method to the test. During the twelve steps, we are trying to awaken our potential for compassion, sagehood, and Buddhahood. Do not leave this step until you have laid the foundations for a healthy, realistic assessment of yourself and made the meditation on love a regular part of your day. Once you have started to feel a genuine compassion for yourself, you will be able to extend it to others. THE FOURTH STEP Empathy When the Buddha was born, his father invited the local priests to his home to tell the child’s fortune. One of them predicted that he was destined to see three disturbing sights, which would inspire him to renounce the world and become a monk. The Buddha’s father had more worldly ambitions for his son, so he immured the boy in a luxurious palace and posted guards around the grounds to keep all distressing reality at bay. It is a striking image of the mind in denial. As long as we close our minds to the pain that presses in upon us on all sides, we remain imprisoned in delusion, because this artificial existence bears no relation to reality. It is also futile, because suffering is inescapable and will always break through our carefully constructed defenses. When the Buddha was twenty-nine years old, the gods decided that he had lived in this fool’s paradise long enough, so they sent four of their number past the guards into the grounds, disguised as a sick man, an old man, a corpse, and a monk. Utterly unprepared for these spectacles of suffering, the future Buddha was so shocked that he left home that very night determined to find a way to help himself and others to bear the sorrow of life with serenity, creativity, and kindness. This story is a mythos, devised to show Buddhists what they had to do to achieve their own enlightenment. We cannot even begin our quest until we allow the ubiquitous dukkha of life to invade our minds and hearts. That is why nearly all the religious traditions put suffering at the top of their agenda. We would rather push it away and pretend that the ubiquitous grief of the world has nothing to do with us, but if we do that we will remain confined in an inferior version of ourselves.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Here’s what we decided: we’d remain each other’s primary partner. In the language of open relationships, this meant that we’d give each other priority, the bulk of our time and energy. It meant that we were committed to a shared future with shared goals and a shared home. We also had a child together, and she would come above anything and anyone else. We agreed that June should not be impacted, especially not negatively, by the opening of our marriage. It had nothing to do with her. Anyone else we dated would be a secondary partner. We would be open with each other about who we were seeing, and we would communicate with trust and clarity when it came to scheduling. We would have to be generous with each other, each making time for the other—and for the other to be with others. I wanted to date a woman, a queer or lesbian woman. I did not want Brandon to vet my partners, nor did I want to vet his. Brandon didn’t feel strongly either way, or didn’t say he did. Anyway, I had a husband and a child: What queer woman, what lesbian, would want to date me? And what straight woman would want to get with a married man? We commiserated, encouraged each other. We were both afraid of failing, and of succeeding. The sticking point remained love. We couldn’t seem to get around it. What happens if you fall in love? Brandon asked. I don’t want you to. I don’t want to either, I said. But what happens if you do? I felt my insides ball up, like I’d been scolded. I couldn’t let myself consider the possibility of love: the thought was too painful, too pointed a reminder that I was steering us into murky waters. So I’d point the conversation in another direction instead: If we’d let ourselves interrogate monogamy, I’d ask, why not interrogate love? We’d allowed ourselves to question why sex with someone else should necessarily hurt our relationship, and Pfffft, we’d answered, how narrow-minded. We were bigger than that. So why should love be a threat? Is there not enough to go around? If we—we as a couple—were capable of more than we’d previously imagined, why not this too? I began to see myself as someone who could love more than one person at a time. Hadn’t I said, anyway, that I wanted to know what it was like to be loved by a woman who loved women? Loved—that was the word that I’d reached for. I, I, I. There was so much I. Even I could hear it. We never worried about him falling in love, only me. Of course we knew.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The first gods to emerge from the slimy primal matter (similar to Mesopotamia’s alluvial soil) were “nameless, natureless, futureless,” 95 virtually inseparable from the natural world and seen as enemies of progress. The next gods to emerge from the sludge became progressively more distinct until the divine evolution culminated in Marduk, the most splendid of the Anunnaki. In the same way, Mesopotamian culture had developed from rural communities immersed in the natural rhythms of the countryside that were now regarded as sluggish, static, and inert. But the old times could return: this hymn expressed the fear of civilization lapsing back into abysmal nothingness. The most dangerous of the primitive gods was Tiamat, whose name means “Void”; she was the salty sea, which, in the Middle East, symbolized not only primeval chaos but the social anarchy that could bring starvation, disease, and death to the entire population. She represented an ever-present threat that every civilization, no matter how powerful, had to be ready to confront. The hymn also gave sacred sanction to the structural violence of Babylonian society. Tiamat creates a horde of monsters to fight the Anunnaki, a “growling roaring rout, ready for battle,” suggestive of the danger the lower classes presented to the state. Their monstrous forms represent the perverse defiance of normal categories and the confusion of identity associated with social and cosmic disorder. Their leader is Tiamat’s spouse Kingu, a “clumsy laborer,” one of the Igigi, whose name means “Toil.” The narrative of the hymn is repeatedly punctuated with this pounding refrain: “She has made the Worm, the Dragon, the Female Monster, the Great Lion, the Mad Dog, the Mad Scorpion and the Howling Storm, the Fish-Man, the Centaur.” 96 But Marduk defeats them all, casting them into prison and creating an ordered universe by splitting Tiamat’s corpse in two and separating heaven and earth. He then commands the gods to build the city of bab-ilani, “gate of the gods,” as their earthly home and creates the first man by mixing Kingu’s blood with a handful of dust to perform the labor on which civilization depends. “Sons of toil,” the masses are sentenced for life to menial labor and are held in subjection. Liberated from work, the gods sing a hymn of praise and thanksgiving. The myth and its accompanying rituals reminded the Sumerian aristocracy of the reality on which their civilization and privilege depended; they must be perpetually primed for war to keep down rebellious peasants, ambitious aristocrats, and foreign enemies who threatened civilized society. Religion was therefore deeply implicated in this imperial violence and could not be separated from the economic and political realities that sustained any agrarian state.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  2:12) associated with the Gentile converts as brethren in Christ, but was intimidated by emissaries from the bigoted Jewish converts in Jerusalem and acted against his better conviction which he had entertained ever since the vision at Joppa (Acts 10:10–16), and which he had so boldly confessed at the Council in Jerusalem (Acts 15:7–11) and carried out in Antioch. We have here the same impulsive, impressible, changeable disciple, the first to confess and the first to deny his Master, yet quickly returning to him in bitter repentance and sincere humility. It is for this inconsistency of conduct, which Paul called by the

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  5 In a similar fashion, when the Crusaders slaughtered Muslims, they claimed that Islam was a violent religion of the sword—a fantasy with little basis in fact but that reflected buried anxiety and guilt about their own behavior. Jesus had, after all, told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. At a time when the papacy was trying to impose celibacy on the reluctant clergy, medieval Christians condemned Islam as a faith that encouraged Muslims to pander to their basest instincts. 6 In many ways, the Crusaders’ attitude toward the Islamic world, which was far more powerful and sophisticated than Western Europe at this time, resembled the response of a modern Third World country to a great power. Their distorted view of Muslims was a compensation for their own feelings of inferiority. In their mingled fear, resentment, and envy, medieval Christians projected doubts about their own identity onto the Muslim foe. Islam had become the shadow self of Europe, a confused image of everything the Crusaders believed they were not—but feared that they were. Suffering is a law of life, and it is essential during this step to acknowledge our own pain or we shall find it impossible to have compassion for the distress of others. In Buddhism, compassion (karuna) is defined as a determination to liberate others from their grief, something that is impossible if we do not admit to our own unhappiness and misery. Today in the West we are often encouraged to think positively, brace up, stiffen our upper lip, and look determinedly on the bright side of life. It is, of course, important to encourage the positive, but it is also crucial sometimes to allow ourselves to mourn. The ancient Greeks had no problem with shedding tears; they believed that weeping together created a bond between human beings. In Shakespeare’s day it was considered quite normal for men to weep. Not anymore. Today there is often a degree of heartlessness in our determined good cheer, because if we simply tell people to be “positive” when they speak to us of their sorrow, we may leave them feeling misunderstood and isolated in their distress. Somebody once told me that when she had cancer, the hardest thing of all was her friends’ relentless insistence that she adopt a positive attitude; they refused to let her discuss her fears—probably because they were frightened by her disease and found it an uncomfortable reminder of their own mortality.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Aggressive deforestation had made more land available for cultivation but had destroyed the natural habitat of many species and decimated the region’s wildlife. 24 Hunters now came home empty-handed, and because so much land was now devoted to growing crops, there was less for the breeding of sheep and cattle. In the old days, without a thought for the morrow, aristocrats had slaughtered hundreds of beasts and given lavish gifts to demonstrate their wealth. Concerned above all with status and prestige, they had engaged in bloody vendettas and petty feuds. But in the dawning age of scarcity, the new watchwords were moderation, control, and restraint. Court ritualists evolved complex codes to control every detail of life (even warfare was strictly governed by elaborate chivalric rites that mitigated the horror of battle). 25 The nobles discovered the virtue of self-restraint and no longer called out the army in response to every imagined slight. For more than a century the li seemed to have worked. 26 But by the time of Confucius, the Four Fs had reasserted themselves. In the incipient market economy of the sixth century BCE, people were casting restraint to the winds in headlong and aggressive pursuit of luxury, wealth, and power. Large new states, ruled by erstwhile barbarians unfamiliar with the li , attacked the smaller principalities with impunity, resulting in terrible loss of life. Confucius was horrified. The Chinese seemed bent on self-destruction, and in his view, salvation lay in a renewed appreciation of the underlying spirit of the old rites. The rituals of consideration ( shu ) ensured that people did not treat others carelessly and were not driven simply by utility and self- interest; these gracious codes of behavior had made people conscious of the dignity of every human being; they expressed and conferred sacred respect; they taught every family member to live for the others; they introduced individuals to the virtue of “yielding” to their fellows, helping them to cultivate the “softness” and “pliability” of ren . Properly understood, therefore, the rites were a spiritual education that enabled people to transcend the limitations of selfishness. In the old days, it was thought that the li conferred a magical power on the recipient. Confucius reinterpreted this: when people are treated with reverence, they become conscious of their own sacred worth, and ordinary actions, such as eating and drinking, are lifted to a level higher than the biological and invested with holiness. The implications for politics were immense. If instead of ruthlessly pursuing his own self-interest to the detriment of others, a ruler would “curb his ego and submit to li for a single day,” Confucius believed, “everyone under Heaven would respond to his goodness!” 27 What is ren , asked one of his disciples, and how can it be applied to political life?

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Above all, we need to listen. All too often in an argument or debate, we simply listen to others in order to twist their words and use them as grist for our own mill. True listening means more than simply hearing the words that are spoken. We have to become alert to the underlying message too and hear what is not uttered aloud. Angry speech in particular requires careful decoding. We should make an effort to hear the pain or fear that surfaces in body language, tone of voice, and choice of imagery. To take just one example: every fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation; and each one began with what was perceived to be an assault by the liberal or secular establishment. 9 History shows that to attack any fundamentalist movement, whether militarily, politically, or in the media, is counterproductive because the assault merely convinces its adherents that their enemies really are bent on their destruction. If we analyze fundamentalist discourse as carefully as we interpret a poem or an important political speech, ferreting out the underlying emotions and intentions of the poet or speaker, this fear and humiliation become immediately apparent. Instead of ridiculing fundamentalist mythology, we should reflect seriously on the fact that it often expresses anxieties that no society can safely ignore. It is difficult to achieve this kind of dispassion, because any fundamentalist position is a profound challenge to principles and ideals, such as free speech or the rights of women, that are sacred to their liberal opponents. But aggression, righteous condemnation, and insult only make matters worse. Somehow we have to break the escalating cycle of attack and counterattack. We have seen what happens when fundamentalist fear hardens into rage. Language is based on trust. We have to assume, at least initially, that our interlocutor is speaking the truth and telling us something of value. Logicians have argued that the truth of an individual sentence can be assessed only by considering the whole context. It cannot be seen in isolation but is part of a “conceptual scheme,” a fabric of interwoven sentences. We cannot understand the ideas expressed unless we are familiar with this conceptual scheme in its entirety. 10 Thus the sentence “the law is an ass” is explicable only in a particular framework.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I had a phone consultation that morning with a divorce lawyer, a man recommended by our corporate attorney. We talked for exactly eleven minutes, and it felt oddly straightforward, maybe too easy. He said it sounded like Brandon and I agreed upon most everything, which made us good candidates for an uncontested divorce. I wondered when it would feel real, the concept of our divorce. I went to therapy. I wanted to feel giddy still from my night with Ash, but by afternoon I did not. My head jangled, an almost audible rattle. As soon as I’d put down the phone, I said, I felt critical of Ash. It was almost like my vision changed: I pulled up a photo of Ash on my phone, giddy to study the face of “my girlfriend,” and now it had no impact at all. Yesterday it would have made my eyes roll back with pleasure. I hate this feeling, I told him. I remember it from when I was dating Brandon. It scares me. Of course it does, my therapist said. It’s like I can let myself be open going in, and then it gets harder just at the point when I always thought it would get easier. Like, I can’t hold on to the glee of it. Well, let’s look at Nora, he said. You made yourself busy trying to do everything the right way, trying to win her love. That might have given you, in a sense, a feeling of control. That’s not the case with Ash. Ash is clear: they are telling you who they are and what they want. Ash met your ex-husband at a dance party, and Ash still wants you. Maybe they even want all of you, what about that? Maybe they even want the parts you don’t want them to see. 27My mother turned seventy in late November, and to celebrate, she and I took June to New York City for three days. Brandon flew separately to his parents’ house in New Jersey, and we all met there for Thanksgiving. Upon our arrival I broke out in hives. At least by now I knew which antihistamine to buy. My mother and I slept downstairs in the guest room that Brandon and I used to sleep in, and he took his childhood bedroom upstairs. June was thrilled for a slumber party with her grandparents. His mother commended us on the whole situation, said how glad she was that we’d come. But I don’t know how you think you’ll do this, she added, once you have other people in your lives.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Oh, but she mourned his good, honest friendship; he had taken that from her, the thing she most needed — but perhaps after all it had never existed except as a cloak for this other emotion. And then, lying there in the thickening darkness, she would shrink from what might be waiting in the future, for all that had just happened might happen again — there were other men in the world beside Martin. Fool, never to have visualized this thing before, never to have faced the possibility of it; now she understood her resentment of men when their voices grew soft and insinuating. Yes, and now she knew to the full the mean- ing of fear, and Martin it was, who had taught her its meaning — IIO THE WELL OF LONELINESS her friend — the man she had utterly trusted had pulled the scales from her eyes and revealed it. Fear, stark fear, and the shame of such fear — that was the legacy left her by Martin. And yet he had made her so happy at first, she had felt so contented, so natural with him; but that was because they had been like two men, companions, sharing each other’s interests. And at this thought her bitterness would all but flow over; it was cruel, it was cowardly of him to have deceived her, when all the time he had only been waiting for the chance to force this other thing on her.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Some one had come in and was stumping down the room in squeaky trench boots. It was Blakeney holding the time-sheet in her hand—funny old monosyllabic Blakeney, with her curly white hair cropped as close as an Uhlan’s, and her face that suggested a sensitive monkey. ‘Service, Gordon; wake the kid! Howard—Thurloe—ready?’ They got up and hustled into their trench coats, found their gas masks and finally put on their helmets. Then Stephen shook Mary Llewellyn very gently: ‘It’s time.’ Mary opened her clear, grey eyes: ‘Who? What?’ she stammered. ‘It’s time. Get up, Mary.’ The girl staggered to her feet, still stupid with fatigue. Through the cracks in the shutters the dawn showed faintly. 2 The grey of a bitter, starved-looking morning. The town like a mortally wounded creature, torn by shells, gashed open by bombs. Dead streets—streets of death—death in streets and their houses; yet people still able to sleep and still sleeping. ‘Stephen.’ ‘Yes, Mary?’ ‘How far is the Poste?’ ‘I think about thirty kilometres; why?’ ‘Oh, nothing—I only wondered.’ The long stretch of an open country road. On either side of the road wire netting hung with pieces of crudely painted rag—a camouflage this to represent leaves. A road bordered by rag leaves on tall wire hedges. Every few yards or so a deep shell-hole. ‘Are they following, Mary? Is Howard all right?’ The girl glanced back: ‘Yes, it’s all right, she’s coming.’ They drove on in silence for a couple of miles. The morning was terribly cold; Mary shivered. ‘What’s that?’ It was rather a foolish question for she knew what it was, knew only too well! ‘They’re at it again,’ Stephen muttered. A shell burst in a paddock, uprooting some trees. ‘All right, Mary?’ ‘Yes—look out! We’re coming to a crater!’ They skimmed it by less than an inch and dashed on, Mary suddenly moving nearer to Stephen. ‘Don’t joggle my arm, for the Lord’s sake, child!’ ‘Did I? I’m sorry.’ ‘Yes—don’t do it again,’ and once more they drove forward in silence. Farther down the road they were blocked by a farm cart: ‘Militaires! Militaires! Militaires!’ Stephen shouted. Rather languidly the farmer got down and went to the heads of his thin, stumbling horses. ‘Il faut vivre,’ he explained, as he pointed to the cart, which appeared to be full of potatoes. In a field on the right worked three very old women; they were hoeing with a diligent and fatalistic patience.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Subsequent rulings by the official Church only tightened up on medical exceptions to the ban on abortions, eventually even including ectopic pregnancies life-threatening to the mother. In the early twentieth century this stance was strengthened in reaction not merely to an opposite tendency to liberalization in Protestant thought, but to the legalization of abortion in Communist Russia, amid many other undeniable horrors. The Catholic insistence on the right to life, of which opposition to abortion was now a centrepiece, chimed with many emphases in Western liberalism when so much else in official Catholic teaching did not. [30] * The bull of 1869 and the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 were parts of a greater pattern. Pius IX’s personal popularity and more than three decades as Pope, the longest reign in Catholic history, combined in encouraging him to affirm more and more dogma that the Church had before left indeterminate. He needed to produce a coherent response to the legacy of the Revolution: not merely its destruction of ancient authority but its creation of government based on Enlightenment principles, paying at least lip-service to popular consent and choice. The Revolutionary idea of a nation became the chief motor of politics in nineteenth-century Europe, where often no comparable political unit, common culture or mass consciousness had previously existed. For many a ‘liberal’, nationalism became an emotional replacement for the Christian religion. It might imitate the French example, but many lands overrun by French Revolutionary or Napoleonic armies gained a full sense of national unity in outraged reaction. On that basis, Belgium, Italy and Germany all built up national identities during the nineteenth century, in the process also overturning what remained of ancient political structures. Their rhetoric of national resistance in turn provided a model for the twentieth-century struggles of non-European colonial peoples against the rule of those same nation-states. Could a Catholic also be a liberal or a nationalist? In the first years of his papal reign, Pius had shown sympathy with some aspects of liberal changes and aspirations, but he was horrified by the continent-wide upheavals of 1848–9; among much else, a republic was declared in the Papacy’s 1,110-year-old endowment of territories in central Italy, and the Pope had to flee Rome. He became more bitter still when the royal House of Savoy reinvented itself as a monarchy for all Italy and pursued its goal through military conquest, not least of those same Papal States. In his ‘Syllabus of Errors’ of 1864 the Pope compiled a ragbag of denunciations from recent papal statements which famously culminated in condemning the error that the Pope ‘can and ought to reconcile himself with progress, liberalism and modern civilization’. [31] The Syllabus made some sense in the context of Catholic southern Europe and Latin America amid continuing anti-clerical onslaughts on the Church; yet, for many conscientious French and German Catholics seeking reconciliation with liberal principles, it was disastrous.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  I guess you think this is all pretty silly don't you now... ???" "Well, to tell the truth... Yes..." "You are frank, Carl... This is good.... And now ...Carl..." He dragged the name out caressingly like a sweet con dick about to offer you an Old Gold -- ( just like a cop to smoke Old Golds somehow) and go into his act.... The con dick does a little dance step. "Why don't you make The Man a proposition?" he jerks a head towards his glowering superego who is always referred to in the third person as "The Man" or "The Lieutenant." "That's the way the Lieutenant is, you play fair with him and he'll play fair with you.... We'd like to go light on you.... If you could help us in some way." His words open out into a desolate waste of cafeterias and street corners and lunch rooms. Junkies look the other way munching pound cake. "The Fag is wrong." The Fag slumps in a hotel chair knocked out on goof balls with his tongue lolling out. He gets up in a goof ball trance, hangs himself with- out altering his expression or pulling his tongue in. The dick is diddling on a pad. "Know Marty Steel?" Diddle. "Yes." "Can you score off him?" Diddle? Diddle? "He's skeptical." "But you can score." Diddle diddle "You scored off him last week didn't you?" Diddle??? "Yes." "Well you can score off him this week." Diddle... Diddle... Diddle... "You can score off him today." No diddle. "Not No! Not that!!" "Now look are you going to cooperate" -- three vicious diddles -- "or does the... does the Man cornhole you?" He raises a fay eyebrow. "And so Carl you will please oblige to tell me how many times and under what circumstances you have uh indulged in homosexual acts???" His voice drifts away. "If you have never done so I shall be inclined to think of you as a somewhat atypical young man." The doctor raises a coy admonishing finger. "In any case..." He tapped the file and flashed a hideous leer. Carl noticed that the file was six inches thick. In fact it seemed to have thickened enormously since he entered the room. "Well, when I was doing my military service... These queers used to proposition me and sometimes... when I was blank..." "Yes, of course, Carl," the doctor brayed heartily. "In your position I would have done the same I don't mind telling you heh heh heh.... Well, E guess we can uh dismiss as irrelevant these uh understandable means of replenishing the uh exchequer . And now, Carl, there were perhaps" -- one finger tapped the file which gave out a faint effluvia of moldy jock straps and chlorine -- "occasions. When no uh economic factors were involved." A green flare exploded in Carl's brain. He saw Hans' lean brown body -- twisting towards him, quick breath on his shoulder.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  When I say "the junk virus is public health problem number one of the world today," I refer not just to the actual ill effects of opiates upon the individual’s health (which, in cases of controlled dosage may be minimal), but also to the hysteria that drug use often occasions in populaces who are prepared by the media and narcotics officials for a hysterical reaction. The junk problem, in its present form, began with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 in the U.S.A. Anti-drug hysteria is now worldwide, and it poses a deadly threat to personal freedoms and due-process protections of the law everywhere. - William S. Burroughs October 1991 I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train...Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me. I am evidently his idea of a character. You know the type comes on with bartenders and cab drivers, talking about right hooks and the Dodgers, call the counterman in Nedick's by his first name. A real asshole. And right on time this narcotics dick in a white trench coat (imagine tailing somebody in a white trench coat -trying to pass as a fag I guess) hit the platform. I can hear the way he would say it holding my outfit in his left hand, right hand on his piece: "I think you dropped something, fella" But the subway is moving. "So long flatfoot!" I yell, giving the fruit his B production. I look into the fruit's eyes, take in the white teeth, the Florida tan, the two hundred dollar sharkskin suit, the button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and carrying The News as a prop. "Only thing I read is Little Abner." A square wants to come on hip....Talks about "pod," and smoke it now and then, and keeps some around to offer the fast Hollywood types. "Thanks, kid," I say, "I can see you're one of our own." His face lights up like a pinball machine, with stupid, pink effect. "Grassed on me he did," I said morosely. ( Note: Grass is English thief slang for inform.) I drew closer and laid my dirty junky fingers on his sharkskin sleeve. "And us blood brothers in the same dirty needle, I can tell you in confidence he is due for a hot shot."(Note: This is a cap of poison junk sold to addict for liquidation purposes. Often given to informers. Usually the hot shot is strychnine since it tastes and looks like junk.) "Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a oneway whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Not thinking very well, the barman started for the front hall. ‘Hella, see him out!’ Koroviev shouted. Again that naked redhead in the front hall! The barman squeezed through the door, squeaked ‘Goodbye!’, and went off like a drunk man. Having gone down a little way, he stopped, sat on a step, took out the packet and checked—the ten-rouble bills were in place. Here a woman with a green bag came out of the apartment on that landing. Seeing a man sitting on a step and staring dully at some money, she smiled and said pensively: ‘What a house we’ve got . . . Here’s this one drunk in the morning . . . And the window on the stairway is broken again!’ Peering more attentively at the barman, she added: ‘And you, citizen, are simply rolling in money! . . . Give some to me, eh?’ ‘Let me alone, for Christ’s sake!’ the barman got frightened and quickly hid the money. The woman laughed. ‘To the hairy devil with you, skinflint! I was joking . . .’ And she went downstairs. The barman slowly got up, raised his hand to straighten his hat, and realized that it was not on his head. He was terribly reluctant to go back, but he was sorry about the hat. After some hesitation, he nevertheless went back and rang. ‘What else do you want?’ the accursed Hella asked him. ‘I forgot my hat . . .’ the barman whispered, pointing to his bald head. Hella turned around. The barman spat mentally and closed his eyes. When he opened them, Hella was holding out his hat to him and a sword with a dark hilt. ‘Not mine . . .’ the barman whispered, pushing the sword away and quickly putting on his hat. ‘You came without a sword?’ Hella was surprised. The barman growled something and quickly went downstairs. His head for some reason felt uncomfortable and too warm in the hat. He took it off and, jumping from fear, cried out softly: in his hands was a velvet beret with a dishevelled cock’s feather. The barman crossed himself. At the same moment, the beret miaowed, turned into a black kitten and, springing back on to Andrei Fokich’s head, sank all its claws into his bald spot. Letting out a cry of despair, the barman dashed downstairs, and the kitten fell off and spurted back up the stairway. Bursting outside, the barman trotted to the gates and left the devilish no. 302-bis for ever. What happened to him afterwards is known perfectly well. Running out the gateway, the barman looked around wildly, as if searching for something. A minute later he was on the other side of the street in a pharmacy.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  It tumbled noisily into it and there perished. The rook saluted deferentially, mounted the wheel, and flew off. A black cloak appeared at once from behind one of the tombstones. A fang flashed in the moonlight, and Margarita recognized Azazello. He gestured to Margarita, inviting her to get on the broom, jumped on to a long rapier himself, they both whirled up and in a few seconds, unnoticed by anyone, landed near no. 302-bis on Sadovaya Street. When the companions passed through the gateway, carrying the broom and rapier under their arms, Margarita noticed a man languishing there in a cap and high boots, probably waiting for someone. Light though Azazello’s and Margarita’s footsteps were, the solitary man heard them and twitched uneasily, not understanding who had produced them. By the sixth entrance they met a second man looking surprisingly like the first. And again the same story repeated itself. Footsteps . . . the man turned and frowned uneasily. And when the door opened and closed, he dashed after the invisible enterers, peeked into the front hall, but of course saw nothing. A third man, the exact copy of the second, and therefore also of the first, stood watch on the third-floor landing. He smoked strong cigarettes, and Margarita had a fit of coughing as she walked past him. The smoker, as if pricked with a pin, jumped up from the bench he was sitting on, began turning around uneasily, went to the banister, looked down. Margarita and her companion were by that time already at the door of apartment no. 50. They did not ring the bell. Azazello noiselessly opened the door with his own key. The first thing that struck Margarita was the darkness in which she found herself. It was as dark as underground, so that she involuntarily clutched at Azazello’s cloak for fear of stumbling. But then, from far away and above, the light of some little lamp flickered and began to approach. Azazello took the broom from under Margarita’s arm as they walked, and it disappeared without a sound in the darkness. Here they started climbing some wide steps, and Margarita began to think there would be no end to them. She was struck that the front hall of an ordinary Moscow apartment could contain this extraordinary invisible, yet quite palpable, endless stairway. But the climb ended, and Margarita realized that she was on a landing. The light came right up to them, and Margarita saw in this light the face of a man, long and black, holding a little lamp in his hand. Those who in recent days had been so unfortunate as to cross paths with him, would certainly have recognized him even by the faint tongue of flame from the lamp.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Dishes fell clattering from the tables, women screamed. All the while the waiters were tying up the poet with napkins, a conversation was going on in the coat room between the commander of the brig and the doorman. ‘Didn’t you see he was in his underpants?’ the pirate inquired coldly. ‘But, Archibald Archibaldovich,’ the doorman replied, cowering, ‘how could I not let him in, if he’s a member of Massolit?’ ‘Didn’t you see he was in his underpants?’ the pirate repeated. ‘Pardon me, Archibald Archibaldovich,’ the doorman said, turning purple, ‘but what could I do? I understand, there are ladies sitting on the veranda . . .’ ‘Ladies have nothing to do with it, it makes no difference to the ladies,’ the pirate replied, literally burning the doorman up with his eyes, ‘but it does to the police! A man in his underwear can walk the streets of Moscow only in this one case, that he’s accompanied by the police, and only to one place—the police station! And you, if you’re a doorman, ought to know that on seeing such a man, you must, without a moment’s delay, start blowing your whistle. Do you hear? Do you hear what’s going on on the veranda?’ Here the half-crazed doorman heard some sort of hooting coming from the veranda, the smashing of dishes and women’s screams. ‘Now, what’s to be done with you for that?’ the freebooter asked. The skin on the doorman’s face acquired a typhoid tinge, his eyes went dead. It seemed to him that the black hair, now combed and parted, was covered with flaming silk. The shirt-front and tailcoat disappeared and a pistol butt emerged, tucked into a leather belt. The doorman pictured himself hanging from the fore-topsail yard. His eyes saw his own tongue sticking out and his lifeless head lolling on his shoulder, and even heard the splash of waves against the hull. The doorman’s knees gave way. But here the freebooter took pity on him and extinguished his sharp gaze. ‘Watch out, Nikolai, this is the last time! We have no need of such doormen in the restaurant. Go find yourself a job as a beadle.’ Having said this, the commander commanded precisely, clearly, rapidly: ‘Get Pantelei from the snack bar. Police. Protocol. A car. To the psychiatric clinic.’ And added: ‘Blow your whistle!’ In a quarter of an hour an extremely astounded public, not only in the restaurant but on the boulevard itself and in the windows of houses looking on to the restaurant garden, saw Pantelei, the doorman, a policeman, a waiter and the poet Riukhin carry through the gates of Griboedov’s a young man swaddled like a doll, dissolved in tears, who spat, aiming precisely at Riukhin, and shouted for all the boulevard to hear: ‘You bastard! . . .

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  I know that office, they issue passports to anybody. Whereas I, for instance, wouldn’t issue one to the likes of you! Not on your life I wouldn’t! I’d just take one look at your face and instantly refuse!’ The cat got so angry that he flung the passport on the floor. ‘Your presence at the funeral is cancelled,’ the cat continued in an official voice. ‘Kindly return to your place of residence.’ And he barked through the door: ‘Azazello!’ At his call a small man ran out to the front hall, limping, sheathed in black tights, with a knife tucked into his leather belt, red-haired, with a yellow fang and with albugo in his left eye. Poplavsky felt he could not get enough air, rose from his seat and backed away, clutching his heart. ‘See him off, Azazello!’ the cat ordered and left the hall. ‘Poplavsky,’ the other twanged softly, ‘I hope everything’s understood now?’ Poplavsky nodded. ‘Return immediately to Kiev,’ Azazello went on. ‘Sit there stiller than water, lower than grass, and don’t dream of any apartments in Moscow. Clear?’ This small man, who drove Poplavsky to mortal terror with his fang, knife and blind eye, only came up to the economist’s shoulder, but his actions were energetic, precise and efficient. First of all, he picked up the passport and handed it to Maximilian Andreevich, and the latter took the booklet with a dead hand. Then the one named Azazello picked up the suitcase with one hand, with the other flung open the door, and, taking Berlioz’s uncle under the arm, led him out to the landing of the stairway. Poplavsky leaned against the wall. Without any key, Azazello opened the suitcase, took out of it a huge roast chicken with a missing leg wrapped in greasy newspaper, and placed it on the landing. Then he took out two pairs of underwear, a razor-strop, some book and a case, and shoved it all down the stairwell with his foot, except for the chicken. The emptied suitcase went the same way. There came a crash from below and, judging by the sound of it, the lid broke off. Then the red-haired bandit grabbed the chicken by the leg, and with this whole chicken hit Poplavsky on the neck, flat, hard, and so terribly that the body of the chicken tore off and the leg remained in Azazello’s hand. ‘All was confusion in the Oblonskys’ house,’ 3 as the famous writer Leo Tolstoy correctly put it. Precisely so he might have said on this occasion. Yes, all was confusion in Poplavsky’s eyes. A long spark flew before his eyes, then gave place to some funereal snake that momentarily extinguished the May day, and Poplavsky went hurtling down the stairs, clutching his passport in his hand. Reaching the turn, he smashed the window on the landing with his foot and sat on a step. The legless chicken went bouncing past him and fell down the stairwell.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  We should make a point of asking ourselves whether we want to win the argument or seek the truth, whether we are ready to change our views if the evidence is sufficiently compelling, and whether we are making “place for the other” in our minds in the Socratic manner. Above all, we need to listen. All too often in an argument or debate, we simply listen to others in order to twist their words and use them as grist for our own mill. True listening means more than simply hearing the words that are spoken. We have to become alert to the underlying message too and hear what is not uttered aloud. Angry speech in particular requires careful decoding. We should make an effort to hear the pain or fear that surfaces in body language, tone of voice, and choice of imagery. To take just one example: every fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation; and each one began with what was perceived to be an assault by the liberal or secular establishment.9 History shows that to attack any fundamentalist movement, whether militarily, politically, or in the media, is counterproductive because the assault merely convinces its adherents that their enemies really are bent on their destruction. If we analyze fundamentalist discourse as carefully as we interpret a poem or an important political speech, ferreting out the underlying emotions and intentions of the poet or speaker, this fear and humiliation become immediately apparent. Instead of ridiculing fundamentalist mythology, we should reflect seriously on the fact that it often expresses anxieties that no society can safely ignore. It is difficult to achieve this kind of dispassion, because any fundamentalist position is a profound challenge to principles and ideals, such as free speech or the rights of women, that are sacred to their liberal opponents. But aggression, righteous condemnation, and insult only make matters worse. Somehow we have to break the escalating cycle of attack and counterattack. We have seen what happens when fundamentalist fear hardens into rage.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [30] This combination has been available for export wherever traditional male roles look threatened. Sydney is central to a worldwide campaigning network throughout Anglicanism that has made no secret of its aim to supplant Lambeth Palace at the centre of the Anglican Communion, in order to promote a tailored version of ‘traditional values’. The campaign against homosexuality was galvanized by the choice of an openly partnered gay man as Bishop in the US Episcopal Church in 2003. Gene Robinson’s consecration for New Hampshire followed his open election by the diocese and took place in the largest venue available in the state, a university ice-hockey stadium (Plates 34 and 35). Following a slew of hate mail, both Robinson and his partner wore bullet- proof vests during the ceremony, as did Frank Griswold the Presiding Bishop of the Church: not a normal liturgical provision in the Anglican Communion. [31] In 2007, five provinces of the Communion took further joint action. They agreed to boycott the forthcoming Lambeth Conference and laid the foundations for an alternative, in an organization known as Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON). Four of the provinces were large Churches in central and east Africa, the other a small province in southern south America; others showed interest, including various conservative splinter groups formed in opposition to the progress of gay rights and women’s ministry in the US Episcopal and Canadian Anglican Churches. GAFCON has grown since, but it faces the recurrent difficulty of schisms based on principle; participants are liable to carry on splitting on principle. This is the value of homosexuality as an issue: women’s ordination divides GAFCON members, with some provinces ordaining women despite bitter criticism from others, but everyone can agree on condemning homosexuality, with the added advantage that it plays well on the frontiers of African Christianity and Islam. A favourite argument of African Anglicans denouncing Western attitudes to sexuality is that African Christians are ridiculed or worse by African Muslims because of their association with Churches that condone homosexuality. There is some truth in this; it has been one consideration in the Egyptian Coptic Church’s official reaffirmation of a firmly traditionalist line on same-sex relations. Despite gay people among the Coptic faithful urging change, the leadership is aware of the fragile position of Copts in a majority-Muslim Egyptian society. [32] Yet the competition between African Christians and African Muslims as to who can be most hostile to homosexuality irresistibly recalls competitive Protestant and Catholic punitive action against witchcraft in the European Reformation (above, Chapter 14).

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  The Doctor shrugs: 'It's the Old Army Game, son. Pea under the shell... Now you see it now you don't....') "And Doc Parker in the back room in his drugstore shooting horse heroin three grains a jolt -'Tonic,' he mutters. 'It's always Spring.' " 'Hands' Benson Town Pervert has took up a querencia in the school privy (Querencia is bullfight term.... The bull will find a spot in the ring he likes and stay there and the bullfighter has to go in and meet the bull on his bull terms or coax him out -- one or the other). Sheriff A.Q. 'Flat' Larsen say 'Some way we gotta lure him outa that querencia.'...And Old Ma Lottie sleep ten years with a dead daughter and home cured too, wakes shivering in the East Texas dawn... vultures out over the black swamp water and cypress stumps.... "And now gentlemen -- I trust there are no transvestites present -- he he -- and you are all gentlemen by act of Congress it being only remain to establish you male humans, positively no Transitionals in either direction will be allowed in this decent hall. Gentlemen, present short arms. Now you have all been briefed on the importance of keeping your weapons well lubricated and ready for any action flank or rear guard." STUDENTS: "Hear! Hear!" They wearily unbutton their flies. One of them brandishes a huge erection. PROF: "And now, gentlemen, where was I? Oh yes, Ma Lottie... She wake shivering in the gentle pink dawn, pink as the candles on a little girl's birthday cake, pink as spun sugar, pink as a sea-shell, pink as a cock pulsing in a red fucking light.... Ma Lottie... hurumph... if this prolixity be not cut short will succumb to the infirmities of age and join her daughter in formaldehyde. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge the poet... I should like to call your attention to the symbolism of the Ancient Mariner himself ." STUDENTS: " Himself the man says." "Thereby call attention to his own unappetizing person." "That wasn't a nice thing to do, Teach." A hundred juvenile delinquents... switch blades clicking like teeth move at him. PROF: "Oh Lansakes!" He tries desperately to disguise himself as an old woman with high black shoes and umbrella.... "If it wasn't for my lumbago can't rightly bend over I'd turn them offering my Sugar Bum the way baboons do it....