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 My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  reaccustomed to a feeling of cozy extravagance. I put on a little weight, and so when I lay down on the living room floor, my bones didn’t hurt. My face lost its mean edge. I asked for flowers. “Lilies.” “Birds of paradise.” “Daisies.” “A branch of catkins.” I jogged in place, did leg lifts, push-ups. It was easier and easier to pass the time between getting up and going down. But by the end of May, I sensed that I was going to grow restless soon. A prediction. The sound of tires on the wet pavement. A window was open so I could hear it. The sweet smell of spring crept in. The world was out there still, but I hadn’t looked at it in months. It was too much to consider it all, stretching out, a circular planet covered in creatures and things growing, all of it spinning slowly on an axis created by what—some freak accident? It seemed implausible. The world could be flat just as easily as it could be round. Who could prove anything? In time, I would understand, I told myself. • • • ON MAY 28, I came to, knowing this was the last time I would perform my habitual ablutions and take the Infermiterol. There was only one pill left. I swallowed it and prayed for mercy. Light from passing cars slid through the blinds and flashed across the living room walls in yellow stripes, once, twice. I turned to face the ceiling. The floorboards gave a short screech, like the squelch of a boat turning suddenly in a storm. A hum in the air signaled the approaching wave. Sleep was coming for me. I knew the sound of it by now, the foghorn of dead space that put me on autopilot while my conscious self roamed like a goldfish. The sound got louder until it was almost deafening, and then it stopped. In that silence, I began to drift down into the darkness, descending at first so slowly and steadily, I felt I was being lowered on pulleys—by angels with gold-spun ropes around my body, I imagined, and then by the electric casket lowering device they used at both my parents’ burials, and so my heart quickened at that thought, remembering that I’d had parents once, and that I’d taken the last of the pills, that this was the end of something, and then the ropes seemed to detach and I was falling faster. My stomach turned and I was cold with sweat, and I started writhing, first grasping at the

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  It seemed the Lords and Ladies pressed past her, flowing silently along the walls and towards the long wooden tables. Plate and goblets were already set. The air was heavy with the aroma of supper. And then Beauty saw the Queen. She sat at the very end upon a raised dais. Her veiled head was encircled with a gold crown, and the deep sleeves of her green gown were trimmed in pearls and gold embroidery. Beauty was led forward by a quick snap of the Prince's fingers. The Queen had risen, and now she embraced her son as he stood before the dais. "Tribute, Mother, from the land over the Mountains, and the loveliest we have received in a long time if my memory serves me. My first love slave, and I am very proud to have claimed her." "And well you should be," said the Queen in a voice that sounded both young and cold. Beauty dared not look up at her. But it was the Prince's voice which frightened her most. "My first love slave." She remembered his puzzling commiserations with her parents, the mention of their service in this same land, and she felt her pulse quicken. "Exquisite, absolutely exquisite," said the Queen, "but all the Court must have a look at her. Lord Gregory," she said, and made an airy gesture. A great murmur rose from the Court gathered around. And Beauty saw a tall gray-haired man approach, though she could not see him clearly. He wore soft leather sock boots, turned down at the knees to reveal a lining of the finest miniver. "Display the girl..." "But Mother," the Prince protested. "Nonsense, all the common people have seen her. We shall see her," said the Queen. "And should she be gagged, your Highness?" asked this strange tall man with the fur-lined boots. "No, that is not necessary. Though punish her surely if she speaks or cries out." "And the hair, she is shielded by all this hair," said the man, but he was now lifting Beauty and immediately had her wrists clasped over her head. As she stood, she felt herself hopelessly revealed and could not prevent crying. She dreaded a reproof from the Prince, and she could see the Queen all the better though she did not want to see her. Black hair showed beneath the Queen's sheer veil, hanging in ripples over her shoulders, and her eyes were black as the Prince's eyes. "Leave her hair as it is," said the Prince almost jealously. "O, he will defend me!" Beauty thought. But then she heard the Prince himself give the order. "Mount her on the table for all to see." The table was rectangular and stood in the center of the room. It reminded Beauty of an altar. She was forced to kneel on it facing the thrones where the Prince had taken his place beside his mother. And quickly the gray-haired man placed a large block of smooth wood beneath her belly.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  He lifted her up onto the bed and laid her down. The candles threw a warm, almost rosy light over her. Her hair fell down on either side of the bed, and she seemed on the verge of crying out, her hands struggling to keep still at her sides. "My darling, you have a dignity about you that shields you from me, much like your lovely golden hair shrouds you and shields you. Now I want you to surrender to me. You'll see, and you'll be very surprised that you wept when I first suggested it." The Prince bent over her. He parted her legs. He could see the battle she fought not to cover herself or turn away from him. He stroked her thighs. Then with his finger and thumb, he reached into the silky damp hair itself and felt those tender little lips and forced them very wide open. Beauty gave a terrible shudder. With his left hand he covered her mouth, and behind his hand she cried softly. It seemed easier for him with him covering her mouth and that was all right for now, he thought. She shall be taught everything in time. And with his right fingers, he found that tiny nodule of flesh between her tender nether lips and he worked it back and forth until she raised her hips, arching her back, in spite of herself. Her little face under his hand was the picture of distress. He smiled to himself. But even as he smiled, he felt the hot fluid between her legs for the first time, the real fluid which had not come before with her innocent blood. "That's it, that's it, my darling," he said. "And you mustn't resist your Lord and master, hmmmm?" Now he opened his clothing and took out his hard, eager sex, and mounting her he let it rest against her thigh as he continued to stroke her and work her. She was twisting from one side to the other, her hands gathering up the soft sheets at her sides into knots, and it seemed her whole body grew pink, and the nipples of her breasts looked as hard as if they were tiny stones. He could not resist them. He bit at them with his teeth, playfully, not hurting her. He licked them with his tongue, and then he licked her sex, too, and as she struggled, and blushed and moaned beneath him, he mounted her, slowly. Again she arched her back. Her breasts were suffused with red. And as he drove his organ into her, he felt her shudder violently with unwilling pleasure. An awful cry was muffled by the hand over her mouth; she was shuddering so violently it seemed she all by lifted him on top of her. And then she lay still, moist, pink, with her eyes closed, breathing deeply as the tears flowed silently. "That was lovely, my darling," he said.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  I was on the phone. It was my first 911 call and it felt transgressive: Was this really an emergency? My classmates and I had been told as children that the police would fine you for unwarranted calls. Don’t call 911 because your sister cut your bangs too short. But there was this masturbating man: the outline of his body in the bushes, the movement of his hand. So I was on the phone, my blood scraping through me like sheets of tin. Police? Fire? Ambulance? Dispatch seemed to operate too slowly. What is your emergency? I told the operator how he’d held his hoodie shut with one hand, the other hand on his penis. I told her how he ran when I pulled out my phone . . . which way did he go? Toward the mall, I guess—he went in the direction of the mall. I told her his approximate height and weight, and how he’d yanked up his sweatpants before taking off. Then the call was over. The first call, and then a follow-up call with the police. (This happens often, unfortunately. We’ll send a car to the area.) Then I was boarding my train, still thinking about the man’s sturdy legs. Had they been hairy? Should I have told the police about that? Already, I doubted what I’d seen. If you’d asked me, a few weeks later, whether the man’s knees were plump or knobby, I would not have been able to tell you. He was, already, a shape fading into the landscape, absorbed and dispersed through my neighborhood. It was the most vivid experience I’d ever had in which my brain couldn’t supply all the details. Some details I did hold on to, if not the relevant ones: I was listening to Bonnie “Prince” Billy when I noticed him; the T-shirt I was wearing—low-cut and black—showed what little cleavage my A-cups could muster. Afterward I went to a music show and drank two Steam Whistle beers and stayed up until 3 a.m. I laughed with my coworkers and talked about work, and I didn’t bring up the encounter because masturbators aren’t small talk. WHEN YOU DON’T WALK ALONE AT NIGHT, YOU SAVE $20 monthly on drunken burger purchases. But you take cabs home from the bar, so you bypass that caloric gauntlet of delicious fast-food outlets and spend the money anyway. People tell you about a late-night poutinerie that recently opened near your apartment, and how they spoon tiny pierogi onto the french fries. That poutinerie may as well be Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, for all the good it does you. You do not eat poutine alone at 3 a.m. Safety is your comfort food. Three Years After

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  What if nobody believed Him again? What if He tried to prove his identity by walking across the water on Central Park Lake? Would CBS Evening News cover the occurrence? Would it be billed as a human interest story? I laughed. Brian laughed too. It was only an idea for a science fiction novel, he said. It was only a joke. In the days that followed, the jokes multiplied. What if he were Zeus and I were Hera? What if he were Dante and I Beatrice? What if there were two of each of us—matter and antimatter, three- dimensional and no-dimensional? What if the people on the subway were really communicating with him telepathically and asking him to save them? What if Christ came back and liberated all the animals in the Central Park Zoo? What if the yaks followed Him down Fifth Avenue and birds sat and sang on His shoulders? Would people believe who He was then? What if He blessed the computers and instead of spewing out printed sheets about which housewives buy the most detergent, they suddenly started spewing out loaves and fishes? What if the world was really controlled by a gigantic computer and nobody knew it except Brian? What if this computer ran on human blood? What if, as Sartre said, we were all in hell right now? What if we were all controlled by complex machines which were controlled by other complex machines which were controlled by other complex machines? What if we had no freedom at all? What if man could only assert his freedom by dying on the cross? What if you walked across the streets of New York against red lights with your eyes closed for a whole week and you weren’t even grazed by a car? Did that prove you were God? What if every book you opened at random had the letters G O D somewhere in every paragraph? Wasn’t that proof positive? Night after night the questions continued. Brian repeated them at me like a catechism. What if? What if? What if? Listen to me. Don’t fall asleep! Listen to me! The world is ending and you’re going to sleep through it! Listen to me! In his frenzy to have a constant audience he even slapped my cheek once or twice to awaken me. Dazed and bleary-eyed, I listened. And listened. And listened. After the fifth night, it was no longer possible to doubt that Brian had no plans for science fiction. He himself was the Second Coming. The recognition was slow to dawn. When it did, I wasn’t actually sure he wasn’t God. But, according to his logic, if he was Jesus, then I was the Holy Ghost. And bleary-eyed as I was, I knew that was crazy. On Friday, Brian’s boss left town for the weekend and delegated him to close an important deal with the makers of an oven-cleaning product called Miracle Foam.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  When I stood upright afterward, I started to go blind. The fluorescent lights were on overhead. The edges of my vision turned black. Like a cloud, the darkness came and rested in front of my eyes. I could move my eyes up and down, but the black cloud stayed fixed. Then it grew, widening. I buckled down to the kitchen floor and splayed out on the cold tile. I was going to sleep now, I hoped. I tried to surrender. But I would not sleep. My body refused. My heart shuddered. My breath caught. Maybe now is the moment, I thought: I could drop dead right now. Or now. Now. But my heart kept up its dull bang bang, thudding against my chest like Reva banging on my door. I gasped. I breathed. I’m here, I thought. I’m awake. I thought I heard something, a scratching sound at the door. Then an echo. Then an echo of that echo. I sat up. A rush of cold air hit my neck. “Kshhhh,” the air said. It was the sound of blood rushing to my brain. My vision cleared. I went back to the sofa. I watched Jenny Jones and Maury Povich and Nightline. • • • WHEN THE TWENTIETH CAME, I went downtown to see Dr. Tuttle. I felt drunk and crazy getting dressed and lacing up a pair of rubber-soled boots from the closet, which I hadn’t remembered buying. I felt drunk in the elevator, I felt drunk walking across York, I felt drunk in the cab. I toddled up the steps to Dr. Tuttle’s brownstone and leaned on the buzzer for a good minute until she came to the door. The snow-covered street blinded me. I shut my eyes. I was dying. I would tell Dr. Tuttle that. I was the walking dead. “You look troubled,” she said matter-of-factly through the glass. I looked at her standing in the foyer. She wore red long underwear under a fleece cape. Her hair came down over her forehead and covered the top halves of the lenses in her glasses. She had her neck brace on again. “I’ve done some reorganizing,” she said, opening the door. “You’ll see.” I hadn’t been to her office in over a month. A full menorah of candles had melted in a baking dish on top of the radiator in the waiting room. A fake Christmas tree had been wedged into the corner, the top third lopped off and placed next to it in a milk crate. The main part of the tree was decorated with purple strands of tinsel and what looked like costume jewelry—fake pearl necklaces, gold and silver bangles, children’s rhinestone tiaras, baubley clip-on earrings. Her office smelled like iodine and sage. Where the unsittable fainting sofa had been there was now a large, Band-Aid–colored massage table. “I’ve just been certified as a shaman, or sha- woman, if you please,” Dr.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She could not see his expression in the darkness. "All right, there is but one answer," he said to her. "You shall become accustomed to all the sights of the castle, and I shall become accustomed to seeing you accustomed to them." He pulled the bell rope by the bed. And lifting Beauty he sat her at the end of the bed so that her legs were curled under her. A Page entered, as innocent as the boy who had so diligently punished Prince Alexi, and like all the Pages he was extremely tall with powerful arms. Beauty was certain they had all been chosen for these endowments. She had no doubt he could have held her by the ankles had he been ordered, but his face was smooth without the slightest meanness. "Where is Prince Alexi?" The Prince demanded. He appeared angry and resolute, and he paced back and forth as he spoke. "O, he is in frightful trouble tonight, your Highness. The Queen is much concerned with his clumsiness. You know he must be her example to others. She had had him tied in the garden, most uncomfortably." "Yes, well, I shall make him even more uncomfortable. Obtain my mother's permission and bring him to me and bring Squire Felix with him." Beauty heard all this in quiet amazement. She tried to make her face as smooth as the Page's face. But she was more than alarmed. She was going to see Prince Alexi again, and she could not imagine concealing her feelings from her Prince. If only she could distract him from this. But when she made a little whispering sound, he ordered her at once to be quiet, and to sit where she was, and to cast her eyes down. Her hair fell around her, tickling her naked arms and her thighs, and almost with pleasure she realized there was no escaping this. Squire Felix appeared almost immediately, and as she had suspected he was the Page who had so vigorously spanked Prince Alexi earlier. He had the gold paddle fixed to his belt so it dangled at his side as he bowed to the Prince. "All of those who serve here are picked for their gifts," Beauty thought, looking at him, for he too was fair, and his blond hair made an excellent frame for his youthful face, thought it was somewhat plainer than those of the captive Princes. "And Prince Alexi?" the Prince demanded. His color was high, his eyes had an almost evil glitter, and Beauty became frightened again. "We're preparing him, your Highness," said Squire Felix. "And why should this take so long? How long has he served in this house that he should be so lacking in respect?"

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Any looming shadow prompted its body to dart away. In the new world of hunting, however, predators and prey alike began to evolve more capable systems for movement, or motor systems, to navigate with greater speed and dexterity. These newer animals could dart, turn, and dive deliberately toward things like food and away from things like threats in ways that suited their environment. Once creatures could sense at a distance and make more sophisticated movements, evolution favored those who performed these tasks efficiently. If they chased a meal but moved too slowly, something else caught the meal and ate it first. If they burned up energy fleeing from a potential threat that never arrived, they wasted resources that they might have needed later. Energy efficiency was a key to survival. You can think about energy efficiency like a budget. A financial budget tracks money as it’s earned and spent. A budget for your body similarly tracks resources like water, salt, and glucose as you gain and lose them. Each action that spends resources, such as swimming or running, is like a withdrawal from your account. Actions that replenish your resources, such as eating and sleeping, are like deposits. This is a simplified explanation, but it captures the key idea that running a body requires biological resources. Every action you take (or don’t take) is an economic choice​—​your brain is guessing when to spend resources and when to save them. The best way to keep to a financial budget, as you may know from personal experience, is to avoid surprises​— ​to anticipate your financial needs before they arise and make sure you have the resources to meet them. The same is true of a body budget. Little Cambrian creatures needed an energy-efficient way to survive when a hungry predator was nearby. Should they wait around until the ravenous beast made its move and then react by freezing or hiding? Or should they anticipate the lunge and prepare their bodies in advance to escape? When it came to body budgeting, prediction beat reaction. A creature that prepared its movement before the predator struck was more likely to be around tomorrow than a creature that awaited a predator’s pounce. Creatures that predicted correctly most of the time, or made nonfatal mistakes and learned from them, did well. Those that frequently predicted poorly, missed threats, or false-alarmed about threats that never materialized didn’t do so well. They explored their environment less, foraged less, and were less likely to reproduce. Your brain runs a budget for your body that regulates water, salt, glucose, and many other biological resources inside you. Scientists call the budgeting process allostasis . The scientific name for body budgeting is allostasis . It means automatically predicting and preparing to meet the body’s needs before they arise.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  After a while, I began to wonder if she was drunk. Maybe we’d die in a car accident, I thought. I leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the window and looked out at the dark water of the East River. It wouldn’t be that bad to die, I thought. Traffic slowed. Reva turned the radio down. “Can I sleep over at your place?” she asked stiffly. “I don’t want to be needy, but I’m afraid of being alone right now. I don’t feel like myself and I’m afraid something bad is going to happen.” “Okay,” I said, though I assumed she’d change her mind a few minutes past midnight. “We can watch a movie,” she said. “Whatever you want. Hey, can you dig my gum out of my purse? I don’t want to take my hands off the wheel.” Reva’s fake Gucci bag sat between us on the console. I fished around tampons and perfume and hand sanitizer and her makeup kit and rolled up issues of Cosmo and Marie Claire and a hairbrush and a toothbrush and toothpaste and her huge wallet and her cell phone and her datebook and her sunglasses and finally found a single piece of cinnamon Extra in the little side pocket otherwise full of old LIRR ticket receipts. The paper had turned pink and oily. “Wanna split it?” she asked. “Gross,” I said. “No.” Reva put her hand out. I watched her watching the road. Maybe she wasn’t drunk, I thought, just exhausted. I placed the piece of gum in her palm. Reva unwrapped it and stuck it in her mouth and flicked the wrapper over her shoulder and chewed and kept on driving. I stared down into the East River again, black and glittering with the yellow lights of the city. The traffic wasn’t budging. I thought of my apartment. I hadn’t been there in days—not awake, anyway. I imagined the mess I’d discover with Reva when we walked in. I hoped she wouldn’t comment. I didn’t think she would, given the day. “I always think about earthquakes when I’m on this bridge,” Reva said. “You know, like in San Francisco when that bridge collapsed?” “This is New York City,” I said. “We don’t get earthquakes.” “I was watching the World Series when it happened,” Reva said. “With my dad. I totally remember it. Do you remember it?” “No,” I lied. Of course I remembered it, but I’d thought nothing of it. “You’re watching a baseball game and then all of a sudden, boom. And you’re like, thousands of people just died.” “It wasn’t thousands.” “A lot, though.” “Maybe a few hundred, max.” “A lot of people got crushed on that freeway. And on that bridge,” Reva insisted. “It’s fine, Reva,” I said. I didn’t want her to cry again.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She almost let out a little cry. "Be still, my dear," he said matter-of-factly. "Your nipples are tender and must be slightly toughened. You've been subjected to very little sport so far from your love-stricken master." Beauty was frightened by this. Her nipples felt painfully hard to her; she knew her face had colored darkly. It seemed all the feeling in her breasts swelled and pumped towards those tiny hard nipples. Mercifully, Leon let go of her breasts with a hard squeeze. But then he parted her legs and rubbed the oil into her inner thighs, and this was even worse for her. She could feel her sex throbbing. She wondered if it gave off heat that he could feel with his hands. She hoped he would be quick. Yet even as she lay, red faced and trembling, he pushed her legs farther apart, and to her horror, parted the lips of her sex with his fingers as though inspecting her. "O, please..." she whispered, turning her head from side to side, her eyes stinging. "Now, Beauty," he scolded gently, "you must never never plead for anything from anyone, not even from your loyal and devoted groom. I must inspect you to see if you are sore, and as I thought, you are. Your Prince has been rather...devoted." Beauty bit her lip and closed her eyes as he widened the orifice and now oiled it. She felt as if she were being pulled apart, and even under the plaster that tiny knot of feeling throbbed above the opening Leon's fingers had broadened. "If he touches it, I shall die," she thought, but he was quite careful not to do that, though she felt his fingers entering her, and massaging the lips of her vagina. "Poor darling slave," he whispered to her with feeling. "Now sit up. If I were to have my way, you would rest. But Lord Gregory wants you to see the rest of the Training Hall and the Hall of Punishments. Let me finish your hair quickly." He began to brush Beauty's hair and arrange it in coils on the back of her head as she sat, still trembling, her knees drawn up, and her head bowed. THE TRAINING HALL BEAUTY WASN'T certain that she hated Lord Gregory. Perhaps there was something comforting in his air of command. What would it be like to be here without someone who directed her so completely? But he appeared obsessed with his duties. As soon as he took her out of Leon's hands, he gave her two gratuitous blows with the paddle before ordering her to her knees to follow him. She was to keep close to the heel of his right boot, and she was to observe all that was around her.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And one may indeed be wary, but the point is that it was inevitable that black and white should arrive at this dizzying height of tension. Only when we have passed this moment will we know what our history has made of us. Many white people appear to live in a state of carefully re pressed terror in relation to blacks. There is something curious and paradoxical about this terror, which is invoh·ed not only with the common fear of death, but with a sense of its being considered utterly irrelevant whether one is breathing or not. I think that this has something to do with the fact that, 4-7 2 NO NAME IN THE STREET whereas white men have killed black men for sport, or out of terror or out of the intolerable excess of terror called hatred, or out of the necessity of affirming their identity as white men, none of these motives appear necessarily to obtain for black men: it is not necessary for a black man to hate a white man, or to have any particular teelings about him at all, in order to realize that he must kill him. Yes, we have come, or are com ing to this, and there is no point in flinching before the pros pect of this exceedingly cool species of fratricide-which prospect white people, after all, have brought on themselves. Of course, whenever a black man discusses violence he is said to be "advocating" it. This is very far indeed tr om my inten tion, if only because I have no desire whatever to see a gen eration perish in the streets. But the shape and extent of whatever violence may come is not in the hands of people like myselt� but in the hands of the American people, who are at present among the most dishonorable and violent people in the world. I am merely trying to face certain blunt, human tacts. I do not carry a gun and do not consider myself to be a violent man: but my lite has more than once depended on the gun in a brother's holster. I know that when certain pow erful and blatant enemies of black people are shoveled, at last, into the ground I may feel a certain pity that they spent their lives so badly, but I certainly do not mourn their passing, nor, when I hear that they arc ailing, do I pray for their recovery.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And this was a dreadful moment-as brief as lightning, and far more illuminating. I realized that this man thought that he was being kind; and he was, indeed, being as kind as can NO NAME IN THE STREET be expected tram a guide in hell. I realized that I must not speak to him, must not involve myself with him in any way whatever. I wasn't hungry anymore, but I certainly couldn't say that. Not only because this would have forced both of us to go further, into what confrontation I dared not think, but because of my Northern accent. It was the first time I realized that this accent was going to be a very definite liability; since I certainly couldn't change it, I was going to have to find some way of turning it into some kind of asset. But not at this very flaming moment, on this dark and empty street. I saved my honor, hopefully, by reflecting, Well, this is what you came here for. Hit it-and I tore my eyes fr om his face and walked through the door he had so kindly pointed out. I found myself in a small cubicle, with one electric light, and a counter, with, perhaps, four or five stools. On one side of the cubicle was a window. This window more closely re sembled a cage-wire mesh, and an opening in the mesh. I was, now, in the back of the restaurant, though no one in the res taurant could see me. I was behind the restaurant counter, behind the hatchet-faced woman, who had her back to me, serving the white customers at the counter. I was nearly close enough to touch them, certainly close enough to touch her, close enough to kill them all, but they couldn't see me, either. Hatchet-Face now turned to me, and said, "What you want?" This time, she did not say, "boy": it was no longer necessary. I told her I wanted a hamburger and a cup of coffee, which I didn't; but I wanted to see how those on my side of the mesh were served; and I wondered if she had to wash her hands each time, before she served the white tolks again. Pos sibly not: for the hamburger came in paper, and the coffee in a paper cup. I had all I could do to be silent as I paid her, and she turned away.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This obser vation-set to music, as are so many black observations denies, simply, the validity of the legend which is responsible for these films: films which exist tor the sole purpose of per petuating the legend. Black men, after all, have been the lovers, and victims, of women like the woman in In This, Our Life: and these women CHAPTER TWO 5 2 3 have also been the victims of black men: and sometimes they have loved each other: and sometimes had to live in hell to pay for it. Even the most thoughtless, even the most deluded black person knows more about his life than the image he is offered as the justification of it. Black men know something about white sheriffs. They know, for one thing, that the shcritf is no fr eer to become friends with them than they arc to be come friends with the sheri ff: For example: A white taxi driver once drove me fr om the airport in Bir mingham, Alabama, to the Gaston Motel. This is a long, dark, tree-lined drive, and the taxi driver was breaking the law: for a white taxi driver is not-or was not, it is hard to be accurate concerning the pace of my country's progress-allowed to pick up a black fare . That this was not a wicked man is proven, perhaps, by the fact that I am still here. But I was in his cab only because the idea of waiting another hour at the airport (sitting on my typewriter, which I never carried South again) was too fr ightening. I had had no choice but to gamble on him. Y ct, I could not be at case about his motives in breaking the law for a black, Northern journalist. It was perfectly pos sible, after all, that he had no intention of driving me to the Gaston Motel (which had already been bombed three times) but to my death. And there was no way for this thought not to have entered my mind: I would have had to be mindless not to have thought it. And what was he thinking? For, I felt that he wanted to talk to me, and I certainly wanted to talk to him. But neither of us could manage it. It was not his fault, and it was not my fault.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Without the really extraordinary cooperation of my German publishers, I could never have managed it at all. But manage it we did, and so the day came when I was deposited in the waiting room of the prison at Holstenglacis. The prison is part of a complex of intimidating structures, scattered over quite a large area-a little like the complex on l' lle de Ia Cite in Paris, or the complex on Center Street in New York-but it resembles neither of them. It is more me dieval than either, and gives the impression of being far more isolated-though, as I say, I could walk to it from my ex ceedingly fashionable hotel. Yet, the streets were torn up all around it-men at work; I learned to walk from there because taxis seemed never to come anywhere near it; there was a tramline, but I did not know how to use it, and it also seemed to skirt the prison. The only people I ever saw around there were clearly connected with the prison, or were visitors; you could tell the lawyers by their briefcases and their slightly chas tened air of self-importance. To visit the prisoner, one had, of course, to have a pass. I am not, legally, related to Tony by blood, and my only pretext to have the right to visit (a right 416 NO NAME IN THE STREET later to be taken fr om me) was that I was the only fr iend he had in Germany, and I had traveled quite a long way to see him. This was all arranged between my publishers and the lawyer, and I will never quite know how it was done. But the lawyer rang the bell, anyway, one fr osty afternoon, before the great door, which opened and let us in. Then, I was deposited in the waiting room, and before me, at the height of two or three steps, was the great barred door which led to the interior of the prison. There were two or three people in the room with me. One man silently offered me a cigarette and, silently, I took it. The smoke between us, then, was all that we could manage of communion. I was fr ightened in a way very hard to describe. The fact that this was the fabled Germany of the Third Reich, and this was a German prison, certainly had something to do with it.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  And as scary as her lineage was, Mamaw Bonnie herself was so terrifying that, many decades later, a Marine Corps recruiter would tell me that I’d find boot camp easier than living at home. “Those drill instructors are mean,” he said. “But not like that grandma of yours.” That meanness wasn’t enough to dissuade my grandfather. So Mamaw and Papaw were married as teenagers in Jackson, in 1947.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We spent six weeks in London visiting our English relatives, seeing the sights, accumulating huge bills at Claridge’s which, my father said, were “paid by Uncle Sam....” What a rich uncle. But I spent the trip being terrified by all the torture devices we saw in the Tower of London and all the wax horrors we saw at Madame Tussaud’s. I had never seen thumbscrews and racks before. I had never realized. “Do people still use those things?” I asked my mother. “No, darling. They only used them in the olden days when people were more barbaric. Civilization has progressed since then.” It was civilized 1955, only a decade or so since the Nazi holocaust; it was the era of atomic testing and stockpiling; it was two years after the Korean War, and only shortly after the height of the communist witchhunts, with blacklists containing the names of many of my parents’ friends. But my mother, smoothing the real linen sheets between which I trembled, insisted, that rainy night in London, on civilization. She was trying to spare me. If the truth was too hard to bear, then she would lie to me. “Good,” I said, closing my eyes. And Uncle Sam, who made so many things tax deductible, had just two years ago electrocuted the Rosenbergs in the name of civilization. Was two years ago the olden days? My mother and I conspired to pretend it was as we hugged each other before turning out the light. But where was my mother now? She hadn’t saved me then and she couldn’t save me now, but if only she’d appear, I’d surely be able to get through the night. Night by night, we get by. If only I could be like Scarlett O’Hara and think about it all tomorrow. W SEVENTEEN Dreamwork It seems to me like this. It’s not a terrible thing—I mean it may be terrible, but it’s not damaging, it’s not poisoning to do without something one really wants.... What’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better. —Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook hen it was clear to me that I’d never fall asleep, I decided to get up. As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn’t care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you. I sat upright on the bed, pinned my hair in a barrette, and took off my soiled clothes. I marched to the curtain, pushed it aside with great fake courage, and looked around. No one.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "I'm so afraid of you." "You'll find me more reasonable than you expect," he said. He removed his long cloak, tossing it over a chair, and bolted the door. Then he snuffed all but a few candles. He would sleep in his clothes as he did most nights, in the forest, or in the country inns, or in the houses of those humble peasants at which he sometimes stopped, and that was no great inconvenience to him. And as he drew near her now, he thought he must be merciful and make her punishment quick. And seating himself on the side of the bed, he reached out for her, and pulling her wrists into his left hand he brought her naked body down over his lap so that her legs dangled over the floor helplessly. "Very, very lovely," he said, his right hand moving languidly over her rounded buttocks, forcing them ever so slightly apart. Beauty was crying aloud, but muffling her cries into the bed, her hands held out in front of her by his long left arm. And now with his right hand he spanked her buttocks hard and heard her cries grow louder. It wasn�t really much of a slap. But it left a red mark on her. And he spanked her hard again, and he felt her writhing against him, the heat and moisture of her sex against his leg, and again he spanked her. "I think you are sobbing more from the humiliation than the pain," he scolded her in a soft voice. She was struggling not to make her cries too loud. He flattened out his right hand, and feeling the heat of her reddened buttocks drew it up and delivered another series of hard, loud slaps, smiling as he watched her struggle. He could have spanked her much harder, for his own pleasure, and without really hurting her. But he thought better of it. He had so many nights ahead of him for these delights. He lifted her up now so that she was standing in front of him. "Toss your hair back," he commanded. Her tear-stained face was unspeakably beautiful, her lips trembling, her blue eyes gleaming with the dampness of the tears. She obeyed immediately. "I don't think you were so very spoilt," he said. "I find you very obedient and eager to please, and this makes me very happy." He could see her relief. "Clasp your hands behind your neck," he said, "under your hair. That's it. Very good." He lifted her chin again. "And you have a lovely modest habit of looking down. But now I want you to look directly at me." She obeyed shyly, miserably. It seemed she felt her nakedness and her helplessness more fully now as she looked at him. Her lashes were matted and dark, and her blue eyes larger than he had thought. "Do you find me handsome?" he asked her.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I turned and looked at him. He was waving his arms wildly and jumping up and down. “The lightbulbs will go to heaven!” he shouted. “They will! They will!” “You’re driving me crazy!” I yelled in utter exasperation. “You’ll go to heaven!” he screamed, and then he grabbed my hand and started leading me toward the window. “Let’s go to heaven! Let’s go! Let’s go!” He threw open the window and leaned out. “Stop it!” I screamed hysterically. “I can’t stand this anymore!” and with that I began to shake him. He must have gotten really frightened because he put his hands around my throat and started choking me. “Shut up,” he yelled. “The police will come!” But I wasn’t screaming anymore. He tightened his grip. I started to black out. Why he let me go before he killed me, I’m not sure. Perhaps it was plain dumb luck on my part. I don’t know how to account for it. All I know is that when he finally let go, I was shaking all over and gasping for breath (and I remember later finding big blue bruises on my neck). I ran into the hall closet and sat there in the dark biting my knees and sobbing. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” I gasped. And then somehow I collected myself and called my family doctor. He was in East Hampton. I called my mother’s psychiatrist. He was in Fire Island. I called my current psychiatrist. He was in Wellfleet. I called a friend of my sister Randy’s who was a psychiatric social worker. She told me to send for the police or a doctor—any doctor. Brian was psychotic, she said, and possibly dangerous. I was not to stay alone with him. A Sunday in June and if you want to get sick, you’d better do it at a beach resort. No doctor to be found. I finally reached the guy who was pinch- hitting for my internist. He would be over right away, he said. Five hours later, he arrived. During all that time Brian was astonishingly subdued. He sat in the living room listening to Bach, seemingly in a trance. I sat in the bedroom trying to absorb what had happened. We pretended to ignore each other. The calm after the storm. At least Brian’s problem had a name now. It was the next best thing to a cure. Being told he was “psychotic” had given me a strange sense of relief. Here was a disease to be treated, a problem to be solved. Naming the thing made it less frightening. Also, it diminished my guilt. Insanity was no one’s fault. It was an act of God. There was something very comforting about that. All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  In other words, he’s a dog. Sometimes Rowdy can barely contain himself, and once this nearly proved to be his undoing. Rowdy was out for a walk with his owner, my friend Angie, when a teenage boy approached to pet him. Rowdy did not know the boy and proceeded to bark and jump up on him. The boy was not visibly hurt, so it was a surprise when a few hours later, his mother (who had not been present) had Rowdy arrested and registered as a “potentially dangerous dog.” Poor Rowdy had to be muzzled on walks for several years afterward. And if Rowdy ever again jumps up on someone, he will be registered as vicious and maybe even put down. The boy was afraid of Rowdy and perceived him as angry and dangerous. When you encounter a dog who barks and growls, does he actually feel anger? Or is this merely territorial behavior, or an overly boisterous attempt to be friendly? In short, can dogs experience emotion? Common sense seems to say yes, of course, Rowdy feels emotion when he growls. Numerous popular books explore the issue, like The Emotional Lives of Animals by Marc Bekoff, Animal Wise by Virginia Morell, and How Dogs Love Us by Gregory Berns, to name just a few. Dozens of news stories inform us of scientific discoveries in animal emotion: dogs get jealous, rats experience regret, crayfish feel anxiety, and even flies fear the incoming fly swatter. And of course, if you live with pets, you’ve certainly seen them behave in ways that seem emotional: running around in fear, jumping up in joy, whining in sadness, purring with love. It seems so obvious that animals experience emotions just the way we do. * Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, puts it succinctly: “So, do other animals have human emotions? Yes, they do. Do humans have animal emotions? Yes, they’re largely the same.” 1 Figure 12-1: Rowdy Some scientists are not so sure. They suggest that emotions in animals are just illusions: that Rowdy has brain circuits that trigger behaviors for survival but not for emotion. From their perspective, Rowdy can approach or withdraw in dominance or submission, to defend his territory or to avoid a threat. In these instances, the argument goes, Rowdy might experience pleasure, pain, arousal, or other varieties of affect, but he does not have the mental machinery to experience more than that. This latter explanation is deeply unsatisfying because it denies our own experiences. Millions of pet owners would bet money that their dogs growl in anger, droop in sadness, and hide their heads in shame. It’s hard to conceive that these perceptions are illusions built around some general affective responses. 2 I myself have succumbed to the allure of animal emotions. For years, my daughter has maintained a herd of guinea pigs in her bedroom.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  But then that one who had just been spanked was placed before her, and ushered out to the waiting paddle. The girl was frantic, sobbing, but she kept her hands on her neck, and soon she was running beside her laughing rider, a tall young Lord who lifted his arm way back as he spanked her. Suddenly another rider appeared, the elderly Lord Gerhardt, and as Beauty watched in terror, the pretty Princess ran out to receive the first blows and run with graceful lifts of her knees beside him. But for all her complaints, the Lord's horse seemed to move terribly fast and the paddle was loud and merciless. Beauty was forced to the threshold of the garden. For the first time she stared at the true immensity of the Court, the dozens upon dozens of tables that sprawled out on the green and appeared in great numbers in the forest beyond it. Everywhere were servants and naked slaves. It was perhaps three times the size she had judged from the windows. She felt tiny, insignificant, for all her terror. Lost and without a name or a soul suddenly. "What am I now," she might have thought, but she could not think. And as if in nightmare, she saw all the faces of those at the nearest tables, Lords and Ladies twisted to see the Bridle Path, and far to her loomed the pavilion of the Queen, canopied and festooned with flowers. She was gasping for breath, and when she looked up and saw the splendid mounted figure of Lady Juliana, her eyes filled with tears of gratitude that it was she, though she knew Lady Juliana would spank her perhaps all the harder to do her duty. The lovely Lady's braids were done with the same silver that threaded her shapely gown. She seemed made for the sidesaddle in which she sat and the handle of her paddle was laced to her wrist. She was smiling. There was no time to see more, to think more. Beauty was running forward, feeling the crunch of the Bridle Path under her horseshoes, hearing the stomp of hooves beside her. And though she thought it was not possible to endure such degradation, she felt the first cracking blow to her naked buttocks. It was so forceful it almost knocked her off balance. The stinging pain spread out from it like a warm fire and Beauty realized she was rushing forward. The stomp of hooves deafened her. And the paddle caught her again and again, almost lifting her and forcing her forward. She realized she was crying out loud through her clenched teeth, her tears making a blur of the torches that clearly defined the path before her.