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 Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  She insisted on going home, said she had an apartment to herself—and besides she had to look after her mother. On reflection I decided that it would be still cheaper sleeping at her place, so I said yes and let’s go immediately. Before going, however, I decided it was best to let her know just how I stood, so that there wouldn’t be any squawking at the last minute. I thought she was going to faint when I told her how much I had in my pocket. “The likes of it!” she said. Highly insulted she was. I thought there would be a scene. … Undaunted, however, I stood my ground. “Very well, then, I’ll leave you,” I said quietly. “Perhaps I’ve made a mistake.” “I should say you have!” she exclaimed, but clutching me by the sleeve at the same time. “Ecoute, chéri… sois raisonnable!” When I heard that all my confidence was restored. I knew that it would be merely a question of promising her a little extra and everything would be O.K. “All right,” I said wearily, “I’ll be nice to you, you’ll see.” “You were lying to me, then?” she said. “Yes,” I smiled, “I was just lying. …” Before I had even put my hat on she had hailed a cab. I heard her give the Boulevard de Clichy for an address. That was more than the price of room, I thought to myself. Oh well, there was time yet… we’d see. I don’t know how it started any more but soon she was raving to me about Henry Bordeaux. I have yet to meet a whore who doesn’t know of Henry Bordeaux! But this one was genuinely inspired; her language was beautiful now, so tender, so discerning, that I was debating how much to give her. It seemed to me that I had heard her say—“quand il n’y aura plus de temps.” It sounded like that, anyway. In the state I was in, a phrase like that was worth a hundred francs. I wondered if it was her own or if she had pulled it from Henry Bordeaux. Little matter. It was just the right phrase with which to roll up to the foot of Montmartre. “Good evening, mother,” I was saying to myself, “daughter and I will look after you—quand il n’y aura plus de temps !” She was going to show me her diploma, too, I remembered that. She was all aflutter, once the door had closed behind us. Distracted. Wringing her hands and striking Sarah Bernhardt poses, half undressed too, and pausing between times to urge me to hurry, to get undressed, to do this and do that. Finally, when she had stripped down and was poking about with a chemise in her hand, searching for her kimono, I caught hold of her and gave her a good squeeze. She had a look of anguish on her face when I released her. “My God! My God!

• From The Girls (2016)

  glinting past the apartment window. My father scratched his neck as we watched, the expression on his face unfamiliar to me—he was afraid. Tamar wouldn’t leave it alone. “The kid,” she said. “It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t kill the kid.” I had a numb certainty they would see it on me. A rupture in my face, the silence obvious. But they didn’t. My father locked the apartment door, then checked again before he went to bed. I stayed awake, my hands limp and clammy in the lamplight. Was there the merest slip between the outcomes? If the bright faces of planets had orbited in another arrangement, or a different tide had eaten away at the shore that night— was that the membrane that separated the world where I had or had not done it? When I tried to sleep, the inward reel of violence made me open my eyes. And something else, too, chiding in the background—even then, I missed her. — The logic of the killings was too oblique to unravel, involving too many facets, too many false clues. All the police had were the bodies, the scattered scenes of death like note cards out of order. Was it random? Was Mitch the target? Or Linda, or Scotty, or even Gwen? Mitch knew so many people, had a celebrity’s assortment of enemies and resentful friends. Russell’s name was brought up, by Mitch and by others, but it was one of many. By the time the police finally checked out the ranch, the group had already abandoned the house, taking the bus to campgrounds up and down the coast, hiding out in the desert. I didn’t know how stalled the investigation was, how the police got caught up following trivia—a key fob on the lawn that ended up belonging to a housekeeper, Mitch’s old manager under surveillance. Death imbued the insignificant with forced primacy, its scrambled light turning everything into evidence. I knew what had happened, so it seemed the police must know, too, and I waited for Suzanne’s arrest, the day the police would come looking for me—because I’d left my duffel behind. Because that Berkeley student Tom would put together the murders and Suzanne’s hissing talk of Mitch and contact the police. My fear was real, but it was unfounded—Tom knew only my first name. Maybe he did speak to the police, good citizen that he was, but nothing came of it—they

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

  How many hours of sleep had I been getting? Did I have any problems in concentrating? Had I been more talkative than usual? Did I talk faster than usual? Had anyone told me to slow down or that they couldn’t make sense out of what I was saying? Had I felt a pressure to talk constantly? Had I been more energetic than usual? Were other people saying that they were having difficulty keeping up with me? Had I become more involved in activities than usual, or undertaken more projects? Had my thoughts been going so quickly that I had difficulty keeping track of them? Had I been more physically restless or agitated than usual? More sexually active? Had I been spending more money? Acting impulsively? Had I been more irritable or angry than usual? Had I felt as though I had special talents or powers? Had I had any visions or heard sounds or voices that other people probably hadn’t seen or heard? Had I experienced any strange sensations in my body? Had I ever had any of these symptoms earlier in my life? Did anyone else in my family have similar sorts of problems? I realized that I was on the receiving end of a very thorough psychiatric history and examination; the questions were familiar, I had asked them of others a hundred times, but I found it unnerving to have to answer them, unnerving not to know where it all was going, and unnerving to realize how confusing it was to be a patient. I answered yes to virtually all of his questions, including a long series of additional ones about depression, and found myself gaining a new respect for psychiatry and professionalism. Gradually, his experience as a physician, and self-confidence as a person, began to take effect, much in the same way that medications gradually begin to take hold and calm the turmoil of mania. He made it unambivalently clear that he thought I had manic-depressive illness and that I was going to need to be on lithium, probably indefinitely. The thought was very frightening to me—much less was known then than is known now about the illness and its prognosis—but all the same I was relieved: relieved to hear a diagnosis that I knew in my mind of minds to be true. Still, I flailed against the sentence I felt he had handed me. He listened patiently. He listened to all of my convoluted, alternative explanations for my breakdown—the stress of a stressed marriage, the stress of joining the psychiatry faculty, the stress of overwork—and he remained firm in his diagnosis and recommendations for treatment. I was bitterly resentful, but somehow greatly relieved. And I respected him enormously for his clarity of thought, his obvious caring, and his unwillingness to equivocate in delivering bad news.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  Rowenna Erickson, a former Kingston bride, said, “Their whole structure is beginning to quake, it’s like a low-level earthquake.”173 The FLDS would also feel those reverberations. Warren Jeffs succeeded his father, Rulon Jeffs, as the “prophet” and absolute leader of the FLDS shortly after Rulon’s death in September 2002. Only a month later authorities revealed that they had been extensively investigating underage marriages within the FLDS communities.174 That investigation would eventually lead to sex charges against numerous men and Warren Jeffs. They would face sex charges in both Utah and Arizona.175 Jeffs ruled over his FLDS kingdom like a ruthless tyrant. He threw out more than one hundred men, stripping them of wives and children, whom he then reassigned to other men who were loyal to him. Jeffs banned school and forbade the color red and use of the word fun . He also banned television, rock music, short sleeves for men, and trousers for women. Jeffs, like other purported cult leaders, sought to control every aspect of FLDS life. He controlled the homes of all FLDS members through the UEP trust.176 The police of Colorado City and Hildale were his loyal followers.177 When asked to explain the dynamics of the group, Warren Jeffs’ nephew, Brent Jeffs, told a news correspondent, “The entire cult, as I would put it, is run by complete fear. Everything they do is run by fear. They control the women and the children all by fear…The men in there that have brainwashed these women and children, have convinced them ever since they were babies that this is right. Because they think in their minds they have nowhere else to go.”178 As authorities began to close in on Jeffs, the polygamist leader sought a special refuge. In November 2003 David S. Allred, acting as a surrogate for Warren Jeffs, bought a remote 1,691-acre ranch in western Texas near the small town of Eldorado. Locals were initially told it was to be a “hunting compound,” but it wasn’t long before massive construction began and the “Yearning for Zion” (YFZ) FLDS stronghold took shape. Three three-story houses, each comprising ten thousand square feet, were quickly completed and would become dormitories. Soon there was a cheese factory, medical clinic, grain silo, commissary, and sewage treatment plant. The perimeter included watchtowers, infrared night-vision cameras, and walls encircling the compound, topped with spikes. A huge limestone-clad temple would become the centerpiece of the new, completely contained polygamist community populated by hundreds of FLDS members Jeffs had handpicked.179 The people of Eldorado recalled that another rural compound in Texas, run by a cult leader named David Koresh near the town of Waco, had ended in tragedy. They shuddered to think that the same situation might develop again in their own area. Like Koresh, Warren Jeffs had made a doomsday prediction that Armageddon was coming in 2005.

• From The Girls (2016)

  texted. So instantly Alex understood she had made a mistake. The texts came rapid-fire. Alex Are u fucking kidding me What the fuck Can you just fucking pick up Alex had been on hour ten of a nice, swimmy run of benzos when he’d called: a warm compress cooling on the last dregs of the stye, takeout stinking up the room but blessedly out of sight. The texts from Dom had seemed funny. But then Dom left a message the next day, almost crying, and he had been nice enough to her. Almost a friend, in his demented way. She finally responded with a text: I can’t talk rn. But in a few days, ok? Alex had assumed, at first, that some solution would turn up. It always did. So she kept putting Dom off. He checked in almost daily. Alex? Things escalated. Dom calling again. Dom leaving voicemails. Acting lighthearted, even jokey, as if this was a low-key misunderstanding. Then swinging wildly into aggression, his voice going to some eerie psycho register, and she was genuinely afraid. She remembered the time—last year. Or it must have been before that, before he left the city. When he woke her up with his hands on her throat. Her eyes locked onto his— his hands tightened. His expression was one of mild concentration. She didn’t look away until he pressed hard enough that her eyes closed and she felt them roll back in her head. Alex could change her number, but what about the ads she’d already paid for, ads that were linked to this phone number? She told herself Dom would get tired of this eventually. He’d require fresh blood. But then, leaving her place one morning, she’d spotted Dom across the street. Dom lingering on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets. It was Dom, it had to be. Maybe not. Or was it just a coincidence? She hadn’t given him her new address. She was suddenly paranoid. The stye was coming back. Her roommates no longer acknowledged her in the common areas. They changed the Wi-Fi password. The bathroom cabinet had been emptied of every medication, even ibuprofen. Alex had the disorienting sense that she was infectious. What’s next on your reading list? Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now. _142857084_

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Sometimes, as I stood there taking a leak, I wondered what an impression it would make on those swell dames whom I observed passing in and out of the beautiful lavatories on the Champs-Elysées. I wondered if they would carry their tails so high if they could see what was thought of an ass here. In their world, no doubt, everything was gauze and velvet—or they made you think so with the fine scents they gave out, swishing past you. Some of them hadn’t always been such fine ladies either; some of them swished up and down like that just to advertise their trade. And maybe, when they were left alone with themselves, when they talked out loud in the privacy of their boudoirs, maybe some strange things fell out of their mouths too; because in that world, just as in every world, the greater part of what happens is just muck and filth, sordid as any garbage can, only they are lucky enough to be able to put covers over the can. As I say, that afternoon life with Tania never had any bad effect upon me. Once in a while I’d get too much of a skinful and I’d have to stick my finger down my throat—because it’s hard to read proof when you’re not all there. It requires more concentration to detect a missing comma than to epitomize Nietzsche’s philosophy. You can be brilliant sometimes, when you’re drunk, but brilliance is out of place in the proofreading department. Dates, fractions, semicolons!—these are the things that count. And these are the things that are most difficult to track down when your mind is all ablaze. Now and then I made some bad blunders, and if it weren’t that I had learned how to kiss the boss’s ass, I would have been fired, that’s certain. I even got a letter one day from the big mogul upstairs, a guy I never even met, so high up he was, and between a few sarcastic phrases about my more than ordinary intelligence, he hinted pretty plainly that I’d better learn my place and toe the mark or there’d be what’s what to pay. Frankly, that scared the shit out of me. After that I never used a polysyllabic word in conversation; in fact, I hardly ever opened my trap all night. I played the high-grade moron, which is what they wanted of us. Now and then, to sort of flatter the boss, I’d go up to him and ask politely what such and such a word might mean. He liked that. He was a sort of dictionary and timetable, that guy. No matter how much beer he guzzled during the break—and he made his own private breaks too, seeing as how he was running the show—you could never trip him up on a date or a definition. He was born to the job. My only regret was that I knew too much.

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

  He screamed again. It was a truly primitive and frightening sound, in part because he himself was so frightened, and in part because he was very tall, very big, and completely psychotic. I put my hand on his shoulder and could feel his whole body shaking out of control. I had never seen such fear in anyone’s eyes, nor such visceral agitation and psychological pain. Delirious mania is many things, and all of them are awful beyond description. The resident had given him a massive injection of an antipsychotic medication, but the drug had not yet taken hold. He was delusional, paranoid, largely incoherent, and experiencing both visual and auditory hallucinations. He reminded me of films I had seen of horses trapped in fires with their eyes wild with fear and their bodies paralyzed in terror. I tightened my hand on his shoulder, shook him gently, and said, “It’s Dr. Jamison. You’ve been given some Haldol; we’re going to take you up to the ward. You’re going to be all right.” I caught his eye for a moment. Then he screamed again. “You’ll be fine. I know you don’t believe it now, but you will be well again.” I looked over at the three thick volumes of his medical records lying on the table nearby, thought about his countless hospitalizations, and wondered about the truthfulness of my remarks. That he would get well again, I had no doubt. How long it would last was another question. Lithium worked remarkably well for him, but once his hallucinations and abject terror stopped, he would quit taking it. Neither the resident nor I needed to see the results of the lithium blood level that had been drawn on his admission to the emergency room. There would be no lithium in his blood. The result had been mania. Suicidal depression would inevitably follow, as would the indescribable pain and disruptiveness to his life and to the lives of the members of his family. The severity of his depressions was a black mirror image of the dangerousness of his manias. In short, he had a particularly bad, although not uncommon, form of the illness; lithium worked well, but he wouldn’t take it. In many ways, it seemed to me, as I stood there next to him in the emergency room, that all of the time, effort, and emotional energy that I and the others put into treating him were to little or no avail.

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

  Although I had been building up to it for weeks, and certainly knew something was seriously wrong, there was a definite point when I knew I was insane. My thoughts were so fast that I couldn’t remember the beginning of a sentence halfway through. Fragments of ideas, images, sentences, raced around and around in my mind like the tigers in a children’s story. Finally, like those tigers, they became meaningless melted pools. Nothing once familiar to me was familiar. I wanted desperately to slow down but could not. Nothing helped—not running around a parking lot for hours on end or swimming for miles. My energy level was untouched by anything I did. Sex became too intense for pleasure, and during it I would feel my mind encased by black lines of light that were terrifying to me. My delusions centered on the slow painful deaths of all the green plants in the world—vine by vine, stem by stem, leaf by leaf they died, and I could do nothing to save them. Their screams were cacophonous. Increasingly, all of my images were black and decaying. At one point I was determined that if my mind—by which I made my living and whose stability I had assumed for so many years—did not stop racing and begin working normally again, I would kill myself by jumping from a nearby twelve-story building. I gave it twenty-four hours. But, of course, I had no notion of time, and a million other thoughts—magnificent and morbid—wove in and raced by. Endless and terrifying days of endlessly terrifying drugs—Thorazine, lithium, valium, and barbiturates—finally took effect. I could feel my mind being reined in, slowed down, and put on hold. But it was a very long time until I recognized my mind again, and much longer until I trusted it.

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

  I first met the man who was to become my psychiatrist when he was chief resident at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. Tall, good-looking, and a man of strong opinions, he had a steel-trap mind, a quick wit, and an easy laugh that softened an otherwise formidable presence. He was tough, disciplined, knew what he was doing, and cared very much about how he did it. He genuinely loved being a doctor, and he was a superb teacher. During my year as a predoctoral clinical psychology intern he had been assigned to supervise my clinical work on the adult inpatient service. He turned out to be an island of rational thought, rigorous diagnosis, and compassion in a ward situation where fragile egos and vapid speculation about intrapsychic and sexual conflicts prevailed. Although he was adamant about the importance of early and aggressive medical treatments for psychotic patients, he also had a genuine and deep belief in the importance of psychotherapy in bringing about healing and lasting change. His kindness to patients, combined with an extremely keen knowledge of medicine, psychiatry, and human nature, made a critical impression upon me. When I became violently manic just after joining the UCLA faculty, he was the only one I trusted with my mind and life. I knew intuitively that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that I could outtalk, outthink, or outmaneuver him. In the midst of utter confusion, it was a remarkably clear and sane decision. I was not only very ill when I first called for an appointment, I was also terrified and deeply embarrassed. I had never been to a psychiatrist or a psychologist before. I had no choice. I had completely, but completely, lost my mind; if I didn’t get professional help, I was quite likely to lose my job, my already precarious marriage, and my life as well. I drove from my office at UCLA to his office in the San Fernando Valley; it was an early southern California evening, usually a lovely time of day, but I was—for the first time in my life—shaking with fear. I shook for what he might tell me, and I shook for what he might not be able to tell me. For once, I could not begin to think or laugh my way out of the situation I was in, and I had no idea whether anything existed that would make me better.

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

  He screamed again. It was a truly primitive and frightening sound, in part because he himself was so frightened, and in part because he was very tall, very big, and completely psychotic. I put my hand on his shoulder and could feel his whole body shaking out of control. I had never seen such fear in anyone’s eyes, nor such visceral agitation and psychological pain. Delirious mania is many things, and all of them are awful beyond description. The resident had given him a massive injection of an antipsychotic medication, but the drug had not yet taken hold. He was delusional, paranoid, largely incoherent, and experiencing both visual and auditory hallucinations. He reminded me of films I had seen of horses trapped in fires with their eyes wild with fear and their bodies paralyzed in terror. I tightened my hand on his shoulder, shook him gently, and said, “It’s Dr. Jamison. You’ve been given some Haldol; we’re going to take you up to the ward. You’re going to be all right.” I caught his eye for a moment. Then he screamed again. “You’ll be fine. I know you don’t believe it now, but you will be well again.” I looked over at the three thick volumes of his medical records lying on the table nearby, thought about his countless hospitalizations, and wondered about the truthfulness of my remarks. That he would get well again, I had no doubt. How long it would last was another question. Lithium worked remarkably well for him, but once his hallucinations and abject terror stopped, he would quit taking it. Neither the resident nor I needed to see the results of the lithium blood level that had been drawn on his admission to the emergency room. There would be no lithium in his blood. The result had been mania. Suicidal depression would inevitably follow, as would the indescribable pain and disruptiveness to his life and to the lives of the members of his family. The severity of his depressions was a black mirror image of the dangerousness of his manias. In short, he had a particularly bad, although not uncommon, form of the illness; lithium worked well, but he wouldn’t take it. In many ways, it seemed to me, as I stood there next to him in the emergency room, that all of the time, effort, and emotional energy that I and the others put into treating him were to little or no avail.

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

  I kept on with my life at a frightening pace. I worked ridiculously long hours and slept next to not at all. When I went home at night it was to a place of increasing chaos: Books, many of them newly purchased, were strewn everywhere. Clothes were piled up in mounds in every room, and there were unwrapped packages and unemptied shopping bags as far as the eye could see. My apartment looked like it had been inhabited and then abandoned by a colony of moles. There were hundreds of scraps of paper as well; they cluttered the top of my desk and kitchen counters, forming their own little mounds on the floor. One scrap contained an incoherent and rambling poem; I found it weeks later in my refrigerator, apparently triggered by my spice collection, which, needless to say, had grown by leaps and bounds during my mania. I had titled it, for reasons that I am sure made sense at the time, “God Is a Herbivore.” There were many such poems and fragments, and they were everywhere. Weeks after I finally cleaned up my apartment, I still was coming across bits and pieces of paper—filled to the edges with writing—in unimaginably unlikely places. My awareness and experience of sounds in general and music in particular were intense. Individual notes from a horn, an oboe, or a cello became exquisitely poignant. I heard each note alone, all notes together, and then each and all with piercing beauty and clarity. I felt as though I were standing in the orchestra pit; soon, the intensity and sadness of classical music became unbearable to me. I became impatient with the pace, as well as overwhelmed by the emotion. I switched abruptly to rock music, pulled out my Rolling Stones albums, and played them as loud as possible. I went from cut to cut, album to album, matching mood to music, music to mood. Soon my rooms were further strewn with records, tapes, and album jackets as I went on my way in search of the perfect sound. The chaos in my mind began to mirror the chaos of my rooms; I could no longer process what I was hearing; I became confused, scared, and disoriented. I could not listen for more than a few minutes to any particular piece of music; my behavior was frenetic, and my mind more so.

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

  The patient, in the meantime, stared through me for a very long time. Then turning sideways so she would not see me directly, she explained why she was in St. Elizabeths. Her parents, she said, had put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to see if I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? The whole thing was bizarre but riveting. I asked her, What does the silver ball mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her eyes. She stared off into space, caught up in some internal world. I never found out what the silver ball meant. Although fascinated, I was primarily frightened by the strangeness of the patients, as well as by the perceptible level of terror in the room; even stronger than the terror, however, were the expressions of pain in the eyes of the women. Some part of me instinctively reached out, and in an odd way understood this pain, never imagining that I would someday look in the mirror and see their sadness and insanity in my own eyes.

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

  The noise of the jet had become louder, and I saw the other children in my second-grade class suddenly dart their heads upward. The plane was coming in very low, then it streaked past us, scarcely missing the playground. As we stood there clumped together and absolutely terrified, it flew into the trees, exploding directly in front of us. The ferocity of the crash could be felt and heard in the plane’s awful impact; it also could be seen in the frightening yet terrible lingering loveliness of the flames that followed. Within minutes, it seemed, mothers were pouring onto the playground to reassure children that it was not their fathers; fortunately for my brother and sister and myself, it was not ours either. Over the next few days it became clear, from the release of the young pilot’s final message to the control tower before he died, that he knew he could save his own life by bailing out. He also knew, however, that by doing so he risked that his unaccompanied plane would fall onto the playground and kill those of us who were there. The dead pilot became a hero, transformed into a scorchingly vivid, completely impossible ideal for what was meant by the concept of duty. It was an impossible ideal, but all the more compelling and haunting because of its very unobtainability. The memory of the crash came back to me many times over the years, as a reminder both of how one aspires after and needs such ideals, and of how killingly difficult it is to achieve them. I never again looked at the sky and saw only vastness and beauty. From that afternoon on I saw that death was also and always there.

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

  The Lord Lieutenant and the herald on horseback, both arrayed in the insignia of their office, arrive with the doomed man and the old pastor, followed by a small procession of spectators. Farel invites Servetus to solicit the prayers of the people and to unite his prayers with theirs. Servetus obeys in silence. The executioner fastens him by iron chains to the stake amidst the fagots, puts a crown of leaves covered with sulphur on his head, and binds his book by his side. The sight of the flaming torch extorts from him a piercing shriek of "misericordias" in his native tongue. The spectators fall back with a shudder. The flames soon reach him and consume his mortal frame in the forty-fourth year of his fitful life. In the last moment he is heard to pray, in smoke and agony, with a loud voice: "Jesus Christ, thou Son of the eternal God, have mercy upon me!"1197 This was at once a confession of his faith and of his error. He could not be induced, says Farel, to confess that Christ was the eternal Son of God. The tragedy ended when the clock of St. Peter’s struck twelve. The people quietly dispersed to their homes. Farel returned at once to Neuchâtel, even without calling on Calvin. The subject was too painful to be discussed. The conscience and piety of that age approved of the execution, and left little room for the emotions of compassion. But two hundred years afterwards a distinguished scholar and minister of Geneva echoed the sentiments of his fellow-citizens when he said: "Would to God that we could extinguish this funeral pile with our tears."1198 Dr. Henry, the admiring biographer of Calvin, imagines an impartial Christian jury of the nineteenth century assembled on Champel, which would pronounce the judgment on Calvin, "Not guilty"; on Servetus, "Guilty, with extenuating circumstances."1199 The flames of Champel have consumed the intolerance of Calvin as well as the heresy of Servetus. § 156. The Character of Servetus. Servetus—theologian, philosopher, geographer, physician, scientist, and astrologer—was one of the most remarkable men in the history of heresy. He was of medium size, thin and pale, like Calvin, his eyes beaming with intelligence, and an expression of melancholy and fanaticism. Owing to a physical rupture he was never married. He seems never to have had any particular friends, and stood isolated and alone. His mental endowments and acquirements were of a high order, and placed him far above the heretics of his age and almost on an equality with the Reformers.1200 His discoveries have immortalized his name in the history of science. He knew Latin, Hebrew, and Greek (though Calvin depreciates his knowledge of Greek), as well as Spanish, French, and Italian, and was well read in the Bible, the early fathers, and the schoolmen. He had an original, speculative, and acute mind, a tenacious memory, ready wit, a fiery imagination, ardent love of learning, and untiring industry.

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

  Indeed, it was his known adherence to these views which compelled his flight to Germany in the year 1535. Thus the future reformer, in his tenderest and most susceptible years, had impressed upon him the doctrine of justification by faith in the righteousness of Christ, heard much of the corrupt state of the dominant Church, and was witness to the efforts of that Church to put to death those who differed from her teaching. Nothing was further from the mind of the father and uncle, and also from that of Theodore himself, than that he should be an advocate of the new views. The career marked out for him was that of law, in which his uncle Nicolas had been so distinguished. To this end he was sent to the University of Orleans. Although very young, he attracted attention. He joined the German nation—for the students in universities then were divided into factions, according to their ancestry, and Burgundy was accounted part of Germany—and rapidly became a favorite. But he did not give himself up to mere good-fellowship. He studied hard, and on Aug. 11, 1539, attained with honor the degree of licentiate of the law. His education being thus advanced, Beza, now twenty years old, came to Paris, there, as his father desired, to prosecute further law studies; but his reluctance to such a course was pronounced and invincible, so much so that at length he won his uncle to his side, and was allowed by his father to pursue those literary studies which afterwards accrued so richly to the Reformed Church; but at the time he had no inkling of his subsequent career. By his uncle Claudius’ influence the possessor of two benefices which yielded a handsome income, and enriched further by his brother’s death in 1541, well-introduced and well-connected, a scholar, a wit, a poet, handsome, affable, amiable, he lived on equal terms with the best Parisian society, and was one of the acknowledged leaders.1276 That he did not escape contamination he has himself confessed, but that he sinned grossly he has as plainly denied.1277 In 1544 he made in the presence of two friends, Laurent de Normandie and Jean Crespin, eminent jurists, an irregular alliance with Claudine Denosse,1278 a burgher’s daughter, and at the time declared that when circumstances favored he would publicly marry her. His motive in making a secret marriage was his desire to hold on to his benefices. But he was really attached to the woman, and was faithful to her, as she was to him; and there was nothing in their relationship which would have seriously compromised him with the company in which he lived. The fact that they lived together happily for forty years shows that they followed the leading of sincere affection, and not a passing fancy. In 1548 he published his famous collection of poems—Juvenilia. This gave him the rank of the first Latin poet of his day, and his ears were full of praises.

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

  "The only thing I said, and, if need be, a hundred times repeat, is, that in this matter Philip can no more be torn from me than he can from his own bowels.970 But although fearing the thunder which threatened to burst from violent men (those who know the boisterous blasts of Luther understand what I mean), he did not always speak out openly as I could have wished, there is no reason why Westphal, while pretending differently, should indirectly charge him with having begun to incline to us only after Luther was dead. For when more than seventeen years ago we conferred together on this point of doctrine, at our first meeting, not a syllable required to be changed.971 Nor should I omit to mention Gaspar Cruciger, who, from his excellent talents and learning, stood, next after Philip, highest in Luther’s estimation, and far beyond all others. He so cordially embraced what Westphal now impugns, that nothing can be imagined more perfectly accordant than our opinions. But if there is still any doubt as to Philip, do I not make a sufficient offer when I wait silent and confident for his answer, assured that it will make manifest the dishonesty which has falsely sheltered itself under the venerable name of that most excellent man?" Calvin urged Melanchthon repeatedly to declare openly his view on the points in controversy. In a letter of March 5, 1555, after thanking him for his approval of the condemnation of Servetus, he says: "About ’the bread-worship’ (peri; th'" ajrtolatreiva"), your most intimate opinion has long since been known to me, which you do not even dissemble in your letter. But your too great slowness displeases me, by which the madness of those whom you see rushing on to the destruction of the Church, is not only kept up, but from day to day increased." Melanchthon answered, May 12, 1555: I have determined to reply simply and without ambiguity, and I judge that I owe that work to God and the Church, nor at the age to which I have arrived, do I fear either exile or other dangers." On August 23 of the same year, Calvin expressed his gratification with this answer and wrote: "I entreat you to discharge, as soon as you can, the debt which you acknowledge you owe to God and the Church." He adds with undue severity: "If this warning, like a cock crowing rather late and out of season, do not awaken you, all will cry out with justice that you are a sluggard. Farewell, most distinguished sir, whom I venerate from the heart." In another letter of Aug. 3, 1557, he complains of the silence of three years and apologizes for the severity of his last letter, but urges him again to come out, like a man, and to refute the charge of slavish timidity.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  In all Dijon not two like them. Meanwhile the old fellow was making the rounds; I could hear the jingle of his keys, the crunching of his boots, the steady, automatic tread. Finally I heard him coming through the driveway to open the big door, a monstrous, arched portal without a moat in front of it. I heard him fumbling at the lock, his hands stiff, his mind numbed. As the door swung open I saw over his head a brilliant constellation crowning the chapel. Every door was locked, every cell bolted. The books were closed. The night hung close, dagger-pointed, drunk as a maniac. There it was, the infinitude of emptiness. Over the chapel, like a bishop’s miter, hung the constellation, every night, during the winter months, it hung there low over the chapel. Low and bright, a handful of dagger points, a dazzle of pure emptiness. The old fellow followed me to the turn of the drive. The door closed silently. As I bade him good night I caught that desperate, hopeless smile again, like a meteoric flash over the rim of a lost world. And again I saw him standing in the refectory, his head thrown back and the rubies pouring down his gullet. The whole Mediterranean seemed to be buried inside him—the orange groves, the cypress trees, the winged statues, the wooden temples, the blue sea, the stiff masks, the mystic numbers, the mythological birds, the sapphire skies, the eaglets, the sunny coves, the blind bards, the bearded heroes. Gone all that. Sunk beneath the avalanche from the North. Buried, dead forever. A memory. A wild hope. For just a moment I linger at the carriageway. The shroud, the pall, the unspeakable, clutching emptiness of it all. Then I walk quickly along the gravel path near the wall, past the arches and columns, the iron staircases, from one quadrangle to the other. Everything is locked tight. Locked for the winter. I find the arcade leading to the dormitory. A sickish light spills down over the stairs from the grimy, frosted windows. Everywhere the paint is peeling off. The stones are hollowed out, the banister creaks; a damp sweat oozes from the flagging and forms a pale, fuzzy aura pierced by the feeble red light at the head of the stairs. I mount the last flight, the turret, in a sweat and terror. In pitch darkness I grope my way through the deserted corridor, every room empty, locked, molding away. My hand slides along the wall seeking the keyhole. A panic comes over me as I grasp the doorknob. Always a hand at my collar ready to yank me back. Once inside the room I bolt the door. It’s a miracle which I perform each night, the miracle of getting inside without being strangled, without being struck down by an ax. I can hear the rats scurrying through the corridor, gnawing away over my head between the thick rafters.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  But the letter... I’m forgetting the letter. ... “The reason why I wanted you to commit suicide that evening at the Cronstadts’, when Moldorf became God, was that I was very close to you then. Perhaps closer than I shall ever be. And I was afraid, terribly afraid, that some day you’d go back on me, die on my hands. And I would be left high and dry with my idea of you simply, and nothing to sustain it. I should never forgive you for that.” Perhaps you can visualize him saying a thing like that! Myself it’s not clear what his idea of me was, or at any rate, it’s clear that I was just pure idea, an idea that kept itself alive without food. He never attached much importance, Boris, to the food problem. He tried to nourish me with ideas. Everything was idea. Just the same, when he had his heart set on renting the apartment, he wouldn’t forget to put a new washer in the toilet. Anyway, he didn’t want me to die on his hands. “You must be life for me to the very end,” so he writes. “That is the only way in which you can sustain my idea of you. Because you have gotten, as you see, tied up with something so vital to me, I do not think I shall ever shake you off. Nor do I wish to. I want you to live more vitally every day, as I am dead. That is why, when I speak of you to others, I am just a bit ashamed. It’s hard to talk of one’s self so intimately.” You would imagine perhaps that he was anxious to see me, or that he would like to know what I was doing—but no, not a line about the concrete or the personal, except in this living-dying language, nothing but this little message from the trenches, this whiff of poison gas to apprise all and sundry that the war was still on. I sometimes ask myself how it happens that I attract nothing but crackbrained individuals, neurasthenics, neurotics, psychopaths—and Jews especially. There must be something in a healthy Gentile that excites the Jewish mind, like when he sees sour black bread. There was Moldorf, for example, who had made himself God, according to Boris and Cronstadt. He positively hated me, the little viper—yet he couldn’t stay away from me. He came round regularly for his little dose of insults—it was like a tonic to him.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  She had ceased to put up a fight any more. She lay back with her legs apart and she let him fool around and fool around and then, just as he was climbing over her, just as he was going to slip it in, she informs him nonchalantly that she has a dose of clap. He rolled off her like a log. I heard him fumbling around in the kitchen for the black soap he used on special occasions, and in a few moments he was standing by my bed with a towel in his hands and saying—“can you beat that? that son-of-a-bitch of a princess has the clap!” He seemed pretty well scared about it. The princess meanwhile was munching an apple and calling for her Russian newspapers. It was quite a joke to her. “There are worse things than that,” she said, lying there in her bed and talking to us through the open door. Finally Fillmore began to see it as a joke too and opening another bottle of Anjou he poured out a drink for himself and quaffed it down. It was only about one in the morning and so he sat there talking to me for a while. He wasn’t going to be put off by a thing like that, he told me. Of course, he had to be careful... there was the old dose which had come on in Le Havre. He couldn’t remember any more how that happened. Sometimes when he got drunk he forgot to wash himself. It wasn’t anything very terrible, but you never knew what might develop later. He didn’t want any one massaging his prostate gland. No, that he didn’t relish. The first dose he ever got was at college. Didn’t know whether the girl had given it to him or he to the girl; there was so much funny work going on about the campus you didn’t know whom to believe. Nearly all the coeds had been knocked up some time or other. Too damned ignorant... even the profs were ignorant. One of the profs had himself castrated, so the rumor went. ... Anyway, the next night he decided to risk it—with a condom. Not much risk in that, unless it breaks. He had bought himself some of the long fish skin variety —they were the most reliable, he assured me. But then, that didn’t work either. She was too tight. “Jesus, there’s nothing abnormal about me,” he said. “How do you make that out? Somebody got inside her all right to give her that dose. He must have been abnormally small.” So, one thing after another failing, he just gave it up altogether. They lie there now like brother and sister, with incestuous dreams. Says Macha, in her philosophic way: “In Russia it often happens that a man sleeps with a woman without touching her. They can go on that way for weeks and weeks and never think anything about it.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  Because he walked with God when others were walking away from him, day by day Enoch came nearer to God, and death was no more than the last step that took him into the very presence of that God with whom he had always walked. We cannot think of Enoch without thinking of the different attitudes to death. The sheer serenity of the Old Testament statement, so simple and yet so moving, points forward to the Christian attitude. (1) There are those who have thought of death as mysterious and inexplicable. The nineteenth-century writer and artist William Morris wrote: Death have we hated, knowing not what it meant. Francis Bacon, the philosopher, said: ‘Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark.’ To some, it has always been the terrifying unknown, giving rise to what Hamlet called ‘that dread of something after death’. (2) There are those who simply have seen in death the one inevitable thing in life. Shakespeare makes Caesar say in Julius Caesar: It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come. And, in Cymbeline, he writes with a strange fatalistic beauty: Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, Nor the furious winter’s rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone and ta’en thy wages: Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. Fear no more the frown o’ the great, Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke: Care no more to clothe and eat; To thee the reed is as the oak: The sceptre, learning, physic must All follow this, and come to dust. Fear no more the lightning-flash, Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone; Fear not slander, censure rash; Thou hast finish’d joy and moan: All lovers young, all lovers must Consign to thee, and come to dust. Death is inevitable, and there is nothing to be gained by struggling against it. (3) Some have seen in death sheer extinction. It was that loveliest of Roman poets, Catullus, who pleaded with Lesbia for her kisses because the night was coming: Lesbia mine, let’s live and love! Give no doit for tattle of Crabbed old censorious men; Suns may set and rise again, But when our short day takes flight Sleep we must one endless night. To die was to go out to nothingness and be lost in an eternal sleep. (4) Some have seen in death the supreme terror and the unmitigated evil. In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare makes Claudio say: Death is a fearful thing. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison’d in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world ...