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.

Page 187 of 529 · 20 per page

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  As regards the commanded acts of the will, then, the will can suffer violence, in so far as violence can prevent the exterior members from executing the will’s command. But as to the will’s own proper act, violence cannot be done to the will. The reason of this is that the act of the will is nothing else than an inclination proceeding from the interior principle of knowledge: just as the natural appetite is an inclination proceeding from an interior principle without knowledge. Now what is compelled or violent is from an exterior principle. Consequently it is contrary to the nature of the will’s own act, that it should be subject to compulsion and violence: just as it is also contrary to the nature of a natural inclination or movement. For a stone may have an upward movement from violence, but that this violent movement be from its natural inclination is impossible. In like manner a man may be dragged by force: but it is contrary to the very notion of violence, that he be dragged of his own will. Reply to Objection 1: God Who is more powerful than the human will, can move the will of man, according to Prov. 21:1: “The heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord; whithersoever He will He shall turn it.” But if this were by compulsion, it would no longer be by an act of the will, nor would the will itself be moved, but something else against the will. Reply to Objection 2: It is not always a violent movement, when a passive subject is moved by its active principle; but only when this is done against the interior inclination of the passive subject. Otherwise every alteration and generation of simply bodies would be unnatural and violent: whereas they are natural by reason of the natural interior aptitude of the matter or subject to such a disposition. In like manner when the will is moved, according to its own inclination, by the appetible object, this movement is not violent but voluntary. Reply to Objection 3: That to which the will tends by sinning, although in reality it is evil and contrary to the rational nature, nevertheless is apprehended as something good and suitable to nature, in so far as it is suitable to man by reason of some pleasurable sensation or some vicious habit. Whether violence causes involuntariness?Objection 1: It would seem that violence does not cause involuntariness. For we speak of voluntariness and involuntariness in respect of the will. But violence cannot be done to the will, as shown above [1052](A[4]). Therefore violence cannot cause involuntariness. Objection 2: Further, that which is done involuntarily is done with grief, as Damascene (De Fide Orth. ii, 24) and the Philosopher (Ethic. iii, 5) say. But sometimes a man suffers compulsion without being grieved thereby. Therefore violence does not cause involuntariness.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Let me reiterate. Generally, an animal in the wild, if not killed, recovers from its immobility and lives to see another day. It is wiser but none the worse for wear. For example, a deer learns to avoid a certain rock outcropping where it was ambushed by a mountain lion. While my observational hypothesis is based on field observations and is not empirically proven, my interviews with wildlife managers throughout the world have supported it. In addition, it is difficult to imagine how individual wild animals (or their entire species, for that matter) would have ever survived if they routinely developed the sorts of debilitating symptoms that many humans do.b This natural “immunity” is clearly not the case for us modern humans … but why and what can we do about it? Long-Lasting ImmobilityAs I was completing my doctoral dissertation at Berkeley in 1977, I continued with my daily visits to the musty stacks of the graduate library, where I stumbled upon the critical key in my understanding of trauma. This article by Gordon Gallup and Jack D. Maser informed the central question of how the normally time-limited immobility response becomes long-lasting and eventually unending.26 For their work, I would like to make a personal nomination for them to retroactively receive the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine—along with the three ethologists previously mentioned. In a carefully thought-out and well-controlled experiment, the authors demonstrated that if an animal is both frightened and restrained, the period during which it remains immobilized (after the restraint is removed) is dramatically increased. There is a nearly perfect linear correlation between the level of fear an animal experiences when it is restrained, and the duration of immobility.27 When an animal is not subjected to fear before being restrained, immobility generally lasts from seconds to about a minute. This spontaneous capacity is called “self-paced termination.”28 In dramatic contrast, when both repeatedly frightened and repeatedly restrained, the experimental animal may remain immobilized for as long as seventeen hours! It is my clinical experience and understanding that such a robust potentiation has profound clinical implications for the understanding and treatment of human trauma. I shall discuss how the “potentiation,” or enhancement, of immobility by fear can lead to a self-perpetuating feedback loop causing an essentially permanent quasi-paralysis in the traumatized individual. This condition, I believe, underpins several of trauma’s most debilitating symptoms, especially numbing, shutdown, dissociation, feelings of entrapment and helplessness. A few years ago, in Brazil, I had the opportunity to observe the interaction between fear and immobility within a laboratory setting and thereby gained direct verification of the seminal work of Gallup and Maser on tonic immobility. Although there are very few researchers in this important field, I found one actively involved in experimental animal research on tonic immobility at the laboratory of Leda Menescal de Oliveira at the Federal University, School of Medicine in Ribeirao Preto, Brazil. Her work has focused on the brain pathways activated in tonic immobility.29

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Now that he was home, he understood, he must still be vigilant. Memories would creep up on him, emotions sabotaging his thinking brain. To come alive after dying to himself was dangerous. There was far too much to feel, so he must seek, he thought, only shallow sensations. We also learn that, “as a child, Fidelis had breathed lightly and gone motionless … whenever as a child sorrow had come down upon him.” As a young soldier, “he’d known from the first that in his talent for stillness lay the key to his survival.” The human need to gradually return from the land of the walking dead to the land of the living needs to be understood, respected and honored. Too much, too soon, threatens to overwhelm the fragile ego structure and adaptive personality. This is why the rate at which people resolve trauma must be gradual and “titrated.” Instinct and ReasonIn the final analysis, I believe that it is the dynamic balance between the most primitive and the most evolved/refined parts of the brain that allows trauma to be resolved and difficult emotions to be integrated and transformed. Effective treatment is a matter of helping individuals keep the “observing” prefrontal cortex online as it simultaneously experiences the raw primitive sensations generated in the archaic portions of the brain (the limbic system, hypothalamus and brain stem; see Figure 4.2). The key to this delicate undertaking is being able to safely sense both intense and subtle body sensations and feelings. It turns out that there is a paired brain structure that appears to do exactly that: wedged in between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex are the insula (nearer to the limbic system) and cingulate (nearer to the cortex). Briefly, the insula receives input from the internal structures of the body, including muscles, joints and viscera. Together, insula and cingulate help us make sense of these primitive sensations by weaving them into nuanced feelings, perceptions and cognitions.52 Accessing that function is a key to the approach of transforming trauma and difficult emotions described in the following chapters. Balancing Instinct and Reason [image file=image_rsrc2N7.jpg] Figure 4.2 This illustrates the importance of keeping the prefrontal cortex online during activation of survival-based arousal in the brain stem and limbic system. Note how nerve impulses flow between the instinctual brain structures of the thalamus and hypothalamus (which controls the secretion of the pituitary gland that is vital for maintaining organ and cellular homeostasis) and the frontal lobe (or rational brain). Restoring the balance and rhythm between instinct and reason also plays a central part in healing the mind/body split. Integration of brain and body, of right and left cerebral hemispheres, and of primitive and evolved brain regions promotes wholeness and makes us fully human. Until then, we are, as Margaret Mead noted, “the missing link between apes and humans.”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  “Safe as houses” is something closer to “the house always wins.” Instead of a shared structure providing shelter, it means that the person in charge is secure; everyone else should be afraid. Dream House as WarningA few months before your girlfriend became the Woman in the Dream House, a young, upper-class, petite, blonde undergrad named Lauren Spierer went missing in Bloomington. The parents of the woman in the Dream House were apoplectic; she was not an undergrad but she was young and upper class and petite and blonde and thus a potential target for whatever monster spirited Lauren off this earth. (Years later, you learned that another girl went missing at the same time. Unlike Lauren, she did not come from a wealthy family. Her name was Crystal Grubb. The family struggled to get other people to care; eventually, they found her strangled in a cornfield. It is not an extraordinary thing to claim that some people are more valuable than others to the world.) You were both acutely aware of Lauren’s nonpresence in those first few months. Massive signs were hung and erected all over town; in them, her face was tilted, her sunglasses perched in her hair. Every time you went out, you thought about Lauren, last seen with no shoes, walking down the street on that humid June night. Where was she going? What was she walking away from? Dream House as AppetiteYou make a mistake early on, though you don’t know it at the time. You admit to her that you are constantly nursing low-grade crushes on many people in your life. Nothing acted on, just that you find many people attractive and do your best to surround yourself with smart, funny minds, and the result is a gooey, lovely space somewhere between philia and eros. You’ve been this way as long as you can remember. You’ve always found this quirk of your personality to be just that, a quirk, and she laughs and says she’s charmed by it. Over the course of your relationship, she will accuse you of fucking, or wanting to fuck, or planning to fuck, the following people: your roommate, your roommate’s girlfriend, dozens of your friends, the Clarion class you haven’t even met yet, a dozen of her friends, not a few of her colleagues at Indiana, her ex-girlfriend, her ex-boyfriend, your ex-boyfriends, several of your teachers, the director of your MFA program, several of your students, one of your doctors, and—in perhaps the most demented moment of this exercise—her father. Also, an untold litany of strangers: people on the subway and in coffee shops, waiters at restaurants, store clerks and grocery store cashiers and librarians and ticket takers and janitors and museumgoers and beach sleepers.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  A woman’s sanity is undercut by her conniving husband, who misplaces objects—a brooch, a painting, a letter—in an attempt to make her believe she is mad so that he ultimately can send her to an asylum. Eventually his plan is revealed: he had murdered her aunt when the woman was a child and orchestrated their whirlwind romance years later in order to return to the house to locate some missing jewels. Nightly, Gregory—played by a silky, charismatic Charles Boyer—ventures into their attic, unbeknownst to her, to search for them. The eponymous gaslights are one of the many reasons the heroine believes herself to be truly going mad—they dim as if the gas has been turned on elsewhere in the house, even when, it would seem, no one has done so. Bergman’s Paula is in a terrible, double-edged tumble: as she becomes convinced she is forgetful, fragile, then insane, her instability increases. Everything she is, is unmade by psychological violence: she is radiant, then hysterical, then utterly haunted. By the end she is a mere husk, floating around her opulent London residence like a specter. He doesn’t lock her in her room or in the house. He doesn’t have to. He turns her mind into a prison. Watching the film, you feel for Paula, even though she is not real: her suffering is captured in celluloid’s carbonite. You watch it over and over again in the dark: admiring the eerie shots of their respective shadows against the fanciful Victorian furniture and decor, pausing over her defeated expressions, her swooning, her dewy, trembling mouth. Ingrid Bergman is a mountain of a woman, tall and robust, but in this movie she is worn down like a sand dune. Gregory makes her break down in public, during a concert; later, he does so in their home, with only their two maids as witnesses. No audience is too small for her debasement. “Don’t humiliate me in front of the servants,” Paula sobs. But even if they hadn’t come in and seen what they’d seen, we would have. She might as well have said, “Don’t humiliate me in front of the audience.” Because either way, we—servants, viewers—are witnesses without power. People who have never seen Gaslight, or who have only read secondhand descriptions of it, often say that Gregory’s entire purpose—the reason he “makes the lamps flicker”—is to drive Paula mad, as though that is the sum of his desires. This is probably one of the most misunderstood aspects of the story. In fact, Gregory has an extremely comprehensible motivation for his actions—the need to search for the jewels unimpeded by Paula’s presence. The flickering gas lamps are a side effect of that pursuit, and even his deliberate madness-inducing machinations are directed to this very sensible end. And yet, there is an unmistakable air of enjoyment behind his manipulation. You can plainly see the microexpressions flit across his face as he improvises, torments, schemes. He enjoys it and it serves him, and he is twice satisfied.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The rain slows, then stops, and you enter Indiana. In the final stretch, when she exits the main highway and takes a two-lane country road south to Bloomington, the car begins to yawn to the left, kissing the double line, surpassing it, and then to the right, where the door passes within inches of a metal barrier. When you look over, the back of her skull is touching the headrest, her eyes closed. You bark her name, and the car rights itself. “Now you’re too tired,” you say. “You’re falling asleep. Please, let me do this final stretch. We’re almost there.” You have never been so awake. “I’m fine,” she says. “My body is my bitch. I can make it do whatever I want.” “Please, please pull over.” She curls her lip, but doesn’t say anything else and doesn’t stop. Every so often, the car swerves drunkenly. You pass a religious billboard that asks you if you know where you’d go after death. In full daylight, this sort of manipulative propaganda would make you roll your eyes. But now, it tugs on an old childhood fear, and you whimper and then try, too late, to swallow the sound. When you first came to Bloomington—when you helped her find the Dream House—it was impossibly bright. It was late spring, and the trees were electric, new-growth neon green. Now the leaves burn in red and orange, and brown ones spiral away from the branches. The season is dying and you are going to die too, you are certain, this night. The car pulls into the driveway around four in the morning and sits there in silence. You feel like you are going to throw up. The leaves drop onto the car’s roof and the wind snatches them away with a papery scrape. Finally she reaches to unbuckle her seat belt, but you are watching the lawn. Two dark shapes are crossing it, like dogs, but not. Coyotes? It would have been a lovely sight at any time, but in contrast to this night’s terrors it is so beautiful your face tingles. “Look,” you say softly, pointing. She starts as if you’ve struck her. Then she sees what you see. You wait for her coo, for her sweetness. “Fuck you,” she says. She leans toward you and speaks directly into your ear. “You say ‘look’ without saying anything else, I think you’re fucking pointing out someone who’s going to fucking kill us. It’s the middle of the night. What the fuck is wrong with you?” She kicks open the car door; the coyotes bolt for the trees. You watch her stomp through the Dream House. Her silhouette is thrown up against a series of illuminated windows—kitchen, bathroom, bedroom—and then all the lights go out.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  He leaps into action, attaches his computer to the elaborate speaker system he’s set up in your house, and begins to play some sort of chaotic noise metal. He runs around like Mickey from “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” adding his own energy to the noise. “Resist, Carmen, resist!” he cries, slapping the counter with his hands and hitting pans with wooden spoons and amping up the music as loud as it will go. (In Angel Street, when the police sergeant finally makes contact with the tormented, gaslit wife, he tells her firmly, “You are up against the most awful moment in your life, and your whole future depends on what you are going to do in the next hour. Nothing less. You have got to strike for your freedom, and strike now, for the moment may not come again.”) You feel suddenly infused with the discordance, and yell “fuck you” at the phone (which has done nothing but its precise function!) before attempting to figure out how to block her number. You end up googling it, and once it’s done, the phone goes silent. But the voicemails are there, and you ask John to turn down the music. Each one is a little different. Some are steeped in sorrow: I love you, I miss you. Others are threatening. You fucking cunt, pick up this phone right now. (As if she has forgotten you own a cell phone and not a landline, and you are not standing still in the kitchen listening to her voice on an answering machine while she’s leaving her message.) You are so deeply freaked out by this seemingly unhinged sequence, like a bad and offensive movie about a woman with multiple personality disorder, that you try to imagine her leaving the messages—where she might be in the Dream House. You imagine her threatening you in the bedroom, weeping for you in the living room, pledging her undying love in the office. You think it will make you feel better, but it makes you feel worse. You save the voicemails, in case you need to get a restraining order. When you upgrade your phone a few months later, they are lost. Dream House as DenouementYou have planned a chat with Val between an end-of-semester barbecue and a house party. You leave the former later than you intend, so when Val calls, you pull over on a shady street. It is so strange to hear her voice, soft and sweet over the phone. You chatter nervously at each other for a few minutes before arriving at a mush of apologies and tears. “I can’t believe you agreed to be in an open relationship,” you say to her. “She cared about you,” she says. “I didn’t think I had a choice.” “Before that.” “What do you mean?” “When I met her, she was in an open relationship.” The silence on the end of the line is long and slow. “What are you talking about?” she asks.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 39. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Types T511.1.3, Conception from eating mango; T511.1.5, Conception from eating lemon; T511.2.1, Conception from eating mandrake; T511.2.2, Conception from eating watercress; T511.3.1, Conception from eating peppercorn; T511.3.2, Conception from eating spinach; T511.4.1, Conception from eating rose; T511.5.2, Conception from swallowing worm (in drink of water); T511.5.3, Conception from eating louse; T511.6.1, Conception from eating woman’s heart; T511.6.2, Conception from eating finger-bones; T511.7.1, Conception after eating honey given by lover; T511.8.6, Conception from swallowing a pearl; T512.4, Conception from drinking saint’s tears; T512.7, Conception from drinking dew; T513.1, Conception through another’s wish; T514, Conception after reciprocal desire for each other; T515.1, Impregnation through lustful glance; T516, Conception through dream; T517, Conception from extraordinary intercourse; T521, Conception from sunlight; T521.1, Conception from moonlight; T521.2, Conception from rainbow; T522, Conception from falling rain; T523, Conception from bathing; T524, Conception from wind; T525, Conception from falling star; T525.2, Impregnation by a comet; T528, Impregnation by thunder (lightning); T532.1.3, Impregnation by leaf of lettuce; T532.1.4, Conception by smell of cooked dragon heart; T532.1.4.1, Conception after smelling ground bone-dust; T532.2, Conception from stepping on an animal; T532.3, Conception from fruit thrown against breast; T532.5, Conception from putting on another’s girdle; T532.10, Conception from hiss of cobra; T533, Conception from spittle; T534, Conception from blood; T535, Conception from fire; T536, Conception from feathers falling on woman; T539.2, Conception by a cry.Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure®You wake up and the air is milky and bright. The room glows with a kind of effervescent contentment, despite the boxes and clothes and dishes. You think to yourself: this is the kind of morning you could get used to. When you turn over, she is staring at you. The luminous innocence of the light curdles in your stomach. You don’t remember ever going from awake to afraid so quickly. “You were moving all night,” she says. “Your arms and elbows touched me. You kept me awake.” If you apologize profusely, go to this page. If you tell her to wake you up next time your elbows touch her in your sleep, go to this page. If you tell her to calm down, go to this page. “I’m so sorry,” you tell her. “I really didn’t mean to. I just move my arms around a lot in my sleep.” You try to be light about it. “Did you know my dad does the same thing, the sleeping damsel swoon? So weird. I must have—” “Are you really sorry?” she says. “I don’t think you are.” “I am,” you say. You want the first impression of the morning to return to you; its freshness, its light. “I really am.” “Prove it.” “How?” “Stop doing it.” “I told you, I can’t.” “Fuck you,” she says, and gets out of bed. You follow her all the way to the kitchen. Go to this page.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Undead I think about Debra Reid so much—incarcerated, unpardoned—how powerless she must have felt. Even after Jackie was gone, she was still there. When Debra was on trial for her murder, Debra’s brother brought her a dress to wear. Her first thought was, “Oh God, Jackie going to kill me if she saw me with this one.” Dream House as Sanctuary The night she chased me in the Dream House and I locked myself in the bathroom, I remember sitting with my back against the wall, pleading with the universe that she wouldn’t have the tools or know-how to take the doorknob out of the door. Her technical incompetence was my luck, and my luck was that I could sit there, watching the door test its hinges with every blow. I could sit there on the floor and cry and say anything I liked because in that moment it was my own little space, even though after that it would never be mine again. For the rest of my time in the Dream House, my body would charge with alarm every time I stepped into that bathroom; but in that moment, I was the closest thing I could be to safe. When Debra Reid was eventually released on parole, she had to stay in prison longer than she needed to because securing housing was a condition of her release and she was having difficulty doing so. She told an interviewer, “I just want to get an apartment and turn my own little doorknob and use my own bathroom and eat my own food.” I can’t get Debra or her doorknob out of my mind. I hope she got what she needed.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  Linda is in for it. “The both of you,” she tells me. We try to wheel the bike but it won’t. Linda picks up the front end and I pick up the back end. At the end of the street we have to set it down for a second. My mother and Helen are still back there, sitting on the curb. My mother is talking and Helen is shaking her head. My sewer leg is still cool to the touch. We pick up the bike and carry it another half block before resting. My mother and Helen are a ways behind, walking slowly. “I think she’s laughing,” I tell Linda. She sets down her end, fiddles with her shoelace, looks backward under her armpit, and then picks up the bike again. We resume walking. “I think she’s crying.” She may be right. Either thing is possible. We stow the bike in the garage for our dad to look at once he sobers up. Tomorrow, or a week from tomorrow, hard to say. In the house, we divide up. I take a can of Pledge into the living room and start polishing the furniture; Linda runs dishwater and briskly begins dumping glasses and spoons into it. This place is a mess. My parakeet is asleep on his perch. I stick my finger through the bars and he’s on it in an instant, biting into my knuckle with his beak. The door slams and I race back to my Pledge and spray it dramatically on the coffee table, all around the plastic flower arrangement. Yimmer trots into the living room, leash trailing. She inspects the spot where she threw up earlier and then goes back into the kitchen for a long drink. My mother and Helen must have swung by the tavern on their way back. Well, that’s a relief; one of the boozehounds is home. The other one, lacking a leash, is always harder to retrieve. I’m reading a book called I Was Murdered , a mysterious ghost story about a lady who can’t rest until her killer is found. The cover has a picture of a typewriter, with two bloody hands typing the title on a piece of paper. I got it out of the neighbor’s trash, along with some comic books that I already read. I’m partial to ghost stories, but this is nothing like the ones at the school library, where the ghosts invariably turn out to be real people guarding buried treasure. This book has a severed head in a refrigerator and other goings-on that I’m way too young to read about. That’s the main reason I can’t stop. My sister is watching The Man from U.N.C.L.E . and putting on clear fingernail polish. She’s quote babysitting unquote while my parents are over at the tavern.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  10 1 Timothy 4:1–5.11 1 Timothy 4:3.12 Verses 4–5.13 The God Factor by Cathleen Falsani.14 The word confession in the Hebrew language literally means “to cast or throw out.” To confess simply means to get it out.15 xxxchurch.com, a resource for porn-addiction recovery.16 I was on vacation with my extended family, miles from pavement and the internet and the phone and the news, when my sister-in-law joined us, having flown across the country to get there. After she had unpacked and gotten settled, she came into the living room and said to me, “I thought you’d enjoy these. I bought them in the airport.”As she said this, she placed in front of me a stack of those magazines. You know the ones I’m talking about—the glossy ones with pictures of celebrities doing extraordinary things like getting coffee and picking something up at the dry cleaners and walking their dogs. Those magazines, the ones that you tell yourself you’re not going to read because it’s meaningless fluff and yet you find yourself getting your oil changed or at the dentist’s office or waiting to get your hair cut . . . and you’re hooked. It seems that while I had been away in the woods something very important was happening with a famous handsome actor that we all needed to know about. He was filming a movie with a famous actress, and rumors had started that their relationship was more than professional. They denied it and he proved they were just rumors by appearing in public with his beautiful actress wife, whom everybody loves. But then he and his wife announced they were separating. And then came the shocker: pictures of the famous handsome actor on vacation with the famous actress he was in the movie with. Reading this story in the magazine my sister-in-law put in front of me, I had only one question: “Do the other magazines have any important details this magazine missed?” And so I read and read until I was fully abreast of the situation. Because, of course, we all need to know. What struck me most was what the famous actress said about their affair, which was now public thanks to the covers of a multitude of magazines. She said that she and the famous handsome actor “couldn’t help themselves.” Couldn’t help themselves? Now these are incredibly disciplined people who are known for their outstanding work ethic. If they want to gain weight or lose weight or learn an accent or acquire a new skill for a film, they do it. They’re both legendary for how much—let me find the right word here—for how much control they’re able to exercise over their lives. They’ve built incredibly successful careers on it. And yet when it comes to each other—when it comes to sex—they “can’t help themselves.” Why is this? Is it just the way it is? Can you relate? 17 Genesis 1.CHAPTER FOUR: Leather, Whips, and Fruit

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  I got away ...,” she cried softly. It was then she remembered molding into the man’s torso as he held a knife to her throat. She went on, “I did that to make him think I was his ... Then my body knew what to do, and it did it ... That’s what let me escape.” Then the story that her body had been telling emerged in words: eighteen months earlier, Bonnie had been the victim of an attempted rape. While walking home after visiting a friend in another neighborhood, a stranger had pulled her into an alley and threatened to kill her if she didn’t cooperate. Somehow, she was able to break free and run to a lighted street corner where two passersby yelled for the police. Bonnie was politely interviewed by the police and then taken home by a friend. Surprisingly, she could not remember how she had escaped, but she was tearfully grateful to have been left unharmed. Afterward, her life appeared to return to normal, but when she felt stressed or in conflict, her body was still responding as it had when the knife was held to her throat. Bonnie found herself helpless and passive or easily enraged under everyday stress, not realizing that this was a replay of the brief pretense at submissiveness that probably saved her life. Her “submission” successfully fooled the assailant, allowing a momentary opportunity for the instinctual energy of a wild animal to take over, propelling her arms and legs in a successful escape. However, it had all happened so fast that she had not had the chance to integrate the experience. At a primitive level, she still didn’t “know” that she had escaped, and remained identified with the “submissiveness” rather than with her complete two-phase strategy that had in fact saved her life. Motorically and emotionally, it was like part of her was still in the assailant’s clutches. After processing and completing the rape-related actions, Bonnie now reported having an overall sense of capability and empowerment. She was “back to even more of her [old] self” in place of the previous submissive self-hatred. This new self came from being able to physically feel the motor response of elbowing her assailant, and then to sense the immense power in her legs that had, in fact, carried her to safety. This is a case where symptoms did not emerge full-blown for twelve to eighteen months after the traumatic experience. Hence, it was not readily apparent that they were sequelae to a precipitating event. For reasons largely unknown, it is not uncommon for symptoms to be delayed by six months or even one and a half to two years. In addition, symptoms may only manifest after yet another traumatic encounter occurs—sometimes years later. How many of our own habitual behaviors and feelings are outside of our conscious awareness or are long accepted as part of ourselves, of who we are, when in fact they are not?

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  We are hurtling through the night, as they say, on our way to a bar where the guys own speedboats, snowmobiles, whatever else is current. I sing full-throttle: You can take me to paradise, but then again you can be cold as ice; I’m over my head, but it sure feels nice . I turn the rearview mirror around, check to see what’s happening with the face. Nothing good. But there you have it. It’s yours at least, and your hair isn’t liable to thrust itself upward into stray pointing fingers. It doesn’t sound like corn husks when you brush it. My cousin, beautiful in the dashboard light, glances over at me. She has a first name but I’ve always called her Wendell. She pushes it up to eighty and the song ends, a less wonderful one comes on. We’re coming to the spot on the highway where the giant trees dangle their wrists over the ground. In the crotch of an elm, during daylight hours, a gnarled car is visible, wedged among the branches. Up ahead, the cornfields are dark and rustling. The deer shifts nervously behind the curtain of weeds, waiting for its cue. The car in the tree’s crotch is a warning to fast drivers, careening kids. Hidden beneath the driver’s seat, way up in the branches, is a silver pocketwatch with a broken face. It had been someone’s great-grandfather’s, handed down and handed down, until it reached the boy who drove his car into the side of a tree. Below the drifting branches, the ground is black and loamy, moving with bugs. In the silence, stalks of corn stretch their thin, thready feet and gather in the moisture. The pocket-watch is stopped at precisely 11:47, as was the boy. Fleetwood Mac rolls around the bend and the deer springs full-blown out of the brocade trees. In the white pool of headlights, in front of a swerving audience, it does a short, stark, modern dance, and exits to the right. We recover and slow it down, shaking. “He could have wrecked my whole front end,” Wendell says. This is the farm-kid mentality. Her idea of a gorgeous deer is one that hangs upside down on the wall of the shed, a rib cage, a pair of antlers, a gamy hunk of dinner. She feels the same way about cows and pigs. We’re in the sticks. Way out here things are measured in shitloads, and every third guy you meet is named Junior. I’ve decided I don’t even like this bar we’re going to, that howling three-man band and the bathroom with no stalls, just stools. Now I’m slumped and surly, an old pose for me. That deer had legs like canes, feet like Dixie cups. Wendell pats my knee, grinning. “Settle down,” she says. “It didn’t hit us. We’re safe.” She likes excitement as long as her car doesn’t get hurt.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I have to follow England until I’m out of Alabama. Green car, old Impala, unreadable license plate, lots of rust. Seat covers made out of that spongy stuff, something standing on the dashboard, a coffee cup or a sad Jesus. The fishing hat with a sweat ring around it right above the brim. Lures with feathers and barbs. I’ve never been so close to so much hatred in my whole life. He wanted to kill me . Think of England, with its white cows and broken-toothed farmers and dark green pastures. Think of the Beatles. I’m hugging the truck so closely now I’m almost under it. Me, of all people, he wanted to kill. Me. Everywhere I go I’m finding out new things about myself. Each way I turn, there it is. It’s Jo Ann he wanted to kill. By noon I want to kill him. I took a right somewhere and got onto the interstate, had the nerve to pee in a rest area, adrenaline running like an engine inside me, my keys threaded through my fingers in case anyone tried anything. I didn’t do anything to earn it, I realize. His anger. I didn’t do anything. Unless you count giving him the finger, which I don’t. He earned that. As it turned out, my husband couldn’t bring himself to leave me when I got back to Iowa, so I waited awhile, and watched, then disentangled myself. History: We each got ten photo albums and six trays of slides. We took a lot of pictures in thirteen years. In the early years he looks stoned and contented, distant; in the later years he looks straight and slightly worried. In that last year he only appears by chance, near the edges, a blur of suffering, almost out of frame. Just before we split, when we were driving somewhere, I told him about the guy in the green car. “Wow,” he said. Then he turned up the radio, checked his image in the rearview mirror, and smiled sincerely at the passing landscape. The Boys of My Youth [image "art" file=Image00000.jpg] W e adore Dave Anderson. He plays basketball in his driveway for hours each day, dribble, fake-out, shoot, dribble some more. He has smooth brown hair cut straight across his forehead, like the Dave Clark Five Dave. We watch him until we’re so bored we’re falling asleep, then we call him up. It’s like a commercial during a TV show. His mom hollers at him, he sets the ball down, steadies it with his foot, opens the screen door, and gives it a kick back against the house so it shuts with a flat slam. The last thing we see is tennis-shoe rubber. We always hang up after he says hello, and then a minute later he’s back out, drinking a bottle of Pepsi that he holds by the neck, walking around the court, dribbling in slow motion. He has no idea it’s us.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  He agreed to let his friend Jimmy Chin film his process for what Chin imagined would be an amazing documentary, not only because Honnold was one of the few climbers who would consider something so dangerous but because no one had ever tried a free solo ascent of El Capitan. Nearly all climbers use ropes for safety when rock climbing. The human body can rarely survive a fall greater than eighty feet. For rock formations hundreds or even thousands of feet in vertical height, falling means dying. Even the world’s most skilled climbers (who consider themselves “free” climbers) acknowledge and accommodate the inevitability of gravity. Free climbers remain attached to ropes for safety but don’t use those ropes to assist their climb, in the same way trapeze artists or wire walkers would use a net (or ropes) to catch them only if they fall. Free climbing is considered a test of climbing skill that has the benefit of forgiveness if you slip more than eighty feet above the ground. Free solo climbing is the same test of skill, but you die the first time you make a mistake because there are no ropes to stop your fall from a fatal height. This is why there are so few free solo climbers, and most of the famous free solo climbers are no longer with us. Such a feat is the ultimate pass-fail test. Tommy Caldwell, another elite, hard-core climber and friend who helped Honnold practice, said, “Imagine an Olympic gold-medal level athletic achievement, that if you don’t get the gold medal, you’re going to die. That’s pretty much what free soloing El Cap is like. You have to do it perfectly.” Filming Honnold was also a difficult, expensive, and delicate process. Chin recruited a camera crew of experienced rock climbers. Like Chin and Caldwell, most of them were friends with Honnold. They had to figure out placing, setting up, and operating ten cameras at different spots on the route. They also had to do it invisibly, making sure to not interfere or assist with the climb. Honnold spent several months in 2016 practicing—with ropes—the intricacies of all thirty sections (known as “pitches’’) of the Freerider route. His training on the route was frequently documented by the film crew, including the time he slipped while practicing on Pitch 6, Freeblast Slab (480 feet up). He was attached to a rope, so his fall was “just” thirty feet, still far enough that he sprained his ankle and tore a ligament. Three weeks after his injury, only partially recovered, he resumed practice and soon decided to attempt his free solo climb, before the coming winter weather closed his window for 2016. The documentary crew filmed it all. On the morning of his attempt, he woke up at 3:30 and began climbing in the dark. The camera crew had to simultaneously stay out of sight and get to their positions.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House at Newton’s Apple Early in the summer, this guy drops you a line. When you first got to Iowa, he had flown into town and the two of you spent a weekend in bed together and it was a nice culmination of a few years of light internet flirtation. It turns out he’s in town for a conference for work, and he asks if you want to get dinner. You agree, even though you don’t really want to see him. You even agree to pick him up from his hotel— his request—although you don’t want to do that, either. Even as you’re driving to his hotel, you’re thinking about how you’re just doing what he’s asking you, the same way you’d respond to the woman in the Dream House, even though he’s just this random guy. You think about that as you pull up under the awning, as you drive him to the restaurant. He is talking to you. Even as you’re responding to him, even as you’re ordering and making small talk, you’re marveling at the fact that his maleness—the generic fact of it—has as much pull as a carefully curated, long-term abusive relationship. It’s as if one scientist spent decades developing a downward-facing propulsion system to get an apple to descend to the ground and another one just used gravity. Same result, entirely different levels of effort. You refuse to get a drink, pick at your meal. He insists on paying. You drive him back to the hotel. You pull in front of the entrance, and he smiles at you. “Why don’t you park so we can say good-bye?” he asks. You pull into the parking space around the corner. “Why don’t you walk me inside?” he says. “There’s a gorgeous koi pond in the lobby.” He’s not wrong. The soaring atrium is breathtaking. It’s nicer than any hotel you’ve ever stayed in. You bend over a bridge and look down at the koi, their muscular bodies the color of warning. You think about how much easier it would be to just sleep with him. He isn’t the worst guy in the world. The effort of resisting is exhausting. “I should go,” you say. “I have a thing at eight.” He makes a clucking sound in his throat, smiles. “Why don’t you come on up?” he says. “I have to go,” you say. He walks you back to your car, and as you fish your keys out of your purse, he kisses you. He keeps kissing you; he grabs your arms, pushes his tongue in your mouth. Your body goes rigid. You don’t fight, but you don’t respond. You briefly float outside your body and see yourself, the almost comedy of your mismatched libidos. When he pulls away, he does not seem to notice that you can feel nothing at all. He gives you a key card, tells you his room number, in case you change your mind. On the drive home you pull over near a parking garage and stumble out onto a patch of grass. You drop down into child’s pose and take deep, shuddering breaths as the car’s emergency signal ticks next to you. The grass catches the copper light: on and off and on again.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  The enemy will be described as “amoral,” “irrational,” “untrustworthy,” or “aggressive,” the implication being that “our” group is the opposite. No side ever likes to admit it is not pure in its ethics, or has aggressive intentions, or is governed by emotion—it is always the other side. In the end, the need to feel a part of the tribe and against the other side is more important than the actual differences, which tend to be greatly exaggerated. Look at the group you belong to, and you will inevitably see some sort of enemy or bogeyman to push against. What you require is the ability to detach yourself from this dynamic and to see the “enemy” as it is, minus the distortions. You will not want to overtly display your skepticism—you might be seen as disloyal. Instead, keep your mind open so that you can resist the downward pull and overreactions that come from such tribal emotions. Take this even a step further by learning from the enemy, adapting some of its superior strategies. Group factions: Over enough time, individuals in a group will begin to split off into factions. The reason for this dynamic is simple: In a group, we get a narcissistic boost from being around those who share our values. But in a group over a certain size, this becomes too abstract. The differences among the members become noticeable. Our power to influence the group as individuals is reduced. We want something more immediate, and so we form subgroups and cliques with those who seem even more like us, giving us back that narcissistic boost. In this subgrouping, we now have power to divvy up, which increases its members’ sense of self- importance. Eventually the faction will experience its own splits from within, on and on. This splitting occurs unconsciously, almost as if it were responding to mechanical laws of group fission. If a faction gets strong enough, its members will start to give precedence to its interests over that of the greater group. Some leaders try to exploit this dynamic by playing one faction off the other, in the form of divide and conquer: the more the factions fight, the weaker they become, and the greater the power in the hands of the man or woman on top. Mao Zedong was a master at this game, but it is a dangerous one, because too much time tends to be wasted dealing with petty internal squabbles, and it can be hard to keep them all down.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Climbers on the descent can suffer from a combination of fatigue, oxygen deprivation (hypoxia), frostbite, changing weather, becoming lost or disoriented, falling into a crevasse, and darkness if they persist too long in their summit attempt. The darkness and fatigue multiply the likelihood of making a mistake and slipping on the narrow Southeast Ridge, where a misstep can cause you to fall 8,000 feet to your death into Tibet, or 12,000 feet to your death into Nepal. In fact, eight times more people die on Everest on the way down than on the way up. No client makes the sacrifices needed to get to the top of Everest with the intent of stopping short of the summit. And the pull of the summit goes beyond the amateur climbers. Assistant expedition guides prove their ability by summiting Everest, or doing it multiple times. Expedition leaders, competing with each other for business, market their successes in getting their clients to the top of the mountain. Sherpas aren’t immune to the pull either. Their marketability and local standing are enhanced by summiting. Turnaround times are there to prevent people from making poor decisions to keep going when they’re in the shadow of the summit, building into a climbing plan three crucial concepts. The first is that persistence is not always a virtue. Whether it is prudent to continue up the mountain depends both on the climbing conditions and the condition of the climbers. When those conditions warrant quitting, it is a good decision to heed those signals. The second is that making a plan for when to quit should be done long before you are facing the quitting decision. It recognizes, as Daniel Kahneman has pointed out, that the worst time to make a decision is when you’re “in it.” On Everest, when the summit is within reach and you have sacrificed so much to be there, you are truly in it. That is when you will be the least fit to make a decision about whether to continue on or to quit. That is why turnaround times are set long before you are ever faced with that choice. Third, and perhaps most important, the turnaround time is a reminder that the real goal in climbing Everest is not to reach the summit. It is, understandably, the focus of enormous attention, but the ultimate goal, in the broadest, most realistic sense, is to return safely to the base of the mountain. The Invisible Men at the Top of the WorldHutchison, Taske, and Kasischke were part of one of three expeditions trying to reach the summit on the same day and the top of the mountain was crowded. More crowded than it was supposed to be. The evening before, the expedition leader with the least experience announced that his group would not attempt to summit the next day.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Five Lights In the sixth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard is captured by the Cardassians during a secret mission to Celtris III. Early on in the second episode of the two-episode arc, the Cardassians use a truth serum to interrogate Picard on the details of his mission. Gul Madred ostensibly wants cooperation; information about the defense strategy for the Minos Korva planetary system. When the serum does not give him the results he desires, he implants a device in Picard’s body that, when activated, produces excruciating pain. “From now on, I will refer to you only as ‘human,’” Madred tells him. “You have no other identity.” They strip Picard naked, hang him from his wrists, and leave him there overnight. In the morning, Madred is unctuous, measured, unflaggingly polite. He drinks from a thermos like a weary bureaucrat. He turns on a string of lights above him, flooding Picard with illumination. Picard flinches; holds his arm like a wounded velociraptor. Madred asks him how many lights he can see. “Four,” Picard says. “No,” Madred replies. “There are five.” “Are you quite sure?” Picard asks. Madred presses the button on the device in his hand; Picard buckles, staggers, and drops to the ground in agony. The scene is a pastiche of one from 1984, but there are also some beats lifted, very lightly, from The Princess Bride. Madred is inordinately fond of his machine. That was the lowest possible setting. “I know nothing about Minos Korva,” Picard says. “But I’ve told you that I believe you. I didn’t ask you about Minos Korva. I asked how many lights you see.” Picard squints upward. “There are four lights.” Gul Madred sighs like a disappointed parent. “I don’t understand how you can be so mistaken.” Picard squints against them and says, “What lights?” He spasms so hard his body leaps from the chair, strikes the floor. Lying on the floor, Picard mumble-sings a French folk song from his childhood. “Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse, on y danse.” On the bridge of Avignon, we’re all dancing, we’re all dancing. “Where were you?” Madred asks. “At home. Sunday dinner. We would all sing afterward.” Madred opens the door and tells Picard he may go. But as Picard prepares to leave, Madred tells him he’ll torture Dr. Crusher instead. Picard returns to his chair. “Are you choosing to stay with me?” Madred asks. Picard is silent. “Excellent,” Madred says. “I can’t tell you how pleased this makes me.” Later, Madred feeds Picard. Boiled taspar egg, “a delicacy,” he says. When cracked open, it is an undulating, gelatinous mass with an eye at its center. Picard sucks the contents from the shell. Madred has his own meal; shares a story of his own childhood as a street urchin in Lakat, on the Cardassian homeworld. “In spite of all you have done to me,” Picard says with clarity, “I find you a pitiable man.” Madred’s cordial attitude vanishes. “What are the Federation’s defense plans for Minos Korva?” he shouts. “There are four lights!” Picard says. Gul Madred turns on the device, and Picard begins writhing. “How many do you see now?” Picard screams, weeps, sings. On the bridge of Avignon, we’re all dancing, we’re all dancing. Back on the Enterprise, the crew has negotiated Picard’s release. In the final scene between Picard and Madred, Picard grabs the device that controls the pain, smashes it against a table. Madred calmly tells him it doesn’t matter; he has many more. “Still,” Picard says, “it felt good.” “Enjoy your good feelings while you can. There may not be many more of them.” Madred goes on to explain that a battle has commenced, and the Enterprise is “burning in space.” Everyone will assume you’ve died with them, Madred says, and so you will stay here

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Ernest had seen enough. Too much! Grabbing his shirt, he headed for the stairs. But there were no stairs, no walls, no house. Before him lay a black starlit expanse. He began to run and soon found himself in a forest of towering conifers. Hearing a thundering roar, he looked back to see behind him a monstrous cat with fire-red eyes—like a lion but black and white and much larger. Bear-sized. Saber-toothed-tiger-sized. He ran faster, he practically flew, but ever louder and closer grew the thump of the beast’s padded paws pounding the pine-needle floor of the forest. Seeing a lake, he headed toward it. Cats hate water, Ernest thought, and waded in. He heard, from far off in the misty center of the lake, the sound of water streaming. Then he saw her: Artemis, standing stock-still in the middle of the lake. One hand was raised high like that of the Statue of Liberty while the other hand cupped one of her enormous breasts, out of which, as she pointed it toward him, gushed a mighty stream of water or milk. No, he saw as he approached closer, it was not milk but a fluorescent green liquid. Nor was the figure Artemis; it was a metal robot. And the lake was not water but acid, eating away at his feet and legs. He opened his mouth and with all his strength tried to scream: “Momma! Momma! Help me, Momma!” But no words came. The next thing Ernest knew, he was in his car, half dressed, pressing hard on the accelerator and zooming down Marin Drive away from Artemis’s Black Forest house. He tried to focus on what had happened to him, but fear overwhelmed him. How many times had he preached to patients and students that a crisis represents not only danger but opportunity? How many times had he preached that anxiety is a trail that leads to insight and wisdom? That of all dreams, the nightmare is the most instructive? Yet, upon reaching his Russian Hill apartment, Ernest dashed in the door and headed not to his writing pad to record the dream but to his medicine cabinet and a professional sample pack of two-milligram tablets of Ativan, a heavy-duty antianxiety drug. But that night the drug brought neither relief nor sleep. In the morning he canceled his entire day’s schedule and managed to squeeze his more urgent patients into slots the following evening.