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 238 of 529 · 20 per page

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  The mandate of intimacy, when taken too far, can resemble coercion. In my own work, I see couples who no longer wait for an invitation into their partner’s interiority, but instead demand admittance, as if they are entitled to unrestricted access into the private thoughts of their loved ones. Intimacy becomes intrusion rather than closeness—intimacy with an injunction. “You have to listen to me.” “Take care of me; tell me you love me.” Something that should develop normally, that is part of the beauty and the wisdom of a loving relationship, is forced on the partner who is less inclined to communicate verbally. In his book Passionate Marriage, David Schnarch deftly illustrates how the wish for intimacy can lead a person to impose forced reciprocity as a way to stave off the threat of rejection. The bargain of reciprocity goes something like this: “I’ll tell if you will, and I want to, so you have to.” We don’t like to be intimate alone. Some couples take this one step farther, confusing intimacy with control. What passes for care is actually covert surveillance—a fact-finding approach to the details of a partner’s life. What did you eat for lunch? Who called? What did you guys talk about? This kind of interrogation feigns closeness and confuses insignificant details with a deeper sense of knowledge. I am often amazed at how couples can be up on the minute details of each other’s lives, but haven’t had a meaningful conversation in years. In fact, such transparency can often spell the end of curiosity. It’s as if this stream of questions replaces a more thoughtful and authentically interested inquiry. When the impulse to share becomes obligatory, when personal boundaries are no longer respected, when only the shared space of togetherness is acknowledged and private space is denied, fusion replaces intimacy and possession co-opts love. It is also the kiss of death for sex. Deprived of enigma, intimacy becomes cruel when it excludes any possibility of discovery. Where there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek. Bodies Speak, Too If one consequence of the supremacy of talk is that it leaves men at a disadvantage, another is that it leaves women trapped in repressed sexuality. It denies the expressive capacity of the female body, and this idea troubles me. Favoring speech as the primary pathway to intimacy reinforces the notion that women’s sexual desire is legitimate only when it is embedded in relatedness—only through love can female carnality be redeemed.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  “Why would you suck on a guy’s fingers?” I asked. It was so inconceivable to me that people felt pleasure on their penises, that genitals were where we felt pleasure, or that sex acts had anything to do with pleasure at all. To me this ever-growing number of sexual maneuvers I was expected to know were entirely random: roll die for first body part, roll die for the second, make them interact. Tell your friends about it. Repeat. I could label fallopian tubes on a worksheet, I could even explain how a diaphragm worked, but I could not tell you why we had sex—not during my vending machine Pop-Tart–eating days, and not even during my first several years of sexual activity. The girls should have laughed me out of town for that question; I should have had to change schools. God must have smiled down on me that day. “It’s when you rub your hand up and down on a boy’s penis,” Claire corrected matter-of-factly. “Oh right,” I said, kicking my field hockey stick and catching it above my shoulder. “I know that one.” All of sex felt scary to me, even the fringe acts. At no point during middle school and high school sex education classes did it become clear to me why humans engaged in this clearly life-ruining activity. I was so adept at absorbing our culture’s cis-heteronormative, fear-based messaging around sexual health that I didn’t explore sexual pleasure on my own, not even in private, until college, and my relationship with it remained fraught for years to come. When I eventually became sexually active, I found sex to be fun, interesting, and validating. Hooking up became a novel way to pass the time and generate brunch conversations. The sex, though, was almost universally unsatisfying. I didn’t mind, and I don’t blame myself now. Looking back, I wonder what my sexual history would have looked like if I’d learned that sex was supposed to feel good, if I had learned this in school or at home or in the parking lot before field hockey. Would I have tolerated—nay, sought out!—all that bad sex? Would I have found deeper romantic fulfillment? Would I have found it easier to say no? In my thirty-one years on Beyoncé’s earth, I have never needed to identify fallopian tubes on a worksheet, even though my sixth-grade health teacher gave me the impression this would come up constantly. What has come up constantly is bad sex.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  This is the challenge of sexual intimacy, of bringing home the erotic. It is the most fearsome of all intimacies because it is all-encompassing. It reaches the deepest places inside us, and involves disclosing aspects of ourselves that are invariably bound up with shame and guilt. It is scary, a whole new kind of nakedness, far more revealing than the sight of our nude bodies. When we express our erotic yearnings we risk humiliation and rejection, which are equally devastating. I have witnessed the painful scene when a person’s preferences are condemned and labeled by his or her partner as perverse, deviant, and disgusting. It is no wonder that many of us prefer the security of workable sex as a shield against this harrowing scenario. We may be far from passion, but at least we feel normal. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a bad compromise. But then there are those who long to be known differently, to give themselves over and risk crossing that threshold. They muster the courage to confront the cultural prohibitions against sex—exuberant sex—at home. They hunger for full expression in the erotic realm, and resist the urge to withhold. For them sexual communion is far from dirty, but rather a sacred melding that puts us in touch with the divine. Erotic intimacy is the revelation of our memories, wishes, fears, expectations, and struggles within a sexual relationship. When our innermost desires are revealed, and are met by our loved one with acceptance and validation, the shame dissolves. It is an experience of profound empowerment and self-affirmation for the heart, body, and soul. When we can be present for both love and sex, we transcend the battleground of Puritanism and hedonism. 7 Erotic BlueprintsTell Me How You Were Loved, and I’ll Tell You How You Make Love Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us. —Gaston Bachelard A HOST OF INSTITUTIONS LOOK out for our best interest. Religion, government, medicine, education, the media, and pop culture all labor tirelessly to define and regulate the parameters of our sexual well-being. The incentives and prohibitions surrounding the voluptuousness of the body are the mother’s milk of society. Much of what we learn about sex comes from the street, the movies, television, and school. But before any of these reach us, our family gets to us first. We are members of a society, but we’re also the children of our parents. (This includes grandparents, stepparents, guardians, foster parents, and anyone else who is entrusted with our early well-being.) No history has a more lasting effect on our adult loves than the one we write with our primary caregivers. The Archaeology of Desire

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  5. Disaster Acts 21:27–36 First, you can see from those texts how much letter space Paul gave to this collection and how great were his care and concern for its accomplishment. Next, you also read above his fears for what might happen to it: James’s Christian Jews might refuse it and Jerusalem’s non-Christian Jews might attack him. Finally, you can read in Acts that Paul’s fears were amply justified. What happened there, according to Luke as our only source? First, James’s community refused to accept the collection unless Paul showed that he himself “observed and guarded the law” by using (some of?) the money to pay for a purification ritual in the Temple (Acts 21:24; read 21:17–24). He apparently agreed to accept this admittedly rather ambiguous test. He was in Jerusalem with a group of Christian Gentiles carrying the collection. Nothing whatsoever prohibited him and those Christian pagan companions from entering the Temple’s huge outer Court of the Gentiles, but they would have had to wait for him there while he and the Christian Jews with him passed the warning balustrade and entered the smaller inner courts reserved under penalty of death for Jews alone. Once he had entered the Temple, he was attacked by “Jews from Asia” for violating that ban by bringing those pagan associates into the inner Court of the Jews (Acts 21:27–28). Paul was then arrested and started the long journey to Rome. Luke, in Acts, does not tell us what eventually happened to Paul when he reached Rome. He never tells us about his death or martyrdom. Once Paul is openly preaching in Rome, the story Luke intended to tell is over. So he simply ends by saying that Paul “lived there two whole years at his own expense and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance” (28:30–31). But what happened to Paul after that ending? THE MARTYRDOM OF PAUL It is likely that Luke, writing one or two generations after Paul, knew what had happened to him. But he probably did not want to conclude his second volume—Acts—with a Roman condemnation of Paul just as he had finished his first one—the gospel—with a Roman condemnation of Jesus. In Luke’s gospel Pilate had, of course, asserted the innocence of Jesus “a third time” (23:22). And in Acts the viper that left him unharmed “asserted” the innocence of Paul (28:3–6). Still, Luke probably wanted to avoid having both his volumes end with a Roman execution after his repeated claims that Roman authority and pro-Roman Jewish authority considered Christianity to be an innocent phenomenon. So, without either Paul’s letters or Luke’s Acts to guide us, how and when did that great apostle of Jesus die?

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Evening fell before I expected it. Night imposed silence on the cannon and machine guns and engines all along the hills and within the arc of the front. But this sudden peace seemed to me so false and so heavy that I regretted the daylight. It was wiser to stop, and we also badly needed a little sleep after these past forty hours of being awake, which included twelve hours of shoveling, and twenty-six of forced marching on an empty stomach. We entered a field of ripe wheat which nobody dared pick. We arranged to take turns at standing watch and hid ourselves in the wheat. I was still chewing a thistle stem which was sour in my mouth when the war, for a moment silenced by the night, started again, more cynical and terrible than ever. A magnificent fireworks began: magnesium flares blindingly white, yellow, and then red, like dying stars; straight bright red streaks of machine-gun fire; elegant and clear lines of bullets traced like fugitive neon lights; and scarlet, sinister rugged patches from antiaircraft artillery. Then the noise: after the solemn, promising silence of the flares came the mad disorderly reaction of the inhabitants of the earth to the regular, obstinate sounds of the invisible motors in the sky. The airplanes replied to the nervous coughing of the machine guns with great battering blows that shook the earth. It was a celebration in honor of death. On the other side of the road a tribe of Bedouins rose from the middle of a field like a flight of partridge whose nest has been wrecked by a storm. These fugitives were perfectly silhouetted against the intermittent and richly colored flashes of light, until they disappeared, pursued by their fate, chanting monotonous prayers. This vision taught us a useful lesson: it was best to stay where we were.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  A gentle yellowish day had driven away every trace of the cold white dawn. We set off again. All along the road, there were burnt and broken skeletons of trucks; some, put out of action by machine-gun fire, were like insects bitten by a spider, motionless and apparently intact. The first volleys of machine-gun fire stopped us and we hesitated. From where were they being fired? In what direction? In our complete ignorance of the situation, we did not know whether each step might not be leading us headlong to death, and this worried me as though I had suddenly been struck blind. I tried to master my brain that was so weary that it ached behind my painful forehead. So we were in the center of a semicircle and there was fighting on both flanks. But how far from the center were we? With daylight, aircraft would sweep over the interior of the arc. The firing grew louder, accompanied by the intermittent choking of machine guns. Suddenly, from behind the hills, two British fighter planes came flying low over the fields to attack a farm which, to us, looked like a doll’s house. A German antiaircraft gun, hidden in the hills, reacted violently and dryly like a piece of cloth being ripped. Swift and elegant, the steel-gray pursuit plane rose and then, as if unaware of the antiaircraft barrage, swooped down on the road. We threw ourselves into the ditches just as a terrifying din burst out. I lay with my face to the ground, beneath the weight of my haversack, and was only aware of the mauve thistle that was scratching my face. I supposed that, seen from above, the red, green, and blue Bedouin blankets in which our kits were rolled on our backs must form a colorful ribbon. Automatically, I slipped my blanket beneath me. In the general noise, a hurrah came from the men. I looked to the side: a little cart, madly drawn by a galloping donkey, tore down the road. I joined in the shouting too when, with my shortsighted eyes, I made out Picchonero, oblivious to the bombing, gesticulating on the seat by the driver. “I’ll send you help from Tunis! I’ll send...” So he disappeared. Across the road, from the depths of their ditches on either side, the men lay flat on the ground and made joyous signs to each other. If Picchonero was not killed on the way, we could hope for a truck in a few hours.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Imagine strolling leisurely in an open meadow. A shadow suddenly moves into the periphery of your vision. How do you respond? Instinctively, your previous motions stop. You may crouch slightly in a flexed posture, and your heart rate will change as your autonomic nervous system is engaged. After this momentary “arrest” response, your eyes open wide. Without willing it, your head turns in the direction of the shadow (or sound) in an attempt to locate and identify it. Your neck, back, legs and feet muscles are working together to turn your body, which extends and lengthens. Your eyes narrow as your pelvis and head shift horizontally to give an optimal, panoramic view of your surroundings. What is your internal state? What other intangible aspects of yourself do you feel or sense in response to seeing the moving shadow? Most people will feel alert and engaged, even curious. Perhaps you feel a hint of excitement and anticipation or, possibly, of danger. Animals and humans also need to know if one of their own has aggressive intentions. Ignoring such signals may well put you in harm’s way. In sessions with hundreds of rape victims, I have discovered that many could recall the early presence of danger signals that they had ignored or overridden. They could remember the man staring at them as they left a restaurant or the fleeting shadow as they passed a street corner. I have also worked with several rapists who graphically described precisely how they knew (from a woman’s posture and gait) who was fearful (or propped up with false bravado) and would thus be easy prey. The precision and accuracy of these perpetrators’ assessments were truly unsettling. Although their capacity to empathize and read subtle emotions was greatly impaired, their predatory ability to read fear and helplessness was expertly honed. They made deliberate use of the innate skills that we tend to dismiss at our own peril. One’s posture and facial muscles signal emotional states, not only to others, but to oneself as well.13 We shall see in the following sections that, as social creatures, it is through empathy that we make our deepest communications. To do this we must be able to “resonate” with the sensations and emotions of others; we must, in other words, be able to feel the same things as those around us feel. The way we indicate this is primarily nonverbal; it is through our postures and expressive emotions.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Although Livingstone and Redside appeared to be surprisingly unscathed by their unpleasant encounters with predatory cats, Livingstone nonetheless developed an inflammatory reaction in that shoulder that broke out for the rest of his life on the anniversary date of the attack. Unfortunately, for many traumatized individuals, such dissociative reactions or “body memories” are not minor and transitory, but lead to a wide variety of enduring, so-called psychosomatic (physical) symptoms (which might aptly be called “somatic dissociation”25) as well as to an inability to focus, orient and function in present time—in the here and now. While traumatized humans don’t actually remain physically paralyzed, they do get lost in a kind of anxious fog, a chronic partial shutdown, dissociation, lingering depression, and numbness. Many are able to earn a living and/or raise a family in a kind of “functional freeze” that severely limits their enjoyment of life. They carry their burden with diminished energy in an uphill struggle to survive, despite their symptoms. In addition, we human beings, who cleave to symbols and images, may continue to see (in the mind’s eye) ourselves at death’s door long after the real danger has passed. A vision of the mugger or rapist holding a knife at your throat can endlessly recycle itself, as though it is still happening. How Biology Becomes PathologyAlthough the states of immobilization and dissociation (like those just described by Livingstone and Redside) are dramatic, they do not necessarily lead to trauma. Even though he didn’t develop any limiting fears, Livingston did exhibit a localized anniversary reaction on his affected shoulder. In the case of my accident, I notice that I am now a bit more cautious when crossing streets—especially in Brazil, where I often teach, and where moving vehicles can be a considerable challenge to pedestrians. Otherwise, I don’t exhibit any type of fear or anxiety reaction in respect to traffic. Perhaps my friend who was robbed is also a little more careful about going to an ATM at night. But neither my friend nor Livingstone nor Redside nor I was traumatized; though we undoubtedly experienced arrest, terror, immobilization and dissociation. Speaking for myself, I feel (and friends have confirmed) that I was actually made stronger and more resilient by successfully navigating my accident and its sequel. My friends noticed that I seemed more grounded, focused and playful. This brings me to the central question: what determines whether acute exposure to a (potentially) traumatizing event will have a long-term debilitating effect as in posttraumatic stress disorder? And how does understanding the dynamics of the immobility response postulate clinical solutions to this crucial question?

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

  ORIGEN. He took with Him the self-confident Peter, and the others, that they might see Him falling on His face and praying, and might learn not to think great things, but little things of themselves, and not to be hasty in promising, but careful in prayer. And therefore, He went forward a little, not to go far from them, but that He might be near them in His prayer. Also, He who had said above, Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, now commendably humbling Himself, falls on His face. But He shews His devotion in His prayer, and as beloved and well-pleasing to His Father, He adds, Not as I will, but as thou wilt, teaching us that we should pray, not that our own will, but that God’s will, should be done. And as He began to have fear and sorrow, He prays accordingly that the cup of His Passion may pass from Him, yet not as He wills, but as His Father wills; wills, that is, not according to His Divine and impassible Substance, but according to His human and weak nature. For in taking upon Him the nature of human flesh, He fulfilled all the properties thereof, that it might be seen that He had flesh not in appearance only, but in-reality. The believer indeed must in the first instance be loth to incur pain, seeing it leads to death, and he is a man of flesh; but if it be God’s will, he acquiesces because he is a believer. For as we ought not to be too confident that we may not seem to make a boast of our own strength; so neither ought we to be distrustful, lest we should seem to charge God our helper with weakness. It is to be observed that Mark and Luke write the same, but John does not introduce this prayer of Jesus’, that this cup may pass from Him, because the first three are rather occupied about Him, according to His human nature, John according to His divine. Otherwise; Jesus makes this petition, because He sees what the Jews will suffer for requiring His death. JEROME. Whence He says emphatically, This cup, that is, of this people of the Jews, who, if they shall put Me to death, can have no excuse for their ignorance, seeing they have the Law and the Prophets, who speak of Me.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  But how is one to stop this collective seizure of epilepsy? I felt like shouting insults at them, like beating them, beating with all my strength these women and musicians. But I was paralyzed, as if watching all of this through a glass pane. How could I communicate with these people? Perhaps I too should dance until I became giddy, until I lost consciousness after accepting these rhythms and beating my own head again and again with disjointed gestures, repeated until it continued to shake all by itself, as empty as a doll’s head that moves as it follows its leaded pendulum, until my whole body became dislocated in all its joints, so that no longer a single bone, not a muscle, remained in its proper place, with all my consciousness vanished and my body disintegrated while I allowed the bagpipes to seize my nerves, the tom-tom to rule the beating of my heart and blood, and the cymbals to tear my limbs apart and scatter them north, south, east, and west, throughout the sky and the earth? Would I then manage in turn to get through to the other side of this pane of glass? I felt almost delirious. Suddenly, the music stopped on a single beat, leaving behind it a silence that was heavy and painful. Like a puppet when the thread that guides it breaks, my mother now collapsed, abandoned by the music, limp as a rag, motionless. Why, at this point, such a nauseous pity within me? My heart followed her to the floor and suffered from the sound of her heavy fall on the woven straw mat. Meanwhile, the other women continued their movements. Fat old Khmeissa, our neighbor from across the hallway, seemed to be suffering as she bent forward, with her head and her heavy breasts over my inanimate mother and, forcing her spine so that her buttocks protruded like something monumental, managed at last to place her mouth close to my mother’s ear. The women whispered among themselves in a moment of relative peace. Khmeissa then placed her ear close to my mother and seemed to be listening attentively for a long while. Suddenly, she shouted: “They have spoken! They have said: a red scarf and a white cock!” So the Djnoun spirits had answered! They had expressed their desires to the dancer in her seizure! But what could you really hear, you crazy old witch, from the lips of this poor woman in her coma? Still, Khmeissa may not have been lying that day, perhaps she really heard the voice of her own imagination, educated to this end and convinced of its truth ever since childhood.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Theologians will almost always say, “But of course this was because of God’s love for us.” But at a popular level, in sermons and talks to young people, enthusiastic preachers will often throw caution to the winds and use illustrations or explanatory stories that fall into this trap. The day after I wrote that last sentence I received an e-mail that included a link to a short video claiming to sum up the gospel in a way that, I was told, I would find refreshing. It would build up my faith. Intrigued, I watched it. It was well put together, with clever sequences and plenty of hi-tech touches. But at the center of the message was a line that made my blood run cold. The video had described how we all mess up our lives, how we all do things that spoil God’s world, and so on. Then said the narrator, “Someone has to die,” and it turned out, of course, to be Jesus. That sums up the problem. What kind of “good news” is that? What kind of God are we talking about once we say that sort of thing? If God wants to forgive us, why can’t he just forgive us? (Heinrich Heine famously suggested God would indeed forgive us, since after all that was his job.) Why does “someone have to die”? Why death? Why would that help? And could it just be “someone,” anyone? Did it have to be God’s own son? How does it all work? The danger with this kind of popular teaching—and examples of it are not hard to come by—is that ultimately we end up rewriting one of the most famous verses in the Bible. I already quoted the King James Version of John 3:16: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.” Look at the two verbs: God so loved the world that he gave his son. The trouble with the popular version I have described is that it can easily be heard as saying, instead, that God so hated the world, that he killed his only son. And that doesn’t sound like good news at all. If we arrive at that conclusion, we know that we have not just made a trivial mistake that could easily be corrected, but a major blunder. We have portrayed God not as the generous Creator, the loving Father, but as an angry despot. That idea belongs not in the biblical picture of God, but with pagan beliefs. There are many reasons, most of them good ones, why people want to reject the picture of God-the-angry-despot.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  When I was growing up, all the local towns and villages had their own war memorials from World Wars I and II. I knew many families (including my own) who had lost one, two, or more members in those conflicts, and we solemnly remembered them year after year. In ancient Galilee, even without stone memorials to the rebels who had died, the towns and villages in which Jesus announced God’s kingdom would have had similar memories of people known, loved, and lost to Roman brutality. When he told his followers to pick up their own crosses and follow him, they would not have heard this as a metaphor. The next time that Roman crosses littered the landscape Jesus knew so well came two generations later. The Roman general Vespasian and his son Titus closed in on Jerusalem at the end of the war of AD 66–70. As they overran the surrounding countryside and laid siege to the holy city itself, they crucified so many Jews outside the walls that they ran out of timber and had to fetch some from farther afield. Josephus says that he walked past these crucifixions and, finding three of his friends among them, had them taken down from their crosses. One survived; the others died, their corpses rotting and providing food for the birds and the dogs. The crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, most likely in AD 33, is poised historically in between these two large-scale crucifixions. Nobody in that world would have been able to hear the word “cross” or be reminded of someone dying in that way without feeling instinctively the horror and shame of the whole thing. So too Saul of Tarsus, traveling the Roman world, must have seen plenty of crosses in his time: plenty of blood, plenty of rotting flesh, plenty of carrion and vermin picking over squirming carcasses. He must have known in his gut, more perhaps than we ever can, why the “word of the cross” was shocking, scandalous, and foolish beyond all measure. All of this needs to be in our minds and imaginations if we are even to glimpse, let alone understand, why that “word” was so utterly revolutionary. The second point of special interest for us is the way in which the Romans sometimes used crucifixion as a way of mocking a victim with social or political pretensions. “You want to be high and lifted up?” they said in effect. “All right, we’ll give you ‘high and lifted up.’” Crucifixion thus meant not only killing by slow torture, not only shaming, not only issuing a warning, but also parodying the ambitions of the uppity rebels. They wanted to move up the social scale?

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Thus, as John Donne observed nearly four hundred years ago in these now familiar lines, the funeral bell tolls not only for the dead but also for you and me—survivors, yes, but for a limited time. This insight is as old as history. Four thousand years ago in a Babylonian epic, Gilgamesh realized that the death of his friend Enkidu foreshadowed his own: “Enkidu has become dark and cannot hear me. When I die shall I not be like unto Enkidu? Sorrow enters my heart. I am afraid of death.” The death of the other confronts us with our own death. Is this a good thing? Should such a confrontation be encouraged in the psychotherapy of grief? Question: Why scratch where it doesn’t itch? Why fan the flame of death anxiety in bereaved individuals already bowed low by loss? Answer: Because the confrontation with one’s own death may generate positive personal change. My first awareness of the therapeutic potential of an encounter with death in the therapy of grief occurred decades ago when a sixty-year-old man described to me his terrible nightmare the night after learning that his wife’s cervical cancer had dangerously metastasized and was no longer treatable. In the nightmare he’s running through an old deteriorating house—broken windows, crumbling tiles, leaking roof—pursued by a Frankenstein monster. He defends himself: he hits, he kicks, he stabs, he throws the monster off the roof. But—and this is the central message of the dream—the monster is unstoppable: it instantly reappears and continues the pursuit. The monster is no stranger to him, having first invaded his dreams when he was a boy of ten, shortly after his father’s funeral. It terrorized him for months and eventually vanished, only to reappear fifty years later at the news of his wife’s fatal illness. When I asked for his thoughts about the dream, his first words were: “I’ve got a hundred thousand miles on me as well.” I understood then that the death of the other—first of his father and now the impending death of his wife—confronted him with his own. The Frankenstein monster was a personification of death, and the deteriorating house signified his bodily aging and breakdown. With that interview I believed I had discovered a wonderful new concept with significant implications for the psychotherapy of grief. Soon I began to look for this theme in every bereaved patient, and it was to test this hypothesis that, a few years prior to my seeing Irene, a colleague, Morton Lieberman, and I embarked on our research project in bereavement.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Silence followed the uproar. We were all alive, not quite knowing whether we had been aimed at, but our new hope reviving all our last and most selfish energies. We took to the road again in small and scattered groups, linked only loosely by our ebbing strength. The first group disappeared far ahead, and the last straggled to the rear. Each one wanted to exploit to the full his last chance, and the redhead no longer tried to regroup us. Nor did I have any more suggestions to make. Maybe he was right, and it was better to save a few than lose the lot. I hid my precious papers, some sugar, and a piece of bread in my pockets, and threw away my haversack. The road grew narrower, constrained between tall wall-like hedges of cactus. At the entrance to an Arab farm, we saw two charred and disemboweled mules. We had had nothing to drink since the distant and vague time of our work at the quarries. We ran to the well of the deserted farm, and took turns drinking from a bucket an opaque and salty liquid, the mere sight of which made us drool. Some men lay down in the shade of the narrow shapeless buildings and refused to move any more, so we went on without them. Discussion implies at least a minimum of contact and it had long since died between us. We regretfully left the wretched farm, which still had something human about it, for the wild, hostile countryside where we had no compass to guide us in our wanderings. Outside, horror had taken on the quiet and sinister disguise of a machine. Regular and even flights of bombers came over us in waves, dropped their bombs on the hills, and flew off again. During all this relay race, the machine guns kept quiet and there were no accessory noises. Death, at this stage, seemed to neglect all the smaller means that were at its disposal. I had not tried to eat since our last departure, so I now put a piece of sugar in my mouth, but sucking it was so painful that I soon spat it out.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  That’s where I feel shaky ... My legs feel solid.” The juxtaposition of the empowering sensations of her arms and legs supports her ability to experience the “shaky” sensations associated with the weakness without being swallowed up by them. Her breathing is now deep, continuous and spontaneous. Her skin has a warm rosy glow, indicating that the social engagement system is starting to function, to come online. I suggest that she slowly begin to open her eyes and look around. “That’s funny,” she says. “Things seem a little clearer; the colors are brighter and ... I think warmer, too. Actually, I feel a little warmer, and the trembling is less ... or not so scary ... It feels like I could go back inside now ... Do you want me to do that?” “That’s up to you,” I say, knowing how important the element of choice is. “What I can tell you, though, is that you are starting to be able to go inside yourself, and you seem less scared and helpless.” She looks at me momentarily, but then averts her gaze downward to the floor. Slowly she looks upward, contacting my eyes. A single tear rolls down her cheek. “Yes that’s right, I don’t feel so scared ... In some ways I feel a little excited ... Yes I want to go on ... It’s scary, but I think I can do it ... I just need some help ... your help.” More tears stream from her eyes. Her words stumble as she chokes: “It’s hard for me to ask ... It feels emotional ... I don’t think I have so much experience in asking for help.” This acknowledgment lets me know that the social engagement system is operative, and that deeper exploration is possible. “Yes, I’m glad to give you support,” I respond. When I ask her if she has any ideas of what kind of support might be helpful, she responds that just to do what I’ve been doing is what she wants. I ask her to be more specific. “I’m not sure,” she says. “Actually, I think it has to do with feeling that you’re here, here for me. When you give me feedback, that helps keep me in touch with what I feel ... in a way with who I am.” “When you say that,”—I see her face relax—“you seem to let go more deeply.” Miriam smiles, and I continue, “It’s different than a few minutes ago, when you spoke of not having had the experience of asking for help.” “Yes,” she adds, “it’s really different to ask you for support in helping me to learn how to be there for myself ... That way I don’t feel less than you, I feel more equal ... I like that ...

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

  camp. When I got bored I took the car to a stretch of road halfway to Marblemount where I could get it up to a hundred miles an hour without having to make any turns. As Champion placidly watched the white line shivering between the headlights I chattered like a gibbon and wept tears of pure terror. Then I stopped the car in the middle of the road, turned it around, and did the same thing headed the other way. I drove a little farther each time. Someday, I thought, I would just keep going. One morning I backed the car into a ditch while turning it around for my run home. I spun the wheels for a while, then got out and looked things over. I spun the wheels some more, until I was dug in good and deep. Then I gave up and started the trek back to camp. It was nearly three o’clock, and the walk home would take at least four hours. They would find me missing before I got there. The car too. I let off a string of swear words, but they seemed to be coming at me, not from me, and I soon stopped. Champion ran ahead through the forest that crowded the road on both sides. The mountains were black all around, the stars brilliant in the inky sky. My footsteps were loud on the roadway. I heard them as if they came from somebody else. The movement of my legs began to feel foreign to me, and then the rest of my body, foreign and unconvincing, as if I were only pretending to be someone. I watched this body clomp along. I was outside it, watching it without belief. Its imitation of purpose seemed absurd and frightening. I did not know what it was, or what was watching it so anxiously, from so far away. And then a voice bawled, “Oh Maybelline!” I knew that voice. It was mine, and it was loud, and I got behind it. I sang “Maybelline” and another song, and another. I kept singing at the top of my voice. A couple of times I broke off to try to think up an excuse for my situation—Look, I know you won’t believe this, but I just kind of woke up and there I was, driving the car!—but all of these ideas led me to despair, and I went back to singing songs. I sang every song I knew, and it began to amaze me how many of them there were. And I became aware that I didn’t sound that bad out here where I could really cut loose—that I sounded pretty good. I took different parts. I did talking songs, like “Deck of Cards” and “Three Stars.” I sang falsetto. I began to enjoy myself. I WAS HALFWAY to Chinook when I heard an engine behind me. I faced the lights and flagged the driver down. He stopped his truck in the road, engine running, a man I didn’t know. “That your car back there?” he asked.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  All this is focused particularly in what we can only describe as Jesus’s long-running battle with the unseen (though sometimes very vocal) forces of evil. It is striking that, apart from one or two incidents in Acts, most of the early Christian references to exorcisms and the problem they were addressing are found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Nor were the hostile forces whom Jesus thus encountered simply corrupting and destroying the unfortunate humans in whom they appeared to have taken up residence. They were, it seems, bent on unmasking Jesus and thereby placing him and his kingdom mission in grave danger; one of them remarks, “I know who you are: you’re God’s Holy One!” (Mark 1:24). In the evangelists’ portrait of Jesus as he is faced with this kind of opposition, we have a sense that all the varied evil in the world is somehow closing in. And just as time after time Jesus expels the demon and heals the afflicted person, so the evangelists are saying that as evil closes in, literally, for the kill, Jesus will perform one final great act of deliverance in which at last his true identity will be disclosed. This time the “exorcism” will displace forever the iron grip that the unseen and nebulous, but very powerful, quasi-personal force of evil has not only on Israel, but on the whole world. This, in other words, is how the evangelists explain that Jesus has won the unique victory over the powers of evil: not by superimposing the notion of victory upon the narrative, but by allowing it to emerge and reach its climax from within the narrative itself. Once we recognize that the four gospels are telling not only the story of God’s kingdom being inaugurated, but also the story of how evil draws itself up to its height so that it can then be defeated by the Messiah, we recognize that this emerges not only in the four gospels themselves (and also in Paul, as we shall see), but also in the Acts of the Apostles. In Acts 4, Peter and John are hauled in front of the chief priests and elders because of the lame man they had healed and the preaching about Jesus that had followed. Those in charge give the apostles a lecture and warn them against continuing to speak in Jesus’s name, which of course makes little or no impact on Peter and John. They return to their own people and report what has happened, and the whole company prays together, invoking Psalm 2: Why did the nations fly into a rage And why did the peoples think empty thoughts? The kings of the earth arose And the rulers gathered themselves together Against the Lord and against his anointed Messiah. (4:26, quoting Ps. 2:1–2)

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I am amazed at not being afraid; but habit gives one courage, and I have actually watched for my self-discovery for a long while: I am dying through having turned back to look at my own self. It is forbidden to see oneself, and I have reached the end of discovering myself. God turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt — is it possible for me to survive my contemplation of myself? I did not kill myself because I remembered the ditch in summer camp where I used to go and weep every afternoon, and because I refuse to allow myself any compromises. I am leaving now with Henry to give what is left of my life its last chance. Here, there’s no solution; whatever my choice, I would have suffered. If the world is everywhere such a tissue of lies and hatred as here, then life is but endless despair. Perhaps I owe it to myself to cross the ocean first. Perhaps elsewhere I will be taken for a man of good will with a simple case history and simple feelings. Perhaps my body and my soul will recover there. If ever I get cured of my tuberculosis and of my life which I should never have known, I will then have all of my life ahead of me. The secret of living must be simple, since all men live. If I die, at least my apprenticeship will have been thorough. With all my heart, I hope what I have learned can be of help to others. Our train reached Tunis at eleven in the morning. The city was full of soldiers of all kinds and all races, and they seemed foreign to me. The unusual and limitless nonchalance of the crowd gave one the erroneous impression of a fair. The merchants had organized their business accordingly, with English inscriptions and banners across the streets and exhibits of the most heterogeneous wares. The soldiers were buying as souvenirs all the junk that had not been sold for years. So it was time for me to get out of this dry rot too.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Michaelis heard they were in town, and came running with roses. "Why, whatever's wrong?" he cried. "You're a shadow of yourself. Why, I never saw such a change! Why ever didn't you let me know? Come to Nice with me! Come down to Sicily! Go on, come to Sicily with me, it's lovely there just now. You want sun! You want life! Why you're wasting away! Come away with me! Come to Africa! Oh, hang Sir Clifford! Chuck him, and come along with me. I'll marry you the minute he divorces you. Come along and try a life! God's love! That place Wragby would kill anybody. Beastly place! Foul place! Kill anybody! Come away with me into the sun! It's the sun you want, of course, and a bit of normal life." But Connie's heart simply stood still at the thought of abandoning Clifford there and then. She couldn't do it. No ... no! She just couldn't. She had to go back to Wragby. Michaelis was disgusted. Hilda didn't like Michaelis, but she _almost_ preferred him to Clifford. Back went the sisters to the Midlands. Hilda talked to Clifford, who still had yellow eyeballs when they got back. He, too, in his way, was over-wrought; but he had to listen to all Hilda said, to all the doctor had said, not what Michaelis had said, of course, and he sat mum through the ultimatum. "Here is the address of a good manservant, who was with an invalid patient of the doctor's till he died last month. He is really a good man, and fairly sure to come." "But I'm _not_ an invalid, and I will _not_ have a manservant," said Clifford, poor devil. "And here are the addresses of two women; I saw one of them, she would do very well; a woman of about fifty, quiet, strong, kind, and in her way cultured...." Clifford only sulked, and would not answer. "Very well, Clifford. If we don't settle something by tomorrow, I shall telegraph to father, and we shall take Connie away." "Will Connie go?" asked Clifford. "She doesn't want to, but she knows she must. Mother died of cancer, brought on by fretting. We're not running any risks." So next day Clifford suggested Mrs. Bolton, Tevershall parish nurse. Apparently Mrs. Betts had thought of her. Mrs. Bolton was just retiring from her parish duties to take up private nursing jobs. Clifford had a queer dread of delivering himself into the hands of a stranger, but this Mrs. Bolton had once nursed him through scarlet fever, and he knew her. The two sisters at once called on Mrs. Bolton, in a newish house in a row, quite select for Tevershall. They found a rather good-looking woman of forty-odd, in a nurse's uniform, with a white collar and apron, just making herself tea, in a small, crowded sitting-room.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  GIANNI LOTTERINGHI HEARETH KNOCK AT HIS DOOR BY NIGHT AND AWAKENETH HIS WIFE, WHO GIVETH HIM TO BELIEVE THAT IT IS A PHANTOM; WHEREUPON THEY GO TO EXORCISE IT WITH A CERTAIN ORISON AND THE KNOCKING CEASETH "My Lord, it had been very agreeable to me, were such your pleasure, that other than I should have given a beginning to so goodly a matter as is that whereof we are to speak; but, since it pleaseth you that I give all the other ladies assurance by my example, I will gladly do it. Moreover, dearest ladies, I will study to tell a thing that may be useful to you in time to come, for that, if you others are as fearful as I, and especially of phantoms, (though what manner of thing they may be God knoweth I know not, nor ever found I any woman who knew it, albeit all are alike adread of them,) you may, by noting well my story, learn a holy and goodly orison of great virtue for the conjuring them away, should they come to you. There was once in Florence, in the quarter of San Brancazio, a wool-comber called Gianni Lotteringhi, a man more fortunate in his craft than wise in other things, for that, savoring of the simpleton, he was very often made captain of the Laudsingers[340] of Santa Maria Novella and had the governance of their confraternity, and he many a time had other little offices of the same kind, upon which he much valued himself. This betided him for that, being a man of substance, he gave many a good pittance to the clergy, who, getting of him often, this a pair of hose, that a gown and another a scapulary, taught him in return store of goodly orisons and gave him the paternoster in the vulgar tongue, the Song of Saint Alexis, the Lamentations of Saint Bernard, the Canticles of Madam Matilda and the like trumpery, all which he held very dear and kept very diligently for his soul's health. Now he had a very fair and lovesome lady to wife, by name Mistress Tessa, who was the daughter of Mannuccio dalla Cuculia and was exceeding discreet and well advised. She, knowing her husband's simplicity and being enamoured of Federigo di Neri Pegolotti, a brisk and handsome youth, and he of her, took order with a serving-maid of hers that he should come speak with her at a very goodly country house which her husband had at Camerata, where she sojourned all the summer and whither Gianni came whiles to sup and sleep, returning in the morning to his shop and bytimes to his Laudsingers. [Footnote 340: See p. 144, note 2.]