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 254 of 529 · 20 per page

• From Educated (2018)

  red pills were on the counter in front of me. “This is what people take for pain,” Charles said. “Not us.” “Who is this us?” Charles said. “You’re leaving tomorrow. You’re not one of them anymore.” I closed my eyes, hoping he would drop it. “What do you think will happen if you take the pills?” he said. I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what would happen. Mother always said that medical drugs are a special kind of poison, one that never leaves your body but rots you slowly from the inside for the rest of your life. She told me if I took a drug now, even if I didn’t have children for a decade, they would be deformed. “People take drugs for pain,” he said. “It’s normal.” I must have winced at the word “normal,” because he went quiet. He filled a glass of water and set it in front of me, then gently pushed the pills forward until they touched my arm. I picked one up. I’d never seen a pill up close before. It was smaller than I’d expected. I swallowed it, then the other. For as long as I could remember, whenever I was in pain, whether from a cut or a toothache, Mother would make a tincture of lobelia and skullcap. It had never lessened the pain, not one degree. Because of this, I had come to respect pain, even revere it, as necessary and untouchable. Twenty minutes after I swallowed the red pills, the earache was gone. I couldn’t comprehend its absence. I spent the afternoon swinging my head from left to right, trying to jog the pain loose again. I thought if I could shout loudly enough, or move quickly enough, perhaps the earache would return and I would know the medicine had been a sham after all. Charles watched in silence but he must have found my behavior absurd, especially when I began to pull on my ear, which still ached dully, so I could test the limits of this strange witchcraft. — MOTHER WAS SUPPOSED TO drive me to BYU the next morning, but during the night, she was called to deliver a baby. There was a car sitting in the

• From Educated (2018)

  My father was carried to the couch. Rescue Remedy—the homeopathic for shock—was poured into the lipless cavity that had been his mouth. They gave him lobelia and skullcap for the pain, the same mixture Mother had given Luke years before. Dad choked on the medicine. He couldn’t swallow. He’d inhaled the fiery blast, and his insides were charred. Mother tried to take him to the hospital, but between rasping breaths he whispered that he’d rather die than see a doctor. The authority of the man was such that she gave way. The dead skin was gently cut away and he was slathered in salve—the same salve Mother had used on Luke’s leg years before—from his waist to the tip of his head, then bandaged. Mother gave him ice cubes to suck on, hoping to hydrate him, but the inside of his mouth and throat were so badly burned, they absorbed no liquid, and without lips or muscles he couldn’t hold the ice in his mouth. It slid down his throat and choked him. They nearly lost him many times that first night. His breathing would slow, then stop, and my mother—and the heavenly host of women who worked for her—would fly about, adjusting chakras and tapping pressure points, anything to coax his brittle lungs to resume their rattle. That morning was when Audrey called me. * His heart had stopped twice during the night, she told me. It would probably be his heart that killed him, assuming his lungs didn’t give out first. Either way, Audrey was sure he’d be dead by midday. I called Nick. I told him I had to go to Idaho for a few days, for a family thing, nothing serious. He knew I wasn’t telling him something—I could hear the hurt in his voice that I wouldn’t confide in him—but I put him out of my mind the moment I hung up the phone. I stood, keys in hand, hand on the doorknob, and hesitated. The strep. What if I gave it to Dad? I had been taking the penicillin for nearly three days. The doctor had said that after twenty-four hours I would no longer be contagious, but then he was a doctor, and I didn’t trust him. I waited a day. I took several times the prescribed dose of penicillin, then called Mother and asked what I should do. “You should come home,” she said, and her voice broke. “I don’t think the strep will matter tomorrow.”

• From Educated (2018)

  When I arrived at the peak, Mother was making the Thanksgiving meal. The large oak table was covered with jars of tincture and vials of essential oil, which I cleared away. Charles was coming for dinner. Shawn was in a mood. He sat on a bench at the table, watching me gather the bottles and hide them. I’d washed Mother’s china, which had never been used, and I began laying it out, eyeing the distance between each plate and knife. Shawn resented my making a fuss. “It’s just Charles,” he said. “His standards aren’t that high. He’s with you, after all.” I fetched glasses. When I put one in front of him, Shawn jabbed a finger into my ribs, digging hard. “Don’t touch me!” I shrieked. Then the room turned upside down. My feet were knocked out from under me and I was swept into the living room, just out of Mother’s sight. Shawn turned me onto my back and sat on my stomach, pinning my arms at my sides with his knees. The shock of his weight forced the breath from my chest. He pressed his forearm into my windpipe. I sputtered, trying to gulp enough air to shout, but the airway was blocked. “When you act like a child, you force me to treat you like one.” Shawn said this loudly, he almost shouted it. He was saying it to me,

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The otters were gone, rivers were poisoned, there were guillemots drowning in oiled seas. Everything was sick. And we’d be next. I knew it. All of us. I knew that one morning there’d be a siren, then a double flash of light on the horizon and I’d look up and see a distant mushroom cloud, and then, on the wind, the fallout would come. Invisible dust. And then everything would be dead. Or we’d go back to the Stone Age, and live in rags huddled around ruins and smoking fires. But even that slim dream of survival was dashed. ‘Are we going to build a nuclear fallout shelter under the garden?’ I asked my parents one afternoon after school. They looked at each other. Maybe they didn’t understand, I thought, so I went on. ‘In the leaflet it says we should build a shelter under the stairs and there’s not very much room under ours for you and me and James.’ There was a long pause, then they gently told me that our house was very close to several very important military targets. ‘There’s no point in worrying,’ they said. ‘There’ll be no fallout. If there’s a war, we won’t even know about it. We’ll be instantly vaporised.’ This, needless to say, did not help at all. I scratched my name on bits of slate and buried them as deep as I could in the garden, under the earth. Maybe they’d survive the apocalypse. The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world. The rabbit was a ghost from the apocalypse of my childhood, and later that week another appeared. This one was not a rabbit, but a book. I had pulled it from my friend’s shelves: a new edition of J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, the story of a man obsessively watching wintering wild peregrines in the Essex countryside of the late 1960s. I’d not read it for years. I remembered it as a poetic celebration of nature. But as I started reading it I found it was not like that at all. This, I thought with a chill, comes from the same place as that rabbit. I saw in it the writer’s awful desire for death and annihilation, a desire disguised as an elegy for birds that flew through poisonous skies, falcons as searing- bright and pewter-flashed as reflected sun, already things of memory before they were ever gone. I was frightened of Baker and what he meant. I was not as frightened of White. Despite his disaster with Gos, despite his desire for cruelties and his dreadful politics, White fought hard against death. He loved the small things of the world, and knowing war was coming, he lived in hope of miracles.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  In Baker’s book I saw no hope at all. For him the world was dying, and his hawks were icons of extinction: ours, theirs and his own. There was no struggle in him. He shared the falcons’ fate; had no choice but to follow them. He was lured towards them just as the gulls and plovers in his book rose helplessly towards the peregrine’s killing strike, just as the compass-beaks of all the small birds hiding in hedges pointed in fear towards the magnet that was the falcon in the air. There were no place names, no people in his book. They’d fallen away. I understood this better now, for I knew the pull of the hawk, and I knew how the world could disappear in the light it cast. But his hawks were made of death. Troubled, I hoped my hawk was life. I hoped it very much. I’d never believed in Baker’s falcons, because I’d met real ones before I’d ever read his book: cheerful, friendly falconer’s birds that preened on suburban lawns. But most of my bird-loving friends read Baker’s book before they ever saw a live one, and now they can’t see real peregrines without them conjuring distance, extinction and death. Wild things are made from human histories. When I was a child I hated what White had thought of his goshawk. But Gos’s hawkish ghost moved behind the patterned, living feathers of my own. And there were still darker ghosts behind him. A few years ago I visited a friend who was at that time the president of the British Falconers’ Club. We chatted over tea and biscuits. We talked about the history of falconry for a while, and the history of the Club, and then he said, ‘Come and look at this.’ And he pulled open a cupboard, and there, right at the back, half-obscured by the usual household bits and bobs, I saw it. ‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘Gordon, is that it?’ He looked at me and nodded. ‘I hate it,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear to have it in the house.’ I crouched down and pulled it out. It was a bronze falcon standing on a vertical plinth, heavy, stylised, and slightly worn around its wings. ‘Shit, Gordon. This freaks me out,’ I said. ‘Me too,’ he replied. The statuette was very valuable, and very beautifully made, but it was a thing that both of us wished had never been made at all. In 1937 Gilbert Blaine and Jack Mavrogordato were invited to the International Hunting Exhibition in Germany. They travelled to Berlin with a display of British falconry: stuffed falcons on perches, falconry equipment, photographs, books and paintings.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  There was none. His parents’ marriage was ill-starred from the first. Constance Aston had been nearly thirty when her mother’s jibes about the cost of keeping her became unbearable. ‘I’ll marry the next man who asks me,’ she snapped. The man was Garrick White, a District Commissioner of Police in Bombay. The newly-weds travelled to India, and as soon as Terence was born, Constance refused to sleep with her husband any more. He took to drink and the marriage toppled into violence . Five years later , the family came back to England to live for a while with Constance’s parents in the south-coast resort of St Leonards-on-Sea. When they returned to India they left the boy behind. It was an abandonment, but it was also a reprieve from fear. All that time was too beautiful for these words , was how White described his St Leonards life in a faintly fictionalised autobiographical fragment that in places breaks into his own, childish voice, the voice of a small boy desperate for attention and already desirous of transformation into other , safer selves: Look at me, Ruth, I am a pirate chief! Look, I am an aeroplane! Look, I am a polar bear! Look! Look! Look! There were puss-moth caterpillars, a tortoise, a storeroom with chocolate and sugar in jars, and endless games with his cousins. But it could not go on for ever . ‘They took us away from that life,’ he wrote, shortly, ‘and sent us to schools.’ The idyll was over, the child pitched back into a life of fear and violence. His Cheltenham housemaster was a sadistic middle-aged bachelor with a gloomy suffused face’ and the prefects were his acolytes. They used to beat the younger boys after evening prayers. Every day the boy prayed, ‘ Please , God, don’t let me be beaten tonight.’ He usually was. ‘I knew in a dumb way it was a sexual outrage,’ he later mused, ‘though I could not have phrased that charge.’ No wonder he felt so deeply for the hawk. The boy had been torn from the only place he’d ever felt was home and sent away to be educated in a world of exacting bureaucratic cruelty. It was a betrayal that marked White for ever . And it would also mark his hawk. Ferox. Fairy. Free. Tim White sits at his kitchen table and fills his fountain pen from a bottle of green ink that stands on the oilskin tablecloth. The ink is a mischievous thing, a small, fierce thing. He is writing of his new life with a colour that is the ink of – what does Havelock Ellis call it? The favourite ink of inverts. The hawk arrives tomorrow. Soon there will be three souls in the house: himself, his dog, his hawk. The thought thrills him.

• From Educated (2018)

  My strongest memory is not a memory. It’s something I imagined, then came to remember as if it had happened. The memory was formed when I was five, just before I turned six, from a story my father told in such detail that I and my brothers and sisters each conjured our own cinematic version, with gunfire and shouts. Mine had crickets. That’s the sound I hear as my family huddles in the kitchen, lights off, hiding from the Feds who’ve surrounded the house. A woman reaches for a glass of water and her silhouette is lighted by the moon. A shot echoes like the lash of a whip and she falls. In my memory it’s always Mother who falls, and she has a baby in her arms. The baby doesn’t make sense—I’m the youngest of my mother’s seven children—but like I said, none of this happened. — A YEAR AFTER MY FATHER told us that story, we gathered one evening to hear him read aloud from Isaiah, a prophecy about Immanuel. He sat on our mustard-colored sofa, a large Bible open in his lap. Mother was next to him. The rest of us were strewn across the shaggy brown carpet. “Butter and honey shall he eat,” Dad droned, low and monotone, weary

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  White’s politics were deeply unfortunate. He loathed capitalism, and while he’d flirted with Communism at Stowe, loving its revolutionary fervour, he began to fear it, for if the revolution came, it would take away his individuality and he was sure that was all he had. Now he wondered if he might be a fascist. He was not sure. He hated nationalism, but certainly did not believe people were equal. He did not like Hitler. But he did not like the British government either. He had a child’s vision of apocalyptic redemption: he believed that war, when it came, would bring waste and murder and the ruin of civilisation, but that war would be worthwhile if we could emerge from the ruins with wisdom. One had to choose one’s side. Democracy against fascism. The rational against the irrational. Blood or peace. People or rabbits. White chose to shoot rabbits, rather than people, and he chose to fight the war in person with a hawk. Through Gos, he battled the dictator in himself. And for him the hawk was a salutary thing, for he believed that war came from society’s repression of innate human urges. Because the hawk could not dissemble he was a ‘tonic for the less forthright savagery of the human heart’. And so the war was fought, here, in a kitchen and a barn, a garden and a wood. To and fro across the disputed territory the battle onward raged. When White understood that he was the dictator he tasted defeat, engineered the hawk’s loss and pushed it away. Then came a new stage in the war: his retreat to forest bunkers. From these miniature shelters, he hoped to bring down the hawks of the air that flew like the aeroplanes in his dreams.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  But he returns and tries again. Two days later Gos is back on the railings and White is forty yards away, whistling and waving two ounces of butcher’s steak in his hand. He pleads. He calls. He tries every voice he knows: his tone is commanding, pandering, urgent, mad, soft, desperate, cross. ‘Now, now,’ he remonstrates. ‘Don’t be silly, come-along, be-a-good-Gos, Gossy-gossy-gos.’ After ten minutes, Gos decides to fly. But the falconer’s joy turns fast to horror, for what is approaching him is hardly a hawk at all. It is a ‘hump-backed aviating Richard III’, a ghastly aerial toad, and its glowing headlamp eyes are not focused on his outstretched fist, my God, but on his exposed and unprotected face. He begins to panic. Gos had hurt him a few minutes before, had jumped up to his shoulder and buried a foot in his neck. There was blood. There was a great deal of pain. He remembers the force of that blow, the agony of it, the reserves of patience it required for him not to dash the hawk to the ground and kill it, to wait, just to wait for the hawk to let go. Closer. Now it is five paces. It is almost upon him. Those great eyes are fixed on his. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. He cannot bear it. His nerve breaks. He shuts his eyes and ducks. Gos, vastly confused, veers off into the branches of a tree, misses his footing, drops awkwardly into a hedge. White collects himself, retrieves the hawk, walks back to the railings and tries the whole lesson again. This time he will be brave. This time. As the hawk flies to him he holds his breath and tries to stand his ground: I braced the breast muscles not to flinch. It was too much. At two yards humanity became again the inherent coward, and cringed away to the right, averting face from the eyes of slaughter, humping shoulder, powerless to remain erect. But Gos bound to the shoulder with a decisive blow, stepped quickly down the arm, was feeding on two ounces of beef.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  At this point, space-time is folded and scrunched into direct relations. Trigonometry. Goshawk glide-path to my fist, and Goshawk intentionality, which I am sure is also derivable in mathematical terms. My beating, horrified heart, and my soul feeling like water at four degrees; heavier than ice, falling to the bottom of the ocean. And suddenly, she is back on the glove, I feel soaked in iced water, and I cannot believe she’s not lost. I feel like White: a tyro, a fool, a beginner. An idiot. ‘Never mind,’ says Stuart. He knows I am in pieces. I catch the flash of his grin in the darkness. ‘She’s too high, and it’s getting dark. But you got her back, right? That’s always a good end to the day.’ I can barely speak. I croak a reply. The adrenalin fits and fizzes in my veins as I walk back to the car, and I’m still not sure how I managed to drive home. The air is dark and full of water. He is soaked to the skin. Gos is nowhere to be seen. He is tying pieces of rabbit to all the places where the hawk had been. They are like prayers, like the tattered ribbons pagans tie to winter twigs. His hands are very white against the coruscating green of the wind-blown bark of empty oaks. He has run out of rabbit. He has no lure. He has no meat but liver. He’ll ask Mrs Wheeler to buy some steak for him in Buckingham. Standing by the farmhouse door he listens. ‘Rooks observed to be mobbing, or a solitary crow sitting on the dead branch of some tree, cawing or jerking about uneasily, are an almost certain sign that the lost hawk is not far away,’ he’d read in Blaine. Nothing. Then a single caw, loudly repeated. There. A couple of hundred yards away is a crow, circling the top of a tree, cursing at the bird beneath it. On the topmost branch sits Gos, tiny at that distance, his familiar blunt-shouldered form hunched against the gale. White runs to the tree and stands under it waving a piece of liver and a handkerchief as a lure while flashes of water spread on the further fields. The rain falls on the glades, avenues, and all the temples and obelisks of Stowe, and Gos sits there, imperious, indecisive, and horribly soaked, for White’s constant stroking had taken the waterproofing oil from his feathers. The gale buffets his perch. It is not comfortable here. It is not comfortable at all. He opens his wings, intending to fly down to the man with the food in his hand. He leaves the tree, turns in mid-air, starts to descend. White’s heart, beating. The hawk approaching. Then the wind fills his wings and pushes, and the hawk, who has no skill and does not know how to fly in a gale like this, is sucked away downwind and is gone.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I’m looking forward to seeing him but am wobbly all the same, because this will not be a flying visit for Mabel. Tony’s giving Mabel a spare aviary for the moulting season. Tomorrow I’ll be driving back here and leaving her behind. I have to do it. It’s time for her to drop all her feathers, one by one, and grow new ones. She needs to be fat and full of food to grow her new plumage, so all week I’ve been giving her as much quail and pheasant as she can eat. She’s round as a turkey now, and part of me has been waiting for her to get wild. A fat goshawk is a wild goshawk , say the books. They are wrong. Of course they are. Mabel’s less willing to tolerate strangers in this fed-up state, but she’s still as tame as a kitten with me. This morning we played throw and catch with paper balls, and for the last hour she’s been snoozing on my fist while I watch bad TV. ‘Right, Mabel,’ I say. ‘Bedtime.’ I put her on her perch in the other room, switch off the light and go upstairs to bed. Some things are too terrifying to comprehend. Seconds can pass in disbelief as the world you live in turns into a lie. At just past one in the morning I’m having one of the worst nightmares of my life. My dreams lately have been small and full of light, but in this one, someone – something, for it cannot be human – has taken hold of the end of my bed and is shaking it, shaking it hard, trying to pitch me to the floor. It is the feeling in the dream that terrifies me most of all. It is not like a nightmare. It is worse. I wake with a start. Something is still shaking my bed. I can see it move, hear it creaking. There is no one in the room. Every inch of my skin crawls with terror . I am shaking and unable to move. The wrongness is indescribable. The fear is falling through a thousand feet of air. The bed is still shaking, senselessly, violently, horribly, impossibly. Then it stops. For a few seconds I lie there, stricken. I have not been breathing, I realise. I take a vast gulp of shuddering air. The lampshade above me is swinging in circles still. Then a flash of understanding. An earthquake. It was an earthquake. Here, in England. They hardly ever happen here, do they? Was it definitely an earthquake? It must have been. Yes . I still can’t quite believe it. I jump out of bed and peer through the curtains. Lights are on in all the houses. People in the street are wandering fearfully in pyjamas. The phone rings, and I pick it up, and it is Christina. ‘Earthquake!’ she yells. ‘Did you feel it?’ I swear.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And Main Street, though also fuzzhot, is even more crowded now. When the bars close on Main Street, their world spills into the streets. Malehustlers, queens, scores—all those who havent made it yet in one way or another—or have made it and are trying again—disperse into the night, squeezing every inch of nightlife from the streets. They stand pretending to be looking into store windows—continue their searches into the all-night moviehouses—the burlesque-movie theaters, where along the dark rows, in the early jammed hours of the morning on weekends, men sit, fly open, pulling off.... Or the scattered army goes to Hooper’s on Main Street—where periodically the cops come in, walk up and down the counter sullenly, picking you out at random—and youre suddenly intensely studying the cup of coffee before you. Life is lived on the brink of panic on the streets, intensifying the immediate experience—the realness of Today, of This Moment—Now!—and panic is generated by the threat of the vice-squad (plainclothesmen sitting in the known heads licking their lips; sometimes roaming the streets, even offering you money before they bust you); by the copear driving along the streets—a slowly moving hearse. Like a gang looking for a rumble from a rival gang, cops haunt this area, personally vindictive.... And for the homeless drifters there is also the panic that one day youll wake up to the fact that youre through on the streets, in the bars—that everyone has had you, that those who havent have lost Interest—that youve been replaced by the fresher faces that come daily into the city in that shifting wave of vagrants—younger than you now (and Youth is at a premium), and now the interest you once felt is focused on someone else. One day someone will say about you: “I had him when he was young and pretty.” And as a reminder of this, beyond Los Angeles Street, in the same area of the world of Main Street but not really a part of it, is Skid Row—and you see prematurely old defeated men, flying on Thunderbird or Gallo wine, lost in this sunny rosy haven—hanging shaggily like zombies waiting for the Mission to open; folded over in a pool of their own urine where theyve passed out along the alleys.... If youre young, you avoid that street, you concentrate on Today. Tomorrow, like Death, is inevitable but not thought of.... At night, the fat Negro woman sprawled like chocolate pudding between Harry’s Bar and Wally’s mumblingly coaxes you to take a copy from the slender stack of religious magazines falling from her lap to her fat tired feet. The magazine shouts: AWAKE! And along that strip, the gray hotels welcome the scores and malehustlers: No Questions Asked. For a few minutes—unless you havent got another place and stay all night—you occupy the fleetingly rented room, where inevitably a neonlight outside will wink off and on feebly like exhausted but persistent lightning....

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  20% Wyn by nab, v2 2 K 37 18", esp. with ndy, ny, 1K15” Je 21? 37° "+5; 2819” David fled מעל אבשלום‎ from Absalom (whom his presence had encumbered), Ne 13* 39028) Dyn, ef. Gn 13" 25° Nu 20% ישרי מַעָלִיו‎ Db}, 2 0 20%; Ex 05 dyn > (contemptuously ; be no more obnoxious to me), similarly 2 5 13” שלחורנא את-זאת מעלי‎ (Amnon of Tamar). 0. From beside (cf. by 6 c), in different nuances: Gni7~ God went up מעל אברהם‎ from beside A., 35%; 18° Tray אל נא תעבר מעל‎ (ef. by ,לד‎ 42% Nu 16%"; 1 K1* to come down M3357 Syn (ef. by 13'; 6 6 and 7 b); from attendance on Gn 45} (cf. by 7b.), Ju 3” py כּלההָעַמְרִים‎ voy wy 1S 17" (y. Dr), 28 13°, cf. 1 8 13°" 2 K 25° (Je 367 rd. מ ,על‎ being dittogr.), cf. 2Ch35"; from attachment to, ” byp PM 162' Ez11® 44” cf. 8°,” by 1D Je 32” 1 6% * by MYA Ez 44%, cf. 14° Dt 132; also מָעַל חטאות‎ 7D 2 K "סז‎ 15" (usu. ,(מהטאות‎ cf. Ez 14° 23°; from companionship with, Ib1g*® PM yD אחי‎ ; from accompany- ing protectingly 1S 28% מַעָלִי‎ 1D obi, v2 d. In late 1160.,== על‎ above: 2 K 25" נָתַן‎ ונה‎ NBD מָעַל‎ IND (|| 16 52 more class. (ממעל ל‎ Est 3! שמים 108° ש‎ dyn ,(עד "57 ||( גדול‎ 6 57 שמָר‎ F232 מָעַל‎ 733, Ne 35 8* 2 Ch 34* ְמַעָלָה‎ מס מָעַלִיהֶם‎ high above them; Ez 41'™*.—Pr 14% rd. with De Now Str "923203. e. 5 by (chiefly late, and pleon. for עס על‎ else=the more class. syn.? וְמַמַעַל‎ (a) Gn by yp (Ez1*/ 5 byron), Ez1>(txt.dub.;v.Comm.), . Jon 4° Mal 1° upon, over the border‏ 17% 5 ד (territory) of Israel (so 166111 Ké: but Hi Ew‏ We beyond), 2 Ch 13* upon mount Zemaraim,‏ dyn,‏ לְמַזבַּח הַקטרֶת "26 beside 2 Ch‏ )6( ,”24 dub.: BeRy (in all) off the side‏ 2711-7555 ד 6 אך לק 6)=at alittle distance from ; Ke in‏ מן) of‏ upon, in v*"S”-% by the side of (an ... voriiber).‏ mby transp. fr. my (q.v.) Ho 10°.‏ -1] yu. miby n.pr.m. in Edom Gn 36% (P) = 1 Ch 1% Qr (Kt my), G Tota; GL™ Arova. a.prm. in Edom Gn 36 (P), 8‏ עלון1 200 @ (עלין Tohov, Toda = 1 Ch 1% Qr (Kt‏ .שסטס\(ג. A 100, GL‏ 59 bby

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The anthropologist Rane Willerslev once lived for a year in a Yukaghir community in north-eastern Siberia and became fascinated by how their hunters saw the relationship between humans and animals. The hunters, he wrote, think ‘humans and animals can turn into each other by temporarily taking on one another’s bodies’. If you want to hunt elk, you dress in elkskins, walk like an elk, take on an elk’s alien consciousness. If you do this, elk will recognise you as one of their own and walk towards you. But, Willerslev explained, Yukaghir hunters consider these transformations very dangerous, because they can make you lose sight of your ‘original species identity and undergo an invisible metamorphosis’. Turning into an animal can imperil the human soul. Willerslev included the story of a hunter who’d been tracking reindeer for many hours and ended up in an unfamiliar camp, where women he did not know gave him lichen to eat and he started forgetting things. He remembered his wife but could not remember her name. Confused, he fell asleep, and it was only when he dreamed he was surrounded by reindeer urging him to leave that he saw what he had done. That story made me shiver when I read it, because that was what it was like. I’d turned myself into a hawk – taken all the traits of goshawks in the books and made them my own. I was nervous, highly strung, paranoid, prone to fits of terror and rage; I ate greedily or didn’t eat at all; I fled from society, hid from everything; found myself drifting into strange states where I wasn’t certain who or what I was. In hunting with Mabel, day after day, I had assumed – in my imagination, of course, but that was all it could ever be – her alien perspective, her inhuman understanding of the world. It brought something akin to madness, and I did not understand what I had done. When I was small I’d thought turning into a hawk would be a magical thing. What I’d read in The Sword in the Stone encouraged me to think it, too, as a good and instructive thing; a lesson in life for the child who would be king. But now the lesson was killing me. It was not at all the same.

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

  In 388 Theodosius gave the monks the go-ahead, and they fell on the village shrines of Syria like a plague; with the connivance of the local bishop, they also destroyed a synagogue at Callinicum on the Euphrates. The pagan orator Libanius urged the emperor to prosecute this “black-robed tribe” who were guilty of latrocinium (“robbery and violence”), describing the “utter desolation” that followed their vicious attacks on the temples “with sticks and stones and bars of iron, and in some cases, disdaining these, with hands and feet.” The pagan priests had no option but to “keep quiet or die.” 79 The monks became the symbolic vanguard of violent Christianization. The mere sound of their chanting was enough to make the governor of Antioch adjourn his court and flee the city. Even though there were no boskoi on Minorca, the leader of the Jewish community there dreamed in 418 that his synagogue was in ruins and its site occupied by psalm-singing monks. A few weeks later the synagogue was in fact destroyed—though not by monks but by fanatic local Christians. 80 Some bishops opposed this vandalism, but not consistently. Because Roman law protected Jewish property, Theodosius ordered the bishop who had instigated the burning of the Callinicum synagogue to pay for its repair. But Ambrose (339–97), bishop of Milan, forced him to rescind this decree, since rebuilding the synagogue would be as humiliating to the true faith as Julian’s attempt to restore the Jewish temple. 81 The Christianization of the empire was now, increasingly, equated with the destruction of these iconic buildings. In 391, after Theodosius had permitted Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, to occupy the temple of Dionysius, the bishop pillaged all the temples in the city and paraded the looted treasure in an insulting display. 82 In response, the pagans of Alexandria barricaded themselves into the magnificent temple of Serapis with some Christian hostages, whom they forced to reenact the trauma of Diocletian’s persecution: These they forced to offer sacrifice on the altars where fire was kindled; those who refused they put to death with new and refined tortures, fastening some to gibbets and breaking the legs of others and pitching them into the caverns which a careworn antiquity had built to receive the blood of sacrifices and the other impurities of the temple. 83 When the pagan leader thought he heard monks singing in some distant part of the shrine, he knew they were doomed. In fact, the Serapaeum was destroyed by imperial soldiers acting on the bishop’s orders, but the monks who turned up afterward carrying relics of John the Baptist and squatted in the ruins became the symbols of this Christian triumph. 84 It was reported that many pagans were so shocked by these events that they converted on the spot.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I tell you, all the world is here this afternoon - and her amongst ’em. She is over at the table of some paper or magazine. I saw her, and nearly fainted dead away!’ ‘My God.’ Diana, here! The thought was awful — and yet ... Well, they do say that old dogs never forget the tricks their mistresses beat into them: I had felt myself stir, faintly, at the first mention of her hateful name. I looked once into the tent, and saw Florence, on her feet again and still shaking her arm at the platform; then I turned to Zena. ‘Will you show me,’ I asked, ‘where?’ She gave me one swift warning sort of look; then she took my arm and led me through the crowd, towards the bathing lake, and came to a halt behind a bush. ‘Look, there,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Near that table. D’you see her?’ I nodded. She was standing beside a display - it was for the women’s journal Shafts, that she sometimes helped with the running of — and was talking with another lady, a lady I thought might be one of the ones who had come dressed as Sappho to the fancy-dress ball. The lady had a Suffrage sash across her bosom. Diana was clad in grey, and her hat had a veil to it — though this was, at the moment, turned up. She was as haughty and as handsome as ever. I gazed at her and had a very vivid memory - of myself, sprawled beside her with pearls about my hips; of the bed seeming to tilt; of the chafing of the leather as she straddled me and rocked ... ‘What do you think she would do,’ I said to Zena, ‘if I went over?’ ‘You ain’t going to try it!’ ‘Why not? I’m quite, you know, out of her power now.’ But even as I said it, I looked at her and felt that doggishness come over me again — or doggishness, perhaps, is not the term for it. It was like she was some music-hall mesmerist, and I a blinking girl, all ready to make a mockery of myself, before the crowd, at her request ... Zena said, ‘Well I ain’t going nowhere near her ...’; but I didn’t listen. I glanced quickly again at the speakers’ tent, then I stepped out from behind the bush and made my way towards the stall - straightening the knot in my necktie, as I did so.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I could not bear the thought of that brown water sucking at my skirts, washing over my head, filling up my mouth. I turned away and put my hands before my eyes, and forced my brain to stop its dreadful whirling. I could not, I knew, keep running all day. I should have to find a place to hide myself. I had nothing on me but my dress. I groaned aloud, and gazed about me again - but this time rather desperately. Then I held my breath. I recognised this bridge: we had driven over it every night since Christmas, on our way to Cinderella. The Britannia Theatre was nearby; and there was money, I knew, in our dressing-room. I set off, wiping my face with my sleeve, smoothing my dress and my hair. The door-man at the theatre eyed me rather curiously when he let me in, but was pleasant enough. I knew him well, and had often stopped to chat with him; today, however, I only nodded to him as I took my key, and hurried by without a smile. I didn’t care what he thought; I knew I should not be seeing him again. The theatre, of course, was still shut up: there were sounds of hammering from the hall as the carpenters finished their work, but apart from that the corridors, the green-room - all were quiet. I was glad: I didn’t want to be seen by anyone. I walked very fast but very quietly to the dressing-rooms, until I reached the door that said Miss Butler and Miss King. Then very stealthily - for I half-feared, in my fevered state, that Kitty might be on the other side, awaiting me - I unlocked the door and pushed it open. The room beyond it was dark: I stepped across it in the light from the corridor, struck a match and lit a gas-jet, then closed the door as softly as I could. I knew just what I wanted. In a cupboard beneath Kitty’s table there was a little tin box with a pile of coins and notes in it - a portion of our wages went there every week, for us to draw on as we chose. The key to it lay mixed up with her sticks of grease-paint, in the old cigar-box in which she kept her make-up. I took this box, and tipped it up; the sticks fell out, and so did the key — and so, I saw, did something else. There had always been a sheet of coloured paper at the bottom of the box, and I had never thought to lift it. Now it had come loose and behind it was a card.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  As we will see in the next chapter, Jesus will become an exile to include every life in his dance. To reach beyond the margins of creation, however, means being cut off from creation. The courage of Jesus is not in facing death, but in facing what it means to be alone. To restore all of creation, Jesus must step outside of creation. What he is about to do, he must do alone. His friends will be asleep to him. God will be asleep to him. In the deepest level of the Native Covenant, in order for all things to be, Jesus must venture where no things can be. The balance he will affect is between being and nonbeing. As the Native Messiah, he must enter the void to reach the ground of being. No average human, even one inspired by a Sun Dance vision, could hope to fulfill a challenge like the one Jesus encounters in the Garden. Quite literally, he is being asked to go where no person has gone before. The Native Messiah wakes his friends with the intention of being true to the vision he has received in the Garden. He is going to step off the edge of the world into oblivion. He is going to face the death not only of the body, but of the spirit. He is going to the great Alone. He will make his Sun Dance to maintain the balance of all life for all time. Jesus let’s himself be taken to hang from the tree. He sacrifices not only his life, but his fear. The piercing and the blood loss will be very real. The pain and the anguish will be felt. For God, it will be a good day to die. Chapter 9THE CROSSIn March 1617 Rebecca Rolfe died suddenly in England at Gravesend on the Thames River. She was only twenty-two years old, but already she had made a name for herself that would continue through history. In her brief lifetime she is credited with having risked her own life to save a person about to be executed, having an unrequited love affair as poetic as that of Abelard and Heloise, preventing a war, and being presented to the King and Queen of England as an Imperial Princess. Among her descendants were two First Ladies, the wives of Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan, as well as the noted astronomer, Percival Lowell. She was buried in St. George’s Church in Kent, England. Although her exact burial spot at the parish has been lost, a statue commemorating her stands in the churchyard. It honors her not only by her Christian name of Rebecca Rolfe, but also by her maiden name, Pocahontas.1 Who does not know her story? In the United States, at least, not many. Of all the Native American women of our national history, her name stands out above the rest. Far above the rest. She is a legend.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  There was concern in his face. It was born of care. This hawk had been hatched in an incubator , had broken from a frail bluish eggshell into a humid perspex box, and for the first few days of her life this man had fed her with scraps of meat held in a pair of tweezers, waiting patiently for the lumpen, fluffy chick to notice the food and eat, her new neck wobbling with the effort of keeping her head in the air. All at once I loved this man, and fiercely. I grabbed the hood from the box and turned to the hawk. Her beak was open, her hackles raised; her wild eyes were the colour of sun on white paper , and they stared because the whole world had fallen into them at once. One, two, three . I tucked the hood over her head. There was a brief intimation of a thin, angular skull under her feathers, of an alien brain fizzing and fusing with terror , then I drew the braces closed. We checked the ring numbers against the form. It was the wrong bird. This was the younger one. The smaller one. This was not my hawk. Oh . So we put her back and opened the other box, which was meant to hold the larger , older bird. And dear God, it did. Everything about this second hawk was different. She came out like a Victorian melodrama: a sort of madwoman in the attack. She was smokier and darker and much, much bigger , and instead of twittering, she wailed; great, awful gouts of sound like a thing in pain, and the sound was unbearable. This is my hawk , I was telling myself and it was all I could do to breathe. She too was bareheaded, and I grabbed the hood from the box as before. But as I brought it up to her face I looked into her eyes and saw something blank and crazy in her stare. Some madness from a distant country. I didn’t recognise her. This isn’t my hawk . The hood was on, the ring numbers checked, the bird back in the box, the yellow form folded, the money exchanged, and all I could think was, But this isn’t my hawk . Slow panic. I knew what I had to say, and it was a monstrous breach of etiquette. ‘This is really awkward,’ I began. ‘But I really liked the first one. Do you think there’s any chance I could take that one instead . . . ?’ I tailed off. His eyebrows were raised. I started again, saying stupider things: ‘I’m sure the other falconer would like the larger bird? She’s more beautiful than the first one, isn’t she? I know this is out of order , but I . . . Could I?

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

  As to the Roman empire, Gibbon estimates the number of slaves under the reign of Claudius at no less than one half of the entire population, i.e., about sixty millions (I. 52, ed. Milman, N. Y., 1850). According to Robertson there were twice as many slaves as free citizens, and Blair (in his work on Roman slavery, Edinb. 1833, p. 15) estimates over three slaves to one freeman between the conquest of Greece (146 b.c.) and the reign of Alexander Severna (A.D. 222–235). The proportion was of course very different in the cities and in the rural districts. The majority of the plebs urbana were poor and unable to keep slaves; and the support of slaves in the city was much more expensive than in the country. Marquardt assumes the proportion of slaves to freemen in Rome to have been three to two. Friedländer (Sittengeschichte Roms. l. 55, fourth ed.) thinks it impossible to make a correct general estimate, as we do not know the number of wealthy families. But we know that Rome A.D. 24 was thrown into consternation by the fear of a slave insurrection (Tacit. Ann. IV. 27). Athenaeus, as quoted by Gibbon (I. 51) boldly asserts that he knew very many (pavmpolloi) Romans who possessed, not for use, but ostentation, ten and even twenty thousand slaves. In a single palace at Rome, that of Pedanius Secundus, then prefect of the city, four hundred slaves were maintained, and were all executed for not preventing their master’s murder (Tacit. Ann. XIV. 42, 43). The legal condition of the slaves is thus described by Taylor on Civil Law, as quoted in Cooper’s Justinian, p. 411: "Slaves were held pro nullis, pro mortuis, pro quadrupedibus; nay, were in a much worse state than any cattle whatsoever. They had no head in the state, no name, no title, or register; they were not capable of being injured; nor could they take by purchase or descent; they had no heirs, and therefore could make no will; they were not entitled to the rights and considerations of matrimony, and therefore had no relief in case of adultery; nor were they proper objects of cognation or affinity, but of quasi-cognation only; they could be sold, transferred, or pawned, as goods or personal estate, for goods they were, and as such they were esteemed; they might be tortured for evidence, punished at the discretion of their lord, and even put to death by his authority; together with many other civil incapacities which I have no room to enumerate." Gibbon (I. 48) thinks that "against such internal enemies, whose desperate insurrections had more then once reduced the republic to the brink of destruction, the most severe regulations and the most cruel treatment seemed almost justifiable by the great law of self-preservation."