Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  to his crewmates. “Did you guys ever think that one Christmas you’d be orbiting the Moon?” “Just hope we are not doing it on New Year’s,” Anders replied, his wit growing drier with each orbit. There was a dark truth behind Anders’s humor. If Apollo 8 was still here in a week, it meant the crew was never coming home. Susan Borman knew it, too. She cleared her kitchen table, sat, and started to compose Frank’s eulogy. She needed to be ready—not like her friend Pat White, who’d been taken by surprise by the death of her husband in the Apollo 1 fire, and by the swiftness with which government officials moved in to orchestrate funeral arrangements. This time, Susan would be in charge. She would do it the way she and Frank wanted it, and the way that was right for their sons. It seemed to her a better fate for a man like Frank to die in space than to burn up on the launchpad while training, and a better fate for her, knowing Frank was in a place he’d be forever, a beautiful Moon she could see in the night, a place where she could always find him. — Just eight and a half hours remained before Trans Earth Injection. On board Apollo 8, Anders secretly hoped something would go wrong— nothing catastrophic, of course, just enough that he could show Houston, and his crewmates, how beautifully he’d mastered the spacecraft and its systems. But the ship was proving to be a jewel. As the spacecraft readied to reconnect with Houston and begin its seventh pass across the lunar near side, Borman called out to his crewmates. “Oh, brother! Look at that!” “What was it?” Lovell asked. “Guess,” Borman said. Lovell did some quick computations. The ship was above the far side, at around 120ºE longitude, and at the most southerly part of its orbit. For Borman to react like that, he must have seen Tsiolkovsky, one of the far side’s most impressive craters, 115 miles wide, with a peak rising 2 miles

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  two days, and I didn’t—didn’t even get much to eat today.” “Pretty sunrise,” Anders remarked. Inside Mission Control, there was little anyone could do but wait. Soon, people began talking and milling about. That made Kraft furious. He got on his intercom and told anyone who could hear him to shut up so that he could pray or do whatever the hell else he could dream up to make sure Apollo 8 came out on the other side of the Moon when it was supposed to. A few minutes later, the clocks in Mission Control read midnight. It was now Christmas Day in Houston, much of America, and the world. No one had ever been farther from home on this important family day than Borman, Lovell, and Anders. From their windows, which faced toward the lunar surface, it appeared to the astronauts as if they would be headed for trouble when the rocket lit. “It looks to me like I’m going to burn right into the ground,” Borman said. But the men didn’t have time to worry about that. They’d long since maneuvered the spacecraft to the attitude NASA had calculated. They had faith that the agency had gotten it right. Just thirty seconds remained until TEI. “Flight recorder going to record,” Anders called. He’d made this flight believing he had a one-third chance of dying. Trans Earth Injection had been a major part of that calculus. “Stand by to start ullage,” Lovell called. Lovell believed that at certain points in life, a person just had to have faith. “Two valves,” Borman called. Borman had come for America, because he believed it was the greatest country on Earth and he would have died in order to protect it. In Mission Control, people could barely breathe. It was this moment that had so shaken James Webb when he heard of Low’s plan. It wasn’t just that the mission allowed only four months’ preparation rather than the usual year and a half, or that it required manning a rocket that had flown only twice (and experienced myriad problems the second time), or that the crew would have no backup if the SPS engine failed, or that so much would have to be done for the very first time. What had shaken Webb most deeply was the idea that if the crew of Apollo 8 were stranded in lunar orbit on December 25, no one would ever look at Christmas, or the Moon, the same way again. Five seconds remained until Trans Earth Injection. Inside the spacecraft, the number 99 flashed on a display, asking the crew for the go-ahead to light the SPS engine and begin the burn. If no one pressed the Proceed key, ignition would not occur. Lovell looked to Borman, and Borman nodded. Lovell reached forward. He pressed Proceed. And then there was only silence. Chapter Twenty-Two

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  an old familiar face. “Look who’s coming there, would you?” he said. “What?” Lovell asked. “The Moon.” A minute later, Borman checked his indicators. “Well, men, we’re getting close.” “There’s no turning back now,” Anders said. “Old Mother Earth has us,” Lovell said. Two minutes later, Anders noticed a change in the view outside his window. “What is that?” he asked. Borman and Lovell, the old spaceflight pros, decided to have a little fun with the rookie. “That’s right, you’ve never seen the airglow. Take a look at it,” Lovell said. “You can’t get your [astronaut] pin without seeing the airglow,” Borman said. Apollo 8 plunged, blunt end first, toward Earth at more than 24,750 miles per hour, breaking below one hundred miles altitude and pushing its crew faster than any humans ever had traveled. On board, the astronauts, seated with their backs to the direction of travel, began to feel the first drag from the atmosphere and could see the dark sky begin to ionize and glow around them. Borman and Lovell might have experienced reentry before, but never at these speeds. They weren’t kidding with Anders anymore. “That’s the airglow we are starting to get, that’s what it is, gentlemen,” Lovell said. The three men braced themselves. “Goddamn,” Borman said. “This is going to be a real ride. Hang on!” Chapter Twenty-Four THE MEN WHO SAVED 1968 The world outside the spacecraft lit up even before the astronauts expected it. “I’ve never seen it this bright before!” Borman told his crewmates. “You got zero point oh-five g yet?” “Zero point oh-five g!” Lovell answered, checking a readout on the console. “Okay, we got it!” Anders called. The spacecraft neared 25,000 miles per hour. “Hang on!” Borman yelled. Out his window, Lovell could see a pink glow turning brighter by the second, and he felt the g-forces building. Temperatures rose fast around the command module as it collided with the atmosphere. The crew could only hope the heat shield would do its job; no manned ship had ever endured the heat loads Apollo 8 was about to experience. A second later, Houston lost contact with the spacecraft as Apollo 8 became enveloped in ionized gas. On CBS, Walter Cronkite narrated over an animated rendering of the command module entering a fiery atmosphere. At their homes, the astronauts’ wives watched the broadcasts, willing their husbands home in these hand-drawn capsules. Inside the spacecraft, the g-forces increased fast. “They’re building up!” Lovell called. “Call out the g’s,” Borman told him. “We’re one g,” Lovell answered. The men’s labored breathing could be heard on their intercom system as the forces multiplied. “Ohhh!” Lovell groaned. “Five!” he called, straining to speak. “Six!” Cronkite explained to the nation what the astronauts were enduring.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Apollo 8 into a burning meteor. If it came in too shallow, it would bounce off the atmosphere like a stone skipped on water and coast back out into space. Without the service module, Apollo 8 lacked any means of propulsion and could not apply the brakes sufficiently to reenter Earth’s atmosphere. At that point, each astronaut would have a chat with his wife and children before drifting away from Earth in a ship with only a few hours’ life support, to embark on a long elliptical orbit, one that would be fatal. But even if the spacecraft hit the entry corridor perfectly, the friction created by the drag of the atmosphere on an object moving at almost 25,000 miles per hour would generate temperatures of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. To enable the astronauts to survive it, the command module had been covered by a heat shield made of a reinforced phenolic resin injected into a fiberglass honeycomb. Rather than defeat the heat in combat, the shield was designed to succumb to it and then vaporize away, leaving a new layer of shield beneath to continue the fight, all while keeping the command module cool. Even if it worked and the astronauts weren’t fried to a crisp, they would be undergoing tremendous g-forces as the atmosphere slowed the ship. They would also lose all communications with Earth as gases around the spacecraft ionized from the shock wave, creating a kind of wall through which radio signals could not pass. To mitigate the fantastic amount of heat and g-forces caused by reentry, Apollo 8 wouldn’t simply plunge through the atmosphere; rather, it would use its aerodynamic design (its slightly off-center weight distribution turned the spacecraft into a kind of wing), allowing it to achieve lift and dip up and down, extend its path, shed velocity, and diffuse the heat that it had to endure as it aimed for the designated landing site. The whole process would take about five minutes. If all went well, the spacecraft would have slowed enough to make its final drop to Earth. The astronauts’ lives would then depend on the command module’s parachute system, and the recovery forces that even now moved back and forth in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii like predatory big cats on the hunt. —

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  Recognizing the voice, she sighed inwardly before turning. “Good afternoon, Monsieur Robidoux.” As the vendor moved away, the Frenchman bowed to her and gestured toward a nearby bench. She looked past him to find Sebastian still deep in conversation with Lucien Remington. Reluctantly, she moved toward the seat. And then she felt the barrel of a pistol pressed to her spine. She stilled, her heart hammering against her ribs. “What in blazes are you doing?” “Go quietly, petite, and you will not be harmed. Scream, and I will shoot you down.” The tone of his voice drove the point home. He was serious. What was happening? She’d done nothing to rile this man, had in fact gone out of her way to be polite. No cause was given for him to accost her, and certainly not with a weapon. She looked wild-eyed toward Sebastian, but he’d altered direction and now faced away. Her gloves grew damp with the sweat of her palms. The baby fluttered, frightening her further. In any other circumstance, she would scream and fight for her life. But she had her child to consider now, and she would do nothing to endanger the precious life. “Go!” he ordered, bruising her back with a sharp shove of the gun. She stumbled forward. “There are many people around, monsieur. Someone will see.” “I care not. After today I can leave this dreary country and never return.” “If something happens to me,” she warned, “Lord Merrick will hunt you down.” He snorted dismissively. “Phoenix will be dead.” “Lord Merrick!” Sebastian turned toward the panicked voice, startled to see Lady Julienne running toward him, skirts held in one hand and a hatbox in the other. “Yes? What is it?” He looked past her. “Where is Lady Merrick?” “I saw her walking away with that odd Frenchman.” She turned to her husband, snapping her gloved fingers. “Oh, what is that man’s name? The blond Frenchie with the greasy voice?” Sebastian tensed, his chest tightening. “Robidoux?” “Yes, that’s it!” she cried. “Dominique Robidoux.” He stilled. “You mean Pierre. Pierre Robidoux.” “No, my lord,” Remington corrected with a frown. “Julienne is correct. The man’s name is Dominique.” Sebastian’s gaze swept across the crowded thoroughfare. If what the Remingtons said was true, he’d eliminated the lesser threat and allowed the greater one to get close to his heart. “Which way did they go?” Julienne pointed down the street. “That way, and just a moment ago.” Sebastian ran, heedless of the gawking pedestrians and the sight he made. He cared nothing for anyone. He never had. The only person who mattered was Olivia. Blood roaring in his ears, he almost missed her cry. He stopped abruptly and veered down an alley, melting with relief to find Olivia and Robidoux waiting at the end. The minute he saw the Frenchman’s face, he knew he’d made a fatal mistake. He’d killed Pierre, not Dominique. His hand lowered to his thigh, vainly reaching for the blade that wasn’t there.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Even at NASA, Thanksgiving was a day for family, and Borman, Lovell, and Anders found their way home just in time to celebrate the holiday. Apollo 8 was scheduled to launch in just twenty-three days, so Thursday was the only day off the men were allowed. By now, all three wives had decided where they’d be when Apollo 8 lifted off. Marilyn Lovell wanted to see it live, to be as close to it and as much a part of it as possible. (She had been too far along in her pregnancy to watch Jim launch on Gemini 7, but she did witness his flight on Gemini 12 in person.) And she wanted her four children to be there, too; it was something she thought they should experience as a family. That was fine with Lovell; while he knew there was a chance of disaster, he never thought about launches, or life, in those terms, and he didn’t want his children to think that way, either. A person had to take things as they came. Lovell spread out his maps of the Moon for his children and showed them which parts of the lunar surface he’d be flying over and what the crew intended to do there. He’d even brought his children to explore the simulator at the Cape. He didn’t tell them that his mission was dangerous, or that their father might not be coming home. There was no reason to put a fear like that into children. Valerie Anders made a different decision. Her children were younger than Marilyn’s, the flu was going around, and she didn’t want to risk having five sick kids while holed up at a hotel near Cape Kennedy. The decision to stay home in Houston made a lot of sense to Anders. Even if his kids remained healthy, he wanted them and Valerie to be home, in a comfortable and safe environment, in case a disaster unfolded. In any event, Anders got the sense that his kids were more interested in water-skiing and playing with their friends, which was fine with him. His eleven-year-old son, Alan, told how a classmate brought his fireman father to school one day, and everyone thought that kid had the coolest father of them all; in this neighborhood, it seemed every old dad was an astronaut. When Valerie talked to the kids about Apollo 8, she explained what their father would be doing, but she never promised that he would be okay; she didn’t want to mislead them. And they didn’t seem worried, anyway. They had other excitements to deal with, like the new color

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  eternity. NASA had confidence in the SPS engine. While it had not performed well in its brief test firing at eleven hours into the flight, it had functioned twice without issue at the Moon, when it was used to enter, and then to circularize, lunar orbit. Still, that was no guarantee. With the TEI maneuver just three hours away, Kraft’s dread began mounting. Rockets, he knew, were complex, temperamental, violent machines. They failed, blew up, or shut down, often without warning. In the harsh environment of space, a rocket’s highly pressurized mélange of moving mechanical parts, which generated intense friction and heat and depended on proper lubrication and coolants and a universe of electrical connections, could go wrong in any number of ways. While the astronauts worked to pack away loose items and prepare for TEI, Mission Control examined data from the spacecraft and its systems to determine whether Apollo 8 was ready. They broadcast their decision seventy-one minutes later, after the ship had emerged from the Moon’s eastern limb. “Okay, Apollo 8,” Mattingly radioed to the crew. “We have reviewed all your systems. You have a Go for TEI.” The maneuver was now just one hour and fifteen minutes away. The crew began its final preparatory procedures, running down checklists while straining to keep the bright Sun from their eyes. Much of the exchange between the men was technical and rote, indecipherable to a lay listener, but comforting in the way its call-and-response rhythms sounded like a preacher and his congregation: Anders: Okay, let’s go to P40: P30, complete; CMC, On. Borman: CMC is On. Anders: ISS, On; spacecraft SCS, operating. Borman: Right. Anders: Test the Caution/Warning lamp; EMS mode, Standby. Borman: Yes. Anders: Function, delta-v set. Borman: Right. Anders: And have you set 1586.8?

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  As the wind whipped by again, she returned her gaze to Phoenix. She screamed as he lost his grip and was blown free, his body dangling precariously by the rigging. He was suspended there as the wind flew by, and then his hold began to slip. Unable to watch, Olivia turned to Red and buried her face in his chest, her fists clutching handfuls of his filthy shirt. No one could long survive being battered against the mast like a flag. “Damned stupid fool!” she cried into the pirate’s chest as the men on deck scrambled into action. It was unreasonable, this horrid fear that clawed at her vitals and tortured her mind. Phoenix was a stranger of only hours’ acquaintance. But they’d been intimate. He’d touched her in ways she’d never touched herself. He’d made her feel reckless and wild. She’d felt alive— Warm hands gripped her shoulders and turned her, pressing her face into salt-flavored bare skin. “Hush, love,” Phoenix’s deep voice purred in her ear, his warm breath fanning across her neck, his hair blowing around them. Olivia sank into him with relief. Her fingers clawed at his back, pulling him closer. “You bloody idiot!” she scolded. He chuckled. “Don’t swear, sweetheart. I’m fine.” She pulled back and slapped his chest with a smack that tingled her palm. “You won’t be when I’ve finished with you! Are you daft? What were you doing up there in weather such as this?” It was then that she saw his arm, bleeding and chafed raw from the coarse rope that had saved his life. “Oh . . . look at your arm.” Her hands went to the injury, and her eyes flew up to his. “It’s nothing,” he said dismissively, absently rubbing the spot where she’d hit him. Maggie leaned over. “I can make my grandmother’s healing tea. It’ll take a bit to cook up, but it works miracles.” “Yes, do that.” Olivia returned her gaze to Phoenix as the abigail moved away. “I have some salve to put on this. Return to the cabin and allow me to tend it.” The blue of his eyes darkened. “I suppose you’ll insist, and threaten me with some weapon or another.” “If I have to.” He offered a mocking half-bow. “After you.” Clutching her bodice, Olivia hurried down to the cabin, willing her heartbeat to slow. Her entire face was marked with his scent. Salty and spicy, it was a richly masculine smell of hardworking male and pure Phoenix. Every breath she took was redolent of the faint traces of his cologne and his unique fragrance.

• From Story of the Eye (1928)

  Besides, the bull opposite him was distrustful and seemed unresponsive; the combat went on just as drearily as before. The events that followed were without transition or connection, not because they weren’t actually related, but because my attention was so absent as to remain absolutely dissociated. In just a few seconds: first, Simone bit into one of the raw balls, to my dismay; then Granero advanced towards the bull, waving his scarlet cloth; finally, almost at once, Simone, with a blood-red face and a suffocating lewdness, uncovered her long white thighs up to her moist vulva, into which she slowly and surely fitted the second pale globule—Granero was thrown back by the bull and wedged against the balustrade; the horns struck the balustrade three times at full speed; at the third blow, one horn plunged into the right eye and through the head. A shriek of unmeasured horror coincided with a brief orgasm for Simone, who was lifted up from the stone seat only to be flung back with a bleeding nose, under a blinding sun; men instantly rushed over to haul away Granero’s body, the right eye dangling from the head. 11. Under the Sun of Seville Thus, two globes of equal size and consistency had suddenly been propelled in opposite directions at once. One, the white ball of the bull, had been thrust into the “pink and dark” cunt that Simone had bared in the crowd; the other, a human eye, had spurted from Granero’s head with the same force as a bundle of innards from a belly. This coincidence, tied to death and to a sort of urinary liquefaction of the sky, first brought us back to Marcelle in a moment that was so brief and almost insubstantial, yet so uneasily vivid that I stepped forward like a sleepwalker as though about to touch her at eye level. Needless to say, everything was promptly back to normal, though with blinding obsessions in the hour after Granero’s death. Simone was in such a foul mood that she told Sir Edmund she wouldn’t spend another day in Madrid; she was very anxious to see Seville because of its reputation as a city of pleasure. Sir Edmund took a heady delight in satisfying the whims of “the simplest and most angelic creature ever to walk the earth,” and so the next day he accompanied us to Seville, where we found an even more liquefying heat and light than in Madrid. A lavish abundance of flowers in the streets, geraniums and rose laurels, helped to put our senses on edge.

• From Story of the Eye (1928)

  Now it was difficult for Simone to see this rigidity, partly because of the darkness, and partly because of the swift rising of my left leg, which kept hiding my stiffness by turning the pedal. Yet I felt I could see her eyes, aglow in the darkness, peer back constantly, no matter how fatigued, at this breaking point of my body, and I realized she was tossing off more and more violently on the seat, which was pincered between her buttocks. Like myself, she had not yet drained the tempest evoked by the shamelessness of her cunt, and at times she let out husky moans; she was literally torn away by joy, and her nude body was hurled upon an embankment with an awful scraping of steel on the pebbles and a piercing shriek. I found her inert, her head hanging down, a thin trickle of blood running from the corner of her mouth. Horrified to the limit of my strength, I pulled up one arm, but it fell back inert. I threw myself upon the lifeless body, trembling with fear, and as I clutched it in an embrace, I was overcome with bloody spasms, my lower lip drooling and my teeth bared like a leering moron. Meanwhile, Simone was slowly coming to: her arm touched me in an involuntary movement, and I quickly returned from the torpor overwhelming me after I had besmirched what I thought was a corpse. No injury, no bruise marked the body, which was still clad in the garter belt and a single stocking. I took her in my arms and carried her down the road, heedless of my fatigue; I walked as fast as I could because the day was just breaking, but only a superhuman effort allowed me to reach the villa and happily put my marvellous friend alive into her very own bed. The sweat was pouring from my face and all over my body, my eyes were bloody and swollen, my ears deafened, my teeth chattering, my temples and my heart drumming away. But since I had just rescued the person I loved most in the world, and since I thought we would soon be seeing Marcelle, I lay down next to Simone’s body just as I was, soaked and full of coagulated dust, and soon I drifted off into vague nightmares. 6. Simone One of the most peaceful eras of my life was the period following Simone’s minor accident, which only left her ill. Whenever her mother came, I would step into the bathroom. Usually, I took advantage of these moments to piss or even bathe; the first time the woman tried to enter, she was immediately stopped by her daughter: “Don’t go in,” she said, “there’s a naked man in there.” Each time, however, the mother was dismissed before long, and I would take my place again in a chair next to the sickbed.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  ruined body. He paced around in that aimless way I remembered from earlier fasts. “Y’all know I been prophesying the destruction of America for years; well, God told me the time has come. I asked the Lord the other night if there was anything I could do to hold off what’s coming.” He pulled his shirttail from his pants and began to unbutton it. “God told me there was only one way.” The people around me began to rock and moan. I don’t know if they knew what was coming next. I didn’t. Brother Terrell slipped out of his shirt, revealing a short-sleeved white T-shirt underneath. He unbuckled his belt, pulled it through his pants, doubled it, and held it at both ends. Clutching the waistband of his trousers with one hand and the belt with the other, he walked over and stood in front of one of the young men seated on the platform. He looked down at the man and extended the belt to him. “Brother Walker, God told me he needed someone to stand in the gap. I need you to stand up and take the belt.” The man did as he was told. “The prophet always has to bear the signs in his own body.” Brother Terrell walked over to an empty folding chair and Brother Walker followed, the belt dangling from his right hand. Brother Terrell knelt in front of the chair and took off his shirt. “God told me someone has to take the whipping for America.” Brother Walker dropped the belt and backed away, shaking his head. Brother Terrell looked over his shoulder. “Pick it up, Brother Walker. I know you don’t want to do this, but you have to. I have to.” The younger man picked up the belt and beat the prophet. When Brother Walker collapsed in tears, Brother Terrell called one of the other ministers to take his place. After the second whipping, the welts began to bleed. Everyone in the tent wailed and cried, and I was right there with them. Oh God. Oh God. Oh Lord. He called preacher after preacher. If they did not hit him hard enough, he looked up and told them that if they didn’t want to see children running through the streets of America with their skin melting from their bones, they better hit him harder. We screamed and moaned with every lash. The blood ran down his back. After about an hour, he pulled his T-shirt over his head and a couple of men ran to help him up. Blood seeped through the cotton of his shirt as he stumbled offstage between the men. The preacher woman spoke over the microphone as the men led Brother Terrell offstage. “We’ve just seen an innocent man take a whipping for the sins of this country. I want everyone to gather in the altar and pray. Pray for Brother Terrell. Pray for

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  102 Lecture 19: George Orwell, 1984 • The Ministry of Plenty is devoted to consciously contrived poverty. • The Ministry of Love is devoted to torture and hate. In the world of 1984, language is controlled and speech is constantly being revised to re fl ect the political currents. What the Party wants said must be said in language that is approved. Thought is also controlled. The thought police are the most dreaded instruments of control. They operate from the Ministry of Love. Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth is to fabricate history, because one slogan of the Party is that he who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future. Those in power can rewrite history and, thereby, control the perceptions of future generations. In 1984 in Oceania, there is no truth. Truth is whatever the Party says it is. God has been of fi cially banished, as in the Soviet Union. There is also no absolute good or evil. Winston can vaguely remember a time when London was not a boarded-up, poverty-stricken city and that there may have been a time when there was no Oceania. He remembers that he once had a mother, but she disappeared. With great dif fi culty, he can re fl ect and reconstruct what life was like before the Party. Winston has decided to make a stand for conscience on this April day. He goes to his tiny apartment on his lunch hour, takes a swig of Victory gin, and conceals what he is doing from the telescreen, which is a device that constantly broadcasts information and watches each individual. He takes out an old-fashion notebook and pen, which he has bought in the proletariat part of London. Although the Party is allegedly governing in the best interests of the proletariat, it does not really care about the masses; the proletariat has been reduced to almost a savage level. Winston writes, “Down with Big Brother” and fi nds that the act of writing this statement gives him a real sense of freedom. Winston returns to his task at the Ministry of Truth and to the set of conscious lies that dominate the life of every inhabitant of Oceania. In Oceania, people are told that ignorance is strength, war is peace, and slavery is freedom. The people must be willing to accept these paradoxes. To survive in the Oceania of 1984, one must practice and be convinced of doublethink,

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  If asked about their length, you will say what you know. But you still see the bottom line as longer. You have chosen to believe the measurement, but you cannot prevent System 1 from doing its thing; you cannot decide to see the lines as equal, although you know they are. To resist the illusion, there is only one thing you can do: you must learn to mistrust your impressions of the length of lines when fins are attached to them. To implement that rule, you must be able to recognize the illusory pattern and recall what you know about it. If you can do this, you will never again be fooled by the Müller-Lyer illusion. But you will still see one line as longer than the other. Not all illusions are visual. There are illusions of thought, which we call cognitive illusions. As a graduate student, I attended some courses on the art and science of psychotherapy. During one of these lectures, our teacher imparted a morsel of clinical wisdom. This is what he told us: “You will from time to time meet a patient who shares a disturbing tale of multiple mistakes in his previous treatment. He has been seen by several clinicians, and all failed him. The patient can lucidly describe how his therapists misunderstood him, but he has quickly perceived that you are different. You share the same feeling, are convinced that you understand him, and will be able to help.” At this point my teacher raised his voice as he said, “Do not even think of taking on this patient! Throw him out of the office! He is most likely a psychopath and you will not be able to help him.” Many years later I learned that the teacher had warned us against psychopathic charm, and the leading authority in the study of psychopathy confirmed that the teacher’s advice was sound. The analogy to the Müller-Lyer illusion is close. What we were being taught was not how to feel about that patient. Our teacher took it for granted that the sympathy we would feel for the patient would not be under our control; it would arise from System 1. Furthermore, we were not being taught to be generally suspicious of our feelings about patients. We were told that a strong attraction to a patient with a repeated history of failed treatment is a danger sign—like the fins on the parallel lines. It is an illusion—a cognitive illusion—and I (System 2) was taught how to recognize it and advised not to believe it or act on it. The question that is most often asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be overcome. The message of these examples is not encouraging. Because System 1 operates automatically and cannot be turned off at will, errors of intuitive thought are often difficult to prevent. Biases cannot always be avoided, because System 2 may have no clue to the error. Even when cues to likely errors are available, errors can be prevented only by the enhanced monitoring and effortful activity of System 2. As a way to live your life, however, continuous vigilance is not necessarily good, and it is certainly

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  hear Mission Control tell them about it, either. Still, Borman kept his hand clear of the abort handle. To Anders, it seemed that the flight had already lasted an hour when he and his crewmates heard the first, faint transmission in their headphones, a call from the launch operations manager at the Cape that conveyed a simple but essential piece of information. “Tower clear.” The call had come thirteen seconds into the flight. At home, Borman’s seventeen-year-old son, Fred, watched on TV. He’d never known anyone as committed to his work as his father, a man he still saw as a fighter pilot at Edwards Air Force Base, a man who refused to crash in machines that crashed all the time. So Fred was calm today as the rocket climbed, just as he had been during Gemini 7, just as he had been every time there had been sirens and black smoke in the sky at Edwards. Just keep going, Dad, Fred thought. If you just keep doing that, everything’s going to be fine. Borman radioed back to Houston, which had just assumed command from the Cape now that the tower was clear. His voice quaked along with the rocket: “Roll and pitch program.” He was confirming that the vehicle was turning to head out to sea exactly as required. “Roger,” answered CapCom Mike Collins. The punishing cacophony began to diminish as a seagull—the same one Borman had seen before lift-off?—flew past the ripples of sound and smoke made by the rocket. “How do you hear me, Houston?” Borman asked. “Loud and clear,” Collins answered. Apollo 8 climbed higher, riding a column of fire into a brilliant blue sky. In Houston, controllers watched for any sign of catastrophe, ready to relay abort instructions to Borman, but all they saw were solid reports from their consoles. Inside the spacecraft, Anders could feel the ride smoothing out, and while he hoped the rocket’s fins hadn’t been ripped off by the tower, he figured he was probably okay given that, by all indications, he was still alive. My God, he thought. If we missed that in our training, what else have we missed? Around the world, millions watched as the rocket pushed higher into

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  fashion that she should not R eligion is the most seductive system that mankind has created. Death is our greatest fear, and religion offers us the illusion that we are im-think it lewd of him to mortal, that something about us will live on. The idea that we are an infini-make the sort of proposal he had in mind. By tesimal part of a vast and indifferent universe is terrifying; religion putting certain questions to humanizes this universe, makes us feel important and loved. We are not ani-her, he soon discovered that mals governed by uncontrollable drives, animals that die for no apparent she had never been reason, but creatures made in the image of a supreme being. We too can be intimate with the opposite sex and was every hit as sublime, rational, and good. Anything that feeds a desire or a wished-for il-innocent as she seemed; lusion is seductive, and nothing can match religion in this arena. and he therefore thought of Pleasure is the bait that you use to lure a person into your web. But no a possible way to persuade her, with the pretext of matter how clever a seducer you are, in the back of your targets' mind they serving God, to grant his are aware of the endgame, the physical conclusion toward which you are desires. He began by heading. You may think your target is unrepressed and hungry for pleasure, delivering a long speech in which he showed her how but almost all of us are plagued by an underlying unease with our animal powerful an enemy the nature. Unless you deal with this unease, your seduction, even when suc-devil was to the Lord God, cessful in the short term, will be superficial and temporary. Instead, like and followed this up by Natalie Barney, try to capture your target's soul, to build the foundation of impressing upon her that of all the ways of serving a deep and lasting seduction. Lure the victim deep into your web with God, the one that He most spirituality, making physical pleasure seem sublime and transcendent. Spiri-appreciated consisted in tuality will disguise your manipulations, suggesting that your relationship is putting the devil back in Hell, to which the timeless, and creating a space for ecstasy in the victim's mind. Remember Almighty had consigned that seduction is a mental process, and nothing is more mentally intoxicat-him in the first place. • ing than religion, spirituality, and the occult. The girl asked him how this was done, and Rustico In Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary, Rodolphe Boulanger visits replied: • "You will soon the country doctor Bovary and finds himself interested in the doctor's find out, but just do beautiful wife, Emma. Boulanger was brutal and shrewd. He was some-whatever you see me doing for the present. "And so thing of a connoisseur: there had been many women in his life." He senses saying, he began to divest

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Valmont decided to test the waters. One day he arranged a little walk no impatience, for she must with the Présidente and his aunt. He chose a delightful path that they had live here in the city, and at never taken before, but at a certain point they reached a little ditch, unsuit-this moment that is enough for me. This possibility is able for a lady to cross on her own. And yet, Valmont said, the rest of the the condition for the proper walk was too nice for them to turn back, and he gallantly picked up his appearance of her image— aunt in his arms and carried her across the ditch, making the Présidente everything will be enjoyed in slow laugh uproariously. But then it was her turn, and Valmont purposefully drafts. . . . • The picked her up a little awkwardly, so that she caught at his arms, and while nineteenth • Cordelia, he was holding her against him he could feel her heart beating faster, and then, is her name! saw her blush. His aunt saw this too, and cried out, "The child is afraid!" Cordelia! It is a beautiful name, and that, too, is But Valmont sensed otherwise. Now he knew that the challenge could be important, since it can met, that the Présidente could be won. The seduction could proceed. often be very disturbing to have to name an ugly name together with the most tender adjectives. Interpretation. Valmont, the Présidente de Tourvel, and the Marquise de —SØREN KIERKEGAARD, THE Merteuil are all characters in the eighteenth-century French novel Danger-SEDUCER'S DIARY, TRANSLATED ous Liaisons, by Choderlos de Laclos. (The character of Valmont was in-BY HOWARD V. H O N G AND EDNA H . H O N G spired by several real-life libertines of the time, most prominent of all the Duke de Richelieu.) In the story, Valmont worries that his seductions have become mechanical; he makes a move, and the woman almost always responds the same way. But no two seductions should be the same—a differ-Love as understood by Don Juan is a feeling akin ent target should change the whole dynamic. Valmont's problem is that he to a taste for hunting. It is is always seducing the same type—the wrong type. He realizes this when he a craving for an activity meets Madame de Tourvel. which needs an incessant diversity of stimuli to It is not because her husband is a count that he decides to seduce her, challenge skill. or because she is stylishly dressed, or is desired by other men—the usual — S T E N D H A L , L O V E , reasons. He chooses her because, in her unconscious way, she has already TRANSLATED BY GILBERT AND seduced him. A bare arm, an unrehearsed laugh, a playful manner—all SUZANNE SALE

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  shake, and people’s chests were pounded by the pressure waves, and it spread out at the speed of sound for miles around the Cape. Inside the command module, the noise had already become deafening for the astronauts, their headsets rendered useless for communicating with the Cape or with one another. Borman and Lovell could sense the slowness of the acceleration due to the sheer weight of the Saturn V, a much different kind of movement than they’d experienced from the nimble Titan II rocket that had powered the Gemini program just two years earlier. But it wasn’t just the speed that was different. The cabin shook so violently that Anders believed the rocket’s fins were grinding through the girders of the launch tower and being shorn off. He tried to find an instrument or a gauge to monitor, something that would confirm the disaster unfolding beneath him, but his head was being shaken with such force he couldn’t focus or even think, and even if he could have, he never could have communicated any information to Borman, either by speaking or signaling, since he was no longer in control of his body and his arms had turned to lead. None of this had been predicted or simulated. In the mountains of books and reams of papers, no one had mentioned that even before the rocket cleared the tower, the world inside it would be coming apart. Holy shit, Anders managed to think as the bodies of the three astronauts were rag-dolled against their straps, what the hell is going on? And the rocket still hadn’t cleared the launch tower. Groaning under its own weight, the Saturn V began to move higher, bending farther away from the tower as the spitting tail of flame grew longer. The flight was now just ten seconds old, but Anders already felt like a rat in the jaws of a giant, angry terrier, helpless to do anything but hang on and breathe while the five massive F-1 engines constantly swiveled their thrust to keep the 363-foot rocket from toppling over. Again, Anders tried to pick out instruments to get an idea of what was happening, but the rocket kept thrashing him into Lovell, against the wall, into his straps. The crew had trained for hundreds of hours for every kind of emergency, but NASA’s simulators were not the kind of dynamic, multiaxis machines that could come close to approximating such violence. If an engine had fallen off or exploded, if the rocket had been engulfed in flames, if any number of disasters had been unfolding, the crew wouldn’t have known about it, and they wouldn’t have been able to

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  sign of America’s intention to dominate the world. Just fourteen days after Hiroshima, Stalin issued a secret decree ordering the urgent development of Russia’s own nuclear weapon. The idea seemed a pipe dream. Twenty-seven million Soviet citizens had died in the war, and the nation’s industries had been decimated. Cities and villages lay in ruin. People were left homeless, and food was scarce. An atomic bomb required cutting-edge technology and the marshaling of vast resources and great scientific minds. The Soviets could hardly build a good car. But the Soviet Union still had the biggest army in the world. And it had proved itself able to sustain massive casualties in war. So American diplomats paid attention in 1946, when Stalin blamed World War II on capitalism and promised that the Soviet Union would overtake the West in science and technology. By now it was clear that good science made good weapons. This was a new kind of conflict, one that would be fought not with bodies on a battlefield, but with propaganda and threats, military buildups, and the formation of alliances—a cold war. Perhaps most important, it would be a race to see which side could harness technology to achieve things that, until now, had seemed unimaginable. In August 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb—three years sooner than American experts had believed possible. Memories of bodies burned at Hiroshima and piled at Auschwitz remained fresh in the American psyche. No one had to imagine what a mass annihilation looked like, or to wonder whether human beings were capable of inflicting it on each other—they remembered it all too well. It was around this time that Americans learned to protect themselves —or at least try to survive—during a nuclear attack. In 1952, in schools across the country, a film featuring Bert the Turtle showed children how to “duck and cover” when they “saw the flash.” “We all know the atomic bomb is very dangerous,” the friendly narrator said over footage of children hiding under their desks. “Since it may be used against us, we must get ready for it.” By 1954, atomic bomb drills were being run throughout the country. Most people in the mid-1950s expected nuclear bombs to be delivered by airplanes like the B-29 Superfortress that had dropped atomic bombs

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  The spacecraft now gained speed and altitude fast. Two minutes into the flight, it was traveling at 3,300 miles per hour and was 100,000 feet above Earth. Here, the atmosphere had grown so thin that the rocket faced little risk of disaster caused by aerodynamic stress, but the next hurdle awaited. In less than a minute, the propellant for the first-stage engines would run out. At that point, the stage would have to be severed and allowed to fall away from the ship. The engines continued to burn staggering amounts of propellant, causing the ship to grow lighter and g-forces to increase, pressing the astronauts into their seats with up to four times the force of gravity on Earth, making each man’s arm feel as if it weighed about thirty-six pounds. At an altitude of about 215,000 feet, the spacecraft reached a speed of 4,236 miles per hour. With the onboard clock nearing two and a half minutes’ elapsed time, the first stage shut down, explosives fired, then retro rockets ignited, separating the first stage from the rest of the Saturn V and enveloping all of Apollo 8 in a cocoon of fire. To many of those watching from the ground and on television, it appeared that the entire ship had exploded, but it was just the precursor to the first stage falling back toward the Atlantic, glowing a brilliant goodbye. Inside the spacecraft, the sudden shutdown of the first stage caused g- forces to drop from four to zero almost instantly. Having been severely compressed, the 363-foot tower of aluminum alloy suddenly sprang back, flinging the astronauts forward with explosive force. By instinct, Anders threw up his hand in front of his face to prevent being catapulted through the instrument panel, but by that time, the five J-2 engines of the second stage had kicked in and the acceleration threw Anders’s outstretched hand back so hard against his head that the wrist ring on his glove carved a gouge in his helmet. As with the launch itself, simulations hadn’t come close to preparing the astronauts for the violence of this moment. Pinned back once again by the force of five screaming engines, the crew began to check instruments to make sure all was okay. Out of the corner of his eye, Anders glanced to check whether Borman or Lovell had noticed the gouge in his helmet, the sure mark of a rookie astronaut. Thankfully, it seemed they hadn’t. A few seconds after the first-stage booster fell away, Borman prepared to get rid of the other end of the vehicle, the thirty-four-foot-tall spire-

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  jammed nose down into the ground, a terrible crash. When Arthur inquired, he was told two people had been killed during a ride. Bill looked at the seat he’d occupied in the now-fractured craft, and remembered how close he’d come to the ground on his loop. On airplanes, it seemed, the difference between life and death could come down to a few feet. Bill began high school in Texas, but he moved with his family to the San Diego area to begin his sophomore year. By then Arthur had been made a Navy reservist as a result of his wartime injuries and was working at the naval training station. He and Bill played catch, took car rides, and went on San Diego Mineral and Gem Society trips; as a boy, Bill had fallen in love with natural history and geology, and he resolved to own a piece of every kind of rock in the world. Sometimes, the men would go high into the Sierras looking for specimens; it was on trips like that when Bill noticed that he was willing to travel almost anywhere as long as there was something new to find. Bill became president of his high school’s biology club, largely on the strength of his expertise on snakes. He read books, many on science, often finishing them in one day. Instead of science fiction, Bill preferred to read about old ships from bygone eras, and about pirates and life on the high seas. Those were men who’d undertaken real adventure, who’d pushed themselves into actual, not theoretical, unknowns. As the second-smallest student in his class, Bill found it hard to make time with the ladies (his love of science and snakes didn’t help). Despite her son’s size, Muriel encouraged Bill to play football. He suited up and was knocked flat, but he loved the feeling of getting up and realizing he had survived. After his junior year of high school, in 1950, Bill transferred to a military prep school in San Diego. Since early boyhood, he’d envisioned a life like his father’s—defending his country on board a ship, fighting back. Military school would give him the best chance for admission to one of the nation’s service academies. In a different time, one in which America had lesser enemies, Bill might have become a geologist. Now, in the teeth of the Cold War, he headed for Annapolis. —