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 Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  For John, intimacy harbors a threat of entrapment. He grew up in a home with an alcoholic, abusive father. He can’t remember a time when he wasn’t acutely attuned to both his father’s moods and his mother’s sadness. As a young boy he was recruited to be his mother’s emotional caretaker, and to alleviate her loneliness. He was her hope, her solace, a vicarious affirmation that her miserable life would be vindicated through her marvelous son. Children of such conflicted marriages are often enlisted to protect the vulnerable parent. John has never doubted his mother’s deep love for him; nor has the love ever been without a sense of burden. From early on, love implied responsibility and obligation. And even while he craves the closeness of intimacy—he has always had a woman in his life—he doesn’t know how to experience love in a way that does not feel confining. The emerging love he feels for Beatrice carries with it the same heaviness that love has always had for him. There are many circumstances that can lead people to experience love and intimacy as constricting—an unhappy childhood is not a prerequisite. Popular love talk has made a real case for thinking of this as a “fear of intimacy,” which is seen as afflicting men in particular. But what I observe is not so much a reluctance to engage in intimate bonding—no one can doubt John’s deep involvement with Beatrice. Rather it is the weightiness of that involvement that these people find overbearing. Foreclosing the necessary freedom and spontaneity that eros demands, they feel trapped by intimacy. John’s sexual inhibitions are exacerbated as his emotional involvement with his girlfriend deepens. As a matter of fact, the more he cares about her, the less he can freely lust after her. For him, as for many other men in this predicament, erotic shutdown is not subtle. He is at the mercy of a stubborn penis that simply will not respond. But why? What is the erotic block that stops him from pursuing pleasure with Beatrice, the same woman with whom he lay in a languorous paradise not so long ago?

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  the thought that they are suffering, from their townsfolk, what earlier Christ-followers including himself faced from their compatriots: “the Judaeans, who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all humanity, hindering us from speaking to the nations that they might be saved” (2:14–16). This passage vividly depicts a rupture between Christ-followers and their contemporaries, whether Judaean or Greek, who reject the alleged revelation. Scholars of a previous generation, certain that the condign punishment of Jews for rejecting Christ (2:16) must reflect post-70 conditions, declared at least this part of the passage a post-Pauline interpolation. That option has now fallen out of favor, for good reason. 50 Nowadays, the prevailing PWJ momentum in scholarship leads to the assumption that the passage reflects internal Jewish conflict.51 But that is not what it obviously says. If we read only what Paul writes, without resorting to Romans or other material unavailable to his audience in Thessalonica, the point seems clear: all heaven-bound Christ-followers will face “persecution” from the champions of ethnos-custom, Judaean and Greek or Thessalonian. The spectrum of ways in which Judaean Christ-followers had reacted to this pressure is another matter, irrelevant to Paul’s points to the Thessalonians and not explored here. But he will later charge that some of his Judaean Christ-following opponents, based in Jerusalem, caved in to persecution from other Judaeans, and that this explains their hostility to his mission among non-Judaeans (Gal 6:12). He, by contrast, uses “new creation” language to stress the radical distinction between Christ-following and maintaining any such old commitments: the old has passed away (2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15). As far as his surviving letters permit us to judge, Paul remained devoted to The Announcement for the rest of his life. At the end of his undisputed corpus, at least, he still feels the acute need to defend The Announcement (Rom 1:15–16), for which God has uniquely chosen him (1:1). He has by now ful y proclaimed The Announcement in the eastern Roman Empire, he says, and so wants to proceed to “the remainder” of the nations, in the west (Rom 15:17–28; 1:13). The Parthian world and points farther east do not offer the same attraction. If Paul had been free to continue touring The Announcement throughout the Roman Empire, without interference or challenge, perhaps any subsequent letters would have resembled 1 Thessalonians: he gathers a following, leaves town, and sends 50 Birger A. Pearson, “1 Thessalonians 2:13–16: A Deutero-Pauline Interpolation,” HTR 64 (1971): 79–94. 51 Sarah E. Rollens, “Inventing Tradition in Thessalonica: The Appropriation of the Past in 1

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Demonic Possession You have always been interested in demon and possession narratives, no matter how cheesy or silly they are. It’s the perfect intersection of your morbid curiosities and the remnants of your religious upbringing; a reminder of a time when you believed in that sort of thing. After she blames those nights on a kind of amnesia, you do research while she mopes around. She feels bad, so bad, she says. There is remorse there, true remorse, and yet sometimes you catch her composing her face into sadness. You google memory loss, sudden onsets of rage and violence. The internet gives you nothing, except one article about how it has been shown that heavy marijuana use can, theoretically, trigger an onset of schizophrenia, if one were already genetically prone to it. This is terrifying; you feel deeply for her. You try to present your various theories, but she scoffs at all of them. She hasn’t been smoking much pot, she says. She doesn’t have schizophrenia. She says it with such disdain you begin to wonder if you’d exaggerated the events of that trip, whether perhaps you are remembering them wrong. This is not to say that you seriously consider demonic possession. You are a modern woman and you don’t believe in God or any accompanying mythologies. But isn’t the best part of a possession story that the inflicted can do and say horrific things for which they’ll receive carte blanche forgiveness the next day? “I did what? I masturbated with a crucifix? I spit on a priest?” That’s what you want. You want an explanation that clears her of responsibility, that permits your relationship to continue unabated. You want to be able to explain to others what she’s done without seeing horror on their faces. “But she was possessed, see.” “Oh well, that happens to everyone at one time or another, doesn’t it?” At night, you lie next to her and watch her sleep. What is lurking inside? Dream House as Naming the Animals Adam had one job, really. God said, “See this fuzzy thing? And that scaly thing there, in the water? And these feathery things, flying through the air? I really need you to give them names. I’ve been making the world for a week and I’m exhausted. Let me know what you decide.” So Adam sat there. What a puzzler, right? It’s obvious to us, now, that that is a squirrel and that is a fish and that is a bird, but how was Adam supposed to know that? He wasn’t just newly born, he was newly created; he didn’t have years of life experience to support this creative enterprise, or anyone to teach him about it. When I think about him, just sitting there with his brand-new fist under his brand-new chin, looking vaguely perturbed and puzzled and anxious, I feel a lot of sympathy. Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  7 Sarah E. Rollens, “Inventing Tradition in Thessalonica: The Appropriation of the Past in 1 Thessalonians 2:14–16,” BTB 46.3 (2016): 123. 8 Ibid., 124. 9 Ibid., 127. 10 S. G. Wilson, Related Strangers: Jews and Christians, 70–170 C.E. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), 175. Parting of the Ways151 151 Wilson, like most Johannine scholars, treats John 16:2–4 as a reference to a historical trauma of expulsion, in accordance with the influential work of J. L. Martyn. 11 But, as Martin de Boer has noted, few have noticed that Martyn himself understood John 16 as a reference to a second trauma: the murder, and martyrdom, of Johannine believers at the hands of Jewish authorities. For Martyn, the gospel’s high Christology was not the cause of expulsion but the effect of that expulsion, and the catalyst for this second, life-threatening trauma. 12 The criterion of plausibility is central to de Boer’s defense of Martyn’s hypothesis. De Boer argues that “the claim that both expulsion and execution were fabrications of the Johannine community is unlikely given the specificity of the charges (which, if false, could easily have been disconfirmed by the first readers of the Gospel) ... It is unlikely that such predictions would have been preserved or attributed to Jesus if they had not been fulfilled in the experience of the Johannine community.” He further adds that “the external evidence, such as it is, supports this reading.” 13 Like Bockmuehl, de Boer supports the claim of plausibility by appealing to a number of extracanonical sources: Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, selected rabbinic, and the Pseudo-Clementine literature. Also relevant are the reported martyrdoms of Stephen (Acts 7:58–60), James the son of Zebedee (Acts 12:2–3), and James the brother of the Lord (Josephus, A.J. 20.200), as well as the persecution of Paul (234–45). De Boer concludes that while these texts cannot all be taken at face value, “the number and diversity of sources and witnesses ... cumulatively give a considerable degree of plausibility to the historicity of the second trauma mentioned in John 16:2b,” that is, the Jewish persecution and murder of Johannine Christ-confessors. 14 De Boer frames his argument as a rebuttal of my own analysis of these passages; in his words, I went “on the offensive” against Martyn’s hypothesis in 1998. 15 It is therefore not surprising that de Boer’s “plausible” argument does not seem plausible to me. I agree with Wilson that the descriptions are vivid and with de Boer that they are detailed. But neither vividness nor detail demonstrate historicity, as the work of excellent novelists and poets, from the ancient period to the present, can attest. My own analysis of the gospel as a rhetorical document suggests that the expulsion passages contribute to John’s well-developed rhetoric of fear. I do not see John’s reference to persecution in chapter 16 as a historical referent but as an echo of a biblical trope deployed for rhetorical purposes. 16 My argument also relies on the criterion of plausibility, as it is based on a particular perspective on the gospel’s genre and purpose. This example in particular suggests two important points: the criterion of plausibility is unavoidable in situations where external evidence is sparse, lacking, or ambiguous; and it is not

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  In a strange way, I both know and don’t know what has just happened. (3. In one of the paradoxes of trauma, traumatized people have a split perception/reception. They are on autopilot, where they act calmly. They also enter into a dream/nightmare from which they cannot wake.) As the various fragments begin to converge, they convey a horrible reality: I must have been hit by this car as I entered the crosswalk. In confused disbelief, I sink back into a hazy twilight. I find that I am unable to think clearly or to will myself awake from this nightmare. A man rushes to my side and drops to his knees. He announces himself as an off-duty paramedic. When I try to see where the voice is coming from, (4. This is an automatic, initial biological orienting response.) he sternly orders, “Don’t move your head.” (5. Now I am put in a double bind with two contradictory commands: one is the innate effort to orient; the other is a demand not to execute this compelling instinct. The result is a collision of opposing impulses. This results in a thwarting of the biological orienting impulse. This was also the case with Vince, the fireman with the frozen shoulder in Chapter 8.) The contradiction between his sharp command and what my body naturally wants—to turn toward his voice—frightens and stuns me into a sort of paralysis. My awareness strangely splits, and I experience an uncanny “dislocation.” It’s as if I’m floating above my body, looking down on the unfolding scene. (6. This description is a classic presentation of dissociation. However, dissociation takes many forms, including the panoply of psychological fragmentation and physical symptoms that can occur in the wake of trauma.) I am snapped back when he roughly grabs my wrist and takes my pulse. He then shifts his position, directly above me. Awkwardly, he grasps my head with both of his hands, trapping it and keeping it from moving. His abrupt actions and the stinging ring of his command panic me; they immobilize me further. (7. This conflict deepens the thwarting and intensifies the immobility response by introducing more fear. This results in fear-potentiated immobility.) Dread seeps into my dazed, foggy consciousness: Maybe I have a broken neck, I think. (8. Dread and helplessness increase the depth and duration of immobility.) I have a compelling impulse to find someone else to focus on. (9. The need for human contact, when threatened, is a mammalian survival instinct—see Chapter 6.) Simply, I need to have someone’s comforting gaze, a lifeline to hold onto. But I’m too terrified to move and feel helplessly frozen. (10. Due to the power of the shock and the immobilization response, there is a reduced ability to ask for help—that is, to engage that more recently developed mammalian social survival instinct.) The Good Samaritan fires off questions in rapid succession: “What is your name? Where are you? Where were you going?

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

  For many people, the prohibitions against ruthlessness within the context of a loving relationship are just too great to allow for erotic abandon. The self-absorption inherent in sexual excitement obliterates the other in a way that collides with the ideal of intimacy. Such people find they can be safely lustful and intemperate only with people they don’t know as well, or care about as much. Recreational sex, pornography, and cybersex all share an element of distance, even anonymity, that avoids the burden of intimacy and makes sexual excitement possible. Clearly, these emotionally disengaged situations are more often found outside the home, where the need for differentiation is less intense. Being with an unavailable partner provides a protective limit—if you can’t get too close to a person, you need not fear entrapment or loss of self. To my thinking, cultivating a sense of ruthlessness in our intimate relationships is an intriguing solution to the problems of desire. While it may appear at first glance to be detached and even uncaring, it is in fact rooted in the love and security of our connection. It is a rare experience of trust to be able to let go completely without guilt or fretfulness, knowing that our relationship is vast enough to withstand the whole of us. We reach a unique intimacy in the erotic encounter. It transcends the civility of the emotional connection and accommodates our unruly impulses and primal appetites. The flint of rubbing bodies gives off a heat not easily achieved through tamer expressions of love. Paradoxically, ruthlessness is a way to achieve closeness. Erotic intimacy invites us into a state of unboundedness where we experience a sweet freedom. We get a temporary break from ourselves—the legacies of our childhood, the habits of our relationship, and the constraints of our respective cultures. Loving another without losing ourselves is the central dilemma of intimacy. Our ability to negotiate the dual needs for connection and autonomy stems from what we learned as children, and often takes a lifetime of practice. It affects not only how we love but also how we make love. Erotic intimacy holds the double promise of finding oneself and losing oneself. It is an experience of merging and of total self-absorption, of mutuality and selfishness. To be inside another and inside ourselves at the same time is a double stance that borders on the mystical. The momentary oneness we feel with our beloved grows out of our ability to acknowledge our indissoluble separateness. In order to be one, you must first be two. 8 ParenthoodWhen Three Threatens Two

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Take for instance the Vietnam vet who wakes up to find himself strangling his terrified wife, unaware that it was the backfiring of a distant car, or even the light footsteps of their young child in the hallway, that provoked his freakish behavior and grossly exaggerated reaction. However, years earlier, when sleeping in a bamboo thicket, under fire from the Vietcong, his immediate kill-response was an essential, life-preserving action. It may only take a very mild stimulus to abruptly trigger the tightly coiled spring (the kill-or-be-killed survival reaction) into an intense, out-of-control, emotional eruption. I know of only one way to break compulsive cycles like this, and in the process expand consciousness toward greater freedom. It is to become aware of the premovement before it graduates into a full-blown movement sequence. It is to extinguish the spark before it ignites the tinder, as emphasized by Buddhist teachings. Many times in the past, I walked with my dog in the Colorado Mountains. Pouncer, a dingo mix, was imbued with a strong instinctual urge to chase deer and other swift creatures of the upland forests. Try as I might, it was not possible to neutralize this “habit” by reprimanding him. If I tried to call him back or foolishly admonished his behavior when he returned, breathless and panting from the chase, it was of no avail. However, if when we encountered deer up ahead, at the very moment his posture changed (just hinting at his readiness to leap forward), I would firmly but gently say, “No, Pouncer. Heel.” He would then calmly continue on our walk, striding enthusiastically by my side. Then there is the following story of a brash young samurai sword fighter and a venerated Zen master. Two Horns of the Dilemma The vital balancing act between expression and restraint requires that when we experience a strong emotional feeling, we need not necessarily act upon it, as this teaching story demonstrates. A young, brash samurai swordsman confronted a venerated Zen master with the following demand: “I want you to tell me the truth about the existence of heaven and hell.” The master replied gently and with delicate curiosity, “How is it that such an ugly and untalented man as you can become a samurai?” Immediately, the wrathful young samurai pulled out his sword and raised it above his head, ready to strike the old man and cut him in half. Without fear, and in complete calm, the Zen master gazed upward and spoke softly: “This is hell.” The samurai paused, sword held above his head.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Chekhov’s Gun You’d been staying at the Dream House for weeks over Christmas break, carless, careless. You shouldn’t have been so stupid; the warnings were already there, but the prospect of endless days of fucking for hours in a lavender bed and eating decadently and being with her was too tantalizing. You have always been a hedonist, and she is there to indulge with you, with an animal hunger that matches your own. In the final week, you go to the local bowling alley with her and her writer friends. You’d driven there in her car—a sleek, luxury thing gifted by her parents—and she was supposed to be the designated driver, for once. So you’d been drinking freely of the pitchers of pale beer, the sort you don’t drink, except you never get the chance to get drunk around her anymore and you’re eager for that looseness in your limbs. She has a single beer, sips it slowly, smiles at you. You bowl the way you always bowl; your turns generally ending with no pins down at all, because you get too excited and the gutter slurps up the ball. But then every so often, a strike; so beautiful and devastating a crash that you get the sensation of being good at something, a sliver of confidence. You turn the ball in your hand, pearlescent and peach, and whip it down with that beautiful thunk-whirr . She sits there, looking butch, and pats her lap. You sit. You haven’t had many boyfriends or girlfriends, and none of them—and certainly no flirtatious people in your past—have ever gestured to you like this. You feel calm, content, a little high. Just a girl sitting on her girl’s lap. Her hands are running up your breasts before you can do anything about it. You clasp them in your own and push them down gently. She puts them up again. When you move them a second time, you can feel her anger; you can’t see her but the smell of her changes, like a cheap dish towel left on a live electric burner. She snaps around you like a Venus flytrap, pinning your arms against your torso . She leans in to your ear. What are you doing, she says. It doesn’t sound like words, like a question; it sounds like a purr. “Don’t,” you say. She tightens her grip on your arms. “I fucking hate you,” she says. She sounds, suddenly, drunk, even though you’ve been watching her and you know she’s had only the one beer. But you’ve had beer, too, and you don’t know what to do. “I fucking hate you,” she says again. The sounds of the bowling alley are coming from very far away; you feel like your heart is going to stop. You are not a parent; no one has ever told you that they hated you. You stand up and look around wildly at the others, who are studiously looking elsewhere.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Lesson Learned You have a redheaded aunt, your mother’s closest sister. As a child you not so secretly referred to her as your “scary aunt” because she was known to fly into unpredictable rages; rages that, more often than not, centered on you. 17 You dreaded the annual trips to Wisconsin because you knew it meant close proximity to a woman who clearly really hated you and did comically little to hide it. It was a power struggle, which was weird because you had no power at all. You cannot remember a conversation with her in which you weren’t tense, tiptoeing around unseen land mines. Things that you remember sparked her anger: the time you made popcorn with your cousin and sprinkled parmesan cheese on it; the time you and your cousin tried to make watercolors out of flower petals at your grandmother’s house; the time you started to describe the movie Return to Oz to your cousin. (It was too scary, apparently, even though the same cousin had read, and described to you in great, horrifying detail, the entire plot of Needful Things the night before as you clutched your stuffed dog and stared at her in the darkness.) In middle school, when you were always fighting with your mother, your aunt told you over AOL instant messenger that if your parents got divorced it’d be your fault, and she threatened to cut your father’s balls off. (Years later, after your parents’ toxic, miserable marriage came to an end, you traced back to that moment as the first time you felt the tiniest twinge of sympathy for your aunt, who had gone through a divorce of her own and never remarried.) Your mother explained away her behavior with any number of facts. Your aunt was a single mom, she said, a nurse who worked very hard to support her kids. She had a disease called endometriosis and was often in pain. (Years later, when the condition bloomed in your own body, you observed that you managed to get through the worst of it without screaming at small children, or anyone for that matter.) Your aunt met the woman from the Dream House, once. Your cousin, her daughter, was graduating from college in a nearby midwestern town, and the two of you attended a party thrown in her honor. Your aunt was stiff and polite, your cousin utterly delighted. Later, you felt ugly with regret: Why was the only girlfriend you took to Wisconsin the one who’d reinforce all of your conservative Catholic relatives’ perceptions of queer women? After that, when your grandmother passed away, you went for a drive with your scary aunt and your mother. Your scary aunt said, apropos of nothing, “I don’t believe in gay people,” and from the back seat—empowered by adulthood—you said, “Well, we believe in you.” Your mother said nothing at all. 18 17 . Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , Type S72, Cruel aunt. 18 . Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , Type S12.2.2, Mother throws children into fire.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  You give the woman you’ve been talking to your phone number, tell her to call you if she needs anything, and then dart across the lawn. Your girlfriend is glowering. Your new friend is running next to her, looking a little anxious and breathless, and gets to you first. “She was just worried about you,” your new friend says, with such preemptive anxiety that you are taken aback. The three of you get in your car, and your girlfriend is radiating fury. You drive silently to the friend’s house. When you get there, she seems almost reluctant to get out of the car, and once she’s out she lingers, like there’s something she wants to say. But then she goes inside. As you pull away from the curb, your girlfriend slams her hand on the dashboard as hard as she possibly can. “Where the fuck were you?” You explain about the woman in the bathroom, what she said to you, how you couldn’t text because she was talking and you didn’t want to interrupt her. You fully expect this explanation to deflate her rage—you even expect her to apologize—but somehow she gets even angrier. She continues to pound the dashboard. “You are the most inconsiderate fucking person I’ve ever met, and how fucking dare you just walk out of the building with no explanation like that.” Every time you bring up the woman she starts yelling again. A few blocks from your house, you pull over. “Don’t talk to me like that,” you say. Then, horrifyingly, you start to cry. “I had to make a decision, and I feel confident that I made the right decision.” She unbuckles her seat belt, and leans very close to your ear. “You’re not allowed to write about this,” she says. “Don’t you ever write about this. Do you fucking understand me?” You don’t know if she means the woman or her, but you nod. Fear makes liars of us all. 10 10 . Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , Type C420.2, Taboo: not to speak about a certain happening.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  “I think we need to go,” you say. “I think—” But when she stands, she does look drunk. How will you get home? You reach for your wallet, but you have no cash, and after a few minutes one of the poets comes up to you. “I’m so sorry,” he says a few times, his speech slurred, though sorry for what he does not specify—but then he presses a twenty-dollar bill into your hand for a cab. You tell him you’ll pay him back, but now that you think about it, you never did. When the cab pulls away from the bowling alley, you see her car gleaming in the parking lot and pray that it doesn’t get towed before morning. In the back of the cab, she closes her eyes, begins to mutter a monologue that lasts for the entire drive home. You fucking cunt I fucking hate you goddamn you Carmen fuck you fuck your mother fuck everything you cunt you goddamn fucking slut fuck you … The sensation of pulling a sheet from the bed is terrible. You will sleep on the couch. That’s what people do, when they’re mad at the person who would otherwise sleep next to them. You’ve never done it but you have heard of it happening. You’ve seen it in movies. You can’t find your pajamas. You go out to the living room, strip down to your underwear, and curl up on the broken couch with the springs pressing into your side. You pull the sheet around you. It’s that soft, wonderfully stretchy jersey fabric, the same type you had in college. She peels the sheet away from your body; you shiver. 30 “What are you doing?” she asks, standing over you. You don’t say anything. Then, when she doesn’t move, you tell her, “I’m angry, and I’d like to sleep alone, please.” She kneels at the side of the couch like a supplicant with an offering. You think maybe she is going to try to kiss you, or maybe fuck you, though you won’t let her, though you won’t let her you won’t let her you won’t— She leans over and begins to scream directly in your ear, like she’s pouring acid out of her mouth and into you. You try to scramble away, but she is pushing on your body, howling like a wounded bear, like an ancient god. (An ancient bear; a wounded god.) It is as if something has been cut loose. You roll off the couch, stand, and dart to the other side of the room. She vanishes into her bedroom and comes out again with your suitcase. With a tremendous yell, she hurls it across the room, where it crashes into the wall. She reaches down and grabs something—your very fancy ModCloth boot, the first pair of shoes you’ve ever spent that much money on—and throws it at you. It spins, misses.

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

  Dwight always went drinking with some other Scoutmasters, then picked me up outside Glenvale for the drive home. This year he would have a long wait. He would have a long wait, and a long drive home alone, and a long explanation to make to my mother when he pulled up to the house without me. I told no one but Arthur, who kept my secrets even when I betrayed his. He liked the plan. He thought so highly of it that he asked to be included. At first I said no. Being on my own was the whole idea. And Arthur had no money. But a few days before The Gathering of the Tribes I told him I’d changed my mind, that he could come along after all. I gave Arthur this news with a show of reluctance, as if I were doing him a favor, but really I was just afraid to be alone. ARTHUR’S FATHER, CAL , worked on the turbines in the powerhouse. He thought I was a great wit because I could always tell him a new joke. I got the jokes from “Today’s Chuckle,” a filler they ran on the front page of the paper. Whenever I visited Arthur, Cal said, “Well, Jackaroony, what’s the word?” “Woman bought three hundred pounds of steel wool. Says she’s going to knit a stove.” “Knit a stove! Knit a stove, you say! Oh that’s rich, that’s a beauty ....” and Cal would hold his sides and reel back and forth while Arthur and Mrs. Gayle looked on with disgust. He was a simple, sunny man well liked in the camp. Even the kids called him Cal. I never heard anyone call him Mr. Gayle. Once, at a beach house belonging to friends of theirs, I persuaded Cal to let me take Arthur out for a spin in a sailboat, claiming that back in Florida I had pretty much lived with a tiller in my hand. After being very nearly swept out to sea we ran aground a mile from the house. Arthur went up the beach and got Cal, but Cal didn’t know how to sail either, so he had to pull the boat home through the surf. He had a hard time of it—the wind was stiff and the waves high—but he didn’t stop laughing the whole way back. Arthur and Mrs. Gayle were complicated. They were complicated by themselves and exotically complicated when together, playing off each other in long cryptic riffs like a pair of scat singers, then falling heavily, portentously silent. They had a way of turning silence into accusation. Cal could not begin to understand them. Under their scrutiny he smiled and blinked his eyes. This seemed to compound the unspoken charges against him. Mrs. Gayle was a snob. She and Cal had been among the first to move into the camp, and she would have nothing to do with those who came afterwards. Mrs.

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

  Whenever I passed through the utility room he groveled and abased himself, hoping to keep me there, then barked and hurled himself against the door as I went outside. This caused me some trouble. For almost a year now, ever since I started high school, I’d been sneaking out of the house after midnight to take the car for joy rides. Dwight wouldn’t teach me to drive—he claimed to believe that I would kill us both—so I had taken the teaching function upon myself. After Champion attached himself to me, I had to bring him along or he would raise the household with his cries. With Champion beside me on the front seat, gazing out the window like a real passenger or snapping his chops at the wind, I cruised the empty streets of the camp. When I got bored I took the car to a stretch of road halfway to Marblemount where I could get it up to a hundred miles an hour without having to make any turns. As Champion placidly watched the white line shivering between the headlights I chattered like a gibbon and wept tears of pure terror. Then I stopped the car in the middle of the road, turned it around, and did the same thing headed the other way. I drove a little farther each time. Someday, I thought, I would just keep going. One morning I backed the car into a ditch while turning it around for my run home. I spun the wheels for a while, then got out and looked things over. I spun the wheels some more, until I was dug in good and deep. Then I gave up and started the trek back to camp. It was nearly three o’clock, and the walk home would take at least four hours. They would find me missing before I got there. The car too. I let off a string of swear words, but they seemed to be coming at me, not from me, and I soon stopped. Champion ran ahead through the forest that crowded the road on both sides. The mountains were black all around, the stars brilliant in the inky sky. My footsteps were loud on the roadway. I heard them as if they came from somebody else. The movement of my legs began to feel foreign to me, and then the rest of my body, foreign and unconvincing, as if I were only pretending to be someone. I watched this body clomp along. I was outside it, watching it without belief. Its imitation of purpose seemed absurd and frightening. I did not know what it was, or what was watching it so anxiously, from so far away. And then a voice bawled, “Oh Maybelline!” I knew that voice. It was mine, and it was loud, and I got behind it. I sang “Maybelline” and another song, and another. I kept singing at the top of my voice.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  346The History of Christianity II JAPANESE DOMINATION õFrom 1910 to 1945, Korea was under Japanese domination. The Japanese wanted Korean subjects to sever all relations with missionary groups and other foreign organizations, and to take part in the rituals of Japanese traditional religion, Shinto. õIn the Shinto worldview, Japan was a paradise created by the gods, and participating in Shinto rites at public shrines was a required demonstration of political loyalty. The Vatican saw that Korean Catholics were in a tight spot and signed a concordat with the Japanese government in 1936, basically saying that Catholics can do that; their activity at the shrines is not idol-worship but an act of patriotism. õProtestants got into more tangles with the Japanese government: They pushed back against Japanese efforts to turn Korean schools into secular, Japanese-language operations. Christians were accused of trying to assassinate the governor general, and when some Korean activists got together in 1919 to sign a declaration of independence, nearly half of them were Protestant. õIn the government’s eyes, Christianity in general, and Protestantism in particular, seemed like a cult devoted to overthrowing the regime (even though most Korean Christians advocated for nonviolent resistance). Japanese troops burned churches, arrested and executed Christian leaders, and at least once herded Christians into their church and set it on fire. AFTER DIVISION õWith the end of World War II, the Allied powers ended Japanese rule in Korea. American forces occupied the south, and the Soviets held the north. This situation led to the establishment of two rival regimes: the Republic of Korea in the South, and the communist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the North. Under the leadership of

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

  Ironically, even the closeness generated by good sex can have a boomerang effect. Like John and Beatrice, many couples experience their relationship as a dance in which great sex brings them close, but then this very closeness can make sex difficult again. The initial rapture facilitates a swift bonding and establishes an immediate connection. But while many of us relish the idea of losing ourselves in sex, the very oneness that we experience through the merging of our bodies can evoke a sense of obliteration. The intensity of sexual passion triggers a fear of engulfment. Of course, few of us are aware of these undercurrents as they’re happening. What we feel instead is the urge to pull out right after orgasm, or the sudden desire to make a sandwich, to light a cigarette. We welcome the intrusion of any random thought: I meant to send an e-mail to…These windows need cleaning…. I wonder how my friend Jack is doing? We appreciate being left alone to meander leisurely in our own mind because this reestablishes a psychological distance, a delineation of the boundaries between me and you. From “inter-” we go back to “intra-.” Having been all over each other, we retreat back into our own skin. Nowhere is the passage from connection to separateness represented more clearly than at the end of a sexual act. In his book Arousal, the psychoanalyst Michael Bader offers another explanation for John and Beatrice’s erotic impasse. In his view, intimacy comes with a growing concern for the well-being of the other person, which includes a fear of hurting her. But sexual excitement requires the capacity not to worry, and the pursuit of pleasure demands a degree of selfishness. Some people can’t allow themselves this selfishness, because they’re too absorbed with the well-being of the beloved. This emotional configuration is reminiscent of how John felt toward his mother—his awareness of her unhappiness overwhelmed him with worry and a sense of burden. The very caring he experiences makes it harder for him to focus on his own needs, to feel spontaneous, sexually alive, and carefree. John has faced this vexing problem of loss of desire in every intimate relationship he’s been in. In the past, every time the block set in he interpreted it as meaning that he no longer loved the woman. In fact, the contrary is true. It is because he loves her so much that he carries this sense of responsibility for her and can’t enjoy the blithe quest for erotic rapture. Patterns Are Equal Employment Opportunities

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

  He explains, “The degradation of romance, the waning of desire, is due not to the contamination of love by aggression, but to the inability to sustain the necessary tension between them.” Jed and Coral Jed is unassuming. He is a clean-shaven, mild-mannered architect, brilliant and well-spoken. He is kind, never the sort of person to get in your face about anything. But sexually, he’s another man. Jed discovered S-M (sadomasochism) as a teenager, and for years he has used eroticism as a venue for aggression. He loves leather, hard surfaces, chains, handcuffs. “I used to be shy, and it was hard for me to assert myself. But at the same time I was angry a lot, and I didn’t know where to go with it. I was too afraid of hurting people, so I kept it all inside.” “I can see why S-M was so attractive to you,” I reply. “You could make demands and not fear hurting anyone. The unambiguous codes, the negotiating beforehand, made it safe for you. Emotionally, you tend to put other people first. Sexual domination is a way for you to override the other person’s supremacy. It’s a clever answer to your more typical emotional subordination.” “Exactly,” he says. “But at the same time, you know, it’s all about their needs. I’m pleasing them—that’s the key piece. They want it. They have to be really into it, or it’s a no-go for me.” For years, Jed avoided getting serious with women. Becoming close felt obliterating. Haunted by the timid little boy he once was, he dreaded feeling powerless and dependent. “Coral was the first woman I ever loved who I didn’t feel indebted to. I wasn’t constantly on guard not to be sucked up by the relationship.” Jed grew up as a loner, had few friends, and spent much of his adolescence reading science fiction and listening to heavy metal in his room. Coral, who grew up in the same neighborhood, barely remembers him from high school. She was popular, pretty, outgoing. She edited the yearbook. “I wasn’t on the A-list, but I had a perfectly respectable place.” Even today, Coral has many friends. She is the hub of her social circle, and she has plenty of interests to supplement her rising career as a documentary filmmaker. Eleven years after graduating from high school they ran into each other at a wedding. Jed had learned to mask his shyness with satire, and Coral was drawn to his perceptiveness and offbeat sense of humor.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  since he was a boy, he had dreaded the possibility that he might become king. Compared with his affable grandfather, Louis was quite shy around people; he was an awkward young man, always uncertain and fearful of making mistakes. He felt the august role of French king to be beyond his capacities. Now, having ascended the throne, he could no longer disguise his insecurities from the court and from the French people. But as he prepared for his coronation, to take place in the spring of 1775, Louis began to feel differently. He had decided to study the coronation ritual itself so that he could be prepared and not make mistakes; and what he learned actually filled him with the confidence that he desperately needed. According to legend, a dove sent from the Holy Spirit had deposited some sacred oil that was kept at a church in the town of Reims and was used to anoint all kings of France from the ninth century on. Once anointed with this oil, the king was suddenly elevated above the ranks of mere mortals and imbued with a divine nature, becoming God’s lieutenant on earth. The ritual represented the marriage of the new king with the church and the French people. In his body and spirit, the king would now embody the entire populace, their two fates intertwined. And, sanctified by God, the king could depend on the Lord’s guidance and protection. By the 1770s, many French people and progressive clergymen had come to see this ritual as a relic of a superstitious past. But Louis felt the opposite. To him, the ancientness of the rite was comforting. Believing in its significance would be the means to overcome his fears and doubts. He would be buoyed by a profound sense of mission, his divine nature made real by the anointment. Louis decided to reenact this sacred ritual in its more original form. And he would go even further. At the palace of Versailles he noticed that many of the paintings and statues of Louis XIV associated him with Roman gods, a way to symbolically strengthen the image of the French monarchy as something ancient and unshakable. The new king decided he would surround himself with similar imagery for the public part of the coronation, overwhelming his subjects with the spectacle and the symbols he had chosen. — Louis XVI’s coronation took place on June 11, 1775, and in the crowd outside the cathedral that warm day was a most unlikely tourist—a fifteen-year-old youth named Georges-Jacques Danton. He was a student at a boarding school in the town of Troyes. His family had come from the peasantry, but his father had managed to become a lawyer, raising the family up into the expanding French middle class. His father had died when Danton was three, and his mother had raised him with the hope that Danton would continue in his father’s footsteps, securing a solid career.

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

  As we went into the first curve I felt Pearl’s fingers sinking into my forearm. “Please, Dwight,” I said. “Please, Dwight ,” he said. And then he took us through the turns above the river, tires wailing, headlights swinging between cliff and space, and the more we begged him the faster he went, only slowing down for a breath after the really close calls, and then laughing to show he wasn’t afraid. When I was alone in the house I went through everyone’s private things. One day I found in my mother’s bureau a letter from her brother Stephen, who lived in Paris. It was filled with descriptions of the city and the pleasures to be had there. I read it a couple of times, then copied the address from the flimsy blue envelope and put it back in the drawer. That night I wrote my uncle a long letter in which I created a nightmare picture of our life in Chinook. It seemed true enough as I wrote it, but I got carried away. At the end of the letter I pleaded with my uncle to bring my mother and me to Paris. If he would just help us get started, I said, we’d be on our feet in no time. We would find jobs and pay him back whatever we owed. I said I didn’t know how much longer we could hold out—everything depended on him. I plastered an envelope with stamps and mailed it off. I waited a few days for his answer, then forgot about it. MY MOTHER CAUGHT me on the steps one afternoon as I was coming in from my paper route. She said she wanted me to take a walk with her. Not far from the house there was a footbridge over the river, and when we got there she stopped and asked me what in the world I had written to her brother. I said I didn’t remember, exactly. “It must’ve been pretty bad,” she said. When I didn’t answer, she asked, “How did you get his address?” I told her I’d found the letter on top of her bureau. She shook her head and looked out over the water. “I was just trying to help,” I said. “Read this,” she said, and handed me a blue envelope. Inside was another letter from Uncle Stephen. He expressed his shock and sympathy at the wretchedness of our condition, but explained that he wasn’t able to launch a rescue operation on the scale of the one I had proposed. They didn’t have room for both of us, and as far as finding jobs was concerned we had no prospects at all. We didn’t speak French, and even if we did we would never be able to get working papers. I belonged in school, anyway. The whole idea was ridiculous. Still, he and his wife wanted to do what they could.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  8 Lecture 2: The Epic of Gilgamesh The Epic of Gilgamesh Lecture 2 The ¿ rst [part of the poem]… is pretty much a … heroic story about the exploits of a legendary king. … [who] for the second part … goes out on a … spiritual quest looking for a more literal remedy against death than … a name that will live on beyond him. W e begin our study of world literature with one of the oldest literary works in the world, the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh . The modern text is based on a 7 th-century B.C.E. copy found in the library of the Assyrian King Assurbanipal. The poem itself dates to about 2800 B.C.E., when Gilgamesh was king of the Sumerian city of Uruk. The poems written about him were passed down from the Sumerians to the Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians as these people succeeded to power in the Middle East. The poems were woven into a single narrative in the 2 nd millennium B.C.E. by a Babylonian scribe known as Sin-liqe- uninni. Professor Vandiver tells the story of the poem’s rediscovery in the 19 th century in The Teaching Company course Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, 2nd Edition. The poem is divided into two parts: a heroic story about the exploits of a legendary king, and a narrative about a spiritual quest by a man who has just recognized his own mortality. Gilgamesh is heroic in that, like Achilles and Aeneas, he is partly divine and hence larger than life in all respects. His adventures are told in an epic, which is a narrative poem about a heroic ¿ gure who de¿ nes his culture. Gilgamesh begins the story as a ruler who wears out his people, who pray to the gods for relief. The gods create Enkidu as an alter-ego for Gilgamesh: half animal, half human in complement to Gilgamesh’s half-human, half- divine nature. Enkidu is civilized by a prostitute who has sex with him, introduces him to shepherds—who teach him to eat human food, wear clothing, and groom himself—and then takes him to meet Gilgamesh. The two wrestle and become fast friends, the ¿ rst instance in literature of the kind of male friendship that we will later encounter in this course between

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

  Our love affair with monogamy arguably comes at some cost. The Brazilian family therapist Michele Scheinkman says, “American culture has great tolerance for divorce—where there is a total breakdown of the loyalty bond and painful effects for the whole family—but it is a culture with no tolerance for sexual infidelity.” We would rather kill a relationship than question its structure. So entrenched is our faith in monogamy that most couples, particularly heterosexual couples, rarely broach the subject openly. They have no need to discuss what’s a given. Even those who are otherwise willing to probe sexuality in all its permutations are often reluctant to negotiate the hard lines around exclusivity. Monogamy has an absolute quality. According to this way of thinking, you can’t be mostly monogamous, or 98 percent monogamous, or periodically nonmonogamous. Discussing fidelity implies that it’s open to discussion, no longer an imperative. The prospect of betrayal is too dark, so we avoid the subject with practiced denial. We fear that the smallest chink in our armor will let in Sodom and Gomorrah. Despite a 50 percent divorce rate for first marriages and 65 percent the second time around; despite the staggering frequency of affairs; despite the fact that monogamy is a ship sinking faster than anyone can bail it out, we continue to cling to the wreckage with absolute faith in its structural soundness. Finding the One Historically, monogamy was an externally imposed system of control over women’s reproduction. “Which child is mine? Who gets the cows when I die?” Fidelity, as a mainstay of patriarchal society, was about lineage and property; it had nothing to do with love. Today, particularly in the West, it has everything to do with love. When marriage shifted from a contractual arrangement to a matter of the heart, faithfulness became a mutual expression of love and commitment. Once a social prohibition directed at women, fidelity is now a personal choice for both sexes. Conviction has replaced convention.