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 From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  It was the dramatic and decisive policy of a zealous emperor bent on rebuilding the Roman Empire, without time or tears for those who risked the favor of God. Th e enterprise of reconquest, of course, was to collapse, crumbling of its own overweening ambition and the unfore- seeable advent of plague. Th e later legislation of Justinian bears the darkened mood of po liti cal disappointment and desperate suff ering. A law issued sometime in the years after the appearance of the bubonic plague refl ects the utterly transformed atmosphere. Th e law is motivated by the fear of God, whose dis plea sure manifested itself in the famines, earthquakes, and pestilence that had struck so inexplicably. It is written in the language of sin and salvation. Justinian, as legislator, considered the “sins” against nature within his regulatory remit. Th e prefect was charged to take care lest these sins lead to the destruction of the “city and the polity.” Another law, com- posed toward the end of Justinian’s reign, represents a complete union of Christian ideology, state power, and ecclesiastical ambition. In response to terrible earthquakes, Justinian came to believe that God was angry at the sins of man, with special anger reserved for the grievous impiety of sex between men. If proof were needed, he pointed to the fi res of Sodom, which smoldered “up to the present time.” What God wanted, even more than the destruction of sinners, was their repentance. Justinian commanded that all guilty of such sin immediately repent. Th ey were to take themselves  FROM SHAME TO SIN to the patriarch of Constantinople, undergoing penance as a “therapy for their disease.” Th e prefect was to encourage penitence, but any who failed to submit themselves faced “atrocious penalties.” To allow sin to abide was to invite “the good God to destroy us all.”  Th e late mea sures of Justinian are truly the end of a late antique trajec- tory. In Justinian’s reign the legal regime has become fully consonant with a cultural system that or ga nized sexual morality fi rst and foremost around the gender of the participants. Th e conception of same- sex desire as a dis- ease, susceptible to ecclesiastical therapy, has come to be embodied in im- perial law. Justinian’s policies presume a powerful religio- juridical complex. Th e state, with its monopoly of violence, is used to control and enforce private morality directly.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Virtually anyone can be seduced into a mind control relationship or recruited into a cult, especially if they don’t understand what to watch out for. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the typical cult member was college-aged, but by the late 1980s it had become commonplace for people of all ages to fall victim. Elderly people are quite likely to be recruited.70 The elderly tend to be solicited for heavy financial contributions or public-relations endorsements. Many middle-aged people are recruited for their professional expertise, to help set up or run cult-owned businesses. Still, young people, for the most part, represent the core workers. They can sleep less, eat less and work harder. Although the white middle class is still the main target of recruitment, several groups are now actively seeking out blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. As they gather individuals from these communities, they use them to design programs that will bring in others. The big cults have already developed indoctrination programs in Spanish, for example. Another target population is made up of Europeans visiting, going to school or working in the United States. After a few years of training and indoctrination (usually with expired visas), they are sent home to recruit in their own countries. Cults also reach into foreign countries to provide workers. For decades, Scientology has recruited in Africa, eastern Europe and Asia to provide staff for its U.S., UK and Australian organizations. Recruits are offered a ‘scholarship’ which in reality is a 90-hour work week. Interestingly, cults generally avoid recruiting people who will burden them, such as those with physical disabilities or severe emotional problems. They want people who will stand up to the grueling demands of cult life. If someone is recruited who uses illegal drugs, they are usually told to either stop using them or leave. To my knowledge, there are few people with disabilities recruited in cults, because it takes time, money, and effort to assist them. People born into cults who develop disabilities are often distanced and sent to government welfare programs. Cult Life: Illusion And Abuse Once a person joins a destructive cult, for the first few weeks or months they typically enjoy a “honeymoon phase.” They are treated as though they were royalty. They are made to feel very special as they embark on a new life with the group. The new convert has yet to experience what life in the group is really going to be like. Even though most cult members say publicly that they are happier than they’ve ever been in their lives, the reality is sadly different. Life in a destructive cult is, for the most part, a life of sacrifice, pain and fear. People involved full-time in a destructive cult know what it is like to live under totalitarianism, but can’t objectively see what is happening to them. They live in a fantasy world created by the group.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  There were boys on their knees—three, four, five, six—he couldn’t count them all, but they were on their knees with their sea bags still over their shoulders like Christs, and they were crawling, he saw them crawling! trying not to quit, trying to catch up with the rest. And he was thankful now he was still on his feet. Oh his legs ached and his chest felt like it was going to explode and his head was pounding now and his eyes were burning and he was getting closer and closer. Some men were cursing now, swearing and cursing like the drill instructors, cursing the heat, cursing the sweat. They began to shout and curse the shock, the shock of this day. They dragged themselves, exhausted, in single file into the squad bay. It was a long hallway painted green with double racks on each side making the place seem even tighter than it was. He found a rack at the end near the window that looked out into the swamps. He stood rigid at attention in front of his rack, dropping his sea bag at his side, staring straight ahead like they had told him, staring directly into the eyes of another young man. All of them now were coming in, their big boots banging against the wooden deck, cursing and sweating and dragging their sea bags up to their racks. “Get in there! Hurry up! Hurry up! Get in there!” screamed the sergeant who came running through the open door of the squad bay. “I want each one of you to get in front of a rack!” screamed the sergeant. “And now I want you to listen to me!” And he told them that this place, this squad bay, would be their home for the next three months. They would live here and sleep here and shower here and work here until they became marines. “It’s late!” screamed the short sergeant. “And I know how tired you ladies are tonight. Are you tired ladies?” screamed the sergeant. “Yessir!” shouted the men. “I can’t hear you!” screamed the sergeant. “Louder!” “Yessir!” the young men screamed again. “That’s more like it.” The sergeant repeated a long list of names including the president and vice president of the United States and everyone else right on down to the senior drill instructor himself, and after completing the list, he shouted to the men that every night from here on out they would repeat those names. And then he shouted, “Ready—Mount!” And they shouted back “Ready—Mount! Aye aye, sir!” And all eighty jumped into bed, still standing at attention, lying in their racks. “Awright! I want you to stand at attention all night! I think it’s good practice for you.” And as they lay in their racks at attention, one of the sergeants had a young black boy from Georgia sing the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallo-o-wed be Thy name,” he sang.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  People who were sexually abused as children often have crippling phobias about themselves programmed into them by their perpetrators. Many children have no conscious memories of the phobia installation. However they suffer deep trauma issues about identity and sexuality. They are unable to visualize themselves being healthy and valued as a unique human being. Not surprisingly, a large number of sex trafficking victims were sexually abused as children, making them especially vulnerable to recruitment and continued abuse. This childhood mind control abuse set them up for being abused again and again. What do phobias have to do with cult groups and mind control? In some cults, members are systematically made to be phobic about ever leaving the group. Today’s cults know how to effectively implant vivid negative images deep within members’ unconscious minds, making it impossible for them to even conceive of ever being happy and successful outside of the group. When the unconscious is programmed to accept such negative associations, it behaves as though they were true. The unconscious mind of the typical cult member contains a substantial image-bank of all of the bad things that will occur if they, or anyone, were to ever betray the group. Members are programmed, either overtly or subtly, to believe that if they ever leave, they will die of some horrible disease, be hit by a car, be killed in a plane crash, or perhaps cause the death of loved ones. Some cults program members to believe that if they leave the group, planetary nuclear holocaust will be the result. Yet cult-induced phobias are so cleverly created and implanted that people often don’t even know they exist. Of course, these thoughts are irrational and often nonsensical. However, keep in mind that most phobias are irrational. Most planes don’t crash, most elevators don’t get stuck, and most dogs aren’t rabid. Imagine what it would be like if you believed that mysterious people were determined to poison you. If this belief were implanted deep in your unconscious, do you think you would ever be able to go to a restaurant and enjoy your meal? How long would it be before you only ate food that you bought and prepared yourself? If, by chance, someone you were eating with in a restaurant suddenly became ill, how long would it be before you stopped eating out altogether? Such a belief—whether conscious or unconscious—would substantially limit your choices. If the belief were not conscious, you might try to rationalize your behavior by telling your friends that you don’t like eating out because you are on a diet, or because many restaurants are unsanitary. Either way, your choices no longer include simply going to a restaurant and enjoying a good meal. In the same way, cult phobias take away people’s choices. Members truly believe they will be destroyed if they leave the safety of the group. They think there is no way outside the group for them to grow—spiritually, intellectually, or emotionally.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  For the longest time I thought she meant that the other kids were going to steal me, but she was talking about the police. Children could be taken. Children were taken. The wrong color kid in the wrong color area, and the government could come in, strip your parents of custody, haul you off to an orphanage. To police the townships, the government relied on its network of impipis, the anonymous snitches who’d inform on suspicious activity. There were also the blackjacks, black people who worked for the police. My grandmother’s neighbor was a blackjack. She had to make sure he wasn’t watching when she smuggled me in and out of the house. My gran still tells the story of when I was three years old and, fed up with being a prisoner, I dug a hole under the gate in the driveway, wriggled through, and ran off. Everyone panicked. A search party went out and tracked me down. I had no idea how much danger I was putting everyone in. The family could have been deported, my gran could have been arrested, my mom might have gone to prison, and I probably would have been packed off to a home for colored kids. So I was kept inside. Other than those few instances of walking in the park, the flashes of memory I have from when I was young are almost all indoors, me with my mom in her tiny flat, me by myself at my gran’s. I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t know any kids besides my cousins. I wasn’t a lonely kid—I was good at being alone. I’d read books, play with the toy that I had, make up imaginary worlds. I lived inside my head. I still live inside my head. To this day you can leave me alone for hours and I’m perfectly happy entertaining myself. I have to remember to be with people. — Obviously, I was not the only child born to black and white parents during apartheid. Traveling around the world today, I meet other mixed South Africans all the time. Our stories start off identically. We’re around the same age. Their parents met at some underground party in Hillbrow or Cape Town. They lived in an illegal flat. The difference is that in virtually every other case they left. The white parent smuggled them out through Lesotho or Botswana, and they grew up in exile, in England or Germany or Switzerland, because being a mixed family under apartheid was just that unbearable.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  They were coming home from church, a big group, my mom and Andrew and Isaac, her new husband and his children and a whole bunch of his extended family, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews. They had just pulled into the driveway when Abel pulled up and got out of his car. He had his gun. He looked right at my mother. “You’ve stolen my life,” he said. “You’ve taken everything away from me. Now I’m going to kill all of you.” Andrew stepped in front of his father. He stepped right in front of the gun. “Don’t do this, Dad, please. You’re drunk. Just put the gun away.” Abel looked down at his son. “No,” he said. “I’m killing everybody, and if you don’t walk away I will shoot you first.” Andrew stepped aside. “His eyes were not lying,” he told me. “He had the eyes of the Devil. In that moment I could tell my father was gone.” For all the pain I felt that day, in hindsight, I have to imagine that Andrew’s pain was far greater than mine. My mom had been shot by a man I despised. If anything, I felt vindicated; I’d been right about Abel all along. I could direct my anger and hatred toward him with no shame or guilt whatsoever. But Andrew’s mother had been shot by Andrew’s father, a father he loved. How does he reconcile his love with that situation? How does he carry on loving both sides? Both sides of himself? Isaac was only four years old. He didn’t fully comprehend what was happening, and as Andrew stepped aside, Isaac started crying. “Daddy, what are you doing? Daddy, what are you doing?” “Isaac, go to your brother,” Abel said. Isaac ran over to Andrew, and Andrew held him. Then Abel raised his gun and he started shooting. My mother jumped in front of the gun to protect everyone, and that’s when she took the first bullet, not in her leg but in her butt cheek. She collapsed, and as she fell to the ground she screamed. “Run!” Abel kept shooting and everyone ran. They scattered. My mom was struggling to get back to her feet when Abel walked up and stood over her. He pointed the gun at her head point-blank, execution-style. Then he pulled the trigger. Nothing. The gun misfired. Click! He pulled the trigger again, same thing. Then again and again. Click! Click! Click! Click! Four times he pulled the trigger, and four times the gun misfired. Bullets were popping out of the ejection port, falling out of the gun, falling down on my mom and clattering to the ground. Abel stopped to see what was wrong with the gun. My mother jumped up in a panic. She shoved him aside, ran for the car, jumped into the driver’s seat.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  When I was born, my mother hadn’t seen her family in three years, but she wanted me to know them and wanted them to know me, so the prodigal daughter returned. We lived in town, but I would spend weeks at a time with my grandmother in Soweto, often during the holidays. I have so many memories from the place that in my mind it’s like we lived there, too. Soweto was designed to be bombed—that’s how forward-thinking the architects of apartheid were. The township was a city unto itself, with a population of nearly one million. There were only two roads in and out. That was so the military could lock us in, quell any rebellion. And if the monkeys ever went crazy and tried to break out of their cage, the air force could fly over and bomb the shit out of everyone. Growing up, I never knew that my grandmother lived in the center of a bull’s-eye. In the city, as difficult as it was to get around, we managed. Enough people were out and about, black, white, and colored, going to and from work, that we could get lost in the crowd. But only black people were permitted in Soweto. It was much harder to hide someone who looked like me, and the government was watching much more closely. In the white areas you rarely saw the police, and if you did it was Officer Friendly in his collared shirt and pressed pants. In Soweto the police were an occupying army. They didn’t wear collared shirts. They wore riot gear. They were militarized. They operated in teams known as flying squads, because they would swoop in out of nowhere, riding in armored personnel carriers—hippos, we called them—tanks with enormous tires and slotted holes in the side of the vehicle to fire their guns out of. You didn’t mess with a hippo. You saw one, you ran. That was a fact of life. The township was in a constant state of insurrection; someone was always marching or protesting somewhere and had to be suppressed. Playing in my grandmother’s house, I’d hear gunshots, screams, tear gas being fired into crowds. My memories of the hippos and the flying squads come from when I was five or six, when apartheid was finally coming apart. I never saw the police before that, because we could never risk the police seeing me. Whenever we went to Soweto, my grandmother refused to let me outside. If she was watching me it was, “No, no, no. He doesn’t leave the house.” Behind the wall, in the yard, I could play, but not in the street. And that’s where the rest of the boys and girls were playing, in the street. My cousins, the neighborhood kids, they’d open the gate and head out and roam free and come back at dusk. I’d beg my grandmother to go outside. “Please. Please, can I go play with my cousins?” “No! They’re going to take you!”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Perhaps the “sister,” in searching for the kerosene can, might overturn the jar of prunes which were being stewed and thus endanger all our lives by robbing us of the required calories in the morrow’s meal. A severe beating would have to be given, not in anger, because that would disturb the digestive apparatus, but silently and efficiently, as a chemist would beat up the white of an egg in preparation for a minor analysis. But the “sister,” not understanding the prophylactic nature of the punishment, would give vent to the most bloodcurdling screams and this would so affect the old man that he would go out for a walk and return two or three hours later blind drunk and, what was worse, scratching a little paint off the rolling doors in his blind staggers. The little piece of paint that had been chipped off would bring on a battle royal which was very bad for my dream life, because in my dream life I frequently changed places with my sister, accepting the tortures inflicted upon her and nourishing them with my supersensitive brain. It was in these dreams, always accompanied by the sound of glass breaking, of shrieks, curses, groans and sobs, that I gathered an unformulated knowledge of the ancient mysteries, of the rites of initiation, of the transmigration of souls and so on. It might begin with a scene from real life—the sister standing by the blackboard in the kitchen, the mother towering over her with a ruler, saying two and two makes how much? and the sister screaming five . Bang! no , seven , Bang! no , thirteen , eighteen , twenty! I would be sitting at the table, doing my lessons, just as in real life during these scenes, when by a slight twist or squirm, perhaps as I saw the ruler come down on the sister’s face, suddenly I would be in another realm where glass was unknown, as it was unknown to the Kickapoos or the Lenni-Lenape. The faces of those about me were familiar—they were my uterine relatives who, for some mysterious reason, failed to recognize me in this new ambiance . They were garbed in black and the color of their skin was ash gray, like that of the Tibetan devils. They were all fitted out with knives and other instruments of torture: they belonged to the caste of sacrificial butchers. I seemed to have absolute liberty and the authority of a god, and yet by some capricious turn of events the end would be that I’d be lying on the sacrificial block and one of my charming uterine relatives would be bending over me with a gleaming knife to cut out my heart. In sweat and terror I would begin to recite “my lessons” in a high, screaming voice, faster and faster, as I felt the knife searching for my heart.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  People kept singing for a block or two as we left the Party headquarters behind, turning right on the narrow street just past it, they cycled through two or three verses before the song faded away once we reached Stamboliyski Boulevard. We had returned to civilization, I thought, we were passing shops and restaurants, their lit interiors calling us back from what we had almost become, it was unimaginable now. At the intersection with Vitosha, the beautiful old church, Sveta Nedelya, sat brooding in the pool of its lights. Ostavka, people were still chanting, but it felt half-hearted now, a matter almost of form. That hasn’t happened before, M. said, meaning the moment at the Party headquarters, I was scared almost, she said, were you, and I admitted that I was, that for a minute I had thought things might get bad. But it’s good that we’re scared, she said. If we’re scared, that means they’re scared, too. She looked at me, her face bright in a streetlamp, then looked away. They need to be scared, she said, maybe that’s the whole point, they need to know they should be scared of us. We turned back onto Vitosha, where M. stopped and said goodbye, she would take the metro home. I guess I should do my homework, she said, squeezing my arm in farewell before deciding instead to give me a quick hug. I’m so happy I saw you, she said, it was so great to do this, and then she was gone. Other people were leaving too, streaming down into the metro or dispersing on foot, the march was thinning out. Those of us who stayed turned onto Tsar Osvoboditel again, beginning the last leg of the protest, bringing us back full circle. There were still people yelling cherveni boklutsi but not many, most people were walking quietly, chatting among themselves. I would follow the march to the end, I had booked a hotel room for the night, in the luxury hotel near the statue of the tsar; after the embassy warnings travelers were staying in hotels far from the protests, the rooms were cheap enough for me to afford. I would spend the night there and take the metro to campus in the morning. I glanced at my phone and saw that D. was already waiting for me to join him for a drink at the bar. He was right, D. had texted, meaning the writer I had met and the argument they had had, what’s happening is better than I thought, I can’t wait to talk to you, hurry up. We were still a few blocks away but a new chant had started up, utre pak, tomorrow again, it gave people fresh energy, everyone was chanting it, pumping their fists in the air. Even I joined in, utre pak, I wanted to see what it was like to chant with the others, but soon I felt foolish and stopped.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I was born on the Fourth of July. I can’t feel . . .” “What religion are you?” “Catholic,” I say. “What outfit did you come from?” “What’s going on? When are you going to operate?” I say. “The doctors will operate,” he says. “Don’t worry,” he says confidently. “They are very busy and there are many wounded but they will take care of you soon.” He continues to stand almost at attention in front of me with a long clipboard in his hand, jotting down all the information he can. I cannot understand why they are taking so long to operate. There is something very wrong with me, I think, and they must operate as quickly as possible. The man with the clipboard walks out of the room. He will send the priest in soon. I lie in the room alone staring at the walls, still sucking the air, determined to live more than ever now. The priest seems to appear suddenly above my head. With his fingers he is gently touching my forehead, rubbing it slowly and softly. “How are you,” he says. “I’m fine, Father.” His face is very tired but it is not frightened. He is almost at ease, as if what he is doing he has done many times before. “I have come to give you the Last Rites, my son.” “I’m ready, Father,” I say. And he prays, rubbing oils on my face and gently placing the crucifix to my lips. “I will pray for you,” he says. “When will they operate?” I say to the priest. “I do not know,” he says. “The doctors are very busy. There are many wounded. There is not much time for anything here but trying to live. So you must try to live my son, and I will pray for you.” Soon after that I am taken to a long room where there are many doctors and nurses. They move quickly around me. They are acting very competent. “You will be fine,” says one nurse calmly. “Breathe deeply into the mask,” the doctor says. “Are you going to operate?” I ask. “Yes. Now breathe deeply into the mask.” As the darkness of the mask slowly covers my face I pray with all my being that I will live through this operation and see the light of day once again. I want to live so much. And even before I go to sleep with the blackness still swirling around my head and the numbness of sleep, I begin to fight as I have never fought before in my life. I awake to the screams of other men around me. I have made it. I think that maybe the wound is my punishment for killing the corporal and the children. That now everything is okay and the score is evened up. And now I am packed in this place with the others who have been wounded like myself, strapped onto a strange circular bed.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I don’t want you people to look left or right, I want you people to stand straight ahead.” It was unbearably hot. He could feel the sweat rolling off his face. He was afraid to look either way and he stared straight ahead like he’d been told. “Left face!” screamed the sergeant. “You goddamned idiots!” screamed the short sergeant again. “You’re turned the wrong way. You goddamned fucking people, you goddamned scum, when are you people gonna listen, when are you people gonna learn? You came here to be marines.” The short sergeant was laughing now. He took a deep breath and stepped forward, picking out one of the young boys, the tips of his shiny shoes almost touching the tips of the ones the boy wore. “You no good fucking civilian maggot,” he screamed in the boy’s ears. “You’re worthless, do you understand? And I’m gonna kill you. There are eighty of you, eighty young warm bodies, eighty sweet little ladies, eighty sweetpeas, and I want you maggots to know today that you belong to me and you will belong to me until I have made you into marines.” The formation was very sloppy. It didn’t look to him like a military formation at all. He was trying so hard, standing straight and looking straight ahead and cupping his hands right along the seams of his trousers the way the guidebook had taught him, the way Richie and he had practiced it so many times. He was straining till he felt his hands almost go numb, he was trying so hard to be a good marine and do what they said and boot camp hadn’t even started yet. But he was determined, even though he didn’t understand why they had to be so angry and so mean, why they had to scream and shout and curse the way they did. He couldn’t understand that, but it didn’t matter. He was going to make it, he was going to do what they said, like a good marine. They took them from the place where they had stayed that night and marched them and ran them shouting and screaming, eighty of them, dressed in suits and ties and sweatshirts and T-shirts, long-haired and short-haired, short ones and fat ones, kids from New Jersey, kids from Detroit, the drill instructor almost stepping on the boys’ heels, taunting and threatening, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” He looked up at the sky as he ran; he could hardly breathe. “Awright, awright, all you maggots, get in there!” They had come to what looked like a large hangar. And they marched, all eighty, single file, with their heads straight ahead, into the aluminum structure, with the chrome-domes they had just gotten spinning on their heads, their cartridge belts loosely fitted, jumping and dangling from their waists. They didn’t look like marines, he thought, they looked like Richie and Pete and the rest of the guys, running into Sally’s Woods for a game of guns.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Nigger he hum all time. White man think nigger learn his place. Nigger learn nuthin’. Nigger wait. Nigger watch everything white man do. Nigger no say nuthin’, no sir, no siree. BUT JUST THE SAME THE NIGGER IS KILLING THE WHITE MAN OFF ! Every time the nigger looks at a white man he’s putting a dagger through him. It’s not the heat, it’s not the hookworm, it’s not the bad crops that’s killing the South off—it’s the nigger! The nigger is giving off a poison, whether he means to or not. The South is coked and doped with nigger poison. Pass on. . . . Sitting outside a barber shop by the James River. I’ll be here just ten minutes, while I take a load off my feet. There’s a hotel and a few stores opposite me; it all tails off quickly, ends like it began—for no reason. From the bottom of my soul I pity the poor devils who are born and die here. There is no earthly reason why this place should exist. There is no reason why anybody should cross the street and get himself a shave and haircut, or even a sirloin steak. Men, buy yourselves a gun and kill each other off! Wipe this street out of my mind forever—it hasn’t an ounce of meaning in it. The same day, after nightfall. Still plugging on, digging deeper and deeper into the South. I’m coming away from a little town by a short road leading to the highway. Suddenly I hear footsteps behind me and soon a young man passes me on the trot, breathing heavily and cursing with all his might. I stand there a moment, wondering what it’s all about. I hear another man coming on the trot; he’s an older man and he’s carrying a gun. He breathes fairly easy, and not a word out of his trap. Just as he comes in view the moon breaks through the clouds and I catch a good look at his face. He’s a manhunter. I stand back as the others come up behind him. I’m trembling with fear. It’s the sheriff, I hear a man say, and he’s going to get him. Horrible. I move on toward the highway waiting to hear the shot that will end it all. I hear nothing—just this heavy breathing of the young man and the quick, eager steps of the mob following behind the sheriff. Just as I get near the main road a man steps out of the darkness and comes over to me very quietly. “Where yer goin’, son?” he says, quiet like and almost tenderly. I stammer out something about the next town. “Better stay right here, son,” he says. I didn’t say another word. I let him take me back into town and hand me over like a thief. I lay on the floor with about fifty other blokes. I had a marvelous sexual dream which ended with the guillotine. I plug on. .

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I made ideological changes and excursions; I was a vagabond in the country of the brain. Everything was absolutely clear to me because done in rock crystal; at every egress there was written in big letters ANNIHILATION. The fright of extinction solidified me; the body became itself a piece of ferroconcrete. It was ornamented by a permanent erection in the best taste. I had achieved that state of vacuity so earnestly desired by certain devout members of esoteric cults. I was no more. I was not even a personal hard on . It was about this time, adopting the pseudonym Samson Lackawanna, that I began my depredations. The criminal instinct in me had gotten the upper hand. Whereas heretofore I had been only an errant soul, a sort of Gentile Dybbuk, now I became a flesh-filled ghost. I had taken the name which pleased me and I had only to act instinctively. In Hong Kong, for instance, I made my entry as a book agent. I carried a leather purse filled with Mexican dollars and I visited religiously all those Chinese who were in need of further education. At the hotel I rang for women like you would ring for whisky and soda. Mornings I studied Tibetan in order to prepare for the journey to Lhasa. I already spoke Yiddish fluently, and Hebrew too. I could count two rows of figures at once. It was so easy to swindle the Chinese that I went back to Manila in disgust. There I took a Mr. Rico in hand and taught him the art of selling books with no handling charges. All the profit came from ocean freight rates, but it was sufficient to keep me in luxury while it lasted. The breath had become as much a trick as breathing. Things were not dual merely, but multiple. I had became a cage of mirrors reflecting vacuity. But vacuity once stoutly posited I was at home and what is called creation was merely a job of filling up holes. The trolley conveniently carried me about from place to place and in each little side pocket of the great vacuum I dropped a ton of poems to wipe out the idea of annihilation. I had ever before me boundless vistas. I began to live in the vista, like a microscopic speck on the lens of a giant telescope. There was no night in which to rest. It was perpetual starlight on the arid surface of dead planets. Now and then a lake black as marble in which I saw myself walking amidst brilliant orbs of light. So low hung the stars and so dazzling was the light they shed, that it seemed as if the universe were only about to be born. What rendered the impression stronger was that I was alone; not only were there no animals, no trees, no other beings, but there was not even a blade of grass, not even a dead root.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Things like that happened a lot. I was bullied all the time. The incident at the mulberry tree was probably the worst of them. Late one afternoon I was playing by myself like I always did, running around the neighborhood. This group of five or six colored boys was up the street picking berries off the mulberry tree and eating them. I went over and started picking some to take home for myself. The boys were a few years older than me, around twelve or thirteen. They didn’t talk to me, and I didn’t talk to them. They were speaking to one another in Afrikaans, and I could understand what they were saying. Then one of them, this kid who was the ringleader of the group, walked over. “Mag ek jou moerbeie sien?” “Can I see your mulberries?” My first thought, again, was, Oh, cool. I made a friend. I held up my hand and showed him my mulberries. Then he knocked them out of my hand and smushed them into the ground. The other kids started laughing. I stood there and looked at him a moment. By that point I’d developed thick skin. I was used to being bullied. I shrugged it off and went back to picking berries. Clearly not getting the reaction he wanted, this kid started cursing me out. “Fok weg, jou onnosele Boesman!” “Get the fuck out of here! Go away, you stupid Bushie! Bushman!” I ignored him and went on about my business. Then I felt a splat! on the back of my head. He’d hit me with a mulberry. It wasn’t painful, just startling. I turned to look at him and, splat!, he hit me again, right in my face. Then, in a split second, before I could even react, all of these kids started pelting me with berries, pelting the shit out of me. Some of the berries weren’t ripe, and they stung like rocks. I tried to cover my face with my hands, but there was a barrage coming at me from all sides. They were laughing and pelting me and calling me names. “Bushie! Bushman!” I was terrified. […] I started crying, and I ran. I ran for my life, all the way back down the road to our house. […] “No, no, Trevor,” she said. “I’m not laughing because it’s funny. I’m laughing out of relief. I thought you’d been beaten up. I thought this was blood. I’m laughing because it’s only berry juice.” […] “Look on the bright side,” she said, laughing and pointing to the half of me covered in dark berry juice. “Now you really are half black and half white.”

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

  Objection 2: Further, whosoever exposes himself to danger sins. But he who renounces all he has and embraces voluntary poverty exposes himself to danger—not only spiritual, according to Prov. 30:9, “Lest perhaps . . . being compelled by poverty, I should steal and forswear the name of my God,” and Ecclus. 27:1, “Through poverty many have sinned”—but also corporal, for it is written (Eccles. 7:13): “As wisdom is a defense, so money is a defense,” and the Philosopher says (Ethic. iv, 1) that “the waste of property appears to be a sort of ruining of one’s self, since thereby man lives.” Therefore it would seem that voluntary poverty is not requisite for the perfection of religious life. Objection 3: Further, “Virtue observes the mean,” as stated in Ethic. ii, 6. But he who renounces all by voluntary poverty seems to go to the extreme rather than to observe the mean. Therefore he does not act virtuously: and so this does not pertain to the perfection of life. Objection 4: Further, the ultimate perfection of man consists in happiness. Now riches conduce to happiness; for it is written (Ecclus. 31:8): “Blessed is the rich man that is found without blemish,” and the Philosopher says (Ethic. i, 8) that “riches contribute instrumentally to happiness.” Therefore voluntary poverty is not requisite for religious perfection. Objection 5: Further, the episcopal state is more perfect than the religious state. But bishops may have property, as stated above ([3791]Q[185], A[6]). Therefore religious may also. Objection 6: Further, almsgiving is a work most acceptable to God, and as Chrysostom says (Hom. ix in Ep. ad Hebr.) “is a most effective remedy in repentance.” Now poverty excludes almsgiving. Therefore it would seem that poverty does not pertain to religious perfection. On the contrary, Gregory says (Moral. viii, 26): “There are some of the righteous who bracing themselves up to lay hold of the very height of perfection, while they aim at higher objects within, abandon all things without.” Now, as stated above, ([3792]AA[1],2), it belongs properly to religious to brace themselves up in order to lay hold of the very height of perfection. Therefore it belongs to them to abandon all outward things by voluntary poverty.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  For the longest time I thought she meant that the other kids were going to steal me, but she was talking about the police. Children could be taken. Children were taken. The wrong color kid in the wrong color area, and the government could come in, strip your parents of custody, haul you off to an orphanage. To police the townships, the government relied on its network of impipis, the anonymous snitches who’d inform on suspicious activity. There were also the blackjacks, black people who worked for the police. My grandmother’s neighbor was a blackjack. She had to make sure he wasn’t watching when she smuggled me in and out of the house. My gran still tells the story of when I was three years old and, fed up with being a prisoner, I dug a hole under the gate in the driveway, wriggled through, and ran off. Everyone panicked. A search party went out and tracked me down. I had no idea how much danger I was putting everyone in. The family could have been deported, my gran could have been arrested, my mom might have gone to prison, and I probably would have been packed off to a home for colored kids. So I was kept inside. Other than those few instances of walking in the park, the flashes of memory I have from when I was young are almost all indoors, me with my mom in her tiny flat, me by myself at my gran’s. I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t know any kids besides my cousins. I wasn’t a lonely kid—I was good at being alone. I’d read books, play with the toy that I had, make up imaginary worlds. I lived inside my head. I still live inside my head. To this day you can leave me alone for hours and I’m perfectly happy entertaining myself. I have to remember to be with people. — Obviously, I was not the only child born to black and white parents during apartheid. Traveling around the world today, I meet other mixed South Africans all the time. Our stories start off identically. We’re around the same age. Their parents met at some underground party in Hillbrow or Cape Town. They lived in an illegal flat. The difference is that in virtually every other case they left. The white parent smuggled them out through Lesotho or Botswana, and they grew up in exile, in England or Germany or Switzerland, because being a mixed family under apartheid was just that unbearable.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  That was the turning point. When my mother started making more money and getting her independence back—that’s when we saw the dragon emerge. The drinking got worse. He grew more and more violent. It wasn’t long after coming for me in the pantry that Abel hit my mom for the second time. I can’t recall the details of it, because now it’s muddled with all the other times that came after it. I do remember that the police were called. They came out to the house this time, but again it was like a boys’ club. “Hey, guys. These women, you know how they are.” No report was made. No charges were filed. Whenever he’d hit her or come after me, my mom would find me crying afterward and take me aside. She’d give me the same talk every time. “Pray for Abel,” she’d say. “Because he doesn’t hate us. He hates himself.” To a kid this makes no sense. “Well, if he hates himself,” I’d say, “why doesn’t he kick himself?” Abel was one of those drinkers where once he was gone you’d look into his eyes and you didn’t even see the same person. I remember one night he came home fuckdrunk, stumbling through the house. He stumbled into my room, muttering to himself, and I woke up to see him whip out his dick and start pissing on the floor. He thought he was in the bathroom. That’s how drunk he would get—he wouldn’t know which room in the house he was in. There were so many nights he would stumble into my room thinking it was his and kick me out of bed and pass out. I’d yell at him, but it was like talking to a zombie. I’d go sleep on the couch. He’d get wasted with his crew in the backyard every evening after work, and many nights he’d end up fighting with one of them. Someone would say something Abel didn’t like, and he’d beat the shit out of him. The guy wouldn’t show up for work Tuesday or Wednesday, but then by Thursday he’d be back because he needed the job. Every few weeks it was the same story, like clockwork. Abel kicked the dogs, too. Fufi, mostly. Panther was smart enough to stay away, but dumb, lovable Fufi was forever trying to be Abel’s friend. She’d cross his path or be in his way when he’d had a few, and he’d give her the boot. After that she’d go and hide somewhere for a while. Fufi getting kicked was always the warning sign that shit was about to go down. The dogs and the workers in the yard often got the first taste of his anger, and that would let the rest of us know to lie low. I’d usually go find Fufi wherever she was hiding and be with her.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  When he got off the radio, he told me the major had changed his mind. The scouts would now lead the attack into the village. I climbed on one of the Amtracs to talk to the men. They seemed very quiet. They had the same feeling I did that it was all about to come down, that this walk in the sand might be the last one for all of us. There was going to be some kind of crazy tactical maneuver where we were going to march west along the bank of the river and make a direct assault on the village after crossing the razorback, which was the biggest sand dune in the area. A group of us would dismount from one of the Amtracs and lead the primary assault and the other two Amtracs would sweep from north to south through the graveyard and attack from another flank. It all sounded so crazy and simple. I kept trying to get my thoughts together, trying to think how much I wanted to prove to myself that I was a brave man, a good marine. No matter what happened out there, I thought to myself, I could never retreat. I had to be courageous. Here was my chance to win a medal, here was my chance to fight against the real enemy, to make up for everything that had happened. This was it, he thought, everything he had been praying for, the whole thing up for grabs. * * * There were ten of them walking toward the village, and he felt the rosary beads in his top pocket and knew that the little black Bible they had given them all on the planes coming in was in his other pocket too. The other men were getting off the ’tracs in the graveyard. He could see the heat still coming up from the big engines and the men looked real small in the distance, like little toy soldiers jumping off tanks. He looked to the left and they were all there, it was a perfect line. He had trained the scouts well and everything looked good. There was a big pagoda up ahead and a long trench full of Popular Forces. There wasn’t any firing going on and he asked the commander of the Viet unit to help him in the assault that was about to take place. The Viet officer said they were staying put and none of them was even going to think about attacking the village. He was angry as he moved the scouts over the top of the long trench line. They’re a bunch of fucking cowards, he thought. “Look at them!” he shouted to the scouts. “They’re sitting out the war in that trench like a bunch of babies.” “Let’s go!” he said. And now they began to move into a wide and open area. They were ten men armed to the teeth, walking in a sweeping line toward the village.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Th e androgyne, thought Philo, for “debasing the coinage of his nature,” should be killed with impunity, not allowed to live for one day, or one hour.  Th e shrill tone never falters. Th ere is a sense, in Philo’s fevered attacks, that he is throwing the kitchen sink at a practice that he held in special disfavor. But beneath the vernacular assumptions about masculinity, Phi- lo’s attack on same- sex eros is governed by an irreducibly Jewish logic, a sense of blinding dread toward all forms of sexual contact between males. For Philo, no mitigating factors— not age, not status— could render male fl esh an appropriately neutral object of sexual desire for men. His coruscat- ing attack dispersed all the mists of ambiguity— the sympotic drunken- THE WILL AND THE WORLD  ness, the close philosophical mentorship, the obfuscated exchanges of gifts and favors— that had, for centuries, sustained the institution of pederasty amid a culture of machismo. What is so striking about Philo’s invective is the remorseless effi ciency with which he unravels the contradictions of ped- erasty from the inside out, in native terms of masculinity, all in the ser vice of his own exceptional opposition to venereal contact between members of the same sex. It is but a short step from Philo’s logic to that which animates Paul’s thought in the epistle to the Romans. Th e unexpected outburst at the head of the Letter to the Romans was to prove absolutely decisive for Christian attitudes toward same- sex erotics. It would completely overshadow the even more fl eeting and oblique condem- nations in the vice lists of the New Testament. Th ese rapid- fi re rosters of iniquity regularly included adulterers and fornicators, as well as two types of sexual actors whose crimes are less obvious. Paul provides the fi rst at- tested use of the term arsenokoitēs. Although it recurs sporadically across the centuries, arsenokoitēs was not destined to become a primary term of the Christian sexual vocabulary. It has perennially befuddled earnest transla- tors. Th e term itself—“male- bedders”—points, ambiguously, to some form of sexual transgression, as does its placement next to other carnal vices. But as a sensitive observer has pointed out, arsenokoitia is usually located along the border between sexual deviance and economic exploitation. Perhaps the key to unlocking the meaning of the term is recognizing that in the Roman Empire the frontiers between sexual and economic exploitation were hazy and indistinct.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Out there, did I dare to brood on it, the spectral quietude of insanity, the world of men lulled, exhausted by centuries of incessant slaughter. Out there one gory encompassing membrane within which all activity took place, the hero-world of lunatics and maniacs who had quenched the light of the heavens with blood. How peaceful our little dove-and-vulture life in the dark! Flesh to bury in with teeth or penis, abundant odorous flesh with no mark of knife or scissors, no scar of exploded shrapnel, no mustard burns, no scalded lungs. Save for the hallucinating hole in the ceiling, an almost perfect womb life. But the hole was there—like a fissure in the bladder—and no wadding could plug it permanently, no urination could pass off with a smile. Piss large and freely, aye, but how forget the rent in the belfry, the silence unnatural, the imminence, the terror, the doom of the “other” world? Eat a bellyful, aye, and tomorrow another bellyful, and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow—but finally , what then? Finally! What was finally? A change of ventriloquist, a change of lap, a shift in the axis, another rift in the vault . . . what? what? I’ll tell you—sitting in her lap, petrified by the still, pronged beams of the black star, horned, snaffled, hitched and trepanned by the telepathic acuity of our interacting agitation, I thought of nothing at all, nothing that was outside the cell we inhabited, not even the thought of a crumb on a white tablecloth. I thought purely within the walls of our amoebic life, the pure thought such as Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant gave us and which only a ventriloquist’s dummy could reproduce. I thought out every theory of science, every theory of art, every grain of truth in every cockeyed system of salvation. I calculated everything out to a pinpoint with gnostic decimals to boot, like primes which a drunk hands out at the finish of a six-day race. But everything was calculated for another life which somebody else would live some day—perhaps . We were at the very neck of the bottle, her and I , as they say, but the neck of the bottle had been broken off and the bottle was only a fiction. I remember how the second time I met her she told me that she had never expected to see me again, and the next time I saw her she said she thought I was a dope fiend, and the next time she called me a god, and after that she tried to commit suicide and then I tried and then she tried again, and nothing worked except to bring us closer together, so close indeed that we interpenetrated, exchanged personalities, name, identity, religion, father, mother, brother. Even her body went through a radical change, not once but several times.