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 The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  But this sudden peace seemed to me so false and so heavy that I regretted the daylight. It was wiser to stop, and we also badly needed a little sleep after these past forty hours of being awake, which included twelve hours of shoveling, and twenty-six of forced marching on an empty stomach. We entered a field of ripe wheat which nobody dared pick. We arranged to take turns at standing watch and hid ourselves in the wheat. I was still chewing a thistle stem which was sour in my mouth when the war, for a moment silenced by the night, started again, more cynical and terrible than ever. A magnificent fireworks began: magnesium flares blindingly white, yellow, and then red, like dying stars; straight bright red streaks of machine-gun fire; elegant and clear lines of bullets traced like fugitive neon lights; and scarlet, sinister rugged patches from antiaircraft artillery. Then the noise: after the solemn, promising silence of the flares came the mad disorderly reaction of the inhabitants of the earth to the regular, obstinate sounds of the invisible motors in the sky. The airplanes replied to the nervous coughing of the machine guns with great battering blows that shook the earth. It was a celebration in honor of death. On the other side of the road a tribe of Bedouins rose from the middle of a field like a flight of partridge whose nest has been wrecked by a storm. These fugitives were perfectly silhouetted against the intermittent and richly colored flashes of light, until they disappeared, pursued by their fate, chanting monotonous prayers. This vision taught us a useful lesson: it was best to stay where we were. I dozed, then came my turn to watch, and when I was relieved I dozed off again. I closed my eyes, but for a long time I followed the lights and colors from under my eyelids. Three bombs dropped so close that we were showered with sulphur. At last, as the tired night receded, the war again became wary and silent. We made the best of the truce and marched on. I did not feel rested. Sleep, which had not for a moment been deep, only reduced my weariness to a general torpor; in the same way, dawn veiled the landscape and obliterated the contours of hills and the ragged olive trees, softened the harsh brown earth and the dry green of the cactus hedges. We trudged silently ahead step by step, for centuries, it seemed. I have no recollection of this dead and shapeless time when nothing existed but the monotonous and independent movement of our clogs. Nothing, I imagine, could have made me more tired, and I no longer had either memory or desire. But I stopped once more to drink. Beside the road, a clay-red stream wound along the bottom of an eroded bed, and I rediscovered my thirst which made my tongue cling to my palate.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Broad day come, the good man with whom Fra Alberto had taken refuge, being on the Rialto, heard how the angel Gabriel had gone that night to lie with Madam Lisetta and being surprised by her kinsmen, had cast himself for fear into the canal, nor was it known what was come of him, and concluded forthright that this was he whom he had at home. Accordingly, he returned thither and recognizing the monk, found means after much parley, to make him fetch him fifty ducats, an he would not have him give him up to the lady's kinsmen. Having gotten the money and Fra Alberto offering to depart thence, the good man said to him, 'There is no way of escape for you, an it be not one that I will tell you. We hold to-day a festival, wherein one bringeth a man clad bear-fashion and another one accoutred as a wild man of the woods and what not else, some one thing and some another, and there is a hunt held in St. Mark's Place, which finished, the festival is at an end and after each goeth whither it pleaseth him with him whom he hath brought. An you will have me lead you thither, after one or other of these fashions, I can after carry you whither you please, ere it be spied out that you are here; else I know not how you are to get away, without being recognized, for the lady's kinsmen, concluding that you must be somewhere hereabout, have set a watch for you on all sides.'

• From The Decameron (1353)

  How sore concerned was Cimon for this it needeth not to ask; himseemed the gods had vouchsafed him his desire but to make death the more grievous to him, whereof, without that, he had before recked little. His comrades lamented on like wise, but Iphigenia bewailed herself over all, weeping sore and fearing every stroke of the waves; and in her chagrin she bitterly cursed Cimon's love and blamed his presumption, avouching that the tempest had arisen for none other thing but that the gods chose not that he, who would fain against their will have her to wife, should avail to enjoy his presumptuous desire, but, seeing her first die, should after himself perish miserably. Amidst such lamentations and others yet more grievous, the wind waxing hourly fiercer and the seamen knowing not what to do, they came, without witting whither they went or availing to change their course, near to the island of Rhodes, and unknowing that it was Rhodes, they used their every endeavour to get to land thereon, an it were possible, for the saving of their lives. In this fortune was favourable to them and brought them into a little bight of the sea, where the Rhodians whom Cimon had let go had a little before arrived with their ship; nor did they perceive that they had struck the island of Rhodes till the dawn broke and made the sky somewhat clearer, when they found themselves maybe a bowshot distant from the ship left of them the day before. At this Cimon was beyond measure chagrined and fearing lest that should betide them which did in very deed ensue, bade use every endeavour to issue thence and let fortune after carry them whither it should please her, for that they could be nowhere in worse case than there. Accordingly, they made the utmost efforts to put to sea, but in vain; for the wind blew so mightily against them that not only could they not avail to issue from the little harbour, but whether they would or no, it drove them ashore.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  “You don’t think you ruined my life forever?” she shot back. Uncool Through another series of jumbled, and by now somewhat alcohol-tinged, events, Maddie found herself in the backseat of a car with Josh, heading to the party she was supposed to have gone to in the first place. A boy named Anthony, another senior, was driving; his girlfriend, Paige, rode shotgun. Maddie ignored them all, focusing on the texts she’d begun trading with Kyle, occasionally yelling at her phone. Josh, seeming truly concerned, asked what was wrong. “There’s this guy I’ve been in love with for a year and a half,” Maddie told him, her voice teary, “and I lost my virginity to him and now he’s had sex with another girl.” “Have you had sex with anyone else?” Anthony asked from the front seat. “No,” Maddie said, still weepy. “I only have sex with people I’m in love with.” “Well, that’s your problem!” Anthony told her. “If you just have sex with someone else, you’ll get over it!” Maddie may have been upset with Kyle, but she wasn’t stupid; she ignored Anthony’s “advice.” The group drove around for a while, but they couldn’t find the party. Maybe, Anthony said, it had already been broken up by the cops. The boys suggested they head to a familiar park instead, and the girls agreed. When Anthony drove to a wooded area that Maddie didn’t recognize, she didn’t say anything—she didn’t want to appear uncool in front of older kids—but she surreptitiously took a screenshot with her phone. The next day, the Geotag showed the boys had lied: they were nowhere near where they claimed to be. Anthony and Paige strolled off into the trees, leaving Maddie alone with Josh. He pushed her against the car door and began to kiss her. Maddie didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to be kissing him. She felt angry, confused, maybe a little scared. “God damn it,” she thought, “what am I supposed to do?” She tried to tell herself it would be over soon: Anthony and Paige would come back and they’d go to a real party, where she could ditch Josh. When she described what she actually said to him, though, she used the tiny, helpless voice teenage girls lapse into when they’re uncomfortable, when they don’t want to offend. “I was like, ‘Okay, we don’t have to keep doing this, get off now!’” she said. Josh grabbed her wrist and pulled her deeper into the woods. He backed her against a tree and began kissing her again. “I knew this was not good, that I needed to leave,” Maddie said. But where could she go? When Josh began pushing down on her shoulders, she shrugged him off. He persisted. She moved his hands. After a few more tries, he finally said, “Oh, is that too hard for you? Do you not want to do it?”

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  I was afraid of swimming pools, high-tension wires, lye under the sink, aspirin in the medicine cabinet, The Broken Man himself. I was afraid of rattlesnakes, riptides, landslides, strangers who appeared at the door, unexplained fevers, elevators without operators and empty hotel corridors. The source of the fear was obvious: it was the harm that could come to her. A question: if we and our children could in fact see the other clear would the fear go away? Would the fear go away for both of us, or would the fear go away only for me? 10She was born in the first hour of the third day of March, 1966, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. We were told that we could adopt her late the afternoon of the same day, March third, when Blake Watson, the obstetrician who delivered her, called the house at Portuguese Bend in which we then lived, forty-some miles down the coast from Santa Monica. I was taking a shower and burst into tears when John came into the bathroom to report what Blake Watson had said. “I have a beautiful baby girl at St. John’s,” is what he had said. “I need to know if you want her.” The baby’s mother, he had said, was from Tucson. She had been staying with relatives in California for the birth of the baby. An hour later we stood outside the window of the nursery at St. John’s looking at an infant with fierce dark hair and rosebud features. The beads on her wrist spelled out not her name but “N.I.,” for “No Information,” which was the hospital’s response to any questions that might be asked about a baby being placed for adoption. One of the nurses had tied a pink ribbon in the fierce dark hair. “Not that baby,” John would repeat to her again and again in the years that followed, reenacting the nursery scene, the recommended “choice” narrative, the moment when, of all the babies in the nursery, we picked her. “Not that baby … that baby. The baby with the ribbon.” “Do that baby,” she would repeat in return, a gift to us, an endorsement of our wisdom in opting to follow the recommended choice narrative. The choice narrative is no longer universally favored by professionals of child care, but it was in 1966. “Do it again. Do the baby with the ribbon.” And later: “Do the part about Dr. Watson calling.” Blake Watson was already a folk figure in this recital. And then: “Tell the part about the shower.” Even the shower had become part of the recommended choice narrative. March 3, 1966.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  After we left St. John’s that night we stopped in Beverly Hills to tell John’s brother Nick and his wife, Lenny. Lenny offered to meet me at Saks in the morning to buy a layette. She was taking ice from a crystal bucket, making celebratory drinks. Making celebratory drinks was what we did in our family to mark any unusual, or for that matter any usual, occasion. In retrospect we all drank more than we needed to drink but this did not occur to any of us in 1966. Only when I read my early fiction, in which someone was always downstairs making a drink and singing “Big Noise blew in from Winnetka,” did I realize how much we all drank and how little thought we gave to it. Lenny added more ice to my glass and took the crystal bucket to the kitchen for a refill. “Saks because if you spend eighty dollars they throw in the bassinette,” she added as she went. I took the glass and put it down. I had not considered the need for a bassinette. I had not considered the need for a layette. The baby with the fierce dark hair stayed that night and the next two in the nursery at St. John’s and at some point during each of those nights I woke in the house at Portuguese Bend to the same chill, hearing the surf break on the rocks below, dreaming that I had forgotten her, left her asleep in a drawer, gone into town for dinner or a movie and made no provision for the infant who could even then be waking alone and hungry in the drawer in Portuguese Bend. Dreaming in other words that I had failed. Been given a baby and failed to keep her safe. When we think about adopting a child, or for that matter about having a child at all, we stress the “blessing” aspect. We omit the instant of the sudden chill, the “what-if,” the free fall into certain failure. What if I fail to take care of this baby? What if this baby fails to thrive, what if this baby fails to love me? And worse yet, worse by far, so much worse as to be unthinkable, except I did think it, everyone who has ever waited to bring a baby home thinks it: what if I fail to love this baby? March 3, 1966.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  She made mystifying, even hostile, judgments. When she came to visit me in New York for example she pronounced St. James’ Episcopal Church, the steeple and slate roof of which constitute the entire view from my living room windows, “the single ugliest church I have ever seen.” When, on her own coast and at her own suggestion, I took her to see the jellyfish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, she fled to the car, pleading vertigo from the movement of the water. I recognize now that she was feeling frail. I recognize now that she was feeling then as I feel now. Invisible on the street. The target of any wheeled vehicle on the scene . Unbalanced at the instant of stepping off a curb, sitting down or standing up, opening or closing a taxi door. Cognitively challenged not only by simple arithmetic but by straightforward news stories, announced changes in traffic flow, the memorization of a telephone number, the seating of a dinner party. “Estrogen actually made me feel better,” she said to me not long before she died, after several decades without it. Well, yes. Estrogen had made her feel better. This turns out to have been “the situation” for most of us. And yet: And still: Despite all evidence: Despite recognizing that my skin and my hair and even my cognition are all reliant on the estrogen I no longer have: Despite recognizing that I will not again wear the red suede sandals with the four-inch heels and despite recognizing that the gold hoop earrings and the black cashmere leggings and the enameled beads no longer exactly apply: Despite recognizing that for a woman my age even to note such details of appearance will be construed by many as a manifestation of misplaced vanity : Despite all that: Nonetheless: That being seventy-five could present as a significantly altered situation, an altogether different “it,” did not until recently occur to me. 27 S omething happened to me early in the summer. Something that altered my view of my own possibilities, shortened, as it were, the horizon. I still have no idea what time it was when it happened, or why it was that it happened, or even in any exact way what it was that happened. All I know is that midway through June, after walking home with a friend after an early dinner on Third Avenue in the eighties, I found myself waking on the floor of my bedroom, left arm and forehead and both legs bleeding, unable to get up. It seemed clear that I had fallen, but I had no memory of falling, no memory whatsoever of losing balance, trying to regain it, the usual preludes to a fall. Certainly I had no memory of losing consciousness.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Perhaps I reassert my confidence by trying to conquer older men. Or am I courting pain? What do I feel when I see Henry’s rather cold blue eyes on me? (My father had icy blue eyes.) I want them to melt with desire for me. There is now a great tension between Fred and me; we cannot bear each other’s eyes. He wrote something about me so exact, so piercing that I felt invaded in the most secret precincts of my being. His writing about Henry also terrified me, as if he had come too close to my own fears and doubts. He writes occultly. I could barely talk after reading those pages. And he was reading my journal. He said, “You should not let me read this, Anaïs.” I asked why. He seemed stunned. He bowed his head, his mouth trembled. He is like a ghost of me. Why was he stunned? Did I reveal the similitude, the recognition? He is a part of me. He could understand my entire life. I would put all my journals in his hands. I do not fear him. He is so tender with me. Henry talks beautifully to me, in a cool, sagelike mood. He says, “I love you,” while I lie in his arms, and I say, “I do not believe you.” He realizes I am in a devilish mood. He insists: “Do you love me ?” And I answer vaguely. When we are sensually bound together I cannot believe that we are close only physically. When I awake from the deliriousness and we talk quietly, I am surprised that he should talk about our love so seriously. “Sunday night after you left I slept a while, then I went out for a walk, and I felt so happy, Anaïs, happier than I have ever felt before. I realized a terrible truth: that I don’t want June to come back. I need you terribly—absolutely. At certain moments I even feel that if June should come back and disappoint me and I should not care any more for her, I would be almost glad. Sunday night I wanted to send her a cablegram telling her I did not want her any more.”

• From White Oleander (1999)

  It fell among the willows, and a flurry of whistling wings rose from cover, brown wading birds. It was happening again. I was being drawn back into her world, into her shadow, just when I was starting to feel free. I coughed the dry hacking cough I’d had all spring, from smoking pot and the perennial mold at Rena’s. I dashed down the slope to the water, squatted and touched the current with my fingertips. Cold, real. Water from mountains. I put it between my eyes, the third eye spot. Help me, River. And what if she did get out? If she came walking up to the house on Ripple Street, if she said, “I’m back. Pack up, Astrid, we’re leaving.” Could I resist her? I pictured her, in the white shirt and jeans they let her change into when they arrested her. “Let’s go,” she said. I saw us standing on the porch at Rena’s, staring at each other, but nothing beyond that. Was she still in my bones, in my every thought? I squatted by the water as it flowed over the tumbled rocks, thought how far must they have come to have settled in this concrete channel, the stream clear and melodious, the smell of fresh water. I didn’t want to think about my mother anymore. It made me tired. I’d rather think about the way the willows and the cottonwoods and palms broke their way through the concrete, growing right out of the flood control channel, how the river struggled to reestablish itself. A little silt was carried down, settled. A seed dropped into it, sprouted. Little roots shot downward. The next thing you had trees, shrubs, birds. My mother once wrote a poem about rivers. They were women, she wrote. Starting out small girls, tiny streams decorated with wildflowers. Then they were torrents, gouging paths through sheer granite, flinging themselves off cliffs, fearless and irresistible. Later, they grew fat and serviceable, broad slow curves carrying commerce and sewage, but in their unconscious depths catfish gorged, grew the size of barges, and in the hundred-year storms, they rose up, forgetting the promises they made, the wedding vows, and drowned everything for miles around. Finally, they gave out, birth-emptied, malarial, into a fan of swamp that met the sea. But this river was none of these things. It flowed serene and ignored past fences spray-painted 18th Street, Roscos, Frogtown, alive despite everything, guarding the secrets of survival. This river was a girl like me. A makeshift tent sat on a small island in the middle of the miniature forest, its blue plastic tarp startling amid the grays and greens. The here-and-now Hiltons, Barry used to call them. I knew whose it was.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  In order to make him feel safe, we all assured him that we would be there to protect Pooh Bear. By offering this support and reassurance, we help Sammy move closer to playing the game— in his own time at his own pace . After this reassurance, Sammy ran into the bedroom instead of out the door. This was a clear signal that he felt less threatened and more confident of our support. Children may not state verbally whether they want to continue, so take cues from their behavior and responses. Respect their wishes in whatever way they choose to communicate them. Children should never be rushed to move through an episode too fast or forced to do more than they are willing and able to do. Just like with Sammy, it is important to slow down the process if you notice signs of fear, constricted breathing, stiffening or a dazed (dissociated) demeanor. These reactions will dissipate if you simply wait, quietly and patiently, while reassuring the child that you are still by his side and on his side. Usually, the youngster’s eyes and breathing pattern will indicate when it’s time to continue . 2. Distinguish between fear, terror and excitement . Experiencing fear or terror for more than a brief moment during traumatic play will not help the child move through the trauma. Most children will take action to avoid it. Let them! At the same time, try and discern whether it is avoidance or escape. The following is a clear-cut example to help in developing the skill of “reading” when a break is needed and when it’s time to guide the momentum forward. When Sammy ran down to the creek, he was demonstrating avoidance behavior. In order to resolve his traumatic reaction, Sammy had to feel that he was in control of his actions rather than driven to act by his emotions. Avoidance behavior occurs when fear and terror threaten to overwhelm both children and adults. With kids this behavior is usually accompanied by some sign of emotional distress (crying, frightened eyes, screaming). Active escape, on the other hand, is exhilarating. Children become excited by their small triumphs and often show pleasure by glowing with smiles, clapping their hands or laughing heartily. Overall, the response is much different from avoidance behavior. Excitement is evidence of the child’s successful discharge of emotions that accompanied the original experience. This is positive, desirable and necessary. Trauma is transformed by changing intolerable feelings and sensations into desirable ones. This can only happen at a level of activation that is similar to the activation that led to the traumatic reaction in the first place.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  But the land henceforth belongs to a limited number, not merely for use, but for complete possession, and the ever increasing remnant will have no right in it, nor income from it. What God gave for the support of all, will be the special privilege of some. Farm-land will more and more come to have a monopoly value. As land grows dear, it will become harder for a young man without capital to secure his first foothold. He will have to mortgage himself heavily or become a tenant. There will be two layers of population drawing their living from the land,—those who own the land and those who till it. Our farmers will become peasants. Their prosperity, their hopefulness and moral vigor, will decline, and therewith the moral strength of our nation will be indefinitely diminished. As the monopoly value of farm-land increases, it will be a more profitable form of investment for the huge industrial capital anxiously seeking investment. Our rich men will become large owners of agricultural lands. In time we shall have three layers of population on the land, as in England and Eastern Germany,—the great proprietor, the tenant farmer, and the agricultural laborer,—and that means poverty and ignorance in the country. This may seem a far-fetched fear to some, just as thirty years ago it seemed an idle fear that our great corporations might come to shackle our political democracy. But common sense and the experience of other nations teach a lesson plain enough to all except that not infrequent class which will learn only in the dear school of experience. Already thousands of our best young farmers are passing over our northwestern boundary to Canada to escape the conditions. If they have the choice between cheap land and loyalty to their country, they choose the cheap land. Already the current of immigration, which no longer finds a ready outlet to the land, is choking our great cities. Already the industrial laboring class is gasping under an increased pressure because the automatic outlet of the workers to the land is being stopped. Yet we are only at the beginning of things. The situation clamors for sufficient moral foresight to avoid the fate of Italy, Spain, or Ireland. The farmers ever cling with the grip of desperation to the land, like an unweaned child to its mother’s breast. But when they have once been forced from it into the city, it is exceedingly hard to plant them on the soil once more. An agricultural population is hard to recreate. Yet without a sound agricultural population a nation declines in economic ability and in moral resourcefulness. In the matter of ordinary agricultural land the monopolistic element inhering in private ownership has not yet made itself felt. But throughout our country those locations which give the access to special opportunities are rapidly being absorbed.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  This seemed to be offered as encouraging news, and I accepted it as such. At that instant in April 2009 I realized that I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die, afraid that I might damage my brain (or my heart or my kidneys or my nervous system) and survive, continue living. Had there been an instant when Tasha was afraid not to die? Had there been an instant when Quintana was afraid not to die? Toward the very end, say, for example on the August morning when I walked into the ICU overlooking the river at New York-Cornell and one of what must have been twenty doctors in the unit happened to mention (a point of interest, a teachable moment, Grand Rounds for two students, the husband and the mother of the patient) that they were doing hand compression because the patient could no longer get enough oxygen through the ventilator? Only he did not say “the ventilator,” he said “the vent”? And I asked dutifully (the attentive student, up on the vernacular) how long it had been since the patient could get enough oxygen through the vent? And the doctor said it had been at least an hour? Did I get this all wrong? Did I misunderstand a key point? Could they have actually let an hour go by without mentioning to me that her brain had already been damaged by insufficient oxygen? Put the question another way: what if the attentive student had never asked? Would they have mentioned it at all? One further turn of the screw: if I had never asked would she still be alive? Warehoused somewhere? No longer sentient but alive, not dead? What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead? Was there an instant when she knew what was in store for her that August morning in the ICU overlooking the river at New York–Cornell? Did the instant occur that August morning when she was in fact dying? Or had it occurred years before, when she thought she was?

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Now the attraction between men and women is just as fundamental a fact in social life as the attraction of the earth is in physics, and the only way in which that tremendous force of desire can be prevented from wrecking lives is to make it build lives by home contentment. The existence of a large class of involuntary celibates in society is a more threatening fact even than the increase of divorces. The slums are aggregations of single men and women. If the monastic celibates of the Middle Ages, who had the powerful incentive of religious enthusiasm and all the preventives of isolation and supervision, could not keep chaste, is it likely that the unmarried thousands in the freedom of modern life will maintain their own purity and respect the purity of others? They are thrust into the lonely life through no wise resolve of their own, but mainly through the fear that they will not be able to maintain a family in the standard of comfort which they deem necessary for their life. If a man and woman do marry, they do not yet constitute a true family. The little hand of a child, more than the blessing of a priest, consecrates the family. France has long been held up as furnishing the terrible example of a declining birth-rate, but the older portions of our country are saved from the same situation only by the fertility of the immigrants. The native population of New England would not reproduce itself. The chief cause for this profoundly important fact is economic fear. Whenever the economic condition of any class is hopeful and improving, there is an increase in the birth-rate Whenever there is economic disaster or increasing pressure, there is a decline. In the West, where land is still abundant, families are large. The immigrants, who feel the relative easement of pressure, multiply. The natives, who suffer by the competition of the immigrants and who feel the tightening grip of our industrial development, refuse to bring children into a world which threatens them with poverty. Our cheerful newspaper optimists assure us that the American child makes up by quality what it lacks in numbers. They quote the reply of the lioness in the fable, “One, but a lion.” But that is merely an effort to make an ugly fact look sweet. People hunting for apartments in a large city soon discover one cause. “As arrows in the hand of a mighty man, so are the children of youth,” said the Psalmist. “Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them; they shall not be put to shame when they speak with their enemies in the gate.” But they shall talk very humbly and beseechingly when they speak with their prospective landlords nowadays.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  She held out a box of cigarettes to Cheri, smiling at him from blue eyes which had grown smaller, and he was frightened to find her so direct in her approach, and as jovial as an old gentleman. She called him ‘child’, and he turned away his eyes, as though she had let slip an indecent word. But he exhorted himself to be patient, in the vague hope that this first picture would give place to a shining transfiguration. The two women looked him over calmly, sparing him neither goodwill nor curiosity. ‘He’s got rather a look of Hernandez ...’ said Valerie Cheniaguine. ‘ Oh, X don’t see that at all,9 Lea protested. ‘Ten years ago perhaps ... and, anyhow, Hernandez had a much more pronounced jaw I* ‘Who’s that?’ Ch<§ri asked, with something of an effort. ‘A Peruvian who was killed in a motor accident about six months ago,’ said Lea. ‘He was living with Maximilienne. It made her very unhappy.’ ‘Didn’t prevent her finding consolation,’ said Valerie. ‘Like anyone else,’ Lda said. ‘You wouldn’t have wished her to die of it, surely? ’ She laughed afresh, and her merry blue eyes disappeared, lost behind wide cheeks bulging with laughter. Cheri turned away his head and looked at the woman in black. She had brown hair and an ample figure, vulgar and feline like thousands and thousands of women from the south. She seemed in disguise, so very carefully was she dressed as a woman in good society. Valerie was wearing what had long been the uniform of foreign princesses and their ladies — a black tailor-made of undistinguished cut, tight in the sleeve, with a blouse of extremely fine white batiste, showing signs of strain at the breast. The pearl buttons, the famous necklace, the high stiff whalebone collar, everything about Valerie was as royal as the name she legitimately bore. Like royalty, too, she wore stockings of medium quality, flat-heeled walking shoes and expensive gloves, embroidered in black and white. From the cold and calculating way she looked him over, Cheri might have been a piece of furniture. She went on with her criticisms and comparisons at the top of her voice. ‘Yes, yes, there is something of Hernandez, I promise you. But. to hear Maximilienne to-day, Hernandez might never have existed ... now that she has made quite certain of her famous Amerigo. And yeti And yet! I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen him, her precious Amerigo. I’m just backfrom Deauville. I saw the pair of them! ’ ‘No! Do tell us!’

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  I was afraid of swimming pools, high-tension wires, lye under the sink, aspirin in the medicine cabinet, The Broken Man himself. I was afraid of rattlesnakes, riptides, landslides, strangers who appeared at the door, unexplained fevers, elevators without operators and empty hotel corridors. The source of the fear was obvious: it was the harm that could come to her. A question: if we and our children could in fact see the other clear would the fear go away? Would the fear go away for both of us, or would the fear go away only for me? 10She was born in the first hour of the third day of March, 1966, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. We were told that we could adopt her late the afternoon of the same day, March third, when Blake Watson, the obstetrician who delivered her, called the house at Portuguese Bend in which we then lived, forty-some miles down the coast from Santa Monica. I was taking a shower and burst into tears when John came into the bathroom to report what Blake Watson had said. “I have a beautiful baby girl at St. John’s,” is what he had said. “I need to know if you want her.” The baby’s mother, he had said, was from Tucson. She had been staying with relatives in California for the birth of the baby. An hour later we stood outside the window of the nursery at St. John’s looking at an infant with fierce dark hair and rosebud features. The beads on her wrist spelled out not her name but “N.I.,” for “No Information,” which was the hospital’s response to any questions that might be asked about a baby being placed for adoption. One of the nurses had tied a pink ribbon in the fierce dark hair. “Not that baby,” John would repeat to her again and again in the years that followed, reenacting the nursery scene, the recommended “choice” narrative, the moment when, of all the babies in the nursery, we picked her. “Not that baby … that baby. The baby with the ribbon.” “Do that baby,” she would repeat in return, a gift to us, an endorsement of our wisdom in opting to follow the recommended choice narrative. The choice narrative is no longer universally favored by professionals of child care, but it was in 1966. “Do it again. Do the baby with the ribbon.” And later: “Do the part about Dr. Watson calling.” Blake Watson was already a folk figure in this recital. And then: “Tell the part about the shower.” Even the shower had become part of the recommended choice narrative. March 3, 1966.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  “I have to know about this.” So Quintana said when I found her hiding under the covers of her bed in Malibu, stunned, disbelieving, flashlight in hand, studying a book of old Life photographs that she had come across somewhere. There were blue-and-white checked gingham curtains in the windows of her room in Malibu. I remember them blowing as she showed me the book. She was showing me the photographs Margaret Bourke-White did for Life of the ovens at Buchenwald. That was what she had to know. Or ask the child who would not allow herself to fall asleep during most of 1946 because she feared the fate of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan, who on January seventh of that year had been kidnapped from her bed in Chicago, dissected in a sink, and disposed of in pieces in the sewers of the far north side. Six months after Suzanne Degnan’s disappearance a seventeen-year-old University of Chicago sophomore named William Heirens was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment. Or ask the child who nine years later followed the California search for fourteen-year-old Stephanie Bryan, who vanished while walking home from her Berkeley junior high school through the parking lot of the Claremont Hotel, her customary shortcut, and was next seen several hundred miles from Berkeley, buried in a shallow grave in California’s most northern mountains. Five months after Stephanie Bryan’s disappearance a twenty-seven-year-old University of California accounting student was arrested, charged with her death, and within two years convicted and executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin. Since the events surrounding the disappearances and deaths of both Suzanne Degnan and Stephanie Bryan occurred in circulation areas served by aggressive Hearst papers, both cases were extensively and luridly covered. The lesson taught by the coverage was clear: childhood is by definition perilous. To be a child is to be small, weak, inexperienced, the dead bottom of the food chain. Every child knows this, or did. Knowing this is why children call Camarillo. Knowing this is why children call Twentieth Century–Fox. “This case has been a haunting one all my life as I was a grown-up eight-year-old when it happened and followed it every day in the Oakland Tribune from day one till the end.” So wrote an internet correspondent in response to a recent look back at the Stephanie Bryan case. “I had to read it when my parents weren’t around as they didn’t think it was fitting to be reading about a homicide at my age.” As adults we lose memory of the gravity and terrors of childhood. Hello, Quintana. I’m going to lock you here in the garage. After I became five I never ever dreamed about him. I have to know about this. One of her abiding fears, I learned much later, was that John would die and there would be no one but her to take care of me. How could she have even imagined that I would not take care of her? I used to ask that.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  9 And Sennacherib king of Assyria, heard them say concerning Tirhakah king of Cush (Ethiopia), “He has come out to fight against you.” And when he heard it, he sent messengers to Hezekiah, saying, 10 “You shall say to Hezekiah king of Judah, ‘Do not let your God in whom you trust deceive you, saying, “Jerusalem will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.” 11 ‘Listen carefully, you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands, utterly destroying them. So will you be rescued? 12 ‘Did the gods of the nations which my fathers destroyed rescue them—a Gozan, Haran [of Mesopotamia], Rezeph, and the sons of Eden who were in Telassar? 13 ‘Where is the king of Hamath, the king of Arpad [of northern Syria], the king of the city of Sepharvaim, [the king of] Hena, or [the king of] Ivvah?’ ” Hezekiah’s Prayer in the Temple 14 Then Hezekiah took the letter from the hand of the messengers and read it, and he went up to the house of the LORD and spread it out before the LORD . [2 Kin 19:14–19 ] 15 And Hezekiah prayed to the LORD saying, 16 “O LORD of hosts, God of Israel, who is enthroned above the cherubim, You are the God, You alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth. 17 “Incline Your ear, O LORD , and hear; open Your eyes, O LORD , and see; and hear all the words of Sennacherib that he has sent to taunt and defy the living God. 18 “It is true, O LORD , that the kings of Assyria have laid waste all the countries and their lands, 19 and have cast the gods [of those peoples] into the fire, for they were not gods but the work of men’s hands, wood and stone. Therefore they have destroyed them. 20 “Now, O LORD our God, save us from his hand so that all the kingdoms of the earth may know and fully realize that You alone, LORD , are b God.” God Answers through Isaiah 21 Then Isaiah son of Amoz sent word to Hezekiah, saying, “For the LORD , the God of Israel says this, ‘Because you have prayed to Me about Sennacherib king of Assyria, [2 Kin 19:20–37 ; 2 Chr 32:20 , 21 ] 22 this is the word that the LORD has spoken against him: “She has shown contempt for you and mocked you, The Virgin Daughter of Zion (Jerusalem); She has shaken her head behind you, The Daughter of Jerusalem! 23 “Whom have you taunted and blasphemed? And against whom have you raised your voice And haughtily lifted up your eyes? Against the Holy One of Israel! 24 “Through your servants you have taunted and defied the Lord, And you have said, ‘With my many chariots I have gone up to the heights of the mountains, To the remotest parts of Lebanon.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  When the nurse came to take his temperature and blood pressure, he was so frightened that she was unable to record his vital signs. This vulnerable little boy was then strapped down in a “pediatric papoose” (a board with flaps and Velcro straps). With his torso and legs immobilized, the only parts of his body he could move were his head and neck—which, naturally, he did, as energetically as he could. The doctors responded by tightening the restraint and immobilizing his head with their hands in order to suture his chin. After this upsetting experience, mom and dad took Sammy out for a hamburger and then to the playground. His mother was very attentive and carefully validated his experience of being scared and hurt. Soon, all seemed forgotten. However, the boy’s overbearing attitude began shortly after this event. Could Sammy’s tantrums and controlling behavior be related to his perceived helplessness from this trauma ? When his parents returned, we agreed to explore whether there might be a traumatic charge still associated with this recent experience. We all gathered in the cabin where I was staying. With parents, grandparents and Sammy watching, I placed his stuffed Pooh Bear on the edge of a chair in such a way that it fell to the floor. Sammy shrieked, bolted for the door and ran across a footbridge and down a narrow path to the creek. Our suspicions were confirmed. His most recent visit to the hospital was neither harmless nor forgotten. Sammy’s behavior told us that this game was potentially overwhelming for him. Sammy’s parents brought him back from the creek. He clung dearly to his mother as we prepared for another game. We reassured him that we would all be there to help protect Pooh Bear. Again he ran—but this time only into the next room. We followed him in there and waited to see what would happen next. Sammy ran to the bed and hit it with both arms while looking at me expectantly. “Mad, huh?” I said. He gave me a look that confirmed my question. Interpreting his expression as a go-ahead sign, I put Pooh Bear under a blanket and placed Sammy on the bed next to him. “Sammy, let’s all help Pooh Bear.” I held Pooh Bear under the blanket and asked everyone to help. Sammy watched with interest but soon got up and ran to his mother. With his arms held tightly around her legs, he said, “Mommy, I’m scared.” q Without pressuring him, we waited until Sammy was ready and willing to play the game again. The next time, grandma and Pooh Bear were held down together, and Sammy actively participated in their rescue. When Pooh Bear was freed, Sammy ran to his mother, clinging even more tightly than before. He began to tremble and shake in fear, and then, dramatically, his chest expanded in a growing sense of excitement and pride . Here we see the transition between traumatic reenactment and healing play .

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  If any one had foretold ten years ago the facts which are now understood by all, he would have been denounced as an incurable pessimist. Our cities have surrendered nearly all the functions that bring an income, keeping only those that demand expenditure, and they are now so dominated by the public service corporations that it takes a furious spasm of public anger, as in Philadelphia, or a long-drawn battle, as in Chicago, to drive the robbers from their intrenchments in the very citadel of government; and after the victory is won there is absolutely no guarantee that it will be permanent. There is probably not one of our states which is not more or less controlled by its chief railways. How far our national government is constantly warped in its action, the man at a distance can hardly tell, but the public confidence in Congress is deeply undermined. Even the successful action against the meat-packers and against railway rebates only demonstrated what overwhelming popular pressure is necessary to compel the government to act against these great interests. The interference of President Roosevelt in the great coal strike was hailed as a demonstration that the people are still supreme. In fact, it rather demonstrated that the supremacy of the people is almost gone. The country was on the verge of a vast public calamity. A sudden cold snap would have sent Death through our Eastern cities, not with his old-fashioned scythe, but with a modern reaper. The President merely undertook to advise and persuade, and was met with an almost insolent rejoinder. Mr. Jacob A. Riis, in his book. “Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen,” says that the President, when he concluded to interfere, set his face grimly and said: “Yes, I will do it. I suppose that ends me; but it is right, and I will do it.” The Governor of Massachusetts afterward sent him “the thanks of every man, woman, and child in the country.” The President replied: “Yes, we have put it through. But heavens and earth! It has been a struggle.” Mr. Riis says, “It was the nearest I ever knew him to come to showing the strain he had been under.” Now what sinister and ghostly power was this with which the President of our nation had wrestled on behalf of the people, and which was able to loosen even his joints with fear? Whose interests were so inviolable that they took precedence of the safety of the people, so that a common-sense action by the most august officer of the nation was likely to bring political destruction upon him? To what extent is a power so threatening able to turn the government aside from its functions by silent pressure, so that its fundamental purpose of public service is constantly frustrated? Have we a dual sovereignty, so that our public officers are in doubt whom to obey? Here is another instance showing how political power is simply a tool for the interests of the dominant class.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  ‘It’s a dream! Especially since the iron bars were put across the windows. And I’ve had a steel grid fixed over the pantry fanlight, which I had forgotten about. With my electric bells and my burglaralarms ... Ouf! It’s been long enough before I could feel at all safe! ’ ‘ And your old house? ’ ‘ Bolted and barred. Up for sale. And the pictures in store. My little entresol flat is a gem for the eighteen hundred francs it cost me. And no more servants looking like hired assassins. You remember those two footmen? The thought of them still gives me the creeps! ’ ‘You took much too black a view, my dear.’ ‘You can’t realize, my poor friend, without having been through it all- Monsieur, delighted to have met you. ... No, don’t you move, Lea.’ She enfolded them both in her velvety barbaric gaze, and was gone. Ch£ri followed her with his eyes until she reached the door, yet he lacked the courage to follow her example. He remained where he was, all but snuffed out by the conversation of these two women who had been speaking of him in the past tense, as though he were dead. But now Lea was coming back into the room, bursting with laughter. * Princess Cheniaguine! Sixty millions! and a widow! - and she’s not in the least bit happy. If that can be called enjoying life, it’s not my idea of it, you know I’ She clapped her hand on her thigh as if it were a horse’s crupper. ‘What’s the matter with her?’ ‘Funk. Blue funk, that’s all. She’s not the sort of woman who knows how to carry such wealth. Cheniaguine left her everything. But one might say that it would have done her less harm if he’d taken her money instead of leaving her his. You heard what she said?’ She subsided into the depths of a well upholstered armchair, and Cheri hated to hear the gentle sigh of its cushions as they took the weight of her vast bulk. She ran the tip of her finger along the grooved moulding of the chair, blew away the few specks of dust, and her face fell. ‘ Ah! things are not at all what they were, not even servants. Eh? ’