Fear

Passages

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

Page 310 of 529 · 20 per page

• From Wild (2012)

  “I can’t believe a girl like you would be all alone up here. You’re way too pretty to be out here alone, if you ask me. How long of a trip are you on?” he asked. “A longish one,” I answered. “I don’t believe that a young thing like her could be out here by herself, do you?” he said to his red-haired friend, as if I weren’t even there. “No,” I said before the red-haired man could answer him. “Anyone can do it. I mean, it’s just—” “I wouldn’t let you come out here if you were my girlfriend, that’s for shit shock sure,” the red-headed man said. “She’s got a really nice figure, don’t she?” the sandy-haired man said. “Healthy, with some soft curves. Just the kind I like.” I made a complacent little sound, a sort of half laugh, though my throat was clotted suddenly with fear. “Well, nice to meet you guys,” I said, moving toward Monster. “I’m hiking on a bit farther,” I lied, “so I’d better get going.” “We’re heading out too. We don’t want to run out of light,” said the red-haired man, pulling on his pack, and the sandy-haired man did too. I watched them in a fake posture of readying myself to leave, though I didn’t want to have to leave. I was tired and thirsty, hungry and chilled. It was heading toward dark and I’d chosen to camp on this pond because my guidebook—which only loosely described this section of the trail because it was not in fact the PCT—implied that this was the last place for a stretch where it was possible to pitch a tent. When they left, I stood for a while, letting the knot in my throat unclench. I was fine. I was in the clear. I was being a little bit silly. They’d been obnoxious and sexist and they’d ruined my water purifier, but they hadn’t done anything to me. They hadn’t meant harm. Some guys just didn’t know any better. I dumped the things out of my pack, filled my cooking pot with pond water, lit my stove, and set the water to boil. I peeled off my sweaty clothes, pulled out my red fleece leggings and long-sleeved shirt, and dressed in them. I laid out my tarp and was shaking my tent out of its bag when the sandy-haired man reappeared. At the sight of him I knew that everything I’d felt before was correct. That I’d had a reason to be afraid. That he’d come back for me. “What’s going on?” I asked in a falsely relaxed tone, though the sight of him there without his friend terrified me. It was as if I’d finally come across a mountain lion and I’d remembered, against all instinct, not to run. Not to incite him with my fast motions or antagonize him with my anger or arouse him with my fear. “I thought you were heading on,” he said.

• From Wild (2012)

  I returned to my camp and did my best to dry my things out in between rain showers. I heated a pot of water and hunched naked near it, bathing myself with my bandanna. I took apart my water purifier, shook out the muck that the sandy-haired man had sucked up into it, and ran clean water through my pump so I could use it again. A few minutes before I was going to walk to the small building where I’d been instructed to go for dinner, the Three Young Bucks appeared, soaking wet and dreamier than ever. I literally leapt with joy at the sight of them. I explained to them that I was off to have dinner and they could probably have dinner with me too and I’d be right back to get them if they could, but when I reached the little building and inquired, the woman in charge was unmoved by their arrival. “We don’t have enough food,” she said. I felt guilty about sitting down to eat, but I was starving. Dinner was family fare, the kind I’d eaten at a thousand potlucks as a kid in Minnesota. Cheddar-cheese-topped casserole with ground beef, canned corn, and potatoes with an iceberg lettuce salad. I filled my plate and ate it in about five bites and sat politely waiting for the woman to cut the yellow cake with white frosting that sat enticingly on a side table. When she did, I ate a piece and then returned to discreetly take another—the biggest piece in the pan—and folded it into a paper napkin and put it in the pocket of my raincoat. “Thank you,” I said. “I’d better get back to my friends.” I walked across the wet grass, holding the cake very carefully inside my coat. It was only 5:30, but it was so dark and dreary it might as well have been the middle of the night. “There you are. I was looking for you,” a man called to me. It was the ranger who’d given me my box and letters that morning. He was blotting his lips with a dish towel. “I’m talking funny,” he slurred as I approached him. “I had some surgery on my mouth today.” I pulled my hood up over my head because it had started to rain again. He seemed slightly drunk in addition to having the troubles with his mouth. “So how about you come to my place for a drink now? You can get out of the rain,” he said in his garbled voice. “My place is right there, the other half of the station. I got a fire going in the fireplace and I’ll mix you up a nice cocktail or two.”

• From Don't Feed the Monkey Mind: How to Stop the Cycle of Anxiety, Fear, and Worry (2017)

  well as whether my message was fresh and accurate. I ruminated over past efforts I’d made to write in high school and college. My husband had always teased me about my grammar and spelling, and getting what was perfectly clear in my head down on paper was always a challenge. Did my worrying keep me safe from writing poorly? No. What it kept me safe from was actually feeling the risk that I was taking. By worrying I was attempting to solve the problem, which kept me from experiencing the full force of my fear. Agonizing over what I wanted to say was better than the agony I would feel if I accepted the possibility that I’d embarrass myself and let everybody down by writing a lousy book. The truth was, writing the book would actually help me clarify my message, and even if it wasn’t especially book-worthy, I would survive. The threat was only a perception of my monkey mind, a perception I confirmed when I worried. The more I worried, the more I joined with my monkey. Together we agreed that writing a book was dangerous—it could lead to me losing status in my tribe. Worry is so ubiquitous that we are largely unaware of when we are doing it. Revisiting the same challenges and problems over and over in our heads doesn’t resolve them or make them go away. It is our instinctive response to the monkey’s call to action: Something is wrong. Do something! Worrying is doing something.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This was not an isolated experience. Some weeks later, while I was shopping in Cornmarket, the world seemed to have lost all connection with the fundamental laws that gave it meaning and coherence. It took on the grotesque aspect of a cartoon. The women ahead of me in the queue at Marks & Spencer looked as though they belonged in a primitive painting by Beryl Cook; their features became coarse and alien. Again there was that paralyzing fear. I had no idea where I was or what I was doing. When I reached the till, the woman sitting behind it seemed to be shouting at me, pointing to my purse. I stared back at her blankly, unable to understand what she was saying or what she wanted me to do. Somebody took my purse from me and opened it, but I could make nothing of the round metal discs inside. Dazed, I put down my wire basket and wandered out into the street. I don’t know how long it was before I found myself sitting outside Brasenose College in Radcliffe Square, contemplating the perfect dome of the Camera, an image of wholeness and harmony. It was one of my favorite haunts, a place where I loved to come and study. It had been raining. I was wet and chilled, but back in my skin on a planet that had returned to normal. I never imagined for one moment that these were supernatural visitations. I knew at once that I must be ill and assumed that, like my fainting attacks, these visions were symptoms of strain. This seemed oddly appropriate. The world that I had rejected had turned on me and exacted a revenge, in which my surroundings periodically took on a nightmarish unfamiliarity. But as these strange interludes became more frequent, I became frightened, and took myself off to the doctor. How was I going to live with a horror that descended upon me without warning and made it impossible for me to function? It seemed as though the world and I had become chronically incompatible; that I would never be able to live in it. And what if one day I remained trapped on the other side of the looking glass?

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But whatever the reason, my sudden fall from grace was a great blow. The possibility of a life in scholarship had been the one hopeful thing in my life. Now, yet again, it seemed that I was to be prized away from a familiar world. Jacob slept peacefully, turned on his side away from me. I took out my book and started to read by the small circle of pale light that came from Jenifer’s bedside lamp. I was on the late shift, sitting with Jacob until his mother, who was at a college dinner, returned home. Lying on Jenifer’s bed in the long attic room, I felt peacefully away from things. An owl hooted outside and I looked anxiously at Jacob, who was a light sleeper and, once woken, was likely to remain restless all night. But he slept on, while the alarm clock on the cluttered bedside table ticked loudly in the silence. Suddenly, Jacob reared up and gazed ahead, his eyes fixed and frightened and yet also, I sensed, unseeing. He began to make a strange keening sound in his throat and for a moment I felt pure panic. This was it: he was about to have an epileptic seizure. Snatching the rubber teething ring that Jenifer kept by her bed, I carefully inserted it into Jacob’s mouth, as instructed, and pushed him gently back on his side. Then we both waited. I was frightened: I had no idea what I would see or how I would cope. Jacob was a big child, taller and probably stronger than I. How could I prevent him from hurting himself? And what if he did not stop convulsing? If he had not regained consciousness within ten minutes, this would be a medical emergency. Status epilepticus, I had been told, could be fatal. But I was alone in the house and the nearest telephone was downstairs. Suddenly Jacob stopped breathing for what seemed like minutes but was probably only a few seconds. His face became distorted, and his eyes brutish and angry. The color drained from his skin, until it finally took on the mottled hue of a dirty stone. Then, after what seemed another long interval, his teeth locked on the teething ring and his body started to jerk convulsively. Please, let this stop, I prayed to nobody in particular, while it went on and on. Then, just as suddenly, the convulsions ceased and Jacob relaxed. The teething ring fell from his mouth, and he fell into a heavy, comatose sleep, his breathing rasping and ugly. The color gradually seeped back into his face. It was over. But I knew that there was always the danger of another seizure. If that happened, I must send for an ambulance immediately. Gradually, however, Jacob’s breathing returned to normal and he slid into a peaceful sleep. It seemed so unfair. Jacob had only recently started to have seizures. Did he not have enough to deal with?

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Weak with fright and trembling slightly, I sank back onto the leather banquette, staring at the Lady of Shalott without really seeing her. What had happened? The last thing that I could remember clearly was getting onto the tube train at Highgate. I had been due to meet the party at Charing Cross station at 2:15, but I had no recollection of the intervening period. My mind racing now, I realized that I must have left the tube at Charing Cross, and instead of taking the escalator up to the Mainline station, I must have walked all the way down the Embankment to the Tate. As I struggled to remember, I thought I could dimly recall the steely gray Thames, the wet cloudy sky, umbrellas, and mackintoshed figures. But nothing else, nothing at all. How was I going to explain this to Richard and Jackie? Dazed, I got up and walked groggily through the other galleries. My colleagues’ reaction, I told myself grimly, was the least of my problems. Nothing ever got better. My mind was as infirm and as unreliable as ever. I seemed quite unable to function as a normal human being. Again I glimpsed the locked ward, the padded cell. I felt sick, and had a strong desire to lie down on one of the long benches and sleep for hours. Outside the midwinter rain cut into my face and the wind penetrated to my bones. As I walked toward Pimlico station, the white, peeling houses, decayed relics of a splendid past, looked blank and shuttered. As soon as I opened the envelope, I knew that it was hopeless. The terse official letter from Oxford told me that my academic career was over. The professor who had been so hostile to the very idea of my thesis had been appointed as my examiner. Friends, family, and colleagues told me that I was despairing too soon. I wondered how they could be so certain about this, but after a while I realized that their remarks were not really considered statements, but were more in the nature of denial. It had to be all right, because the alternative was unthinkable. “Let’s face it, Karen,” Jane exclaimed cheerfully on the phone, “if you fail, there’s no hope for any of us.” So for the next three months, while I waited for the viva that was to be held—a cruel irony, this— on Valentine’s Day, most people refused to discuss the matter. “It will be fine!” they said airily. “Don’t even think about it!” Even my supervisor seemed unconcerned. “It’s such a lovely piece of work,” she assured me. “It simply cannot fail.” Mind you, she admitted, there were irregularities. She had protested against the appointment of the hostile professor—let us call him Alastair Courtney— who had long been on the Oxford faculty but now occupied a chair in a provincial university. She had pointed out to the Academic Board that I now had two external examiners.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But what could I realistically do with this nostalgia for transformation and transcendence? In a world that was now empty of God, I could see no place for it and did not understand what, if anything, it meant. The crisis of the sudden, shocking demise of my teaching career pushed these vague worries to the back of my mind. I was, quite simply, terrified. All my old fears about money came to the surface again, with good reason. My situation was indeed alarming. My neurologist was disturbed to hear that I had lost my job. “You won’t get another,” he told me. “I know how these things work. Now that you’ve been invalided out of one post because of your condition, no one else will want to know.” It was ironic that, thanks to this wonderful doctor, my epilepsy improved dramatically during the summer of 1981. Just after the head asked me to leave the school, he brought me into hospital for two weeks and put me on a regime of medication that at last gave me effective control over my condition. But it was too late to convince the school authorities of this. So I began my final year at Dulwich in good health, and because I was no longer working full-time, I was rested and felt immeasurably better. Emotionally, however, I was a wreck. I would spend whole evenings in tears and days in a state of sheer panic. I simply did not know what to do and could see no solution. As the doctor had pointed out, there seemed little point in applying for another teaching job, and I could not imagine how I could finance any training for an alternative career. Friends assumed that I had made a lot of money from Through the Narrow Gate, but that was not the case. Because of the recession, the advance royalties had been very modest. The money might tide me over for a year or, if I was very frugal, even two, but what then? “Well, you must write, of course!” was the continual response. But write what? The publishers had commissioned a sequel and I used this fallow year to write Beginning the World, but I obviously could not continue to write volumes of autobiography. As it was, I was struggling hard with this second memoir and realized that I had not begun to assimilate these last difficult years. In the summer of 1982, as the school year came to an end, Through the Narrow Gate came out in paperback, so that meant more talk shows and more publicity. I was expected to be positive with my interviewers, and confident about the future, but I felt as though I were heading into an abyss.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  And indeed it did, when my new agent, Felicity Bryan, managed at about this time to find a publisher for A History of God. Helen Fraser of Heinemann, who had been at St. Anne’s with me and had even made a brief appearance in Through the Narrow Gate, offered a modest advance, and we agreed that I would submit the manuscript sometime in 1992. We decided to wait until after the book was finished before trying to find an American publisher, when Felicity felt that we would have a better chance. I was delighted. With the money that I was beginning to earn from reviewing and writing the occasional article, I could just keep afloat financially. But most important, I felt that I now had a future. I settled down to work with a greater sense of purpose and direction, looking forward to two years of uninterrupted research. But in February 1990, this tidy program was interrupted by a new confrontation with the Islamic world. Fresh from my study of the Crusades, I found myself preoccupied by one news story in particular. Everybody in literary London was talking about the plight of Salman Rushdie, who was now approaching the end of his first year in hiding. His novel The Satanic Verses, which included a portrait of the prophet Muhammad that many Muslims found blasphemous, had caused riots in Pakistan, and Muslims in Bradford, in northern England, had ceremonially burned the novel, raising the fearful specter of the Inquisition and the book burnings of the Nazis. On February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini had issued his fatwa, condemning Rushdie and his publishers to death. In hiding, Rushdie had become a martyr for the sacred principle of free speech, and the fatwa was a prime example of the cruel religious certainty that I had come to loathe. Of course, I believed that Rushdie had the right to publish what he chose. But I was also shocked by the raw pain experienced by the more thoughtful Muslims, who condemned the fatwa and the book burning but tried to explain to us why the novel had occasioned such outrage. They spoke of this insult to their Prophet in startling imagery—as a violation, a rape, or as a knife through the heart. Even though this reaction initially seemed excessive, it struck a chord with me. I myself had felt violated and undermined when people had preferred their own fictitious interpretations to my own version of events that were central to my life and identity. And I remembered the Golden Rule. If I had felt this type of pain, I should not inflict it on others. How would we in the West like our traditions misrepresented in this manner? The Satanic Verses itself was a brilliant and sympathetic study of the way this kind of prejudice turned people into monsters. And I felt a pang of fear for the future.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “Come along, Mrs. Saunders, you can do it!” a nurse said encouragingly every thirty seconds. But could she? And could I? My mantra seemed absurd in this context: it was, to put it mildly, difficult to find a source of strength in the psychiatric ward of my worst nightmares. True, there was no padded cell and this was not a locked ward. I had been breezily told that I would be able to come and go as I chose, just as long as I kept the nurses informed. But as I looked around the room at these other broken people, I feared that this was where I really belonged. I too had intimations of the kind of terror that was paralyzing Mrs. Saunders, making it impossible for her, try as she would, to take the next step. I stared glumly around the ward. There was a strong smell of sickness and disinfectant. Two brave souls were playing table tennis, but most were simply sitting on the ancient chairs and sofas, gazing at the walls or into space. I could be here for weeks or even months, until I found accommodation that would satisfy Dr. Piet. But then I pulled myself up sharply. I had to get out as quickly as I feasibly could. I must not even begin to think that this was a natural habitation for me. A short, middle-aged man with a beer belly plunked himself down on the sofa beside me. “Cheer up, darling. It’s not so bad! In a day or two, it’ll come to seem like home.” That was precisely what I was afraid of. My new companion began to tell me a long, convoluted story about how he had ended up in what he called the “loony bin”: headaches, doctors, inconclusive medical tests, and then six months in the Littlemore for depression, though, as he explained, he’d never really felt depressed. But that, the doctors had informed him, was really the cause of his trouble. If he’d allowed himself to feel depressed, he wouldn’t have had the headaches. And how were these headaches, after six months of group therapy, individual psychotherapy, and Valium? “Shocking.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I really don’t. Nothing’s shifted them.” He was plainly bemused by the whole psychiatric approach. How could he be depressed without realizing it? I wondered how he would get on with Dr. Piet, and looked at him thoughtfully. Perhaps there was something physically wrong with his brain? But now that he was stuck in here and branded a “nutter” (his term), how would anybody ever find out? A woman in a cerise knitted dress, her shoulder blades sticking painfully through the thin material, her graying hair pulled neatly from her face, walked uncertainly toward us. “Who am I?” she asked, bending down so that her lost, worried eyes looked directly into mine. “I don’t know who I am.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I would listen, bemused by this fantasy. For Dr. Piet, the religious life was like the secret gardens or lost domains of literature. He saw serene processions of beautiful nuns gliding down sunlit cloisters, and imagined the convent as an enclave of sisterly peace and concord. Seductive as the religious life had undoubtedly been, he would tell me sternly, I had been running away from my true problems and responsibilities. Indeed, he clung to this idyllic vision so persistently when I tried to interject a little reality into the discussion that I sometimes wondered what psychological significance this fiction held for him. True, we had been shielded from some of the uncomfortable realities of the outside world, but anybody who entered a convent simply to escape unpleasantness would not have lasted a month, let alone seven years. Furthermore, it was not really accurate to say that I had been running away. The core of most of our problems is our own self, and in the religious life I had been forced to confront this self for twenty-four hours a day 365 days a year. You have far more opportunities to escape from self-knowledge in secular life. It is very easy to change the subject, pick up the telephone, turn on the television, or pour a stiff drink. None of these options was available in the convent, and as a result we very quickly came to a most uncomfortable perception of our own limitations. But Dr. Piet was my only chance. Without him I could be condemned to a lifetime of these uncanny eruptions of horror, each one of which made the darkness encroach a little more. I felt as though I were standing on a beach with my back to a cliff, watching the tide creep up the shore a little closer . . . and then a little closer still. So I went back to Dr. Piet, telling myself that I couldn’t expect a miracle overnight. What did I know about psychiatry and the mystery of the human mind? If I persevered I might well find that everything suddenly fell into place. But then I would be overtaken by a queasy sense of déjà vu. This was exactly the sort of reasoning that I had used in the convent, and look where it had got me. It was a hot, sticky day in July 1970. The room in the Examination Schools that had been set aside for the viva voce examination seemed to echo to our footsteps as the four of us trooped in and sat in a miserable little huddle against the wall. I looked hopelessly at the members of the board of examiners, who were sitting around three sides of a large table in the big bay window—sixteen dons in full academic dress, gazing at us expressionlessly. Opposite them was a lonely chair for the candidate, and the ten question papers of the final examinations that we had sat some six weeks earlier.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Yet could you behave like that indefinitely, without inflicting real and lasting damage on your mind? I remembered the moment, a year or so later, when I had realized that my mind no longer worked freely. It was the recreation hour in the noviceship. We all sat around the long table in the community room with our needlework, Mother Walter, our novice mistress, presiding. That night we were talking about the liturgical changes that were being introduced by the Second Vatican Council: the Mass was being said in English instead of Latin, for example, and that morning the children in the adjacent boarding school had played guitars to accompany a song they had composed themselves. Mother Walter had not enjoyed that song. She was devoted to the Gregorian chant and had taught us to love it too. Even though she once told me that I had a voice like a broken knife grinder, I had to sing in the choir, and though I could never hit the higher notes and was ruefully aware of the tunelessness of my efforts, I was beginning to appreciate the spiritual quality of plainsong—the way the music circled meditatively around the words and drew attention to a phrase or obscure preposition that could easily have passed unnoticed, but which proved to have rich meaning. Now it looked as if the days of the chant were numbered, and though Mother Walter would have cut out her tongue rather than criticize the Vatican, she was convinced that this would be an irreparable loss. “Of course the council is inspired by the Holy Spirit,” she was saying, “but it is hard to see how we can replace a musical tradition that goes back hundreds of years. Just think: Saint Bernard would have sung the same chant as we do. So would Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi. And now we have to listen to those silly children playing guitars.” For a moment, the measured calm of her voice faltered and her face darkened in a way we had learned to dread. “But Mother”—Sister Mary Jonathan, a novice who was a year ahead of me and who had been my guardian angel when I had begun my novitiate, spoke up eagerly—“surely the changes needn’t necessarily be a disaster? After all, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with playing a guitar at Mass, is there?” Mother frowned. “I should have thought,” she replied coldly, “that this is a matter we need not discuss.” We all bent our heads obediently over our needlework, distancing ourselves. The topic had been portentously closed. No one would dream of taking it any further, against the expressed wish of our superior.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I hated it, hated teaching—and I just got thinner and thinner.” “But what is it?” “Anorexia nervosa, the eating disease.” I nodded. Besides Charlotte, a number of girls in college had it. “At first the doctors thought that I might just have an overactive thyroid. Everybody was very keen on that—anything so long as I wasn’t suffering from a mental illness, an emotional disorder. Some of the community still refuse to accept it.” Again I nodded wordlessly. I could imagine that all too well. “But what are they going to do about it?” I demanded. An eating disorder required hospitalization, special programs, and expert help. It could, in extreme cases, even be fatal. “Nothing,” Rebecca said flatly. “But you need a doctor!” I persisted. “You can’t teach looking like that.” “Oh yes, I can.” Rebecca spoke grimly, and I was beginning to sense that underneath the studied calm she was very, very angry. “I’m teaching French in the school here, and Reverend Mother Provincial says that she cannot find a replacement at the moment. And then”—her voice took on a real edge—“in a few years, I am to be the next headmistress.” I was shocked into silence. This was not the ideal solution for somebody who hated teaching and was becoming dangerously ill. It could kill her. “Are you eating?” I said at last. “No, I’m eating all right.” Rebecca explained, as we drove slowly up the village street that led to the imposing convent gatehouse. “Apparently I’ve got an extreme form of the disease. I’m just not absorbing the food.” I began to feel really frightened. “You know,” Rebecca went on, “I put it down to that Oxford regime. Remember? We’d get in from our lectures too late to go to the first table sitting for lunch, and wait outside the refectory until the community finished their meal. Then we’d have to rush in and gulp down two full courses in ten minutes, to make sure that we were kneeling in our places in church to do our prayers on the dot of one forty-five.” I realized that the disease must have a deeper root cause than this, but this ridiculous arrangement could have focused Rebecca’s attention on food, making it a symbol of a deeper discontent. “Supper was no better,” I recalled. “I had to read to the community for fifteen minutes and bolt down my food in ten; you were up and down serving throughout the entire meal. They meant it kindly, I suppose. They wanted us to be free to go to compline with them after dinner.” Rebecca might joke about it, but the religious life had damaged her, as, in a different way, it had me. She took the car into the long drive, and through the avenue of cedars toward the fourteenth-century chapel.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It had been a perfectly ordinary day in college. Richard was producing some short plays by W. B. Yeats and I was his assistant, dogsbody, and stage manager. That evening I stayed late for a rehearsal. My role was chiefly to administer moral support. I could not contribute directorially, because the plays were so cryptic that I couldn’t really understand them. But there was a nice sequence that I always enjoyed, in which Nicky, one of the most gifted of our students, performed a magical dance to the accompaniment of strange, haunting music. A curious feature of these somewhat arcane plays was a chorus of four women, who had to fold and unfold a large cloth, which they displayed to the audience. I hadn’t a clue what this signified, and never quite dared to reveal my ignorance to Richard, but I guessed that the women were the Irish equivalent of the Fates or something of that sort. That evening, the girls made us all laugh when we reached the end of the play, since when the cloth was unfolded for the last time, we saw that it was inscribed with the words “That’s All, Folks!” Richard was not amused—he took this venture very seriously—but I was still smiling to myself when I reached Baker Street station to begin the long journey home to Finchley. The rush hour was over, and the large, dank ticket office looked desolate and grim. A few commuters hurried past, the collars of their coats turned up against the cold. Outside it was raining and the drunks had taken up their usual places near the turnstiles. Everything seemed as usual. But just after I had gone through the ticket barrier, it hit me: the smell, the acrid taste, the flickering quality of the light, and the terror. But the experience was more intense this time. I was dimly aware of lurching around, trying to get away from something— but from what? I grasped the railing as my thought processes splintered and the fluorescent station lights began to flash violently with a ferocity that was almost blinding. And then there was a change. Suddenly—at last—all the conflicting pieces of the pattern seemed to fuse into a meaningful whole. I had entered a new dimension of pure joy, fulfillment, and peace: the world seemed transfigured, and its ultimate significance—so obvious and yet quite inexpressible—was revealed. This was God. But no sooner had I realized this than I began to fall down that familiar dark tunnel into oblivion.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  The atmosphere was frigid, and sometimes even frightening. At night in our long dormitory we often heard one another weeping, but knew that we must never ask what was wrong. We lived together in community, cheek by jowl, but were so lonely that we might as well have been living in solitary confinement. We became entirely dependent upon our superior’s every move, and accepted her worldview and her opinion of ourselves as gospel truth. I was so young that I could draw upon no experience to counter this regime. So the world receded, and the tiny dramas and cold values of noviceship life filled my entire horizon. This type of isolation is central to the rituals of initiation practiced in the ancient world and in many indigenous societies today. On reaching puberty, boys are taken away from their mothers, separated from their tribe, and subjected to a series of frightening ordeals that change them irrevocably. It is a process of death and resurrection: initiates die to their childhood and rise again to an entirely different life as mature human beings. They are often told that they are about to suffer a horrible death; they are forced to lie alone in a cave or a tomb; they are buried alive, experience intense physical pain (the boys are often circumcised or tattooed), and undergo terrifying rituals. The idea is that in these extreme circumstances, the young discover inner resources that will enable them to serve their people as fully functioning adults. The purpose of these rites of passage is thus to transform dependent children into responsible, self-reliant males who are ready to risk their lives as hunters and warriors and, if necessary, to die in order to protect their people. Our training had been an initiation. We too had been segregated from the world, deprived of normal affection, and subjected to trials that were designed to test our resolve. We too were to be warriors of sorts—soldiers of God, who practiced the military obedience devised by Saint Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, whose rule we followed. The training was designed to make us wholly self-reliant, so that we no longer needed human love or approval.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “You sound as though you’ve just got out of prison!” We laughed uneasily, our eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead. “But it’s all so different inside these days,” she continued. “The car, the habit—those are the most obvious changes, and we have more baths, more talking. We can make our cells into bed-sitting-rooms and give each other cups of Nescafé. It’s probably a bit like St. Anne’s—lots of girlish laughter; intense discussions and pop psychology. We all sit around talking about how damaged we are.” There we were; we had arrived at the heart of what was uppermost in both our minds. There was silence, and then Rebecca said quietly: “Karen, thank you for not saying anything.” “About your weight.” It was not a question. I forced myself to turn and look directly at her. “When did it happen?” “Very quickly.” Rebecca sighed. “In London, while I was doing the certificate of education. I hated it, hated teaching—and I just got thinner and thinner.” “But what is it?” “Anorexia nervosa, the eating disease.” I nodded. Besides Charlotte, a number of girls in college had it. “At first the doctors thought that I might just have an overactive thyroid. Everybody was very keen on that—anything so long as I wasn’t suffering from a mental illness, an emotional disorder. Some of the community still refuse to accept it.” Again I nodded wordlessly. I could imagine that all too well. “But what are they going to do about it?” I demanded. An eating disorder required hospitalization, special programs, and expert help. It could, in extreme cases, even be fatal. “Nothing,” Rebecca said flatly. “But you need a doctor!” I persisted. “You can’t teach looking like that.” “Oh yes, I can.” Rebecca spoke grimly, and I was beginning to sense that underneath the studied calm she was very, very angry. “I’m teaching French in the school here, and Reverend Mother Provincial says that she cannot find a replacement at the moment. And then”—her voice took on a real edge—“in a few years, I am to be the next headmistress.” I was shocked into silence. This was not the ideal solution for somebody who hated teaching and was becoming dangerously ill. It could kill her. “Are you eating?” I said at last. “No, I’m eating all right.” Rebecca explained, as we drove slowly up the village street that led to the imposing convent gatehouse. “Apparently I’ve got an extreme form of the disease. I’m just not absorbing the food.” I began to feel really frightened. “You know,” Rebecca went on, “I put it down to that Oxford regime. Remember? We’d get in from our lectures too late to go to the first table sitting for lunch, and wait outside the refectory until the community finished their meal. Then we’d have to rush in and gulp down two full courses in ten minutes, to make sure that we were kneeling in our places in church to do our prayers on the dot of one forty-five.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Her limbs splayed in all directions, so that she looked disjointed. On her face was an expression of exaggerated terror as she took each painful step forward. While both her hands and feet made contact with the wall, she was all right, but each time she inched forward, she broke her sole link with concrete reality. “Come along, Mrs. Saunders, you can do it!” a nurse said encouragingly every thirty seconds. But could she? And could I? My mantra seemed absurd in this context: it was, to put it mildly, difficult to find a source of strength in the psychiatric ward of my worst nightmares. True, there was no padded cell and this was not a locked ward. I had been breezily told that I would be able to come and go as I chose, just as long as I kept the nurses informed. But as I looked around the room at these other broken people, I feared that this was where I really belonged. I too had intimations of the kind of terror that was paralyzing Mrs. Saunders, making it impossible for her, try as she would, to take the next step. I stared glumly around the ward. There was a strong smell of sickness and disinfectant. Two brave souls were playing table tennis, but most were simply sitting on the ancient chairs and sofas, gazing at the walls or into space. I could be here for weeks or even months, until I found accommodation that would satisfy Dr. Piet. But then I pulled myself up sharply. I had to get out as quickly as I feasibly could. I must not even begin to think that this was a natural habitation for me. A short, middle-aged man with a beer belly plunked himself down on the sofa beside me. “Cheer up, darling. It’s not so bad! In a day or two, it’ll come to seem like home.” That was precisely what I was afraid of. My new companion began to tell me a long, convoluted story about how he had ended up in what he called the “loony bin”: headaches, doctors, inconclusive medical tests, and then six months in the Littlemore for depression, though, as he explained, he’d never really felt depressed. But that, the doctors had informed him, was really the cause of his trouble. If he’d allowed himself to feel depressed, he wouldn’t have had the headaches. And how were these headaches, after six months of group therapy, individual psychotherapy, and Valium? “Shocking.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I really don’t. Nothing’s shifted them.” He was plainly bemused by the whole psychiatric approach. How could he be depressed without realizing it? I wondered how he would get on with Dr. Piet, and looked at him thoughtfully. Perhaps there was something physically wrong with his brain?

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  My project, of course, demanded that I concentrate on Judaism and Christianity. I had no brief as yet to study Islam, but I found that in Jerusalem it was impossible to ignore this third member of the Abrahamic family. On my very first morning, I had been torn violently from sleep at dawn by the ear-splitting call to prayer, which exploded at dawn from the minaret beside the American Colony Hotel. I had sprung up in bed, dry mouthed, with my heart beating wildly. Islam had erupted into my world as a reality that was raw, alien, shocking, intrusive, and wholly unexpected. But after that first morning, the muezzin never woke me again, though the dawn call was still issued at exactly the same number of decibels. I had somehow managed to absorb and accommodate it. Indeed, I soon learned to love the strange Arabic chant as it echoed through the streets of Jerusalem and filled the valleys and hills around the Old City. The call to prayer was a constant reminder that whether Christians or Jews liked it or not, Islam was a part of their story too. Perhaps we were talking about a tradition that had gone not in two directions but in three. Even though I was not studying Islam, I found, during this first visit, that I was spending more and more time in Muslim Jerusalem. My Israeli colleagues were becoming friendlier. I could see that Joel was now less pessimistic about my prospects, but they still regarded me as a prim English schoolteacher and were happy to part company with me at the end of a day’s work. Danny would drive me back to the American Colony, screeching up to the entrance of the hotel with a flourish, clearly eager to get rid of me and begin his own evening. “Thank you very much,” I had said on the first occasion, as I got out of the car. “What for?” I looked at him questioningly. “Why are you thanking me? Don’t thank me! I have to drive you, whether I like it or not! It’s my job!”

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

  Their retreat from public life after the Civil War had narrowed and, perhaps, distorted their vision. Instead of engaging as before with such issues as racial or economic inequality, they focused on biblical literalism, convinced that every single assertion of scripture was literally true. And so their enemy was no longer social injustice but the German Higher Criticism of the Bible, which had been embraced by the more liberal American Christians who were still attempting to bring the gospel to bear on social problems. For all the claims that fundamentalisms make of a return to basics, however, these movements are highly innovative. Before the sixteenth century, for instance, Christians had always been encouraged to read scripture allegorically; even Calvin did not believe that the first chapter of Genesis was a factual account of the origins of life, and he took severely to task those “frantic persons” who believed that it was. 2 The new fundamentalist outlook now required a wholesale denial of glaring discrepancies in scripture itself. Closed to any alternative and coherent only in its own terms, biblical inerrancy created a shuttered mind-set born of great fear. “Religion has to fight for its life against a large class of scientific men,” warned Charles Hodge, who formulated this dogma in 1874. 3 This embattled preoccupation with the status of the biblical text reflected a wider Christian concern about the nature of religious authority. Just four years earlier the First Vatican Council (1870) had promulgated the new—and highly controversial—doctrine of papal infallibility. At a time when modernity was demolishing old truths and leaving crucial questions unanswered, there was a yearning for absolute certainty. Fundamentalisms are also often preoccupied by the horror of modern warfare and violence. The shocking slaughter in Europe during the First World War could only be the beginning of the end, the evangelicals concluded; these times of unprecedented carnage must be the battles foretold in the book of Revelation. There was a deep anxiety about the centralization of modern society and anything approaching world rule. In the new League of Nations, they saw the revival of the Roman Empire predicted in Revelation, the abode of Antichrist. 4 Fundamentalists now saw themselves grappling with satanic forces that would shortly destroy the world. Their spirituality was defensive and filled with a paranoid terror of the sinister influence of the Catholic minority; they even described American democracy as the “most devilish rule this world has ever seen.” 5 The American fundamentalists’ chilling scenario of the end time, with its wars, bloodshed, and slaughter, is symptomatic of a deep-rooted distress that cannot be assuaged by cool rational analysis. In less stable countries, it would be all too easy for a similar malaise, despair, and fear to erupt in physical violence. Their horrified recoil from the violence of the First World War also led American fundamentalists to veto modern science. They became obsessed with evolutionary theory.

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

  The situation could have been contained, had not Archelaus sent in the army, which killed three thousand worshippers. 20 Protests then spread to the countryside, where popular leaders, acclaimed as “kings,” waged guerrilla warfare against Roman and Herodian troops. Again, taxation rather than religion was the main issue. Mobs attacked the estates of the nobility and raided local fortresses, storehouses, and Roman baggage trains to “take back the goods that had been seized from the people.” 21 It took P. Quintilius Varus, governor of neighboring Syria, three years to restore the Pax Romana, during which he burned the Galilean city of Sepphoris to the ground, sacked the surrounding villages, and crucified two thousand rebels outside Jerusalem. 22 Rome now decided that Herod’s realm should be divided among his three sons: Archelaus was given Idumaea, Judea, and Samaria; Antipas Galilee and Peraea; and Philip the Transjordan. But Archelaus’s rule was so cruel that Rome soon deposed him, and for the first time Judea was governed by a Roman prefect, supported by the Jewish priestly aristocracy, from his residence in Caesarea. When Coponius, the first governor, arranged for a census as a prelude to tax assessment, a Galilean named Judas urged the people to resist. His religious commitment was inseparable from his political protest: 23 paying Roman taxes, Judas insisted, “amounted to slavery, pure and simple,” because God was “the only leader and master” of the Jewish people. If they remained steadfast in their opposition and did not shrink “from the slaughter that might come upon them,” God would intervene and act on their behalf. 24 Typically peasants did not resort to violence. Their chief weapon was noncooperation: working slowly or even refraining from work altogether, making their point economically and often cannily. Most Roman governors were careful to avoid offending Jewish sensibilities, but in 26 CE Pontius Pilate ordered the troops in the Antonia fortress to raise military standards displaying the emperor’s portrait right next to the temple. At once a mob of peasants and townsfolk marched to Caesarea, and when Pilate refused to remove the standards, they simply lay motionless outside his residence for five days. When Pilate summoned them to the stadium, they found that they were surrounded by soldiers with drawn swords and fell to the ground again, crying that they would rather die than break their laws. They may have relied on divine intervention, but they also knew that Pilate would risk massive reprisals had he slaughtered them all. And they were right: the Roman governor had to admit defeat and take down the standards. 25 The chances of such a bloodless outcome were much slimmer when, fourteen years later, Emperor Gaius Caligula would order his statue to be erected in the Jerusalem temple. Once again the peasants took to the road, “as if at a single signal … leaving their houses and villages empty.”

• From Bestiary (2020)

  On TV, when I heard the word recession, I thought it meant the same thing as recess, when you were free of teachers who slid their rulers into your mouth and told you your accent was an inch off. But this recession did not mean free, unless free meant that no one could afford to pay. Duck Uncle’s secret ingredient for his black sauce—fermented garlic—was stolen by another chain. He sold the rest of his recipes. By then, Duck Uncle didn’t sleep, his neck thin enough to make a fist around it, his teeth indented from sleepwalking into his tree. Even his voice was less like a duck and more like the gun. Prayer to Disappear a Tail: To Be Repeated Twice Nightly and Once in the Morning (Prior to Counting Every Toe in the Household) dear shangdi dear papakwaka please let my skin rescind all scars all tails let my teeth be benign as butterflies let my tail be a fuse if I light it the fire deletes me dear papakwaka if you are the mountain that mothered us all like my ama says please let me not become her hu gu po please let the world be extinct of children so I will have nothing to eat but myself dear papakwaka dear ancestors who took up spears toothpicked the dutch like fancy finger food who bombed back the qing dynasty with bags of farts who turned all japanese soldiers into beads with holes in their bellies please open my tail like an umbrella build me for protection not for prey keep buffering from girl from girl from girl from girl to please stop stalling if I have to transform let my new species be a window a bar of herbal soap my mother’s thumb in my ear dear papakwaka I know this story is outside your language but is hu gu po born one limb at a time or all at once which part of her am I already o papakwaka mountain teat mouth of us all please don’t strand my body outside its myth _ Before he left, we ate at the largest of Duck Uncle’s restaurants, an hour away in a mall that sold fake phones and sour plums. Duck Uncle told us the rules before we went in through the glazed double doors: No spitting anything out, even if you’re choking on it. No swallowing your noodles whole and then pulling them back out through your nose. No removing any item of your clothing at the table. No disturbances. The red carpet made my eyes runny and the plastic chandelier hung so low we ducked for it.