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 Wild (2012)

  The following day I hiked over Santiam Pass and crossed into the Mount Jefferson Wilderness, named for the dark and stately summit to my north. I hiked past the rocky multipeaked Three Fingered Jack, which rose like a fractured hand into the sky, and continued hiking into the evening as the sun disappeared behind a blanket of clouds and a thick mist slowly enveloped me. The day had been hot, but within thirty minutes the temperature dropped 20 degrees as the wind picked up and then suddenly stilled. I walked as quickly as I could up the trail, the sweat dripping from my body in spite of the chill, searching for a place to camp. It was precariously close to dark, but there was no place flat or clear enough to pitch my tent. By the time I found a spot near a small pond, it was as if I were inside a cloud, the air eerily still and silent. In the time it took me to pitch my tent and filter a bottle of water with my insufferably slow water purifier, the wind started up again in great violent gasps, whipping the branches of the trees overhead. I’d never been in a mountain storm. I’m not afraid, I reminded myself as I crawled into my tent without eating dinner, feeling too vulnerable outside, though I knew my tent offered little protection. I sat in expectant wonder and fear, bracing for a mighty storm that never came. An hour after dark, the air went still again and I heard coyotes yipping in the distance, as if they were celebrating the fact that the coast was clear. August had turned to September; the temperatures at night were almost always bitingly cold. I got out of my tent to pee, wearing my hat and gloves. When I scanned the trees with my headlamp, they caught on something, and I froze as the reflection of two bright pairs of eyes gazed back at me. I never found out whose they were. An instant later they were gone. The next day was hot and sunny, as if the strange storm the night before had been only a dream. I missed a fork in the trail and later discovered that I was no longer on the PCT but on the Oregon Skyline Trail, which paralleled the PCT roughly a mile to the west. It was an alternate route my guidebook detailed adequately, so I continued on, unworried. The trail would lead back to the PCT the next day. The day after that I’d be at Olallie Lake. Hop, skip, jump, done. I walked in a dense forest all afternoon, once rounding a bend to come upon a trio of enormous elks, who ran into the trees with a thunderous clamor of hooves. That evening, only moments after I stopped to make camp near a trailside pond, two bow hunters appeared, walking southbound down the trail. “You got any water?” one of them burst out immediately.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Ah!” I yelled when a hairy beast materialized in front of me on the trail, so close I could smell him. A bear, I realized a moment later. His eyes passed blandly over me before he snorted and reeled and ran northward up the trail. Why did they always have to run in the direction I was going? I waited a few minutes and then hiked on, picking my way trepidatiously along, belting out lines from songs. “Oh I could drink a case of youuuuu, darling, and I would still be on my feet,” I crooned loudly. “She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean …!” I growled. “Time out for tiny little tea leaves in Tetley Tea!” I chirped. It worked. I didn’t run into the bear again. Or Bigfoot. Instead, I came upon something I actually had to fear: a wide sheaf of icy snow covering the trail at a 40-degree angle. Hot as it was, not all the snow had melted off the north-facing slopes. I could see to the other side of the snow. I could practically throw a stone across it. But I couldn’t do the same with myself. I had to walk it. I looked down the mountain, my eyes following the course of the snow, should I slip and slide. It ended far below at a gathering of jagged boulders. Beyond them there was only air. I began to chip my way across, kicking each step with my boots, bracing myself with my ski pole. Instead of feeling more confident on the snow, given the experience I’d had with it in the Sierra, I felt more shaken, more aware of what could go wrong. One foot slipped out from beneath me and I fell onto my hands; slowly I stood again with my knees bent. I’m going to fall was the thought that came into my head, and with it I froze and looked down at the boulders below me, imagining myself careening into them. I looked at the place I’d come from and the place I was going, the two equidistant from me. I was too far from either, so I forced my way forward. I went down on my hands and crawled the rest of the way across, my legs shaking uncontrollably, my ski pole clanging along beside me, dangling from my wrist by its pink nylon strap.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Come back, then, to the Massachusetts coast in October 1991. The wind from the west, the storm from the north, and the hurricane from the southeast —they are all converging on a single point. This is not the place to be, not the time to be out on the open sea. Now think of the Middle East in the first century. There was a gale, there was a storm, and there was a hurricane. And Jesus was caught in the middle of it all. The Roman Storm The gale blowing steadily from the far west was the new social, political, and (not least) military reality of the day. The new superpower. The name on everyone’s lips, the reality on everyone’s minds. Rome. Rome had been steadily increasing in power and prominence as a world force over the previous two or three hundred years. But until thirty years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, Rome had been a republic. An intricate system of checks and balances ensured that nobody could hold absolute power, and those who did have power didn’t have it very long. Rome had had tyrants many centuries before and was proud to have rid itself of them. But with Julius Caesar all that changed. “Caesar” was simply his family name, but Julius made it a royal title from that day on (the words “Kaiser” and “Tsar” are variations on “Caesar”). A great military hero out on the frontiers, he did the unthinkable: he brought his army back to Rome itself and established his own power and prestige there. It seems that he even allowed people to think he was divine. The traditionalists were furious, and they assassinated him. But this threw Rome into a long and bloody civil war from which one winner emerged, Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian. He took the title “Augustus,” which means “majestic” or “worthy of honor.” This, along with “Caesar,” became the name or title of his successors as well. He declared that his adoptive father, Julius, had indeed become divine; this meant that he, Augustus Octavian Caesar, was now officially “son of god,” “son of the divine Julius.” If you’d asked anybody in the Roman Empire, from Germany to Egypt, from Spain to Syria, who the “son of god” might be, the obvious answer, the politically correct answer, would have been “Octavian.” In a world where mainstream religion was emphatically a branch of the state, Augustus took the senior priestly roles.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  One night, when I/Jie went to her bedside and asked who I/she was, Ma took out her fist from under the pillow and punched me/her in the throat, that tender cage where our thirsts perch. She said, You sound different in pain. It’s true: Jie wails like some wounded animal. I go silent, as if the wound is an ear that will eavesdrop on me. In the dark, I pretend it is Jie’s voice saying my husband’s name. It’s her salt in the sweat we make. I am the mattress, the moon, below and above myself. It’s only at the moment of pain that my sister and I individuate. That I’m brought back to my body, reminded it is mine. _ During the week, Ma sews wholesale skirts in the downtown garment district, which I once imagined was an actual city made of garments. Giant scarves for crosswalks, sweaters on all the trees. But no trees here. In Arkansas, I saw rows of cows rigged to machines, their milk pumped like gasoline. We miss the fields fizzing with our piss, the taro we raised behind the church, the rain fucking our mouths full of a sky’s salt. Ma says the factories are worse than farms, where at least a cow could shit whenever it wanted. No bathroom breaks for the ladies. One time Ma pissed herself and got yelled at, so she started bringing jars to keep under the table. It’s hard to aim and run the needle at the same time, but Ma’s always been coordinated. She can drum my sister and me at the same time, each hand keeping a different beat. Ma says we have to learn quick in this city. Jie got robbed at gunpoint her first week here, working the cashier at the electronics store. It was a Chinese boy with half a beard, the left side. The boy spoke a dialect we’d heard only in movies. We wondered what part he was playing. Jie thought about playing dead, splaying on the vinyl floor until he left. Kept wondering why the boy only had the left side of his beard. When the bullet spent itself into the wall behind her, it burrowed there like some nest bird. Ma says, God took a big breath and blew the bullet around your head. Jie says the boy was so stupid, he wouldn’t have been able to shoot the sky. Still, I saw Jie pray that night. She got off the bed and onto her knees, her hair curtaining the bright theater of her teeth. I asked if she was crying. She wiped her nose on my arm and punched me off the bed. On weekends, Ma cleans houses. You’ve never even cleaned your own room. You blame your brother for the stains on the mattress, but I see you pissing in your sleep too, both of you born with so many leaks, a lineage of them.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  15:1–20), the question of whether Jesus and his followers are being loyal to Israel’s law is a question about whether Jesus is a true teacher or a false one. The law is quite specific (at least, as interpreted by the stricter minds of the day); if Jesus and his followers are transgressing it, that shows that they are on the wrong track, and that Jesus’s claim to be announcing and indeed spearheading God’s kingdom movement must be false, deluded, or perhaps even demonic. This is a decidedly political as well as a religious charge. And this in turn explains once more why Jesus only gives a cryptic answer in public and waits until he is in private before saying the truly explosive thing—that what you eat is irrelevant for genuine purity. That is tantamount to burning a flag or spray-painting a revolutionary slogan on a palace wall. No wonder he had to say it in private. In the second case too (Mark 10:1–12; Matt. 19:1–12), the stakes are high. The question of divorce is no abstract ethical problem. I remember once being asked by a reporter for my views on marriage and divorce—at just about the same time that Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, was getting a divorce from Princess Diana. I remember thinking at the time that an “innocent” question about divorce and remarriage posed by a journalist to a churchman in the middle 1990s was no more “innocent” than the Pharisees’ question to Jesus. Mark and Matthew both locate the incident in question in “the districts of Judaea across the Jordan.” Memories are stirred. That was where John had been baptizing. That was where John had denounced Herod Antipas for taking his brother’s wife. To ask the question about divorce in that setting was no mere theoretical enquiry. It was inviting Jesus to incriminate himself, to say something that might lead Antipas to do to Jesus what he’d done to John. Jesus sticks to scripture, which they can hardly fault. But in doing so he demonstrates that he is speaking from a world in which God, becoming king on earth as in heaven, is transforming the very hearts of human beings as part of his project of new creation. Jesus’s hearers, thinking from within a world where the legislation for the hard-hearted still applies, cannot even recognize the kingdom when it is breaking in right there in their midst.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  There was, after all, no obvious model for what it might look like, how it might happen, that YHWH would do what all those psalms and prophets said and come in person to take charge, ruling the world, rescuing Israel, establishing his presence in the Temple, judging the nations, and causing the trees and the animals to shout for joy. The ancient scriptures are quite unhelpful on the matter. When YHWH visits Abraham, Abraham sees three men and entertains them at a meal. When YHWH meets Moses, what Moses sees is a burning bush. When, later, YHWH guides Moses and the Israelites through the desert, what they see is a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. When YHWH reveals his glory to the prophet Isaiah, all Isaiah tells us (in his terror) is that YHWH was high and lifted up, surrounded by angels, with the hem of his robe filling the Temple. Was that, we wonder, what was meant when, in the same book, we are told that the sentinels would shout for joy as in plain sight they saw YHWH returning to Zion? Was that what was meant when it said, “The glory of YHWH will be revealed, and all people shall see it together” (Isa. 40:5)? When Ezekiel saw the glory of YHWH, all he offered by way of a description was a strange account of YHWH’s chariot-throne, with its whirling wheels darting this way and that. Which of these models, if any, ought one to expect? Or would it be something different? The notion of YHWH himself as Israel’s true king thus became closely bound up with the idea of his powerful return. At the time of the exile, it was widely believed that Israel’s God had abandoned the Temple and the city of Jerusalem, leaving them to their fate. (How else, people reasoned, could they have fallen?) Ezekiel saw the glory depart because of the people’s wickedness (chaps. 10–11). But then, toward the end of his majestic book, he was given another vision of YHWH’s glory returning to the newly rebuilt Temple (43:1–5). For Isaiah and Ezekiel, then, not only would Israel return to its land, but YHWH would return to the Temple. That is at the heart of the vision of King YHWH in Isaiah 52. And that, we may suppose, is what devout Jews hoped and prayed for as they sang all those psalms about YHWH becoming king, taking charge at last, rescuing his people, and bringing justice to the world. But it hadn’t happened yet—or not as far as the prophets after the exile were concerned. Yes, they had returned from Babylon to Judaea. Yes, they had rebuilt the Temple. But YHWH had not returned to fill the house once more with his glory. The last two prophets in the canon both promise that he will indeed come, but this makes it all the clearer that he has not yet done so:

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  (7:15–18) Then I desired to know the truth concerning the fourth beast, which was different from all the rest, exceedingly terrifying, with its teeth of iron and claws of bronze, and which devoured and broke in pieces, and stamped what was left with its feet; and concerning the ten horns that were on its head, and concerning the other horn, which came up and to make room for which three of them fell out—the horn that had eyes and a mouth that spoke arrogantly, and that seemed greater than the others. As I looked, this horn made war with the holy ones and was prevailing over them, until the Ancient One came; then judgment was given for the holy ones of the Most High, and the time arrived when the holy ones gained possession of the kingdom. This is what he said: “As for the fourth beast, there shall be a fourth kingdom on earth that shall be different from all the other kingdoms; it shall devour the whole earth, and trample it down, and break it to pieces . As for the ten horns, out of this kingdom ten kings shall arise and another shall arise after them. This one shall be different from the former ones, and shall put down three kings. He shall speak words against the Most High, shall wear out the holy ones of the Most High, and shall attempt to change the sacred seasons and the law; and they shall be given into his power for a time, two times, and a half a time. Then the court shall sit in judgment and his dominion shall be taken away, to be consumed and totally destroyed. The kingship and dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the holy ones of the Most High; their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey them.” (7:19–27) From these it becomes clear, in case it wasn’t already, that the “monsters” or “beasts” are pagan kingdoms, who—especially the final king of the final kingdom—will rage against God’s people. But then, in a great heavenly court scene, God will take his seat and pronounce judgment, which will result in God’s people, “the holy ones of the Most High,” being vindicated and themselves being given “the kingdom” (7:18, 22, 27). The figure who is seen, in the original vision, as “one like a son of man”—one, in other words, like a human being—is to be interpreted as a symbol for the whole faithful people of God, the people who will be rescued and vindicated. But how will this happen?

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Up until this point, Anwen and Sameer’s story was relentlessly, depressingly ordinary, the kind of episode that happens at high school parties and college campuses every Saturday night. Then, at the beginning of his sophomore year, as part of training to become a student orientation leader, Sameer attended a presentation by a representative of Green Dot, a program that instructs students on how to intervene and defuse situations that could potentially lead to “power-based violence.” “The person was talking about how assault wasn’t only physical force,” Sameer recalled. “It could be emotional manipulation and coercing someone into a sexual act. It could be putting someone in a situation where they didn’t feel like they could say no. And right away, I remembered that night. I thought, Did I do that? Does Anwen see it that way? If she does, why hasn’t she reported me? I was terrified. I was terrified that I’d assaulted her. I was terrified that I’d hurt her. I was terrified of what would happen if she reported it. And I was terrified because, if this was true, then who was I?” Much of his immediate reaction, Sameer said, centered on what could happen to him if Anwen filed a complaint—expulsion, maybe jail—but over the next year, he began to engage in some serious soul-searching. He attended another, longer Green Dot training and successfully lobbied to make the program mandatory for new recruits to his frat. He read whatever he could find about consent and healthy sexual interactions. Eventually, he took courses on human sexuality and romantic relationships. He talked to his female friends about their experiences, too. He began to recognize that most assault didn’t happen between strangers. In retrospect, he was also pretty sure Anwen was not the only girl he’d harmed. The following fall, Anwen, too, became an orientation leader. One night, as Sameer was walking back from an event he had staffed, he heard her call his name from the shadows. It was the first time they’d spoken in over a year. He turned toward her, his heart pounding. “Can we talk?” she said. “Sure.” They went to a quiet spot and sat on the ground, chatted uncomfortably for a few minutes. Then, “I want to talk about that night,” she said. “Just to clarify, you mean the night you came home with me?” She nodded. “Yes. I want you to name it.” Sameer hugged his knees to his chest. He rocked back and forth. He tried to speak, but nothing came out. He tried again and croaked. “Rape.” Relief flooded Anwen. She wasn’t crazy. This had really happened. But she said, “I wouldn’t call it rape”—although she’d later learn that, according to their school’s conduct code, it was—“I’d call it sexual assault.” A moment later, she added, “I forgive you.”

• From Wild (2012)

  Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. Oprah’s note: I just love that line for all the obvious reasons. So much of who we are is born of the story we tell ourselves. Cheryl’s courage is born of a different story. That’s what was so exciting to me. Most people are stuck in the same story they’ve been telling themselves since they were ten years old. Click here to return to the text. What a mountain was and what a desert was were not the only things I had not expected. I hadn’t expected the flesh on my tailbone and hips and the fronts of my shoulders to bleed. Oprah’s note: As I continued to read this book, I realized what a wuss-puss I am. For me, this kind of pain is all the more reason to turn back. But for Cheryl, the trip was about reclaiming herself. If she gives up on the trip, she gives up on herself. Click here to return to the text. The one for whom behind every hot pair of boots or sexy little skirt or flourish of the hair there was a trapdoor that led to the least true version of me. Now there was only one version. On the PCT I had no choice but to inhabit it entirely, to show my grubby face to the whole wide world. Oprah’s note: This passage represents a shift in identity for Cheryl. Until this point, she was an idea of who she should be. The PCT stripped her raw—down to who she really was. I loved it because it shows her getting to the core of who she really is. Click here to return to the text. I was soothed by their company. Being near Tom and Doug at night kept me from having to say to myself I am not afraid whenever I heard a branch snap in the dark or the wind shook so fiercely it seemed like something bad was bound to happen. But I wasn’t out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I’d come, I realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really—all that I’d done to myself and all that had been done to me. I couldn’t do that while tagging along with someone else. Oprah’s note: This is the definition of real courage to me: to stand in the face of fear and stare it down. Click here to return to the text.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “Don’t kill me, Rufus,” he heard himself say. “I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m only trying to help.” The bathroom door was still open and the light still burned. The bald kitchen light burned mercilessly down on the two orange crates and the board which formed the kitchen table, and on the uncovered wash and bathtub. Dirty clothes lay flung in a corner. Beyond them, in the dim bedroom, two suitcases, Rufus’ and Leona’s, lay open in the middle of the floor. On the bed was a twisted gray sheet and a thin blanket. Rufus stared at him. He seemed not to believe Vivaldo; he seemed to long to believe him. His face twisted, he dropped the knife, and fell against Vivaldo, throwing his arms around him, trembling. Vivaldo led him into the bedroom and they sat down on the bed. “Somebody’s got to help me,” said Rufus at last, “somebody’s got to help me. This shit has got to stop.” “Can’t you tell me about it? You’re screwing up your life. And I don’t know why.” Rufus sighed and fell back, his arms beneath his head, staring at the ceiling. “I don’t know, either. I don’t know up from down. I don’t know what I’m doing no more.” The entire building was silent. The room in which they sat seemed very far from the life breathing all around them, all over the island. Vivaldo said, gently, “You know, what you’re doing to Leona—that’s not right. Even if she were doing what you say she’s doing—it’s not right. If all you can do is beat her, well, then, you ought to leave her.” Rufus seemed to smile. “I guess there is something the matter with my head.” Then he was silent again; he twisted his body on the bed; he looked over at Vivaldo. “You put her in a cab?” “Yes,” Vivaldo said. “She’s gone to your place?” “Yes.” “You going back there?” “I thought, maybe, I’d stay here with you for awhile—if you don’t mind.” “What’re you trying to do—be a warden or something?” He said it with a smile, but there was no smile in his voice. “I just thought maybe you wanted company,” said Vivaldo. Rufus rose from the bed and walked restlessly up and down the two rooms.

• From Wild (2012)

  Hell, I thought. Bloody hell. I took out my ice ax and studied my course, which really only meant standing there for several minutes working up the nerve. I could see that Doug and Tom had made it across, their tracks a series of potholes in the snow. I held my ice ax the way Greg had taught me and stepped into one of the potholes. Its existence made my life both harder and easier. I didn’t have to chip my own steps, but those of the men were awkwardly placed and slippery and sometimes so deep that my boot got trapped inside and I’d lose my balance and fall, my ice ax so unwieldy it felt more like a burden than an aid. Arrest, I kept thinking, imagining what I’d do with the ax if I started to slide down the slope. The snow was different from the snow in Minnesota. In some places it was more ice than flake, so densely packed it reminded me of the hard layer of ice in a freezer that needs defrosting. In other places it gave way, slushier than it first appeared. I didn’t look at the bank of boulders below until I’d reached the other side of the snow and was standing on the muddy trail, trembling but glad. I knew that little jaunt was only a sample of what lay ahead. If I didn’t opt to get off the trail at Trail Pass to bypass the snow, I’d soon reach Forester Pass, at 13,160 feet the highest point on the PCT. And if I didn’t slip off the side of the mountain while going over that pass, I’d spend the next several weeks crossing nothing but snow. It would be snow far more treacherous than the patch I’d just crossed, but having crossed even this much made what lay ahead more real to me. It told me that I had no choice but to bypass. I wasn’t rightly prepared to be on the PCT in a regular year, let alone a year in which the snow depth measurements were double and triple what they’d been the year before. There hadn’t been a winter as snowy as the previous one since 1983, and there wouldn’t be another for more than a dozen years.

• From Wild (2012)

  The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer—and yet also, like most things, so very simple—was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay. As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull was coming back, I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go. The bull, I acknowledged grimly, could be in either direction, since I hadn’t seen where he’d run once I closed my eyes. I could only choose between the bull that would take me back and the bull that would take me forward. And so I walked on. It took all I had to cover nine miles a day. To cover nine miles a day was a physical achievement far beyond anything I’d ever done. Every part of my body hurt. Except my heart. I saw no one, but, strange as it was, I missed no one. I longed for nothing but food and water and to be able to put my backpack down. I kept carrying my backpack anyway. Up and down and around the dry mountains, where Jeffrey pines and black oaks lined the trail, crossing jeep roads that bore the tracks of big trucks, though none were in sight.

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

  So my fainting, we all agreed, was emotional self-indulgence. And in my last year in the order, my body did indeed seem to be staging a rebellion all its own. I wept uncontrollably, convulsed more by anger than grief. I found it impossible to keep my food down, suffered such severe nosebleeds that I had to have a vein cauterized, and . . . I fainted. It was as though my whole physical self had risen in protest and demanded that I take notice, telling me that however much I might want to stay in the convent, something was badly wrong. Finally, in the refectory of our convent in Harrogate, where I had been sent for the long vacation, I had given up the battle and succumbed to a breakdown. It was only logical to assume that there had been unconscious tension all along, which had finally and irrevocably surfaced and taken me out of the religious life. And now I was out in the world. I was no longer struggling to conform to a way of life for which I was not suited. I was free, fortunate, privileged to be attending one of the finest universities in the world, and even though I was having some trouble adjusting, I was now on the mend. Wasn’t I? So why were the symptoms recurring, as though my body had not been informed that the battle was over? Why was it behaving in the same old way? I was not kneeling in a convent chapel this time, but sitting in a pleasant library in Merton College. The room was full but not unduly crowded; it was not stuffy, even on this warm summer day. The tall leaded windows were open and a light, fragrant breeze wafted into the room, gently lifting the threadbare curtains. I was listening to John Jones’s lectures on nineteenth-century England, enjoying the slightly eccentric cast of his mind and his delightful command of the language, when the familiar stench choked me, the voice of the lecturer became a confused babble of meaningless sound, the light in the room looked suddenly uncanny, there was a moment of pure terror, and then I felt myself falling down that familiar narrow shaft. When I opened my eyes, I was conscious of a hard band of pain across my forehead; the brown blur in front of me composed itself into the grain of a polished wood floor. I groaned and rolled over onto my stomach to try to blot out the world for a few more minutes.

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

  But one night, the world broke apart again. It was early evening and I was tired, having stayed up most of the previous night to write my essay. This weekly essay crisis, as we called it, was a feature of Oxford life. Throughout the college, lights burned all through the night as students scribbled earnestly, trying to get their piece finished in time. Since leaving the convent, I had fallen into this weekly ritual and in a perverse way quite enjoyed it. There was something rather magical about sitting alone in the lamplight, surrounded by darkness and absolute stillness. Occasionally there would be a gentle scratching on the door, and Rosemary or Charlotte, whose essay night coincided with my own, would peer cautiously round the door, and we would have a midnight coffee break before returning to our books. The next day I felt hollow and depleted, but triumphant, and I used to revel in the post-tutorial euphoria: essay done, duly praised, and a lovely fresh assignment beckoning me invitingly into the next week. But on this particular occasion, my eyes prickled with fatigue. Suddenly I found myself invaded by the familiar stench, but this time it was different. My brain felt as though a cosmic potato masher was pounding it, reducing it to long worms of sensation like spaghetti, but spaghetti that was alive. I could hear a bell ringing mournfully in the distance and I was convinced that somebody was standing beside me. I could almost glimpse his face out of the corner of my eye. An aged, senile mask with empty eyes. Some part of me knew that there was nobody there, and that if I reached out to touch him my hand would encounter empty air. And yet I could not connect this knowledge with the specter because it had its own reality, its own absolutely commanding presence. I had no leisure to think about this, because I was gripped suddenly with a quite overwhelming fear. When I looked around me, the room was wholly unfamiliar, as though I had never seen any of these objects before. The world had become uncanny and horrifying. I did not know who, what, or where I was, but was aware only of my extreme terror, a cold, sickening dread that made everything around me seem brown, rotten, and repulsive because it had no meaning.

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

  If I could write good, competent essays about Chaucer or Shakespeare, my mind might not be irretrievably damaged. I could still think logically and coherently, if not originally. The more I read and studied, the more competent work I produced, the easier it was to believe that I was not completely mad and that one day I might be able to make my way in the world as an ordinary person. If I could stay forever in the nice secure realm of scholarship, doing a little teaching or writing the occasional article on Emily Brontë or Wordsworth, I might be able to keep my demons at bay. Besides turning me into a solitary, these attacks of fear dealt yet another blow to my already wavering faith. No, I did not imagine that I had seen Satan during these visitations and knew very well that the evil I sensed had no metaphysical existence but was simply the product of my own mind. But these visions got me thinking. In an age that was less scientific than our own, it would surely have been natural to conclude that the ghostly, senile presence that I sensed with hallucinatory intensity was a real, diabolic personality. Poets and mystics had often spoken of the foul stench of hell. Almost certainly, hell was simply the creation of infirm minds like my own. There was no objective evidence to support such a belief. That was a wonderful and liberating thought, but what if God was also a mental aberration? The ecstatic, celestial visions of the saints could be just as fantastic as my own infernal sensations. What we called God could also be a disease, the invention of a mind that had momentarily lost its bearings. I was slightly dismayed to find that this idea did not trouble me overmuch. If there were no God, then much of my life had been nonsense, and I should, surely, have felt more upset. But then, God had never been a real presence to me. He had been so consistently absent that he might just as well not exist. Perhaps I should just leave the church and have done with it. Father Geoffrey Preston, a benign Dominican at Blackfriars in St. Giles, urged me not to make too hasty a decision. I had started to attend Mass at Blackfriars on the recommendation of one of my tutors, who was also recovering from an unhappy Catholic past and sometimes looked as though she had barely survived the struggle. She had recommended the family Mass at Blackfriars on Sunday morning, and I found that it was indeed a cheerful, imaginative liturgy, geared to the needs of children, who could crawl or run around the church freely and, within reason, make as much noise as they liked. My tutor also advised me to talk to Geoffrey.

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

  Traditional boundaries and markers had come down, and many lacked a clear sense of identity. In America such people followed Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson; in Iran they turned to Ayatollah Khomeini. In Britain they voted for Margaret Thatcher, who became prime minister on May 4, 1979. Margaret Thatcher went into Downing Street with the prayer of Saint Francis on her lips: “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.” In fact, she was highly combative and played on tabloid fears of internal decay. In her very first press conference, she issued a ringing attack on those “who gnaw away at our self-respect, rewriting British history as centuries of gloom, oppression, and failure.” She was going to put the “Great” back into Great Britain. To many she seemed the answer to the long decline of the seventies, but to me she was a symbol of the dangers of certainty. With her hectoring rhetoric, upholstered, buttoned-up clothes, rigidly upswept hair, and unfaltering propriety, she seemed to epitomize an attitude of unquestioned and unquestioning superiority. I remembered my flickering distaste when confronted with certainty in the person of poor, ineffective Miss Franklin. But watching Mrs. Thatcher, I knew that I wanted no such certainty in my own life. Under the influence of Thatcherism, British people became preoccupied by money as never before; some prospered, but others were impoverished. For the first time, large numbers of homeless men and women started sleeping rough on the streets of London. An underpass near Waterloo station, where people erected shelters out of boxes, became known as Cardboard City; there was a soup kitchen for the destitute on the South Bank. In the Middle East, religious certainty led to such atrocities as the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in October 1981; in Britain, Thatcher’s economic and political certainty had pushed people onto the streets. As far as I could see, certainty made people heartless, cruel, and inhuman. It closed their minds to new possibilities; it made them complacent and pleased with themselves. It also did not work. The new regime in Iran seemed just as oppressive as that of the shah, the murder of Sadat did not lead to a new era in Egypt, and Thatcherism too would prove to be an expensive mistake. This type of certainty was unrealistic, and out of step with the way things really worked. Religious people seemed particularly prone to this dogmatism, and even though there was nothing remotely religious or Christian about Mrs. Thatcher’s regime, the experience of living in “Maggie’s Britain” made me even more leery of faith, dogmatism, and orthodoxy, which so often— even in a good cause—made people ride roughshod over other people’s sensitivities. That kind of certainty had damaged me in the past, and I wanted no more of it.

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

  And yet, of course, it wasn’t like that at all. I am trying to describe an experience that has nothing whatever to do with words or ideas and is not amenable to the logic of grammar and neat sentences that put things into an order that makes sense. Maybe I could explain it better if I were a poet. But I am sure that this is the kind of horror that Hieronymus Bosch tried to convey in his paintings. It is as though a comforting veil of illusion has been ripped away and you see the world without form, without significance, purposeless, blind, trivial, spiteful, and ugly to the core. T. S. Eliot describes something similar in the third poem of Ash-Wednesday. He is climbing a spiral staircase, a mythical image of the ascent of the mind and heart to spiritual enlightenment. But “at the first turning of the second stair” he sees a shape twisted into the banister, surrounded by vaporous, fetid air, and he is forced to struggle with “the devil of the stairs.” He leaves these convoluted forms behind, and at the next turning finds only darkness: “Damp, jaggèd, like an old man’s mouth drivelling beyond repair, / Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark,” the underbelly of consciousness that lurks in the basement of all our minds. When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is “really” there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience is stripped away, so you can never respond to the world in quite the same way again. The revelation remains embedded in your soul and affects everything you feel and everything you see. But when you try to express this vision in words, you inevitably distort it and find yourself writing purple, melodramatic prose. Better to be as simple as Coleridge, when he describes the recurrent terror of the ancient mariner after his ordeal, which makes him feel Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread. The words are flat, and the image of the “frightful fiend” deliberately banal, but the simple description of a fear that is constantly beside you but just out of reach captures the sensation exactly.

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

  The thesis was my passport to a job and a career, an earnest of my survival in a world that had once seemed so impossibly alien. I watched the girl behind the post office grille slap on the stamps and the registration forms. Then she put the parcel in a pile at the end of the room, whence they would be conveyed to Oxford. In some bewilderment, I stared around the art gallery. A student was copying William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay, and one or two other people were strolling round the Tate’s Pre-Raphaelite exhibits. I was stiff, as though I had been sitting for some time in an uncomfortable position. I got up and stretched. In front of me, John William Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott reared up in her fragile little boat. Her tapestry, the fruit of so much dedicated toil, floated away downstream, waterlogged, stained, and ruined. The lady’s face had already assumed the pallor of death and her skin looked as gray as the sky behind her—Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, who for so long had been my alter ego. She had tried to break out of her prison, as I had mine, but the effort had destroyed her. Waterhouse had caught the lady at the moment when she realized the folly of her rebellion. I shook my head hard and looked around the room again. On the other side of the gallery was John Millais’s Ophelia, who lay supine in the water. Having succumbed to madness, she too was about to die. Her hands were lifted slightly, as though she welcomed her fate; her expression was one of surrender. They were disturbing pictures, but that was not what was bothering me. My head was aching and my mind was foggy. I groped through the mists and suddenly—there it was. What on earth was I doing in the Tate? I was supposed to be in Greenwich with Richard and Jackie. We were taking a group of students to a matinee performance of Jean Genet’s The Maids. I looked at my watch. Too late: the play had started almost an hour ago. 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?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But imagine what it would be like if you’d lived for years and years under the vicious and repressive rule of a foreign tyrant. You have no system in place to change things. No elections are held, or if they are, they’re rigged from start to finish. And imagine that this takes place in a world without radio, TV, or printed media. The only way you hear about things is by rumor (often very effective, and sometimes remarkably accurate) or by some kind of public proclamation—perhaps as it finally filters down to your town, far away from the center of power. Proclamations would be used too to announce a change of ruler, but the continuation of the system. The old emperor dies, but the power brokers around him will take care that, before the bad news of his death is released, the good news of his successor is firmly in place. Then the heralds are sent off to provinces, cities, and towns across the whole empire, with a message that carries weight, authority, and a sense that this isn’t a new idea you might like to think about, but a new fact that you’d better get used to. “Good news—we have a new emperor!” So when Jesus was in his late teens, and the old emperor Augustus finally died after his four decades as master of the Western world, we can imagine Jesus, perhaps in the newly rebuilt city of Sepphoris, not far from Nazareth, being in the market square when the herald came in to read the proclamation. “Good news—Tiberius Caesar is emperor!” The herald might well be accompanied by a squad of soldiers, especially in potential trouble spots. Everybody knew then, as people who live under tyrannies today know equally well, that a change of ruler is a moment of vulnerability, a moment when a revolution could erupt. The reason Sepphoris had had to be rebuilt, perhaps with help from local carpenters such as Joseph and possibly even Jesus himself, was that it had been the center of a major anti- Roman revolt after the death of Herod the Great, and the Romans had smashed it to the ground. The proclamation of a new emperor, then, carried weight. It wasn’t a take-it-or-leave-it affair. It meant that Tiberius was now in charge—and that his local agents, with his backing, had to be obeyed. Or else. Celebration, Healing and Forgiveness So what about Jesus’s own kingdom announcement? His going around Galilee saying, like one of Caesar’s heralds, that God himself was now becoming king would be a poke in the eye for two people at least. In the north of the country, where Jesus was launching his campaign, there was Herod Antipas, one of the many sons of Herod the Great. Herod Antipas wasn’t particularly powerful, but, though the Romans hadn’t allowed him to keep his father’s title of “king of the Jews,” he was the nearest equivalent at the time.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  It’s like mustard seed, which starts small and grows to a great shrub for the birds to nest in; it’s like yeast mixed into dough, transforming the whole lump. And, in a solemn warning that resonates with many similar ones, Jesus warns his hearers that they may one day see Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets—and people from east and west, from north and south!—sitting down to eat in the kingdom of God, while they themselves will be thrown out (Luke 13:18–30). The time of Jesus’s public career is the time of fulfillment, the time through which God’s new creation, his earth-as-in-heaven new reality, is being launched, up close and personal. But this means it is possible to miss the boat, to lose the one chance. That is the warning that goes with the note of fulfillment. A New Creation The theme of new creation that bubbles up from these stories emerges in our third category: matter. Reality. The physical world in all its complexity and glory. Here today’s readers of the New Testament have to take an even deeper breath than before. We have been schooled to believe, as a bedrock principle in our worldview, that the material world is relentlessly and reductively subject to the laws of physics, chemistry, and the more specific sciences of astronomy, biology, zoology, botany, and the rest. But as with geography (space) and chronology (time), so here also the Jewish worldview begs to differ. The world of matter, no less than those of space and time, was made by the creator God. It was made not only to display his beauty and power, but also as a vessel for his glory. Again and again the prophets and psalms hint at what we might conceivably have guessed from the story of creation itself: the material world was made to be filled with God’s glory. “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of YHWH , as the waters cover the sea” (Hab. 2:14). Suppose that isn’t just an extravagant way of speaking? Suppose it means what it says? What prevents us from thinking in these terms, I believe, is the long and often unrecognized triumph of the movement called Deism—a modern version of the ancient philosophy called Epicureanism. As long as we are thinking in that way, with God or the gods a long way away and earth trundling on entirely by its own steam, we will never glimpse that vision. As long as we are still in awe of the great Scottish philosopher David Hume, who declared that miracles don’t happen because they can’t happen, we will not only find it difficult to believe in the ancient Jewish worldview.