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 363 of 529 · 20 per page

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

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

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

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

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Two and two is four, five and five is ten, earth, air, fire, water, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, Meocene, Pleocene, Eocene, the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, red, blue, yellow, the sorrel, the persimmon, the pawpaw, the catalpa . . . faster and faster . . . Odin, Wotan, Parsifal, King Alfred, Frederick the Great, the Hanseatic League, the Battle of Hastings, Thermopylae, 1492, 1776, 1812, Admiral Farragut, Pickett’s charge, The Light Brigade, we are gathered here today, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not, one and indivisible, no, 16, no, 27, help! murder! police!—and yelling louder and louder and going faster and faster I go completely off my nut and there is no more pain, no more terror, even though they are piercing me everywhere with knives. Suddenly I am absolutely calm and the body which is lying on the block, which they are still gouging with glee and ecstasy, feels nothing because I, the owner of it, have escaped. I have become a tower of stone which leans over the scene and watches with scientific interest. I have only to succumb to the law of gravity and I will fall on them and obliterate them. But I do not succumb to the law of gravity because I am too fascinated by the horror of it all. I am so fascinated, in fact, that I grow more and more windows. And as the light penetrates the stone interior of my being I can feel that my roots, which are in the earth, are alive and that I shall one day be able to remove myself at will from this trance in which I am fixed. So much for the dream, in which I am helplessly rooted. But in actuality, when the dear uterine relatives come, I am as free as a bird and darting to and fro like a magnetic needle. If they ask me a question I give them five answers, each of which is better than the other; if they ask me to play a waltz I play a double-breasted sonata for the left hand; if they ask me to help myself to another leg of chicken I clean up the plate, dressing and all; if they urge me to go out and play in the street I go out and in my enthusiasm I cut my cousin’s head open with a tin can; if they threaten to give me a thrashing I say go to it, I don’t mind! If they pat me on the head for my good progress at school I spit on the floor to show that I have still something to learn. I do everything they wish me to do plus .

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  But Avery Jenkins’s letters, handwritten in print so small I needed a magnifying glass to read them, convinced me that he had been very ill for a long time. I looked up his case and began to piece together his story. It turned out he’d been convicted of the very disturbing and brutal murder of an older man. The multiple stab wounds inflicted on the victim strongly suggested mental illness, but the court records and files never referenced anything about Jenkins suffering from a disability. I thought I’d find out more by meeting him in person. When I pulled into the prison parking lot, I noticed a pickup truck there that looked like a shrine to the Old South: It was completely covered with disturbing bumper stickers, Confederate flag decals, and other troubling images. Confederate flag license plates are everywhere in the South, but some of the bumper stickers were new to me. A lot were about guns and Southern identity. One read, I F I ’D KNOWN IT WAS GOING TO BE LIKE THIS, I ’D HAVE PICKED MY OWN DAMN COTTON . Despite growing up around images of the Confederate South and working in the Deep South for many years, I was pretty shaken by the symbols. I’d always been especially interested in the post-Reconstruction era of American history. My grandmother was the daughter of people who were enslaved. She was born in Virginia in the 1880s, after federal troops had been withdrawn and a reign of violence and terror had begun, designed to deny any political or social rights for African Americans. Her father told her stories of how the recently emancipated black people were essentially re-enslaved by former Confederate officers and soldiers, who used violence, intimidation, lynching, and peonage to keep African Americans subordinate and marginalized. My grandmother’s parents were deeply embittered by how the promise of freedom and equality following slavery ended when white Southern Democrats reclaimed political power through violence. Terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan cloaked themselves in the symbols of the Confederate South to intimidate and victimize thousands of black people. Nothing unnerved rural black settlements more than rumors about nearby Klan activity. For a hundred years, any sign of black progress in the South could trigger a white reaction that would invariably invoke Confederate symbols and talk of resistance. Confederate Memorial Day was declared a state holiday in Alabama at the turn of the century, soon after whites rewrote the state constitution to ensure white supremacy. (The holiday is still celebrated today.) When black veterans returned to the South after World War II, Southern politicians formed a “Dixiecrat” bloc to preserve racial segregation and white domination out of fear that military service might encourage black veterans to question racial segregation.

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

  In this case obscurity is not to be ascribed to the large shadow of the lex Iulia and the creeping infl uence of iniuria, but rather to the inher- ent limits of Roman institutions. Th e lex Scantinia, the sources agree, was fearsome in the penalties it laid down. Th e Sentences of Paul describes the penalties for sexual passivity around AD 300. “Whoever of his own volition  FROM SHAME TO SIN submits to fl agitious and impure violation will be deprived of half of his property, nor is he allowed to make a testament disposing of a greater por- tion of his estate.” Th is information is transmitted under the text’s section on the lex Iulia. It has been argued, not unreasonably, that the lex Scantinia established criminal penalties for male sexual receptivity, possibly a fi xed fi ne, which the lex Iulia modifi ed with a sliding scale. All we can say is that from the early to the late empire the lex Scantinia is spoken of as a rule not quite in desuetude but never energetically applied. It was a legal loup- garou, haunting enough, even if verifi ed sightings were rare.  Th e economic punishments of the lex Scantinia were, in fact, probably not the most eff ective or worrisome legal impositions faced by men who played the passive role in sex. Men who “submitted to the female role” were stigmatized by the civil disabilities of infamia, offi cial disrepute. Th e concept of infamia truly places us at the vital interface of social reputation and public order. In the early days of Rome, in an agrarian, militaristic society, it is likely that the censors who controlled access to voting and to public offi ce could strike men guilty of sexual deviance from the ranks of the eligible. Censorian infamia, this primitive maintenance of the circle of honor, can be pieced together only from later clues because it disappeared, ineluctably, with the transformation of Roman society into a vast, urbanized, civilian society. But the use of infamia survived into the imperial period. Never a perfectly systematic concept, infamia entailed civil disabilities, especially limits on the ability to hold offi ce or to access public legal remedies. If we judge sim- ply by the legal debris that survive in the late codifi cations of Roman law, infamia appears to have relatively little bite. In fact, the only specifi c dis- ability that we can be sure was applied to men who willingly submitted to sexual penetration was the ineligibility to apply to a public magistrate on someone else’s behalf. Th is deprivation may have be an ominous sign of other incapacities, but it is not in itself the most insidious form of stigmatization ever contrived.  Th e dispositions against male sexual passivity in the classical law are strikingly few and general.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  She was rather shocked to find us in the raw, but we soon tumbled her out of the canoe and stripped her. And then the three of us began to play tag under the water, but it was hard to get anywhere with them because they were slippery as eels. After we had had enough of it we ran to a little bathhouse which was standing in the field like an abandoned sentry box. We had brought our clothes along and we were going to get dressed, the three of us, in this little box. It was frightfully hot and sultry and the clouds were gathering for a storm. Agnes—that was Francie’s friend—was in a hurry to get dressed. She was beginning to be ashamed of herself standing there naked in front of us. Francie, on the other hand, seemed to be perfectly at ease. She was sitting on the bench with her legs crossed and smoking a cigarette. Anyway, just as Agnes was pulling on her chemise there came a flash of lightning and a terrifying clap of thunder right on the heels of it. Agnes screamed and dropped her chemise. There came another flash in a few seconds and again a peal of thunder, dangerously close. The air got blue all around us and the flies began to bite and we felt nervous and itchy and a bit panicky too. Especially Agnes who was afraid of the lightning and even more afraid of being found dead and the three of us stark naked. She wanted to get her things on and run for the house, she said. And just as she got that off her chest the rain came down, in bucketsful. We thought it would stop in a few minutes and so we stood there naked looking out at the steaming river through the partly opened door. It seemed to be raining rocks and the lightning kept playing around us incessantly. We were all thoroughly frightened now and in a quandary as to what to do. Agnes was wringing her hands and praying out loud; she looked like a George Grosz idiot, one of those lopsided bitches with a rosary around the neck and yellow jaundice to boot. I thought she was going to faint on us or something. Suddenly I got the bright idea of doing a war dance in the rain—to distract them. Just as I jump out to commence my shindig a streak of lightning flashes and splits open a tree not far off. I’m so damned scared that I lose my wits. Always when I’m frightened I laugh. So I laughed, a wild, bloodcurdling laugh which made the girls scream. When I heard them scream, I don’t know why, but I thought of the velocity exercises, and with that I felt that I was standing in the void and it was blue all around and the rain was beating a hot-and-cold tattoo on my tender flesh.

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

  A common technique among religious cults is to instruct people to ask God what He wants them to do. Members are exhorted to study and pray in order to know God’s will for them. It is always implied that joining the group is God’s will and leaving the group is betraying God. Of course, if a person tells the cult leader, “I prayed, and God told me to leave,” this will not be accepted. Perhaps the most powerful persuasion is exerted by other cult members. For the average person, talking with an indoctrinated cultist is quite an experience. You’ll probably never meet anyone else who is so absolutely convinced that they know what is best for you. A dedicated cult member also does not take no for an answer, because they have been indoctrinated to believe that if you don’t join, either you are evil or they are to blame. This creates a lot of pressure on them to succeed. When someone is completely surrounded by such people, group psychology plays a major role in the changing process. People are deliberately organized into specific small groups, or cells. People who ask too many questions are quickly isolated from the main body of other members. In the Moonies, we would set up teams at the beginning of a workshop to evaluate the recruits. We would divide them into sheep and goats, and assign them to groups accordingly. The sheep were the ones who were “spiritually prepared.” Goats were stubborn individualists who were not expected to make good members. If they couldn’t be broken, their “negativity” was safely confined to a goat team where sheep couldn’t see it, and they could be asked to leave. (After I left the Moonies, I was amazed to learn that entirely different cults were doing the same thing. I thought “The Family” had invented the technique.) But the changing process involves much more than obedience to a cult’s authority figures. It also includes numerous “sharing” sessions with other ordinary members, where past evils are confessed, present success stories are told, and a sense of community is fostered. These group sessions are very effective in teaching conformity, because the group vigorously reinforces certain behaviors by effusive praise and acknowledgement, while punishing non-group ideas and behaviors with icy silence. Human beings have an incredible capacity to adapt to new environments. Charismatic cult leaders know how to exploit this strength. By controlling a person’s environment, using behavior modification to reward some behaviors and suppress others, and inducing hypnotic states, they may indeed reprogram a person’s identity. Once a person has been fully broken down through the process of changing, they are ready for the next step. Refreezing

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

  After a couple of months of fundraising on a model team in Pennsylvania, I was put in charge of all fundraising in Baltimore. My regional commander ordered me to have each member bring in a minimum of $100 a day, even if it meant staying up all night to reach that goal. I had a team of eight inexperienced fundraisers. As a good leader, I had to set an example and stay up with them. I drove my team hard, and together they averaged over $1,000 a day in total profit—tax-exempt cash. It was also my responsibility to feed, clothe, and shelter my team, as well as to order, buy, and pick up product—the items we pushed on people—and to collect the cash nightly and wire it to New York twice a week. We sold chocolate mints, peanut brittle, chocolate bars, roses, carnations, and candles. The markups were enormous. A box of mints that cost us 30 cents was sold for two dollars. A ten-cent flower was sold for a minimum of a dollar, and usually two dollars. People would buy these items from us because they thought they were donating to a charitable cause. Our consciences had been reprogrammed by Moon’s value system. We told people we were sponsoring Christian youth programs: a lie. We told them we operated drug rehabilitation houses: another lie. We told them that we were helping orphaned kids: another lie. On the spur of the moment we told them anything that we thought would work.41 Since we thought saving the world from evil and establishing God’s kingdom on Earth was the most important effort on the planet, we didn’t see it as “real” lying. After all, every person but us was being controlled by Satan, and it was up to us “Heavenly Children” to claim money back from Satan for God’s Messiah, Sun Myung Moon. We believed we were saving the world from Satan and Communism by selling those products, and that we were giving people the opportunity to help the Messiah create the Garden of Eden on Earth. At about 5:30 a.m. on April 23, 1976, I was driving the van to pick up the last member of my group, who had been out all night fundraising in front of a 24-hour convenience store. I hadn’t slept at all in the previous two days and was driving alone. Usually I had someone ride “shotgun” position to protect me from being attacked by evil forces, including “sleep spirits.” As ridiculous as it seems now, I actually believed that spiritual entities were all around me, waiting to invade me and possess me. This was all part of the mind control indoctrination. Staying focused on the True Parents was the only way to ward off the evil spirits. If my attention wavered, I could be taken over. Phobias such as this kept me and other members dependent and compliant.

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

  People are being incorrectly described as “self-radicalized” into becoming terrorists. These folks can be better understood as being on the fringes of a destructive cult—but in the “sphere of influence” of mind control. They are absolutely being recruited—by people in person and online. Cult recruiters are expert at targeting vulnerabilities and activating motivation. Political and religious cults that use terrorist tactics are aggressively recruiting and some people are being sucked into their vortex. Before we move on to a more comprehensive description of mind control, there are a few more major points I wish to cover. Phobias: The Force That Robs Cult Members’ Freedom68 We all know someone who has had a phobia. Yourself, perhaps? The most common phobias include fears of flying in airplanes, public speaking, taking elevators, driving in tunnels or over bridges, and children commonly develop phobias about certain animals like snakes, spiders, and even dogs. Basically, phobias are an intense fear reaction to someone or something. A phobic reaction can range from very mild to very severe. An intense phobic reaction can cause physical responses like racing heartbeat, dry mouth, sweating, and muscle tension. Phobias can immobilize people and keep them from doing the things they truly want to do. Indeed, phobias can rob people of free choice. Often people develop phobias as a result of a traumatic life experience. For example, a friend dies in a plane crash. An elevator someone is traveling in gets stuck for hours without light. Someone is bitten by a snake. We learn to associate extremely negative feelings with the object. After such an experience, our fears can then take on a life of their own and, in minutes or over several years, can become full-blown phobias. The structure of a phobia involves several internal components that interact to cause a vicious cycle. These components include worrisome thoughts, negative internal images, and feelings of dread and being out of control. Just thinking about the object can sometimes trigger the cycle into action. The person may say to himself, “Oh, I hope the teacher doesn’t call on me to give my report.” That thought is enough to cause them to start feeling tense and anxious. They see—usually unconsciously—a picture of themselves going to the front of the class and freezing up. In this vivid “motion picture,” they see themselves sweating and fidgeting, and their minds turning blank. Everyone is laughing and the teacher starts yelling at them. This imagined ridicule causes them to feel even more upset and fearful that they will be called upon. Such a person could be well on their way toward having a fully developed phobia.

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

  Around the year AD 51 the apostle Paul arrived for the first time in Corinth, the bustling seat of Roman power in Achaea. The city, once razed by the Romans but long since resurrected by its destroyers, was an imposing sight. In Paul’s own words, he came to Corinth “in weakness and in much fear and trembling.” The Acrocorinth, the sheer escarpment housing Corinth’s most archaic temples, dominated the views of the approaching visitor. Perched on its eastern summit was a temple of Aphrodite, looming over the town that sprawled toward the sea beneath her solicitous watch. As Paul entered the forum, he would have been confronted by the bewildering noise of power, commerce, and diffuse piety that characterized urban life in a vibrant provincial town of the Roman Empire. The sanctuaries of the gods—Tychē and Aphrodite, Artemis and Dionysus—ringed the crowded center of the town, hard by the merchants’ stalls and public offices. The haphazard accretion of religious monuments, and the tessellation of the sacred and the profane, belied the reverent balance and careful rhythms that guaranteed the gods their due honor. Into this enveloping cityscape of tremulous paganism crept a missionary with a startling message. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?”9 We meet the community of Christians Paul founded in Corinth through the tantalizing but imperfect prism of the letters he wrote, some six years after first visiting the city, when challenged by the unexpectedly fractious relations in a small apocalyptic movement. Word reached Paul in Ephesus that the Corinthian Christians were feuding, split on a range of mundane problems, from marriage and manumission to sacrificial meat. In the patient response of the apostle that has come to be known as First Corinthians, fierce disagreement over proper sexual behavior lurches to the surface. Such dissent was surely inevitable. Nowhere did the moral expectations of the Jesus movement stand in such stark contrast to the world in which its adherents moved. Corinth in particular was not famous for its sexual virtue. In recent decades the reputation of Roman Corinth has enjoyed the sort of undeserved rehabilitation that comes only when generations of gross exaggeration allow overcorrection to pass as healthy revision. It is true that Corinth had first earned its notoriety in centuries long past. But the laxity of the Corinthians in venereal affairs was not just hoary legend. In the words of a second-century admirer, Corinth was a city “more dear to Aphrodite than all cities that exist or have existed.” The eroticized atmosphere of Corinth was the predictable attribute of a wealthy, imperial crossroads; even against the indulgent backdrop of late pagan sensuality, Corinth stood out as louche.10

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  It happened twice more in the next week and a half. The following week, when I made a typing mistake, he didn’t spank me. Instead, he told me to bend over his desk, look at the typing mistake and repeat “I am stupid” for several minutes. Our relationship didn’t change otherwise. He was still brisk and friendly in the morning. And, because he seemed so sure of himself, I could not help but react to him as if he were still the same domineering but affable boss. He did not, however, ever invite me to discuss my problems with him again. I began to have recurring dreams about him. In one, the most frequent, I walked with him in a field of big bright red poppies. The day was brilliant and warm. We were smiling at each other, and there was a tremendous sense of release and goodwill between us. He looked at me and said, “I understand you now, Debby.” Then we held hands. There was one time I felt disturbed about what was happening at the office. It was just before dinner, and my father was upset about something that had happened to him at work. I could hear him yelling in the living room while my mother tried to comfort him. He yelled, “I’d rather work in a circus! In one of those things where you put your head through a hole and people pay to throw garbage at you!” “No circus has that anymore,” said my mother. “Stop it, Shep.” By the time I went down to eat dinner, everything was as usual. I looked at my father and felt a sickening sensation of love nailed to contempt and panic. The last time I made a typing error and the lawyer summoned me to his office, two unusual things occurred. The first was that after he finished spanking me he told me to pull up my skirt. Fear hooked my stomach and pulled it toward my chest. I turned my head and tried to look at him. “You’re not worried that I’m going to rape you, are you?” he said. “Don’t. I’m not interested in that, not in the least. Pull up your skirt.” I turned my head away from him. I thought, I don’t have to do this. I can stop right now. I can straighten up and walk out. But I didn’t. I pulled up my skirt. “Pull down your panty hose and underwear.” A finger of nausea poked my stomach. “I told you I’m not going to fuck you. Do what I say.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Bring her back!” I started after her, the rain still coming down like pitchforks, and yelling to her to come back, but she ran on blindly as though possessed of the devil, and when she got to the water’s edge she dove straight in and made for the boat. I swam after her and as we got to the side of the boat, which I was afraid she would capsize, I got hold of her round the waist with my one hand and I started to talk to her calmly and soothingly, as though I was talking to a child. “Go away from me,” she said, “you’re an atheist!” Jesus, you could have knocked me over with a feather, so astonished I was to bear that. So that was it? All that hysteria because I was insulting the Lord Almighty. I felt like batting her one in the eye to bring her to her senses. But we were out over our heads and I had a fear that she would do some mad thing like pulling the boat over our heads if I didn’t handle her right. So I pretended that I was terribly sorry and I said I didn’t mean a word of it, that I had been scared to death, and so on and so forth, and as I talked to her gently, soothingly, I slipped my hand down from her waist and I gently stroked her ass. That was what she wanted all right. She was talking to me blubberingly about what a good Catholic she was and how she had tried not to sin, and maybe she was so wrapped up in what she was saying she didn’t know what I was doing, but just the same when I got my hand in her crotch and said all the beautiful things I could think of, about God, about love, about going to church and confessing and all that crap, she must have felt something because I had a good three fingers inside her and working them around like drunken bobbins. “Put your arms around me, Agnes,” I said softly, slipping my hand out and pulling her to me so that I could get my legs between hers. . . . “There, that’s a girl . . . take it easy now . . . it’ll stop soon.” And still talking about the church, the confessional, God, love, and the whole bloody mess I managed to get it inside of her. “You’re very good to me,” she said, just as though she didn’t know my prick was in her, “and I’m sorry I acted like a fool.” “I know, Agnes,” I said, “it’s all right . . . listen, grab me tighter . . . yeah, that’s it.” “I’m afraid the boat’s going to tip over,” she says, trying her best to keep her ass in position by paddling with her right hand.

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

  women, they waste in body and soul, so that not one ember of their manly nature is left fl ickering with heat.” Similar conceptions may well have un-derlain Greco- Roman opposition to pederasty with free boys, though Philo has given fullest voice to the fear. Pederasty, he argued, might so disrupt the buildup of proper heat that turned a boy into a man that an irreversible cycle of tabescence would set in, rendering the boy cold, frail, moist: an ef-feminate. Manliness was such a fragile, indeterminate thing that it might be lost altogether. Th e eromenos might become an androgyne, a she- male, a physiological monster. Th e androgyne, thought Philo, for “debasing the coinage of his nature,” should be killed with impunity, not allowed to live for one day, or one hour. Th e shrill tone never falters. Th ere is a sense, in Philo’s fevered attacks, that he is throwing the kitchen sink at a practice that he held in special disfavor. But beneath the vernacular assumptions about masculinity, Philo’s attack on same- sex eros is governed by an irreducibly Jewish logic, a sense of blinding dread toward all forms of sexual contact between males. For Philo, no mitigating factors— not age, not status— could render male fl esh an appropriately neutral object of sexual desire for men. His coruscat-ing attack dispersed all the mists of ambiguity— the sympotic drunken- T H E W I L L A N D T H E WO R L D  ness, the close philosophical mentorship, the obfuscated exchanges of gifts and favors— that had, for centuries, sustained the institution of pederasty amid a culture of machismo. What is so striking about Philo’s invective is the remorseless effi ciency with which he unravels the contradictions of pederasty from the inside out, in native terms of masculinity, all in the ser vice of his own exceptional opposition to venereal contact between members of the same sex. It is but a short step from Philo’s logic to that which animates Paul’s thought in the epistle to the Romans. Th e unexpected outburst at the head of the Letter to the Romans was to prove absolutely decisive for Christian attitudes toward same- sex erotics. It would completely overshadow the even more fl eeting and oblique condemnations in the vice lists of the New Testament. Th ese rapid-fi re rosters of iniquity regularly included adulterers and fornicators, as well as two types of sexual actors whose crimes are less obvious. Paul provides the fi rst attested use of the term arsenokoitēs. Although it recurs sporadically across the centuries, arsenokoitēs was not destined to become a primary term of the Christian sexual vocabulary. It has perennially befuddled earnest translators. Th

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The faces of those about me were familiar—they were my uterine relatives who, for some mysterious reason, failed to recognize me in this new ambiance . They were garbed in black and the color of their skin was ash gray, like that of the Tibetan devils. They were all fitted out with knives and other instruments of torture: they belonged to the caste of sacrificial butchers. I seemed to have absolute liberty and the authority of a god, and yet by some capricious turn of events the end would be that I’d be lying on the sacrificial block and one of my charming uterine relatives would be bending over me with a gleaming knife to cut out my heart. In sweat and terror I would begin to recite “my lessons” in a high, screaming voice, faster and faster, as I felt the knife searching for my heart. Two and two is four, five and five is ten, earth, air, fire, water, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, Meocene, Pleocene, Eocene, the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, red, blue, yellow, the sorrel, the persimmon, the pawpaw, the catalpa . . . faster and faster . . . Odin, Wotan, Parsifal, King Alfred, Frederick the Great, the Hanseatic League, the Battle of Hastings, Thermopylae, 1492, 1776, 1812, Admiral Farragut, Pickett’s charge, The Light Brigade, we are gathered here today, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not, one and indivisible, no, 16, no, 27, help! murder! police!—and yelling louder and louder and going faster and faster I go completely off my nut and there is no more pain, no more terror, even though they are piercing me everywhere with knives. Suddenly I am absolutely calm and the body which is lying on the block, which they are still gouging with glee and ecstasy, feels nothing because I, the owner of it, have escaped. I have become a tower of stone which leans over the scene and watches with scientific interest. I have only to succumb to the law of gravity and I will fall on them and obliterate them. But I do not succumb to the law of gravity because I am too fascinated by the horror of it all. I am so fascinated, in fact, that I grow more and more windows.

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

  Like any such passage, it knew its limits, and no one should be surprised to fi nd pieces of the old in the new, or the new in the old. Th ere are patent risks in overestimating the ex- tent to which immemorial patterns of erotic experience, shaped by the primitive dictates of power, desire, and reproduction, actually changed. But there are risks, too, in underestimating Christianization as a watershed, or reducing it to something so abstract as a cultural substitution. At the begin- ning of our story, the Mediterranean was home to a society where an em- peror’s male beloved, victim of an untimely death, would be worshipped around the empire as a god; in this same society, the routine exploitation of slaves and poor women was a foundation of the sexual order. By the end, we are in a world where the emperor will command the gory mutilation of men caught in same- sex aff airs, even as he affi rmed the moral dignity of women without any civic claim to honor. Paradoxically, these realignments were eff ected by the same, deep earthquake in human morality. Society and its needs had lost some mea sure of command over the sexual honor of men and women, and instead the individual, in his or her moral ends, was imag- ined as an isolate— free, frail, and awesomely responsible for all corporal stirrings. Th e triumph of Christianity within the public order was not the displacement of one self- deluding superego by another. It was a revolution in the rules of behavior and in the very image of the human as a sexual be- ing. More profoundly, it was a revolution in the nature of society’s claims on the moral agent, and in the place imagined for the sexual self within the cosmos. LEUCIPPE’S SHIELD AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF ROMANCE In the last of a long series of threats to her chastity, the heroine of a second- century Greek novel, Leucippe, stood in imminent danger of suff ering sex- ual violence at the hands of a man claiming to be her master. Th e romantic novel, the characteristic literary invention of the Roman Empire, was a genre built out of such theatrical endangerments to feminine chastity. In the scene of her attempted rape, Leucippe is threatened by Th ersander, a caricature of a villain whose very name means “Savage Man.” Leucippe, a freeborn girl of unparalleled beauty, has been enslaved by pirates and sold to this ste reo typical brute. It was “fate’s wish” that she be a slave for a time, but her true status is never really in doubt, and the problematic relationship between status and behavior runs as a thread throughout the entire con- frontation between Th ersander and Leucippe. When Th ersander puts his hands beneath Leucippe’s chin and lifts her face upward for a kiss, she re- sists and reproaches him, “You are not acting as a free man, nor as a well- born one.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He had met her at a party during the previous week. She immediately reminded him of a girl he had known years before, Sharon, a painfully serious girl with a pale, gentle face whom he had tormented off and on for two years before leaving for his wife. Although it had gratified him enormously to leave her, he had missed hurting her for years, and had been half-consciously looking for another woman with a similarly fatal combination of pride, weakness and a foolish lust for something resembling passion. On meeting Beth, he was astonished at how much she looked, talked and moved like his former victim. She was delicately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look to him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or no trouble. She said, “I hope you are a savage.” He went home with her that night. He lay with her on her sagging, lumpy single mattress, tipping his head to blow smoke into the room. She butted her forehead against his chest. The mattress squeaked with every movement. He told her about Sharon. “I had a relationship like that when I was in college,” she said. “Somebody opened me up in a way that I had no control over. He hurt me. He changed me completely. Now I can’t have sex normally.” The room was pathetically decorated with postcards, pictures of huge-eyed Japanese cartoon characters, and tiny, maddening toys that she had obviously gone out of her way to find, displayed in a tightly arranged tumble on her dresser. A frail model airplane dangled from the light above the dresser. Next to it was a pasted-up cartoon of a pink-haired girl cringing open-mouthed before a spire-haired boy-villain in shorts and glasses. Her short skirt was blown up by the force of his threatening expression, and her panties showed. What kind of person would put crap like this up on her wall? “I’m afraid of you,” she murmured. “Why?” “Because I just am.” “Don’t worry. I won’t give you any more pain than you can handle.” She curled against him and squeezed her feet together like a stretching cat. Her socks were thick and ugly, and her feet were large for her size. Details like this could repel him, but he felt tenderly toward the long, grubby, squeezed-together feet. He said, “I want a slave.” She said, “I don’t know. We’ll see.” He asked her to spend the weekend with him three days later.

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

  A Zulu driver got out with an iwisa, a large, traditional Zulu weapon—a war club, basically. They’re used to smash people’s skulls in. Another guy, his crony, got out of the passenger side. They walked up to the driver’s side of the car we were in, grabbed the man who’d offered us a ride, pulled him out, and started shoving their clubs in his face. “Why are you stealing our customers? Why are you picking people up?” It looked like they were going to kill this guy. I knew that happened sometimes. My mom spoke up. “Hey, listen, he was just helping me. Leave him. We’ll ride with you. That’s what we wanted in the first place.” So we got out of the first car and climbed into the minibus. We were the only passengers in the minibus. In addition to being violent gangsters, South African minibus drivers are notorious for complaining and haranguing passengers as they drive. This driver was a particularly angry one. As we rode along, he started lecturing my mother about being in a car with a man who was not her husband. My mother didn’t suffer lectures from strange men. She told him to mind his own business, and when he heard her speaking in Xhosa, that really set him off. The stereotypes of Zulu and Xhosa women were as ingrained as those of the men. Zulu women were well-behaved and dutiful. Xhosa women were promiscuous and unfaithful. And here was my mother, his tribal enemy, a Xhosa woman alone with two small children—one of them a mixed child, no less. Not just a whore but a whore who sleeps with white men. “Oh, you’re a Xhosa,” he said. “That explains it. Climbing into strange men’s cars. Disgusting woman.” My mom kept telling him off and he kept calling her names, yelling at her from the front seat, wagging his finger in the rearview mirror and growing more and more menacing until finally he said, “That’s the problem with you Xhosa women. You’re all sluts—and tonight you’re going to learn your lesson.” He sped off. He was driving fast, and he wasn’t stopping, only slowing down to check for traffic at the intersections before speeding through. Death was never far away from anybody back then. At that point my mother could be raped. We could be killed. These were all viable options. I didn’t fully comprehend the danger we were in at the moment; I was so tired that I just wanted to sleep. Plus my mom stayed very calm. She didn’t panic, so I didn’t know to panic. She just kept trying to reason with him. “I’m sorry if we’ve upset you, bhuti. You can just let us out here—” “No.” “Really, it’s fine. We can just walk—” “No.”

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

  As the apartheid regime fell, we knew that the black man was now going to rule. The question was, which black man? Spates of violence broke out between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the ANC, the African National Congress, as they jockeyed for power. The political dynamic between these two groups was very complicated, but the simplest way to understand it is as a proxy war between Zulu and Xhosa. The Inkatha was predominantly Zulu, very militant and very nationalistic. The ANC was a broad coalition encompassing many different tribes, but its leaders at the time were primarily Xhosa. Instead of uniting for peace they turned on one another, committing acts of unbelievable savagery. Massive riots broke out. Thousands of people were killed. Necklacing was common. That’s where people would hold someone down and put a rubber tire over his torso, pinning his arms. Then they’d douse him with petrol and set him on fire and burn him alive. The ANC did it to Inkatha. Inkatha did it to the ANC. I saw one of those charred bodies on the side of the road one day on my way to school. In the evenings my mom and I would turn on our little black-and-white TV and watch the news. A dozen people killed. Fifty people killed. A hundred people killed. Eden Park sat not far from the sprawling townships of the East Rand, Thokoza and Katlehong, which were the sites of some of the most horrific Inkatha–ANC clashes. Once a month at least we’d drive home and the neighborhood would be on fire. Hundreds of rioters in the street. My mom would edge the car slowly through the crowds and around blockades made of flaming tires. Nothing burns like a tire—it rages with a fury you can’t imagine. As we drove past the burning blockades, it felt like we were inside an oven. I used to say to my mom, “I think Satan burns tires in Hell.” Whenever the riots broke out, all our neighbors would wisely hole up behind closed doors. But not my mom. She’d head straight out, and as we’d inch our way past the blockades, she’d give the rioters this look. Let me pass. I’m not involved in this shit. She was unwavering in the face of danger. That always amazed me. It didn’t matter that there was a war on our doorstep. She had things to do, places to be. It was the same stubbornness that kept her going to church despite a broken-down car. There could be five hundred rioters with a blockade of burning tires on the main road out of Eden Park, and my mother would say, “Get dressed. I’ve got to go to work. You’ve got to go to school.” “But aren’t you afraid?” I’d say. “There’s only one of you and there’s so many of them.” “Honey, I’m not alone,” she’d say. “I’ve got all of Heaven’s angels behind me.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  . . It’s just as hard to go back as to go forward. I don’t have the feeling of being an American citizen any more. The part of America I came from, where I had some rights, where I felt free, is so far behind me that it’s beginning to get fuzzy in my memory. I feel as though someone’s got a gun against my back all the time. Keep moving, is all I seem to hear. If a man talks to me I try not to seem too intelligent. I try to pretend that I am vitally interested in the crops, in the weather, in the elections. If I stand and stop they look at me, whites and blacks—they look me through and through as though I were juicy and edible. I’ve got to walk another thousand miles or so as though I had a deep purpose, as though I were really going somewhere. I’ve got to look sort of grateful, too, that nobody has yet taken a fancy to plug me. It’s depressing and exhilarating at the same time. You’re a marked man—and yet nobody pulls the trigger. They let you walk unmolested right into the Gulf of Mexico where you can drown yourself. Yes sir, I reached the Gulf of Mexico and I walked right into it and drowned myself. I did it gratis. When they fished the corpse out they found it was marked F.O.B. Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn; it was returned C.O.D. When I was asked later why I had killed myself I could only think to say—because I wanted to electrify the cosmos! I meant by that a very simple thing—The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western had been electrified, the Seaboard Air Line had been electrified, but the soul of man was still in the covered wagon stage. I was born in the midst of civilization and I accepted it very naturally—what else was there to do? But the joke was that nobody else was taking it seriously. I was the only man in the community who was truly civilized. There was no place for me—as yet. And yet the books I read, the music I heard assured me that there were other men in the world like myself. I had to go and drown myself in the Gulf of Mexico in order to have an excuse for continuing this pseudo-civilized existence. I had to delouse myself of my spiritual body, as it were. When I woke up to the fact that as far as the scheme of things goes I was less than dirt I really became quite happy. I quickly lost all sense of responsibility. And if it weren’t for the fact that my friends got tired of lending me money I might have gone on indefinitely pissing the time away. The world was like a museum to me; I saw nothing to do but eat into this marvelous chocolate layer cake which the men of the past had dumped on our hands.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  There is only one street, I must say—the continuation of the street on which I lived. I come finally to an iron bridge over the railroad yards. It is always nightfall when I reach the bridge, though it is only a short distance from the boundary line. Here I look down upon the webbed tracks, the freight stations, the tenders, the storage sheds, and as I gaze down upon this cluster of strange moving substances a process of metamorphosis takes place, just as in a dream . With the transformation and deformation I become aware that this is the old dream which I have dreamed so often. I have a wild fear that I shall wake up, and indeed I know that I will wake up shortly, just at the moment when in the midst of a great open space I am about to walk into the house which contains something of the greatest importance for me. Just as I go toward this house the lot on which I am standing begins to grow vague at the edges, to dissolve, to vanish. Space rolls in on me like a carpet and swallows me up, and with it of course the house which I never succeed in entering. There is absolutely no transition from this, the most pleasurable dream I know, to the heart of a book called Creative Evolution . In this book by Henri Bergson, which I came to as naturally as to the dream of the land beyond the boundary, I am again quite alone, again a foreigner, again a man of indeterminate age standing on an iron bridge observing a peculiar metamorphosis without and within. If this book had not fallen into my hands at the precise moment it did, perhaps I would have gone mad. It came at a moment when another huge world was crumbling on my hands. If I had never understood a thing which was written in this book, if I have preserved only the memory of one word, creative , it is quite sufficient. This word was my talisman. With it I was able to defy the whole world, and especially my friends. There are times when one must break with one’s friends in order to understand the meaning of friendship. It may seem strange to say so, but the discovery of this book was equivalent to the discovery of a weapon, an implement, wherewith I might lop off all the friends who surrounded me and who no longer meant anything to me. This book became my friend because it taught me that I had no need of friends. It gave me the courage to stand alone, and it enabled me to appreciate loneliness. I have never understood the book; at times I thought I was on the point of understanding, but I never really did understand. It was more important for me not to understand.