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 Blue Nights (2011)

  “Of course you won’t tell her she’s adopted,” many people said at the time she was born, most of these people the age of my parents, a generation, like that of Diana’s parents, for which adoption remained obscurely shameful, a secret to be kept at any cost. “You couldn’t possibly tell her.” Of course we could possibly tell her. In fact we had already told her. L’adoptada, m’ija. There was never any question of not telling her. What were the alternatives? Lie to her? Leave it to her agent to take her to lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel? Before too many years passed I would write about her adoption, John would write about her adoption, Quintana herself would agree to be one of the children interviewed for a book by the photographer Jill Krementz called How It Feels to Be Adopted. Over those years we had received periodic communications from women who had seen these mentions of her adoption and believed her to be their own lost daughter, women who had themselves given up infants for adoption and were now haunted by the possibility that this child about whom they had read could be that missing child. This beautiful child, this perfect child. Qué hermosa, qué chula. We responded to each of these communications, we followed up, we explained how the facts did not coincide, the dates did not tally, why the perfect child could not be theirs. We considered our role fulfilled, the case closed. Still. The recommended choice narrative did not end, as I had imagined it would (hoped it would, dreamed it would), with the perfect child placed on the table between us for lunch at The Bistro (Sidney Korshak’s corner banquette, the blue-and-white dotted organdy dress) on the hot day in September 1966 when the adoption became final. Thirty-two years later, in 1998, on a Saturday morning when she was alone in her apartment and vulnerable to whatever bad or good news arrived at her door, the perfect child received a Federal Express letter from a young woman who convincingly identified herself as her sister, her full sister, one of two younger children later born, although we had not before known this, to Quintana’s natural mother and father. At the time of Quintana’s birth the natural mother and father had not yet been married. At a point after her birth they married, had the two further children, Quintana’s full sister and brother, and then divorced. According to the letter from the young woman who identified herself as Quintana’s sister, the mother and sister lived now in Dallas. The brother, from whom the mother was estranged, lived in another city in Texas. The father, who had remarried and fathered another child, lived in Florida. The sister, who had learned from her mother only a few weeks before that Quintana existed, had determined immediately, against the initial instincts of her mother, to locate her. She had resorted to the internet.

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

  Objection 2: Further, those who are uncertain of their bliss are not blessed: whence Augustine proves (Gen. ad lit. xi) that the demons were never blessed. But the saints are now blessed. Therefore they are certain of their bliss. Now what is certain is not submitted to judgment. Therefore the good will not be judged. Objection 3: Further, fear is incompatible with bliss. But the last judgment, which above all is described as terrible, cannot take place without inspiring fear into those who are to be judged. Hence Gregory observes on Job 41:16 “When he shall raise him up, the angels shall fear,” etc. (Moral. xxxiv): “Consider how the conscience of the wicked will then be troubled when even the just are disturbed about their life.” Therefore the blessed will not be judged. On the contrary, It would seem that all the good will be judged, since it is written (2 Cor. 5:10): “We must all be manifested before the judgment seat of Christ, that every one may receive the proper things of the body, according as he hath done, whether it be good or evil.” Now there is nothing else to be judged. Therefore all, even the good, will be judged. Further, the “general” includes all. Now this is called the general judgment. Therefore all will be judged. I answer that, The judgment comprises two things, namely the discussion of merits and the payment of rewards. As regards the payment of rewards, all will be judged, even the good, since the Divine sentence will appoint to each one the reward corresponding to his merit. But there is no discussion of merits save where good and evil merits are mingled together. Now those who build on the foundation of faith, “gold, silver, and precious stones” (1 Cor. 3:12), by devoting themselves wholly to the Divine service, and who have no notable admixture of evil merit, are not subjected to a discussion of their merits. Such are those who have entirely renounced the things of the world and are solicitously thoughtful of the things that are of God: wherefore they will be saved but will not be judged. Others, however, build on the foundation of faith, wood, hay, stubble [*Cf. [5112]FS, Q[89], A[2]]; they, in fact, love worldly things and are busy about earthly concerns, yet so as to prefer nothing to Christ, but strive to redeem their sins with alms, and these have an admixture of good with evil merits. Hence they are subjected to a discussion of their merits, and consequently in this account will be judged, and yet they will be saved. Reply to Objection 1: Since punishment is the effect of justice, while reward is the effect of mercy, it follows that punishment is more especially ascribed antonomastically to judgment which is the act of justice; so that judgment is sometimes used to express condemnation. It is thus that we are to understand the words quoted, as a gloss on the passage remarks.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  know what I have.” That is a fair summary of the attitude of the royal consciousness—not wanting to know. If we don’t know, perhaps it won’t happen, and we can pretend a while longer. When I must deny about myself then I can afford to deny about my neighbor as well, and I don’t need to know what my neighbor has or doesn’t have. I can imagine both my neighbor and myself out of historical existence, and “forever” becomes not an affirmation but a denial. Bruce Lifton has studied attitudes concerning death in our culture beginning with Hiroshima and Nagasaki and responses to these events. [4] Beyond these he has considered the more general response to living in a world where death is so visible, so daily, so pervasive, and so massive, and yet so unnoticed. Lifton has concluded that we have no adequate way to relate to death’s reality and potential, so we deny it with numbness. Moreover, says Lifton, behind that frightened practice is a symbol gap in which we do not have symbols that are deep or strong enough to match the terror of the reality. What takes place when symbols are inadequate and things may not be brought to public expression is that the experience will not be experienced. Obviously the notion of a symbol gap about the reality of death is pertinent to our theme. The royal consciousness that lacks the symbols for full experience is the same royal consciousness that nullified the symbols in the first place. Those symbols that will release experience and let it be redemptive bring to expression precisely those dimensions of reality that the king fears and cannot subjugate. It is the penchant of kings to nullify all symbols that reveal what is beyond royal administration. And so the power of the king to destroy symbols by reducing them makes necessary the subsequent denial of the experience symbolized. It must be observed that religious practitioners are often easy and unwitting conspirators with and facilitators of such denial. We become the good-humor men and women, for who among us does not want to rush in and smooth things out, to reassure, to cover the grief? Everyone helps his neighbor, And says to his brother, “Take courage!” The craftsman encourages the goldsmith, and he who smoothes with the hammer him who strikes the anvil, saying of the soldering, “It is good”; and they fasten it with nails so that it cannot be moved.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  L’adoptada, she came to be called in the household. The adopted one. M’ija she was also called. My daughter. Adoption, I was to learn although not immediately, is hard to get right. As a concept, even what was then its most widely approved narrative carried bad news: if someone “chose” you, what does that tell you? Doesn’t it tell you that you were available to be “chosen”? Doesn’t it tell you, in the end, that there are only two people in the world? The one who “chose” you? And the other who didn’t? Are we beginning to see how the word “abandonment” might enter the picture? Might we not make efforts to avoid such abandonment? Might not such efforts be characterized as “frantic”? Do we want to ask ourselves what follows? Do we need to ask ourselves what words come next to mind? Isn’t one of those words “fear”? Isn’t another of those words “anxiety”? Terra incognita, as I had seen it until then, meant free of complications. That terra incognita could present its own complications had never occurred to me. 11On the day her adoption became legal, a hot September afternoon in 1966, we took her from the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles to lunch at The Bistro in Beverly Hills. At the courthouse she had been the only baby up for adoption; the other prospective adoptees that day were all adults, petitioning to adopt one another for one or another tax advantage. At The Bistro, too, more predictably, she was the only baby. Qué hermosa, the waiters crooned. Qué chula. They gave us the corner banquette usually saved for Sidney Korshak, a gesture the import of which would be clear only to someone who had lived in that particular community at that particular time. “Let’s just say a nod from Korshak, and the Teamsters change management,” the producer Robert Evans would later write by way of explaining who Sidney Korshak was. “A nod from Korshak, and Vegas shuts down. A nod from Korshak, and the Dodgers suddenly can play night baseball.” The waiters placed her carrier on the table between us. She was wearing a blue-and-white dotted organdy dress. She was not quite seven months old. As far as I was concerned this lunch at Sidney Korshak’s banquette at The Bistro was the happy ending to the choice narrative. We had chosen, the beautiful baby girl had accepted our choice, no natural parent had stood up at the courthouse and exercised his or her absolute legal right under the California law covering private adoptions to simply say no, she’s mine, I want her back. The issue, as I preferred to see it, was now closed. The fear was now gone. She was ours. What I would not realize for another few years was that I had never been the only person in the house to feel the fear.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The man had begun to shake and tremble, started to cry and was released to a transitional living situation six months later. To review, fear both greatly enhances and extends immobility and also makes the process of exiting immobility fearful and potentially violent . An individual who is highly terrified upon entering the immobility state is likely to move out of it in a similar manner. “As they go in, so they come out” was an expression that Army M.A.S.H. medics used when describing the reactions of their war-wounded patients. If a soldier goes into surgery terrified, and needing to be held down, he or she will likely come out of anesthesia in a state of frantic and possibly violent disorientation. The same consequences are sadly true when children are frightened and abruptly separated from their parents before surgery. 41 If they go into the surgery in an agitated state, are held down and then surrounded by gowned and “masked monsters,” they come out of the anesthesia frightened and drastically disoriented. David Levy, in 1945, studied hospitalized children, many of them being treated for injuries requiring immobilization, such as splints, casts and braces. He found that these unfortunate children developed shell-shock symptoms similar to those of the soldiers returning from the war fronts in Europe and North Africa. 42 Some sixty-five years later, a troubled father recounts “an all-too ordinary” story about his son Robbie’s “minor” knee surgery, a virtual guarantee for trauma. The doctor tells me that everything is okay. The knee is fine, but everything is not okay for the boy waking up in a drug-induced nightmare, thrashing around on his hospital bed—a sweet boy who never hurt anybody, staring out from his anesthetic haze with the eyes of a wild animal, striking the nurse, screaming “Am I alive?” and forcing me to grab his arms … staring right into my eyes and not knowing who I am. 43 The immobilization effects Levy observed in children also occur in adult patients. In a recent medical study, more than 52% of orthopedic patients being treated for broken bones were shown to develop full-blown posttraumatic stress disorder, with a majority not recovering and worsening over time. 44 This result should come as no real surprise when one recognizes that many orthopedic procedures follow frightening accidents, stressful ambulance rides endured while one is strapped down and terrifying and depersonalizing emergency room visits. Further, many of these patients have also undergone immediate surgeries, and often in an agitated state. This chain of events often precedes immobilization and is followed by painful rehabilitation regimens.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  You don’t need to do it all in one day! Resting and time are needed to help internally reorganize the child’s experience at subtle levels. Be assured that if the resolution is not complete, the child will return to a similar phase when given the opportunity to play during the next session. 4. Become a safe container . Remember that biology is on your side. Perhaps the most difficult and important aspect of renegotiating a traumatic event with a child is maintaining your own belief that things will turn out OK. This feeling comes from inside you and is projected out to the child. It becomes a container that surrounds the child with a feeling of confidence. This may be particularly difficult if the child resists your attempts to renegotiate the trauma. If the child resists, be patient and reassuring. The instinctive part of your child wants to rework this experience. All you have to do is wait for that part to feel confident and safe enough to assert itself. If you are excessively worried about whether the child’s traumatic reaction can be transformed, you may inadvertently send a conflicting message. Adults with their own unresolved childhood trauma may be particularly susceptible to falling into this trap. 5. Stop if you feel that the child is genuinely not benefiting from the play . In Too Scared to Cry , Lenore Terr, 107 the brilliant and esteemed child psychologist, warns clinicians about allowing children to engage in traumatic play “therapy” that reenacts the original horror. She describes the responses of three-and-a-half-year-old Lauren as she plays with toy cars. “The cars are going on the people,” Lauren says as she zooms two racing cars toward some finger puppets. “They’re pointing their pointy parts into the people. The people are scared. A pointy part will come on their tummies, and in their mouths, and on their … [she points to her skirt]. My tummy hurts. I don’t want to play anymore.” Lauren stops herself as her bodily sensation of fear abruptly surfaces. This is a typical reaction. She may return over and over to the same play, each time stopping when the fearful sensations in her tummy become uncomfortable. Some therapists would say that Lauren is using her play as an attempt to gain some control over the situation that traumatized her. Her play does resemble “exposure” treatments used routinely to help adults overcome phobias. But Terr cautions that such play ordinarily doesn’t yield much success. Even if it does serve to reduce a child’s distress, this process is quite slow in producing results. Most often, the play is compulsively repeated without resolution. Unresolved, repetitious, traumatic play can reinforce the traumatic impact in the same way that reenactment and cathartic reliving of traumatic experiences can reinforce trauma in adults.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Indeed, most of us recognize that primal negative emotions readily turn into self-reinforcing, runaway positive feedback loops. Fear and anger can readily explode into terror and rage. Here trauma is the ouroboros, the serpent swallowing its own tail, eternally re-creating itself. In the reciprocal enervation discovered by Sherrington, the nervous system operates primarily as a negative feedback system much like—but infinitely more complicated than—a house thermostat. Self-regulation of the complex nervous system exhibits what are called emergent properties , which are often somewhat unpredictable and rich in nuance. They frequently lead to finding new and creative solutions and are cherished when they happen in life and in psychotherapy. So while the nervous system operates under the principle of self-regulation, the psyche operates under the emergent properties of creative self-regulation . We might say that as the nervous system self-regulates, the psyche engages with these emergent properties: that is, to creative self-regulation. The relationship between the viscera and the brain is a complex self-regulating system. The richness of creative emergent properties allows these “sounding” and breathing techniques (like the “voo” sound) to initiate change throughout the nervous system. In a situation of inescapable and mortal threat, the brain stem, or reptilian brain, sends intense signals to the viscera, causing some of them to go into hyperdrive (as with the gastrointestinal system) and others to constrict and close down, as with the bronchioles of the lungs or the beating of the heart. In the first instance (hyperdrive), we get symptoms like butterflies, knots in the gut or rumbling, uncontrollable diarrhea. With the lungs, we have feelings of tightness and suffocation, which, when chronic, can lead to the symptoms of asthma. Likewise, the effect of the primitive vagus on the heart is to decrease the beat to a level so low that it can actually lead to (voodoo) death. 80 Because these sensations feel so dreadful, they themselves become the source of threat. So rather than coming from outside, the threat now emanates from deep within one’s bowels, lungs, heart and other organs and can cause the exact same effect upon the viscera that the original threat evoked. This situation is the unfortunate setup for a positive feedback loop with disastrous negative consequences. In addition, because traumatized individuals are experiencing (intense) threat signals, they project this inner turmoil outward and thus perceive the world as being responsible for their inner distress—and so remove themselves from both the real source of the problem and its potential solution. This dynamic also wreaks havoc not only on the body but also on relationships. The “voo” sound—by, first of all, focusing awareness upon the inner locus of the real problem—allows one to begin to change one’s experience from dreadful to pleasant and thus moves the situation from being a positive feedback loop (with negative consequences) to being a negative feedback loop, which helps restore homeostatic balance, equilibrium and, hence, feelings of goodness.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  A caterpillar car drew up in a clatter of chains, like a huge beast. I tried to run, but my joints were stiff. Picchonero rose too, but when the German driver understood what we wanted, he cursed us and started off again. We jumped, for the first bursts of gunfire were very close, leaving trails of motionless smoke in the sky to our left. I had enough experience to realize that it was just a beginning; the reply, more dangerous for us, would not be long in coming. We had to formulate other plans, so we now joined the other men. I was surprised to find them talking, lying on their backs with their heads on their bags, in a mood of cheerfulness again. They had slept, eaten, and drunk a little; perhaps they had not quite understood the situation. I was vaguely angry with them for being so relaxed and carefree. Then I blamed myself; had I not fasted for the last twenty-four hours, and had I too rested for a while, I might also have been more cheerful. The firing was now going strong. We had to leave and go forward to get out of the range of the artillery on the opposite side. It was difficult to go faster with our feet as wounded as they were after twenty-five hours of being chafed by the clogs we wore. My big toe felt as though there was a big cut right across it. The men got up reluctantly. Through the whole of this adventure, not once did I feel so far from them as at this moment, when they stretched and yawned. A gentle yellowish day had driven away every trace of the cold white dawn. We set off again. All along the road, there were burnt and broken skeletons of trucks; some, put out of action by machine-gun fire, were like insects bitten by a spider, motionless and apparently intact. The first volleys of machine-gun fire stopped us and we hesitated. From where were they being fired? In what direction? In our complete ignorance of the situation, we did not know whether each step might not be leading us headlong to death, and this worried me as though I had suddenly been struck blind. I tried to master my brain that was so weary that it ached behind my painful forehead. So we were in the center of a semicircle and there was fighting on both flanks. But how far from the center were we? With daylight, aircraft would sweep over the interior of the arc. The firing grew louder, accompanied by the intermittent choking of machine guns.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  I have extensively interviewed and treated six people who survived plane crashes. Two reported having lost consciousness during the incident; even though they were not physically injured, they collapsed mentally. Two went into a panic and stayed frantic until well after we had started treatment. Two remained calm and resourceful and helped evacuate fellow passengers from the burning wreckage. I’ve found a similar range of responses in survivors of rape, car crashes, and torture. In the previous chapter we saw the radically different reactions of Stan and Ute as they relived the highway disaster they’d experienced side by side. What accounts for this spectrum of responses: focused, collapsed, or frantic? Porges’s theory provides an explanation: The autonomic nervous system regulates three fundamental physiological states. The level of safety determines which one of these is activated at any particular time. Whenever we feel threatened, we instinctively turn to the first level, social engagement. We call out for help, support, and comfort from the people around us. But if no one comes to our aid, or we’re in immediate danger, the organism reverts to a more primitive way to survive: fight or flight. We fight off our attacker, or we run to a safe place. However, if this fails—we can’t get away, we’re held down or trapped—the organism tries to preserve itself by shutting down and expending as little energy as possible. We are then in a state of freeze or collapse. This is where the many-branched vagus nerve comes in, and I’ll describe its anatomy briefly because it’s central to understanding how people deal with trauma. The social-engagement system depends on nerves that have their origin in the brain stem regulatory centers, primarily the vagus—also known as the tenth cranial nerve—together with adjoining nerves that activate the muscles of the face, throat, middle ear, and voice box or larynx. When the “ventral vagal complex” (VVC) runs the show, we smile when others smile at us, we nod our heads when we agree, and we frown when friends tell us of their misfortunes. When the VVC is engaged, it also sends signals down to our heart and lungs, slowing down our heart rate and increasing the depth of breathing. As a result, we feel calm and relaxed, centered, or pleasurably aroused. [image "Diagram of the vagus nerve and its branches, labeled with anatomical structures including the anterior branch, dorsal nucleus, pharyngeal branch (motor to muscles of pharynx and palate; sensory to lower pharynx), superior laryngeal nerve, thoracic cardiac branch, trachea, esophagus, pancreas, liver, stomach, and colon." file=image_rsrc77F.jpg] The many-branched vagus. The vagus nerve (which Darwin called the pneumogastric nerve) registers heartbreak and gut-wrenching feelings. When a person becomes upset, the throat gets dry, the voice becomes tense, the heart speeds up, and respiration becomes rapid and shallow.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Wild as a female animal that feels its offspring threatened, she came toward us and, pretending to caress us, stroked our bodies with her hand wide-open, all five fingers held straight. I shivered, feeling a mortal cold descend through me. God forbid that the exorcism should fail! To distract attention from what she was doing, Mother asked me: “But what are you doing there?” Perhaps because the danger had unnerved me, perhaps also because I wished to take advantage of it in order to betray a secret that was beginning to weigh on my conscience, I exclaimed: “We’re making love!” After that I covered my face, while Mother and Catarina burst out laughing, both of them believing that I had only repeated some coarse remark overheard in the street. Of my earliest years, I have no memories other than those of an endless game, played in constant safety in our twice-concealed blind alley. PART TWO Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche ~ 8. THE DRUGGIST ~ It was only after the summer holidays that Monsieur Bismuth was at last free to see me. I had to wait a long while in the crowd of his customers. The drugstore was luxurious, its windows framed in chromium-plated nickel, the walls painted a light color, the chairs upholstered in leather. On the walls the many framed sheepskins testified to the eminent merits of the owner of the store and to his successes in several pharmaceutical contests. I felt sincerely happy on Monsieur Bismuth’s behalf, and somewhat proud too, as if I shared his glory. Wasn’t my future henceforth bound, in a way, with that of Monsieur Bismuth and of his achievements? Didn’t I now depend to some extent on his prosperity? I gazed in a friendly mood at the faces of his employees, as if I were silently introducing myself: “I’ll be coming here often and you’ll often see me here again.” One of the pharmacists came into the store by a small door at the back and announced that Monsieur Bismuth was ready to see me. I was deeply moved as I followed him into the endless neon-lit passage that was concealed behind the door. This perspective that suddenly opened out before me, completely unpredictable from the outside, came to me as a surprise. I was fond of rooms that are completely closed off, and the passage, with its walls lined with shelves full of bottles and boxes, was a perfectly isolated corridor where none of the sounds of the city could be heard. The artificial effect of neon lighting, still relatively rare in those days, added to my surprise and my emotion. The pharmacist had meanwhile vanished and, in a silence that seemed heavy, I discovered the open door of Monsieur Bismuth’s office. The druggist was writing, his head bent forward, his hair thin on his scalp that appeared pink beneath the carefully combed strands. His hand shook slightly above the paper.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  When something reminds traumatized people of the past, their right brain reacts as if the traumatic event were happening in the present. But because their left brain is not working very well, they may not be aware that they are reexperiencing and reenacting the past—they are just furious, terrified, enraged, ashamed, or frozen. After the emotional storm passes, they may look for something or somebody to blame for it. They behaved the way they did because you were ten minutes late, or because you burned the potatoes, or because you “never listen to me.” Of course, most of us have done this from time to time, but when we cool down, we hopefully can admit our mistake. Trauma interferes with this kind of awareness, and, over time, our research demonstrated why. Stuck in Fight or FlightWhat had happened to Marsha in the scanner gradually started to make sense. Thirteen years after her tragedy we had activated the sensations—the sounds and images from the accident—that were still stored in her memory. When these sensations came to the surface, they activated her alarm system, which caused her to react as if she were back in the hospital being told that her daughter had died. The passage of thirteen years was erased. Her sharply increased heart rate and blood pressure readings reflected her physiological state of frantic alarm. Adrenaline is one of the hormones that are critical to help us fight back or flee in the face of danger. Increased adrenaline was responsible for our participants’ dramatic rise in heart rate and blood pressure while listening to their trauma narrative. Under normal conditions people react to a threat with a temporary increase in their stress hormones. As soon as the threat is over, the hormones dissipate and the body returns to normal. The stress hormones of traumatized people, in contrast, take much longer to return to baseline and spike quickly and disproportionately in response to mildly stressful stimuli. The insidious effects of constantly elevated stress hormones include memory and attention problems, irritability, and sleep disorders. They also contribute to many long-term health issues, depending on which body system is most vulnerable in a particular individual. We now know that there is another possible response to threat, which our scans aren’t yet capable of measuring. Some people simply go into denial: Their bodies register the threat, but their conscious minds go on as if nothing has happened. However, even though the mind may learn to ignore the messages from the emotional brain, the alarm signals don’t stop. The emotional brain keeps working, and stress hormones keep sending signals to the muscles to tense for action or immobilize in collapse. The physical effects on the organs go on unabated until they demand notice when they are expressed as illness. Medications, drugs, and alcohol can also temporarily dull or obliterate unbearable sensations and feelings. But the body continues to keep the score.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Within my own penis, I felt the pleasure of fear transformed into tremors like those of an electric shock. How shall I ever forget my complicity? Yes, I was playing my part in the ceremony, in the ancestral and collective ritual that was food for the mind. It was physically intolerable, and I felt truly faint when the High Priest’s right hand, armed with a razor, came slowly down toward the tiny bit of white flesh that rose between the index and the second finger of his left hand. But my sense of having been liberated was sudden, and all my fear vanished explosively, together with my shame, my pleasure, my disgust, and the unbearable tension that was born of the anguished silence of all of us: unable to stand it any longer, the victim had just burst into tears. What did the crowd do now? What did we do? For a fraction of a second we all hesitated in silence and surprise, then burst out laughing, began to roll on the floor, all of us, big and small in a tangle, beating one another with our fists, climbing onto the benches, upsetting them, in an uproar of shouts and insults, insulting the victim too, still pale as he was from fear as he smiled and trembled in a corner of the synagogue, his eyes glistening with tears. The stupid urchin had really taken the whole farce seriously and been afraid of a mere piece of tin! A good joke indeed, and what fun it was to play at being grownups! ~ 1. THE RED-LIGHT DISTRICT ~ The merest glimpse of a woman’s skin upset me. An uncovered knee or an open blouse caused me such embarrassment that I was forced to look away. But my embarrassment itself was so obvious, and my efforts to keep from looking so violent, that they made the women far more self-conscious than if I had insistently stared. Their quick defensive gestures of pulling down a skirt or fixing a blouse told me that my involuntary aggressiveness had been perfectly well noticed. This left me feeling miserably guilty, so that I found it painful to approach any woman. I had never been able to participate in the sexual games of boys. When I was told that one of the older pupils offered to caress, with enough skill to cause an orgasm, anyone who wished, I refused with scorn and horror. My comrades organized these parties of collective pleasure out on a vacant lot not far from the school. Apparently, they all lined up with their back to the wall and Giacomo passed up the row one by one. I was the only one in the boarding-school common room not to talk of my adventures or to describe with delectation the sexual attributes of men and women a thousand times a day.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Coming home, I thought, tomorrow we will not meet. Or if we meet, we will never lie together again. Tomorrow I’ll tell Henry not to bother about love. But the rest? Hugo says tonight that my face is blazing. I can’t restrain a smile. We ought to have a banquet. Henry has killed my seriousness. It couldn’t survive his changing moods, from beggar to god, from satyr to poet, from madman to realist. When he thrusts at me, I am saved from sobbing or hitting back because of my damned understanding. Whatever I understand, like Henry and the whores, I can’t very well fight about. What I understand, I also simultaneously accept. Henry is such a world in himself that it would not surprise me if he should want to steal, to kill, or to rape. So far I’ve understood everything. Yesterday at the rendezvous I was seeing for the first time a malevolent Henry. He had come more to hurt Fred than to see me. He reveled when he said, “Fred is working. How it must gripe him.” I didn’t want to choose the curtains without Fred but Henry insisted on choosing them. I don’t know whether I imagined it or not but it seemed to me he was exulting in insensibility. “I found as much pleasure doing evil . . .” said Stavrogin. To me, an unknown pleasure. I had planned to send Henry a telegram while I was with Fred saying, “I love you.” Instead, I wanted to go see Fred and blot out the hurt. Henry’s pleasure was startling to me. He said, “I used to like borrowing from a certain man and then I would spend half the sum he gave me to send him a telegram.” When stories like this rise out of drunken mists, I see in him a gleam of deviltry, a secret enjoyment of cruelty. June buying perfume for Jean while Henry starved, or taking pleasure in concealing a bottle of old Madeira in her trunk while Henry and his friends, penniless, wished desperately for something to drink. What startles me is not the act but the pleasure which accompanies it. Henry was pushed to torment Fred. June carries it all much further than he does, blatantly, such as when she wrestled with Jean at Henry’s parents’ house. This love of cruelty binds them together insolubly. They would both take pleasure in humiliating me, in destroying me. I feel my past like an unbearable weight on me, like a curse, the source of every movement I make, every word I utter. At certain moments the past surmounts me, and Henry recedes into unreality. A terrible reserve, an unnatural purity envelops me, and I close out the world completely. Today I am the jeunefille of Richmond Hill, writing on an ivory white desk about nothing at all.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  A gentle yellowish day had driven away every trace of the cold white dawn. We set off again. All along the road, there were burnt and broken skeletons of trucks; some, put out of action by machine-gun fire, were like insects bitten by a spider, motionless and apparently intact. The first volleys of machine-gun fire stopped us and we hesitated. From where were they being fired? In what direction? In our complete ignorance of the situation, we did not know whether each step might not be leading us headlong to death, and this worried me as though I had suddenly been struck blind. I tried to master my brain that was so weary that it ached behind my painful forehead. So we were in the center of a semicircle and there was fighting on both flanks. But how far from the center were we? With daylight, aircraft would sweep over the interior of the arc. The firing grew louder, accompanied by the intermittent choking of machine guns. Suddenly, from behind the hills, two British fighter planes came flying low over the fields to attack a farm which, to us, looked like a doll’s house. A German antiaircraft gun, hidden in the hills, reacted violently and dryly like a piece of cloth being ripped. Swift and elegant, the steel-gray pursuit plane rose and then, as if unaware of the antiaircraft barrage, swooped down on the road. We threw ourselves into the ditches just as a terrifying din burst out. I lay with my face to the ground, beneath the weight of my haversack, and was only aware of the mauve thistle that was scratching my face. I supposed that, seen from above, the red, green, and blue Bedouin blankets in which our kits were rolled on our backs must form a colorful ribbon. Automatically, I slipped my blanket beneath me. In the general noise, a hurrah came from the men. I looked to the side: a little cart, madly drawn by a galloping donkey, tore down the road. I joined in the shouting too when, with my shortsighted eyes, I made out Picchonero, oblivious to the bombing, gesticulating on the seat by the driver. “I’ll send you help from Tunis! I’ll send...” So he disappeared. Across the road, from the depths of their ditches on either side, the men lay flat on the ground and made joyous signs to each other. If Picchonero was not killed on the way, we could hope for a truck in a few hours.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  My mother came back through the herd, pushing aside with her hand the goats that were too obstinate to move and holding her pot of milk safe above any unforeseen or capricious movements of the animals. We then breakfasted in our room that was still full of the odors of sleep, seated at our round table that was our sole heritage from my grandfather, between the walls washed with blue lime and the bed still warm beneath a mound of red and green blankets. One morning my mother forgot and left the door ajar. I opened it wide and found myself, for the first time in my life, alone facing the goats, those monsters with their long silky hair, black and rust-colored, that stood taller than I by a whole head plus their horns. I hesitated on the threshold, but a plan that had long been maturing within me, though I had always postponed its execution, now pushed me ahead: at last, I had an opportunity to test the world all by myself and, at the same time, to revenge myself on these goats that seemed to challenge me. Without moving, I selected with a glance the most terrifying and most maternal of them all, the one with the most swollen dugs. The beast was turning its head away from me. Softly, I came a few steps closer, stretched out my hand and, suddenly seizing a fistful of the heavy fur of its haunches, pulled as hard as I could. Then something happened that I had not allowed myself to foresee, for courage demands contempt for consequences: the beast did not try to escape, did not utter a cry of anguish, but suddenly turned around, lowered its head, aimed its sharp horns at me, and charged, the bell at its neck furiously ringing. I uttered a horrifying howl and threw myself toward the door. I no longer know — indeed, I never knew — whether the horns really grazed me. But I slammed the door and, still howling with all my might, propped myself with both hands against the panel, as if I were holding back the whole of Hell. Avowing my distress by my cries, I automatically called on my guardian angels for protection. At once my mother, the neighbors, and my father, holding up his unbuttoned pants, rushed to my rescue, while heads appeared at the balconies and galleries of the upper stories of the house. Someone caught hold of me, lifted me up, and I closed my eyes, yielded entirely, my legs suddenly weak, my heart in anguish. But I was safe, no matter how painfully my heart beat against my ribs, no matter how weakly my legs failed to carry me.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  One evening, however, the harsh sound of the needle piercing the stuff in the warm silence of the room suddenly stopped. We heard a strange voice speaking. Inquisitive, we stuck our heads out. Catarina, the wife of the Maltese goatherd, was there to collect for the morning milk. Imprudently, when she saw us, she exclaimed to my mother: “Fancy that! You already have two children, and I thought you had only one.” Mother’s expression changed, her mouth drawn tight and hostile in the face of this appeal to the Evil Eye. Wild as a female animal that feels its offspring threatened, she came toward us and, pretending to caress us, stroked our bodies with her hand wide-open, all five fingers held straight. I shivered, feeling a mortal cold descend through me. God forbid that the exorcism should fail! To distract attention from what she was doing, Mother asked me: “But what are you doing there?” Perhaps because the danger had unnerved me, perhaps also because I wished to take advantage of it in order to betray a secret that was beginning to weigh on my conscience, I exclaimed: “We’re making love!” After that I covered my face, while Mother and Catarina burst out laughing, both of them believing that I had only repeated some coarse remark overheard in the street. Of my earliest years, I have no memories other than those of an endless game, played in constant safety in our twice-concealed blind alley. ~ 2. THE SABBATH ~ At first, I wanted to write a whole book about the even tenor of happiness of my earliest years, but in spite of my nostalgia for this period, I have barely managed to scribble these few pages about it, as though I were trying to avoid its very memory. Still, I would like to add something now about our Friday nights and our Saturday mornings, so wonderfully joyful and peacefully holy.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Slowly, the procession passed twice along the walls of the synagogue, then went up to the high chair of the priest on the dais. The crowd was silent while our supervisor, still conscious of his responsibilities, climbed onto the heavy wooden chair that was carved with sacred texts. His aides then placed the boy on the High Priest’s knees, lying face upwards, after which, sharing in the traditional honor, they climbed onto the steps at the back of the throne. In the middle of the watchful group of his torturers, the victim waited, not daring to move or to say a word. His skinny little legs were folded, drawn up over his body, stiff as the legs of a cataleptic chicken. One could hear the breathing of the crowd watchful in its suspense, and the dry sputtering of the flames in the little lamps. The High Priest then drew out his blade and solemnly, with broad gestures, reached out toward the child’s crotch. I felt that I could not bear the sight of what was about to happen. All my groin ached as if the knife were about to wound me too. But why, in spite of this, was I unable to look away, why did my eyes remain glued to the boy’s tiny white penis that I could discern from afar in the light that came down from the air vents which had become green with all the mold of the years? An intolerable fear kept me close to the wall, a feeling of shame before this nakedness; all this was mingled with a feeling too that I shall never forget, a pleasure at being accessory to the ceremony, accepting it all. Within my own penis, I felt the pleasure of fear transformed into tremors like those of an electric shock. How shall I ever forget my complicity? Yes, I was playing my part in the ceremony, in the ancestral and collective ritual that was food for the mind. It was physically intolerable, and I felt truly faint when the High Priest’s right hand, armed with a razor, came slowly down toward the tiny bit of white flesh that rose between the index and the second finger of his left hand. But my sense of having been liberated was sudden, and all my fear vanished explosively, together with my shame, my pleasure, my disgust, and the unbearable tension that was born of the anguished silence of all of us: unable to stand it any longer, the victim had just burst into tears.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  We waited at least half an hour before the first car turned up. As the day advanced there began to appear, from the other direction, an occasional big munitions truck marked with the yellow flag: explosives, danger. The Germans evidently intended to stop the Allies somewhere nearby. In a few hours we would be in the middle of the fight. At last, there came a truck bound for Tunis. We rushed for it, as fast as our stiff legs permitted; but the driver hardly even looked at us. It would be better to stand on the edge of the road, so we decided to take turns at this so as to be visible from a distance. Time passed. I was tense, my head empty, with one arm stiffly held in the hitchhiker’s gesture. The few drivers who were going toward Tunis stared curiously at us but did not answer our signals that grew more and more frantic. A caterpillar car drew up in a clatter of chains, like a huge beast. I tried to run, but my joints were stiff. Picchonero rose too, but when the German driver understood what we wanted, he cursed us and started off again. We jumped, for the first bursts of gunfire were very close, leaving trails of motionless smoke in the sky to our left. I had enough experience to realize that it was just a beginning; the reply, more dangerous for us, would not be long in coming. We had to formulate other plans, so we now joined the other men. I was surprised to find them talking, lying on their backs with their heads on their bags, in a mood of cheerfulness again. They had slept, eaten, and drunk a little; perhaps they had not quite understood the situation. I was vaguely angry with them for being so relaxed and carefree. Then I blamed myself; had I not fasted for the last twenty-four hours, and had I too rested for a while, I might also have been more cheerful. The firing was now going strong. We had to leave and go forward to get out of the range of the artillery on the opposite side. It was difficult to go faster with our feet as wounded as they were after twenty-five hours of being chafed by the clogs we wore. My big toe felt as though there was a big cut right across it. The men got up reluctantly. Through the whole of this adventure, not once did I feel so far from them as at this moment, when they stretched and yawned.

• From Bluets (2009)

  Different dream, same period: Out at a house by the shore, a serious landscape. There was a dance underway, in a mahogany ballroom, where we were dancing the way people dance when they are telling each other how they want to make love. Afterward it was time for rough magic: to cast the spell I had to place each blue object (two marbles, a miniature feather, a shard of azure glass, a string of lapis) into my mouth, then hold them there while they discharged an unbearable milk. When I looked up you were escaping on a skiff, suddenly wanted. I spit out the objects in a snaky blue paste on my plate and offered to help the police boat look for you, but they said the currents were too unusual. So I stayed behind, and became known as the lady who waits, the sad sack of town with hair that smells like an animal. 22. Some things do change, however. A membrane can simply rip off your life, like a skin of congealed paint torn off the top of a can. I remember that day very clearly: I had received a phone call. A friend had been in an accident. Perhaps she would not live. She had very little face, and her spine was broken in two places. She had not yet moved; the doctor described her as “a pebble in water.” I walked around Brooklyn and noticed that the faded periwinkle of the abandoned Mobil gas station on the corner was suddenly blooming. In the baby-shit yellow showers at my gym, where snow sometimes fluttered in through the cracked gated windows, I noticed that the yellow paint was peeling in spots, and a decent, industrial blue was trying to creep in. At the bottom of the swimming pool, I watched the white winter light spangle the cloudy blue and I knew together they made God. When I walked into my friend’s hospital room, her eyes were a piercing, pale blue and the only part of her body that could move. I was scared. So was she. The blue was beating. 23. Goethe wrote Theory of Colours in a period of his life described by one critic as “a long interval, marked by nothing of distinguished note.” Goethe himself describes the period as one in which “a quiet, collected state of mind was out of the question.” Goethe is not alone in turning to color at a particularly fraught moment. Think of filmmaker Derek Jarman, who wrote his book Chroma as he was going blind and dying of AIDS , a death he also forecast on film as disappearing into a “blue screen.” Or of Wittgenstein, who wrote his Remarks on Colour during the last eighteen months of his life, while dying of stomach cancer. He knew he was dying; he could have chosen to work on any philosophical problem under the sun.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Nor was there anything in the room, except the iron bedsteads and the mattresses, to furnish all this bare space. As soon as I was strong enough, I went, on my shaky legs, on a tour of inspection of the infirmary. I met neither patients nor hospital personnel; I seemed to be in a deserted house. The infirmary had been set up in an abandoned old Arab fort, an ancient building of big roughly hewn stones that the weather had stripped of their coating of distemper. The ceilings revealed, in spots, huge scars of mortar from which, every once in a while, there fell a shower of sand. At noon I was visited by a Mohammedan soldier who held a plurality of offices in this infirmary: medical orderly, cook, and watchman. I told him I wanted to go away. He smiled without answering and went his way. I then gave up trying to get away from my bed, besieged by all this emptiness and by the terrifying silence of the mountains. One day, in that accursed period of my life, I thought that I was about to die of fright. I was awakened by dreadful howls. In a ward close to mine, somebody was beating the door with fists and feet, weeping and crying out aloud, then suddenly silent again, then beginning again frantically, as if all the sufferer’s strength were being concentrated in a tempest that could last each time but a moment. Between two waves of this storm, in the pause of calm, I could then hear the serene flight of the cicadas again, as if I had only dreamed it all. I was seized with panic and I jumped out of bed and rushed outside. In the yard, I found the medical orderly, seated on one foot, busy crushing red peppers. My terror could scarcely be reduced to calm by his human presence. I was still shivering with fright. He smiled and made up his mind to speak: “Don’t be scared. It’s a poor madman. We’ve locked him up and he’s complaining. Go back to bed if you want to get better.” I did get better, in order to get away from the howls of the madman, whose alternating bouts of screaming anger and of silence gave a rhythm to my suspense until I could leave the place. When I returned to the summer camp, I no longer felt like writing to my parents and began to reckon the weeks that still kept me away from them. I kept but one envelope for each week, to write to them.