Fear

Passages

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

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• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Harry calls Jessica, says, Come now. Tried to sleep, but the night began to cavern. New dim lights in the house, new sounds. Birds chirping in the middle of the night while I labor in the tub. Jessica asks if the birds are real. They are. She rigs our tub with duct tape and a plastic bag so the tub can grow big with water. She has tricks. I keep wondering bleakly why she’s texting through my labor; later I learn she has an app on her iPhone that times the contractions. Night passes quickly, in the time that is no time. In the morning Harry and Jessica persuade me to go for an hour walk, briskly, in the gray day. It’s hard. The contractions aren’t going to stop if you stop moving, Jessica keeps telling me. OK but how does she know. We walk down to the Rite Aid at York and Figueroa to get castor oil, but when we get there, no one has a wallet. I squint in the gray light. I am going, almost gone. Back to the house for wallets, back to the store, we pace the parking lot, which looks scabrous with trash. I want to be somewhere more beautiful, I think, and also, everything is right. At home I eat the castor oil mixed into chocolate ice cream. I want what’s inside to come out. We’d been living together for just over a year when your mother received her diagnosis. She had gone to the doctor for back pain and was there told that she had breast cancer that had already spread to her spine, a tumor threatening to crack her vertebrae. Within months the cancer would reach her liver; within the year, her brain. We flew her out from Michigan when she became bedridden from radiation with no one to help. We gave her our bed, and started sleeping on our living room floor. We lived this way for months, all of us staring in dread and paralysis out at our mountain. We each anguished differently and severely: you wanted to give her the care she’d once given to you, but could see it was breaking our new household to try; she was sick and broke and terrified, utterly unwilling or unable to discuss her condition or her options. Eventually I, villainous, drew a line; I couldn’t live this way. She chose to go back to her condo in the suburbs of Detroit and decline alone rather than accept the substandard care of a Medicaid facility near us—all her assets liquidated, a TV blaring from behind a neighbor’s canvas curtain, nurses whispering about accepting Christ as your personal savior, you know the place. Who could blame her? She wanted to be at home, crowded in with her beloved Parisian-themed knickknacks—all her I LOVE PARIS plaques, miniature Eiffel Towers. All of her passwords and e-mail addresses were variants on Paris, a city she would never see.

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

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

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  at a certain point i woke up. i listened for her breath, which i heard after a moment. much shallower, faster. i became alert, just then the AC unit went on, aurally overtaking the sound of her. this had happened innumerable times before, and it was always a strange bardo for me. would the breath still be happening when the fan went back off? i strained to hear her breath over the grinding of the fan but couldn't. my torso leapt and sat up to check if her chest was moving. it didn't seem to be. the AC roared. her left hand puffed the sheet up suddenly, the tiniest, instant halloween ghost. her first movement—a signaling. i leapt to her, to that hand. her eyes were open now, illuminated, looking up, her mouth was now closed, her face no longer tilted, akimbo. she was beautiful. and dying. … i cupped her warm hand in mine and let her go. i told her one more time, you are surrounded in love, you are surrounded in light, don't be afraid. … and then her eyes relaxed and her shoulders relaxed of a piece. and i knew she had found her way. dared. summoned up her smarts and courage and whacked a way through. i was really astonished. proud of her. i looked at the clock it was 2:16.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  In the wake of the Patriot Act, during the second administration of George W., you made a series of small, handheld weapons. The rule was that each weapon had to be assembled from household items within minutes. You’d been gay-bashed before, two black eyes while waiting in line for a burrito (you ran after him, of course). Now you thought, if the government comes for its citizens, we should be prepared, even if our weapons are pathetic. Your art-weapons included a steak knife affixed to a bottle of ranch dressing and mounted on an axe handle, a dirty sock sprouting nails, a wooden stump with a clump of urethane resin stuck to one end with dull bolts protruding from it, and more. One night during our courtship, I came home to find the stump with bolts lying across the welcome mat of my porch. You had left town, and I had been baffled by your departure. But when I ascended my front steps and saw the weapon, shadowy in the twilight, I knew you loved me. It was a talisman of protection—a means of keeping myself safe while you were gone, a tool to fight off the suitors (had there been any). I’ve kept it by my bedside ever since. Not because I think they’re coming for us per se. But because it makes the brutal tender, which I’ve since learned is one of your principal gifts. The year my father died, I read a story in school about a little boy who builds ships in the bottoms of bottles. This little boy lived by the maxim that if you could imagine the worst thing that could ever happen, you would never be surprised when it did. Not knowing that this maxim was the very definition of anxiety, as given by Freud (“‘Anxiety’ describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one”), I set to work cultivating it. Already an avid “journaler,” I started penning narratives of horrible things in my school notebook. My first installment was a novella titled “Kidnapped” that featured the abduction and torture of my best friend, Jeanne, and me by a deranged husband-wife team. I was proud of my talismanic opus, even drew an ornate cover page for it. Now Jeanne and I would never be kidnapped and tortured without our having foreseen it! I thus felt confused and saddened when my mother took me out for lunch “to talk about it.” She told me she was disturbed by what I had written, and so was my sixth-grade teacher. In a flash it became clear that my story was not something to be proud of, as either literature or prophylactic.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  It’s hard to explain, but I have a lot of friends who are private investigators. One of them gave me the number of a local PI, a guy named Andy Lamprey, described on a “total security solutions provider” website as follows: “A detective for the Los Angeles Police Department for more than 29 years, Lamprey investigated numerous crimes, including homicide, and was a senior supervisor to the Special Weapons and Tactics Team (SWAT). He is a court qualified expert in narcotics and vice enforcement and has performed several risk and vulnerability assessments, threat and management assessments and fraud investigations nationwide.” You never know—there may come a time when you, too, feel the need to call upon an Andy Lamprey. Lamprey eventually connects me with a guy named Malcolm, another ex-LAPD cop, who will sit, armed, in an unmarked car outside our house through the night, keeping watch over us, if we want. We want. Lamprey says he can negotiate us a reduced rate of $500 per night (LA has unbelievably high rates for “cover,” as I learn it’s called). I call my mother to ask for advice, and also to alert her to the wingnut on the loose, in case he drifts her way; she insists on putting a check in the mail to pay for a night or two of Malcolm. I feel grateful, but also guilty: it was I who had insisted on writing about Jane’s murder, and while I knew intellectually that I wasn’t responsible for this man’s actions any more than Jane was for her murder (as the caller had indicated), my less enlightened self felt sick with a sense of late-breaking comeuppance. I had summoned the horrible thing, and now here he was, attaché case in hand. It wasn’t long before my image of him merged with that of Jared Lee Loughner, the man who, exactly two weeks prior, had walked up to Representative Gabby Giffords in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, and shot her, along with eighteen others. A form letter from Giffords was found in Loughner’s home with the words “Die, Bitch” scrawled on it; Loughner was known for saying that women should not hold positions of power. It doesn’t matter to me if both of these men are mad. Their voices still have clarity.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  You might have thought the history of the twentieth century would provide plenty of examples of this, but many still choose to resist the conclusion—despite the increasing use in public life of the language of “force” (economic “forces,” political “forces,” peer “pressure,” and so on). In recent scholarship, Walter Wink in particular has offered a sharp and compelling analysis of “the powers” and the way they function in today’s world as much as in yesterday’s. The psychotherapist Scott Peck wrote a book, People of the Lie, about the small but significant number of his clients who had, it seemed, bought so deeply into unreality that they appeared to have been taken over by dark forces beyond themselves. The post-Enlightenment idea that such language reeks of medieval superstition is too simplistic by half. Granted the split-level world of Enlightenment thought, we should perhaps expect that we wouldn’t have very good language for talking about a reality that is neither divine nor reducible to terms of the ordinary material world. But this should not stop us trying to come to grips with the reality in question. Without the perspective that sees evil as a dark force that stands behind human reality, the issue of “good” and “bad” in our world is easy to decipher. It is fatally easy, and I mean fatally easy, to typecast “people like us” as basically good and “people like them” as basically evil. This is a danger we in our day should be aware of, after the disastrous attempts by some Western leaders to speak about an “axis of evil” and then to go to war to obliterate it. We turn ourselves into angels and “the other lot” into demons; we “demonize” our opponents. This is a convenient tool for avoiding having to think, but it is disastrous for both our thinking and our behavior.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  A violent image for a violent reality. I have in this book used the analogy of the perfect storm partly as a way of picking up Schweitzer’s point and developing it further. But even this, like all analogies, inevitably breaks down. What we might need, in addition, is to imagine some forces in different planes. In addition to the gale of Rome, the high-pressure system of Israel’s distorted ambitions, and the cyclone of the returning purposes of God, we perhaps need a downward vortex, a giant whirlpool, that threatens to suck down into the black depths all who sail too close to it. One might even tie the themes together and suggest that the gale and the pressure system are themselves driven by the same forces that are dragging down the dark waters: Rome and rebel Israel are the unwitting tools of the Satan, the Accuser, the great force of anti-creation. And one might suggest that Jesus, precisely because he believed that in his public career “the time was fulfilled,” believed too that all these powers of evil were gathering themselves for one last battle, one last attempt to thwart the good purposes of the creator God, to pull the cosmos and the human race down into the depths. The only way, he believed, by which this great anti-creation power could be stopped and defeated would be for him, Jesus, anointed with God’s Spirit to fight the real battle against the real enemy, to take the full power of evil and accusation upon himself, to let it do its worst to him, so that it would thereby be exhausted, its main force spent. He would be the David for this ultimate Goliath—though with the difference that, since violence and death were themselves the ultimate enemy, this David would win the battle by losing his life, with the four nails of crucifixion and the spear thrust in his side taking the place of the five stones David took for his sling. Jesus’s own mind, heart, and body would be the battlefield on which the final victory would be won, as they were also the Temple in which the powerful, loving presence of Israel’s returning God had made his home.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was more ghastly than the image of the jeering hall; more ghastly than the prospect of being laughed and hissed off a thousand, thousand stages... So when Kitty stood in the wing of the theatre that night, waiting for the chairman’s cry, I stood beside her, sweating beneath a layer of grease-paint, biting my lips so hard I thought they would bleed. My heart had beat fast for Kitty before, in apprehension and passion; but it had never thudded as it thudded now - I thought it would burst right out of my breast, I thought I should be killed with fright. When Walter came to whisper to us, and to fill our pockets with coins, I could not answer him. There was a juggling turn upon the stage. I heard the creaking of the boards as the man ran to catch his batons, the clap-gasp-clap-gasp- cheer of the audience as he finished his set; and then came the clack of a gavel, and the juggler ran by us, clutching his gear. Kitty said once, very low, ‘I love you!’ - and I felt myself half-pulled, half-thrust beneath the rising curtain, and knew that I must somehow saunter and sing.At first, so blinded was I by the lights, I couldn’t see the crowd at all; I could only hear it, rustling and murmuring - loud, and close, it seemed, on every side. When at last I stepped for a second out of the glare of lime, and saw all the faces that were turned my way, I almost faltered and lost my place - and would have done, I think, had not Kitty at that moment pressed my arm and murmured, ‘We have them! Listen!’ under cover of the orchestra. I did listen then - and realised that, unbelievably, she was right: there were claps, and friendly shouts; there was a rising hum of expectant pleasure as we worked towards our chorus; there was, finally, a bubbling cascade of cheers and laughter from gallery to pit.The sound affected me like nothing I had ever known before. At once, I remembered the foolish dance that I had failed, all day, to learn, and left off leaning on my stick to join Kitty in her stroll before the footlights. I understood, too, what Walter had wanted of us in the wing: as the new song drew to a close I advanced with Kitty to the front of the stage, drew out the coins that he had tipped into my pocket - they were only chocolate sovereigns, of course, but covered in foil to make them glitter - and cast them into the laughing crowd.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  This scene doesn’t forecast damage or violation per se, but most such literary scenes (the non-French ones?) do. Think of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, whose primal scene of violation I must have read a hundred times over as a young girl. Here is eight-year-old Maya, our narrator, reporting on the actions of her uncle: “Mr. Freeman pulled me to him, and put his hand between my legs…. He threw back the blankets and his ‘thing’ stood up like a brown ear of corn. He took my hand and said, ‘Feel it.’ It was mushy and squirmy like the inside of a freshly killed chicken. Then he dragged me on top of his chest.” This is but the opening salvo of the recurring sexual abuse of Maya at the hands of Mr. Freeman. To be honest, however, I didn’t remember that the abuse continued until I researched it just now. As a child I stuttered out on just this one scene, so startled was I by the penis-corn. If you’re looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (all my favorite books in my preteen years: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Clan of the Cave Bear, The World According to Garp, as well as the few R-rated movies I was allowed to see—Fame, most notably, with its indelible scene of Irene Cara being asked to take her shirt off and suck her thumb by a skeezy photographer who promises to make her a star), then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don’t even want to talk about “female sexuality” until there is a control group. And there never will be. In high school, a wise teacher assigned the short story “Wild Swans” by Alice Munro. The story blew through my penis-corn-addled mind and swept it clean. In just a few short pages, Munro lays it all out: how the force of one’s adolescent curiosity and incipient lust often must war with the need to protect oneself from disgusting and wicked violators, how pleasure can coexist with awful degradation without meaning the degradation was justified or a species of wish fulfillment; how it feels to be both accomplice and victim; and how such ambivalences can live on in an adult sexual life. Munro makes “Wild Swans” more tolerable and interesting by having its protagonist get jerked off by a male stranger on a train (a traveling priest, of course) without her consent or protest, but also without her being forced to do anything to his body. In lieu of genital description, Munro gives us landscape: the view outside as the train hurtles forth, which the girl beholds as she comes.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  “Your moment has come,” he said to the chief priests, the officers of the Temple police, and the elders who had come out to arrest him. “Your moment has come at last, and so has the power of darkness!” (Luke 22:53). The darkness, it seems, had to be allowed to do its worst in order to be defeated. And the dark powers that put Jesus on the cross continued to the last with their mocking questions: “Save yourself, if you’re God’s son! Come down from the cross!” (Matt. 27:40), echoing the same voice in the desert, “If you really are God’s son, tell these stones to become bread!” (Matt. 4:3). Somehow it appears that Jesus’s battle with the satan, which was the battle for God’s kingdom to be established on earth as in heaven, reached its climax in his death. This is a strange, dark, and powerful theme to which we shall return. For the moment the point is clear: Jesus is indeed fighting what he takes to be the battle against the real enemies of the people of God, but it is not the battle his followers or the wider group of onlookers was expecting him to fight. Jesus has redefined the royal task around his own vision of where the real problem lies. And he has thereby redefined his own vocation, which he takes to be the true vocation of Israel’s king: to fight and win the key battle, the battle that will set his people free and establish God’s sovereign and saving rule, through his own suffering and death. Cleansing the Temple The same is true when we consider the other great “royal” aspiration: to cleanse or rebuild the Temple. We regularly refer to the striking action Jesus performed in the Temple as his “cleansing of the Temple.” We don’t, perhaps, always realize that any such action was staking an implicitly royal claim: it was kings, real or aspiring, who had authority over the Temple. It was Israel’s kings or would-be kings who planned it (David), built it (Solomon), cleansed it (Hezekiah, Josiah, Judah the Hammer), rebuilt it (Zerubbabel, Herod the Great), and hoped to defend it (Simon bar-Giora) or to rebuild it once more (Simon the Star). In each case, of course, building the Temple was associated with the larger story of victory over enemies, liberation for the people, and so on. It was the Exodus narrative, in other words, the Passover narrative, all over again; and we shouldn’t forget that a key element in the Passover narrative was always the presence of Israel’s God himself with his people, in the pillar of cloud and fire and then, apparently more permanently, in the tabernacle. Passover implies Presence. Jesus, as we have seen, chose the Passover season as the moment to ride into Jerusalem on a donkey, deliberately awakening in the onlookers’ minds the powerful prophecy of Zechariah 9:9–11: Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you;

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  We know that this book was a favorite of many Jews in the time of Jesus. There is every sign that, as with Isaiah, it was a book Jesus himself drew on heavily for his understanding of what God was up to and what his own role might be within that drama. Jesus was not the only person in the period who made Daniel 7 thematic in his vocation. A hundred years after his day, the great Rabbi Akiba hailed bar-Kosiba, Simon Son-of-the-Star, as Messiah. Akiba is reputed to have explained his view with reference to the famous passage in Daniel 7. This chapter is very important, and we must look at it in a little more detail. In this chapter, the prophet, who up to now has been able to interpret the dreams and visions of others, has a dream of his own. He sees a vision of four horrible monsters causing havoc on earth, climaxing in a terrible monster with a “little horn” that grows up in place of some of its original ones; and the horn speaks arrogantly against God and his people. But then the vision changes: As I watched, thrones were set in place, and an Ancient One took his throne; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire. . . . The court sat in judgment, and the books were opened. I watched then because of the noise of the arrogant words that the horn was speaking. And as I watched, the beast was put to death, and its body destroyed and given over to be burned with fire. . . . As I watched in the night visions, I saw one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him . To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, And his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed. (7:9–11, 13–14) The interpretation of the vision is given in a short form (7:15–18) and a longer version (7:19–27): As for me, Daniel, my spirit was troubled within me, and the visions of my head terrified me. I approached one of the attendants to ask him the truth concerning all this. So he said that he would disclose to me the interpretation of the matter: “As for these four great beasts, four kings shall arise out of the earth. But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever—forever and ever.”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  (Mark 3:11–12) Experts . . . were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul!” Jesus . . . spoke to them. “How can the Accuser cast out the Accuser? If a kingdom splits into two factions, it can’t last. . . . But remember: no one can get into a strong man’s house and steal his property unless first they tie up the strong man; then they can plunder his house.” (Mark 3:22–27) They were suddenly confronted by a man with an unclean spirit. . . . Jesus was saying to him, “Unclean spirit, come out of him!” “What’s your name?” Jesus asked him. “Legion,” he replied. “That’s my name—there are lots of us!” . . . The unclean spirits came out and went into the [herd of] pigs. The herd rushed down the steep slope into the sea—about two thousand of them!—and were drowned. (Mark 5:1–20) “I saw the satan fall like lightning from heaven.” (Luke 10:18) “And isn’t it right that this daughter of Abraham, tied up by the satan for these eighteen years, should be untied from her chains on the sabbath day?” (Luke 13:16) “The satan demanded to have you [Peter]. He wanted to shake you into bits like wheat.” (Luke 22:31) The devil had already put the idea of betraying him into the heart of Judas, son of Simon Iscariot. . . . After the bread, the satan entered into him. (John 13:2, 27) Many modern writers, understandably, have tried to marginalize this theme, but we can’t expect to push aside such a central part of the tradition and make serious progress. It is, of course, difficult for most people in the modern Western world to know what to make of it at all; that’s one of the points on which the strong wind of modern skepticism has done its work well, and the shrill retort from “traditionalists,” insisting on seeing everything in terms of “supernatural” issues, hardly helps either. As C. S. Lewis points out in the introduction to his famous Screwtape Letters, the modern world divides into those who are obsessed with demonic powers and those who mock them as outdated rubbish. Neither approach, Lewis insists, does justice to the reality. I’m with Lewis on this. Despite the caricatures, the obsessions, and the sheer muddle that people often get themselves into on this subject, there is such a thing as a dark force that seems to take over people, movements, and sometimes whole countries, a force or (as it sometimes seems) a set of forces that can make people do things they would never normally do. You might have thought the history of the twentieth century would provide plenty of examples of this, but many still choose to resist the conclusion— despite the increasing use in public life of the language of “force” (economic “forces,” political “forces,” peer “pressure,” and so on).

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

  I was scared. It seemed obvious to me that I was breaking up. Yet again, I could see the locked ward, the padded cell, and a life in the twilight of consciousness. And there did not seem to be anything that I could do about it. Dr. Piet, however, did not seem perturbed. “You’re just becoming an absentminded professor, Karen,” he said cheerily, grinning at me across his desk. “This is what all you academics do, right? You’re just reverting to the stereotype.” “No,” I protested. “It’s not like that. I didn’t just forget. I really didn’t know what I was doing!” “My dear Karen”—Dr. Piet took a more bracing line—“you really mustn’t take yourself so seriously. You’ve probably just been working too hard. Or it could be a side effect of the medication. I’ll take you off the Largactil for a while and we’ll have a go at Librium. But I don’t want to hear any more of this nonsense about padded cells and the rest of it. Believe me, if I committed everyone in Oxford who had periods of forgetfulness, the hospitals would be full to overflowing and city life would grind to a halt. This kind of mental abstraction is an occupational hazard for scholars. You’ve all got your minds on higher things, supposedly. You’re just not focused on mundane reality. Try to get a sense of perspective about this.” I stared mutinously at the carpet, unconvinced. I was not and never had been in the least absentminded. I didn’t forget things; I had an almost abnormally good memory. I could—and still can— recount entire conversations years after they have taken place, recall exactly what everybody was wearing and what we had eaten for lunch. I didn’t float around in an academic haze. These were not bouts of forgetfulness but lapses into a form of unconsciousness, when I was quite compos mentis enough to boil a kettle or cross a road safely, but seemed unaware of what I was doing. This must, surely, be a symptom of something sinister. And yet a part of me longed to believe Dr. Piet. It would be so wonderful if I really were simply behaving like a regular scholar. It would be such a relief to be typical for a change, instead of a freak. And Dr. Piet seemed to have no doubts at all; maybe he really did see a lot of this.

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

  During our walks, Rebecca had listened to my growing saga of frustration with the religious life. She had been a lifeline in that last, difficult year, but she had not shared my disenchantment. Why had she summoned me? I wondered as we pulled into the station. Was she in trouble? We had arranged that she would meet my train with the convent car, but I did not see her on the platform; nor was she in the entrance hall after I had handed in my ticket. Then, suddenly, I caught sight of a nun standing beneath the old-fashioned wall clock, wearing one of those modern habits that gave her the appearance of an Edwardian nurse. There was something familiar about her, but she was far, far too thin. That could not be Rebecca. I looked around again, but found my gaze drawn back to that modest figure, whose eyes were meekly cast down on the tiled floor. The nun looked up and her face brightened with delighted recognition as she gave me a small, discreet wave. And for a moment, my heart stopped. Gone was the serene Madonna. This nun looked as though she had just been released from a concentration camp or was in the final stages of cancer. Her face had shrunk, so that she looked all eyes, which now seemed huge and protuberant. There were cavernous hollows beneath her sharply etched cheekbones. As she crossed the hall toward me I was appalled to see how skeletal her legs were. She was about five foot ten inches, and could not have weighed more than eighty pounds. But when she spoke, her voice was the same, and I had to face it: this was indeed Rebecca, but dreadfully, frighteningly altered. Quickly, I pulled my own face into what I hoped was an answering smile. “I didn’t recognize you for a moment in your new habit,” I murmured as we exchanged the nunlike kiss, pressing each other’s cheeks smartly, one after the other. I kept smiling. “It’s lovely to see you.” “And so good of you to come.” Together we crossed the station forecourt and got into the car. “This is a first,” I said, in what I hoped was a cheery tone of voice. “How long have you been allowed to drive? We could have done with this car in Oxford. Think of the lovely trips we could have taken!” “To the Cotswolds . . . Blenheim . . . How is it all? I do miss it.” Rebecca inched through the traffic and we started the forty-minute drive to the convent. “Oh, it’s all much the same,” I replied. “Though of course, it isn’t the same being outside.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Sameer thought this was his chance: since she was stranded, she could stay in his room, he suggested, but Anwen declined. He, characteristically, pushed. “I remember pulling a classic ‘soft boy’ move,” he told me. “Like, ‘Fine. Leave me alone. Everyone always does.’ Basically, ‘Oh, woe is me, my life is hard, you should feel bad for me, don’t leave me.’ Very emotionally manipulative shit. And it worked.” It was late. It was cold. Anwen didn’t know what else to do—so she eventually said okay. As they left the frat, she spotted a couple of guys from her dorm down the street and told Sameer thanks, but never mind: she would run and follow them home. Again he wasn’t giving up so easily. “You can’t just leave after kissing me like that,” he said. She gazed after the retreating boys, calculating whether she could actually catch them. If she didn’t, then what? So, believing she was taking charge of her situation, she turned to face Sameer. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go talk about this.” They went inside an academic building that was open all night; Anwen could hear people whistling at them, calling out, “Get some!” They sat on a couch in a lounge and she tried to explain to Sameer that she wasn’t interested in dating him, she wasn’t interested in anything; at the same time, she was trying not to hurt his feelings, to let him down easy, to tell him he was a nice guy and she’d had fun dancing with him. It all came out kind of muddled. One point she was very clear on, though: “I don’t want to have sex with you.” “That’s okay,” he replied. “I don’t have any condoms.” Which was not, of course, an actual response to what she’d said. They started to kiss again, and Sameer, still very drunk, pushed Anwen down on the couch. “I can make you feel good,” he said, covering his body with hers. “He was so much larger than I am,” Anwen recalled. “I was totally trapped. That was the moment I started to panic a little bit. So I said, ‘No, Not here.’” He led her into the men’s room, pinned her to a wall Hollywood-style, and began kissing her again. Again she said, “Not here.”

• From Wild (2012)

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

• From Wild (2012)

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

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

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

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

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

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

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