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 Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  The sages and their pupils claimed that their mental exercises, disciplined lifestyle, and intensely dialectical discussions had uncovered the atman and introduced them to a more potent mode of being. The way they described this experience suggests that it may have originated in the brain’s soothing system, which takes over when an animal is at rest and free of threat. A person who knows the atman, said Yajnavalkya, is “calm, composed, cool, patient and collected.” Above all, he is “free from fear,” a phrase that runs like a thread through these texts.11 But the peace discovered by the sages was more than bovine relaxation. They distinguished carefully and consistently between this new knowledge and a temporary, contingent contentment that is repeatedly overwhelmed by the Four Fs. The peaceful mood of a calf resting quietly beside his mother cannot withstand the incentive/resource-focused mechanism: when hungry, he reflexively leaps to his feet and roots around for food. If a lion appears on the scene, the threat-focused mechanism automatically fills him with the terror that will make him flee for his life. But the sages seem to have gained a more permanent degree of immunity from these instinctive drives. Once a person had accessed “the immense and unborn atman, un-ageing, undying, immortal and free from fear,” he was free of terror and anxiety.12 He was no longer so completely in thrall to the instinctual acquisitive drive that compelled him to want more and more, to pursue, desire, achieve, and consume: “A man who does not desire—who is freed from desires, whose desires are fulfilled, whose only desire is his atman—his vital functions do not depart. Brahman he is and to Brahman he goes.”13 The sages did not see this state as supernatural; it had not been bestowed upon them by a god but could be achieved by anybody who had the talent and tenacity to cultivate it, albeit with considerable expenditure of time and effort. A trainee ascetic had to study with his guru for as long as twelve years, and during this time his lifestyle was just as important as the intellectual content of his education. Enlightenment was impossible if he did not curb his aggressive, assertive ego, so he lived in a humble, self-effacing manner, tending his teacher’s fire, collecting fuel from the forest, and begging for his food. All violence forbidden, he was expected to behave with detached courtesy to all. Even Indra, god of war, who never stopped boasting about his military and amorous exploits, had to study for 101 years with a human guru, giving up fighting and sex, cleaning his teacher’s house, and tending his fire.14 Once his training was complete, the student would go home, marry, and bring up his children, putting into practice everything that he had learned from his teacher: he would continue to study and meditate, forswear violence, and deal kindly and gently with others.15

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The answer may be found in texts incorporated in the huge collection of centuries of Roman law undertaken during Justinian’s long reign: the Corpus juris civilis , which shaped the future of Byzantine law and was to have a similar effect in the West when Western scholars rediscovered it in the eleventh century. On homosexual acts, the Corpus consolidated the legislative beginnings made under the two Emperors Theodosius. Justinian amplified the Emperor Augustus’s harsh legislation on adultery and divorce to extend the death penalty from adultery to those ‘who give themselves up to works of lewdness with their own sex’ (we have already seen Theodosius I adding Jewish–Christian marriages to the original Augustan provisions). To that remodelling of a central pre-Christian text, Justinian added newly created legislation, gathered in his Novellae or Novels , which displayed Christian reference and which reflected the natural crises blighting the Empire in Justinian’s time: a concentration of unusually catastrophic earthquakes on the Empire’s Mediterranean tectonic fault lines, and then, beginning in 541, one of the most severe known plague pandemics in human history . Accordingly, the Emperor admonished same-sex offenders in Novel 77 ‘to take to heart the fear of God…that they may not be visited by the just wrath of God…because of such crimes there are famines, earthquakes, and pestilences’. The Antiochene chronicler John Malalas, who had recorded the fate of the bishops of Rhodes and Diospolis with relish, habitually used the same phrase ‘the wrath of God’ to describe earthquakes. Justinian completed the circle of references in Novel 141 ‘against the defilement of males’, after Constantinople suffered a second episode of plague in 544; he made an archetype of the fate of Sodom, where ‘to this very day the land burns with inextinguishable fire.’ This became a recurring cliché as the Byzantine Empire suffered fresh outbreaks of plague through the next two centuries to 750: despite a long Classical tradition of viewing plague as a physiological or medical problem, Byzantine analysis was now primarily couched in terms of morality. As far as same-sex offenders were concerned, accounts of Justinian’s reign show that the general fate of those accused under such legislation imitated that in the pogrom of 521: castration rather than immediate death (though the latter often followed the former). [18] ASCETIC

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Melancholy Baby dies from an overdose of Time or cold turkey withdrawal of breath -- in Arabia -- Paris -- Mexico City -- New York -- New Orleans -- ) The living and the dead... in sickness or on the nod... hooked or kicked or hooked again... come in on the junk beam and The Connection is eating Chop Suey on Dolores Street... dunking pound cake in Bickfords . . chased up Exchange Place by a baying pack of people. Malarials of the world bundle in shivering protoplasm. Fear seals the turd message with a cuneiform account. Giggling rioters copulate to the screams of a burning Nigra. Lonely librarians unite in soul kiss halitosis. That grippy feeling, brother? Sore throat and disquieting as the hot afternoon wind? Welcome to the International Syphilis Lodge -- "Methodith-Epithcopal God damn ith" (phrase used to test speech impairment typical of paresis) or the first silent touch of chancre makes you a member in good standing. The vibrating soundless hum of deep forest and orgone accumulators, the sudden silence of cities when the junky cops and even the Commuter buzzes clogged lines of cholesterol for contact. Signal flares of orgasm burst over the world. A tea head leaps up screaming "I got the fear!" and runs into Mexican night bringing down backbrains of the world. The Executioner shits in terror at sight of the condemned man. The Torturer screams in the ear of his implacable victim. Knife fighters embrace in adrenalin. Cancer is at the door with a Singing Telegram.... HAUSER AND O'BRIEN When they walked in on me that morning at 8 o'clock, I knew it was my last chance, my only chance. But they didn't know. How could they? Just a routine pick-up. But not quite routine. Hauser had been eating breakfast when the Lieutenant called: "I want you and your partner to pick up a man named Lee, William Lee, on your way downtown. He's in the Hotel Lamprey. 103 just off B way." "Yeah I know where it is. I remember him too." "Good. Room 606. Just pick him up. Don't take time to shake the place down. Except bring in all books, letters, manuscripts. Anything printed, typed or written. Ketch?" "Ketch. But what's the angle.... Books... " "Just do it." The Lieutenant hung up. Hauser and O'Brien. They had been on the City Narcotic Squad for 20 years. Old timers like me. I been on the junk for 16 years. They weren't bad as laws go. At least O'Brien wasn't. O'Brien was the con man, and Hauser the tough guy. A vaudeville team. Hauser had a way of hitting you before he said anything just to break the ice. Then O'Brien gives you an Old Gold -- just like a cop to smoke Old Golds somehow... and starts putting down a cop con that was really bottled in bond. Not a bad guy, and I didn't want to do it.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The cleaning woman had already told everybody that when she came to the findirector’s office to clean, she saw the door wide open, the lights on, the window to the garden broken, the armchair lying on the floor, and no one in the office. Shortly after ten o’clock, Madame Rimsky burst into the Variety. She was sobbing and wringing her hands. Vassily Stepanovich was utterly at a loss and did not know how to counsel her. Then at half past ten came the police. Their first and perfectly reasonable question was: ‘What’s going on here, citizens? What’s this all about?’ The team stepped back, bringing forward the pale and agitated Vassily Stepanovich. He had to call things by their names and confess that the administration of the Variety in the persons of the director, the findirector and the administrator had vanished and no one knew where, that the master of ceremonies had been taken to a psychiatric hospital after yesterday’s séance, and that, to put it briefly, this séance yesterday had frankly been a scandalous séance. The sobbing Madame Rimsky, having been calmed down as much as possible, was sent home, and the greatest interest was shown in the cleaning woman’s story about the shape in which the findirector’s office had been found. The staff were asked to go to their places and get busy, and in a short while the investigation appeared in the Variety building, accompanied by a sharp-eared, muscular, ash-coloured dog with extremely intelligent eyes. The whisper spread at once among the Variety staff that the dog was none other than the famous Ace of Diamonds. And so it was. His behaviour amazed them all. The moment Ace of Diamonds ran into the findirector’s office, he growled, baring his monstrous yellow fangs, then crouched on his belly and, with some sort of look of anguish and at the same time of rage in his eyes, crawled towards the broken window. Overcoming his fear, he suddenly jumped up on the window-sill and, throwing back his sharp muzzle, howled savagely and angrily. He refused to leave the window, growled and twitched, and kept trying to jump out. The dog was taken from the office and turned loose in the lobby, whence he walked out through the main entrance to the street and led those following him to the cab stand. There he lost the trail he had been pursuing. After that Ace of Diamonds was taken away. The investigation settled in Varenukha’s office, where they began summoning in turn all the Variety staff members who had witnessed yesterday’s events during the séance. It must be said that the investigation had at every step to overcome unforeseen difficulties. The thread kept snapping off in their hands. There had been posters, right? Right. But during the night they had been pasted over with new ones, and now, strike me dead, there wasn’t a single one to be found! And the magician himself, where had he come from? Ah, who knows!

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The other eye remained shut. Pilate spoke in Greek. ‘So it was you who was going to destroy the temple building and called on the people to do that?’ Here the prisoner again became animated, his eyes ceased to show fear, and he spoke in Greek: ‘Never, goo . . .’ Here terror flashed in the prisoner’s eyes, because he had nearly made a slip. ‘Never, Hegemon, never in my life was I going to destroy the temple building, nor did I incite anyone to this senseless act.’ Surprise showed on the face of the secretary, hunched over a low table and writing down the testimony. He raised his head, but immediately bent it to the parchment again. ‘All sorts of people gather in this town for the feast. Among them there are magicians, astrologers, diviners and murderers,’ the procurator spoke in monotone, ‘and occasionally also liars. You, for instance, are a liar. It is written clearly: “Incited to destroy the temple”. People have testified to it.’ ‘These good people,’ the prisoner spoke and, hastily adding ‘Hegemon’, went on: ‘. . . haven’t any learning and have confused everything I told them. Generally, I’m beginning to be afraid that this confusion may go on for a very long time. And all because he writes down the things I say incorrectly.’ Silence fell. By now both sick eyes rested heavily on the prisoner. ‘I repeat to you, but for the last time, stop pretending that you’re a madman, robber,’ Pilate said softly and monotonously, ‘there’s not much written in your record, but what there is is enough to hang you.’ ‘No, no, Hegemon,’ the arrested man said, straining all over in his wish to convince, ‘there’s one with a goatskin parchment who follows me, follows me and keeps writing all the time. But once I peeked into this parchment and was horrified. I said decidedly nothing of what’s written there. I implored him: “Burn your parchment, for God’s sake!” But he tore it out of my hands and ran away.’ ‘Who is that?’ Pilate asked squeamishly and touched his temple with his hand. ‘Matthew Levi,’ 13 the prisoner explained willingly. ‘He used to be a tax collector, and I first met him on the road in Bethphage, 14 where a fig grove juts out at an angle, and I got to talking with him. He treated me hostilely at first and even insulted me—that is, thought he insulted me—by calling me a dog.’

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Also article by Erle Stanley Gardner for True Magazine .]) NG lived in constant fear of erection so his habit jumped and jumped. (Note: It is a well known tiresome fact, it is a notoriously dull and long winded fact, that anyone who gets hooked because of any disability whatever, will be presented, during the periods of shortage or deprivation [such a thing as too much fun you know] with an outrageously padded, geometrically progressing, proliferating account.) An electrode attached to one testicle glowed briefly and NG woke up in the smell of burning flesh and reached for a loaded syringe. He rolled into a foetal position and slid the needle into his spine. He pulled the needle out with a little sigh of pleasure, and realized that Lee was in the room. A long slug undulated out of Lee's right eye and wrote on the wall in iridescent ooze: " The Sailor is in the City buying up TIME." I am waiting in front of a drugstore for it to open at nine o'clock. Two Arab boys roll cans of garbage up to a high heavy wood door in a whitewashed wall. Dust in front of the door streaked with urine. One of the boys bent over, rolling the heavy cans, pants tight over his lean young ass. He looks at me with the neutral, calm glance of an animal I wake with a shock like the boy is real and I have missed a meet I had with him for this afternoon. "We expect additional equalizations," says the Inspector in an interview with Your Reporter. "Otherwise will occur," the Inspector lifts one leg in a typical Nordic gesture, "the bends is it not? But perhaps we can provide the suitable chamber of decompression." The Inspector opens his fly and begins looking for crabs, applying ointment from a little clay pot. Clearly the interview is at an end. "You're not going?" he exclaims. "Well, as one judge said to the other, 'Be just and if you can't be just be arbitrary.' Regret cannot observe customary obscenities." He holds up his right hand covered with a foul-smelling yellow ointment. One's Reporter rushes forward and clasps the soiled hand in both of his. "It's been a pleasure, Inspector, an unspeakable pleasure," he says peeling off his gloves, rolling them into a ball and tossing them into the wastebasket. "Expense account," he smiles. HASSAN'S RUMPUS ROOM Gilt and red plush. Rococo bar backed by pink shell. The air is cloyed with a sweet evil substance like decayed honey. Men and women in evening dress sip pousse-cafés through alabaster tubes. A Near East Mugwump sits naked on a bar stool covered in pink silk. He licks warm honey from a crystal goblet with a long black tongue.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  We know you" and pull the man's prick off straightaway. Now Willy is getting hot and you can hear him always out there in darkness (he only functions at night) whimpering, and feel the terrible urgency of that blind, seeking mouth. When they move in for the bust, Willy goes all out of control, and his mouth eats a hole right through the door. If the cops weren't there to restrain him with a stock probe, he would suck the juice right out of every junky he ran down. I knew, and everybody else knew they had the Disk on me. And if my kid customers ever hit the stand: "He force me to commit all kinda awful sex acts in return for junk" I could kiss the street good-bye. So we stock up on H, buy a second-hand Studebaker, and start West. The Vigilante copped out as a schizo possession case: "I was standing outside myself trying to stop those hangings with ghost fingers.... I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants -- a body -- after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is only the colorless no smell of death.... Nobody can breathe and smell it through pink convolutions of gristle laced with crystal snot, time shit and black blood filters of flesh." He stood there in elongated court room shadow, his face torn like a broken film by lusts and hungers of larval organs stirring in the tentative ectoplasmic flesh of junk kick (ten days on ice at time of the First Hearing) flesh that fades at the first silent touch of junk. I saw it happen. Ten pounds lost in ten minutes standing with the syringe in one hand holding his pants up with the other, his abdicated flesh burning in a cold yellow halo, there in the New York hotel room... night table litter of candy boxes, cigarette butts cascading out of three ashtrays, mosaic of sleepless nights and sudden food needs of the kicking addict nursing his baby flesh.... The Vigilante is prosecuted in Federal Court under a lynch bill and winds up in a Federal Nut House specially designed for the containment of ghosts: precise, prosaic impact of objects... washstand... door... toilet... bars... there they are... this is it... all lines cut... nothing beyond... Dead End... And the Dead End in every face....

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  4 Ivan Nikolaevich’s apprehensions proved fully justified: passers-by did pay attention to him, laughed, and turned their heads. As a result, he took the decision to leave the main streets and make his way through back lanes, where people are not so importunate, where there were fewer chances of them picking on a barefoot man, pestering him with questions about his drawers, which stubbornly refused to look like trousers. This Ivan did, and, penetrating the mysterious network of lanes around the Arbat, he began making his way along the walls, casting fearful sidelong glances, turning around every moment, hiding in gateways from time to time, avoiding intersections with traffic lights and the grand entrances of embassy mansions. And all along his difficult way, he was for some reason inexpressibly tormented by the ubiquitous orchestra that accompanied the heavy basso singing about his love for Tatiana. CHAPTER 5: There Were Doings at Griboedov’s, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 5 There Were Doings at Griboedov’s The old, two-storeyed, cream-coloured house stood on the ring boulevard, in the depths of a seedy garden, separated from the sidewalk by a fancy cast-iron fence. The small terrace in front of the house was paved with asphalt, and in wintertime was dominated by a snow pile with a shovel stuck in it, but in summertime turned into the most magnificent section of the summer restaurant under a canvas tent. The house was called ‘The House of Griboedov’ on the grounds that it was alleged to have once belonged to an aunt of the writer Alexander Sergeevich Griboedov. 1 Now, whether it did or did not belong to her, we do not exactly know. On recollection, it even seems that Griboedov never had any such house-owning aunt . . . Nevertheless, that was what the house was called. Moreover, one Moscow babbler had it that there, on the second floor, in a round hall with columns, the famous writer had supposedly read passages from Woe from Wit to this very aunt while she reclined on a sofa. However, devil knows, maybe he did, it’s of no importance. What is important is that at the present time this house was owned by that same Massolit which had been headed by the unfortunate Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz before his appearance at the Patriarch’s Ponds. In the casual manner of Massolit members, no one called the house ‘The House of Griboedov’, everyone simply said ‘Griboedov’s’: ‘I spent two hours yesterday knocking about Griboedov’s.’ ‘Well, and so?’ ‘Got myself a month in Yalta.’ ‘Bravo!’ Or: ‘Go to Berlioz, he receives today from four to five at Griboedov’s . . .’ and so on. Massolit had settled itself at Griboedov’s in the best and cosiest way imaginable.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The sales clerks behind the fish counter stood as if petrified, their knives in their hands, the lilac foreigner swung around to the robbers, and here it turned out that Behemoth was mistaken: there was nothing lacking in the lilac one’s face, but, on the contrary, rather some superfluity of hanging jowls and furtive eyes. Turning completely yellow, the salesgirl anxiously cried for the whole store to hear: ‘Palosich! 3 Palosich!’ The public from the fabric department came thronging at this cry, while Behemoth, stepping away from the confectionery temptations, thrust his paw into a barrel labelled ‘Choice Kerch Herring’, 4 pulled out a couple of herring, and swallowed them, spitting out the tails. ‘Palosich!’ the desperate cry came again from behind the confectionery counter, and from behind the fish counter a sales clerk with a goatee barked: ‘What’s this you’re up to, vermin?’ Pavel Yosifovich was already hastening to the scene of the action. He was an imposing man in a clean white smock, like a surgeon, with a pencil sticking out of the pocket. Pavel Yosifovich was obviously an experienced man. Seeing the tail of the third herring in Behemoth’s mouth, he instantly assessed the situation, understood decidedly everything, and, without getting into any arguments with the insolent louts, waved his arm into the distance, commanding: ‘Whistle!’ The doorman flew from the mirrored door out to the corner of the Smolensky market-place and dissolved in a sinister whistling. The public began to surround the blackguards, and then Koroviev stepped into the affair. ‘Citizens!’ he called out in a high, vibrating voice, ‘what’s going on here? Eh? Allow me to ask you that! The poor man’—Koroviev let some tremor into his voice and pointed to Behemoth, who immediately concocted a woeful physiognomy—‘the poor man spends all day reparating primuses. He got hungry . . . and where’s he going to get currency?’ To this Pavel Yosifovich, usually restrained and calm, shouted sternly: ‘You just stop that!’ and waved into the distance, impatiently now. Then the trills by the door resounded more merrily. But Koroviev, unabashed by Pavel Yosifovich’s pronouncement, went on: ‘Where?—I ask you all this question! He’s languishing with hunger and thirst, he’s hot. So the hapless fellow took and sampled a mandarin. And the total worth of that mandarin is three kopecks. And here they go whistling like spring nightingales in the woods, bothering the police, tearing them away from their business. But he’s allowed, eh?’ and here Koroviev pointed to the lilac fat man, which caused the strongest alarm to appear on his face. ‘Who is he? Eh? Where did he come from? And why? Couldn’t we do without him? Did we invite him, or what? Of course,’ the ex-choirmaster bawled at the top of his lungs, twisting his mouth sarcastically, ‘just look at him, in his smart lilac suit, all swollen with salmon, all stuffed with currency—and us, what about the likes of us?! . . .

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  It goes without saying that I was happy to invite him here.’ Just then Margarita saw Azazello hand the platter with the skull to Koroviev. ‘Ah, yes, incidentally, Baron,’ Woland said, suddenly lowering his voice intimately, ‘rumours have spread about your extreme curiosity. They say that, combined with your no less developed talkativeness, it was beginning to attract general attention. What’s more, wicked tongues have already dropped the word—a stool-pigeon and a spy. And, what’s still more, it is hinted that this will bring you to a sorry end in no more than a month. And so, in order to deliver you from this painful anticipation, we have decided to come to your aid, taking advantage of the fact that you invited yourself here precisely with the purpose of eavesdropping and spying out whatever you can.’ The baron turned paler than Abaddon, who was exceptionally pale by nature, and then something strange took place. Abaddon stood in front of the baron and took off his glasses for a second. At the same moment something flashed fire in Azazello’s hand, something clapped softly, the baron began to fall backwards, crimson blood spurted from his chest and poured down his starched shirt and waistcoat. Koroviev put the cup to the spurt and handed the full cup to Woland. The baron’s lifeless body was by that time already on the floor. ‘I drink your health, ladies and gentlemen,’ Woland said quietly and, raising the cup, touched it to his lips. Then a metamorphosis occurred. The patched shirt and worn slippers disappeared. Woland was in some sort of black chlamys with a steel sword on his hip. He quickly approached Margarita, offered her the cup, and said imperiously: ‘Drink!’ Margarita became dizzy, she swayed, but the cup was already at her lips, and voices, she could not make out whose, whispered in both her ears: ‘Don’t be afraid, Queen . . . Don’t be afraid, Queen, the blood has long since gone into the earth. And where it was spilled, grapevines are already growing.’ Margarita, without opening her eyes, took a gulp, and a sweet current ran through her veins, a ringing began in her ears. It seemed to her that cocks were crowing deafeningly, that somewhere a march was being played. The crowds of guests began to lose their shape: tailcoaters and women fell to dust. Decay enveloped the room before Margarita’s eyes, a sepulchral smell flowed over it. The columns fell apart, the fires went out, everything shrank, there were no more fountains, no camellias, no tulips. And there was simply this: the modest living room of the jeweller’s widow, and a strip of light falling from a slightly opened door.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And with that Anna had perforce to be content . Very silently Stephen now went about Morton, and her eyes looked bewildered and deeply unhappy. At night she would lie awake thinking of Martin, missing him, mourning him as though he were dead. But she could not accept this death without question, without feeling that she was in some way blameworthy. What was she, what manner of curious creature, to have been so repelled by a lover like Martin? Yet she had been repelled, and even her pity for the man could not wipe out that stronger feeling. She had driven him away because something within her was intolerant of that new aspect of Martin. Oh, but she mourned his good, honest friendship; he had taken that from her, the thing she most needed—but perhaps after all it had never existed except as a cloak for this other emotion. And then, lying there in the thickening darkness, she would shrink from what might be waiting in the future, for all that had just happened might happen again—there were other men in the world beside Martin. Fool, never to have visualized this thing before, never to have faced the possibility of it; now she understood her resentment of men when their voices grew soft and insinuating. Yes, and now she knew to the full the meaning of fear, and Martin it was, who had taught her its meaning—her friend—the man she had utterly trusted had pulled the scales from her eyes and revealed it. Fear, stark fear, and the shame of such fear—that was the legacy left her by Martin. And yet he had made her so happy at first, she had felt so contented, so natural with him; but that was because they had been like two men, companions, sharing each other’s interests. And at this thought her bitterness would all but flow over; it was cruel, it was cowardly of him to have deceived her, when all the time he had only been waiting for the chance to force this other thing on her. But what was she? Her thoughts slipping back to her childhood, would find many things in her past that perplexed her. She had never been quite like the other small children, she had always been lonely and discontented, she had always been trying to be some one else—that was why she had dressed herself up as young Nelson. Remembering those days she would think of her father, and would wonder if now, as then, he could help her. Supposing she should ask him to explain about Martin? Her father was wise, and had infinite patience—yet somehow she instinctively dreaded to ask him. Alone—it was terrible to feel so much alone—to feel oneself different from other people. At one time she had rather enjoyed this distinction—she had rather enjoyed dressing up as young Nelson. Yet had she enjoyed it? Or had it been done as some sort of inadequate, childish protest?

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Poochie was all up on me in five seconds flat. Lids still closed, I shuddered at the thought of his tongue all in my groove when he spread my booty cheeks apart and fingered the rim of my ass. Heat consumed me again, and I moaned—a sign of weakness as far as I was concerned. I looked at 12 to see if he heard. He just nodded, and I closed my eyes again, cocking my legs open an inch wider as I felt Poochie near my domain. He licked one thigh, then the other. “You want this, huh?” his deep voice asked, trailing his tongue toward my bottom. “Just make nice, niggah,” I shuddered, enjoying the longness of his lasher. Poochie gripped my thighs hard, and my eyes shot open. Bending over me, he had his dick in his hand. “I’m gonna give it to ya, a’ight.” I tried to sit up, but he pushed me back so hard I thought I’d cave the desk in. He pinned me with the weight of one of his arms, but it felt like I was being held down by five niggahs. He was that strong. I looked for 12, but was greeted by the click of the door closing behind him. That niggah had left me. Straight up bounced while a sistah was naked and vulnerable. I cried out when Poochie parted my pussy with calloused hands, but no one answered. The bakery had grown completely quiet of the voices normally blending in with the tunes. But now all I heard was the music. Loud. Blaring. Drowning out my calls for help. “Can’t nobody help you, Sweets,” Poochie said, inserting the tip of his dick inside my tunnel. “No . . .” he plunged the rest of it in me “. . . fuckin’ body!” Lying there helpless, I squirmed as he fucked me hard and fast, beating my already beaten and sore pussy, and prayed he was a two-minute niggah. And he was, I realized when he pulled out suddenly, then shot his cum into a Big Gulp cup I didn’t know he had. The door opened, spiraling freedom through me. I knew I was saved. “Finished?” 12 asked. “What the fuck do you mean, ‘finished’?” I yelled. “Do you know what this niggah—” “Yeah,” Poochie answered him, cutting me off. “Was some sweet pussy too. Just like you said.” I’d been set up. “What?!” 12 grinned at me, then turned and looked behind him. “Forty, you next.” He turned back to me. “Funny how much a niggah can tell when a pistol’s in his mouth. Whisky dropped dime on you.” He closed the door after Forty walked in with his dick out.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  further, the grating over the drain in the middle of it and the metal pail standing beside the drain, a picture of our laundry room at home in W. rose from the abyss and with it, suggested perhaps by the iron hook hanging on a cord from the ceiling, the image of the butcher’s shop I always had to pass on my way to school, where at noon Benedikt was often to be seen in a rubber apron washing down the tiles with a thick hose. No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open. But I do remember that there in the casemate at Breendonk a nauseating smell of soft soap rose to my nostrils, and that this smell, in some strange place in my head, was linked to the bizarre German word for scrubbing brush, Wurzelbuirste, which was a favorite of my father’s and which I had always disliked. Black striations began to quiver before my eyes, and I had to rest my forehead against the wall, which was gritty, covered with bluish spots, and seemed to me to be perspiring with cold beads of sweat. It was not that as the nausea rose in me I guessed at the kind of third-degree interrogations which were being conducted here around the time I was born, since it was only a few years later that I read Jean Ameéry’s description of the dreadful physical closeness between torturers and their victims, and of the tortures he himself suffered in Breendonk when he was hoisted aloft by his hands, tied behind his back, so that with a crack and a splintering sound which, as he says, he had not yet forgotten when he came to write his account, his arms dislocated from the sockets in his shoulder joints, and he was left dangling as they were wrenched up behind him and twisted together above his head: la pendaison par les mains liées dans le dos jusqu’a évanouissement—this is how it is described in the book Le Jardin des Plantes, in which Claude Simon descends once more into the storehouse of his memories, and on page 235 begins to tell the fragmentary tale of a certain Gastone Novelli who, like Améry, was subjected to this particular form of torture. The passage opens with an entry of 26 October 1943 from General Rommel’s diary, in which Rommel comments that in view of the total powerlessness of the police in Italy one must now take charge oneself. As a result of the measures thereupon introduced by the Germans, says Simon, Novelli was arrested and taken to Dachau. Novelli, Simon continues, never mentioned what happened to him there except on one occasion, when he said that after his liberation from the camp he found the sight of a German, or indeed any so-called civilized being, male or female, so intolerable that, hardly recovered, he embarked on the first ship he could find, to make his living prospecting for diamonds and gold in South America. For some time Novelli lived in the green jungle with a tribe of small people who had gleaming, coppery skins and had emerged beside him as if out of nowhere one day, without moving

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The missionary operations of this period display little of the zeal of the great missionary age of Augustine, Columba, and Boniface, and less of achievement. The explanation is to be found in the ambitions which controlled the mediaeval church and in the dangers by which Europe was threatened from without. In the conquest of sacred localities, the Crusades offered a substitute for the conversion of non-Christian peoples. The effort of the papacy to gain supreme control over all mundane affairs in Western Christendom, also filled the eye of the Church. These two movements almost drained her religious energies to the full. On the other hand the Mongols, or Tartars, breaking forth from Central Asia with the fierceness of evening wolves, filled all Europe with dread, and one of the chief concerns of the thirteenth century was to check their advance into the central part of the continent. The heretical sects in Southern France threatened the unity of the Church and also demanded a share of attention which might otherwise have been given to efforts for the conversion of the heathen. Two new agencies come into view, the commercial trader and the colonist, corresponding in this century to the ships and trains of modern commerce and the labors of the geographical explorer in Africa and other countries. Along the shores of the Baltic, at times, and in Asia the tradesman and the explorer went in advance of the missionary or along the same routes. And in the effort to subdue the barbarous tribes of Northeastern Germany to the rules of Christendom, the sword and colonization played as large a part as spiritual measures. The missionary history of the age has three chapters, among the pagan peoples of Northeastern Germany and along the Baltic as far as Riga, among the Mohammedans of Northern Africa, and among the Mongols in Central and Eastern Asia. The chief missionaries whose names have survived are Otto of Bamberg and Vicelinus who labored in Northeastern Europe, Rubruquis, and John of Monte Corvino who travelled through Asia, Francis d’Assisi and Raymundus Lullus who preached in Africa. The treatment which the Jews received at the hand of the Church also properly belongs here. § 74. Missions in Northeastern Germany. At the beginning of this period the Wends,882 who were of Slavic origin, were the ruling population in the provinces along the Baltic from Lübeck to Riga with elements in the territory now covered by Pommerania, Brandenburg intermingled, and parts of Saxony, which were neither German nor Slavic but Lithuanian.883 Charlemagne did not attempt conquest beyond the river Elbe. The bishoprics of Würzburg, Mainz, Halberstadt, Verden, and Bremen-Hamburg, bordering on the territories of these tribes, had done little or nothing for, their conversion. Under Otto I. Havelberg, Meissen, Merseburg, and other dioceses were established to prosecute this work. At the synod of Ravenna, 967, Otto made the premature boast that the Wends had been converted.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  She read from the same script. “Please tell me what can I do, sir.” He blew smoke about the room and let out a hearty laugh, exposing his desires of sex. She was shocked by his idea of sex. She ran from it. Thought it was comical at first, but when he didn’t laugh she knew he was real. She asked him to repeat himself. He blew smoke in her face and asked her if she wanted to leave. She wagged her head. He told her to get to it. She bit her lip and took more breaths, even asked him to blow smoke in her mouth. This sexual experience was going to be new. It didn’t excite her; but then again, neither did getting smashed by two unknown black guys . . . at first. She was willing to be a full slave. She was willing to give all she had. He told her she had three seconds to move her ass. She used all of her time. On the third she carefully placed the head inside her mouth. She eased all the way down until his hairs rest on her chin. She felt his hand on the back of her head. He held her there and told her that she would remain until she gave him what he wanted. She couldn’t breathe. With every slight gag she felt his hand push down on her head. She had never done anything so outlandish in her life as she was about to do. He requested something new. Her eyes slammed shut and her body shuddered. With all the thoughts running through her head, she never realized the moistness between her legs. She thought of nothing but how to please this man. She thought about the amount of come she would receive if she did as told. It excited and scared her at the same time. His hand was joined by another hand. Both pushed her head down to his groin. She gagged but couldn’t get up. Tears streamed down her eyes and for some reason she did not want to open them. She couldn’t open them. She heard him bark, “Do it right now, bitch!” She lifted the bottom half of her body and positioned it over his leg. Her head was locked to his dick; she gripped his legs and steadied herself. She straddled his left leg and felt him pulsate in her mouth. His grip was lethal; her jaw throbbed now like his penis. She had never experienced this, but it excited her. He fucked the back of her throat and told her it was now or never. She thought about her husband. Then the two black men. Then Pretty’s dick as she squatted over his foot.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Cure is always: Let go! Jump! A friend of mine found himself naked in a Marrakech hotel room second floor.... (He is after processing by a Texas mother who dressed him in girl's clothes as a child.... Crude but effective against infant protoplasm....) The other occupants are Arabs, three Arabs... knives in hand... watching him... glint of metal and points of light in dark eyes . pieces of murder falling slow as opal chips through glycerine... Slower animal reactions allow him a full second to decide: Straight through the window and down into the crowded street like a falling star his wake of glass glittering in the sun... sustained a broken ankle and a chipped shoulder... clad in a diaphanous pink curtain, with a curtain-rod staff, hobbled away to the Commissariat de Police.... Sooner or later The Vigilante, The Rube, Lee The Agent, A. J., Clem and Jody The Ergot Twins, Hassan O'Leary the After Birth Tycoon, The Sailor, The Exterminator, Andrew Keif, "Fats" Terminal, Doc Benway, "Fingers" Schafer are subject to say the same thing in the same words to occupy, at that intersection point, the same position in space-time. Using a common vocal apparatus complete with all metabolic appliances that is to be the same person -- a most inaccurate way of expressing Recognition : The junky naked in sunlight... The writer sees himself reading to the mirror as always... He must check now and again to reassure himself that The Crime Of Separate Action has not, is not, cannot occur.... Anyone who has ever looked into a mirror knows what this crime is and what it means in terms of lost control when the reflection no longer obeys.... Too late to dial P o l i c e .... I personally wish to terminate my services as of now in that I cannot continue to sell the raw materials of death.... Yours, sir, is a hopeless case and a noisome one.... "Defense is meaningless in the present state of our knowledge," said The Defense looking up from an electron microscope.... Take your business to Walgreen’s... Steal anything in sight. We are not responsible. I don't know how to return it to the white reader. You can write or yell or croon about it... paint about it... act about it... shit it out in mobiles. . So long as you don't go and do it... Senators leap up and bray for the Death Penalty with inflexible authority of virus yen.... Death for dope fiends, death for sex queens (I mean fiends) death for the psychopath who offends the cowed and graceless flesh with broken animal innocence of lithe movement....

• From The Girls (2016)

  —All of them would be arrested by the end of December. Russell, Suzanne, Donna, Guy, the others. The police descending on their tent encampment in Panamint Springs: torn flannel sleeping bags and blue nylon tarps, the dead ash of the campfire. Russell bolted when they came, as if he could outrun a whole squad of officers. The headlights of the police cruisers glowing in the bleached pink of morning. How pitiful, the immediacy of Russell’s capture, forced to kneel in the scrub grass with his hands on his head. Guy handcuffed, stunned to discover there were limitations to the bravado that had carried him that far. The little kids were herded onto the Social Services van, wrapped in blankets, and handed cold cheese sandwiches. Their bellies distended and scalps boiling with lice. The authorities didn’t know who had done what, not yet, so Suzanne was just one of the skinny jumble of girls. Girls who spit in the dirt like rabid dogs and went limp when the police tried to handcuff them. There was a demented dignity to their resistance—none of them had run. Even at the end, the girls had been stronger than Russell. It would snow in Carmel that same week, the barest slip of white. Class was canceled, frost crunching thinly under our shoes as we tromped across the quad in our jean jackets. It seemed like the last morning on earth, and we peered into the gray sky as if more of the miracle were coming, though it all melted into a mess in less than an hour. —I was halfway back to the beach parking lot when I saw the man. Walking toward me. Maybe a hundred yards away. His head was shaved, revealing the aggressive outline of his skull. He was wearing a T-shirt, which was strange—his skin flushed in the wind. I didn’t want to feel as uneasy as I did. A helpless accounting of the facts: I was alone on the sand. Still far from the parking lot. There was no one else around but me and this man. The cliff, starkly outlined, each striation and pulse of lichen. The wind lashing my hair across my face, dislocating and vulnerable. Rearranging the sand into furrows. I kept walking toward him. Forcing myself to keep my gait. The distance between us fifty yards, now. His arms were honeycombed with muscle. The brute fact of his naked skull. I slowed my pace, but it didn’t matter—the man was still heading briskly in my direction. His head was bouncing as he walked, an insane rhythmic twitch. A rock, I thought crazily. He’ll pick up a rock. He’ll break open my skull, my brain leaking onto the sand. He’ll tighten his hands around my throat until my windpipe collapses. The stupid things I thought of: Sasha and her briny, childish mouth. How the sun had looked in the tops of the trees lining my childhood driveway. Whether Suzanne knew I thought of her.

• From The Girls (2016)

  A system that existed only because everyone believed they were among people like themselves. —BEFORE ALEX LEFT FOR the beach, she had swallowed one of Simon’s painkillers, a leftover from a long-ago back surgery, and already the familiar mental gauze had descended, the surrounding salt water another narcotic. Her heart beat pleasantly, noticeably, in her chest. Why did being in the ocean make you feel like such a good human? She floated on her back, her body moving a little in the push and pull, her eyes closed against the sun. There was a party tonight, hosted by one of Simon’s friends. Or a business friend— all his friends were business friends. Until then, hours to waste. Simon would be working the rest of the day, Alex left to her own devices, as she had been ever since they’d come out here— almost two weeks now. She hadn’t minded. She’d gone to the beach nearly every day. Worked through Simon’s painkiller stash at a steady but undetectable pace, or so she hoped. And ignored Dom’s increasingly unhinged texts, which was easy enough to do. He had no idea where she was. She tried blocking his number, but he got through with new ones. She would change her number as soon as she got the chance. Dom had sent another jag that morning: Alex Alex Answer me Even if the texts still caused a lurch in her stomach, she had only to look up from the phone and it all seemed manageable. She was in Simon’s house, the windows open onto pure green. Dom was in another sphere, one she could pretend no longer quite existed. —STILL FLOATING ON HER back, Alex opened her eyes, disoriented by the quick hit of sun. She righted herself with a glance at the shore: she was farther out than she’d imagined. Much farther. How had that happened? She tried to head back in, toward the beach, but she wasn’t seeming to get anywhere, her strokes eaten up by the water She took a breath, tried again. Her legs kicked hard. Her arms churned. It was impossible to gauge whether the shore was getting any closer. Another attempt to head straight back in, more useless swimming. The sun kept beating down, the horizon line wavered: it was all utterly indifferent. The end—here it was. This was punishment, she was certain of it. Strange, though, how this terror didn’t last. It only passed through her, appearing and disappearing almost instantly. Something else took its place, a kind of reptile curiosity. She considered the distance, considered her heart rate, made a calm assessment of the elements in play. Hadn’t she always been good at seeing things clearly? Time to change course. She swam parallel to the shore. Her body took over, remembering the strokes. She didn’t allow for any hesitation.

• From The Girls (2016)

  How the mother must have begged, at the end. The man was bearing down on me. My hands were limp and wet. Please, I thought. Please. Who was I addressing? The man? God? Whoever handled these things. And then he was in front of me. Oh, I thought. Oh. Because he was just a normal man, harmless, nodding along to the white headphones nested in his ears. Just a man walking on the beach, enjoying the music, the weak sun through the fog. He smiled at me as he passed, and I smiled back, like you would smile at any stranger, any person you didn’t know. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSI would like to thank Kate Medina and Bill Clegg for invaluable guidance. Thank you also to Anna Pitoniak, Derrill Hagood, Peter Mendelsund, Fred and Nancy Cline, and my brothers and sisters: Ramsey, Hilary, Megan, Elsie, Mayme, and Henry. BY EMMA CLINE The Girls Daddy The Guest [image file=Image00006.jpg] PHOTO: MEGAN CLINE EMMA CLINE is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Girls and the short story collection Daddy . The winner of the Plimpton Prize, she has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the First Novel Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Sunday Times Story Award. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize and was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. [image "Part One" file=Image00007.jpg] 1THIS WAS AUGUST. The ocean was warm, and warmer every day. Alex waited for a set to finish before making her way into the water, slogging through until it was deep enough to dive. A bout of strong swimming and she was out, beyond the break. The surface was calm. From here, the sand was immaculate. The light— the famous light— made it all look honeyed and mild: the dark European green of the scrub trees, the dune grasses that moved in whispery unison. The cars in the parking lot. Even the seagulls swarming a trash can. On the shore, the towels were occupied by placid beachgoers. A man tanned to the color of expensive luggage let out a yawn, a young mother watched her children run back and forth to the waterline. What would they see if they looked at Alex? In the water, she was just like everyone else. Nothing strange about a young woman, swimming alone. No way to tell whether she belonged here or didn’t. —WHEN SIMON HAD FIRST taken her to the beach, he’d kicked off his shoes at the entrance. Everyone did, apparently: there were shoes and sandals piled up by the low wood railing. No one takes them? Alex asked. Simon raised his eyebrows. Who would take someone’s shoes? But that had been Alex’s immediate thought— how easy it would be to take things, out here. All sorts of things. The bikes leaning against the fence. The bags unattended on towels. The cars left unlocked, no one wanting to carry their keys on the beach.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  He says that you wanted to fight him one day—that made me laugh awfully, it’s so like you, Stephen! He’s a good-looking person and rather a nice one. He tells me that his regiment’s stationed at Worcester, so I’ve asked him to come over to The Grange when he likes. It must be pretty dreary, I imagine, in Worcester. . . .’ Stephen finished the letter and sat staring at the sea for a moment, after which she got up abruptly. Slipping the letter into her pocket she buttoned her jacket; she was feeling cold. What she needed was a walk, a really long walk. She set out briskly in the direction of Newquay. 2 During those long, anxious weeks in Cornwall, it was borne in on Stephen as never before how wide was the gulf between her and her mother, how completely they two must always stand divided. Yet looking at Anna’s quiet ageing face, the girl would be struck afresh by its beauty, a beauty that seemed to have mollified the years, to have risen triumphant over time and grief. And now as in the days of her childhood, that beauty would fill her with a kind of wonder; so calm it was, so assured, so complete—then her mother’s deep eyes, blue like distant mountains, and now with that far-away look in their blueness, as though they were gazing into the distance. Stephen’s heart would suddenly tighten a little; a sense of great loss would descend upon her, together with the sense of not fully understanding just what she had lost or why she had lost it—she would stare at Anna as a thirsty traveller in the desert will stare at a mirage of water. And one evening there came a preposterous impulse—the impulse to confide in this woman within whose most gracious and perfect body her own anxious body had lain and quickened. She wanted to speak to that motherhood, to implore, nay, compel its understanding. To say: ‘Mother, I need you. I’ve lost my way—give me your hand to hold in the darkness.’ But good God, the folly, the madness of it! The base betrayal of such a confession! Angela delivered over, betrayed—the unthinkable folly, the madness of it. Yet sometimes as Anna and she sat together looking out at the misty Cornish coast-line, hearing the dull, heavy throb of the sea and the calling of sea-gulls the one to the other—as they sat there together it would seem to Stephen that her heart was so full of Angela Crossby, all the bitterness, all the sweetness of her, that the mother-heart beating close by her own must surely, in its turn, be stirred to beat faster, for had she not once sheltered under that heart?