Fear

Passages

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

Page 63 of 529 · 20 per page

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  To an extent, though, everybody was feeling it. The long night marches turned their minds upside down; all the rhythms were wrong. Always a lost sensation. They'd blunder along through the dark, willy-nilly, no sense of place or direction, probing for an enemy that nobody could see. Like a snipe hunt, Sanders said. A bunch of dumb Cub Scouts chasing the phantoms. They'd march north for a time, then east, then north again, skirting the villages, no one talking except in whispers. And it was rugged country, too. Not quite mountains, but rising fast, full of gorges and deep brush and places you could die. Around midnight things always got wild. All around you, everywhere, the whole dark countryside came alive. You'd hear a strange hum in your ears. Nothing specific; nothing you could put a name on. Tree frogs, maybe, or snakes or flying squirrels or who-knew-what. Like the night had its own voice—that hum in your ears—and in the hours after midnight you'd swear you were walking through some kind of soft black protoplasm, Vietnam, the blood and the flesh. It was no joke, Sanders said. The monkeys chattered death-chatter. The nights got freaky. Rat Kiley finally hit a wall. He couldn't sleep during the hot daylight hours; he couldn't cope with the nights. Late one afternoon, as the platoon prepared for another march, he broke down in front of Mitchell Sanders. Not crying, but up against it. He said he was scared. And it wasn't normal scared. He didn't know what it was: too long in-country, probably. Or else he wasn't cut out to be a medic. Always policing up the parts, he said. Always plugging up holes. Sometimes he'd stare at guys who were still okay, the alive guys, and he'd start to picture how they'd look dead. Without arms or legs—that sort of thing. It was ghoulish, he knew that, but he couldn't shut off the pictures. He'd be sitting there talking with Bowker or Dobbins or somebody, just marking time, and then out of nowhere he'd find himself wondering how much the guy's head weighed, like how heavy it was, and what it would feel like to pick up the head and carry it over to a chopper and dump it in. Rat scratched the skin at his elbow, digging in hard. His eyes were red and weary. "It's not right," he said. "These pictures in my head, they won't quit. I'll see a guy's liver. The actual fucking /iver. And the thing is, it doesn't scare me, it doesn't even give me the willies. More like curiosity. The way a doctor feels when he looks at a patient, sort of mechanical, not seeing the real person, just a ruptured appendix or a clogged-up artery." His voice floated away for a second. He looked at Sanders and tried to smile. He kept clawing at his elbow.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  Psychology—that was one thing I knew. You don't try to scare people in broad daylight. You wait. Because the darkness squeezes you inside yourself, you get cut off from the outside world, the imagination takes over. That's basic psychology. I'd pulled enough night guard to know how the fear factor gets multiplied as you sit there hour after hour, nobody to talk to, nothing to do but stare into the big black hole at the center of your own sorry soul. The hours go by and you lose your gyroscope; your mind starts to roam. You think about dark closets, madmen, murderers under the bed, all those childhood fears. Gremlins and trolls and giants. You try to block it out but you can't. You see ghosts. You blink and shake your head. Bullshit, you tell yourself. But then you remember the guys who died: Curt Lemon, Kiowa, Ted Lavender, a half-dozen others whose faces you can't bring into focus anymore. And then pretty soon you start to ponder the stories you've heard about Charlie's magic. The time some guys cornered two VC ina dead-end tunnel, no way out, but how, when the tunnel was fragged and searched, nothing was found except a pile of dead rats. A hundred stories. Ghosts wiping out a whole squad of Marines in twenty seconds flat. Ghosts rising from the dead. Ghosts behind you and in front of you and inside you. After a while, as the night deepens, you feel a funny buzzing in your ears. Tiny sounds get heightened and distorted. The crickets talk in code; the night takes on an electronic tingle. You hold your breath. You coil up and tighten your muscles and listen, knuckles hard, the pulse ticking in your head. You hear the spooks laughing. No shit, /aughing. You jerk up, you freeze, you squint at the dark. Nothing, though. You put your weapon on full automatic. You crouch lower and count your grenades and make sure the pins are bent for quick throwing and take a deep breath and listen and try not to freak. And then later, after enough time passes, things start to get bad. "Come on," Azar said, "let's do it," but I told him to be patient. Waiting was the trick. So we went to the movies, Barbarella again, the eighth straight night. A lousy movie, I thought, but it kept Azar occupied. He was crazy about Jane Fonda. "Sweet Janie," he kept saying. "Sweet Janie boosts a man's morale." Then, with his hand, he showed me which part of his morale got boosted. It was an old joke. Everything was old. The movie, the heat, the booze, the war. I fell asleep during the second reel—a hot, angry sleep—and forty minutes later I woke up to a sore ass and a foul temper. It wasn't yet midnight.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Everything looked set for him to return to Mansfeld in a couple of years, perhaps to marry into the local elite of mine owners as his brother and sisters would eventually do, and use his legal knowledge to advance his family’s interests. — I T was not to be. Luther’s life was about to change forever. Three incidents from his time in Erfurt stand out, hinting at some of the anguish that this young man, apparently destined for a successful career, was suffering. First a fellow student and friend fell ill and died; his death affected Luther deeply and appears to have plunged him into melancholy. Then while traveling home to Mansfeld, about half a mile out of Erfurt he somehow managed to injure himself with his sword, severing an artery at the top of his leg. He pressed his finger on the wound to stop the bleeding but the leg began to swell up massively. Luther could easily have bled to death. Seized with terror, he prayed: “O Mary, help!” A doctor was summoned who treated the wound, but that evening, while Luther was lying in bed, the wound burst and again he called on Mary to save him. It looked as if his prayers were answered, for the wound healed. When he told it years later at table he neatly inverted the story, so that the true miracle was not that Mary saved his life, but that God preserved him from dying trusting in Mary, and not putting faith in Christ as the Christian should. 47 A similar incident happened not long after, but with far more serious consequences. Again, Luther was on the road, this time returning to Erfurt from Mansfeld on a summer’s day. He was near Stotternheim when a terrible thunderstorm broke. Terrified, Luther called on St. Anna—the patron saint of miners—vowing to enter a monastery if she saved him. His response might seem extreme, but storms were believed to be caused by the Devil or by witches, and church bells were rung during tempests to ward them off. As before, Luther called not to Jesus but to a woman saint. When he told the story in 1539, he again gave it a twist: God had kindly taken the word Anna to be the Hebrew word for “grace,” rather than the name of the saint. This tongue-in-cheek interpretation allowed him to maintain that the vow in the storm had indeed been another divine intervention, but once more without female intercession. 48 When the thunderstorm passed Luther kept his vow: He joined the Augustinian order in Erfurt on July 17, 1505. This was a momentous step. At a stroke, it destroyed his father’s plans. Hans Luder’s investment in his son’s education had been for nothing.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  20 In another letter to Thomas Neuenhagen in Eisenach, whom he hardly knew, Luther admonished him not to follow the Eisenach preacher Jacob Strauss. “You should serve Christ, he has served Satan,” he wrote. 21 Shortly afterward, he wrote to Nikolaus Hausmann that the heresies were Satan’s “ragings,” for “the Last Days are at the door.” He felt “sorry” for Oecolampadius, “such a man, captured by such frivolous and worthless arguments.” 22 The same phrases recur again and again in his letters: Satan “rages,” Luther’s opponents suffer from furia and “rage” against him, the Last Days are at hand. There are lurid warnings about backsliders, injunctions to remain firm, heartfelt requests that the recipient pray for Luther in his fight against Satan, and often a final confident proclamation that Luther is on Christ’s side. “Now I understand what it means that the world has gone to the bad and that Satan is the Prince of the World,” he wrote to Michael Stifel in May 1527. “Up until now I thought these were mere words, but now I see that it is reality, and that the Devil truly rules in the world.” 23 Then, on July 6, 1527, Luther suffered a complete physical and spiritual collapse, experiencing an Anfechtung so severe that he fell and lost consciousness. It was like a “rushing” in the ears, he later described it, but outside, not inside the head. He felt that Satan was beating him with his fists, a sensation that reminded him of what Paul described in Corinthians. He was utterly without color and lay as if dead. When he came to, he worried that he had been too bitter in his polemics—just as he had worried in Worms in 1521—fretting that he wanted to write on baptism, and against Zwingli, but God had evidently decided he should not. Then he turned to Jonas and Bugenhagen, sobbing bitterly and speaking “gravely” against the “sacramentarians” and about the many sects that had arisen to pervert God’s Word. Bugenhagen and Jonas wrote a full account of what had occurred, based on notes at the time. 24 It is a remarkable document, not least because it was written at all. As both men would have known, it was highly likely that Luther’s enemies would interpret such an incident as possession by the Devil; indeed, Luther’s opponent Cochlaeus would later allege that Luther had been possessed by the Devil all his life. Yet their response to the event was not to suppress what took place, but to record it in the fullest detail possible. The account was published in German in the very first editions of Luther’s works, in confident disregard of what opponents of the Reformation might do with it.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  without any hurry up the center of the trail. There was no sound at all— none that I can remember. In a way, it seemed, he was part of the morning fog, or my own imagination, but there was also the reality of what was happening in my stomach. I had already pulled the pin on a grenade. I had come up to a crouch. It was entirely automatic. I did not hate the young man; I did not see him as the enemy; I did not ponder issues of morality or politics or military duty. I crouched and kept my head low. I tried to swallow whatever was rising from my stomach, which tasted like lemonade, something fruity and sour. I was terrified. There were no thoughts about killing. The grenade was to make him go away—ust evaporate—and I leaned back and felt my head go empty and then felt it fill up again. I had already thrown the grenade before telling myself to throw it. The brush was thick and I had to lob it high, not aiming, and I remember the grenade seeming to freeze above me for an instant, as if a camera had clicked, and I remember ducking down and holding my breath and seeing little wisps of fog rise from the earth. The grenade bounced once and rolled across the trail. I did not hear it, but there must've been a sound, because the young man dropped his weapon and began to run, just two or three quick steps, then he hesitated, swiveling to his right, and he glanced down at the grenade and tried to cover his head but never did. It occurred to me then that he was about to die. I wanted to warn him. The grenade made a popping noise—not soft but not loud either—not what I'd expected—and there was a puff of dust and smoke—a small white puff—and the young man seemed to jerk upward as if pulled by invisible wires. He fell on his back. His rubber sandals had been blown off. He lay at the center of the trail, his right leg bent beneath him, his one eye shut, his other eye a huge star-shaped hole. For me, it was not a matter of live or die. I was in no real peril. Almost certainly the young man would have passed me by. And it will always be that way. Later, I remember, Kiowa tried to tell me that the man would've died anyway. He told me that it was a good kill, that I was a soldier and this was a war, that I should shape up and stop staring and ask myself what the dead man would've done if things were reversed. None of it mattered. The words seemed far too complicated. All I could do was gape at the fact of the young man's body.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  In my old life, I never kept liquor in my apartment, for—while I could go without for weeks—I never knew when I’d wind up draining anything around. And around the punk bars where I hung out in grad school, if I got lured into the alley and offered cocaine, I could snuffle up the stuff, but I lacked both the money and the recklessness to be a bona fide cokehead. Only once did I incur a debt, and having to sell a TV to pay it back curbed future coke binges. At a few all night parties, I sat among half-strangers in a screaming sweat on a sagging couch—jaw clenched, eyelids stapled to my forehead—while some leering dealer suggested I go back to his place. A small point of pride: I never said yes. The scene scared me. I scared me. I wouldn’t call my pre-Warren drinking out of control because I had control. So long as I didn’t leave my apartment, I didn’t drink. In Cambridge, that person no longer exists. With an invisible eraser, I’m internally rubbing hard at the core of her, and Warren’s steady, unwavering gaze is lasering away her external edges. Soon she’ll be mist. I stand at the bar, its tiered bottles like a shiny choir about to burst into song. With only five or six dollars in tips, how much trouble can I get in? Warren will pick me up soon, and the bar’s on the cusp of closing early. At one end, a man in evening clothes with long gray hair swept back sits behind a sherry glass. On the stool next to him, a tipped violin case. Across from him is the despicable waiter, cradling a brandy snifter. His normally pony-tailed hair’s undone. The waiter says, Buy you a farewell cognac? I say thanks and settle in with coat covering my grease-spattered uniform. The waiter downs his own drink. Standing, he slides spare bills across the bar, adding—before he flips his cashmere scarf around his neck Lautrec-style—At least I’ve helped you to master the fish knife. I hold the glass globe in my hand as the dim yellow lights slide off its perimeter, and boy, does that drink slide down like scorched sunshine. I’m just draining it when the manager—no doubt eager to see me leaving—flies up and buys me another. And right before Warren comes, I ponder a third. What the hell, right? I’m unemployed, with school loans I can’t pay, an invalid dad whose nursing I need to start chipping in on. When I lift my index finger, the barman wipes his hands and refills my snifter. I’m the sole customer—the barman having just covered his olives and cherries with cling film—when he nonchalantly slides a white slip of paper to me. I nonchalantly flip it over. The bill comes to twenty dollars. Hold it, I say, those two bought my other drinks. I’m well buzzed by then, wavering. I know, he says. This is for the third one.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  We face a final door whose long glass window is embedded with chicken wire. Through it, I see people move as in slow motion. The door swings open, and their heads turn curiously to stare at me, and stepping onto the ward, I smell piss. Piss is the territorial marking of the predatory animal. It also signals the uncontrolled release of fear in terrorized prey. I know people pissing in hospital corridors is frowned on and must be quickly mopped up. But the smell persists anyway, and as I enter that urinous climate, the kernel of fear I’d kept buried in my center cracks through its shellac casing. Terror begins to sprout its black ivy up my spine and down along the insides of my arms. I become very small then, telescoping down in some inner tunnel as the world shrinks and gets far away. And pumping through me like methamphetamine is the screaming message that I’ve lost Dev, lost Dev, lost Dev… I sit woodenly before the next intake nurse, water coursing down my mask face. She has an open face—Italian, maybe—round as a skillet. And she’s tiny. She could be in fourth grade, except for being pregnant enough to use her belly as an armrest. By the time she asks, Did you have a plan?, I’ve already told so many strangers, I forget to be embarrassed. I was gonna spirit away our rusting car to a town called, metaphorically enough, Marblehead—the very name seemed apt—like I have a big, swirly marble on my shoulders where a human face should sit. There I’d suck off a garden hose purchased for that purpose. We can take care of the insomnia starting tonight, she says. I don’t want any barbiturates, I say. Nothing addictive. No valium. No ambien. I’m almost crying again. It’s as if some paper-thin membrane in my head holds back this flood, and any discomfort tears through, cranking the sob machine to full bore. The nurse looks up from her notes to describe some old antidepressant I can take as a sleeping pill—only if I need to. Not addictive at all. No side effects other than dry mouth in the morning. She sets down her pen, saying people who are sober take it all the time. (She pronounces it sobah, in the manner of the inner-city Bostonians at the halfway house.) Do you mind if I talk to somebody about it? I mean even tonight—on the phone. Before I take it. She fixes me with her almond eyes, and the calm she gives off reaches me. Maybe it’s some pregnancy hormone juju, for her skin is dewy in the manner of the seriously knocked up. But just sitting there, I sense a warm light the color of faded violets settling around us. She asks, Are you in some kind of recovery?

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ἐπιπίπτω, fut. -πεσοῦμαι, to fall upon or over, ἐπέπιπτον ἀλλήλοις Thuc. 7.84; ἐπί τι Xen. Oec. 18, 7, Theophr. C. P. 5. 4, 5 :—metaph. like Lat. incidere, ἐπί τι Isocr. IOOA; λογισμὸς ἐπιπίπτει τινί Plut. Otho : II. to fall upon in hostile sense, to attack, assail, τινί Hat. 4. 105, Thuc. 3. 112; ἀφυλάκτῳ αὐτῷ ἐπ. Hdt. 9. 116; ἀφράκτῳ τῷ στρατοπέδῳ Thuc. 1.117; ἀπαρασκεύοις Tots ἐναντίοις Xen. Cyr. 7. 4, 3; also, ἐς τοὺς Ἕλληνας Hdt. 7. 10 :—of storms, τοῖσι βαρβάροισι ὃ βορῆς ἐπέπεσε Id. 7.1893; χειμὼν ἐπιπεσών Plat. Prot. 344 Ὁ ; of winds meeting one another, Arist. Meteor. 2. 6, 17; of diseases, Hipp. Aér. 281; ἡ νόσος ἐπ. τοῖς ᾿Αθηναίοις Thuc. 3. 87, cf. 2. 48; so of grief, misfor- tunes, etc, οὐχὶ σοὶ μόνᾳ ἐπέπεσον λῦπαι Eur. Andr. 1042, εἴς. ; ἐπέπεσε πολλὰ καὶ χαλεπὰ ταῖς πολέσι Thuc. 3. 82, etc. 2. to come on after, ἐπ. plyos πυρετῷ Hipp. Aph. 1251. ἐπιπίστωσις, ews, ἡ, (πιστόω) a confirmation of the πίστωσις, in Rhe- toric, cf. Plat. Phaedr. 266 E. ἔπιπλα, τά, implements, utensils, furniture, moveable property (τὰ ἐξ ἐπι- πολῆς ὄντα τῶν κτημάτων Poll. 10.10; σκεύη TA μὴ ἔγγαια GAN ἐπιπο- λαῖα Hesych.), Lat. swpellex, as opp. to fixtures, Hdt. 1.150, 164..7.110, al., Soph. Fr. 7, Thuc. 3, 68, Isae. 72. 41, cf. omn. Xen. Oec. 9, 6, Arist. Pol. 2. 7, 21. (The longer form ἐπίπλοα occurs in Mss. of Hdt. 1. 94, prob. by an error of the Copyist, for elsewhere he uses ἔπιπλα ; at all events the word is prob. derived from ἐπί (as διπλά, διπλόα, from δίς), and not shortened from ἐπίπλοος.) ἐπιπλαδάω, to be loose, flabby at the surface, Philo 2. 418. ἐπιπλάζομαι, fut. - πλάγξομαι : aor. ἐπεπλάγχθην : Pass. To wander about over, πόντον ἐπιπλαγχθείς Od. 8. 14; πόντον ἐπιπλάγξασθαι Ap. Rh. 3. 1066.—The Act. is used in the same sense by Nic. Al. 127. ἐπιπλἄνάομαι. = ἐπιπλάζομαι, γῆν Democrit. ap. Clem. Al. 357; δα- κρύων τοῖς ὄμμασιν ἐπιπλανωμένων Heliod. 7.17, cf. 3.5: absol., κιττὸς ἐπιπλανώμενος Longus 1. 2. ἐπιπλᾶνήτης. ov, 6, a wanderer, Welck. Syll. Ep. 32. 11. ἐπίπλασις, ἡ. the application of a plaster, Aretae. Cur. M. Ac. 1. 9. ἐπίπλασμα, τό, a plaster, Hipp. Art. 805. ἐπιπλάσσω, Att.-Trw; fut. dow [ἃ] :---ἰο spread a plaster on, "γῆν σημαντρίδα ἐπιπλάσας Hdt. 2. 38 ; τι ἐπί τι Theophr. H. P. 9. 13, 2; τί τινι Galen. II. to plaster up, τὰ ὦτα Arist. Probl. 3. 27; τοὺς πόρους Theophr. Sens. 8. ἐπιπλαστέον, verb. Adj. one must plaster over, Geop. 16. 18. ἐπίπλαστος, ov, plastered over, Alciphro 3. 11, Galen. :—metaph. feigned, false, like πλαστός, Luc. D. Mort. 27. 7, Amor. 3. Adv. —-Tws, M. Anton. 2. 16. ἐπιπλᾶταγέω, to applaud by clapping, τινί Theocr. 9. 22. ἐπιπλᾶτύνω, to expand yet more, Arist. Mund. 3, 8, in Pass.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ἀναγκαίων, etc., Ib. 119 E, etc. 6. of a country, to spread, extend, ἐπὶ .. Dion. P. 809, cf. 1092. Til. to run close afler, ἅρματα εν ἵπποις ὠκυπόδεσσιν ἐπέδραμον 1]. 23. 504; ἐπ: τὰ ἴχνη, of hounds, Xen. Cyn. 3, 6: also c. dat. to follow, Arat. 316; ἐπ. τοῖς θήλεσιν, of the male, Plut. 2. 965 E. ἐπίτρησιξ, ews, ἡ, a piercing downwards, Oribas. p. 98. 12. ἐπιτριαπκοστον δεύτερος: πτριτοβ, -τέταρτος, -πέμπτος λόγος, the ταῖϊο of 22, 83. ὁ Bg, 83, Aristid. Quint. p. 115. ἐπιτρίβη, ἡ, a fretting, Schol. Soph. Aj. 103: violence, injury, Eccl. ἐπιτρίβω [1], fut. po: aor, 2 pass. ἐπετρίβην [i]: fut. med. in pass. sense, Luc, Icarom. 33 (where Cobet restores ἐπιτετρίψονται, as in Ar. Pax 246). To rub on the surface, to crush, κἄπνιγε κἀπέτριβεν Id. Nub. 1376, cf. Ran. 571%:—Pass., τυπτόμενον ἐπιτριβῆναι lb. 1408 ; ἐπιτριβόμενος τὸν ὦμον galled by the weight, Id. Ran. 88. 2. metaph. to affiict, distress, destroy, ruin, ἥλιος καίων ἐπιτρίβει τούς τε ἀνθρώπους καὶ τὴν χώρην Hdt. 4. 184; γάμος μ᾽ ἐπέτριψε Ar. Nub. 438, cf. 243; ταῦτά με ἐπιτρίβει πόθῳ Id. Lys. 888; ὀδύναις τινὰ ἐπιτρ. Xen. Mem. 1. 3,12; ἐπ. τοὺς ἀπόρους Dem. 260. fin: simply, ¢o kill, Lys. 135.17: of an actor, to murder a character, Dem. 288. 20, Plut. 2. 531 B:—Pass. to be utterly destroyed or undone, Solon 32. 7, Ar. Ach. 1022, Pax 369; ἐπιτριβείης be hung! Ar. Av.1530, Thesm. 5573 ἐπιτριβείην εἴ τι ἐψευσάμην Luc. D. Meretr. 2. 3. II. in Med. to rub paint on one’s cheeks, of women, A.B. 40, Schol. Ar. Thesm, 389. III. to inflame by friction, ἐπ. τὴν νόσον to Rf es its App. Civ. 5. 59, 62: to irritate, excite, Twa Polyb. 4. 84, 8; τινὰ ἐς πόλεμον App. Maced, 4. ἐπιτριηραρχέω, to be trierarch beyond the legal time, Dem. 1214. 16., 1223. 13, etc.; ἐπ. τέτταρας μῆνας 1218. 13 :—Pass., ἐπιτετριηραρχη- μένων ἤδη δυοῖν μηνοῖν two months beyond my term of office having elapsed, and my successor not having relieved me, 1212. 27; see the whole speech (adv. Polyclem). ἐπιτριηράρχημα, τό, the burden of a trierarchy continued beyond the legal term, Dem. 1206. I1., 121g. 23, etc.: see foreg. emiTpipepys, és, containing 1 + #, Nicom. Ar. p. gg: cf. ἐπίτριτος. ἐπίτριμμα, τό, (ἐπιτρίβω) anything rubbed on, a cosmetic, Nicet. Ann, 37 C, Jo. Chr. 2. anything worn out; metaph., ἐπ. ἐρώτων, of a prostitute, Nicet. Ann. 335 D: cf. περίτριμμα. ἐπίτριπτοϑ, ον, (ἐπιτρίβω) rubbed down, well worn: metaph. of persons, practised, hackneyed, τοὐπίτριπτον κίναδος the cunning fox, Soph. Aj. 103, cf. Andoc. 13. 23; ἐπ. ψωμοκόλακες Sannyr. Iw 1; i οὑπίτριπτος the rogue, Ar.Pl. 275, cf.619; ὠπίτριπτε Id. Ach. 557; ἡ νῦν ἐπ. .. μουσική hackneyed, Sext. Emp. Μ. 6. 14. Cf. ἐπιτρίβω. ἐπιτρίς, Adv. unto three times, Diosc. 5.4. ἔπι- τρι-τέταρτος, ov, containing τ -- ἡ, Nicom, Ar. p. 101: cf. 54.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ἐπικίνδυνος, ov, in danger, insecure, precarious, Hdt.6.86; ἐπ. ἣν μὴ λαμφθείη Id. 7. 239; πρόσοδοι Dem. 948. 2; ἐν ἐπικινδύνῳ, opp. to ἐν τῷ ἀσφαλεῖ, Thuc. 1. 137 :—Comp. --ότερος Xen. An. I. 3, 19. 2. dangerous, στρατεία Plat. Rep. 467 Ὁ ; δεινὴ καὶ ἐπ. ἔρις Plat. Legg. 736 Ὁ, οἴ. Xen. Mem. 4. 6, το; τινι to one, Hipp. Aph.1249, Thuc. 3. 54:-ἐπικίνδυνόν [ἐστι] there is danger, Arist. H. A. 7. 12, 2. 3. Ady. —vws, in a precarious or critical state, Hipp. Aph. 1255; ἐπ. κεῖσθαι Soph. Ph. 502; ἐπ. ἔχειν Eur. Fr. 683: at one’s risk, Thuc. 3. 37. emikiwdivodys, es, (εἶδοΞ) =foreg., Schol. Soph. El. 222. ἐπικϊνέομαι, Pass. to gesticulate at a thing, v. 1. Epict. Enchir. 33. 10: to be moved, zealous, ἐπί τινι LXX (3 Esdr. 8. 74). ἐπικίνυμαι, =foreg., Q. Sm. 12. 145. ἐπικίρνημι, Ion. for ἐπικεράννυμαι, Heracl. All. Hom. p. 117 :—Pass., ἐπικίρναται [ὃ xpnrnp| Hdt. 1. 51, cf. Plut. 2. 270 A. ἐπικιχλίδες, ai, a poem ascribed to Homer, so called because he was rewarded by a present of κίχλαι, fieldfares, cf. Ath. 65 A, 639 A, Bentl. Ep. Mill. p. 63. ἐπικίχρημι, aor. ἐπέχρησα, to lend, τινί τι πρὸς τὸν πόλεμον Plut. Pomp. 52; ἑαυτὸν εἰς ἀπαλλοτρίωσιν ἐπιχρήσας C. 1. 3281. ἐπικλάζω, fut. --κλάγξω, to sound to, θαλάσσῃ Opp. H. 5. 295 ; ἐπί οἱ ἔκλαγξε βροντάν let thunder sound in answer to him, Pind. P. 4. 41. ἐπικλαίω, Att. -KAdw: fut. -cAavoopat:—to weep in answer or still more, Ar. Thesm. 1063 ; τινί at a thing, Nonn, D. 30. 114. émixAdpos, -κλᾶρόω, Dor. for ἐπικληρ--. ἐπίκλαυτος, ον, tearful, νόμος Ar. Ran. 684. ἐπικλάω, fut. dow [ἃ]. to bend to or besides :—Pass. to bend double, ἡ δεξιὰ περὶ τὴν κεφαλὴν ἐπὶ τὸ ἄνω ἐπικεκλασμένη Luc. D. Deor. 11. 2; ἐπικεκλ. τὸν αὐχένα Id, Rhet. Praec. 11; ὕδωρ ἐπικλώμενον broken water, Id. Tox. 20. II. metaph. to bow down, break the spirits of, Twa Plut. Pericl. 37, Oth. 15; ἐπ. τινα εἰς οἶκτον Ael. N. A. το. 36: —Pass., ἐπικλασθῆναι τῇ γνώμῃ to be broken in spirit, lose courage, Lat. frangi animo, Thuc. 4. 37; but also, to be bent or turned to pity, Id. 3.59; or without τῇ γνώμῃ, Id. 3.67; τὸ ἐπικεκλασμένον τῶν μελῶν effeminate, unmanly music, Luc. Demon, 12. ἐπι-κλάω, Att. for --κλαίω. emuchens, ἔς, (xA€os) famed, famous, Ap. Rh. 4. 1472, Ὁ, 1.2613. OF. named, called after, τινι Opp. H. 2. 130, in shortd. Ep, acc. ἐπικλέᾶ. ἐπικλείω, Ep. -KAnio, Att. κλω :---ἴο shut to, close, as a door, Ar. Pax 101; θύραν ἐπεκλήϊσε Tryph. 200:—Med., Luc. Tox. 50:—Pass. to be shut to, opp. to ἀναπτύσσομαι, Xen. Eq. 12, 6.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ἐπιπέλομαι, Dep. (πέλωλ) to come to or upon, οὐδέ τις ἄλλη νοῦσος ἐπὶ στυγερὴ πέλεται .. βροτοῖσι Od. 13. 60., 15. 408 :—elsewhere only in Ep. syncop. part. aor. ἐπιπλόμενος, coming on, approaching, ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δὴ ὄγδοόν μοι ἐπιπλόμενον ἔτος ἦλθεν when the eighth coming year was nigh, Od. 7. 261., 14. 287; ἐπιπλομένων ἐνιαυτῶν Hes. Sc. 87, cf. Th. 493 (v. sub ἐνιαυτός) ; ἐπιπλ. νυκτί, ἐπιπλ. ἠοῦς Ap. Rh. 2.1231, etc. ; of persons, Id. 3. 25,127; in hostile sense, attacking, assaulting, just like ἐπερχύμενος, Id. 1. 465., 3.127; so of a storm, like Lat. ingruens, νέφος ον ἐπιπλ., ἄφατον Soph. O. T. 1314. ἐπίπεμπτος, oy, =1+4, of loans bearing interest at the rate of ἃ of the principal, or 20 per cent., ναυτικὸν ἐπ. Xen. Vect. 3, g, cf. Bockh P. E. 1. 164-186, and y. sub ἐπίτριτος. 11, -- πέμπτος, Eupol., al., ap. Harp.; τοὐπίπεμπτον one-fifth of the votes in a trial, Ar. Fr. 17. ἐπίπεμπω, to send after or again, ἀγγελίας, ἀγγέλους ér., c. inf., Hdt. 1, 160., 4. 83. 2. of the gods, to send upon or to, ὄψιν Id. 7.15; χάριν Pind. Fr. 45; ἔρωτά τινι Plat. Phaedr. 245 B: but esp. by way of punishment, ¢o send upon or against, let loose upon, Lat. immittere, τὰν .."Atbas Καδμείοις ἐπ. Eur. Phoen. 811; κινδύνους τινί Lys. 105.9; δεσμοὺς καὶ θανάτους Plat. Crito 46 C; ἀνάγκην τινά Id. Phaedo 620 : to send against, τινί App. Pun. 49. ΤΙ. to send besides, ἄλλην oTpa- τιάν Thuc. 7.15; πρὸς τὸ στράτευμα ἄλλην ὠφέλειαν 14. 6. 73. 2. to send by way of supply, Ar. Eccl. 235, cf. Polyb. 6. 15, 4. ἐπίπεμψις, ews, 9, a sending to a place, διὰ τὴν .. ἐπὶ πολλὰ ἡμῶν αὐτῶν ἐπ. Thue. 2. 39, cf. Luc. Phal. Pr. 3, Diog. L. 10. 100. ἐπι-πένθ-εκτος, ον, = ἐπιπενταμερής, Nicom. Introd. Arithm. 1. 21. ἐπι-πεντα-μερής, és, =1+ 5, Id.: cf. ἐπιμόριος. ἐπι-πεντ-ένατος, ov, =1 +2, Id. ἐπιπεραίνω, = ἐπιπείρω, dub. in Artemid. ἐπίπερθεν, Adv. = ἐφύπερθεν, v. 1. for ἐπίπεδα, Pind. Fr. 226. ἐπιπεριελίσσω, to wrap round a second time, τι περί τι Hipp. Art. 803. ἐπιπεριτρέπω, to convert to a purpose, M. Anton. 8. 35. ἐπιπερκάζω, to turn dark, of grapes ripening ; ἐπιπερκάζειν τριχί to begin to get a dark beard, Anth. P. 11. 36. ἐπίπερκνος, ov, somewhat dark, of grapes Tipening : hence of the colour of certain hares, Xen. Cyn. 5, 22 (inferior Mss. ἐπίπερκος), Poll. 5. 67. ἐπιπετάννῦμι, fut. -πετάσω, to spread over, τι ἐπί τι Xen. Cyn. 5, 10: —Pass., τέφρη ἐπιπέπτατο, Q. Sm. 14. 25.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  καταπλήσσω, Att. -ττω, fut. éw, properly, to strike down, but mostly metaph. ¢o strike with amazement, astound, terrify, κατέπλησσεν ἐπὶ τὸ φοβεῖσθαι Thuc. 2.65; ὁ φόβος κ. τὰς ψυχάς Xen. Cyr. 3.1, 253 κατα- πλήξειν ᾧετο τὸν δῆμον Dem. 577.11; κ. τοὺς ἀκροατάς, of orators, Arist. Rhet. 3.7, 5.1: so in Med., Polyb. 3. 80, 1, εἴς. :—Pass. to be panic- stricken, amazed, astounded, κατεπλήγη φίλον ἦτορ 1]. 3.31; καταπλήτ- τομαι Eupol. Κόλακ. 1. το; but in this sense the Att. mostly used the aor. 2 and pf., καταπλαγῆναι τῷ πολέμῳ Thuc. 1. 81, cf. 4. το; μὴ καταπέπληχθε Id. 7. 77 ; also c.acc., πάνυ τοῦτ᾽ ἐπαινῶ καὶ καταπλήτ- Towa Eupol. KoA. 1. 10; τὴν ἀπειρίαν τὴν αὑτοῦ καταπεπλῆχθαι Isocr. 415 Ε, εἴο. ; μηδὲν καταπλαγέντες τὸν Φίλιππον Dem. 290. 10; so also, καταπεπλῆχθαι τὸν βίον Id. 970. 5 :—the part. pf. καταπέπληγα is also used intr. by late writers, as App. Mithr. 18, Paus. 10. 22, 8; esp. in part., Dion. H. 6. 25, etc.; τὸ καταπεπληγός abject condition, Plut. Comp. Pel. c. Marc. 1. καταπλίσσομαι, Pass. to be tripped up, ἡμῶν ἴσως ov καταπλῖγήσει (fut. 2) τῷ χόρῳ will be tripped up, beaten by our chorus (as emended by Dind.), Ar. in Meineke Com. Gr. 2. p. 1035, ubi v. Bgk. καταπλοκή, 7, an entwining, interlacing, τοῦ νεύρου Plat. Tim. 76 D: complication, τῶν χρημάτων Artemid. 2. 5. II. in Music, the connexion of notes descending in regular succession, opp. to ἀναπλοκή, Ptol. Harm, 2.12. κατάπλοος, contr.—hous, 6, a sailing down to land, a putting ashore, ! g Ud KaTaTAavaw — καταπόρεω. | from Sicily, Dem, 1285. 21; ἐκ κατάπλου immediately after landing, ε Polyb. 15. 23, 3. II. a sailing back, return, 6 οἴκαδε κ. Xen. ἘΠΕῚ] Sire 45, Dis καταπλουτέω, to be very rich in, Tt Jo. Damasc. sq., Theophyl. Sim. 46 C. καταπλουτίζω, fut. ἐῶ, ἐο enrich greatly, τινά Hdt.6.132, Xen. Oec. 4,7. καταπλουτομἄχέω, to conquer by money, Diod. 5. 38. κατάπλῦμα, τό, -- κατάπλυσις, Synes. Med. de Febr. p. 234. καταπλυντηρίζω, to drench with foul abuse, Com. Anon. 170; cf. πλύνω II, πλυνός II. καταπλύνω [Ὁ], fo wash by pouring over, to drench, Ar. Fr. 546; ὕδατι τὴν κεφαλήν Xen. Eq. 5, 6. ΤΙ. to wash out, remove by washing, τὸ ὑγρόν Arist. Meteor. 2, 3, 13:—Pass., καταπλὔθείσης τῆς ἅλμης Theophr. C. P. 3. 24, 3; metaph., τὸ πρᾶγμα καταπέπλὕῦται the affair is washed out, i.e. forgotten, Aeschin. 79.19, cf. Poll. 7. 38. κατάπλῦσις, 7, a bathing in water, τῶν σκελῶν Xen. Eq. 5, 9. καταπλώω, Ion. for καταπλέω, Hdt.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ὀττεύομαι, Att. for ὀσσεύομαι (which does not occur), to divine from an ominous voice or sound (daca), ὀττευομένη δὲ κάθηται she sits look- ing for omens, of a lover, Ar. Lys. 597; ὁττ. ταῖς τούτων κληδόσι by the cries of children, Plut. 2. 356 E; ὀττ. πρὸς [ὀρνίθων] βοήν Ael. N. A. 1. 48:—generally, to have forebodings of a thing, τὸ μέλλον Polyb. 27.14, 5; περὶ τῶν ὅλων Id. 1. 11, 5:—c. acc. et inf. to augur that .., Porph. Antr. Nymph. 33, cf. Luc. Lexiph. 19. 11. to regard as ominous, τὴν τύχην, TO ἔργον Dion. H. 1. 23, 55 :—hence, to deprecate as ill-omened, Lat. abominari, πάντα τῦφον Id. 2. 19.—The Act. érrevovow in Ael. N. A. 3. 9.—#Andovigopar was the equiv. Hel- lenic form, acc. to Moeris. ὅττϊ, Ep. for ὅτι (the Conjunction), Hom., and Hes. 6 ττι, Ep. for 6 τι, neut. of ὅστις, Hom. ὄττις, 7, = ὄψις, Hesych.; ὄττιες ἀχλυώδεες Aretae. Caus. M. Diut. 2.13. ὀττοτοῖ, f.1. for ὀτοτοῖ. ὅτῳ, Att. dat. of ὅστις. ov, as a Diphthong, is regularly long, except in Aeol. where it is not seldom short, v. Priscian. 1. 6, Schol. Dion. Thrax. in A. B. 779, Buttm, Lexil. 5. ν. βούλομαι 7-9. Later Poets make it short when it represents the Lat. ἃ in pr. names, as in Πόστουμος ( = Postiimus), ‘Podrovados, Jac. Anth. P. p. 631, 926. οὐ (cf. Zd. ava, Lat. haud) is the negative of fact, statement, as μή of the will and thought; οὐ denies, μή rejects; ov is absolute, μή relative ; ov objective, μή subjective. The same differences hold for all compds. of οὐ and μή. Note especially that, in contradistinction to μή, οὐ readily adheres to single words with which it forms a quasi-compd. As to the Form, v. infr. 6. A. UsacE. The uses of οὐ will be considered, T. as the negative of single words, IT. as the negative of the sentence.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  &, exclamation used to express various emotions, like Lat. and Engl, ah! in Hom. always ἃ δειλέ, ἃ δειλώ, ἃ δειλοί, 1]. 11. 441, 452., 17. 443, Od. 20. 355, al.; also in Trag., Aesch. Ag. 1087, etc.; ὦ, μηδαμῶς... Soph. Ph. 1300, cf. O. T. 1147; ἃ μάκαρ C. 1. 401 ; sometimes doubled, ἃ ἃ Aesch. Pr. 114, 566, etc.; rare in Prose, Plat. Hipp. Ma. 295 A. ἃ ἅ or ἃ G, to express laughter, like our ha ha, Eur. Cycl. 157, Ar., etc.; ἃ ἃ δασυνθὲν γέλωτα δηλοῖ Hesych. and Phot.; cf. Meineke Plat. Com. Γρυπ. 2. ἃ, Dor. for Artic. 77. Dor. for 7, dat. of ὅς. ἀάατος, ov, (daw) in Il. with penult. long, zot to be injured or violated, inviolable, viv μοι ὄμοσσον ἀάᾶτον Στυγὸς ὕδωρ, because the gods swore their most binding oaths thereby, 14. 271. II. in Od. with penult. short, μνηστήρεσσιν ἄεθλον ἀάδτον 21. 91; ἄεθλος ἀάᾶτος ἐκτε- τέλεσται 22.5, where it is commonly rendered by hurtful, dangerous ; but here also Buttm., Lexil., attempts to retain a kindred sense, zot fo be hurt, not to be treated lightly or slighted. TIT. in Ap. Rh. 2.77, κάρτος dadrov invincible strength. (Originally ἀάξατος, which is implied in the Lacon. form ἀάβακτος cited by Hesych.; cf. daw, ἄτη.) ἀᾶγής, és, wnbroken, not to be broken, hard, strong, Od. 11. 575, Theocr. 24. 121, etc. (Originally ἀξαγής ; cf. ἄγνυμι.) [The first a short in Od. and Theocr., but long in Ap. Rh. 3. 1251, Q. Sm. 6. 596.] ἀάζω, f. cw, to breathe through the mouth, breathe out, Arist. Probl. 34. 7. (For the Root, v. sub ap.) ἄανθα, ἡ, a kind of earring, Aleman 113, Ar. Fr. 567, Hesych. ἀάπλετος, ov, lengthd. Ep. for ἄπλετος, Q. Sm. 1. 675. ἄ-απτος, ov, (dmropat) not to be touched, resistless, invincible, χεῖρες ἄαπτοι Hom. (mostly in IL, as 1. 567), Hes. Op. 147; κῆτος ἄαπτον Opp. H. 5, 629. das, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, genit. of ἄα, -- ἠώς, as Zenod. read for ἠοῦς in Il. 8. 470 (v. Schol. Ven.) ; used in Boeot. as Ady., Hesych, ἀασιφροσύνη, ἀασίφρων, in Gramm. for deaupp-. ἀασμός, 6, (ἀάζω) a breathing out, Arist. Probl. 34. 7. ἀάσπετος, ἀάσχετος, v. sub ἄσπετος, ἄσχετος. ἄαται, Ep. for ἄεται, from ἄω, satio, Hes. Sc. 1ol. ἄ-ἅτος, contr. Gros, ov, (dw, doar) insatiate, c. gen., datos πολέμοιο Hes. Th. 714; “Apns dros πολέμοιο Il. 5. 388; μάχης τόν περ ἐόντα 22. 218: cf. Buttm. Lexil. s. v.:—absol., datos ὕβρις Ap. Rh. 1. 459. [The first syll. in datos is short in Hes., but long in Ap. Rh.] Gatos, ov, in Q. Sm. I. 217, -- ἄητος, q. Vv.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  On ambush, or other night missions, they carried peculiar little odds and ends. Kiowa always took along his New Testament and a pair of moccasins for silence. Dave Jensen carried night-sight vitamins high in carotene. Lee Strunk carried his slingshot; ammo, he claimed, would never be a problem. Rat Kiley carried brandy and M&M's candy. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried the starlight scope, which weighed 6.3 pounds with its aluminum carrying case. Henry Dobbins carried his girlfriend's pantyhose wrapped around his neck as a comforter. They all carried ghosts. When dark came, they would move out single file across the meadows and paddies to their ambush coordinates, where they would quietly set up the Claymores and lie down and spend the night waiting. Other missions were more complicated and required special equipment. In mid-April, it was their mission to search out and destroy the elaborate tunnel complexes in the Than Khe area south of Chu Lai. To blow the tunnels, they carried one-pound blocks of pentrite high explosives, four blocks to a man, 68 pounds in all. They carried wiring, detonators, and battery-powered clackers. Dave Jensen carried earplugs. Most often, before blowing the tunnels, they were ordered by higher command to search them, which was considered bad news, but by and large they just shrugged and carried out orders. Because he was a big man, Henry Dobbins was excused from tunnel duty. The others would draw numbers. Before Lavender died there were 17 men in the platoon, and whoever drew the number 17 would strip off his gear and crawl in headfirst with a flashlight and Lieutenant Cross's .45-caliber pistol. The rest of them would fan out as security. They would sit down or kneel, not facing the hole, listening to the ground beneath them, imagining cobwebs and ghosts, whatever was down there—the tunnel walls squeezing in—how the flashlight seemed impossibly heavy in the hand and how it was tunnel vision in the very strictest sense, compression in all ways, even time, and how you had to wiggle in—ass and elbows—a swallowed-up feeling—and how you found yourself worrying about odd things: Will your flashlight go dead? Do rats carry rabies? If you screamed, how far would the sound carry? Would your buddies hear it? Would they have the courage to drag you out? In some respects, though not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  In the evenings I'd sometimes borrow my father's car and drive aimlessly around town, feeling sorry for myself, thinking about the war and the pig factory and how my life seemed to be collapsing toward slaughter. I felt paralyzed. All around me the options seemed to be narrowing, as if I were hurtling down a huge black funnel, the whole world squeezing in tight. There was no happy way out. The government had ended most graduate school deferments; the waiting lists for the National Guard and Reserves were impossibly long; my health was solid; I didn't qualify for CO status—no religious grounds, no history as a pacifist. Moreover, I could not claim to be opposed to war as a matter of general principle. There were occasions, I believed, when a nation was justified in using military force to achieve its ends, to stop a Hitler or some comparable evil, and I told myself that in such circumstances I would've willingly marched off to the battle. The problem, though, was that a draft board did not let you choose your war. Beyond all this, or at the very center, was the raw fact of terror. I did not want to die. Not ever. But certainly not then, not there, not in a wrong war. Driving up Main Street, past the courthouse and the Ben Franklin store, I sometimes felt the fear spreading inside me like weeds. I imagined myself dead. I imagined myself doing things I could not do—charging an enemy position, taking aim at another human being. At some point in mid-July I began thinking seriously about Canada. The border lay a few hundred miles north, an eight-hour drive. Both my conscience and my instincts were telling me to make a break for it, just take off and run like hell and never stop. In the beginning the idea seemed purely abstract, the word Canada printing itself out in my head; but after a time I could see particular shapes and images, the sorry details of my own future —a hotel room in Winnipeg, a battered old suitcase, my father's eyes as I tried to explain myself over the telephone. I could almost hear his voice, and my mother's. Run, I'd think. Then I'd think, Impossible. Then a second later I'd think, Run.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  8Temporary HelpCome January, as part of clawing my way into the white-collar classes I mock, I sit behind the receptionist’s desk of a telecommunications firm that helped build and maintain the internet. In this age, faxes are big news. Operators still plug callers in and out of switchboards. Crawling with horn-rimmed MIT geniuses, this place is, and they’re marketing (unsuccessfully if you can believe it) the very first e-mail program. They’re almost growing too fast not to hire me, so soon I move up from receptionist ($12K) to a secretarial job I suck at ($13K). Since I need the overtime, I take up nighttime data entry for accounting. It’s staring into one of those green screens, doing corporate budgets, that I notice how high salaries rise in marketing. Also, they spend hundreds of thousands on trade shows each year, and my product-manager girlfriend informs me that nobody pays attention to the budgets. So in the company library, I read a bunch of trade magazines and essentially retype what they said needs to happen into a proposal for managing that budget. Poof, I’m a marketeer. Riding the six-thirty bus to the company in my cheap suit with my briefcase on my lap, I can pass for a normal citizen—except for scribbling poetry in a black notebook. I never thought of myself as competent in commerce, particularly, and striding through the doors lends me a new bearing. I join a corporate women’s track team, lured by the sweet prospect of fitting in as we lope around the pond at lunch hour. Me, belonging somewhere. Sliding the company credit card across a hotel desk, I radiate bourgeois integrity. For a girl bred to yank peanuts out of the ground, any desk job gives off an urban sheen. And this is the go-go eighties in a company where they slap up new cubicles every week. Meanwhile, Warren’s volunteer library job has morphed into a full-time assistant curator’s position, so we’ve moved to a tree-lined suburb where the noise quotient disturbs his work and sleep less. Financially, I’m not exactly out of the woods, but with the first health insurance I’ve ever had, I track down a therapist. Night terrors still wake me screaming twice a week, and if I have a few drinks, an image of Daddy warping into fossil form can set me on a crying jag. Every month we scrape together enough to eat out at a cheap fish house—mussels in garlic and white wine. Once, at the next table, a similarly steaming bowl is lowered in front of a Polish Nobel laureate in poetry whose public lectures we’ve been religiously going to, all goggle-eyed. We marvel at his high forehead, like that bust of Beethoven you always see. Don’t stare, Warren says. But I can’t stop looking at this laureate’s gray and diabolical eyebrows, projecting above his light eyes like a ram’s horns. He practically speeds up my heart.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Fitful, this rest is. At one point I dream I’m picking up a child’s stuffed animal—a Beanie Baby of the type Dev collected as a kid. In my dream hand, I look down, and the stuffed toy has morphed into a pit viper. With its triangular head, it lunges at my face. I scream myself awake and sit up and see—with eyes wide, a night terror—snakes lunging from the bed’s tufted headboard. Sweaty, heart rattling against my ribs, I look at the digital clock—just after three in the morning I’d gone to bed about two. I pull on running shorts, then tie on a pair of sneakers, thinking that a few miles of road will bang the ugly out of me. Instead, I lie facedown on the carpet, repeating the prayer about God taking my will. Speaking it, I feel the words sucked from my mouth into a vacuum where God is not. My head’s a hurricane, and to pray at all is like screaming into a gale. Lying there, I remember the Scriptures I’ve forgotten for days. Margaret specifically gave me two passages, saying, While I was praying this week, these pieces came to me. I’m very strongly guided to give them to you. How touched I’d been when she handed them over, but I hadn’t picked them up. I find in Mother’s still-boxed books a Bible, floppy and old, its binding cracked and peeling like a batwing. Opening it, I see Mother’s name carefully inscribed: For Charlie Marie Moore, from her loving Mother Mary, Christmas 1927. I flip through the onionskin pages to my first assignment, verses seven through twelve of Psalm fifty-one. What I see makes the skin of my scalp prickle, for the lines are marked in pale blue chalk. A child’s hand has drawn a wavy line in the margin—not across the whole psalm, only alongside the lines I’ve been steered to—verses seven to twelve, which very deliberately traverse two sections of verse from the middle of one to the other. Kneeling, I sit back on my feet and feel the flesh on my scalp creep. I read the words. (Later, I’ll learn this is the hanging psalm read to English prisoners as they approached the gallows.) 7 True I was born guilty, a sinner even as my mother conceived me. 8 Still, you insist on sincerity of heart; in my inmost being teach me wisdom. 9 Cleanse me with hyssop, that I may be pure; wash me, make me whiter than snow. 10 Let me hear sounds of joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice. II 11 Turn away your face from my sins; blot out all my guilt. 12 A clean heart create for me, God; renew in me a steadfast spirit. How odd, I think, for I never thought of Mother as particularly devout in childhood—she wasn’t. But it seems vaguely significant still.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I felt my right hand on the floppy door handle. Sam had been on a tarmac bagging bodies unloaded from a helicopter fresh from the carnage of the Tet Offensive. He’d peeled back one tarp and looked down into his own face. Which was his brother’s, of course. Mary, he said, pray the Lord you never see a face like that. One half was like the inside of a roast you left outside. Just blown slap off. His ear had stayed perfect, though. I wanted something of my brother’s power. And I’d had a vision before I got shipped in-country. In a big cathedral, he was, wearing his dress blues. He was praying over my casket. That’s what was supposed to of happened. Instead, he got his face shot off. The wind eked in the window seals, and the car shook. What scared me most was the crying part of Sam had been cauterized already. He was a living scar. All my life I’d met people bearing wounds far deeper than my own. I’d thought California would change me, heal me, free me from attracting all that. And now I’d flagged it down and climbed in a car with it. We rounded the curve into Dana Point. The car lunged up to a light. It shuddered and died. I jammed my skinny arm through the window slot, slick as a length of licorice, and yanked the door open. I didn’t so much jump from the car as eject myself out on the roadside slope. The effort launched me downward, sliding. Over gravel and scrub oak, rocks scraping my shins. I could hear Sam crank the dead VW back up to a stunted idle, its ragged engine coughing. I scrambled up the gravel incline, losing a flip-flop in the process, hollering as if somebody at the light might take notice. I raised my head and bawled for some driver to see me, hear me. He was calling my name, looking like a guy ditched by his prom date—sweaty and short and like his feelings were hurt. The light changed. Horns. I sprinted across the yellow line before oncoming traffic to the other side of the road. Sam hollered over, Hey, you forgot your pocketbook. I was sprinting so shards of rock got embedded in one foot. Even then I was doubting my instincts. Maybe he was harmless. By the time the shakes hit, I was speed-walking with a single flip-flop along the road’s shoulder, a kind of inner earthquake starting in my middle—a shaking that spread outward and nearly buckled me. At a fish joint famous for not letting the beach-weary use its facilities, I rushed past counter traffic to the bathroom. Soon as I locked the door, I hunched over the sink, washing my unstable limbs with brown paper towels and pink soap as if they belonged to some patient I was paid to tend. The

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ἀθροίζω or ἁθροίζω (Elmsl. Heracl. 122): fut. ow: aor. ἤθροισα Eur., etc.:—Pass., aor. ἠθροίσθην : pf. ἤθροισμαι: plqpf. ἤθροιστο Aesch. Pers. 414:—the quadrisyll. form ἀθροΐζω is used by Archil. 104, Anth. Plan. 308: restored by Dind. in Pseudo-Eur. I. A. 267, Ar. Av. 253: (ἀθρόος or GO pcos). To gather together, collect, esp. to muster forces, ἀθρ. λαόν, στράτευμα, δύναμιν, etc., Soph. O.T.144, Xen. An. 1. 2, 1, etc.; Τροίαν ἀθρ. to gather the Trojans together, Eur. Hec. 1139 ; πνεῦμα ἄθροισον collect breath, Id. Phoen. 851, cf. Arist. G. A. 2. 4, 53 περιπλοκὰς λόγων ἀθροίσας having strung together, Eur. Phoen. 495 :— absol. ¢o collect or hoard treasure, Arist. Pol. 5. 11, 20:—Med. to gather for oneself, collect round one, Eur. Heracl. l.c., Xen. Cyr. 3. 1, 19 :— Pass. to be gathered or crowded together, εὖτε πρὸς ἄεθλα δῆμος ἠθροΐ- ζετο Archil. 1. ο., cf. 60; és τὴν ἀγορὴν ἀθρ. Hdt. 5. 101; ἀθροισθέντες having rallied, Thuc. 1. 50; τὸ δὲ... ξύμπαν ἠθροίσθη δισχίλιοι but the whole amounted collectively to.., Id. 5.6; ἐνταῦθα ἠθροίζοντο they mustered in force there, Id. 6. 44, etc.: to form a society, Plat. Prot. 322 B; ἀθροισθέντες having formed a party, Arist. Pol. 5. 5, 33—of things, περὶ πολλῶν ἀθροισθέντων taken in the aggregate (cf. ἄθροι- σμα 2), Plat. Theaet. 157 B. 2. in Pass. also of the mind, ἀθροίζεσθαι εἰς ἑαυτόν to collect oneself, Plat. Phaedo 83 A, οἵ. 67 C; φόβος ἤθροι- ora fear has gathered strength, arisen, Xen. Cyr. 5. 2, 34. ἀθροίσιμος ἡμέρα, a day of assembling, Eccl. ἄθροισις, €ws, ἡ, a gathering, collecting, mustering, στρατοῦ Eur. Hec. 314; χρημάτων Thue. 6. 26; αἱ τῶν vepay a. Arist. Meteor. I. 3, τό. ἄθροισμα, τό, that which is gathered, a gathering, λαοῦ Eur. Or. 874. 2. a process of aggregation, Plat. Theaet. 157 B. Af in Epicur. philos., the concourse of atams, Diog. L. 8. 66. ἀθροισμός, ὁ, --ἄθροισις, Theophr. C. P. 1. 10,7: condensation, Ib. 5.2, 1. ἀθροιστέον, verb. Adj. one must collect, Xen. Lac. 7. 4. ἀθροιστύριον, τό, a muster-place, Eust. (Ὁ) ἀθροιστικός, 7, dv, of or for collecting, like ἀθροίσιμος, Eccl. in Gramm. collective, ὀνόματα : copulative, σύνδεσμοι. ἀθρόος, a, ov, rarely os, ον (Heraclid. Tar. ap. Ath. 120 D), or better ἁθρόος as Aristarch. wrote it (Schol. Ven. Il. 14. 38), Att. ἅθρους, ουν, poét. dat. pl. ἁθροῖσιν Epigr. Gr. 1034. 26:—but in later writers the spir. lenis prevailed: (a copulat., @pdos). In crowds, heaps or masses, 11.