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 In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

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

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

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

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

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

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

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

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  The lesson taught by the coverage was clear: childhood is by definition perilous. To be a child is to be small, weak, inexperienced, the dead bottom of the food chain. Every child knows this, or did. Knowing this is why children call Camarillo. Knowing this is why children call Twentieth Century–Fox. “This case has been a haunting one all my life as I was a grown-up eight-year-old when it happened and followed it every day in the Oakland Tribune from day one till the end.” So wrote an internet correspondent in response to a recent look back at the Stephanie Bryan case. “I had to read it when my parents weren’t around as they didn’t think it was fitting to be reading about a homicide at my age.” As adults we lose memory of the gravity and terrors of childhood . Hello, Quintana. I’m going to lock you here in the garage . After I became five I never ever dreamed about him . I have to know about this . One of her abiding fears, I learned much later, was that John would die and there would be no one but her to take care of me. How could she have even imagined that I would not take care of her? I used to ask that. Now I ask the reverse: How could she have even imagined that I could take care of her? She saw me as needing care myself. She saw me as frail. Was that her anxiety or mine? I learned about this fear when she was temporarily off the ventilator in one or another ICU, I have no memory which. I told you, they were all the same. The blue-and-white printed curtains. The gurgling through plastic tubing. The dripping from the IV line, the rales, the alarms. The codes. The crash cart. This was never supposed to happen to her . It must have been the ICU at UCLA . Only at UCLA was she off the ventilator long enough to have had this conversation. You have your wonderful memories . I do, but they blur. They fade into one another. They become, as Quintana a month or two later described the only memory she could summon of the five weeks she spent in the ICU at UCLA, “all mudgy.” I tried to tell her: I too have trouble remembering. Languages mingle: do I need an abogado or do I need an avocat? Names vanish. The names for example of California counties, once so familiar that I recited them in alphabetized order (Alameda and Alpine and Amador, Calaveras and Colusa and Contra Costa, Madera and Marin and Mariposa) now elude me. The name of one county I do remember. The name of this single county I always remember. I had my own Broken Man. I had my own stories about which I had to know.

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

  Initially Nancy did not know what had happened to her. “When we went home I was still in a daze, doing the typical things of running a household, yet not really feeling that I was alive or that I was real. I had trouble sleeping that night. For days, I remained in my own little disconnected world. I could not use a hair dryer, toaster, stove or anything that warmed up. I could not concentrate on what people were doing or telling me. I just didn’t care. I was increasingly anxious. I slept less and less. I knew I was behaving strangely and kept trying to understand what was frightening me so. “On the fourth night after the surgery, around 3 AM, I started to realize that the dream I had been living all this time related to conversations I had heard in the operating room. I was suddenly transported back into the OR and could feel my paralyzed body being burned. I was engulfed in a world of terror and horror.” From then on, Nancy says, memories and flashbacks erupted into her life. “It was as if the door was pushed open slightly, allowing the intrusion. There was a mixture of curiosity and avoidance. I continued to have irrational fears. I was deathly afraid of sleep; I experienced a sense of terror when seeing the color blue. My husband, unfortunately, was bearing the brunt of my illness. I would lash out at him when I truly did not intend to. I was sleeping at most 2 to 3 hours, and my daytime was filled with hours of flashbacks. I remained chronically hyperalert, feeling threatened by my own thoughts and wanting to escape them. I lost 23 pounds in 3 weeks. People kept commenting on how great I looked. “I began to think about dying. I developed a very distorted view of my life in which all my successes diminished and old failures were amplified. I was hurting my husband and found that I could not protect my children from my rage. “Three weeks after the surgery I went back to work at the hospital. The first time I saw somebody in a surgical scrubsuit was in the elevator. I wanted to get out immediately, but of course I could not. I then had this irrational urge to clobber him, which I contained with considerable effort. This episode triggered increasing flashbacks, terror and dissociation. I cried all the way home from work. After that, I became adept at avoidance. I never set foot in an elevator, I never went to the cafeteria, I avoided the surgical floors.” Gradually Nancy was able to piece together her flashbacks and create an understandable, if horrifying, memory of her surgery. She recalled the reassurances of the OR nurses and a brief period of sleep after the anesthesia was started. Then she remembered how she began to awaken.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Even the big boys seemed to be impressed by the general silence and began to whisper among themselves, like men who are about to perform a sacrifice that involves terrifying responsibilities. When they at last approached our group, where the smallest boys were gathered together, I closed my eyes and my lips and prayed to God to save me. I would never have been able to defend myself, and my disorganized movements would have only served to encourage my aggressors. On other occasions, I had learned at great cost that it is always wiser, with grownups and with a crowd, to play possum, as if beneath the snout of a fierce animal. I was about to be seized by a hundred hands, brutalized, stripped of my pants, subjected to the touch of these other boys. In my distraction, I began, with my eyes closed, to whisper to myself the Sh’mah Yizroel, the prayer for the dead, until the shouts of the crowd made me realize that I was at last free from this unbearable suspense: the victim had been chosen, and I was not to be sacrificed. But the mere threat had bound me closely to the victim and made me feel all the terrors of a real calvary. I could feel the anguish of the small boy who, all trembling, was now being carried, like the sacrificial lamb, on the shoulders of our supervisor. How would I ever be able to forget his distraught eyes and rejoice now with all the other boys? The procession began to form and, in the greenish light of the dark old synagogue, behind our improvised high priest who was bearing the live offering up to the altar, a most unusual line was already marching past. In single file, with serious expressions on their faces, the children went slowly, raising their faces as if in ecstasy toward the tabernacle that contained the sacred scrolls. The tiny blinking lights of the mortuary lamps hung close together all along the walls and surrounded the procession with a solemn lighting that gave it the same shadows as all the ceremonies of our elders. The children might indeed be playing, but their shadows were the same as all those of their fathers and their ancestors. Surely, the old synagogue was being deceived and was vesting in them all the solemnity of which it was capable. My heart beat faster, under the pressure of fear and confused emotion. What was going to happen to the poor child, my God, what was going to happen to him? Were they really going to cut off his penis? The mere thought of it gave me a vague but not unpleasant pain in my own loins. My body, as usual, was going ahead of me, already in tune with the ceremony. The older boys began to sing the ritual for circumcision while the rest of the crowd, in unison, repeated it.

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

  Nina and I decided to create a set of test cards specifically for children, based on pictures we cut out of magazines in the clinic waiting room. Our first study compared twelve six-to eleven-year-olds at the children’s clinic with a group of children from a nearby school who matched them as closely as possible in age, race, intelligence, and family constellation.[1] What differentiated our patients was the abuse they had suffered within their families. They included a boy who was severely bruised from repeated beatings by his mother; a girl whose father had molested her at the age of four; two boys who had been repeatedly tied to a chair and whipped; and a girl who, at the age of five, had seen her mother (a prostitute) raped, dismembered, burned, and put into the trunk of a car. The mother’s pimp was suspected of sexually abusing the girl. The children in our control group also lived in poverty in a depressed area of Boston where they regularly witnessed shocking violence. While the study was being conducted, one boy at their school threw gasoline at a classmate and set him on fire. Another boy was caught in crossfire while walking to school with his father and a friend. He was wounded in the groin, and his friend was killed. Given their exposure to such a high baseline level of violence, would their responses to the cards differ from those of the hospitalized children? [image "A photograph of a man half under a car working on it with two children holding tools and smiling." file=image_rsrc77J.jpg] One of our cards depicted a family scene: two smiling kids watching dad repair a car. Every child who looked at it commented on the danger to the man lying underneath the vehicle. While the control children told stories with benign endings—the car would get fixed, and maybe dad and the kids would drive to McDonald’s—the traumatized kids came up with gruesome tales. One girl said that the little girl in the picture was about to smash in her father’s skull with a hammer. A nine-year-old boy who had been severely physically abused told an elaborate story about how the boy in the picture kicked away the jack, so that the car mangled his father’s body and his blood spurted all over the garage. As they told us these stories, our patients got very excited and disorganized. We had to take considerable time out at the water cooler and going for walks before we could show them the next card. It was little wonder that almost all of them had been diagnosed with ADHD, and most were on Ritalin—though the drug certainly didn’t seem to dampen their arousal in this situation.

• From Henry and June (1986)

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

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

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

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

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

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

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

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

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

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Evening fell before I expected it. Night imposed silence on the cannon and machine guns and engines all along the hills and within the arc of the front. But this sudden peace seemed to me so false and so heavy that I regretted the daylight. It was wiser to stop, and we also badly needed a little sleep after these past forty hours of being awake, which included twelve hours of shoveling, and twenty-six of forced marching on an empty stomach. We entered a field of ripe wheat which nobody dared pick. We arranged to take turns at standing watch and hid ourselves in the wheat. I was still chewing a thistle stem which was sour in my mouth when the war, for a moment silenced by the night, started again, more cynical and terrible than ever. A magnificent fireworks began: magnesium flares blindingly white, yellow, and then red, like dying stars; straight bright red streaks of machine-gun fire; elegant and clear lines of bullets traced like fugitive neon lights; and scarlet, sinister rugged patches from antiaircraft artillery. Then the noise: after the solemn, promising silence of the flares came the mad disorderly reaction of the inhabitants of the earth to the regular, obstinate sounds of the invisible motors in the sky. The airplanes replied to the nervous coughing of the machine guns with great battering blows that shook the earth. It was a celebration in honor of death. On the other side of the road a tribe of Bedouins rose from the middle of a field like a flight of partridge whose nest has been wrecked by a storm. These fugitives were perfectly silhouetted against the intermittent and richly colored flashes of light, until they disappeared, pursued by their fate, chanting monotonous prayers. This vision taught us a useful lesson: it was best to stay where we were.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The fighter planes! We forced our swollen feet to run and threw ourselves into the ditches. Intelligently and diabolically, the planes passed over us, changed their minds, came back, then swooped and fired wherever they saw any sign of life. A German courier was racing past on his motorcycle, both he and his machine wrapped in striped oilskin camouflage like a fabulous caparisoned beast, when suddenly a Spitfire dived and flew low, riddling him with bullets till it rose again and left behind a flaming human torch. I closed my eyes. But there were neither screams nor spectacular convulsions. The machine silently went on, left the road, cut straight across a field, then lay down on its side, still burning. So the war had caught up with us; any encounter now was dangerous. Outside Bir M’Cherga there was again some traffic. Without quite losing sight of it, we left the road and cut across country. Armored cars, tanks, and trucks formed an endless procession. The bombers resumed their relays. At each alarm, the drivers and their assistants left their vehicles and dashed for the ditches. We threw ourselves flat on the earth which shook hard beneath us. When it was over, each of us glanced at the others to count the survivors, and we then set forth again, uncuriously following the road. Vehicles were burning, and soldiers were trying to save them. I can no longer recall each attack separately: the roar of motors, the screams of warning of the men, their flight, and the silent anxiety as death took its pick, then the thuds of the bombs that shook the ground beneath us, the din of explosions, and again silence, with a gun still rumbling in the distance, and our departure once more. I was no longer surprised to find myself still alive, and the fear of death was no longer so acute. My mind was detached from my body, which lived on and automatically looked after itself.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  14 They took away the pots, the shovels, the snuffers, the spoons, and all the bronze articles which were used in the temple service, 15 the captain of the bodyguard also took away the firepans and basins, anything made of fine gold and anything made of fine silver. 16 The two pillars, the one sea (large basin), and the bases which Solomon had made for the house of the LORD , the bronze of all these articles was incalculable. 17 The height of the one pillar was eighteen cubits (27 ft.), and a capital of bronze was on top of it. The height of the capital was three cubits (4.5 ft.); a network (lattice work) and pomegranates around the capital were all of bronze. And the second pillar had the same as these, with a network. 18 The captain of the bodyguard took [captive] Seraiah the chief priest, Zephaniah the second priest, and the three doorkeepers [of the temple]. 19 And from the city [of Jerusalem] he took an officer who was in command of the men of war, and five men from the king’s personal advisors who were found in the city, and the scribe of the captain of the army who mustered the people of the land [for military service] and sixty men from the people of the land who were found in the city. 20 Nebuzaradan the captain of the bodyguard took them and brought them to the king of Babylon at Riblah. 21 Then the king of Babylon struck them down and killed them at Riblah in the land of Hamath [north of Damascus]. So Judah was taken into exile from its land. Gedaliah Made Governor 22 Now over the people whom Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had left in the land of Judah, he appointed [as governor] Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan. 23 When all the captains of the forces, they and their men, heard that the king of Babylon had appointed Gedaliah governor, they came with their men to Gedaliah at Mizpah, namely, Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, and Johanan the son of Kareah, and Seraiah the son of Tanhumeth the Netophathite, and Jaazaniah the son of the Maacathite. 24 Gedaliah swore [an oath] to them and their men, and said to them, “Do not be afraid of the servants (officials) of the Chaldeans. Live in the land and serve the king of Babylon, and it will be well with you.” 25 But in the seventh month Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, the son of Elishama, of the royal family [who had a claim to be governor], came with ten men and struck and killed Gedaliah and the Jews and the Chaldeans who were with him at Mizpah. 26 Then all the people, both small and great, and the captains of the forces set out and went to Egypt; for they were afraid of the Chaldeans (Babylonians).

• From The Decameron (1353)

  He let some days pass, then, taking with him a trusty companion of his, he repaired to Madam Lisetta's house and withdrawing with her into a room apart, where none might see him, he fell on his knees before her and said, 'Madam, I pray you for God's sake pardon me that which I said to you last Sunday, whenas you bespoke me of your beauty, for that the following night I was so cruelly chastised there that I have not since been able to rise from my bed till to-day.' Quoth Mistress Featherbrain, 'And who chastised you thus?' 'I will tell you,' replied the monk. 'Being that night at my orisons, as I still use to be, I saw of a sudden a great light in my cell and ere I could turn me to see what it might be, I beheld over against me a very fair youth with a stout cudgel in his hand, who took me by the gown and dragging me to my feet, gave me such a drubbing that he broke every bone in my body. I asked him why he used me thus and he answered, "For that thou presumedst to-day, to disparage the celestial charms of Madam Lisetta, whom I love over all things, save only God." "Who, then, are you?" asked I; and he replied that he was the angel Gabriel. "O my lord," said I, "I pray you pardon me"; and he, "So be it; I pardon thee on condition that thou go to her, as first thou mayst, and get her pardon; but if she pardons thee not, I will return to thee and give thee such a bout of it that I will make thee a woeful man for all the time thou shalt live here below." That which he said to me after I dare not tell you, except you first pardon me.'

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

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

• From Bluets (2009)

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

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

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