Fear

Passages

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

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• From The Decameron (1353)

  The gentleman, going up, found his wife at the stairhead, all disordered and fearful, and said to her, 'What is all this? Whom goeth Messer Lambertuccio threatening thus in such a fury?' The lady, withdrawing towards the chamber where Leonetto was, so he might hear her, answered, 'Sir, never had I the like of this fright. There came fleeing hither but now a young man, whom I know not, followed by Messer Lambertuccio, hanger in hand, and finding by chance the door of this chamber open, said to me, all trembling, "For God's sake, madam, help me, that I be not slain in your arms." I rose to my feet and was about to question him who he was and what ailed him, when, behold, in rushed Messer Lambertuccio, saying, "Where art thou, traitor?" I set myself before the chamber-door and hindered him from entering; and he was in so far courteous that, after many words, seeing it pleased me not that he should enter there, he went his way down, as you have seen.' Quoth the husband, 'Wife, thou didst well, it were too great a reproach to us, had a man been slain in our house, and Messer Lambertuccio did exceeding unmannerly to follow a person who had taken refuge here.' Then he asked where the young man was, and the lady answered, 'Indeed sir, I know not where he hath hidden himself.' Then said the husband 'Where art thou? Come forth in safety.' Whereupon Leonetto, who had heard everything, came forth all trembling for fear, (as indeed he had had a great fright,) of the place where he had hidden himself, and the gentleman said to him, 'What hast thou to do with Messer Lambertuccio?' 'Sir,' answered he, 'I have nothing in the world to do with him, wherefore methinketh assuredly he is either not in his right wits or he hath mistaken me for another; for that no sooner did he set eyes on me in the road not far from this house than he forthright clapped his hand to his hanger and said, "Traitor, thou art a dead man!" I stayed not to ask why, but took to my heels as best I might and made my way hither, where, thanks to God and to this gentlewoman, I have escaped.' Quoth the husband, 'Go to; have no fears; I will bring thee to thine own house safe and sound, and thou canst after seek out what thou hast to do with him.' Accordingly, when they had supped, he mounted him a-horseback and carrying him back to Florence, left him in his own house. As for Leonetto, that same evening, according as he had been lessoned of the lady, he privily bespoke Messer Lambertuccio and took such order with him, albeit there was much talk of the matter thereafterward, the husband never for all that became aware of the cheat that had been put on him by his wife." THE SEVENTH STORY [Day the Seventh]

• From Trash (1988)

  All those stories were rising up my throat. Voices were echoing in my neck, laughter behind my ears, and I was terribly terribly afraid that I was finally as crazy as my kind was supposed to be. But the desire to live was desperate in my belly, and the stories I had hidden all those years were the blood and bone of it. To get it down, to tell it again, to make something—by God just once—to be real in the world, without lies or evasions or sweet-talking nonsense. I got up and wrote a story all the way through. It was one of the stories from the yellow pages, one of the ones I had rewritten, but it was different again. It wasn’t truly me or my mama or my girlfriends, or really any of the people who’d been there, but it had the feel, the shit-kicking anger and grief of my life. It wasn’t that whiny voice, but it had the drawl, and it had, too, the joy and pride I sometimes felt in me and mine. It was not biography and yet not lies, and it resonated to the pulse of my sisters’ fear and my desperate shame, and it ended with all the questions and decisions still waiting—most of all the decision to live. It was a rough beginning—my own shout of life against death, of shape and substance against silence and confusion. It was most of all my deep abiding desire to live fleshed and strengthened on the page, a way to tell the truth as a kind of magic not cheapened or distorted by a need to please any damn body at all. Without it, I cannot imagine my own life. Without it, I have no way to know who I am. One time, twice, once in a while again, I get it right. Once in a while, I can make the world I know real on the page. I can make the women and men I love breathe out loud in an empty room, the dreams I dare not speak shape up in the smoky darkness of other people’s imaginations. Writing these stories is the only way I know to make sure of my ongoing decision to live, to set moment to moment a small piece of stubbornness against an ocean of ignorance and obliteration. I write stories. I write fiction. I put on the page a third look at what I’ve seen in life—the condensed and reinvented experience of a cross-eyed, working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language, and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine.

• From Trash (1988)

  The Boatwright children had bad dreams. After supper they were all required to wash again while their mama watched. “That neck don’t look clean to me, Bo. You trying to grow mold in those armpits, Mattie? Why are you so dirty and stupid?” The children scrubbed and scrubbed, while Shirley rubbed her neck with one hand and her bulging belly with another. “I’d kill this thing, if I could,” she muttered. Her five sons and three daughters dreamed often of their mother, dreamed she came in to wash their faces with lye, to cut off the places where their ears stuck out, to tie down their wagging tongues, and plane down their purplish genitals. “You won’t need this,” they dreamed she told them, as she pulled off one piece or another of their flesh. “Or this, or this.” They dreamed and screamed and woke each other in terror. Sometimes Shirley beat on the stairs with a broom handle to remind them how much she and Tucker needed their sleep. She hated the way they cringed away from her. After all, she never hit them. A pinch was enough, if you knew how it should be done. But more than their shameful fear of her, she hated the way Mattie would stare back at her and refuse to drop her eyes. “You think you’re something, don’t you?” Shirley would push her face right up to her daughter’s flushed and sweating cheekbones. “You think God’s got his eye on you?” She would pinch the inside of Mattie’s arm and twist her mouth at the girl’s stubborn expression. “Wouldn’t nobody take an interest in you if you were to birth puppy dogs and turtles—which you might. You might any day now.” She sent them all to bed early and came up to beat the foot of each bed with her broomstick until the children squeezed up near the top. “Boatwrights, you’re all purely bred Boatwrights. My side of the family don’t even want to know you’re alive. I look at you and I swear you an’t no kin to me at all.” It was true that Shirley’s family took no interest in her children. Once a year Shirley would go alone to visit her mother, but neither her parents nor her brothers ever visited her. The only thing the children knew about their grandparents was Shirley’s stories about their house, how big and clean it was, how the porch shone with soapstoned wood and baskets of sweet herbs that Grandma Wilmer used in her cooking, how the neighbors admired her mother and looked up to her daddy. By contrast, their father’s father, a widower, was nothing but a drunk. “Vegetables . . . hell!” That man sells whiskey out of that roadside stand, whiskey I tell you, not tomatoes and squash. He just has those runty old tomatoes there to keep the law off.” “Now Shirley, you know that an’t true,” Tucker always protested.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  224 Lecture 31: The Crusades in the late 8th century, had invaded Spain in an effort to drive back the Muslim armies and had established the Spanish March as a buffer zone against Islam. • Further, some outlet was needed to channel the aggressive militarism of the ascendant Normans. o The Normans were descendants of the Vikings who settled on the western coast of France; the duchy of Normandy dates from 10 th century. o The Norman leader Robert Guiscard had already conquered the Saracens (Muslims) in Sicily and Malta—with the pope’s blessing—and in 1038–1040, we find Normans serving as mercenaries in the Byzantine army. o Again with the approval of the pope, William II of Normandy (William the Conqueror) overcame the Anglo-Saxons in England at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The Normans were great warriors and were spoiling for a fight. • Another strong incentive to undertake a military expedition was the loss of the eastern frontier of the Byzantine Empire to the Seljuk Turks (who were Muslims) in 1071, which threatened not only Byzantium but potentially also the West. • Religious incentives were offered, as well: The papacy promised protection of property for participants, granted plenary indulgences, and promised to regard those who fell in battle as martyrs. o Indulgences were a feature of medieval Christianity that made sense only within the framework of a highly evolved view of the afterlife. o The theory was as follows: If Christians died in mortal sin, they would be punished forever in hell; if they died in a perfect state of grace, fully repentant of all their sins, they would go to heaven.

• From Laura Middleton; Her Brother and Her Lover (1890)

  At first, Laura said this plan would never do. But, as we could devise nothing else, on my pressing her a little on the subject she admitted that before I came she had made up her mind to accept him if he proposed, but that she was afraid to do so now for two reasons: first, she feared he might discover on his first attack that someone had had access before him to the sanctuary of love, and secondly, from the dread that in the event of a child coming before the usual time he might denounce her and turn her adrift. I considered a little, and then asked her whether if these difficulties could be got over she would still be disposed to marry him. She said it was no use thinking of it, but that if it were not for the objections she had mentioned, she certainly would, as she thought she could live happily with him. I then told her that as to the first objection she might set her mind perfectly at ease, for from what I had already seen of Sir Charles, his instrument I knew was so much larger than anything that had found its way into her and he would find so much difficulty in getting it in for the first time that he would never suspect any intruder had been before him, and that if, as she easily might, she insisted in the operation being performed in the dark, I could supply her with a contrivance by which a little red liquid might be applied so as to produce the natural appearance of an effusion of blood. Then as to the second objection, I told her I thought there would be little fear of his making any complaint at least in public on the subject, if she had the power to hold out to him that she could bring forward a matter which it would be equally unpleasant for him to have disclosed. She said that in such a case the matter might perhaps be arranged, but she could not imagine how she was to obtain such a hold over him. I told her I thought she might leave that to me. I then explained to her that Sir Charles had taken a fancy to me on my arrival, and had shown me every kindness and attention, evidently wishing to be on an intimate footing with me.

• From The Girls (2016)

  I tried to pull Suzanne aside, hook my arm through hers like the old days, but she just smiled, low burning and unfocused, and shook herself loose, intent on following Russell. —I learned that Russell had been harassing Mitch for the last few weeks. Showing up unannounced at his house. Sending Guy to knock over his trash cans, so Mitch came home to a lawn junked with flattened cereal boxes and shredded wax paper and tinfoil slick with food scraps. Mitch’s caretaker had seen Russell there, too, just once—Scotty told Mitch he’d seen some guy parked at the gate, just staring, and when Scotty had asked him to leave, Russell had smiled and told him he was the house’s previous owner. Russell had also shown up at the recording engineer’s house, trying to cadge the tapes from his session with Mitch. The man’s wife was home. Later she’d recall being irritated at the sound of the doorbell: their newborn was asleep in the back bedroom. When she opened the door, there was Russell in his grubby Wranglers, his squinty smile. She’d heard stories of the session from her husband, so she knew who Russell was, but she wasn’t afraid. Not really. He was not a frightening man when first encountered, and when she told him her husband wasn’t home, Russell shrugged. “I could just grab the tapes real quick,” he said, straining to look past her. “In and out, just like that.” That’s when she got a little uneasy. Plowing her feet deeper into her old slippers, the fussing of the baby drifting down the hall. “He keeps all that at work,” she said, and Russell believed her. The woman remembered she heard a noise in the yard later that night, a thrash in the roses, but when she looked out the window, she didn’t see anything except the pebbled driveway, the stubble of the moonlit lawn. —My first night back was nothing like the old nights. The old nights had been alive with a juvenile sweetness in our faces—I’d pet the dog, who’d nose around for love, give him a hearty scratch behind his ears, my coursing hand urging me into a happy rhythm. And there had been strange nights, too, when we’d all taken acid or Russell would have to get in some drunk motorcycle guy’s face, using all his flip-flop logic on him. But I had never felt scared. That night was different, by the ring of stones with the barest of fires going. No one paid any attention when the flames dissolved to nothing, everyone’s roiling energy directed at Russell, who moved like a rubber band about to snap. “This right here,” Russell said. He was pacing, dinking out a quick song. “I just made it up and it’s already a hit.” The guitar was out of tune, twanging flat notes—Russell didn’t seem to notice. His voice rushed and frantic. “And here’s another one,” he said.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Leaping over the burning squares of parquet, slapping themselves on their smoking chests and shoulders, those who were in the living room retreated to the study and front hall. Those who were in the dining room and bedroom ran out through the corridor. Those in the kitchen also came running and rushed into the front hall. The living room was already filled with fire and smoke. Someone managed, in flight, to dial the number of the fire department and shout briefly into the receiver: ‘Sadovaya, three-oh-two-bis! . . .’ To stay longer was impossible. Flames gushed out into the front hall. Breathing became difficult. As soon as the first little spurts of smoke pushed through the broken windows of the enchanted apartment, desperate human cries arose in the courtyard: ‘Fire! Fire! We’re burning!’ In various apartments of the house, people began shouting into telephones: ‘Sadovaya! Sadovaya, three-oh-two-bis!’ Just then, as the heart-quailing bells were heard on Sadovaya, ringing from long red engines racing quickly from all parts of the city, the people rushing about the yard saw how, along with the smoke, there flew out of the fifth-storey window three dark, apparently male silhouettes and one silhouette of a naked woman. CHAPTER 28: The Last Adventures of Koroviev and Behemoth, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 28 The Last Adventures of Koroviev and Behemoth Whether these silhouettes were there, or were only imagined by the fear-struck tenants of the ill-fated house on Sadovaya, is, of course, impossible to say precisely. If they were there, where they set out for is also known to no one. Nor can we say where they separated, but we do know that approximately a quarter of an hour after the fire started on Sadovaya, there appeared by the mirrored doors of a currency store 1 on the Smolensky market-place a long citizen in a checkered suit, and with him a big black cat. Deftly slithering between the passers-by, the citizen opened the outer door of the shop. But here a small, bony and extremely ill-disposed doorman barred his way and said irritably: ‘No cats allowed!’ ‘I beg your pardon,’ rattled the long one, putting his gnarled hand to his ear as if he were hard of hearing, ‘no cats, you say? And where do you see any cats?’ The doorman goggled his eyes, and well he might: there was no cat at the citizen’s feet now, but instead, from behind his shoulder, a fat fellow in a tattered cap, whose mug indeed somewhat resembled a cat’s, stuck out, straining to get into the store. There was a primus in the fat fellow’s hands. The misanthropic doorman for some reason disliked this pair of customers. ‘We only accept currency,’ he croaked, gazing vexedly from under his shaggy, as if moth-eaten, grizzled eyebrows. ‘My dear man,’ rattled the long one, flashing his eye through the broken pince-nez, ‘how do you know I don’t have any? Are you judging by my clothes?

• From The Girls (2016)

  Linda was beautiful, though I’m sure her face would’ve grown bawdy or cheap. She slept in bed with her golden-haired little boy, like a teddy bear. —I was so lulled into feeling that the world had winnowed itself around Suzanne and me, that Mitch was just the comic fill—I didn’t even consider other possibilities. I’d gone to the bathroom, used Mitch’s strange black soap and peeked in his cabinet, loaded with bottles of Dilaudid. The enamel shine of the bathtub, the cut of bleach in the air so I could tell he had a cleaning lady. I had just finished peeing when someone opened the bathroom door without knocking. I was startled, reflexively trying to cover myself. I saw the man sliver a glance toward my exposed legs before he ducked back into the hallway. “Apologies,” I heard him say from the other side of the door. A chain of stuffed marigold birds swung gently from where they hung by the sink. “My deepest apologies,” the man said. “I was looking for Mitch. Sorry to bother you.” I sensed him hesitate on the other side of the door, then tap the wood lightly before he walked away. I pulled up my shorts. The adrenaline that spread through me lessened but didn’t disappear. It was probably just a friend of Mitch’s. I was jumpy from the coke, but I wasn’t frightened. Which made sense: nobody thought until later that strangers might be anything but friends. Our love for one another boundless, the whole universe an extended crash pad. —I’d realize a few months after that this must have been Scotty Weschler. The caretaker who lived in the back house, a tiny white-paneled cabin with a hot plate and a space heater. The man who cleaned the hot tub filters and watered the lawn and checked that Mitch hadn’t overdosed in the night. Prematurely balding, with wire glasses: Scotty had been a cadet at a military academy in Pennsylvania before dropping out, moving west. He never shook his cadet idealism: he wrote letters to his mother about the redwoods, the Pacific Ocean, using words like “majestic” and “grandeur.” He’d be the first. The one who tried to fight back, to run. I wish I could squeeze more out of our brief encounter. To believe, when he opened the door, that I had felt a shiver of what was coming. But I’d made out nothing but the flash of a stranger, and I thought of it very little. I didn’t even ask Suzanne who the man was. —The living room was empty when I came back. The music blaring, a cigarette leaching smoke in the ashtray. The glass door that led out to the bay was open. I was surprised by the suddenness of the water when I went out on the porch, the wall of woolly lights: San Francisco in the fog. No one was out on the bank. Then I heard, over the water, a distorted echo.

• From The Girls (2016)

  But in a few days, ok? Alex had assumed, at first, that some solution would turn up. It always did. So she kept putting Dom off. He checked in almost daily. Alex? Things escalated. Dom calling again. Dom leaving voicemails. Acting lighthearted, even jokey, as if this was a low-key misunderstanding. Then swinging wildly into aggression, his voice going to some eerie psycho register, and she was genuinely afraid. She remembered the time—last year. Or it must have been before that, before he left the city. When he woke her up with his hands on her throat. Her eyes locked onto his— his hands tightened. His expression was one of mild concentration. She didn’t look away until he pressed hard enough that her eyes closed and she felt them roll back in her head. Alex could change her number, but what about the ads she’d already paid for, ads that were linked to this phone number? She told herself Dom would get tired of this eventually. He’d require fresh blood. But then, leaving her place one morning, she’d spotted Dom across the street. Dom lingering on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets. It was Dom, it had to be. Maybe not. Or was it just a coincidence? She hadn’t given him her new address. She was suddenly paranoid. The stye was coming back. Her roommates no longer acknowledged her in the common areas. They changed the Wi-Fi password. The bathroom cabinet had been emptied of every medication, even ibuprofen. Alex had the disorienting sense that she was infectious. [image "Ad for Daddy Stories by Emma Cline" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "Penguin Random House publisher logo." file=Image00011.jpg] What’s next on your reading list?Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now. _142857084_

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  • Little is known of Clement’s life. Born in Athens, he became a student of the Platonic philosopher Pantaenus in Alexandria. In the late 2nd century, he became head of the Christian catechetical school in that city. The only other biographical fact we know about Clement is that he fled from persecution in 202. • Clement forged a “thinking person’s” version of Christianity. He sought a middle way between the extreme elitism of Gnosticism and the ignorance of simple believers. He thought in terms of a “Christian Gnosticism” that was orthodox and connected to the larger tradition. He affirmed the lines of the developing rule of faith and despised the compositions of Valentinus and Basilides. • Clement’s project took the form of a three-stage presentation using the forms of ancient Greek rhetoric and philosophy. The Protrepticus (“Exhortation”) is a classic call to conversion, o such as was issued by Greco-Roman philosophers. We see an example in Lucian of Samosata’s Nigrinus, which castigates false philosophers and calls for adherence to the teaching of Nigrinus. Clement similarly attacks pagan errors—especially in religious matters—and argues for the truth of Christianity. The Paidogogos (“Instructor”) in Greek education was the o one who taught young children their morals and manners. Clement’s book by this title offers an extensive catalogue of Christian moral behavior. Clement’s most ambitious work, the Didaskalos (“Teacher”), o was never completed; however, the compilation of notes for that work, the Stromateis (“Fragments”), itself constitutes a major and deeply learned statement on Christianity’s use of Scripture and its relationship to philosophy. • Clement’s work represents a much more ambitious and systematic effort than Justin’s not only to render Christianity as reasonable but to make it a serious contender in ancient philosophical discourse. 87

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  244 Lecture 34: The Great Plague The Great Plague Lecture 34 T he self-confident ventures of the High Middle Ages—the Crusades, cathedrals, and universities—were followed by a period of calamity in the 14 th century that had negative effects on the church and society. The first devastating event of this century was the great famine of 1315– 1317, brought on by a general shift from a moderate to a colder climate. A mere nine years later, the plague hit, killing about half of the population worldwide. This was followed by manmade disasters, including a series of wars between Christian kings and their vassals. The obvious effect of these disasters was to induce an even sharper sense of mortality and fear within the population—and a desperate search for causes. Conflict in Christendom • In the 14 th century, the Crusader spirit was twisted beyond recognition in an endless series of wars between Christian kings and their vassals, leading to death and destruction within Christendom itself. o The papacy was caught up in the dynastic struggles of the Holy Roman Emperors, as well as other kingdoms, and was entangled in the constant battles among Italian powers, such as Venice and Florence. o An even more obvious example was the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) between England and France, which was partly an expression of nationalism and partly a distortion of the idea of holy war. • The papacy exceeded its prior claims to total authority in matters secular and sacred but found itself less a power broker than a pawn of powerful kings. o Boniface VIII (c. 1298–1303) issued a papal bull, Unam sanctam, in 1302 that not only claimed papal authority over the world but declared that no one could be saved without

• From Laura Middleton; Her Brother and Her Lover (1890)

  I affected to be so much engrossed with the pictures as not to observe that he had not only done this, but had also drawn down his own trousers and raised up his shirt displaying his magnificent weapon, until taking my hand he tried to make me grasp—for my fingers could not meet round it—by far the most splendid and largest champion I had ever met with, one which, indeed, I have never seen surpassed. He seemed much amused by my surprised exclamation, "Oh, goodness, what a monster," and, laughing, asked if I had never seen one so large before. But on my expressing my wonder that he should ever get it into a woman at all he seemed to be a little apprehensive that I might be too much frightened to allow it to enter where he wished it should go, and he tried to persuade me that after all there was not so very great a difference between it and mine. In truth I had begun to be somewhat terrified on the subject and to wish at least to delay the operation, if it must be undergone, until it could be effected in a place where the object desired could be secured. I knew that in a few minutes the dinner bell would ring, and I therefore determined to temporize as long as possible and escape on the present occasion by holding out hopes of his attaining his object on a more favourable opportunity. But I found that it was easier to make the resolution than to keep it. His evident passion for me and the means he adopted to excite me to an ardour equal to his own—keeping up a titillatory friction over the most sensitive points of my body—soon produced their effect, and in spite of my resolution, I could not make any effort to oppose him.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  56 Lecture 8: Forms of Witness—martyrdom and apologetic of being restored to life by him; but for you there will be no resurrection to life” (2 Macc. 7:14). • The Gospel of John and the book of Revelation depict Jesus as a witness to God in the face of death. o In John’s Gospel, Jesus tells Pontius Pilate, “For this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice” (John 18:37). And before his death, he tells his followers, “You must bear witness as well, for you have been with me from the beginning” (15:27). o The book of Revelation, in turn, calls Jesus the faithful witness in the shedding of his blood (1:5, 3:4), and his followers are also witnesses (19:10). • In the 2 nd century, martyrdom came to be regarded by many believers as the perfect form of discipleship. They saw themselves conforming completely to the pattern of suffering for others in witness to God’s truth that was established by Jesus. o Already Paul had spoken of believers “bearing in their body the death of Jesus” (2 Cor. 4:10), and if they are thus totally conformed to Christ in his death, they can hope to share in his Resurrection (Phil. 3:11). o Those who “confess Christ” in the face of persecution, torture, and the threat of death but fall short of actual death were accorded second rank of honor as witnesses and came to be called “confessors.” Notable and Anonymous Martyrs • The tradition of martyrdom in Christianity began with the apostles, especially Stephen, who was, according to Acts, put to death by stoning by the Jewish court, and Peter and Paul, who were killed in the persecution in Rome under Nero. The tradition continued in the 2 nd and 3 rd centuries among both notable and anonymous believers. 57 • Three highly visible Christian leaders bore witness in a way that glorified martyrdom. o Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, was arrested circa 107 and was carried to Rome as a captive for execution; in seven letters to churches in Asia Minor, he exalts in the death he faces under the emperor Trajan. He begs the Roman Christians not to intervene when he arrives, seeing martyrdom as the completion of his discipleship. o Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, collected the letters of Ignatius, and himself wrote a letter of exhortation to the Philippians. His execution in 155–156 was celebrated by The Martyrdom of Polycarp, which explicitly connects his witness to that of Jesus. o The Christian philosopher Justin was condemned as a Christian and suffered martyrdom under the emperor Marcus Aurelius During the reign of the emperor Trajan, Ignatius told the Romans: “I will not only be called a Christian but found to be one,” meaning, in his death. © Hemera/Thinkstock.

• From The Girls (2016)

  I didn’t know if this was a problem born of country living, the excess of time and boredom and recreational vehicles, or whether it was a California thing, a grain in the light urging risk and stupid cinematic stunts. I hadn’t been in the ocean at all. A waitress at the café told me this was a breeding ground for great whites. —They looked up from the bright wash of the kitchen lights like raccoons caught in the trash. The girl shrieked. The boy stood to his full, lanky height. There were only two of them. My heart was scudding hard, but they were so young—locals, I figured, breaking into vacation houses. I wasn’t going to die. “What the fuck?” The boy put down his beer bottle, the girl clinging to his side. The boy looked twenty or so, in cargo shorts. High white socks, rosy acne beneath a scrim of beard. But the girl was just a little thing. Fifteen, sixteen, her pale legs tinged with blue. I tried to gather whatever authority I could, clutching the hem of my T-shirt to my thighs. When I said I’d call the cops, the boy snorted. “Go ahead.” He huddled the girl closer. “Call the cops. You know what?” He pulled out his cellphone. “Fuck it, I’ll call them.” The pane of fear I’d been holding in my chest suddenly dissolved. “Julian?” I wanted to laugh—I’d last seen him when he was thirteen, skinny and unformed. Dan and Allison’s only son. Fussed over, driven to cello competitions all over the western United States. A Mandarin tutor on Thursdays, the brown bread and gummy vitamins, parental hedges against failure. That had all fizzled and he’d ended up at the CSU in Long Beach or Irvine. There’d been some trouble there, I remembered. Expulsion or maybe a milder version of that, a suggestion of a year at junior college. Julian had been a shy, irritable kid, cowering at car radios, unfamiliar foods. Now he had hard edges, the creep of tattoos under his shirt. He didn’t remember me, and why should he? I was a woman outside his range of erotic attentions. “I’m staying here for a few weeks,” I said, aware of my exposed legs and embarrassed for the melodrama, the mention of police. “I’m a friend of your dad’s.” I could see the effort he made to place me, to assign meaning. “Evie,” I said. Still nothing. “I used to live in that apartment in Berkeley? By your cello teacher’s house?” Dan and Julian would come over sometimes after his lessons. Julian lustily drinking milk and scuffing my table legs with robotic kicks. “Oh, shit,” Julian said. “Yeah.” I couldn’t tell whether he actually remembered me or if I had just invoked enough calming details. The girl turned toward Julian, her face as blank as a spoon. “It’s fine, babe,” he said, kissing her forehead—his gentleness unexpected. Julian smiled at me and I realized he was drunk, or maybe just stoned.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  had disappeared from view, and said: We left from here for Marienbad only last summer. And now—where will we be going now? This reminiscence, which I did not fully take in at first, was soon occupying my mind so much that I made a call to Vera from the hotel on the island that evening, although in the normal way I never use the telephone. Yes, she said, in a voice very faint with weariness, yes, in the summer of 1938 we all went to Marienbad together, Agata, Maximilian, Vera herself, and me. We had spent three wonderful, almost blissful weeks there. The overweight or underweight spa guests, moving at a curiously slow pace through the grounds with their drinking glasses, radiated an extraordinary peacefulness, as Agata once remarked in passing. We stayed at the Osborne-Balmoral boardinghouse behind the Palace Hotel. In the morning we generally went to the baths, and we took long walks in the country around Marienbad in the afternoons. I had retained no memory at all of that summer holiday when I was just four years old, said Austerlitz, and perhaps that was why when I was in that very place later, in Marienbad at the end of August 1972, I felt nothing but blind terror in the face of the better turn my life should have taken at that time. Marie de Verneuil, with whom I had been in correspondence since the time I spent in Paris, had invited me to accompany her on a visit to Bohemia, where she had to carry out some research for her studies on the architectural history of the spas of Europe, and I think I may now say, added Austerlitz, that she also hoped to try to liberate me from my self-inflicted isolation. She had arranged everything to perfection. Her cousin Frédéric Félix, attaché to the French embassy in Prague, had sent an enormous Tatra limousine to meet us at the airport and take us straight to Marienbad. We sat in the deeply upholstered back of the car for two or three hours as it drove west through the empty countryside, on a road which ran perfectly straight for long stretches of Our journey, sometimes dipping down into valleys, then climbing again to extended plateaux over which one could see into the far distance, to the point, said Marie, where the wastes of Bohemia approach the Baltic. Sometimes we drove past low ranges of hills covered with blue forest, standing out sharp as a saw blade against the uniformly gray sky. There were almost no other vehicles. Only occasionally did a small car of some kind come towards us, and now and then we overtook a truck crawling up the long gradients and trailing behind it great clouds of exhaust fumes. But ever since leaving Prague airport we had been followed by two uniformed motorcyclists who always preserved the same distance. They wore leather crash helmets and black goggles with their tunics and breeches, and their carbines were slung at an angle over their right shoulders. These two escorts made me very uneasy, said Austerlitz, particularly when we went over the top of one of the low hills and down again and they

• From The Girls (2016)

  The glances between the victims that did not know, yet, that they were victims. “What are you gonna do to us?” Gwen kept asking. Scotty rolled his eyes, miserable and sweating, and Gwen laughed—maybe she could see, suddenly, that Scotty could not protect her. That he was just a young man, his glasses fogged, his lips trembling, and that she was far from her own home. She started to cry. “Shut up,” Guy said, “Christ.” Gwen tried to halt her sobs, shaking silently. Linda attempted to keep Christopher calm, even as the girls tied everyone up. Donna knotting a towel around Gwen’s hands. Linda squeezing Christopher one last time before Guy nudged them apart. Gwen sat on the couch with her skirt hitched up her legs, keening with abandon. The exposed skin of her thighs, her still wet face. Linda murmuring to Suzanne that they could have all the money that was in her purse, all of it, that if they just took her to the bank, she could get some more. Linda’s voice was a calm monotone, a shoring up of control, though of course she had none. —Scotty was the first. He’d struggled when Guy put a belt around his hands. “Just a second,” Scotty said, “hey.” Bristling at the rough grasp. And Guy lost it. Slamming the knife with such force that the handle had splintered in two. Scotty struggled but could only flop onto the floor, trying to roll over and protect his stomach. A bubble of blood appearing from his nose and mouth. —Gwen’s hands had been tied loosely—as soon as the blade sank into Scotty, she jerked free and ran out the front door. Screaming with a cartoon recklessness that sounded fake. She was almost to the gate when she tripped and fell on the lawn. Before she could get to her feet, Donna was already on her. Crawling over her back, stabbing until Gwen asked, politely, if she could die already. —They killed the mother and son last. “Please,” Linda said. Plainly. Even then, I think, hoping for some reprieve. She was very beautiful and very young. She had a child. “Please,” she said, “I can get you money.” But Suzanne didn’t want money. The amphetamines tightening her temples, an incantatory throb. The beautiful girl’s heart, motoring in her chest—the narcotic, desperate rev. How Linda must have believed, as beautiful people do, that there was a solution, that she would be saved. Helen held Linda down—her hands on Linda’s shoulders were tentative at first, like a bad dance partner, but then Suzanne snapped at Helen, impatient, and she pressed harder. Linda’s eyes closed because she knew what was coming. —Christopher had started to cry. Crouching behind the couch; no one had to hold him down. His underwear saturated with the bitter smell of urine. His cries were shaped by screams, an emptying out of all feeling. His mother on the carpet, no longer moving. Suzanne squatted on the floor.

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

  “Fuck that nigga. This is what you want! You got time to enjoy my dick. If this clown gets here before we finish fucking, he can watch me do what he should’ve been doing all along with a thick mommy like you! If he catches your legs up in the air or my mouth on his pussy, so be it!” “Life, I don’t want any trouble. Please, just get the fuck out, fast!” “I don’t see no ring on your finger, so what’s the problem here? Why can’t you stand up to this nigga? Just call him back and tell him you don’t wanna see his ass tonight. Is that so hard?” “You don’t understand. I don’t want to talk about this right now.” “Well I do. What’s the deal, Yani? If I don’t understand everything, explain.” “Fine. Maybe if I tell you, you’ll leave! Smooth’s dangerous—he’s a drug dealer, and he’s not wrapped too tight. Please, do yourself a favor and go home. I don’t wanna be with you right now.” “Yani, if and when you get your head together, holla at ya boy,” Life told me. He adjusted his clothes and headed for the door. I wanted to cry when he left. I felt so sad inside for getting so close to something I wanted for myself, and then allowing Smooth to get in the way of it. I picked up the bills that lined the floor and clutched them in my left hand. I walked toward my bedroom and placed the money in a drawer where I kept priceless mementos and souvenirs. After that, I walked toward the bathroom, took my shower, put some sweet-smellin’ stuff on for Smooth, before sliding my feet inside of his favorite red Frederick’s heels. A few moments later I heard a loud banging sound at the door. When I opened it, looking my best, Smooth slammed the door and locked it. He was barely inside when he made me open my mouth wide, forced me to my knees, and shoved a glock down my throat. “Who’s been fucking my pussy, Yani? I want the mother-fucker’s name and address!” I shook my head frantically, not understanding what Smooth was referring to. “Don’t play dumb! Word has it that you were at the club letting baller niggas touch on my shit! After all I’ve done for you, you act up. You get this piece-of-shit job working in some office and now you think you’re the shit ’cause you work around some suit-and-tie motherfuckers? You lucky I don’t blow your fuckin’ head off. From now on, if you ain’t out with me, you ain’t out! You go straight to work and come straight the fuck home. When I take this glock outta yo mouth, you repeat the last line back to me.” “I go straight to work and I come straight home,” I whimpered, shaking on my knees. “Good. Now get the fuck up and let’s go to bed.”

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  55 Christians in the late 2 nd century, it was a religion of women and slaves. • As we have already seen, although formal state persecutions were sporadic and interspersed with relatively long periods of neglect, they were direct attempts to suppress the movement by violence and even death. o The very uncertainty of the breakout of persecution was a contributing factor to the tension felt by Christians during these centuries. It could happen suddenly and without warning. o The actual number of Christians killed is not the whole story; the oppression of believers included the expropriation of property, economic marginalization, exile, and social ostracism. • Two responses to this context of tribulation characterize the 2 nd and 3 rd centuries: martyrdom and apologetic. Both had roots in Judaism, and each developed in distinctive ways during these centuries when Christians endured repression. The Tradition of Martyrdom • The term “martyr” (martys) means “witness,” and the ideal of witnessing to one’s convictions even to the point of death arose within Judaism; for Christ-believers, martyrdom found its perfect realization in the innocent suffering and death of Jesus. • In the early 2 nd century B.C.E., the Maccabees resisted efforts by the Syrian king Antiochus IV Epiphanes to impose syncretistic worship, symbolized by the eating of pork forbidden by Torah. o The elderly Eleazar and seven sons with their mother publicly refused to submit, even when threatened by death, and were executed one after the other. o Their witness to Torah was also a witness to the fidelity of God and to faith in a future resurrection: God will reward those who honor him. The fourth son cries out before his execution, “It is my choice to die at the hands of men with the God-given hope

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  246 eugalP taerG ehT :43 erutceL bishops, although they still relied on secular authorities to carry out their decisions. Even more extreme, Innocent IV’s Ad extirpanda in 1252 o authorized the use of torture by the inquisition, although there is no evidence of its use in the 13th century. Those found to be heretics who repented received the same sorts of penances (fasting, pilgrimages) that other sinners would receive after confession. Serious offenders could be confined in the inquisition’s prisons and burned at the stake by secular authority; perhaps three people a year, on average, were thus executed. The inquisition was turned against the Knights Templar by o Philip IV of France in 1307 and was even used by Pope John XXII against Franciscan “spirituals” in 1318. In the late 15th century, Spanish rulers received permission from o Sixtus IV to organize the inquisition against “Christianized Jews.” After an auto-de-fé (“act of faith”) confessing their crime, those convicted were executed. • The hostility toward, and persecution of, Jewish communities that began with the First Crusade and was expressed in the controlling laws of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215)— and the burning of the Talmud in Paris (1242)—exploded in unparalleled violence in response to the great plague: Jews became a handy scapegoat for the sudden and unexplained deaths. Fear and hysteria were fomented by rumors of Jews’ poisoning o wells or causing the plague by sacrificing Christian children. In 1349, the Jewish communities of Mainz and Cologne o were wiped out; in the same year, 2,000 Jews were murdered in Strasbourg. In all, some 60 major Jewish centers and 150 smaller settlements were destroyed during these irrational and violent outbursts.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  244 eugalP taerG ehT :43 erutceL The Great Plague Lecture 34 The self-confident ventures of the High Middle Ages—the Crusades, cathedrals, and universities—were followed by a period of calamity in the 14th century that had negative effects on the church and society. The first devastating event of this century was the great famine of 1315– 1317, brought on by a general shift from a moderate to a colder climate. A mere nine years later, the plague hit, killing about half of the population worldwide. This was followed by manmade disasters, including a series of wars between Christian kings and their vassals. The obvious effect of these disasters was to induce an even sharper sense of mortality and fear within the population—and a desperate search for causes. Conflict in Christendom • In the 14th century, the Crusader spirit was twisted beyond recognition in an endless series of wars between Christian kings and their vassals, leading to death and destruction within Christendom itself. The papacy was caught up in the dynastic struggles of the o Holy Roman Emperors, as well as other kingdoms, and was entangled in the constant battles among Italian powers, such as Venice and Florence. An even more obvious example was the Hundred Years’ War o (1337–1453) between England and France, which was partly an expression of nationalism and partly a distortion of the idea of holy war. • The papacy exceeded its prior claims to total authority in matters secular and sacred but found itself less a power broker than a pawn of powerful kings. Boniface VIII (c. 1298–1303) issued a papal bull, Unam o sanctam, in 1302 that not only claimed papal authority over the world but declared that no one could be saved without