Loneliness

Passages

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

Page 40 of 63 · 20 per page

• From The Fermata (1994)

  At first I thought it was worth losing the beauty of the world in order to look better to the world: I really was more handsome without glasses—the dashing scar on my left eyebrow, where I cut myself on a scrap of aluminum, was more evident. A girl I knew (and whose clothes I removed) in high school used to sing “Il faut souffrir pour être belle” in a soft voice, to a tune of her own devising, and I took that overheard precept seriously; I was willing to understand it not just in the narrow sense of painful hair-brushing or (say) eyebrow-tweezing or liposuction, but in some broader sense that suffering makes for beauty in art, that the artist has to suffer griefs and privations in order to deliver beauty to his or her public, all that well-ventilated junk. So I continued to wear contacts even when each blink was a dry torment. But then I noticed that my typing was suffering, too—and there, since I am a temp and typing is my livelihood, I really had to draw the line. Especially when I typed numbers, my error rate was way up. (Once I spent two weeks doing nothing but typing six-digit numbers.) People began bringing back financial charts that I had done with mistyped numbers circled in red, asking, “Are you all right today, Arno?” Contact lenses also, I noticed, made me feel, as loud continuous factory noise also will, ten feet farther away from anyone else around me. They were isolating me, heightening rather than helping rid me of my—well, I suppose it is proper to call it my loneliness. I missed the sharp corners of my glasses, which had helped me dig my way out into sociability; they had been part of what I felt was my characteristic expression.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Yet if they took a moment to do the arithmetic of my work life versus their work life, as I have, they would perhaps understand and absolve, for they see the same people every day, their universe of clients and contacts and colleagues is relatively confined and stable, so that a new temp like me in their office is a novelty, a topic of conversation, a person to whom they can “give a leg up,” an outsider in whom they can confide hatreds and old wounds. I stick in their mind because they are pleased that they were able to put aside class differences and treat me as an equal. “Arno, hi!” And there I am, standing in front of Park Street Station, unable to reciprocate properly, feeling like a waiter asked to remember an order from a table he served months before. The name problem is compounded by the fact that there is apparently some vulnerability in my countenance that signals to lost people that I should be approached for directions. I have gotten good at sensing the lost now as they look over a crowdlet of potential help at a stop sign: they spot me, and though I’m wearing a tie like the other men, they seem to smell that I’m a temp and must therefore be permanently lonely and lowly, a sick caribou that the wolf singles out for attention; they know that they will feel at ease with me about admitting to being a stranger because I am going to welcome any human contact, any indication that I’m established and not transient. I go through periods when I am asked three times a day for directions. And these lost people are right—I do like being interrupted on the street, especially by women, but by men, too. I am poor at retaining street names, however, even streets that hold buildings in which I’ve worked in the past. For a while I deliberately studied maps of the business district in the evening, counting traffic lights and memorizing cross streets and helpful landmarks, so that I would live up to the expectations of unintimidating guidance that my face and features seem to create. (I find that the response is especially heavy if I am carrying some bulky item, like a bunch of flowers or a Wang VS backup disk.) As a result, I never know if the person coming toward me on the sidewalk and seeking eye contact is someone I worked with at Gillette or Kendall or Ropes & Gray or Polaroid or MassBank or Arthur Young, or whether he or she just needs to know how to get to Milk Street.

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

  All this extremity! It’s so unnecessary!” With an air of exasperation she got up and kissed me on both cheeks in a way that felt more like a slap than a salutation, and sighed, her hands still on my shoulders, shaking me slightly, clearly mentally reviewing the tears, fainting, vomiting, and bleeding that had punctuated my religious career. “I don’t think anyone ever died of nerves, Karen,” she said finally and made for the door, looking back on me one last time. “You and Sister Rebecca.” She shook her head yet again. “You are a pair!” I found myself thinking about Mother Frances’s parting shot when, a few days later, now back in Oxford, I boarded the number 1 bus in the High Street to go to my first meeting with the psychiatrist to whom I had been assigned. Maybe Rebecca and I had taken the rules and strictures too seriously? I remembered Mother Frances saying to me once in exasperation, “You really are a literal-minded blockhead!” after I had pointed out some inconsistency or other in our training. Or maybe it was just because we had thought too much about it all and tried to make sense of an essentially senseless system. I had already seen the consultant psychiatrist at the Littlemore, a Basque doctor with an excellent reputation, and I was feeling hopeful. Every couple of weeks I would see one of his registrars. In fact I saw a string of registrars, and was passed from one to the other, but to avoid confusion, let us create a composite figure to stand for them all, and call him Dr. Piet. The consultant had not seemed unduly perturbed about my plight. All these anxiety attacks were, perhaps, understandable in the circumstances. And he had said one thing that had made an impression upon me: “You seem to me to be stalled in some way. Life is hurtling on, like a giant merry-go-round; you are watching, but you can’t get on. You want to join in, but you can’t—for reasons that we shall have to discover.” His remark had gone home and I had recognized that it was true. I could see myself confronted with the carnival of sixties Oxford: the other young people with their long hair, confident gestures, and eager voices all understood instinctively how to make something of their lives. I cast my mind back to that party when I had heard my first Beatles record and felt alone and out of place, unable to dance or participate in any way.

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

  She had recently come from India to take a degree in English literature and was living in my old convent at Cherwell Edge. In India, apparently, she had earned a first-class degree, had run schools, and had held high office in her order. But the move from India seemed to have unhinged her completely. She was quite unable to write a coherent essay, complete the simple procedures that enabled her to take books out of the college library, or remember the times of lectures and seminars. I knew about this all too well because—as one familiar with the arcane ways of nuns—I was constantly called to the rescue. When I tried to help Sister Mary Sylvia with her essays, I noticed that she simply could not take in what I was trying to tell her. One day, when she failed to turn up to the philology class that, as usual, was being held in the small seminar room, I found her sitting all alone in the dining hall with her notebook, smiling benignly, while puzzled college servants tried to work around her, waxing the floor and laying the tables for dinner. She was clearly in shock, could make no sense of her surroundings, and had entirely lost her bearings. I was in better shape, but I sensed something of what she was going through. Deprived of the familiar, I too seemed to have lost my way in a world that meant nothing to me. When, later that year, I watched my namesake Neil Armstrong make his “giant leap for mankind” and jump onto the pitted surface of the moon, the utterly bleak, dark, and eerily empty lunar landscape epitomized exactly what planet Earth had become for me. It was little better when I returned home during the vacation. My family gave me a wonderful welcome, but they were expecting the daughter and sister who had left home seven years earlier. My parents were tremulously eager to resume normal family life, but they seemed almost strangers to me. They had been allowed to visit at six-month intervals and I had been permitted to write to them only once every four weeks. These communications had, to put it mildly, been unsatisfactory.

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

  Amplified male voices screamed, guitars thrummed, cymbals clashed, and beneath it all, a drum beat a primitive, disturbing pulse. “No. No, not at all,” I yelled back, politely. It would have been so much easier, I now realize, if I had admitted how strange this new world appeared to me, had shared my confusion and dismay and let people in. But I seemed quite unable to do this. In my own way, I was quite as impenetrable as Miss Franklin or any virgin martyr. I wanted people to believe that I was taking it all in my stride and that leaving a convent was as easy as falling off a log. I didn’t want to be the object of pity or curiosity, and the convent habit of reticence was now almost reflexive. I tried to take an intelligent interest. “Who are the singers?” With a unanimity that was almost comical, Jane and Mark both did a double take. “The Beatles, of course!” Jane exclaimed. And then, as I continued to look blank, she added, a little more tentatively: “You have heard of the Beatles, haven’t you?” I had. Just. My sister had mentioned the group to me on one of her visits, and the name had cropped up occasionally in the conversation of my fellow students. But even though it was now 1969, I had no idea who the Beatles really were, no notion of their extraordinary impact on British society during the sixties, had never encountered Beatlemania, and had certainly never knowingly heard a note of their music. Jane and Mark tried to explain to me what the Beatles meant for their generation, but I took little in. I could see that they were slightly alarmed by my ignorance. Jane was looking at me thoughtfully, though I made her laugh when I asked, in some perplexity, why the band was named after those rather unpleasant black insects. On my other side, Mark was reciting the lyrics, which shocked me by their unabashed expression of naked need: “Love, love me do!” “I want to hold your hand!” “Please please me!” I could not even have admitted to myself that I had such needs, let alone shout my yearnings aloud in such wild abandonment. Yet the words touched some raw place within me, making me aware of my loneliness in this crowded room. All around me I noticed feet tapping, heads nodding, lips mouthing the words of the song, glances exchanged as though a phrase had a special private significance. The Beatles were a current that united everybody at the party, a thread that bound the room together. They were the spokesmen of their generation, but even though they must have been about my own age, they could not speak for me.

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

  There was another, deeper reason for this. These frightening incidents were changing me. I now knew that at any second, the pleasant, innocent-seeming surface of normality could split apart, and this knowledge infected everything. I knew that other people had been to this dark place. I could see it in van Gogh’s tormented, writhing olive trees and swirling, starry skies. It was in the infernal visions of Bosch; it was the heart of darkness evoked by Joseph Conrad. It didn’t matter how often I told myself that these experiences had no substantive reality. However you accounted for them, this was a region of the human mind. And because I had visited it, I felt set apart. I was surrounded by girls whose existence was beginning to blossom. Most of them were hopeful, cheerful, and excited by their unfolding lives, but I could no longer share this instinctive optimism. I was now doubly out of place among my fellow students, as though I were the wicked fairy in the story, brooding balefully over the party. Increasingly I felt as though I were witnessing everything at one remove. As time went on, solid physical objects appeared ephemeral, and people seemed like ghosts, with no clearly defined identity. When your surroundings can so suddenly take on a frightening aspect, you start to experience them as fluid, unreliable, and without inherent integrity. Things seemed to flow into one another; a kind face could rapidly become menacing, a pleasant landscape take on a malign aspect. Sometimes I felt as though I were looking at reality through a sheet of glass. If I put my hand out to touch an object, I often expected to feel this barrier; sounds seemed faint and dim. This happened so gradually and became so habitual that, after a time, I ceased to remark upon it. It became the norm, the element in which I lived. I was rather like the little fish in the Sufi parable, who asks his mother about this stuff called water that he hears everybody discussing but which he has never seen. It is not until the condition lifts that you realize that it was abnormal. At the time, it simply seemed that the world from which I had retreated had now begun to recede from me.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Small flames flared incessantly here and there and they moved through shifting layers of smoke. The cash register rang and rang. One enormous bouncer stood at the door, watching everything, and another moved about, clearing tables and rearranging chairs. Two boys, one Spanish-looking in a red shirt, one Danish-looking in brown, stood at the juke box, talking about Frank Sinatra. Rufus stared at a small blonde girl who was wearing a striped open blouse and a wide skirt with a big leather belt and a bright brass buckle. She wore low shoes and black knee socks. Her blouse was low enough for him to see the beginnings of her breasts; his eye followed the line down to the full nipples, which pushed aggressively forward; his hand encircled her waist, caressed the belly button and slowly forced the thighs apart. She was talking to another girl. She felt his eyes on her and looked his way. Their eyes met. He turned and walked into the head. It smelled of thousands of travelers, oceans of piss, tons of bile and vomit and shit. He added his stream to the ocean, holding that most despised part of himself loosely between two fingers of one hand. But I’ve got to stay there so long.... He looked at the horrible history splashed furiously on the walls—telephone numbers, cocks, breasts, balls, cunts, etched into these walls with hatred. Suck my cock. I like to get whipped. I want a hot stiff prick up my ass. Down with Jews. Kill the niggers. I suck cocks. He washed his hands very carefully and dried them on the filthy roller towel and walked out into the bar. The two boys were still at the juke box, the girl with the striped blouse was still talking to her friend. He walked through the bar to the door and into the street. Only then did he reach in his pocket to see what Cass had pushed into his palm. Five dollars. Well, that would take care of him until morning. He would get a room at the Y. He crossed Sheridan Square and walked slowly along West Fourth Street. The bars were beginning to close. People stood before bar doors, trying vainly to get in, or simply delaying going home; and in spite of the cold there were loiterers under street lamps. He felt as removed from them, as he walked slowly along, as he might have felt from a fence, a farmhouse, a tree, seen from a train window: coming closer and closer, the details changing every instant as the eye picked them out; then pressing against the window with the urgency of a messenger or a child; then dropping away, diminishing, vanished, gone forever.

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

  Even Rebecca, who became so ill in the convent, is now happily married. But we all respond to things in different ways, and it may be that a touch of frost entered my soul during those years. The constant and abrasive rebuffs, which we all experienced as a matter of course during the novitiate, may have made me chronically unconfident of my ability to inspire love. The distrust of my wretched “sensitivity,” which was so carefully cultivated by some of my superiors, and my consequent habit of repressing strong feeling may have left me emotionally impaired. One of the purposes of the initiation rites of traditional societies is to confirm adolescents in their sexuality. It may be that my initiation into the religious life, which virtually ignored gender issues, transformed me into an androgynous anchorite rather than a virginal woman. Or there may be a simpler reaction against those years. Men of my age tend to be big on control, and I have found that when I have let a man into my bed, I have suddenly found my life invaded by a minidictator, who has to have his own way in the smallest matters. My last partner, for example, who had seldom composed anything longer than a letter, used to give me minute but peremptory directions about how I should go about researching and writing my own books; and after the convent, I cannot tolerate this type of supervision and restraint. But I also think that the years after my departure from the convent took their toll. At a time when most people are supposed to find a mate, I was engaged in a solitary battle with an undiagnosed illness, and locked into a private hell. If you cannot trust the integrity of your own mind, you cannot fall in love, and neither can anybody fall in love with you. The strange sensation of talking to people at a distance, through a glass screen, or seeing them through the wrong end of a telescope, which dissipated once I was properly medicated, made real contact very difficult indeed. Because I received no adequate help during this time, I turned in upon myself, and this tendency may have become habitual. But was I pushed into solitude, or did I jump? It was my idea to go into a convent, and nobody forced me to stay in the religious life so long. Recently I have started to wonder whether my solitary state may in fact be due to some deeper imperative within myself, which I am only just beginning to understand. During that last summer at Bedford College, I played hard. I taught at the summer school organized by the University of London for graduate students from overseas, and for six weeks I lived in Bloomsbury, in the center of town. I had participated in this school before, but on this last occasion, I was a great hit.

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

  But it has never been possible. At a very impressionable age, my body was schooled in quite other rhythms, and it has, for better or worse, taken the print. As I watched the dancers, I felt completely out of my element. I could see that this kind of dancing was unabashedly sexual. It reminded me of the ceremonial mating dances performed by Africans that I had seen occasionally in documentaries or news-reels. It was interesting, but had nothing to do with me. I tried to look nonchalant and at ease, but felt miserably that I must look as out of place as the queen, in her suburban, matronly clothes, carrying her ubiquitous handbag like a shield, as she stares with a glazed smile at the ritual dances performed in her honor during a tour of the Commonwealth. I had found, to my considerable sorrow, that even though I no longer belonged in the convent, I didn’t belong out here either. Looking back, I can see that during those first few months, I was experiencing something akin to the culture shock of those who, for one reason or another, have been forced to leave homes in Pakistan, Palestine, or Zimbabwe and migrate to a Western country. The violent upheavals of the twentieth century have made millions of people homeless in one traumatic uprooting after another. Exile is, of course, not simply a change of address. It is also a spiritual dislocation. Anthropologists and psychologists tell us that displaced people feel lost in a universe that has suddenly become alien. Once the fixed point of home is gone, there is a fundamental lack of orientation that makes everything seem relative and aimless. Cut off from the roots of their culture and identity, migrants and refugees can feel that they are somehow withering away and becoming insubstantial. Their world—inextricably linked with their unique place in the cosmos—has literally come to an end. Now I was sharing something of this twentieth-century experience. True, I had left my home in the convent of my own free will and was not languishing in a camp. But I did feel in exile from everything that made sense. Because I could take nothing for granted, and did not know how to interpret the sixties world that had come into being during my absence, I too felt that the world had no meaning. Because I had lost my fundamental orientation, I felt spiritually dizzy, lacking all sense of direction and not knowing where to turn. I could see the same kind of stunned bewilderment in the eyes of the old Bangladeshi lady who served in the corner shop near St. Anne’s where we bought newspapers and sweets. I saw it again in the eyes of Sister Mary Sylvia, a nun in my college.

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

  Amplified male voices screamed, guitars thrummed, cymbals clashed, and beneath it all, a drum beat a primitive, disturbing pulse. “No. No, not at all,” I yelled back, politely. It would have been so much easier, I now realize, if I had admitted how strange this new world appeared to me, had shared my confusion and dismay and let people in. But I seemed quite unable to do this. In my own way, I was quite as impenetrable as Miss Franklin or any virgin martyr. I wanted people to believe that I was taking it all in my stride and that leaving a convent was as easy as falling off a log. I didn’t want to be the object of pity or curiosity, and the convent habit of reticence was now almost reflexive. I tried to take an intelligent interest. “Who are the singers?” With a unanimity that was almost comical, Jane and Mark both did a double take. “The Beatles, of course!” Jane exclaimed. And then, as I continued to look blank, she added, a little more tentatively: “You have heard of the Beatles, haven’t you?” I had. Just. My sister had mentioned the group to me on one of her visits, and the name had cropped up occasionally in the conversation of my fellow students. But even though it was now 1969, I had no idea who the Beatles really were, no notion of their extraordinary impact on British society during the sixties, had never encountered Beatlemania, and had certainly never knowingly heard a note of their music. Jane and Mark tried to explain to me what the Beatles meant for their generation, but I took little in. I could see that they were slightly alarmed by my ignorance. Jane was looking at me thoughtfully, though I made her laugh when I asked, in some perplexity, why the band was named after those rather unpleasant black insects. On my other side, Mark was reciting the lyrics, which shocked me by their unabashed expression of naked need: “Love, love me do!” “I want to hold your hand!” “Please please me!” I could not even have admitted to myself that I had such needs, let alone shout my yearnings aloud in such wild abandonment. Yet the words touched some raw place within me, making me aware of my loneliness in this crowded room. All around me I noticed feet tapping, heads nodding, lips mouthing the words of the song, glances exchanged as though a phrase had a special private significance. The Beatles were a current that united everybody at the party, a thread that bound the room together. They were the spokesmen of their generation, but even though they must have been about my own age, they could not speak for me.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He passed Cornelia Street. Eric had once lived there. He saw again the apartment, the lamplight in the corners, Eric under the light, books falling over everything, and the bed unmade. Eric——and he was on Sixth Avenue, traffic lights and the lights of taxis blazing around him. Two girls and two boys, white, stood on the opposite corner, waiting for the lights to change. Half a dozen men, in a heavy gleaming car, rolled by and shouted at them. Then there was someone at his shoulder, a young white boy in a vaguely military cap and a black leather jacket. He looked at Rufus with the greatest hostility, then started slowly down the Avenue away from him, waving his rump like a flag. He looked back, stopped beneath the marquee of a movie theater. The lights changed. Rufus and the two couples started toward each other, came abreast in the middle of the avenue, passed—only, one of the girls looked at him with a kind of pitying wonder in her eyes. All right, bitch. He started toward Eighth Street, for no reason; he was simply putting off his subway ride. Then he stood at the subway steps, looking down. For a wonder, especially at this hour, there was no one on the steps, the steps were empty. He wondered if the man in the booth would change his five-dollar bill. He started down. Then, as the man gave him change and he moved toward the turnstile, other people came, rushing and loud, pushing past him as though they were swimmers and he nothing but an upright pole in the water. Then something began to awaken in him, something new; it increased his distance; it increased his pain. They were rushing—to the platform, to the tracks. Something he had not thought of for many years, something he had never ceased to think of, came back to him as he walked behind the crowd. The subway platform was a dangerous place—so he had always thought; it sloped downward toward the waiting tracks; and when he had been a little boy and stood on the platform beside his mother he had not dared let go her hand. He stood on the platform now, alone with all these people, who were each of them alone, and waited in acquired calmness, for the train.

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

  And because I had visited it, I felt set apart. I was surrounded by girls whose existence was beginning to blossom. Most of them were hopeful, cheerful, and excited by their unfolding lives, but I could no longer share this instinctive optimism. I was now doubly out of place among my fellow students, as though I were the wicked fairy in the story, brooding balefully over the party. Increasingly I felt as though I were witnessing everything at one remove. As time went on, solid physical objects appeared ephemeral, and people seemed like ghosts, with no clearly defined identity. When your surroundings can so suddenly take on a frightening aspect, you start to experience them as fluid, unreliable, and without inherent integrity. Things seemed to flow into one another; a kind face could rapidly become menacing, a pleasant landscape take on a malign aspect. Sometimes I felt as though I were looking at reality through a sheet of glass. If I put my hand out to touch an object, I often expected to feel this barrier; sounds seemed faint and dim. This happened so gradually and became so habitual that, after a time, I ceased to remark upon it. It became the norm, the element in which I lived. I was rather like the little fish in the Sufi parable, who asks his mother about this stuff called water that he hears everybody discussing but which he has never seen. It is not until the condition lifts that you realize that it was abnormal. At the time, it simply seemed that the world from which I had retreated had now begun to recede from me. This made it even more difficult to relate to other people. When you feel that you are talking to somebody through a plate glass window, it is hard to make real contact. I also found it impossible to feel strongly about current events, which seemed somehow vague and remote. During the spring of 1970, when I read about the fighting between Israelis and Syrians on the Golan Heights, looked at a newspaper photograph of a despairing child in Biafra, or watched television footage of the Viet Cong offensive in Laos, I could not feel anything at all. In May, the anti–Vietnam War rally in Washington, D.C., which delighted so many of my fellow students at St. Anne’s, seemed like something you might see in a surrealist dream, weird and insubstantial. I viewed these distant crises as through the wrong end of a telescope. They might as well be taking place on another planet that I would never visit. Yet again, work became my refuge, because it made me feel relatively normal.

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

  When you feel that you are talking to somebody through a plate glass window, it is hard to make real contact. I also found it impossible to feel strongly about current events, which seemed somehow vague and remote. During the spring of 1970, when I read about the fighting between Israelis and Syrians on the Golan Heights, looked at a newspaper photograph of a despairing child in Biafra, or watched television footage of the Viet Cong offensive in Laos, I could not feel anything at all. In May, the anti–Vietnam War rally in Washington, D.C., which delighted so many of my fellow students at St. Anne’s, seemed like something you might see in a surrealist dream, weird and insubstantial. I viewed these distant crises as through the wrong end of a telescope. They might as well be taking place on another planet that I would never visit. Yet again, work became my refuge, because it made me feel relatively normal. If I could write good, competent essays about Chaucer or Shakespeare, my mind might not be irretrievably damaged. I could still think logically and coherently, if not originally. The more I read and studied, the more competent work I produced, the easier it was to believe that I was not completely mad and that one day I might be able to make my way in the world as an ordinary person. If I could stay forever in the nice secure realm of scholarship, doing a little teaching or writing the occasional article on Emily Brontë or Wordsworth, I might be able to keep my demons at bay. Besides turning me into a solitary, these attacks of fear dealt yet another blow to my already wavering faith. No, I did not imagine that I had seen Satan during these visitations and knew very well that the evil I sensed had no metaphysical existence but was simply the product of my own mind. But these visions got me thinking. In an age that was less scientific than our own, it would surely have been natural to conclude that the ghostly, senile presence that I sensed with hallucinatory intensity was a real, diabolic personality. Poets and mystics had often spoken of the foul stench of hell. Almost certainly, hell was simply the creation of infirm minds like my own. There was no objective evidence to support such a belief. That was a wonderful and liberating thought, but what if God was also a mental aberration? The ecstatic, celestial visions of the saints could be just as fantastic as my own infernal sensations. What we called God could also be a disease, the invention of a mind that had momentarily lost its bearings. I was slightly dismayed to find that this idea did not trouble me overmuch. If there were no God, then much of my life had been nonsense, and I should, surely, have felt more upset.

• From Wild (2012)

  I left forlornly, strolling in my sandals down a short paved path to an overlook to see the grand falls that the park is named for. Burney Falls is the most voluminous waterfall in the state of California for most of the year, a sign explained. As I gazed at the thundering water, I felt almost invisible among the people with their cameras, fanny packs, and Bermuda shorts. I sat on a bench and watched a couple feed an entire pack of Breathsavers to a gaggle of overly familiar squirrels who darted around a sign that said DO NOT FEED THE WILDLIFE. It enraged me to see them do that, but my fury was not only about how they were perpetuating the habituation of the squirrels, I realized. It was also that they were a couple. To witness the way they leaned into each other and laced their fingers together and tugged each other tenderly down the paved path was almost unbearable. I was simultaneously sickened by it and envious of what they had. Their existence seemed proof that I would never succeed at romantic love. I’d felt so strong and content while talking on the phone with Paul in Old Station only a few days before, but I didn’t feel anything like that anymore. Everything that had rested then was roiling now. I limped back to my camp and examined my tortured big toes. To so much as graze against them had become excruciating. I could literally see them throbbing—the blood beneath my flesh pulsating in a regular rhythm that flushed my nails white then pink, white then pink. They were so swollen that it looked as if my nails were simply going to pop off. It occurred to me that popping them off might actually be a good idea. I pinched one of the nails, and with a solid tug, followed by a second of searing pain, the nail gave way and I felt instant, almost total, relief. A moment later, I did the same with the other toe. It was me against the PCT when it came to my toenails, I realized. The score was 6–4, and I was just barely hanging on to my lead. By nightfall four other PCT hikers joined my encampment. They arrived as I was burning the last pages of A Summer Bird-Cage in my little aluminum pie pan, two couples about my age who’d hiked all the way from Mexico, minus the same section of the socked-in Sierra Nevada I’d skipped. Each couple had set out separately, but they’d met and joined forces in southern California, hiking and bypassing the snow together in a weeks-long wilderness double date. John and Sarah were from Alberta, Canada, and hadn’t even been dating a year when they’d started to hike the PCT. Sam and Helen were a married couple from Maine. They were laying over the next day, but I was heading on, I told them, as soon as my new boots arrived.

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

  But I also think that the years after my departure from the convent took their toll. At a time when most people are supposed to find a mate, I was engaged in a solitary battle with an undiagnosed illness, and locked into a private hell. If you cannot trust the integrity of your own mind, you cannot fall in love, and neither can anybody fall in love with you. The strange sensation of talking to people at a distance, through a glass screen, or seeing them through the wrong end of a telescope, which dissipated once I was properly medicated, made real contact very difficult indeed. Because I received no adequate help during this time, I turned in upon myself, and this tendency may have become habitual. But was I pushed into solitude, or did I jump? It was my idea to go into a convent, and nobody forced me to stay in the religious life so long. Recently I have started to wonder whether my solitary state may in fact be due to some deeper imperative within myself, which I am only just beginning to understand. During that last summer at Bedford College, I played hard. I taught at the summer school organized by the University of London for graduate students from overseas, and for six weeks I lived in Bloomsbury, in the center of town. I had participated in this school before, but on this last occasion, I was a great hit. My lectures and classes were popular and crowded, and I found that I had acquired a little circle of literary disciples. It seemed ironic that I was being forced to leave the academic world just as I was beginning to feel at home there. By day we worked hard, but every night, students and staff partied. “You’re so different,” one of the administrators said to me at lunch one day. “I wouldn’t have dared to speak to you last year: you were quite unapproachable. What happened?”

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

  It has been a great privilege to contribute to the debate in this way, but I miss my study and silence as others might miss a beloved person. I once reviewed a book about hermits, which showed that the more solitary a person becomes, the more he or she is drawn into public life. Crowds of people descended upon Saint Antony, the fourth-century ascetic who lived in the deserts of Egypt, demanding his help and advice. In our own day, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton had much the same experience. In a very minor way, this has happened to me, but I have to understand that after the revelation of September 11, I too cannot isolate myself from the problems of the world. There is, perhaps, something about the dynamic of a solitary lifestyle that propels an anchorite back to the world. I am still an outsider. In the United States, despite the warmth and generous appreciation that I enjoy there, I am a stranger and a foreigner. But when I go back to London I remain on the periphery, because my interest in religion and spirituality leaves most of my fellow countrymen cold. This feeling of being forever on the outside has been an important element in my journey, and yet despite this, I have, if only for a few months, come close to the center of things in a way that would have been inconceivable when I left my convent thirty-four years ago. In the words of the late Joseph Camp-bell, we have to “follow our bliss,” find something that wholly involves and enthralls us, even if it seems hopelessly unfashionable and unproductive, and throw ourselves into this, heart and soul. As the foundress of my religious order used to say: “Do what you are doing!” My “bliss” has been the study of theology. For other people it may be a career in law or politics, a marriage, a love affair, or the raising of children. But that bliss provides us with a clue: if we follow it to the end, it will take us to the heart of life.

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

  One of the purposes of the initiation rites of traditional societies is to confirm adolescents in their sexuality. It may be that my initiation into the religious life, which virtually ignored gender issues, transformed me into an androgynous anchorite rather than a virginal woman. Or there may be a simpler reaction against those years. Men of my age tend to be big on control, and I have found that when I have let a man into my bed, I have suddenly found my life invaded by a minidictator, who has to have his own way in the smallest matters. My last partner, for example, who had seldom composed anything longer than a letter, used to give me minute but peremptory directions about how I should go about researching and writing my own books; and after the convent, I cannot tolerate this type of supervision and restraint. But I also think that the years after my departure from the convent took their toll. At a time when most people are supposed to find a mate, I was engaged in a solitary battle with an undiagnosed illness, and locked into a private hell. If you cannot trust the integrity of your own mind, you cannot fall in love, and neither can anybody fall in love with you. The strange sensation of talking to people at a distance, through a glass screen, or seeing them through the wrong end of a telescope, which dissipated once I was properly medicated, made real contact very difficult indeed. Because I received no adequate help during this time, I turned in upon myself, and this tendency may have become habitual. But was I pushed into solitude, or did I jump? It was my idea to go into a convent, and nobody forced me to stay in the religious life so long. Recently I have started to wonder whether my solitary state may in fact be due to some deeper imperative within myself, which I am only just beginning to understand. During that last summer at Bedford College, I played hard. I taught at the summer school organized by the University of London for graduate students from overseas, and for six weeks I lived in Bloomsbury, in the center of town. I had participated in this school before, but on this last occasion, I was a great hit. My lectures and classes were popular and crowded, and I found that I had acquired a little circle of literary disciples. It seemed ironic that I was being forced to leave the academic world just as I was beginning to feel at home there. By day we worked hard, but every night, students and staff partied. “You’re so different,” one of the administrators said to me at lunch one day. “I wouldn’t have dared to speak to you last year: you were quite unapproachable. What happened?”

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

  Nobody likes to be told that things were not as they imagined. But I was quite certain that my own order had not been particularly austere, and agreed with Pat that it had been far more enlightened than many. Most nuns had observed these arcane rituals, had kissed the ground, confessed their external faults to one another, and were forbidden to have what were known as “particular friendships,” since all love must be given to God. That was why the reforms of the Second Vatican Council were so necessary. I also knew that, taken out of context, such practices as kissing the floor or reciting the Lord’s Prayer five times with your arms in the form of a cross would seem sensationalist, exaggerated, and histrionic. But in reality they became as normal to us as breathing, a routine part of our lives, sometimes even a little tedious. To speak of these things outside the convent would give a false impression. I had not left the convent because we had to do public penance but because I had failed to find God and had never come within shouting distance of that complete self-surrender which, the great spiritual writers declared, was essential for those who wished to enter into the divine presence. So I did not speak of my old life to anybody, and most people assumed that I had, therefore, simply put the past behind me. Much better out than in,” Miss Griffiths, my Anglo-Saxon tutor, said decisively as we sat in her elegant college rooms drinking sherry one evening. “You look much better out of that habit, my lamb. And you know, however things turn out in the future, I’m certain you made the correct decision. If you come back to me in fifteen years’ time and say, ‘Look, five children and a divorce!’ I shall still say that you were right to leave.” This, of course, was quite true. There had been no other option. But as I looked around at the richly colored William Morris curtains, the massive bookcases, and the Oriental rug in front of the fire, I felt entirely out of my element. Every item of furniture, down to the tasteful ornaments glinting on the marble mantel-piece and the cunningly arranged lamps, had been designed for comfort and pleasure. In the convent, everything had been pared down to bare essentials: scrubbed floorboards, uncurtained windows, starkly positioned tables and chairs. All were a perpetual reminder of how we too were to be stripped inwardly of any lingering attachment to the world, to people, and to material objects if we were to be worthy of God. Nevertheless, it was nice here, I reflected, the sherry blurring the room in a golden glow.

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

  My life has kept changing, but at the same time I have constantly found myself revolving round and round the same themes, the same issues, and even repeating the same mistakes. I tried to break away from the convent but I still live alone, spend my days in silence, and am almost wholly occupied in writing, thinking, and speaking about God and spirituality. I have come full circle. This reminds me of the staircase in Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, which I picture as a narrow spiral staircase. I tried to get off it and join others on what seemed to me to be a broad, noble flight of steps, thronged with people. But I kept falling off, and when I went back to my own twisting stairwell I found a fulfillment that I had not expected. Now I have to mount my staircase alone. And as I go up, step by step, I am turning, again, round and round, apparently covering little ground, but climbing upward, I hope, toward the light. 1 Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (London, 1991), pp. 47–48.2 Some of the characters in this memoir have their own names. Those who prefer anonymity have pseudonyms.3 On the fifth of November, the British celebrate the foiling of an attempt by a group of Catholic gentry to blow up the Houses of Parliament in the early seventeenth century. They burn effigies of Guy Fawkes, the conspirator who placed the explosives, and stage small firework displays.4 Quoted in R. A. Nicholson, ed., Eastern Poetry and Prose (Cambridge, 1922), p. 148.5 Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago and London, 1974), 1:379; my italics.6 Sutta Nipata 118.7 Chandogya Upanishad 6:13.Karen Armstrong THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE Karen Armstrong is the author of numerous other books on religious affairs, including A History of God, The Battle for God, Through the Narrow Gate, Holy War, Islam, and Buddha. Her work has been translated into forty languages. She is also the author of three television documentaries and took part in Bill Moyers’s television series Genesis. Since September 11, 2001, she has been a frequent contributor to conferences, panels, newspapers, periodicals, and throughout the media on both sides of the Atlantic on the subject of Islam. She lives in London. ALSO BY KAREN ARMSTRONG Through the Narrow Gate Beginning the World The First Christian: St. Paul’s Impact on Christianity Tongues of Fire: An Anthology of Religious and Poetic Experience The Gospel According to Woman: Christianity’s Creation of the Sex War in the West Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World The English Mystics of the Fourteenth Century Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis The Battle for God Islam: A Short History Buddha: A Penguin Life FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2005

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

  And so I did. I got used to a house where rose trees grew in the drawing room, where walls were covered in newspaper, and where the day began with a stentorian announcement of moonrise. When I returned from the library in the evening and climbed the stairs to my room, I learned to expect Jacob’s unfailing greeting. “The Royal—” he would shout from Nanny’s room, where he was watching television. “Arms!” I would yell back as a matter of course, checking in. Soon I felt at home in a house which seemed odd enough to absorb my own strangeness. It was good to have this focus, because Oxford had become a ghost city. Life as a graduate student was very different. True, I had not made many close friends during the last eighteen months, but the crowded, cheerful life of St. Anne’s had given an illusion of sociability. There had always been somebody to have coffee with after dinner, there were tea parties almost every day, and there was usually somebody around in the Junior Common Room. But when the Michaelmas term began in October 1970, Oxford, though crowded with students, seemed deserted. Nearly all my former classmates had scattered to begin new professional lives in publishing, teaching, the civil service, or business. Very few had stayed to do graduate work. The college was now full of a new generation of undergraduates, who were complete strangers. The dons were always reminding us that we were only birds of passage in Oxford. Soon our turn would be over and we would have to leave this artificially constructed existence for the unpredictable, challenging world outside. I never wanted to hear this. I had had my fill of leaving things, places, and people, and longed for some stability. Yet one day, I too would have to face the larger world, which lurked threateningly beyond the groves of academe: unknown, dangerous, and indifferent.