Relief

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 Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  But thus far was Alypius to be instructed. For forthwith, O Lord, Thou succouredst his innocency, whereof Thou alone wert witness. For as he was being led either to prison or to punishment, a certain architect met them, who had the chief charge of the public buildings. Glad they were to meet him especially, by whom they were wont to be suspected of stealing the goods lost out of the marketplace, as though to show him at last by whom these thefts were committed. He, however, had divers times seen Alypius at a certain senator’s house, to whom he often went to pay his respects; and recognising him immediately, took him aside by the hand, and enquiring the occasion of so great a calamity, heard the whole matter, and bade all present, amid much uproar and threats, to go with him. So they came to the house of the young man who had done the deed. There, before the door, was a boy so young as to be likely, not apprehending any harm to his master, to disclose the whole. For he had attended his master to the market-place. Whom so soon as Alypius remembered, he told the architect: and he showing the hatchet to the boy, asked him “Whose that was?” “Ours,” quoth he presently: and being further questioned, he discovered every thing. Thus the crime being transferred to that house, and the multitude ashamed, which had begun to insult over Alypius, he who was to be a dispenser of Thy Word, and an examiner of many causes in Thy Church, went away better experienced and instructed.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  I was very happy when the chore was over. Limori/Azeen didn’t have much to say to me afterwards, much to my relief. In hindsight, it wouldn’t have mattered what any of us had shared. This was simply an exercise in confession. We were baring our souls in an exercise that bound us to Limori and increased that false sense of intimacy between us. (I really did not want to know about Norman and his intimate relationship with his wife – that’s an image I will never be able to scour from my brain.) At the end of day two, when every last person had read the contents of their notepad (except Limori of course; she didn’t participate in these exercises – that would have lowered her to our level), relief and a small sense of accomplishment spread through the room. Limori told us it was a good beginning and that now we could build on this work in the following days at the workshop. During the evening of the second day we were free to do as we liked. Most of us relaxed in the lodge: reading, playing cards, drawing or chatting with one another. One member of the group, Victor, was a shy, gentle, somewhat socially awkward man in his late fifties. He was an engineer, whose family origins were Estonian. Tall and reed thin, he reminded me a bit of Ichabod Crane. Very much an introvert, Victor kept to himself and during free time at workshops he would often go off by himself, to his cabin or for a walk in the woods. An avid outdoorsman who loved canoeing and kayaking, he was the sort of person who was obviously much more comfortable in communion with nature than with people. As a group, we often teased him about his idiosyncratic habits and I am not proud of the borderline abuse he received from me and his other peers in the group simply because he was a bit different. One of the strongest underlying messages that took hold in the group was that to be different was dangerous. We were all required to fit into a mould that had limited parameters, from the clothes we wore (“women should be feminine and wear skirts and dresses, and men should take pride in their appearance and not dress in a sloppy way”) to any inclination to have close relationships outside the group, to speech patterns that were outside the group norm. So Victor’s inclination to spend time by himself, possibly the result of an introvert’s natural need to recharge by being alone, often made him the target of teasing or, in more serious cases, of being workshopped by Limori. On the third day of the workshop, as we settled into our chairs in the living room, Limori began the day by channelling a meditation.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  It was July 1989 and I had finished university in Calgary a few credits shy of a degree. As soon as I could, I had packed my dog and few belongings into my Toyota hatchback and hightailed it over the Rocky Mountains to this lush, green, temperate city nestled between the Coast Mountains and the ocean. I was eager to put behind me the end of a relationship, an education I was too young to appreciate and a climate I had come to deeply resent because I often felt it was trying to kill me. Vancouver offered absurdly mild temperatures (compared to Calgary), soft air and beaches, not to mention my family. My mother, stepfather and brother had preceded me to Lotus Land by a few years and my visits to them while I was in school had introduced me to life on the West Coast. I felt like I had come home the first time I visited the area and couldn’t wait to make it my actual home. My parents welcomed my dog and me into their lives and home and graciously allowed us to stay with them while I found a job and an apartment and set about building myself a new life. There in the meeting room, on a Wednesday night, I stepped inside the doorway for the first time and looked around the room at the others who had come for the meditation circle. Before anyone spoke to me, I found myself thinking, “I’ve found it.” It was an impression of such depth and resonance that it stayed with me for years. I hadn’t even been aware that I was searching for anything until that moment, but when that thought and that feeling came to me it was like the gonging of a bell inside my chest. I felt almost weak with relief. I would recount this experience many times over the next few years, to myself and others, as an example of how I knew the group was the right place for me and the “one true path” for those like me who were seeking. My mother had joined the meditation group a few months earlier. During the Sunday afternoon telephone conversations we’d had while I was still in Calgary, she introduced me to the idea that she was learning to meditate, from a woman originally named Jo-Ann, who had recently changed her name to Limori at the behest of her “spirit guides.” I privately thought my beloved mama had finally lost her marbles. (I might have even voiced that opinion, given that I was in my early twenties and therefore knew everything.) But a couple of weeks after I’d arrived on her doorstep, bored by the dispiriting business of job hunting and without friends my own age to do social things with, I asked to go with her to the meditation class she’d been enjoying so much.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Cool shirt,” a woman said. She had short curly gray hair and a big white dog on a leash. “This is Odin.” She bent to scratch his neck, then stood and pushed her little round glasses back into place on her nose and fixed me in her curious gaze. “Are you, by chance, hiking the PCT?” Her name was Trina. She was a fifty-year-old high school English teacher from Colorado who’d begun her hike only a couple of days before. She’d left Belden Town, hiking north on the PCT, only to be met by enough snow on the trail that she’d returned. Her report filled me with gloom. Would I ever escape the snow? As we talked, another hiker walked up—a woman named Stacy who had also begun her hike the day before, coming up the same road I had to reach Three Lakes. At last I’d met some women on the trail! I was dumbfounded with relief as we exchanged in a flurry the quick details of our lives. Trina was an avid weekend backpacker, Stacy an experienced trekker who’d hiked the PCT with a friend from Mexico to Belden Town the previous summer. Stacy and I talked about the places on the trail we’d both been, about Ed in Kennedy Meadows, whom she’d met the summer before, and about her life in a desert town in southern California, where she worked as a bookkeeper for her father’s company and took her summers off to hike. She was thirty and from a big Irish family, pale, pretty, and black-haired. “Let’s camp together for the night and make a plan,” said Trina. “There’s a spot over in that meadow.” She pointed to a place visible from the store. We walked there and pitched our tents. I unpacked my box while Trina and Stacy talked on the grass. Waves of pleasure came over me as I picked up each item and held it instinctively to my nose. The pristine packets of Lipton noodles or dehydrated beans and rice that I ate for dinner, the still shiny Clif bars and immaculate ziplock bags of dried fruit and nuts. I was sick to death of these things, but seeing them new and unsullied restored something in me. There was the fresh T-shirt I didn’t need now that I had my Bob Marley shirt, two brand-new pair of wool socks, and a copy of Margaret Drabble’s A Summer Bird-Cage, which I wasn’t quite ready for yet—I’d burned my way through only about half the pages of The Novel, tossing them that morning in Paco’s fire. And, most important, a fresh supply of 2nd Skin.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  What is an orgasm? In physiological terms, orgasm is the pleasurable, rapid release from vasocongestive and myotonic symptoms caused by physical and psychological sexual stimulation. In other words, orgasm which feels so active, so much an act, is a kind of anti-act after the action of foreplay—it is a letting go, a surrender and return to the normal. The build to orgasm is an awful joy, full of pleasure and tension in almost equal measure; orgasm is a cool bath bathing the burn. There are many mythic images of getting stuck in copulation, like dogs unable to separate, heroes and heroines in permanent, unceasing intercourse. To avoid getting stuck forever in coitus, the myths say, one has to die—that is, move forward, into orgasm. An orgasm interrupted is a peculiar and fearsome itch, every part of the body leaning into the halted drive. The testicles swell, the penis throbs. Something of the same happens to women, on a larger scale. Masters and Johnson describe an experiment in which a woman was kept highly aroused for six and a half hours, during which she “underwent repeated pelvic examinations.” Five times the woman was brought (exactly how is not explained) to a preorgasmic state without being allowed to climax. By the end of the experiment, her uterus was more than twice normal size, her vaginal barrel was “grossly engorged,” her labia was swollen almost three times normal size. The pelvic exams had became painful. She then rested for six hours without any sexual stimulation, and this level of painful engorgement continued, along with cramping and backache. (She was also, we are informed in an aside, “irritable, emotionally disturbed, and could not sleep.”) Finally, she was allowed to masturbate to orgasm and felt “immediate relief” from all symptoms. In these simple physical terms, there is little difference between men and women, between different men, different women, between one orgasm and the other. Masters and Johnson studied men climaxing during intercourse and from masturbating, and women climaxing from penetration, from clitoral masturbation, from rubbing their breasts, and in a few cases, purely from fantasy—and in each case the measured physical orgasm was essentially the same, varying only in the degree of tension achieved before relaxation. In other words, the worse it gets, the better it will be. That little blip is just a miniature version of the mind-blowing earthquake from last week, the only significant difference a difference of degree. But of course, in our real lives this seems meaningless; what really counts about an orgasm takes place in our heads.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  To be fair, Usenet wasn’t used exclusively for trading sexual pictures. It was also used for trading sexual text. Usenet, like all early Internet applications, was text-based. This limitation was a simple reflection of the state of the technology, but it had a remarkable effect on early users, creating an outpouring of verbal creativity that was unlike anything the world had seen before. It was as though an entire cohort of computing enthusiasts were just waiting for a medium that could serve as an outlet for their pent-up passions. Usenet was that medium. It opened the floodgates for a torrent of textual, sexual output that sprang forth from seemingly everywhere at once. Wherever the Internet became available, people scrambled to get access to this interactive world where they could read about other people’s fantasies and share their own. “In university, one of the first things I discovered were newsgroups where you could share dirty stories,” said a man I will call Mo. “It was all in text. I was eighteen. I had come from a Middle Eastern country. I wasn’t conservative, but I had been raised in a conservative environment, so I was very hungry for information and experience. I discovered that as part of my tuition fees, I had access to this massive sea of filth.” Mo studied computer science and now works as a programmer and designer. He agreed to meet me for lunch to talk about both his pornographic and technological experiences. Though he spoke frankly and with ease, he requested that I not include information that could identify him. For Mo, the proto-Internet was both a source of erotica and also a place where he could educate himself about sexuality in a safe environment. He talked about the sheltered environment he experienced in the Middle East. “One of the things that I had had almost no exposure to was homosexuality,” he recalled. “I knew that homosexuality was somehow related to AIDS, but I wasn’t clear on much more. Browsing the Usenet groups, I would do little searches— I’d find people who were out and gay and talking about gay sexual issues. I’m completely heterosexual, but I was like, ‘I don’t understand this stuff and maybe I need to talk to people.’ I didn’t know it at the time, but I was relatively homophobic. So it was great to get into conversations and get into the mind of a gay person.” Mo’s story highlights one of the major elements of the early Internet that made it such a draw: anonymity. He did not feel comfortable talking to other men about potentially taboo subjects like homosexuality. When he went online and became anonymous, he had nothing to fear. “Being able to talk to somebody in text form was liberating because I could be as frank as I wanted to,” he said.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “That’s true,” I said. “It’s funny, though. The idea of having time to catch up sounds so luscious. But in reality I’ve found that big chunks of raw time don’t help that much. Parkinson’s Law becomes the dominant force. Parkinson’s Law and loneliness. You have to time the time-outs, and mix them in with life—that’s were the art comes in.” “Still,” said Joyce, “I’d love to know what it was like, to wander around Boston when it was totally still. Nothing moving but me. Everyone like a statue. Are you really serious that you can do this?” I nodded. She put her napkin on the table and sat up straight in her chair with her hands in her lap. “Tell me what color bra I’m wearing. Don’t take it off. Just tell me the color and the make.” “Frankly I feel a little weird now doing it,” I said, flapping my arms to signal uncertainty and moral confusion. “Go ahead!” she said. “I’m letting you. I’m still not sure I believe you anyway. You have to demonstrate you’re not lying to me.” I snapped my fingers and went around to Joyce’s side of the table and, after some groping, tore the small label off her bra. I also kissed her lightly on the mouth, so that I could tell her I had. I took my chair and turned everything back on. “You’re wearing a red bra,” I reported. “It is”—I peered at the label—” an ‘Olga Christina.’ It says, ‘Gentle machine wash warm, wash with like colors, no bleach, line dry, no iron.’ ” “It’s my favorite bra.” “All I did was unzip the back of your dress and reach in. I want you to know that I didn’t really grope at your breasts or do anything in any way proactive.” I held out the bra label between my two fingers. She took it and set it down beside her bread plate. “I did also kiss you briefly,” I added. “Really? Where?” “On the lips.” She made an mmm-expression with her mouth to see if she could detect any residual sensations. “No after-tingle?” I said, feigning incredulity. “Nothing,” said Joyce. “How did it go, the kiss?” I said that it had gone very well. “I’m glad to hear it,” she said. By the time we had finished our salads there was a definite feeling of amity in the air. “You know,” I said, “while I was snapped out just now,tearing the label off your bra, I thought of something. I bet there is a way you could experience the Fold-cleft with me.” “I doubt it,” she said. “Well, this is what I’m thinking, anyway. The Fermata seems to know that I am physically one individual, and it exempts me from the general freeze. But what if we confuse it? What if my naked penis is in your vagina when I snap my fingers?” Joyce laughed a this-is-all-just-a-little-too-much laugh, but I could see that the notion wasn’t inconceivable to her.

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

  When I had regained the necessary lucidity, I slipped out of the ward and ran down the corridors to my doctor’s office. Both times, fortunately, she was there and was good enough to see me at once. “I can’t stay here,” I told her. “No, Karen,” she agreed, adding, the second time around, “Hospitals are not for intelligent people.” After that I never went back again. Each time, the color, vibrancy, and sheer energy of the outside world greeted me like a gift. Food tasted better, the air smelled sweeter, and ordinary little privacies seemed the greatest of privileges. I would wake early each day, filled with anticipation. True, nothing had really changed. I would probably suffer from these anxiety attacks all my life, but at least I wasn’t in a psychiatric ward. And as my doctor had reminded me, I had talents. I was intelligent—more intelligent, perhaps, than the nurses who had seemed omnipotent in the hospital. Maybe this was not the kind of intelligence that was of interest to the University of Oxford, but it was a potentially powerful tool, a weapon that would help me to fight my way out of this apparent impasse. I started to eat normally again, quite spontaneously and without any real difficulty, which suggests to me that I was never truly anorexic. The pounds came back on and I barely noticed them. That phase was over. I had given up crying for help, because I had given up expecting any. Of course, I was grateful to the Harts and to Jane for their generosity to me during the crisis, but they could not touch the essential problem, nor could they ease my passage back to the world. Only I could do that, and toward the end of my third year of graduate study, I gave up psychiatry. Maybe this therapy could help others, but it had had no effect upon me at all. And besides, I told myself, I had submitted to other people’s programs and agendas for far too long. That, perhaps, was part of my trouble. It was now time to take my life into my own hands, instead of handing it over to other people, no matter how well intentioned. From now on, I was on my own. Thus, during the third year of my doctoral studies and some four and a half years after leaving my order, I turned a corner. I may have imbibed some of the spirit of the time, because during the late sixties and early seventies, laws that had hitherto seemed to be part of the very nature of things were being severely challenged.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  The boogey monsters and demons of porn are like boogey monsters everywhere—imaginary. There is no such thing as a “snuff” film. I know a number of people with experience in porn who have tried to find these mythical films, and failed. (There is a film titled Snuff; it was a parody.) Anyone who thought to film an actual act of violence (and where could they have gotten such an idea?) commits a crime unless the film is given up as evidence. “Kiddie porn” does exist, but not only is it illegal, it’s not sold in stores anywhere, as the saying goes. I’m not sure how to find it; I’ve never seen it. The images of pornography are many and varied; some are fragmented and idealized. Some are crude and unflattering. I like the dreamy psychedelic quality of certain scenes; I like the surprises in others, and most of all, I like the heat. Porn lets me have all the curiosity of the anthropologist and the frank hope of the voyeur. Our pornography is, for the most part, adolescent and dumb; it fits perfectly and profitably into our adolescent culture. Criticisms of pornography as a form—lack of character development, narrative, and plot, a numbing of imagination, and so on—are criticisms that can be extended to all bad expression. I can take a diatribe against porn and insert the word “television” or “Hollywood” or “damned liberalism” in place of the word “porn” and it still makes some loopy kind of sense. There are the surface criticisms, of production values and stagnant images, that can be extrapolated to all porn only if we assume that badly made pornography is the only possible kind. But the deeper criticisms extend as well—like the fact that pornography gives us a world of unreal power, false intimacy, lousy psychology, and crummy rhetoric. Television, Hollywood, liberals. All kinds of art and expression create illusions of power, numb the imagination, and fail at insightful analysis. Beer commercials do this. Congressional filibusters do this. Porn is treated as being intrinsically different from other forms of expression because sex is treated as being intrinsically different from other acts. It’s really the sex itself, not the form, that’s being criticized; the fact of expressing sex explicitly is being criticized, not how well lit or complex or intelligent is the film in question.

• From Wild (2012)

  I wore the shirt from Paco the next morning as I hiked back to the PCT and on to Belden Town, catching glimpses of Lassen Peak as I went. It was about fifty miles to the north, a snowy volcanic mountain rising to 10,457 feet—a landmark to me not only because of its size and majesty, but because it was the first of the peaks I’d pass in the Cascade Range, which I’d enter just north of Belden Town. From Lassen northward, the mountains of the High Cascades lined up in a rough row among hundreds of other, less prominent mountains, each one marking the progress of my journey in the coming weeks. Each of those peaks seemed in my mind’s eye to be like a set of monkey bars I’d swung on as a child. Every time I got to one, the next would be just out of reach. From Lassen Peak to Mount Shasta to Mount McLoughlin to Mount Thielsen to the Three Sisters—South, Middle, and North—to Mount Washington to Three Fingered Jack to Mount Jefferson and finally to Mount Hood, which I’d traverse fifty-some miles before I reached the Bridge of the Gods. They were all volcanoes, ranging in elevation from a little under 8,000 to just over 14,000 feet. They were a small portion of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a 25,000-mile-long series of volcanoes and oceanic trenches that rim the Pacific Ocean in a horseshoe shape from Chile, up along the western edge of Central and North America, across to Russia and Japan, and down through Indonesia and New Zealand, before culminating in Antarctica. Down, down, down the trail went on my last full day of hiking in the Sierra Nevada. It was only seven miles to Belden from Three Lakes, but the trail descended a merciless 4,000 feet in the space of five of them. By the time I reached Belden, my feet were injured in an entirely new way: the tips of my toes were blistered. They’d slid forward with each step, pressed relentlessly against the toe ends of my boots. This was supposed to be my easy day, but I dragged into Belden Town limping in agony, observing that, in fact, it wasn’t a town. It was a rambling building near a railroad track. The building contained a bar and a small store, which also served as a post office, a tiny laundromat, and a shower house. I pulled off my boots on the store’s porch, put my camp sandals on, and hobbled inside to collect my box. Soon I had my envelope with twenty dollars, the sight of it such a tremendous relief that I forgot about my toes for a minute. I bought two bottles of Snapple lemonade and returned to the porch to drink them, one after the other.

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

  So I went to view the room with some misgivings, and when Mrs. Hart had opened her front door, I was greeted by rather a startling spectacle. The hall was painted scarlet, the dining room a violent purple, and the kitchen an electric turquoise—this at a time when white was almost de rigueur in interior decor. And it was clear that housekeeping was not one of my prospective landlady’s priorities. The walls had not seen a lick of paint for years, and were scuffed, scarred, and slightly grubby. Dust coated every object and had accumulated on shelves and skirting boards in peaceful, undisturbed drifts. There was clutter everywhere. As I walked into the hall and followed Mrs. Hart into the drawing room, I almost tripped over a duffle coat, which lay spread-eagled across the floor. There were some perfectly serviceable hooks just inside the front door, but they seemed to be supporting a grime-laden conglomeration of tennis rackets, umbrellas, and walking sticks, which were wedged tightly together against the wall. There were piles of books and papers on almost every shelf, interspersed with mugs, in which, I later learned, lurked fossilized dregs of Nescafé. When we went upstairs to view the room, it became apparent that something had happened to the banister, because a thick rope was slung along the wall instead, and at the top of the stairs we both had to step over a large pile of dirty sheets and underwear, which uninhibitedly blocked our path. The loud unconventional colors and the mess did not repel me, however. After the militant tidiness of the convent and the tasteful but impersonal decor of St. Anne’s, there was something liberating about this cheerful disregard for appearances. I was, however, beginning to be concerned about what my own room was like, and relieved to see that it was a little haven of order in the surrounding chaos. “Is it all right?” Mrs. Hart asked again, even more anxiously. I realized suddenly that a great deal of effort had gone into the reclamation of this room. “Thank you, Mrs. Hart, it’s very nice.” She visibly relaxed, and again I felt a flicker of unease about her obvious anxiety to secure me as a baby-sitter. “You’ll need a bookcase, of course.” Her words almost fell over one another in her eagerness to please. “I’ve got one, actually, in my other sons’ bedroom. We could go and get it now, if you like.” I followed her back down the corridor. As we passed the pile of laundry, she gave it an absentminded kick, and a pair of underpants, thus dislodged, fluttered down the stairwell.

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

  Nobody was excused from this forced labor, unless they had a physical disability or an article to write. “There goes the chain gang!” Herbert would murmur gleefully as he left the breakfast table for his room, resolutely refusing to take part. I too was exempt from the corvée, since I had housework to do. This included helping Nanny to cook lunch for the conscripts, who returned home hot, scratched, stung, and dirty—with no hope, of course, of a hot bath, since that too was regarded as a ludicrous extravagance. In the afternoon, everybody was expected to bathe from the beach at the foot of the cliff, but nobody was permitted to utter the word “cold” in case we put Jacob off. Tight lipped, with muscles clenched, we strode into the icy water, calling strangled cries of encouragement to Jacob, who showed good sense in his reluctance to join us. Sometimes he would agree to sit on an inflatable raft, which Herbert dutifully towed up and down, wading at thigh level through the freezing blue sea, his hair blowing patriarchally in the breeze. “How are you getting on?” I asked once as I swam briskly past. “I am unaware that I have legs,” he replied calmly, adjusting his spectacles. After we had dressed, each of us was required to fill one of the backpacks that we had brought down from the house with pebbles from the beach (few of us were ecologically minded in the early seventies) in order to replenish the gravel on the terrace, which was constantly being blown away by the high winds. We used to struggle up the cliffs bowed under the weight of our burdens, looking for all the world like the vainglorious who, to expiate their sin of pride, had to toil around Dante’s Mount Purgatory bent double under massive stones. But this remote literary echo was the only reference to religion for me that Easter. For the first time in my life, I took no part in the rituals of Holy Week: the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Maundy Thursday, the Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday, and the solemn Mass of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday morning. The strange thing was that I did not feel at all odd. I experienced no nostalgia and no guilt during my first wholly secular Easter. In fact, I felt a good deal better. The beauty of my surroundings and the general goodwill of the Harts and their guests were healing me in a way that religion had never done.

• From Another Country (1962)

  And they were equal in that both were afraid of what unanswerable and unimaginable riddles might be uncovered in so merciless a light. She switched off the lamp at the head of the bed, and watched him come to her in the gloom. He took her like a boy, with that singlemindedness, and with a boy’s passion to please: and she had awakened something in him, an animal long caged, which came pounding out of its captivity now with a fury which astounded and transfigured them both. Eventually, he slept on her breast, like a child. She watched him, watched his parted lips and the crooked teeth dully gleaming, and the thin, silver trickle of saliva, flowing on to her; and watched the tiny pulsations in the vein of one arm, the red hairs gleaming on it, thrown heavily across her hip; one leg was thrust out behind him, one knee pointed toward her; the little finger of the hand farthest from her, on the edge of the bed, palm upward, twitched; his sex and his belly were hidden. She looked at her watch. It was ten past one. She would have to go home and she was relieved to discover that she was apprehensive, but not guilty. She really felt that a weight had rolled away, and that she was herself again, in her own skin, for the first time in a long time. She moved slowly out from beneath his weight, kissed his brow and covered him. Then she went into the bathroom and stepped into the shower. She sang to herself in an undertone as the water crashed over her body, and used the towel which smelled of him with joy. She dressed, still humming, and combed her hair. But the pins were on the night table. She came out, to find him sitting up, smoking a cigarette. They smiled at each other. “How are you, baby?” he asked. “I feel wonderful. How are you?” “I feel wonderful, too,” and he laughed, sheepishly. Then, “You have to go?” “Yes. Yes, I do.” She came to the night table and put the pins in her hair. He reached up and pulled her down on the bed and kissed her. It was a strange kiss, in its sad insistence. His eyes seemed to be seeking in her something he had despaired of finding, and did not yet trust. “Will Richard be awake?” “I don’t think so. It doesn’t matter. We’re very seldom together in the evenings; he works, I read, or go out to the movies, or watch TV.” She touched his cheek. “Don’t worry.” “When will I see you?” “Soon. Ill call you.” “Does it matter if I call you? Or would you rather I didn’t?”

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  So, over the last few years my own fantasies have become briefer, less detailed, and more effective. Now she hardly gets her pants off, so to speak. My fantasies are also becoming more fragmented, shifting, slipping. I had to stop analyzing them for meaning or significance in order to really have them in the first place. The analysis was a way to circle the fantasies, darting in and out, staying just out of reach, not quite engaged and yet bound to the images. I never surrendered to the fantasy because I mistrusted it. But only surrender makes the fantasy come to an end, be finished, be used up, be psychoanalyzed and not just analyzed. I surrender to them for the same reasons I surrender in them. Release. With this simple willingness to go along for the ride, not pushing or pulling or manipulating, having a sexual fantasy for me now is a little like going to a movie, or an especially good amusement park. I’m not sure what will happen next. I’m not sure who I will be—that is, what point of view I will take, when the point of view will suddenly change. Questions of gender or sexual preference or fetish seem silly. I’m literally being entertained now, instead of analyzed, and there’s no room for guilt. Since I believe my subconscious contains elements of male and female, and the whole range of preference from Kinsey 0 to Kinsey 6, and any number of rare perversions beside, I can’t really claim to be surprised by what my giggling little hindbrain kicks up. Now it might go like this: seeing a woman across a room sprawled on a couch, going over to her, smiling, kissing her, unbuttoning her blouse, stroking her breasts—then flick, a change, to the sex-slave harem room, rows of beds, men and women in various combinations and poses, shifting positions—flick!—in a sauna, naked, woman and man, embracing, hot and sweaty—flick!—lying on rocks in the sun and opening my eyes to find several people standing around me, smiling—flick!—and so on. Sometimes I’m with women, sometimes with men; sometimes I am a woman, sometimes a man, sometimes I’m dominant and sometimes I’m not, and sometimes no one is. Some images, which have gotten so fragmentary they hardly qualify as fantasy, are twisted and nasty, and some are postcard-romantic. One of our long-neglected sexual freedoms is that of imagining ourselves not only with another, but in the other, as the other. The letting up of pressure to be politically correct—or correct in any way—has given my sexual mental health breathing room, and now I can be anyone.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Why wasn’t he good enough? He told me that I could work outside the home if I wanted to, so long as his shirts still got ironed and were ready for work the next day, my mother told me. The feminist in me was unmoved. Couldn’t you have told him you didn’t want to iron his shirts, and taken it from there? When my stepfather finally left, my sister and I felt as much relief as grief. The intruder had finally been expelled. The sodomitical mother would melt away, and the maternal body would be ours, at last. No wonder, then, that our mother’s announcement that she was getting married again caught us off guard, just a few years later. As she and her husband-to-be told us the news at a dinner party orchestrated, to our surprise, for just that purpose, I watched my sister turn a furious red, then lunge around for a vine that could hold her. Well, if the wedding is in June, I’m not going, she sputtered. It’s way too hot in June for anyone to get married. If it’s in June I’m not going. She was ruining the moment, and I loved her for it. But this time, so far as I can tell, my mother has not made her husband her desire incarnate, though she does love him very much. And for his part, so far as I can tell, he doesn’t try to talk her out of her self-deprecation, nor does he abet it. He simply loves her. I am learning from him. About twenty-four hours after I gave birth to Iggy, the nice woman at the hospital who tested his hearing gave me a wide white elastic band for my postpartum belly, basically a giant Ace bandage with a Velcro waist. I was grateful for it, as my middle felt like it was about to slide off me and onto the floor. Falling forever, falling to pieces. Maybe this belt would keep it, me, together. When she handed it to me, she winked and said, Thanks for doing your part to keep America beautiful. I stumbled back to my hospital room, newly corseted, my gratitude now speckled with bewilderment. What’s my part? Having a baby? Taking measures to stop the spread? Not falling to pieces? It is unnerving, though, this melting. This pizza-dough-like flesh hanging down in folds where there used to be a pregnant tautness. Don’t think of it as, You’ve lost your body, one postpartum website counseled. Think of it as, You gave your body to your baby. I gave my body to my baby. I gave my body to my baby. I’m not sure I want it back, or in what sense I could ever have it.

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

  I was late. That in itself was a novelty. It was a dark, gusty evening in February 1969, only a few weeks after I had left the religious life, where we had practiced the most stringent punctuality. At the first sound of the convent bell announcing the next meal or a period of meditation in the chapel, we had to lay down our work immediately, stopping a conversation in the middle of a word or leaving the sentence we were writing half finished. The rule which governed our lives down to the smallest detail taught us that the bell should be regarded as the voice of God, calling each one of us to a fresh encounter, no matter how trivial or menial the task in hand. Each moment of our day was therefore a sacrament, because it was ordained by the religious order, which was in turn sanctioned by the church, the Body of Christ on earth. So for years it had become second nature for me to jump to attention whenever the bell tolled, because it really was tolling for me. If I obeyed the rule of punctuality, I kept telling myself, one day I would develop an interior attitude of waiting permanently on God, perpetually conscious of his loving presence. But that had never happened to me. When I had received the papers from the Vatican which dispensed me from my vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, I was halfway through my undergraduate degree. I could, therefore, simply move into my college and carry on with my studies as though nothing had happened. The very next day, I was working on my weekly essay like any other Oxford student. I was studying English literature, and though I had been at university for nearly eighteen months, to be able to plunge heart and soul into a book was still an unbelievable luxury. Some of my superiors had regarded poetry and novels with suspicion, and saw literature as a form of self-indulgence, but now I could read anything I wanted; and during those first confusing weeks of my return to secular life, study was a source of delight and a real consolation for all that I had lost.

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

  And then there were the problems of institutional life. It brought it all back: the way rules became absolute and could not be adapted to particular cases. I was sharing a room with a pretty, bulimic girl from Switzerland. Our beds were made up so that our heads were only inches away from a huge old-fashioned radiator, which gave off a thick, suffocating heat, smelling strongly of paint. Each night I turned the bedclothes around, so that my feet were beside the radiator and my head near the door. And each night a nurse would shake me awake and put me firmly back in the original position. Each morning I woke with a headache. Although I was supposed to be in hospital for a rest, I was yanked out of bed each morning at six, hustled down the corridor, and weighed with the other anorexic girls—and then told to go back to sleep. It was no use protesting; you were simply humored by the ward staff and rarely saw your doctors, who disappeared behind a phalanx of nurses and registrars. Both times, because I was so heavily drugged, it took me days to work out what to do. I would pretend to swallow the pills that the nurses gave me, spit them out, and then wait until my brain gradually cleared. When I had regained the necessary lucidity, I slipped out of the ward and ran down the corridors to my doctor’s office. Both times, fortunately, she was there and was good enough to see me at once. “I can’t stay here,” I told her. “No, Karen,” she agreed, adding, the second time around, “Hospitals are not for intelligent people.” After that I never went back again. Each time, the color, vibrancy, and sheer energy of the outside world greeted me like a gift. Food tasted better, the air smelled sweeter, and ordinary little privacies seemed the greatest of privileges. I would wake early each day, filled with anticipation. True, nothing had really changed. I would probably suffer from these anxiety attacks all my life, but at least I wasn’t in a psychiatric ward. And as my doctor had reminded me, I had talents. I was intelligent—more intelligent, perhaps, than the nurses who had seemed omnipotent in the hospital. Maybe this was not the kind of intelligence that was of interest to the University of Oxford, but it was a potentially powerful tool, a weapon that would help me to fight my way out of this apparent impasse.

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

  This has meant that, even though nobody would dream of incarcerating me in a mental hospital because of my condition, my epilepsy has been an isolating factor. I tended to retreat from close contact with people during the years before the diagnosis, because I was afraid of having one of my “weird seizures” in front of them. This made my return to secular life far more difficult than it need have been, and I should not have been abandoned for so long in that Boschlike hell, which has left me with an indelible memory of the darker regions of my mind. But when I left Dr. Wolfe’s consulting room on that bright spring morning in 1976, I did not know that I would have these difficulties. I felt simply a joyous relief that has never entirely left me. I still feel a sense of reprieve. All I wanted to do, when I first received the diagnosis, was to revel in this wonderful reversal. As I walked down Mortimer Street that day, I knew that I had a viable future. Later that year, I traveled up to Oxford one afternoon and walked through the city streets to Blackfriars to meet Jenifer Hart. She wanted Jacob to be baptized. “But why?” I had asked. “You don’t believe in any of it! Why do this?” Jenifer had sighed. “I want him to have the whole thing” was all she could say. “I want him to do it properly.” Jacob wouldn’t understand the theology of baptism, of course, but maybe the rite could speak to him at some other level. The Dominicans, who were no fools, had agreed to the christening, and the ceremony was to be held that afternoon. As a final twist in this strange story, I was to be Jacob’s godmother. I had been the person who had brought him into this world of religion, even though I had done it at a time when I was losing my own faith. Jacob seemed doubly my alter ego. I had now discovered that we were also bound together by an illness that could make our environment appear demonic, and was grateful that the experience of looking after him had prepared me for my own diagnosis. Now he was taking my place in the church. Geoffrey Preston had decided to perform the ceremony in a small chapel upstairs. Jenifer was already waiting there, tense, hands clenched tightly in her lap, and clearly ill at ease. But Jacob was sitting quietly, his head to one side in a listening posture, his face thoughtful. “This is a special occasion, isn’t it, Karen?” he hissed as I went and sat beside him. Nobody else was present. We made a strange quartet of belief, unbelief, and—for Jacob—something else that had nothing to do with theological conviction. “Jacob,” Geoffrey said, “would you like some incense for your baptism?” His eyes lit up. “Oh, Geoffrey,” he breathed, “can I make it?” I smiled at Geoffrey.

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

  I explained about Dr. Piet, the hospitalization, the therapy, and the drugs. Dr. Wolfe covered his eyes with his hand, shook his head, and looked up again. “Do you mean to tell me,” he asked, with devastating quiet, “that you were treated by psychiatrists for over three years—men and women who were all fully qualified doctors—that you presented these symptoms, and that none of them, not one, in all that time suggested that you have an EEG?” “No, they didn’t.” I was beginning to be invaded by an enormous astonishment, a confusion of feelings that included anger but also a relief so great that I was close to tears. Dr. Wolfe uttered that explosive sound that novelists used to transcribe as “Pshaw!” “It’s not even as though temporal lobe epilepsy were an obscure condition,” he snapped. “It’s the most common of all the focal epilepsies, and very well documented. And as I say, you are almost a textbook case!” He trailed off. Then his face cleared, while he wrote out a prescription for the drug that, he hoped, would eliminate the demons that had haunted me so long. As I got up to go, he looked at me sternly. “I don’t think you need waste any more of your time with these psychiatrists.” He made the word sound like an obscenity. “No amount of talking about your problems will make the smallest impression on your condition, and I’m very sorry indeed that you have had to wait for so long before getting adequate medical help. By the way,” he added, as I reached the door, “it’s interesting that you were once a nun. People with temporal lobe epilepsy are often religious!” I walked down Mortimer Street in a daze. For many people, I am sure, a diagnosis of epilepsy must be unwelcome news, but for me it was an occasion of pure happiness. As I looked at the grimy buildings, the diseased London pigeons flapping untidily round the gables, the littered streets, and the overflowing dustbins, this urban detritus seemed a vision of beauty. For the first time in years, I felt that I could trust my perceptions. I knew now that my mind was neither broken nor irretrievably flawed. I was not mad, and need not expect to end my days in a locked ward. The world had been given back to me, and perhaps for the first time ever, I felt that I could take charge of my life.

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

  After the militant tidiness of the convent and the tasteful but impersonal decor of St. Anne’s, there was something liberating about this cheerful disregard for appearances. I was, however, beginning to be concerned about what my own room was like, and relieved to see that it was a little haven of order in the surrounding chaos. “Is it all right?” Mrs. Hart asked again, even more anxiously. I realized suddenly that a great deal of effort had gone into the reclamation of this room. “Thank you, Mrs. Hart, it’s very nice.” She visibly relaxed, and again I felt a flicker of unease about her obvious anxiety to secure me as a baby-sitter. “You’ll need a bookcase, of course.” Her words almost fell over one another in her eagerness to please. “I’ve got one, actually, in my other sons’ bedroom. We could go and get it now, if you like.” I followed her back down the corridor. As we passed the pile of laundry, she gave it an absentminded kick, and a pair of underpants, thus dislodged, fluttered down the stairwell. “Here we are . . . Ghastly, isn’t it?” She sighed, and lost for words, I could only smile weakly. The large room was completely papered in sheets of newspaper, now stiff and yellow with age. The light fittings had been torn out, leaving gaping holes, and the words FUCK OFF! had been painted across the ceiling in thick, dark blue letters. “One day I’ll have to strip this.” She scrabbled in a defeated way at the newspaper. “But you see, it’s layers thick. It’ll take weeks—and bring off most of the plaster, probably. The boys insisted on doing it.” “Are they living here now?” I tried to sound calm about the prospect. “Oh no! They’re finished with university and living in communes, learning to be hippies and bricklayers.” Her face looked suddenly sad in the bleak light. “They don’t come home very often.” Abruptly she turned to a tall, white-painted bookcase, crammed with old paperbacks. “This should do for now, and I’ve got another small one downstairs that you can have.” “What should I do with these books, Mrs. Hart?” I asked. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, call me Jenifer.” She sounded impatient, but she was clearly trying to be friendly. She looked helplessly round the room, full to overflowing with old guitars, obsolete gramophones, and in the dark recess of one corner, I could just make out a superannuated bicycle. “We’ll just pile them on this bed for now,” she sighed. Twenty minutes later, we went back to the drawing room, which opened directly into Jenifer’s study.