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 Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This skeptical approach was evident in the two books that I published at this time. The first of these was a poetry anthology, called Tongues of Fire, which came out with the series. I chose the poems and wrote short introductions to the various sections, exploring the similarity between religious experience and poetic creativity. This was potentially a fruitful line of inquiry, but I concluded, in my own mind, that religion was only an art form, a purely natural activity, and therefore could not be seen as divine in any way. The second book was far more critical. The Gospel According to Woman developed some of the ideas in the piece that I had done for Opinions. Like The Body of Christ, it was a polemic, and traced the misogyny that had been the Achilles heel of Christianity. It was clever but inherently hostile to faith. In the crazed excesses of such theologians as Tertullian, Saint Jerome, or Luther, and the lamentable neuroses of some of the women saints, Christianity appeared as unhealthy, unkind, and unnatural in its rejection of women and sexuality. As I finished the book, I felt profoundly relieved to have shaken off the toils of religion once and for all. In the spring of 1985, John asked me if I would like to do another series with Joel: this time on the Crusades. Channel 4 had been so pleased with The First Christian that they were going to give us a proper commission this time. “No more cutting corners, no more silly schedules, darling,” John promised. “Proper, serious filming!” I was thrilled. I remembered what wonderful fun it had been last time and could hardly wait for the project to begin. Joel was also delighted. This time we would be a team right from the start, we promised each other. And with a decent budget, we could do wonders.

• 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)

  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. In my first years with the Harts, I used to make the effort to hear Mass every Sunday at the Catholic Church in Mevagissey, which meant getting up extremely early and walking five miles over the cliffs. It had been a pleasant walk, even though I’d had to brave a field full of bullocks and sometimes tore my clothes on barbed-wire fences. The service itself, however, was less rewarding, the words of the Mass soullessly intoned by a priest who seemed bored and irritated with his congregation of holidaymakers, who were patently longing to get back to the beach as quickly as possible.

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

  I had had a confusing time and it was bound to take its toll. But worse things happened at sea. Mustn’t give in or feel sorry for yourself. Get back into the swing of things. Put your best foot forward. I listened to this string of clichés with mounting irritation. It was easy to be brisk and bracing about other people’s difficulties. I was quite aware that leaving a convent must rank very low on the scale of human suffering. Certainly, a bad divorce or bereavement must be even more painful, but after all, it was not a competition. “Do make an appointment with your GP, however,” the nurse concluded. “Always wise to get these things checked out, especially if it’s happened before.” I promised that I would. It did seem a sensible precaution, and I was grateful for the concern that was so different from the icy response of my superiors. News of the faint traveled fast. People I scarcely knew stopped me in the corridor and asked how I was feeling. Pat and Fiona gave me a bunch of flowers and Rosemary had thoughtfully provided a little vase, realizing that I probably didn’t have one. Charlotte asked me quite a lot about the incident and we again silently sized each other up as fellow neurotics. Charlotte and I were no longer tutorial partners. Dr. Brentwood Smyth had got rid of me fairly rapidly and passed me on to one of his graduate students. The college had responded indignantly. I was being groomed for a first-class degree and should not have been relegated to what they regarded as the scrap heap in this way. Now I was back with Mrs. Bednarowska, who was quite happy with my intricate, Gothic essays, and everybody seemed pleased with me. But I had not forgotten the emptiness I had encountered when I had to rely on my own thoughts, and felt that Dr. Brentwood Smyth had seen through my polished intellectual exterior to the vacuum at the core, as had Charlotte, though she knew too much about the numbing effects of shock to dismiss me as contemptuously as our tutor. So some good had come out of that faint. I had become closer to Jane, let down my guard a little, and allowed people to see that all was not well. And I decided to take Jane’s advice and buy myself a record player. As the new spirit of Vatican II slowly percolated through the convent, we had been encouraged to listen to music.

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

  Cantwell Smith was one of the first theologians to make all this clear to me, in such books as Faith and Belief and Belief in History. I remember the extraordinary sense of relief I felt when I read in his somewhat dry, scholarly prose that our ideas of God were man-made; that they could be nothing else; that it was a modern Western fallacy, dating only from the eighteenth century, to equate faith with accepting certain intellectual propositions about God. Faith was really the cultivation of a conviction that life had some ultimate meaning and value, despite the tragic evidence to the contrary—an attitude also evoked by great art. The Middle English word beleven originally meant “to love”; and the Latin credo (“I believe”) probably derived from the phrase cor do: “I give my heart.” Saint Anselm of Canterbury had written, “Credo ut intellegam,” usually translated “I believe in order that I may understand.” I had always assumed that this meant that I had to discipline my rebellious mind and force it to bow to the official orthodoxy, and that as a result of this submission, I would learn to understand a higher truth. This had been the foundation of my training in the convent. But no, Cantwell Smith explained, “Credo ut intellegam” should be translated “I commit myself in order that I may understand.” You must first live in a certain way, and then you would encounter within a sacred presence that which monotheists call God, but which others have called the Tao, Brahman, or Nirvana. But did that mean that we could think what we liked about God? No. Here again, the religious traditions were in unanimous agreement. The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God’s name, it was bad theology. Compassion was the litmus test for the prophets of Israel, for the rabbis of the Talmud, for Jesus, for Paul, and for Muhammad, not to mention Confucius, Lao-tzu, the Buddha, or the sages of the Upanishads. In killing Muslims and Jews in the name of God, the Crusaders had simply projected their own fear and loathing onto a deity which they had created in their own image and likeness, thereby giving this hatred a seal of absolute approval. A personalized God can easily lead to this type of idolatry, which is why the more thoughtful Jews, Christians, and Muslims insisted that while you could begin by thinking of God as a person, God transcended personality as “he” went beyond all other human categories.

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

  “You’re Mrs. Sims, dear,” my companion explained patiently, with the air of one who had done this many times before. “Got that? Mrs. Sims.” “Oh!” she cried in relief. “I’m Mrs. Sims!” she informed me happily, before wandering unsteadily to another part of the room. “Karen.” A nurse stood at my elbow and picked up my bag. “Would you come this way, please?” “Off to register now, I expect?” my new friend said cheerily. “See you later, sweetheart!” he called after me as I hurried after the nurse, passing Mrs. Saunders, who was still creeping down the corridor. I rounded the corner and there, standing as close to the door of the ward as possible and looking fastidiously alarmed, was Jenifer Hart. “My dear!” She hurried forward and took my bag from the nurse. “What are you thinking of? You can’t possibly stay here— it’s absolutely ludicrous!” I had never been so glad to see anyone in my life. “Do you mean—?” I asked, scarcely daring to hope for so swift a reprieve. Jenifer had already pushed open the door, nodded grimly to the nurse, and was striding resolutely out. “Come on!” she called back to me impatiently, and I followed her down a flight of stairs, through the cavernous entrance hall, and out into the fresh air. I took a deep, luxuriant sniff, reminding myself of Jacob greedily snuffing up the incense at Blackfriars. “What an extraordinary thing to have done!” Jenifer exclaimed. “I telephoned the hospital to ask when they were going to let you out and they told me that you had come here!” “Dr. Piet—” I began as we hurried across the car park toward the Harts’ Morris Minor. The late autumn leaves looked more golden than I had ever seen them, and the air smelled fragrant after the thick, heavy despair in the ward. I felt a thrill of pure exhilaration. Suddenly everything seemed possible. The battered, dusty car looked a chariot fit for the gods. “Yes, I’ve spoken to him.” Jenifer flung my case onto the backseat. “He told me that you didn’t feel able to come back to us and that you had wanted to stay in the convent. My dear! I’ve never heard of such an insane scheme! You must be mad!” “Yes.” I smiled to myself. “I sometimes think I must be.” “Here.” Jenifer scrabbled in the glove compartment and pulled out an already opened packet of after-dinner chocolate mints, threw them into my lap, and turned the ignition key. “These were left over from the guest night we had in college yesterday. There are quite a lot left. I thought they might cheer you up.”

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

  “Okay.” I got out and slammed the door in what I hoped was a reasonable imitation of Israeli insouciance and strode into the hotel without a backward glance, smiling inwardly. I was always being told not to say “please” or “thank you.” When I had lunch with Joel and his colleagues, I learned that I just had to grab what I needed, even if that meant stretching across other people. “You are not in England now!” Joel kept telling me, and even though I was far too English to leave “please” and “thank you” out of my vocabulary entirely, it was quite fun to lay aside the habit of deference for a time. I felt something within me relax and expand. But I saw little of my Israeli colleagues socially. Joel had dutifully invited me to dinner shortly after my arrival, and I had met his wife and baby son. But no further invitations came my way. But Ahmed and his Palestinian friends clearly did not find me so dull, and almost every night somebody in East Jerusalem would call and invite me to dinner. I was so ignorant about the political situation that I saw nothing strange about crossing the line and entering the Arab districts of the city. I noticed that suddenly the Western buildings disappeared and that I seemed to enter the Third World. There were no streetlights, no street signs, and the taxi invariably got lost in Beit Hanina or Sheikh Jarrah. If the driver was an Israeli, he would become nervous and agitated. “It’s dangerous, lady! These people will kill you! Let me drive you back to your hotel.” Today, of course, that would be very sensible advice. But in 1983, the situation was less tense, and feeling perfectly safe, I would refuse to turn back. With much head shaking and muttering, the driver would drop me outside a shop and drive off as though pursued by the hounds of hell, but always the Palestinian shop-keeper greeted me like a long-lost friend, even though he had never set eyes on me before; he would phone Ahmed or one of my other hosts, refuse to take any money for the call, and his wife would bring me a glass of hot sweet tea. Sometimes I would try to buy something from the store to make up for this, but to no avail. More often than not, the couple would give me the goods I had requested as a gift, so I learned not to make the offer. “Please,” they would say, “you are our guest!” Finally my friends would arrive and sweep me off to dinner.

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

  People I scarcely knew stopped me in the corridor and asked how I was feeling. Pat and Fiona gave me a bunch of flowers and Rosemary had thoughtfully provided a little vase, realizing that I probably didn’t have one. Charlotte asked me quite a lot about the incident and we again silently sized each other up as fellow neurotics. Charlotte and I were no longer tutorial partners. Dr. Brentwood Smyth had got rid of me fairly rapidly and passed me on to one of his graduate students. The college had responded indignantly. I was being groomed for a first-class degree and should not have been relegated to what they regarded as the scrap heap in this way. Now I was back with Mrs. Bednarowska, who was quite happy with my intricate, Gothic essays, and everybody seemed pleased with me. But I had not forgotten the emptiness I had encountered when I had to rely on my own thoughts, and felt that Dr. Brentwood Smyth had seen through my polished intellectual exterior to the vacuum at the core, as had Charlotte, though she knew too much about the numbing effects of shock to dismiss me as contemptuously as our tutor. So some good had come out of that faint. I had become closer to Jane, let down my guard a little, and allowed people to see that all was not well. And I decided to take Jane’s advice and buy myself a record player. As the new spirit of Vatican II slowly percolated through the convent, we had been encouraged to listen to music. A record player had appeared in the community room of the scholasticate, and we were allowed to use it during the afternoon recreation hour. I discovered a new world. I remember walking into the room one day after doing the washing up and being almost shocked by the beauty of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. Now, thanks to my simple little player, for which I paid the princely sum of twenty-five pounds, I could have this sublime treat anytime I wanted. Jane introduced me to the late quartets of Beethoven and I would play these almost nightly. This, I was aware, was probably the kind of experience I had sought in religion. While I listened, I felt my spirit knitting together. Things began to make sense. But one night, the world broke apart again. It was early evening and I was tired, having stayed up most of the previous night to write my essay. This weekly essay crisis, as we called it, was a feature of Oxford life. Throughout the college, lights burned all through the night as students scribbled earnestly, trying to get their piece finished in time.

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

  As we drove back to Oxford, I felt a surge of returning life. There was excitement in the bustle of the streets, and the graceful curve of the High Street had never looked more beautiful. I smiled with real affection at the mints. It was so typical of Jenifer, whose frugality was almost miserly, to have pinched a box from college. A brand-new box would have been so uncharacteristic, a sign that something had irrevocably changed. “Does Jacob know what happened?” I asked as we turned into Manor Place. She shook her head. “He knows that you haven’t been well and that you went away for a rest. He’s a bit suspicious—knows that there is something up, but that’s all.” It was almost dark by the time we drove the car into the garage and let ourselves in by the kitchen door. As I carried my bag through the hall, I passed Herbert, who was standing at the entrance to his study. He raised a hieratic hand in greeting. “Moon rises!” he said. That strange and frightening incident proved to be a watershed. Even though the external circumstances of my life had not changed, I was different. I was still plagued by panic and infrequent episodes of amnesia, I still felt cut off from the world in a capsule of unreality, but there seemed no point in fighting any of this. These things were permanent, and had proved to be untreatable, so now I resolved to ride with them. When the attacks came, I just tried to grit my teeth and let them carry me along, as though I were trapped on a roller coaster, with no means of getting off. At least I knew now that at some point, the ride always came to an end, and that even at their very worst, they could not kill me. Come what may, I was determined that I would not end my days in a psychiatric ward.

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

  Wolfe made a note and nodded, as if to himself. “This condition quite often appears in late adolescence—with the hormonal changes, you see. And the good nuns didn’t advise you to check these medically?” “No. We thought it was all due to emotional disturbance.” Dr. Wolfe sighed impatiently. “I do wish people wouldn’t play psychiatrist and make these facile assumptions!” he said, his lips taut with suppressed irritation. “It’s the current fashion to see every illness as psychosomatic, but epilepsy is a physical disease and needs physical treatment, though there are often quite traumatic emotional e fects. You see, I am interested in the fear that you say you experience, the distress, and the smell. This is what we call an aura, and it is associated with a particular kind of focal epilepsy, centered in the temporal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for the retention of memories, and for the senses of taste and smell.” So all that anguish about my feeble willpower had been entirely misdirected. I could have been as emotionally stolid as a sloth and it would have made no difference. I felt a dawning sense of vindication, but Dr. Wolfe’s next question took me completely by surprise . “Now—please don’t be afraid to speak honestly about this; nobody will think that you are mad or deranged in any way if the answer is yes, but have you ever had any hallucinatory experience, seen or heard things that aren’t there?” Again, the silence in the little consulting room vibrated and I sat, afraid almost to move or speak, in case the hope that I was beginning to feel should prove to be yet another delusion. But slowly, in response to his careful probing, I began to answer his questions. “And have you found things looking rather strange? Or have you done things without realizing it? Started to go to one place, perhaps, and ended up somewhere completely different?” Almost winded by the implications of what I was hearing, I answered, hesitantly at first, but then the words almost tumbled over one another in my eagerness to explain. And more wonderful than almost anything else was the fact that Dr. Wolfe was nodding as though this was only to be expected. “Yes,” he said at last. “These are all classic symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy.” He took some more notes, and then looked up, frowning slightly. “But, forgive me, I’m puzzled. This must have been very alarming for you. Why on earth did you not take these symptoms to a doctor?” I explained about Dr. Piet, the hospitalization, the therapy, and the drugs. Dr.

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

  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. The disease itself did not trouble me unduly. The experience of looking after Jacob had taught me that it was a manageable condition. It was also very common. Dr. Wolfe had told me that each year twenty-five thousand people contract epilepsy in Britain alone. It was even a rather distinguished illness: Dostoyevsky, van Gogh, Gustave Flaubert, Edward Lear, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the Great had probably all been epileptics. Later I would learn that Tennyson had also suffered from epilepsy. No wonder I had been drawn to his poetry, with its haunting descriptions of tranced states of mind and of life seen through a veil of unreality. But Tennyson had lived in a terror of the disease, which had darkened his whole life. His brother Edward, also a sufferer, had been confined for years in an asylum for the insane. A hundred years ago, epilepsy was a disgrace; it was thought to be the result of a disordered sexual appetite. Epileptics were thus castrated, circumcised, or incarcerated in Bedlam. But that was no longer true. I had a prescription in my pocket for a drug that would control these symptoms. I might never again have to experience that periodic descent into hell. And even if I still suffered further temporal lobe attacks, at least I would know what was happening to me. By far the most frightening aspect of the whole experience had been the fear of losing my mind. I was, therefore, rather surprised not only that my friends found it difficult to share my relief, but that some positively resisted the diagnosis. This is the only aspect of the disease that I have found truly troubling. Something of the old shibboleths remain. Epilepsy is still, in some sense, an unacceptable disease; as I have found, people need to turn it into something else. Friends will look puzzled and mulish when I explain that it is a purely physical disease, the result of a birth accident. They seem to want it to be the expression of psychological strain or neurosis. They can become quite dogmatic on the subject, even though their knowledge of neurology could be written down on a small postcard. Others simply change the subject if I mention my condition, as though I had made a remark in bad taste. I am quite sure that I would not experience the same kind of reaction if I suffered from diabetes or hypertension.

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

  It must be paradoxical, to remind us that God cannot be contained in a neat, coherent system of thought; and it must be apophatic, that is, it should lead us to a moment of silent awe or wonder, because when we are speaking of the reality of God we are at the end of what words or thoughts can usefully do. Cantwell Smith was one of the first theologians to make all this clear to me, in such books as Faith and Belief and Belief in History. I remember the extraordinary sense of relief I felt when I read in his somewhat dry, scholarly prose that our ideas of God were man-made; that they could be nothing else; that it was a modern Western fallacy, dating only from the eighteenth century, to equate faith with accepting certain intellectual propositions about God. Faith was really the cultivation of a conviction that life had some ultimate meaning and value, despite the tragic evidence to the contrary—an attitude also evoked by great art. The Middle English word beleven originally meant “to love”; and the Latin credo (“I believe”) probably derived from the phrase cor do: “I give my heart.” Saint Anselm of Canterbury had written, “Credo ut intellegam,” usually translated “I believe in order that I may understand.” I had always assumed that this meant that I had to discipline my rebellious mind and force it to bow to the official orthodoxy, and that as a result of this submission, I would learn to understand a higher truth. This had been the foundation of my training in the convent. But no, Cantwell Smith explained, “Credo ut intellegam” should be translated “I commit myself in order that I may understand.” You must first live in a certain way, and then you would encounter within a sacred presence that which monotheists call God, but which others have called the Tao, Brahman, or Nirvana. But did that mean that we could think what we liked about God? No. Here again, the religious traditions were in unanimous agreement. The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God’s name, it was bad theology.

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

  The disease itself did not trouble me unduly. The experience of looking after Jacob had taught me that it was a manageable condition. It was also very common. Dr. Wolfe had told me that each year twenty-five thousand people contract epilepsy in Britain alone. It was even a rather distinguished illness: Dostoyevsky, van Gogh, Gustave Flaubert, Edward Lear, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the Great had probably all been epileptics. Later I would learn that Tennyson had also suffered from epilepsy. No wonder I had been drawn to his poetry, with its haunting descriptions of tranced states of mind and of life seen through a veil of unreality. But Tennyson had lived in a terror of the disease, which had darkened his whole life. His brother Edward, also a sufferer, had been confined for years in an asylum for the insane. A hundred years ago, epilepsy was a disgrace; it was thought to be the result of a disordered sexual appetite. Epileptics were thus castrated, circumcised, or incarcerated in Bedlam. But that was no longer true. I had a prescription in my pocket for a drug that would control these symptoms. I might never again have to experience that periodic descent into hell. And even if I still suffered further temporal lobe attacks, at least I would know what was happening to me. By far the most frightening aspect of the whole experience had been the fear of losing my mind. I was, therefore, rather surprised not only that my friends found it difficult to share my relief, but that some positively resisted the diagnosis. This is the only aspect of the disease that I have found truly troubling. Something of the old shibboleths remain. Epilepsy is still, in some sense, an unacceptable disease; as I have found, people need to turn it into something else. Friends will look puzzled and mulish when I explain that it is a purely physical disease, the result of a birth accident. They seem to want it to be the expression of psychological strain or neurosis. They can become quite dogmatic on the subject, even though their knowledge of neurology could be written down on a small postcard. Others simply change the subject if I mention my condition, as though I had made a remark in bad taste. I am quite sure that I would not experience the same kind of reaction if I suffered from diabetes or hypertension.

• From Wild (2012)

  I believed I was going to Golden Oak Springs, but by seven o’clock it was still nowhere in sight. I didn’t care. Too tired to be hungry, I skipped dinner again, thus saving the water I’d have used to make it, and found a spot flat enough to pitch my tent. The tiny thermometer that dangled from the side of my pack said it was 42 degrees. I peeled off my sweaty clothes and draped them over a bush to dry before I crawled into my tent. In the morning, I had to force them on. Rigid as boards, they’d frozen overnight. I reached Golden Oak Springs a few hours into my third day on the trail. The sight of the square concrete pool lifted my spirits enormously, not only because at the springs there was water, but also because humans had so clearly constructed it. I put my hands in the water, disturbing a few bugs that swam across its surface. I took out my purifier and placed its intake tube into the water and began to pump the way I’d practiced in my kitchen sink in Minneapolis. It was harder to do than I remembered it being, perhaps because when I’d practiced I’d only pumped a few times. Now it seemed to take more muscle to compress the pump. And when I did manage to pump, the intake tube floated up to the surface, so it took in only air. I pumped and pumped until I couldn’t pump anymore and I had to take a break; then I pumped again, finally refilling both my bottles and the dromedary bag. It took me nearly an hour, but it had to be done. My next water source was a daunting nineteen miles away. I had every intention of hiking on that day, but instead I sat in my camp chair near the spring. It had warmed up at last, the sun shining on my bare arms and legs. I took off my shirt, pulled my shorts down low, and lay with my eyes closed, hoping the sun would soothe the patches of skin on my torso that had been worn raw by my pack. When I opened my eyes, I saw a small lizard on a nearby rock. He seemed to be doing push-ups. “Hello, lizard,” I said, and he stopped his push-ups and held perfectly still before disappearing in a flash.

• From Wild (2012)

  The rest of the day was a slow march, my eyes scanning both the ground and the horizon, terrified at every sound, while also chanting to myself: I am not afraid. Shaken as I was, I couldn’t help but feel grateful to glimpse a couple of the animals that shared this place that had begun to feel a tiny bit like mine. I realized that in spite of my hardships, as I approached the end of the first leg of my journey, I’d begun to feel a blooming affection for the PCT. My backpack, heavy as it was, had come to feel like my almost animate companion. No longer was it the absurd Volkswagen Beetle I’d painfully hoisted on in that motel room in Mojave a couple of weeks before. Now my backpack had a name: Monster. I meant it in the nicest possible way. I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it. That I could bear the unbearable. These realizations about my physical, material life couldn’t help but spill over into the emotional and spiritual realm. That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding. It had begun to occur to me that perhaps it was okay that I hadn’t spent my days on the trail pondering the sorrows of my life, that perhaps by being forced to focus on my physical suffering some of my emotional suffering would fade away. By the end of that second week, I realized that since I’d begun my hike, I hadn’t shed a single tear. I hiked the final miles to the narrow flat where I made camp the night before I reached Kennedy Meadows in the familiar agony that had been my constant companion. I was relieved to see that a wide fallen tree bordered my campsite. It was long dead, its trunk worn gray and smooth, shorn of its bark ages ago. It formed a high smooth bench, where I sat and removed my pack with ease. As soon as I got my pack off, I lay on the tree as if it were a couch—a sweet respite from the ground. The tree was just wide enough that if I lay still, I could rest without rolling off either side. It felt spectacular. I was hot, thirsty, hungry, and tired, but all of those things were nothing in comparison to the burning pain that emanated from the knots in my upper back. I closed my eyes, sighing with relief.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Fiona had a key to Terrence’s apartment, but it was back at her place. She had to drop the girls off anyway—their mother was home and knew what Fiona had been going through and wouldn’t mind sparing her for an hour or two. Yale waited on the street while Fiona ran the girls inside. By the time she was back with her keys, he’d flagged down a cab. “I’ll go in first,” Yale said on the way. “You should wait in the hall.” “Nope, no, no, no. We’re going in together.” She asked the cabbie if he could rush. He gestured at the red light and muttered in Polish. Yale admitted to himself, as they finally got out, as they mounted the front steps, as they climbed to the second floor, that this was a welcome distraction. It had been so long since he’d had a clear course of action, an easy decision with an obvious answer. They were going to go up there and find the cat. Or better yet, they wouldn’t find the cat. Fiona puffed out her cheeks and stuck the key in Terrence’s lock. She stopped suddenly and knocked, put her ear to the wood. Yale held his breath, hoping she’d hear new tenants, a cleaning crew, frantic meowing. But she shook her head, turned the key. The living room smelled horrible. Yale couldn’t remember if it was the same horrible—medicine, vomit, cat litter, sweat—as two weeks ago, or if it was something new. Terrence’s furniture was still all in place. A neatly folded sheet still lay on the couch where Yale had left it two weeks ago. Fiona called, “Roscoe!” Quietly, like she was afraid of the answer. Yale went to the kitchen and checked the litter box, which had indeed been used, but not as much as you’d hope. Roscoe had a double plastic bowl—food on one side, water on the other—and both halves were empty. Yale had refilled it himself the morning he left—intentionally overfilled the food side, a mountain of Meow Mix, enough to last a while. The water was the bigger issue. Yale said, “Roscoe?” He ran the faucet to see if the sound might attract him. He looked behind the garbage can, in the cupboards, beside the refrigerator. Fiona was calling still, moving through the apartment. “The toilet’s open,” she called, and Yale understood she meant the cat had a water source if it was smart enough, if it had good balance. There were bottles of pills lined up along the kitchen windows. Painkillers, vitamins, more vitamins, old antibiotics. All half full (he shook a few), all useless. He could grab them for Julian maybe. Or himself. A spider plant wilted on the counter in a little blue pot, and Yale held it under the tap, soaked the soil. Why not. He looked behind the garbage again. In the garbage. Out on the fire escape. Fiona was in the doorway, her face red and wet.

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

  And more wonderful than almost anything else was the fact that Dr. Wolfe was nodding as though this was only to be expected. “Yes,” he said at last. “These are all classic symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy.” He took some more notes, and then looked up, frowning slightly. “But, forgive me, I’m puzzled. This must have been very alarming for you. Why on earth did you not take these symptoms to a doctor?” 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.

• 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)

  The disease itself did not trouble me unduly. The experience of looking after Jacob had taught me that it was a manageable condition. It was also very common. Dr. Wolfe had told me that each year twenty-five thousand people contract epilepsy in Britain alone. It was even a rather distinguished illness: Dostoyevsky, van Gogh, Gustave Flaubert, Edward Lear, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the Great had probably all been epileptics. Later I would learn that Tennyson had also suffered from epilepsy. No wonder I had been drawn to his poetry, with its haunting descriptions of tranced states of mind and of life seen through a veil of unreality. But Tennyson had lived in a terror of the disease, which had darkened his whole life. His brother Edward, also a sufferer, had been confined for years in an asylum for the insane. A hundred years ago, epilepsy was a disgrace; it was thought to be the result of a disordered sexual appetite. Epileptics were thus castrated, circumcised, or incarcerated in Bedlam. But that was no longer true. I had a prescription in my pocket for a drug that would control these symptoms. I might never again have to experience that periodic descent into hell. And even if I still suffered further temporal lobe attacks, at least I would know what was happening to me. By far the most frightening aspect of the whole experience had been the fear of losing my mind. I was, therefore, rather surprised not only that my friends found it difficult to share my relief, but that some positively resisted the diagnosis. This is the only aspect of the disease that I have found truly troubling. Something of the old shibboleths remain. Epilepsy is still, in some sense, an unacceptable disease; as I have found, people need to turn it into something else. Friends will look puzzled and mulish when I explain that it is a purely physical disease, the result of a birth accident. They seem to want it to be the expression of psychological strain or neurosis. They can become quite dogmatic on the subject, even though their knowledge of neurology could be written down on a small postcard. Others simply change the subject if I mention my condition, as though I had made a remark in bad taste. I am quite sure that I would not experience the same kind of reaction if I suffered from diabetes or hypertension.

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

  Not only that, I realized: I had positively enjoyed talking, seemingly to myself, in that dark studio, cut off from the rest of the world by the blinding lights, but conveying my message all the same. I had thought that the school had arrested my progress. I had feared that I was slipping backward into old habits of timidity, but all the time I had been developing a new skill. And if I could do that, I might be capable of other things. Maybe my future was not as hopeless as I had feared. And so, a few weeks later, on the last day of term, I found that I was neither distressed nor frightened to be leaving the school, even though I had no definite plans and no prospect of another job. I had imagined that I would be distraught. But instead I felt a great calm and an occasional flicker of excitement. It was time to go, I acknowledged as I stood with the other members of staff at the back of the hall for the final assembly. I recalled my first morning at the school, when I had stood up in the gallery with the sixth form, looking down at the hundreds of girls in the hall below, and felt suffocated by the all-too-familiar rhythms of institutional life. Against the odds, I had gained something from these years, but now it was time to move on. I listened to the very generous words of the headmistress as she thanked me for my contribution to the school in her detached way, almost as though she were speaking of somebody else. It felt as if I had already gone. Later that morning I was able to joke in my farewell speech to the staff and admire my present: a set of elegant cocktail glasses with dark red stems. I smiled to myself. Not an obvious present for an ex-nun. As I left the school grounds to wait for the bus that had been the bane of my life during the last six years, I felt as though I were beginning a new journey. Other people seemed to progress much more smoothly through life, I reflected wryly, as the bus finally crested the hill and roared toward me. They went through college, chose a career and a partner without all this drama. But that didn’t seem to happen to me. I kept getting derailed, ejected from one job, one lifestyle after another. Doors kept slamming in my face. But had I really wanted to be ordinary; had I really wanted what T. S. Eliot had called “the usual reign”? I forced myself to remember all the times I had been bored and frustrated by the school, despite the regular salary. I couldn’t have it both ways. And now, here I was again, heading into the unknown, and yet I felt in some strange way as though I were back on track.