Admiration

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 Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The controversial conversation piece in which Aldo appeared with the as yet unmartyred St Sebastian hung alongside. Sebastian was a boy of tedious, waxen beauty, with a little loincloth about to tumble down. They had been cleverly posed against a projected backdrop taken from some Tuscan master, but for all the quattrocento piquancy of their gestures they reminded me of nothing so much as those queeny fashion spreads in Tatler and Uomo Vogue. The impression was reinforced by a surge of Trouble for Men across my nostrils and the appearance at biceps level of the luminous pink spectacles of Guy Parvis. For a second I thought I might actually be caught up in one of his Alternative Image TV programmes, and prepared to sidestep the cameras as they zoomed in on Sebastian’s Gillette-smooth profile. But it seemed he was there in a private capacity. I distanced myself even as I was perversely drawn to stare at him, keen to pick up any absurd and memorable remarks. I finished my glass of wine and downed most of another while I looked at the handsome bearded St Laurence with his dinky little gridiron, and the St Stephen who crouched appealingly in a shaft of light while above him the shadowy form of an immense black whom I would have liked to meet held a stone aloft. St Peter was Ashley, who worked out at the Corry, but he was not seen to best advantage upside-down. The bell clacked frequently now and we early browsers became subsumed into the crowd of callers, who greeted each other, kissed, caught up on their news, walked backwards into other guests without apologising and generally, as if they were in a private house where such curiosity would have been unseemly, ignored the pictures. Those who had equipped themselves with a price list were forced into the crude necessity of asking the drinkers to move so as to get some distance on the martyrs or to squinny at the numbered labels. I took another drink and moved downstairs. Here there was a series of life-size nudes, in a sculptural Whitehaven style—martyrs only to the bench and the Nautilus machine—and a set of plates made to illustrate a limited edition of John Gray’s Tombeau d’Oscar Wilde along with Stephen Devlin’s setting of the poem for tenor, string quartet and oboe d’a-more—a martyrdom with a whole teeming afterlife. The photographs were balletic and metaphorical, with a good deal of emphasis on the slim gilt soul aspect and a number of images, in Staines’s most typical style, crossed and half-obscured by the shadows of prison bars.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  In a culture where foundations prefer quick results and time- limited programs, the Zellerbach Family Fund has had the wisdom and courage to recognize the matchless contribution of long-term follow- up studies of children.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  It could be proved, if need were, that these four men had plotted my death; it was to their interest, in any case, to do so. Every transition from one reign to another involved its operations of mopping up; he had taken this task upon himself in order to leave my hands clean. If public opinion demanded a victim, nothing was simpler than to deprive him of his post of Praetorian prefect. He had envisaged such a measure; he was advising me to take it. And if more were needed to conciliate the Senate, he would approve my going as far as relegation to the provinces, or exile. Attianus had been the guardian from whom money could be wheedled, the counselor of my difficult days, the faithful agent; but this was the first time that I had ever looked attentively at that face with its carefully shaven jowls, at those crippled hands tranquilly clasped over the handle of his ebony cane. I knew well enough the different elements of his life as a prosperous citizen: his wife, whom he loved, and whose health was frail; his married daughters and their children, for whom he was modest but tenacious in his ambitions, as he had been for himself; his love of choice dishes; his decided taste for Greek cameos and for young dancing girls. He had given me precedence over all these things: for thirty years his first care had been to protect me, and next to serve me. To me, who had not yet given first place to anything except to ideas or projects, or at the most to a future image of myself, this simple devotion of man to man seemed prodigious and unfathomable. No one is worthy of it, and I am still unable to account for it. I followed his counsel: he lost his post. His faint smile showed me that he expected to be taken at his word. He knew well that no untimely solicitude toward an old friend would ever keep me from adopting the more prudent course; this subtle politician would not have wished me otherwise. Let us not exaggerate the extent of his disgrace: after some months of eclipse, I succeeded in having him admitted to the Senate. It was the greatest honor that I could offer to this man of equestrian rank. He lived to enjoy the easy old age of a wealthy Roman knight, much sought after for his perfect knowledge of families and public affairs; I have often been his guest at his villa in the Alban Hills.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  In order to calm my fears I used to say to myself that the empire could find worse masters; Servianus after all was not without qualities; even the dull Fuscus would one day perhaps be worthy to reign. But all the energy which I had left was summoned to refuse this lie, and I wished to live if only to crush that viper. On coming back to Rome I saw much of Lucius again. In former days I had made commitments to him which ordinarily one hardly troubles to fulfill, but which I had kept. It is not true, however, that I had promised him the imperial purple; such things are not done. But for nearly fifteen years I had paid his debts, hushed up his scandals, and answered his letters without delay; delightful letters they were, but they always ended with requests for money for himself, or for advancement for his friends. He was too much mingled with my life for me to exclude him from it had I wished to do so, but I wished nothing of the sort. His conversation was brilliant: this young man whom people judged superficial had read more, and more intelligently, than the writers who make such works their profession. In everything his taste was exquisite, whether for people, objects, manners, or the most exact fashion of scanning a line of Greek verse. In the Senate, where he was considered able, he had made a reputation as an orator: his speeches were at the same time terse and ornate, and served immediately upon utterance as models for the professors of eloquence. I had had him named praetor, and then consul: he had fulfilled these functions well. Some years earlier I had arranged a marriage for him with the daughter of Nigrinus, one of the consular conspirators executed at the beginning of my reign; that union became the emblem of my policy of conciliation. It was but moderately successful: the young woman complained of being neglected, but she had three children by him, one of whom was a son. To her almost continual repining he would reply with frigid politeness that one marries for one's family's sake and not for oneself, and that so weighty a contract ill affords with the carefree play of love. His complicated system demanded mistresses for display and willing slaves for sensuous delights. He was killing himself in pursuit of pleasure, but was doing so like an artist who destroys himself in completing a masterpiece: it is not for me to reproach him in that.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Before the service began, I thought about all the time I had spent with Walter after he got out. Then the choir sang, and the preacher gave a rousing sermon. He spoke about Walter being pulled away from his family in the prime of his life by lies and bigotry. I told the congregation that Walter had become like a brother to me, that he was brave to trust his life to someone who was as young as I was then. I explained that we all owed Walter something because he had been threatened and terrorized, wrongly accused and wrongly condemned, but he never gave up. He survived the humiliation of his trial and the charges against him. He survived a guilty verdict, death row, and the wrongful condemnation of an entire state. While he did not survive without injury or trauma, he came out with his dignity. I told people that Walter had overcome what fear, ignorance, and bigotry had done to him. He had stood strong in the face of injustice, and his exonerated witness might just make the rest of us a little safer, slightly more protected from the abuse of power and the false accusations that had almost killed him. I suggested to his friends and family that Walter’s strength, resistance, and perseverance were a triumph worth celebrating, an accomplishment to be remembered. I felt the need to explain to people what Walter had taught me. Walter made me understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent. A system that denies the poor the legal help they need, that makes wealth and status more important than culpability, must be changed. Walter’s case taught me that fear and anger are a threat to justice; they can infect a community, a state, or a nation and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous. I reflected on how mass imprisonment has littered the national landscape with carceral monuments of reckless and excessive punishment and ravaged communities with our hopeless willingness to condemn and discard the most vulnerable among us. I told the congregation that Walter’s case had taught me that the death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is, Do we deserve to kill?

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 4: Further, “What things soever were written,” especially of Christ, “were written for our learning,” according to Rom. 15:4. But some of the things written in the Gospels touching Christ’s burial in no wise seem to pertain to our instruction—as that He was buried “in a garden . . .” in a tomb which was not His own, which was “new,” and “hewed out in a rock.” Therefore the manner of Christ’s burial was not becoming. On the contrary, It is written (Is. 11:10): “And His sepulchre shall be glorious.” I answer that, The manner of Christ’s burial is shown to be seemly in three respects. First, to confirm faith in His death and resurrection. Secondly, to commend the devotion of those who gave Him burial. Hence Augustine says (De Civ. Dei i): “The Gospel mentions as praiseworthy the deed of those who received His body from the cross, and with due care and reverence wrapped it up and buried it.” Thirdly, as to the mystery whereby those are molded who “are buried together with Christ into death” (Rom. 6:4). Reply to Objection 1: With regard to Christ’s death, His patience and constancy in enduring death are commended, and all the more that His death was the more despicable: but in His honorable burial we can see the power of the dying Man, who, even in death, frustrated the intent of His murderers, and was buried with honor: and thereby is foreshadowed the devotion of the faithful who in the time to come were to serve the dead Christ. Reply to Objection 2: On that expression of the Evangelist (Jn. 19:40) that they buried Him “as the manner of the Jews is to bury,” Augustine says (Tract. in Joan. cxx): “He admonishes us that in offices of this kind which are rendered to the dead, the custom of each nation should be observed.” Now it was the custom of this people to anoint bodies with various spices in order the longer to preserve them from corruption [*Cf. Catena Aurea in Joan. xix]. Accordingly it is said in De Doctr. Christ. iii that “in all such things, it is not the use thereof, but the luxury of the user that is at fault”; and, farther on: “what in other persons is frequently criminal, in a divine or prophetic person is a sign of something great.” For myrrh and aloes by their bitterness denote penance, by which man keeps Christ within himself without the corruption of sin; while the odor of the ointments expresses good report.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I can finally be who I am.” Our meeting had lasted three hours and both of us were spent emotionally. It was a sad, moving, gallant story, and Karen had told it vividly. Both of us cried as she spoke and both of us ended up smiling and thankful that she had ended on a note that was at least partly upbeat and hopeful. She was on her way to her wedding day. I’d been granted a great privilege to share her life. I wished, as I so often do, that I were a novelist so that I could capture the richness of her feelings and the amazing sweep of changes she had made in her life. As we embraced, I thanked Karen for her generosity and candor. I told her how impressed I was with her, how proud I was of all she’d done, and how much I hoped the years ahead would make up for her past sorrows. She invited me to stay in touch and offered to send me snapshots of their new home. The door was almost closed behind Karen when she turned back and pushed it open. Smiling, she said, “Maybe your next book should be about what happens to all of us when we grow up.” Little did I realize how prophetic her words would turn out to be. • • • AFTER KAREN LEFT, I sat for a long time thinking about the unexpected twists and turns in her life. Did her parents have any idea of what they had started twenty-five years ago when they filed for divorce? If they had known the long-term consequences for their children, would they have done things differently? Would they have divorced? Like most people back then, they probably thought divorce was a minor upheaval in the lives of children. They undoubtedly expected that family life would soon resume its normal course and that parents and children alike would benefit from an end to marital conflict. Surely they did not foresee lasting effects that would extend into the fourth decade of Karen’s life. I thought back on the lovely, wistful child who had tenderly taken care of her distraught mother, younger siblings, and father when he became a “basket case”—and how she had forfeited her own teenage years. I could see her face contorted with grief when in her early twenties she told me how she anguished over whether to leave the young man she had committed to simply because he had been kind to her. Preoccupied with fears of loss, betrayal, and abandonment, she was still locked into the self-sacrificial caregiver role of her childhood and had reinstalled it in her adult relationships with men. But Karen had turned her life around. I was stunned by how much she’d changed since our last meeting.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Untrue is a book with a point of view—namely that whatever else we may think of them, women who reject monogamy are brave, and their experiences and possible motivations are instructive. Not only because female infidelity is far from uncommon but also because the fact of it and our reactions to it are useful metrics of female autonomy, and of the price women continue to pay for seizing privileges that have historically belonged to men. This book is not an exhaustive review of the literature on infidelity, though it does reference the dozens of articles and books I read in a range of fields in an attempt to get my arms around the topic. But for the many studies I cite that suggest female “extra-pair” sexual behavior is a social and reproductive strategy that has served females in particular contexts well over the millennia, there are other studies that argue or suggest otherwise. I am only your guide to my view—informed by the social science and science to which I was drawn and to which I was referred by experts whom I believe are correcting bias in their fields—that what we today call female promiscuity is a behavior with a remarkably long tail, so to speak, a fascinating history and prehistory, and a no less intriguing future. And that it merits open-minded consideration from multiple perspectives. For too long we have handed our sexual problems and peccadillos exclusively to therapists and psychologists, presuming the issues to be personal, even pathological—rooted primarily in our emotional baggage, our families of origin, our “unique difficulties” with trust and commitment—and presuming they have solutions. But these ostensibly most personal matters—how and why we have sex, why we struggle with monogamy—have deep historic and prehistoric underpinnings as well. Biological factors, social control, cultural context, ecologies—female sexuality and our menu of options are shaped by all these factors and more. Rethinking topics as complex as female infidelity and our often heated responses to it arguably requires multiple lenses—sociology, evolutionary biology, primatology, and literary theory are just a few discourses that can enhance our understanding, reframing the adulteress in ways that facilitate greater empathy and understanding of her—and of ourselves.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Sometimes, as Larry’s story shows, the child can rescue himself by finding mentors or summoning the inner strength to become his own parent. Both groups of children enter adulthood with low self-esteem, a hunger for love and human closeness, and badly skewed views of man-woman relationships. Women who are exposed to the sexual acting out of their parents are more likely to become promiscuous starting in their early teens and continuing into their twenties. But in what may be a silver lining to this dark cloud, their promiscuity tapers off as they reach their thirties. Some decide to just stop because they’re afraid of getting hurt or becoming ill. Others find that sex no longer relieves their depression. Still others are lucky enough to meet men who, as one woman put it, “refused to be just the next guy in line.” Two women in the divorced group joined churches with strict standards for moral behavior. “It took the church to keep my legs closed,” one told me seriously. The men raised in chaotic marriages and chaotic divorces also suffer low self-esteem but it’s not usually manifest in promiscuity. Rather, they turn to alcohol and drugs. Unlike their sisters who give up reckless sex, the men’s addictive behaviors overall do not wane as they reach their late twenties and early thirties. Nevertheless, a few of these men and women—six in all in our study—turned their lives around when they joined mainstream churches. None had gone to these churches as children, but here they found the moral guidelines they had been missing as children. They found spouses and a community that provided the support they had always longed for. I left Larry in his early twenties full of admiration for the progress he had achieved in rejecting the alcohol and violence that were the ideals of his adolescent years. But I had more questions than answers about what lay ahead for him. After years of rage in childhood and adolescence, can a young man fully turn his life around? Can he set new goals and sustain his progress by his own efforts? Can he decide to be his own father and carry it off? Larry had been propelled far by his disappointment and anger at his father. His decision to adopt his father as a negative image had energized his grueling work and school program and kept him going. But how would that affect his future relationships with women and in making the important life choices that lay ahead? Considering the view of man-woman relationships that he had experienced in his family, would he be able to become the good husband and father that he aspired to be? Although the lives of all these young people were full of unexpected turns, Larry’s history so far was baffling.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  We were talking, as we did those days after work when we were too exhausted to head home just yet. We talked about his guns, of school, how he might drop out, how the Colt factory in Windsor might be hiring again now that the latest shooting spree was three months done and already old news, we talked of the next game out on Xbox, his old man, his old man’s drinking, we talked of sunflowers, how goofy they looked, like cartoons, Trevor said, but real. We talked about you, about your nightmares, your loosening mind, his face troubled as he listened, which made his pout more defined. A long silence. Then Trevor took out his cell phone, snapped a picture at the colors at the sky’s end, then put it back in his pocket without reviewing what he took. Our eyes met. He flashed an embarrassed smile, then looked away and started picking at a pimple on his chin. “Cleopatra,” he said after a while. “What?” “Cleopatra saw the same sunset. Ain’t that crazy? Like everybody who was ever alive only seen one sun.” He gestured to indicate the whole town, even though we were the only people there far as the eye could see. “No wonder people used to think it was god himself.” “Said who?” “People.” He chewed his lip for a moment. “Sometimes I wanna just go that way forever.” He pointed his chin beyond the sycamores. “Like just psssh.” I studied his arm propped behind him, the thin, flowing muscles, field-toned and burger-fed, shifting as he talked. I flung the last rind from the grapefruit I was peeling off the roof. What about our skeletons, I wanted to ask, how do we get away from them—but thought better of it. “It must suck to be the sun, though,” I said, handing him a pink half. He put the whole half in his mouth. “Hob bob?” “Finish chewing you animal.” He rolled back his eyes and bobbled his head playfully, as if possessed, the clear juice dripping down his chin, his neck, the indent under his Adam’s apple, no larger than a thumbprint, glistening. He swallowed, wiped his mouth with the back of his arm. “How come?” he repeated, serious. “’Cause you never see yourself if you’re the sun. You don’t even know where you are in the sky.” I placed a wedge on my tongue, letting the acid sting the place where I’d bit the inside of my cheek all week for no reason. He looked at me thoughtfully, turned the idea in his head, his lips wet with juice. “Like you don’t even know if you’re round or square or even if you’re ugly or not,” I continued. I wanted it to sound important, urgent—but had no idea if I believed it. “Like you can only see what you do to the earth, the colors and stuff, but not who you are.” I glanced at him.

• From Untrue (2018)

  She grew up to train as a sex therapist and counselor, eventually earning her EdD in family life education from Columbia. After serving on the board of Planned Parenthood, where she met William Masters and Virginia Johnson, Dobbs Butts became the first African American to be trained at the Masters and Johnson Institute. But she brought her very own thinking to the field. Dobbs Butts viewed sexuality through the lens of all the shifts happening in American culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s—the civil rights movement, America’s reckoning with its racist past, and our country’s worship of power and dominance—and committed herself to the project of crossing important and relevant research over into popular culture. Specifically, she wanted black men and women, whose sexualities had so long been mired in stereotypes and misrepresentations, to have access to facts. In 1977, she wrote Ebony magazine’s first feature article on sexuality, “Sex Education: Who Needs It?” and penned other sensationally popular pieces like “Sex and the Modern Black Couple” for that magazine. She went on to contribute to Jet and Essence, where she wrote their most popular monthly column, Sexual Health, from 1980 to 1982. She repeatedly took on the massive and frequently controversial task of confronting the same sexual hypocrisies Frenchie Davis calls out today. As Dobbs Butts observed, “Americans snicker at sexual references in polite society, yet are embarrassed to talk about their sexual lives, especially if they are experiencing inadequacies or discomfort.” Her work went a far distance to disentangle black sexuality from the death grip of controlling images, and in many ways she, like Wyatt, paved the way for today’s most important, provocative African American female storytellers and image makers.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The love for statues of classical antiquity, those great peaceful objects which seem so solid and yet are so easily destroyed, is an uncommon taste among private collectors in these agitated times, cut off from both past and future. The new possessor of the bas-relief of Antonianos, acting on the advice of experts, has just had it cleaned by a specialist whose light, slow rubbing by hand has removed the rust and moisture stains from the marble and restored its soft gleam, like that of alabaster or of ivory.] * Addition of 1958. The second of these masterpieces is the famous sardonyx known as the Marlborough Gem, because it once belonged to that family collection, now dispersed. For more than thirty years this fine intaglio seemed to have been lost, or hidden away, but in January of 1952 it came to light in a public sale in London; the informed taste of the great collector Giorgio Sangiorgi has brought it back to Rome. I am indebted to him for the chance to see and to handle this unique gem. A signature, though no longer complete, can be read around the edge; it is thought, and doubtless correctly, to be that of the sculptor of the bas-relief, Antonianos of Aphrodisias. So skilfully has the master-carver enclosed that perfect profile within the narrow compass of a sardonyx that this bit of stone stands as testimony to a great lost art quite as much as does any statue or any relief. The proportions of the work make us forget the dimensions of the object. At some time during the Byzantine period the gem was set in a nugget of solid gold, and in this form passed from collector to collector, none of whose names we know, until it reached Venice; it is mentioned as part of a great seventeenth-century collection there. In the next century it was purchased by the celebrated dealer in antiques, Gavin Hamilton, and brought to England, whence it now returns to Rome, its starting-point. Of all objects still above ground today it is the one of which we can assume with some assurance that it has often been held in Hadrian's hands. One has to go into the most remote corners of a subject in order to discover the simplest things, and things of most general literary interest.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I asked the father whether he had ever thought of asking his daughter to fly to his home. He said sharply, “I don’t want my little girl alone on an airplane.” I was very impressed with his sensitivity and concern and so I said, “Your child is very fortunate to have you for her father.” As I glanced at the man, I was startled to see tears rolling slowly down his cheek. “Doctor, you’re crying!” “You’re the only person in the whole world who has ever said that to me,” he said. “Everyone else tells me that I’m a fool.” There may be many sensitive, loving fathers or mothers who would be willing to make the necessary sacrifice in order to fly to visit their children. Perhaps no one ever asked them. I FOURTEEN Sex and Drugs n Larry’s and Carol’s stories I talked a bit about drug and alcohol abuse during adolescence and the astonishing rise in sexual promiscuity among many of the young girls from both chaotic intact and chaotic postdivorce families. But we still have not delved into the heart of these destructive behaviors and what the child gains from them psychologically. Paula shows us the inner logic of running out of control. The next time I saw Paula she was fifteen and looked about twenty-five. She was thin, very attractive, and very, very precocious. Her green eyes, lined with heavy black eyeliner, were bloodshot, whether from her incessant smoking or from some other drug I could not tell. With her black, short, sleeveless dress artfully falling from one shoulder and her legs encased in high red leather boots, she was the picture of what her exasperated mother had warned me of a week earlier: “Don’t be surprised, Judy. She looks like a slut.” With bravado, constantly tossing her long, curly hair into and then out of her eyes, she told me of her numerous boyfriends and of her adventures partying and evading the police and the school authorities. She boasted about being high every day and of the huge quantities of alcohol that she and her friends drank. In describing a confused mixture of sexual exploits and physical fights, she told me, “I give as good as I get.” She looked very tough and seemed utterly lost. I remember being saddened and very troubled by Paula at this time, but I wasn’t surprised. Her mother told me that the trouble started the summer after sixth grade when Paula turned twelve. In the next two years, Paula accumulated a police record for possession of drugs, disrupting the peace, and drinking in public. She had been suspended from school several times for possession of marijuana and for stealing from and harassing other students. She was on her final probation. One day, Paula’s mother unexpectedly came home early from work to find her thirteen-year-old daughter in bed with two seventeen-year-old boys.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  But now, twenty-five years later, I am face-to-face with a young man who in no way resembles the furiously angry little boy who attacked his mother so relentlessly. At age thirty-two, Larry is calm, self-assured, and—as he tells me—outrageously happy. He is married to a woman “who brought love and laughter into my life.” They are expecting their second child and he has a good job as a structural engineer, which he enjoys. As I think back to our periodic visits through the years, I am frankly amazed at his turnaround. Here was a child who set out to become a carbon copy of his abusive father and who fell into every trap that violent, dysfunctional families can set for their children. And yet he is a survivor—a child of divorce who drew on his own inner resources in adulthood to break the mold established by his unhappy parents. The Scars of ViolenceUNLIKE MOST CHILDREN in the study who don’t remember events around the breakup, those adults who remembered these events in vivid detail had all witnessed violence in their homes when they were very young. The images of those episodes did not fade away decades after the divorce. We have only recently begun to understand the awful, lasting influence of seeing one parent hit or hurt by the other, the suffering that it causes to the child and how detrimental it is to mental health.1 Many judges who deal with such families do not understand that merely witnessing violence is harmful to children; the images are forever etched into their brains. Even a single episode of violence is long remembered in detail. In fact, there is accumulating scientific evidence that witnessing violence or being abused physically or verbally literally alters brain development, resulting in a hyperactive emotional system.2 But on the hopeful side, Larry’s experience shows that even the worst kinds of marriages and divorces do not condemn children to a life of everlasting misery. Dramatic turnarounds happen, especially in the latter part of the third decade of life, among youngsters who appear for many years to have been failing in their schooling and social adjustment. Larry’s struggles with the long-lasting effects of both the marriage and postdivorce family take us to the heart of the challenges that the child faces in growing up. Perhaps most strikingly, Larry’s experiences reveal that divorce is not the quick solution to a bad marriage that many people understand it to be. High-conflict marriages often lead to high-conflict families after divorce. Postbreakup, the children are not better protected and the bitter fighting continues. Ironically, despite the recent proliferation of legal and mental health experts, the divorce has the effect of leaving the child to find his own way in a treacherous labyrinth in which he can easily become lost and harmed.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I was stunned by his body, but thrilled to see him dressed up, warm and hard, privately beautiful in his uniform. He sat down again to lace up soft-soled black shoes, and leant over me before going and kissed me with a charming assumed air, as if I were a country girl with whom he had enjoyed a night of passion before riding off to join his regiment at dawn. At the door he paused and buffed up his shoes on the backs of his trouser-legs in a schoolboyish way. ‘I’ll be along soon,’ he said. When he had gone I jumped up and walked around stretching, flapping my hands as championship swimmers do before taking up positions. I gazed out into the warm, still night, and heard twelve strike somewhere far off, just as I used to at Oxford and so rarely did in London. I also peered at the one picture in the room, which I’d not been able to make out from the bed. It was an Aerofilms view of Ludlow—the circuit of the roofless castle, the silver loop of the river, the massive church tower foreshortened at the head of its street-long shadow. It had that vacant quality that the photographs of chateaux and provincial towns have in the compartments of French trains: sunlit prospects of places one will never visit and which could never look the same again. Then I settled down to read about Charles’s doings long ago. We have been in Dekatil two days now, pleasantly busy with tax matters, crop inspections & medical help. I think perhaps this is the fulfilment of my dream, or the nearest I can hope to come to it. The Nuba people are enchanting, with an openness & simplicity sadly lacking among the people of the north: indeed the contrast with the past few months could hardly be greater. Those swathed Muslim figures seem from this distance to be the embodiment of restraint & secrecy, whereas here no one wears a stitch of clothing, with the exception of a rare string of beads about the waist. I saw one pair of adolescent boys—very tall & elegant—sauntering along with their fingers intertwined, wearing scarves of red cotton tied round their upper arms. One old man, too, had a watch, & encouraged people to ask him the time, which had to be done in a very respectful manner. Then he wd listen to its ticking, & give a knowing & superior smile.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But little by little a newcomer was taking hold, a stage director and manager. I was beginning to know the names of my actors, and could arrange plausible entrances for them, or exits; I cut short superfluous lines, and came gradually to avoid the most obvious effects. Last, I learned not to indulge too much in monologue. And gradually, in turn, my actions were forming me. My military successes might have earned me enmity from a lesser man than Trajan. But courage was the only language which he grasped at once; its words went straight to his heart. He came to see in me a kind of second-in-command, almost a son, and nothing of what happened later could wholly separate us. On my side, certain of my newly conceived objections to his views were, at least momentarily, put aside or forgotten in presence of the admirable genius which he displayed with the armies. I have always liked to see a great specialist at work; the emperor, in his own field, had a skill and sureness of hand second to none. Placed at the head of the First Legion Minervia, most glorious of them all, I was assigned to wipe out the last enemy entrenchments in the region of the Iron Gates. After we had surrounded and taken the citadel of Sarmizegethusa I followed the emperor into that subterranean hall where the counselors of King Decebalus had just ended their last banquet by swallowing poison; Trajan gave me the order to set fire to that weird heap of dead men. The same evening, on the steep heights of the battlefield, he transferred to my finger the diamond ring which Nerva had given him, and which had come to be almost a token of imperial succession. That night I fell asleep content. My newly won popularity diffused over my second stay in Rome something of the feeling of euphoria which I was to know again, but to a much stronger degree, during my years of felicity. Trajan had given me two million sesterces to distribute in public bounty; naturally it was not enough, but by that time I was administering my own estate, which was considerable, and money difficulties no longer troubled me. I had lost most of my ignoble fear of displeasing. A scar on my chin provided a pretext for wearing the short beard of the Greek philosophers. In my attire I adopted a simplicity which I carried to greater extremes after becoming emperor; my time of bracelets and perfumes had passed. That this simplicity was itself still an attitude is of little importance. Slowly I accustomed myself to plainness for its own sake, and to that contrast, which I was later to value, between a collection of gems and the unadorned hands of the collector.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was a narrow, dark hall, the stairs going up ahead to the left, an old-fashioned coat-and-stick stand, of the kind on which one could conceivably sit, behind the door, and a high, marbletopped table against the opposite wall. On it was a salver with letters stamped for the post—one to the bank, another to a person called Shillibeer with the outlandish address of E7. Above it was a gloomy mirror in a gilt frame. The rest of the panelled walls were covered with pictures, hung one above the other to the cornice, and ascending the stairs too, where their glass collected some light from an upstairs window. There were oils, water-colours, drawings, photographs, all mixed up. There was an unusually large David Roberts of a Nubian temple, choked almost to the eaves with sand, with blue-robed figures giving a sense of its stunted, colossal scale. I was looking at a lovely pastel head of a boy which hung beside it, when the door at the back of the hall opened and Charles and the paramilitary butler appeared in it, issuing from a brighter room beyond, which cast new light over the bizarre, threadbare rugs on the floor. ‘Rosalba,’ said Charles, shuffling forward before greeting me. ‘My dear William. I do hope Lewis wasn’t rude to you. He can be most cantankerous at times. Can’t you, Lewis?’ Lewis had a look of being above such things. Following patiently behind, his square moustached head, with its cropped greying hair, indicated no emotion. ‘You never said he was coming.’ ‘Oh, nonsense, nonsense—I told you days ago I would be having an interesting young guest for tea for two. My word, you’re jolly brown, young fellow.’ We stood now in front of the mirror and I looked in, needlessly, to confirm what he was saying. We were having an early May of wonderful weather, and I was already as dark as some of the half-caste boys I showered with at the Corry. My hair, though, grew lighter, and my eyes too, as I met my own glance, appeared arrestingly pale. It was that faintly depraved effect I admired in James’s thin friend at the baths. Charles laid a hand heavily on my shoulder. ‘Kind of sand-brown, isn’t it. Jolly good, jolly good.’ He also indulged the mirror’s grouping of us for a moment, his eye flinching from the stare of the taller Lewis, who hung about behind us. There was evidently a strange, and I thought pathetic, story behind all this. ‘Let’s go into the library,’ Charles said, pushing me forward as a kind of support. ‘We’ll have tea in there, Lewis, please.’ ‘You do realise I’m cleaning the silver?’ Lewis complained. ‘Well, it won’t hurt to have a break—and I’m sure you’d like a cup yourself, you know. Then you can get back to cleaning the silver; what’s left of it.’

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The policy of conquest on which it was known that my cousin proposed to launch Rome, the regrouping of troops which began, and the progressive tightening of discipline all served to keep the army in a state of excited expectancy. Those Danubian legions functioned with the precision of newly greased military machines; they bore no resemblance to the sleepy garrisons which I had known in Spain. Still more important, the army's attention had ceased to center upon palace quarrels and was turned instead to the empire's external affairs; our troops no longer behaved like a band of lictors ready to acclaim or to murder no matter whom. The most intelligent among the officers attempted to trace some general plan in these reorganizations in which they took part, hoping to foresee the future, and not their own prospects alone. There were, however, a goodly number of absurdities exchanged by way of comment upon these initial events, and strategic planning as idle as it was ill-founded smeared the surface of the tables at each evening meal. For these professionals, with their firm belief in the beneficence of our authority and in the mission of Rome to govern the world, Roman patriotism assumed brutal forms to which I was not yet accustomed. On the frontiers, just where, for the moment at least, address was needed to conciliate certain of the nomad chieftains, the soldier completely eclipsed the statesman; exaction of labor and requisitions in kind gave rise to abuses too generally condoned. Thanks to incessant divisions among the barbarians the situation to the northeast was about as favorable as it ever could be; I doubt if even the wars which followed have improved matters there to any extent. Frontier incidents cost us few losses, and these were disquieting only because they were continuous. Let us admit that this perpetual vigilance was useful in any case for whetting the military spirit. All the same, I was convinced that a lesser expenditure, coupled with somewhat greater mental effort on our part, would have sufficed to subdue some chieftains and to win others to us. I decided to devote myself especially to this latter task, which everyone else was neglecting.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Farther back, beyond Trajan and Nerva, now become officially my father and my grandfather, I looked for example even to those twelve Caesars so mistreated by Suetonius: the clear-sightedness of Tiberius, without his harshness; the learning of Claudius, without his weakness; Nero's taste for the arts, but stripped of all foolish vanity; the kindness of Titus, stopping short of his sentimentality; Vespasian's thrift, but not his absurd miserliness. These princes had played their part in human affairs; it devolved upon me, to choose hereafter from among their acts what should be continued, consolidating the best things, correcting the worst, until the day when other men, either more or less qualified than I, but charged with equal responsibility, would undertake to review my acts likewise. The dedication of the Temple of Venus and Rome was a kind of triumph, celebrated by chariot races, public spectacles, and distribution of spices and perfumes. The twenty-four elephants which had transported the enormous blocks of building stone, reducing thereby the forced labor of slaves, figured in the procession, great living monoliths themselves. The date chosen for this festival was the anniversary of Rome's birth, the eighth day following the Ides of April in the eight hundred and eighty-second year after the founding of the City. Never had a Roman spring been so intense, so sweet and so blue. On the same day, with graver solemnity, as if muted, a dedicatory ceremony took place inside the Pantheon. I myself had revised the architectural plans, drawn with too little daring by Apollodorus: utilizing the arts of Greece only as ornamentation, like an added luxury, I had gone back for the basic form of the structure to primitive, fabled times of Rome, to the round temples of ancient Etruria. My intention had been that this sanctuary of All Gods should reproduce the likeness of the terrestrial globe and of the stellar sphere, that globe wherein are enclosed the seeds of eternal fire, and that hollow sphere containing all. Such was also the form of our ancestors' huts where the smoke of man's earliest hearths escaped through an orifice at the top. The cupola, constructed of a hard but lightweight volcanic stone which seemed still to share in the upward movement of flames, revealed the sky through a great hole at the center, showing alternately dark and blue. This temple, both open and mysteriously enclosed, was conceived as a solar quadrant.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Just talking about polyamory and CNM was making me feel threatened and defensive. I wondered how people actually lived it. And I had to admire the polyamorous in particular. Not only for their commitment to finding another way and making it work but also for the pointed radicalism of their stance. To them, binary thinking and the dyad—the guiding principles of our entire thought system about sex, intimacy, and relationships—are relics. They reject our Northern Star. How did we get here? To the point, as a culture, where we conduct and attend workshops on consensual non-monogamy? And to the point where consensual non-monogamy is a thing? According to researcher and historian of CNM Elisabeth Sheff, the “first wave” of intentional non-monogamy experiments was initiated by Romantic poets and then refined by transcendentalists, who brought their ideas about group living and group sex to life in experimental communities, including the progressive Brook Farm, a free-love community founded by a former Unitarian minister with the help of Nathaniel Hawthorne; John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community, which emphasized group-based “marriage” and sexuality, and where kids lived together in a communal children’s house; and the Nashoba experimental community, founded by Frances Wright in 1826, which brought together freed blacks and whites “to work and make love” on a large farm as a way to confront racism. And yet what Sheff calls the “second wave” of CNM—the fringe-y free love, communal living, open relationships, and swinging movements of the 1970s—seemed like a radical break with tradition. There was a lot of fuss in the mainstream about “living together,” which seems quaint today. And most people who weren’t “free lovers” were likely to keep it to themselves if they fumbled monogamy, in part because couples therapy itself was not really even a “thing” until recently (there were only three thousand family and marital therapists in the US in 1970, whereas by May 2017, the official figure was nearly forty-three thousand). Anyone with marital problems, and anyone interested in issues of sexuality and infidelity, let alone openly discussed and agreed-upon sexual non-exclusivity, did not have the sheer number of advocates, expert voices, or experienced practitioners and advisors that they do today. Indeed, the term “consensual non-monogamy” seems to have been used for the first time as recently as 2000, when academic psychologists writing a paper on the swinger lifestyle introduced it, almost as an aside. Sure, the phrase was coined because it described something that was actually going on, but it was going on in a stigmatized subculture (well, in two of them—as Kaupp, Moran, and Savage all point out, gay men and swingers were into CNM long before we called it that).