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 Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Synagogue, which is a Greek word, is rendered in Latin congregatio. By this name then the Jews were accustomed to call not only the gathering together of people, but also the house where they met together to hear the word of God; as we call by the name of Church, both the place and the company of the faithful. But there is this difference between the synagogue which is called congregation, and the Church which is interpreted convocation, that flocks and cattle, and any thing else can be gathered together in one, but only rational beings can be called together. Accordingly the Apostolical doctors thought right to call a people which was distinguished by the superior dignity of a new grace rather by the name of Church, than Synagogue. But rightly also was the fact of His being magnified by those present proved, by actual evidence of word and deed, as it follows, And he was magnified by all. ORIGEN. But you must not think that they only were happy, and that you are deprived of Christ’s teaching. For now also throughout the world He teaches through His instruments, and is now more glorified by all men, than at that time when those only in one province were gathered together. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. He communicates the knowledge of Himself to those among whom He was brought up according to the flesh. As it follows, And he came to Nazareth. THEOPHYLACT. That He might teach us to benefit and instruct first our brethren, then to extend our kindness to the rest of our friends. BEDE. They flocked together on the Sabbath day in the synagogues, that, resting from all worldly occupations, they might set themselves down with a quiet mind to meditate on the precepts of the Law. Hence it follows, And he entered as was his custom on the Sabbath day into the synagogue. AMBROSE. The Lord in every thing so humbled Himself to obedience, that He did not despise even the office of a reader, as it follows, And he rose up to read, and there was delivered unto him the book, &c. He received the book indeed, that He might shew Himself to be the same who spoke in the Prophets, and that He might stop the blasphemies of the wicked, who say that there is one God of the Old Testament, another of the New; or who say that Christ had His beginning from a virgin. For how did He begin from a virgin, who spoke before that virgin was? ORIGEN. He opens not the book by chance, and finds a chapter containing a prophecy of Himself, but by the providence of God. Hence it follows, And when he had opened the book, he found the place, &c. (Is. 61:1.)

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

  AMBROSE. And indeed if you read it thus, “In none in Israel have I found so great faith,” the meaning is simple and easy. But if according to the Greek, “Not even in Israel have I found so great faith,” faith of this kind is preferred even to that of the more elect, and those that see God. BEDE. But he speaks not of Patriarchs and Prophets in times far back, but of the men of the present age to whom the faith of the centurion is preferred, because they were instructed in the precepts of the Law and the Prophets, but he with no one to teach him of his own accord believed. AMBROSE. The faith of the master is proved, and the health of the servant established, as it follows, And they that were sent returning to the house, found the servant whole that had been sick. It is possible then that the good deed of a master may advantage his servants, not only through the merit of faith, but the practice of discipline. BEDE. Matthew explains these things more fully, saying, that when our Lord said to the centurion, Go thy way, and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee, the servant was healed in the self-same hour. But it is the manner of the blessed Luke, to abridge or even purposely to pass by whatever he sees plainly set forth by the other Evangelists, but what he knows to be omitted by them, or briefly touched upon, to more carefully explain. AMBROSE. Mystically, by the centurion’s servant is signified that the Gentile people who were enthralled by the chain of worldly bondage, and diseased with deadly passions, are to be healed by the mercy of the Lord. BEDE. But the centurion, whose faith is preferred to Israel, represents the elect from the Gentiles, who as it were attended by their hundred soldiers, are exalted by their perfection of spiritual virtues. For the number hundred, which is transferred from the left to the righta, is frequently put to signify the celestial life. These then must pray to the Lord for those who are still oppressed with fear, in the spirit of bondage. But we of the Gentiles who believe can not ourselves come to the Lord, whom we are unable to see in the flesh, but ought to approach by faith; we must send the elders of the Jews, that is, we must by our suppliant entreaties gain as patrons the greatest men of the Church, who have gone before us to the Lord, who bearing us witness that we have a care to build up the Church, may intercede for our sins. It is well said that Jesus was not far from the house, for his salvation is nigh unto them that fear him, and he who rightly uses the law of nature, in that he does the things which he knows to be good, approaches nigh unto Him who is good.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  There meseemed to be suddenly caught up in a dream of ecstasy, and to see many persons in a temple, and a woman about to enter, with the tender attitude of a mother, saying: “My son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold thy father and I sought thee sorrowing”; 5 and as here she was silent, that which first appeared, disappeared. Then appeared to me another woman, 6 with those waters adown her cheeks which grief distils when it rises in one by reason of great

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X X V I The flames redden under Dante’s shadow and the amazed souls gather to him, careful, however, not to issue from the flame. One of them has barely questioned Dante, when a group, circling the mountain in the opposite direction, meets them with a brief salutation, and each group alike proclaims a warning example of lust; after which they sweep past each other like flocks of birds, and continue to utter the wail and song suited to their state. But this does not prevent their drawing again to Dante, who tells them his tale and questions them as to their state. When the souls have somewhat recovered from their amazement, one of them explains that the group accompanying the Poet failed to restrain their carnal appetites within the limits prescribed by the social institutions of humanity, whereas the other group had not even observed the laws laid down by nature. Dante’s interlocutor is Guido Guinicelli, the founder (or precursor) of the new style of Tuscan poetry, the father of Dante and of his betters; to whom Dante renders his passionate homage of affection and loyalty. But he points to the shade of the Troubadour Arnaut Daniel as superior to himself and superior to all Provençal rivals by as much as the new Tuscan school excels the old school of Guittone of Arezzo. Then, with a petition for Dante’s prayers, he yields his place to Arnaut himself; who tells of his state, in his own Provençal tongue; and in his turn implores Dante’s prayers. WHILE WE WERE thus advancing, one in front of the other, along the brink, often the good Master said: “Give heed, let my skill avail thee.” On my right shoulder the sun was beating, that already with his rays was changing the whole face of the west from azure to white; and with my shadow, ruddier I made the flames appear, and even at so slight a sign many shades I saw, as they passed, give heed. This was the cause which gave them an opening to speak of me; and one to the other they began to say: “He doth not seem a shadowy body.” Then certain of them made towards me, so far as they could, ever on their guard not to come forth where they would not be burned. “O thou that goest behind the others, 1 not for being slacker but perchance for reverence, make answer unto me who in thirst and fire do burn; nor alone to me is thine answer needful, for all these have greater thirst for it than Indian or Ethiop for cold water.

• From Escape (2007)

  Linda didn’t envy the mud ducks at all. She looked stricken that they had dared do this. Daring had nothing to do with it for me. I was frustrated that they could do something I couldn’t. Linda went over to talk to them, and it was the by now very muddy redheaded girl who spoke to her first. She said her name was Laura, and then she rattled off the names of her little brothers and sisters. Laura looked over to us and said, “Why don’t you guys get in the mud, too?” Linda told her that our mom would get mad at us if we got muddy. Laura seemed perplexed. What we were saying made no sense to her at all. When the novelty of splashing around in the muddy stream wore off, we asked her if she wanted to play dolls. She said she didn’t have any dolls. I couldn’t believe it. “You don’t have any dolls? What do you play with?” Laura shrugged. She didn’t need dolls to play dolls. She picked up a crooked little stick from the ground and walked over to Mama’s flower garden and plucked a flower. “See, this is her skirt and this little blossom can be her hat.” Next she snapped a blossom off a flower and put it on the stick. Then she found another flower to make a skirt. Now the stick girl had a flounced hat and skirt. I was impressed. Laura had taken a stick and made it into one of the best dolls I had ever seen. “All I have to do to change her clothes is pick another flower.” I certainly couldn’t change clothes as much with my real dolls as she could with her stick ones. Linda, Annette, and I quickly found sticks to make our own dolls. We spent the rest of the afternoon playing with Laura. At dinner that night we talked nonstop about our new friend. In the years ahead, even Mama came to love Laura. She would say that her daughters didn’t fight as much when she was around. The first day of school finally came. My mother took me to my classroom and watched while I picked out my desk. She said she was proud that I was starting first grade. The door to our classroom opened a bit and I saw one of my classmates stick out her tongue at the girl in the doorway, whom I couldn’t see. Then I heard her exclaim, “Ooh, she has red hair.” Laura came in and found a seat, but I could tell she was shy being around so many new people. Not only were we in the same class, but we rode the bus to school every day for the entire year. I was so happy! Having her on the bus helped me feel safe.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Johnson was the only junior senator over his long career whom he referred to as a “disciple.” But the friendship went deeper than that. After attending a hunting party that Johnson had organized in Texas, Russell wrote to him, “Ever since I reached home I have been wondering if I would wake up and find that I had just been dreaming that I had made a trip to Texas. Everything was so perfect that it is difficult to realize that it could happen in real life.” In 1950 the Korean War broke out and there was pressure on the Armed Services Committee to form a subcommittee to investigate the military’s preparedness for the war. Such a subcommittee had been formed during World War II and chaired by Harry Truman, and it was through that chairmanship that Truman had become famous and risen to power. The current chairman of the Armed Services Committee was Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland. Tydings would naturally assume the chairmanship of the subcommittee, since it would be a great platform for publicity. Johnson approached Tydings with a proposal: Tydings was facing a reelection campaign that year, and Johnson offered to chair the subcommittee only up to the time of the election, allowing Tydings to focus on winning it. Then he would step aside and let Tydings have the position. Tydings, protective of the powers he had accrued, declined Johnson’s offer. But then Dick Russell met with him and said something to cause Tydings to change his mind. Johnson was named the chairman, a stunning coup for a senator who had been on the job for only a year and a half, and he would hold on to the job for quite a while, as Tydings lost his reelection bid. As chairman Johnson was suddenly receiving national public exposure, and journalists covering the Senate discovered that he was a master at handling the press. He carefully guarded the findings of the subcommittee, allowing no leaks to journalists. He surrounded its work with tremendous mystery and drama, giving the impression that the committee was uncovering some real dirt on the military. He doled out information and reports to a select group of powerful journalists who had written articles that he had approved of. The other journalists had to fight for any news crumbs he deigned to offer. The junior senator began to fascinate the press corps—he was tough yet sympathetic to the journalists’ job. And most important, he knew how to give them a good story. Soon some of them were writing about him as a zealous patriot, a future political force to be reckoned with. Now Russell could properly defend his elevation of Johnson—the senator from Texas had done a great job and had finally gotten the Senate some positive publicity. In May and June of 1951, Johnson and Russell worked closely together on the recall of General MacArthur from Korea. Now Russell had a firsthand view of Johnson’s staff, and he was

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Jim sees a large, blond, well-dressed man. Jim walks very slowly toward the open window. “You look good enough to eat,” the man calls out. “Where you headed?” “Nowhere—just hanging out.” “Want to get in and talk?” Jim doesn't. He wants to study the man further. If he even gets in the car, and the man's a cop, he'll have violated a condition of his probation. “You've got a gorgeous body, worth paying for,” the man says. Jim loves to hear his body praised. He stretches it. “Can we get together?” the man asks. “Say, you're not a cop, are you?” Jim laughs. “Fuck no—are you?” “Of course not.” As verification, he allows his hand to dangle out the window and touch Jim's groin lightly. “Let's go to my place.” “I don't do anything,” Jim says. “I don't want you to,” the man says. 6:17 P.M. Laurel Canyon. Someone's Home. “Actually I'm a very well-known writer. I've written several books.” The man's home is all brown leather and plastic; glass windows for walls. Trees protect it all. Drawings and photographs decorate the bedroom. “Yes,” the large blond man continues, “I'm told I'm a very talented writer. So you see, I have my … intellect, and you, well, you have your body—that's your talent. We both have something beautiful.” Jim lies naked on the man's bed. The man sits beside him fully dressed. “Of course I'd like to have a body like yours,” the man goes on—defensively, Jim knows, because he desires Jim and will pay to have him and Jim does not desire him, “but not if it meant—well—that I'd be not as … creative—smart— as—well—… People with beautiful bodies aren't very— … They– …” Jim listens with secret amusement. And indeed he believes in the construction of his body as equal art form. Determined hours of thrusting and pushing iron. The result, the muscular body, is put on display; his prize will be to be desired. His naked brown body is stark on the white sheets. Jim feels the man's adoring tongue over his flesh. Afterwards, the man wants to arrange to see him again. But Jim will not commit himself. Paying him twenty dollars, the man tells Jim: “I want to give you more than we agreed—but I don't have any more cash with me. I'll give you a check. What's your name?” “It's—… Skip the check,” Jim says. VOICE OVER: Interview 1 VOICE OVER: Interview 1 A WRITER FOR a literary magazine calls me up about an interview. I'm wary. I ask him to send me some of the interviews he's done. They're good, and with writers I know. When he calls up again, I agree. My place or his? His. I arrive at the building. Two-story Spanish-style apartments, gardens with bleeding flowers kept neat by—of course—an oriental gardener: like a forties movie. Barbara Stanwyck might answer the doorbell.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The Corks were both “climbers,” he in business, she in society; they seemed to me fascinating shams. I especially admired the way Kevin’s mother, so obviously a bohemian, hard drinker and hell raiser, had toned down her exuberance enough to win invitations to a few polite “functions,” those given by the Women’s Club if not by the Steinway Club (the Steinway pretended to be nothing but a little gathering of ladies who liked to play four-hand versions of “Mister Haydn’s” symphonies, though it was in fact the highest social pinnacle). In pursuit of such heights, Mrs. Cork had reduced her damns and hells by the end of the week with us to darns and hecks. I had to admire the way Mrs. Cork was pretending to be shocked by the innocent improprieties that so excited my stepmother. I could tell Mrs. Cork had palled around with real screwballs, even unwed couples—it was just a sense I had. When I took her out one day in a motorboat alone, she and I happily discussed opera. We cut the motor and drifted. I relaxed and became animated to the point of effeminacy; she relaxed and became coarser. “Oh, my boy,” she promised me in her brogue, “you want to hear fine singing, I’ll play you my John McCormack records, make you weep your damn eyes out of their bloody sockets. That ‘Lucevan le stelle,’ it’ll freeze your balls.” I shrieked with delight—we were conspirators who’d somehow found ourselves stranded together here in a world of unthrillable souls. I dreamed of running off and becoming a great singer; I walked through the woods and vocalized. Tonight we had not yet made our rapport explicit, but I was already wise to her. She had through circumstance ended up not on the La Scala stage but in this American cottage, married to an affable, overweight businessman. Now her job was to ingratiate herself with people who would help her husband in his career (lawyer for industry); she was retaining just enough brogue and temperament to be a “character.” Characters—conventional women with minor eccentricities—flourished in our world, as Mrs. Cork had no doubt observed. But she’d failed to notice that the characters were all old, rich and pedigreed. Newcomers, especially those of moderate means, were expected to form an attractive but featureless chorus behind our few madcap divas. “Time for bed, young fella,” my father said at last.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  What a splendid summation, both of this work’s consolations and of its strange lingering suspense. Will our boy survive this boy’s own harrowing story? Does Little Nell still live? We feel a worried breathless interest in this child, left too long to his own brilliant devices. We have enjoyed a kid’s perspective, but one infused with an oracle’s overview, with the aged Casanova’s sensory knowingness. We hear the complaint of someone perpetually unloved, but he has sung all that in a Siren’s magnetic tones, a voice literally irresistible to any passing human ear. The dare is invitational. We believe in his pain but are thrilled to the point of love, admiring how that pain explains itself. This schism helps account for the famously complicated ethics of the work’s ending. At last our narrator seems to have found, only to discard, his very own admiring married man with children. “Daddy? Finally got your full attention. And now—you listening?—you’re fired. No severance package, either, chump. So long, Pop.” All along, this boy’s upper vocal register has been wonderfully complicated by the ventriloquism of his looking back and down on himself, by his having turned forty. He has found a safe place of his own. He has remained deeply engaged and bitterly amused by the comic sadness of his own first years. When we read Ben Franklin’s autobiography we know that everything turned out all right for the suffering typesetting boy, because we bought the story of Ben Franklin; the kid did okay. In the way of these things, given the saving adoption agency run by Art itself, and generously supplanted by completest trust fund Memory, this book contains at least one kind father figure. —That turns out to be none of the priests, counselors, professors, roommates, hoodlums who push forward wanting to lead or corrupt this child. No, the best dad present is the boy himself, matured into the wondrous teller of his own tale.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  He had a handsome face projected onto too much flesh, black hair that geysered up at the end of the formal walkway of his part, large red hands that went white at the knuckles when he picked something up (a glass of whiskey, say) and a tender, satirical manner toward his wife, as though he were a lazy dreamer who’d been stirred into action by this spitfire. She said damn and hell and drank whiskey and had two moods—rage (she was always shouting at Kevin) and mock rage, an appealingly ardent sort of simmering, Virtue Stymied: “All right then, be gone with you,” she’d say, feisty and submissive, or “Of course you’ll be having another drink.” It was all playacting and intended to be viewed as such. She had “temperament” because she was Irish and had been trained as an opera singer. If she wandered into a room and found Kevin’s T-shirt balled and hurled in a chair, she’d start bellowing, “Kevin O’Malley Cork, get in here and get in here now . Look alive!” Nothing could restrain these outbursts, not even the knowledge that Kevin was out of earshot. Her arms would stiffen, her clenched fists would dig into her slim flanks and bunch up her dress, her nose would pale and her thin hair, the color of weathered bricks, would seem to go into shock and rise to reveal still more of her scalp. Because of her operatic training, her voice penetrated every corner of the house and had an alto after-hum that buzzed on in the round metal tabletop from Morocco. During the mornings she chain-smoked, drank coffee and sat around in a silk robe that revealed and highlighted her bony body. With her freckled face, devoid of makeup, rising above this slippery red sheen, she looked like an angry young man trapped in travesty as a practical joke. This couple, with their liquor and cigarettes and roguish, periodic spats, struck my stepmother as “cheap.” Or rather, the woman was cheap (men can’t be cheap). The husband, my father later decided, wasn’t “stable” (their money was by no means secure). Though they lived in a mansion with a swimming pool and antique furniture, they rented it, probably the furniture as well. The Corks were both “climbers,” he in business, she in society; they seemed to me fascinating shams. I especially admired the way Kevin’s mother, so obviously a bohemian, hard drinker and hell raiser, had toned down her exuberance enough to win invitations to a few polite “functions,” those given by the Women’s Club if not by the Steinway Club (the Steinway pretended to be nothing but a little gathering of ladies who liked to play four-hand versions of “Mister Haydn’s” symphonies, though it was in fact the highest social pinnacle). In pursuit of such heights, Mrs. Cork had reduced her damns and hells by the end of the week with us to darns and hecks . I had to admire the way Mrs.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Josh Baran owns and operates a highly successful company, Baran Communications in New York City. He does strategic communications, crisis management, publicity and public affairs. Josh has been a friend and ally since the late 1970’s. It was then that he founded Sorting It Out, a nonprofit dedicated to helping people who had been harmed by spiritual groups, gurus, and cults. He was my counterpart on the west coast—and my go-to person whenever I had a case involving an eastern religious cult. Over the years he has helped bring media attention to many important cult mind control stories. I am proud to call him my friend. Josh became a spiritual seeker in his early teens. He was very attracted to Asian religion and meditation and, when he was in his 20s, living in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s, he would attend presentations by visiting meditation teachers and spiritual masters from around the world. He was a regular at Stephen Gaskin’s Monday Night Class, and one of the first Americans to be given a secret Transcendental Meditation (TM) mantra. Zen especially attracted Josh because it focused on meditation and on direct, personal mystical experience. According to Zen, nirvana is here and now; and all you had to do, according to Zen stories and teachings, was wake up and see for yourself. Then, in San Francisco, Josh met an Englishwoman in her 40s named Jiyu Kennett, who had lived in Japan, Hong Kong and Malaysia for six years. There she had become a Soto Zen nun, gone through the basic training, and been certified as a teacher. She was the first European to receive the ‘transmissions’ of a Zen master and be given permission to teach. She was charming, very accessible, friendly and charismatic. Kennett, along with two western disciples, had set up a small Zen center in a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. Josh started meditating with the group and enjoyed the practice very much. Kennett wanted her serious disciples to become official Buddhists, shave their heads, and be ordained as monks. Josh became a monk when he was 20. A year later, the group moved up to Mount Shasta, near the Oregon border, where it had purchased an old motel with many small cabins. With the approval of her master, Kennett wanted to westernize Zen and liked using Christian terminology, so she named the organization Shasta Abbey. Shasta became a fairly isolated country Zen monastery. Josh became its guest master, then its chief cook, and eventually its president. For the first few years, Josh found the meditation and discipline important and valuable. In retrospect, he said, it “really did help me clear away some of my own inner fog. It also helped me grow up, become more mature, and led to what I often call spiritual adulthood.”

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I soon learned that the quickest way to bridge the race gap was through language. Soweto was a melting pot: families from different tribes and homelands. Most kids in the township spoke only their home language, but I learned several languages because I grew up in a house where there was no option but to learn them. My mom made sure English was the first language I spoke. If you’re black in South Africa, speaking English is the one thing that can give you a leg up. English is the language of money. English comprehension is equated with intelligence. If you’re looking for a job, English is the difference between getting the job or staying unemployed. If you’re standing in the dock, English is the difference between getting off with a fine or going to prison. After English, Xhosa was what we spoke around the house. When my mother was angry she’d fall back on her home language. As a naughty child, I was well versed in Xhosa threats. They were the first phrases I picked up, mostly for my own safety—phrases like “Ndiza kubetha entloko.” “I’ll knock you upside the head.” Or “Sidenge ndini somntwana.” “You idiot of a child.” It’s a very passionate language. Outside of that, my mother picked up different languages here and there. She learned Zulu because it’s similar to Xhosa. She spoke German because of my father. She spoke Afrikaans because it is useful to know the language of your oppressor. Sotho she learned in the streets. Living with my mom, I saw how she used language to cross boundaries, handle situations, navigate the world. We were in a shop once, and the shopkeeper, right in front of us, turned to his security guard and said, in Afrikaans, “Volg daai swartes, netnou steel hulle iets.” “Follow those blacks in case they steal something.” My mother turned around and said, in beautiful, fluent Afrikaans, “Hoekom volg jy nie daai swartes sodat jy hulle kan help kry waarna hulle soek nie?” “Why don’t you follow these blacks so you can help them find what they’re looking for?” “Ag, jammer!” he said, apologizing in Afrikaans. Then—and this was the funny thing—he didn’t apologize for being racist; he merely apologized for aiming his racism at us. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I thought you were like the other blacks. You know how they love to steal.” I learned to use language like my mother did. I would simulcast—give you the program in your own tongue. I’d get suspicious looks from people just walking down the street. “Where are you from?” they’d ask. I’d reply in whatever language they’d addressed me in, using the same accent that they used. There would be a brief moment of confusion, and then the suspicious look would disappear. “Oh, okay. I thought you were a stranger. We’re good then.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  You can’t hold on to her, he had wanted to say to Alek then. The world had blasted away every other part of her life: her parents were dead, her sister was dead, nothing remained to tether her to the world as they knew it. She had only herself and dance. Alek could never hold on to her. No one could. Charles felt proud of her talent. Not that it had anything to do with him. But he felt proud that he could recognize it and what it meant. Yeah, there would be shitty years of auditions and open calls. But nobody who watched Sophie dance could say she didn’t have real charisma. She danced in that way that made it seem natural. Improvised almost. But never sloppy. There was a through line, and you could follow it no matter how complex the combination. She had the same thing Misty Copeland had, which wasn’t pristine Russian technique, but substance. And he felt like he knew that about her. That his talent was for recognizing her talent and knowing he’d get out of her way when the time came. Sophie had lifted herself from Alek’s lap and spun herself around, letting her arms rise above her head. She swayed to the music, animating the song, some formless acoustic indie number full of haunting melodies and high, piercing voices, by a band with a name like a ghost story. And then she left Alek and came toward him, skirting around their other friends, dancing, smiling, until she wrapped her arms around him. “Hey,” she said, “I missed you.” “Hey,” he said, “long time no see.” “Long time,” she said, drawing out the first word, letting it turn indistinct and gravelly at the back of her throat. “What’re you doing here?” Charles sighed and shrugged. The air had smelled of pine needles and burning wood, which made him think of home in rural Maine, and all those hours of light, and the water, so much of it everywhere, lakes and rivers and streams and creeks. So much water. “Oh, you know.” “I know,” she said, and there was a smile, a smile for him. “Come over tonight?” he asked, letting himself pout a little. She looked up at him with a shocked expression, because they never made designs on each other this way, never intruded when the other was out, never asked unless there was a necessity. He knew that he was doing too much, changing the rules of the game, but he’d hated the satisfied look on Alek’s face, so sure of himself, so pleased. He half expected her to turn him down, but she sighed and rolled her eyes. “I can if you want,” she said. “I do,” he had said, realizing he meant it, because as he said it, something in him hurt, and for a dancer, pain is always the way you know something is true. “Yes, I want you to.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Twenty years later, looking back on this enduring and delighting book, the miracle seems that—as De Gaulle first described then embodied the French people, who loved what he showed them of themselves—Edmund White seems to have enjoyed and then outstripped his own utility to the social movement that tried making a mere flag from his exquisitely dyed silk scarf. It is a pleasure to see the work regain itself, and with the added footnote pedigree of its Liberationist utility. By being so comic, so informed, with a style so Nabokovian—when any good journalist’s tiptoe-best prose might have done perfectly well—this novel was enlisted by a worthy cause that really would’ve settled for something far less good. And subsequently has. Little else in the gay canon approaches the joyous control, the go-for-broke candor and high style of this work. If its young narrator kept breaking out of the closet he guessed to be his lifelong fate, gay lit has since set up housekeeping in that dark if capacious storage space. Journalistic romps through gay Savannah by gay journalists pretending—again for popularity’s sake—not to be, that is what, a decade later, outsold but never supplanted this work. White’s novel served its political purpose all too well. Happily, now we can simply read it. James Agee once described the fiction of Theodore Dreiser as seeming the outpouring of some great Russian novelist but served up in a very poor English translation. White’s oeuvre might have been first written in impeccable French, then translated by a party committee including Virgil Thomson, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov. The ear for urgent casual speech exists alongside a topiaried control, a rigorous sentence-by-sentence reveling in the merit of “composition.” The surface would surely gladden the heart of any Gallic schoolmaster, as its subject matter might disturb him. This novel’s diction imitates the young character emerging at its center, the sort of boy who senses the history of everything he sees and touches, the kind of kid who could tell you in the middle of the night the name of the best chocolate on earth and where, on Michigan Avenue, you might acquire some at this hour. But under this knowing pearly overlay, the comedy remains as rude as it is suave. And the writing still feels so wet, generative, scarily honest: I hypothesized a lover who’d take me away. He’d climb the fir tree outside my window, step into my room and gather me into his arms. What he said or looked like remained indistinct, just a cherishing wraith enveloping me, whose face glowed more and more brightly. His delay in coming went on so long that soon I’d passed from anticipation to nostalgia.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  There was nothing cautious about Chuck. He had his own trust fund from a grandmother who owned a cosmetics firm. He had a loud, maniacal laugh, he was big physically and knew it and half-scared people with his craziness, his drunk sprees, the way he’d twitch or shoot his cuffs or without warning scythe the air between you with a closed fist and shriek like a samurai. He scared the masters because he didn’t want or need their approval and because he’d set himself up as an arbiter of absurdity. If a teacher said something banal or foolish or pompous in class, Chuck would quake with silent laughter until he was weeping and had slid halfway out of his seat onto the floor, a helpless sprawl of laughter. He appeared to be in actual pain and every eye was on him. No number of demerits or revoked privileges or low grades intimidated him. He had no particular ambition to go on to college, nor did he doubt his own intelligence which, in the Amercian fashion of that day, had been Tested; he’d been Certified as falling well within the Genius Range and declared that most appealing of creatures, the Underachiever, a status he jealously preserved except in English class, an honors section conducted by a half-blind white-haired amphibian who paddled at the air with one wounded web, who pronounced poetry as “putrid” minus the final d and who was so absent-minded he’d once heard the bell for class and stepped off a high library ladder into thin air. This eccentric teacher was also a Genius; every summer he played Falstaff in an outdoor theater and he’d once written a textbook on semantics. For Dr. Schlumberger, Chuck knocked himself out composing a novel about an oil driller in Oklahoma much given to epic drunks and fornications—a novel in which terse dialogue and tersely narrated violence alternated with nature descriptions of a shocking delicacy, silverpoint tracery against a wash of Chinese white. I read and praised Chuck’s book, and that made him like me. And the book made me like him, for though he continued to slouch about and swear and weep with laughter and refused to say an intelligent word, nevertheless I’d had that written glimpse into his temperament, and just as oils can be made fragrant by saturating them in the perfume of flowers, in the same way in my imagination Chuck’s character had been transformed by this literary enfleurage.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  When I was eleven I started going every day after school to a bookshop which was near the hotel where my mother and sister and I lived. I was fascinated by a woman who worked there. She moved and talked and even sang as though she were on a big stage and not in a very small store. I had seen an overweight and coquettish diva portray Carmen, and this woman seemed just as ready for the role—a peasant blouse worn off the shoulders and so low as to reveal the tops of large breasts; black hair drawn back into a ponytail that hopped almost of its own accord from her back up onto her shoulder, where it would perch like a pet as she nuzzled it with her cheek; a tiny waist sadistically cinched in by a stout black belt that laced up the front; ample hips in rolling motion under a long skirt that swirled in meticulously ironed pleats around her; and small flat feet with painted nails in sandals she remained true to even on snowy days. She bathed herself in a heavy, ruttish perfume that suggested neither a girl nor a matron but rather the overripe coquette, the sort of imposing beauty one could imagine a weak nineteenth-century king taking on as his mistress. This scent, as shameless as her half-naked body, billowed to conceal or shrank to disclose her other abiding odor, the smell of burning cigarettes. She could sit for hours on a high stool behind the counter with an open book and kick her pleated skirt with a dangling leg and stab out one cigarette after another into a small black ashtray from a restaurant in New York. On television I’d seen the host of a New York nightclub introduce the viewing public to celebrities; some of this glamour now attended the woman’s smoking. Each of her butts was lavishly smeared with blood-red lipstick; the growing mound of smoldering butts resembled an open grave, ghastly trough of quartered torsos. As she smoked she hummed throatily, then exhaled, coughed, paused; her eyebrows shot up, her trembling upper lip curled back on one side to reveal a big, red-flecked front tooth, her jaw dropped, her spine grew, her massive shoulders shook—and out came a high, high head tone. Then a snatch of nasal Gounod tossed off saucily, scales sung in muted vocalese ripped open here and there to full volume (dark sleeves slashed with crimson silk), then a bit of hey-nonny-nonny.… She turned a page in the novel and blindly reached for the smoking ashtray.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  They made love every afternoon in the basement of her house. By the time they were fifteen they’d already been lovers for three years and their friends regarded them as older and wiser mentors—parents, really—to whom they could turn for advice. We’d all drop by her house around four-thirty or five. She and he would be coming up out of the basement, smiling, flushed, his fingers on his fly buttons, hers tugging her tartan skirt a quarter-circle around so that the giant safety pin would be on the right side. Then she’d bake chocolate chip cookies while he horsed around outside with a football. Our own parents had only to say a word to us to inject scalding resentment into our veins, but these lesser, better parents, matured not by years but by passion and its induction into sadness, seemed to be mild guardians, he with his chipped tooth and froth of sweat curls above his neck, she with the childhood scar that drew a silky white stitch through one eyebrow and with the melancholy smile. Even the suppers we sat down to of cold milk and hot cookies pocked with runny chocolate were wonderfully unhealthy parodies of nursery meals. At first I didn’t know how to become really popular. The other kids had grown up together and they just more or less accepted one another. Of course, some of them worked at being popular, but others preferred watching TV alone in the afternoons while drinking beer and some had special interests (sewing, dramatics, yearbook, world affairs) that drew them off into tight little groups too peripheral to count. Still others, by virtue of a sudden blossoming into physical beauty or athletic prowess, became leaders without worrying about it. But that left the whole middle ground of those of us with no strange little niche and no inherent distinction (except brains, possibly, or money, neither of which carried much weight), and for us the only way to win popularity was through “personality.” Girls, of course, had personality more than boys, but some boys had personality, too, as a jester has jokes or a seducer sherry. Something bogus, that is, something shameful. I set my sights on the most popular boy in the whole school. I figured that if I could hoodwink him into being my friend, people would have to accept me. I think my strategy, on the whole, was sound. Since I wasn’t athletic, I had nothing to offer other people beside the flattering mirror of my attention, a service that suited my sweet, devious nature.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  300) is in Ada called “psykitsch” (p. 29). The good doctor’s paronomastic avatars are “Dr. Sig Heiler” (p. 28), and “A Dr. Froid ... who may have been an émigré brother with a passport-changed name of the Dr. Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu” (p. 27). Since no parodist could improve on Erich Fromm’s realization that “The little cap of red velvet in the German version of Little Red Riding Hood is a symbol of menstruation” (from The Forgotten Language, 1951, p. 240), or Dr. Oskar Pfister’s felicitously expressed thought that “When a youth is all the time sticking his finger through his buttonhole ... the analytic teacher knows that the appetite of the lustful one knows no limit in his phantasies” (from The Psychoanalytical Method, 1917, p. 79), Nabokov the literary anatomist simply includes these treasures in Pale Fire (p. 271). See Lolita, [PART ONE] c9.1, [PART TWO] c3.1, c11.1, c23.1, and c32.1; and patients ... had witnessed their own conception, King Sigmund, auctioneered Viennese bric-à-brac, and Viennese medicine man. John Ray, Jr.: the first John Ray (1627–1705) was an English naturalist famous for his systems of natural classification. His system of plant classification greatly influenced the development of systematic botany (Historia plantarium, 1686–1704). He was the first to attempt a definition of what constitutes a species. His system of insects, as set forth in Methodus insectorum (1705) and Historia insectorum (1713), is based on the concept of metamorphosis (see not human, but nymphic). The reference to Ray is no coincidence (it was first pointed out by Diana Butler, in “Lolita Lepidoptera,” New World Writing 16 [1960], p. 63). Nabokov was a distinguished lepi-dopterist, worked in Lepidoptera as a Research Fellow in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard (1942–1948), and published some twenty papers on the subject. While I was visiting him in 1966, he took from the shelf his copy of Alexander B. Klots’s standard work, A Field Guide to the Butterflies (1951), and, opening it, pointed to the first sentence of the section on “Genus Lycæides Scudder: The Orange Margined Blues,” which reads: “The recent work of Nabokov has entirely rearranged the classification of this genus” (p. 164). “That’s real fame,” said the author of Lolita. “That means more than anything a literary critic could say.” In Speak, Memory (Chapter Six), he writes evocatively of his entomological forays, of the fleeting moments of ecstasy he experiences in catching exquisite and rare butterflies. These emotions are perhaps best summarized in his poem “A Discovery” (1943; from Poems, p. 15), its twentieth line echoing what he said to me more than two decades later: I found it in a legendary land all rocks and lavender and tufted grass, where it was settled on some sodden sand hard by the torrent of a mountain pass. The features it combines mark it as new to science: shape and shade—the special tinge, akin to moonlight, tempering its blue, the dingy underside, the checquered fringe.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  And yet, it is a split screen we soon adjust to. Using a term oculists employ, “we compensate for it,” one eye giving the other rest then automatically trading off that function. Our young guide is utterly in love with the retinal world and capable of rendering it, now with the folkloric simplifying capacity of N. C. Wyeth, now with a detailed feather-by-feather Audubon notation. And yet, knowing he is banished by his very desire, he stands ever to one side, commenting on the action, judging the dessert forks, remarking the relative allure of all those around him. He is unsparing of his own vanity, more generous with others’. We witness a fierce sustained emotional tussle, but one somewhat cushioned, offset, by an upholstered diction of surpassing humor, knowing reference, compositional refinement. We see this young man seek approval and admiration through clothes and savoir faire; we watch him search for a loving community however small, for some scrap of his father’s own vast distant power. And yet, this youth of the mid-twentieth century shows a potency quite different from that of those pinky-goldy youths in English pulp fiction. Selflessness does not rank high in his repertoire. His merit and clout stem from his cerebral allusiveness, his physical beauty and sexual precocity. Like all prep school boys his age, he has been forced to read Death in Venice. But our young man’s view of the work remains very much his own: I … luxuriated in the tale of a dignified grown-up who died for the love of an indifferent boy my age. That was the sort of power I wanted over an older man. And I awakened to the idea that a great world existed in which things happened and people changed, took risks—more, took notice: a world so sensitive, like a grand piano, that even a step or a word could awaken vibrations in its taut strings. Music is still a distant father. And yet, who else in literature has ever identified, not with Thomas Mann’s deranged older Venetian tourist, the poor man, his face streaming rivulets of orange hair dye, but instead with the roué’s secret love, that Polish boy-aristocrat self-sated, ringlets tossing as he looks back over the shoulder of his form-fitting middy? Our present narrator’s merit depends upon his learnedness and his social wit; both these require and facilitate his endless mutability. Whereas the boy heroes of Victorian novels were praised most when they showed unbending ethical standards, when demonstrating their gift for withstanding cold showers and colder lakes, while evincing their willingness to forgo sexual pleasure till Marriage sanctified it. A Boy’s Own Story is hardly a traditional coming-of-age novel in which some innocent is tested then formed by a gallery of his elders. Instead, this preternaturally observant (and therefore dubious) narrator often seems the oldest person in any company. And yet his own gangliness, his dread of making mistakes, offer us the deadpan humor that makes this work so mortifyingly funny.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  “How interesting,” I said, as I’d been trained to say to everything, even the grossest absurdity. “Who was Balzac?” She smiled and said, to spare my pride, “Ah, now there’s a good question. We’ll wait till Fred comes. He can tell us both.” Fred, it turned out, owned the store. He was a tall man with ragged red hair streaked prematurely gray and acne-pitted skin and workclothes that weren’t quite clean and hundreds of scraps of odd knowledge he stored in his head just as he secreted (in the pockets of his faded blue shirt or his baggy chinos or the blue vest from one secondhand suit or the brown jacket from another) tiny slips of paper on which he jotted notes for his stories. The slips were of five different pastel shades; whether this variety followed a system or merely injected random color into cerebrations so exalted they would otherwise have been uniformly gray I have no way of knowing—certainly at that age I had no way of judging him, only of gazing at him with awe. His eyes, magnified by thick glasses, never met mine. When he spoke to me he scrutinized a point precisely a foot to the left of my head. His voice was so soft and low and expressionless that one might have ignored him had Marilyn not listened to him with such deference. Since everything she did was theatrical, “listening” also had to be pantomimed: she stood like a schoolgirl and her hands, pointing down, were pressed together in inverted prayer. Her mouth was pursed, her head lowered; at a certain moment in Fred’s mutterings her head would start to bob wildly and those strange tones of assent that can only be transcribed as “Mmnn” would issue forth from her throat on a high, surprised note and then on lower, affirming ones—even, finally, on a very low grunt that bore the unintentionally rude message “Of course. Everyone knows that. Get on with it.” None of this was subtle. It was really quite ridiculously overdone—or would have been had Marilyn been concerned at all with the impression she was making on other people. As it happened, she wanted only to conform to a role she was simultaneously writing and reciting. The exact dimensions of that role became clear only as the years went by. She saw herself, I was to learn, as the grisette in a nineteenth-century opera—as Mimi or Violetta or Manon. Like them she was impulsive, warm-hearted, immoral and pious. Like them she must remain eternally young—hence her flamboyant clothes and gestures and hectic displays of energy (the middle-aged imagine the young are energetic).