Awe

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)

  These were really dog-eared browsers, thumbed through time and again by those rent-boys who had the blessing of the management and waited there for pick-ups; curiously incredible stations of sexual intercourse, whose moving versions, or something similar, could be seen downstairs. I looked at the theatrical expressions of ecstasy without interest. The attendant had a small television behind the counter which was a monitor for the films being shown in the cinema; but as there was no one else in the shop he had broken the endless circuit of video sex and was watching a real TV programme instead. He sat there stuffing chips and oozing batter-covered sections of flaky white cod into his mouth, his short-sighted attention rapt by the screen, as if he had been a teenaged boy getting his first sight of a porn film. I sidled along and looked over his shoulder; it was a nature programme, and contained some virtuoso footage shot inside a termite colony. First we saw the long, questing snout of the ant-eater outside, and then its brutal, razor-sharp claws cutting their way in. Back inside, perched by a fibre-optic miracle at a junction of tunnels which looked like the triforium of some Gaudí church, we saw the freakishly extensile tongue of the ant-eater come flicking towards us, cleaning the fleeing termites off the wall. It was one of the most astonishing pieces of film I had ever seen, and I felt a thrill at the violent intrusion as well as dismay at the smashing of something so strange and intricate; I was disappointed when the attendant, realising I was there and perhaps in need of encouragement, tapped a button and transformed the picture into the relative banality of American college boys sticking their cocks up each other’s assholes. ‘Cinema, sir?’ he said. ‘We’ve got some really hot-core hard films …’ His heart wasn’t in it so I paid him my fiver and left him to the wonderful world of nature. I went down the stairs, lit by one gloomy red-painted bulb. The cinema itself was a small cellar room, the squalor of which was only fully apparent at the desolating moment in the early hours when the show ended for the night and the lights were suddenly switched on, revealing the bare, damp-stained walls, the rubbish on the floor, and the remaining audience, either asleep or doing things best covered by darkness. It had perhaps ten tiers of seats, salvaged from the refurbishment of some bona fide picture house: some lacked arms, which helped patrons get to know each other, and one lacked a seat, and was the repeated cause of embarrassment to diffident people, blinded by the dark, who chose it as the first empty place to hand and sat down heavily on the floor instead. I had not been there for months and was struck again by its character: pushing open the door I felt it weigh on sight, smell and hearing.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was one of the most astonishing pieces of film I had ever seen, and I felt a thrill at the violent intrusion as well as dismay at the smashing of something so strange and intricate; I was disappointed when the attendant, realising I was there and perhaps in need of encouragement, tapped a button and transformed the picture into the relative banality of American college boys sticking their cocks up each other’s assholes. ‘Cinema, sir?’ he said. ‘We’ve got some really hot-core hard films …’ His heart wasn’t in it so I paid him my fiver and left him to the wonderful world of nature. I went down the stairs, lit by one gloomy red-painted bulb. The cinema itself was a small cellar room, the squalor of which was only fully apparent at the desolating moment in the early hours when the show ended for the night and the lights were suddenly switched on, revealing the bare, damp-stained walls, the rubbish on the floor, and the remaining audience, either asleep or doing things best covered by darkness. It had perhaps ten tiers of seats, salvaged from the refurbishment of some bona fide picture house: some lacked arms, which helped patrons get to know each other, and one lacked a seat, and was the repeated cause of embarrassment to diffident people, blinded by the dark, who chose it as the first empty place to hand and sat down heavily on the floor instead. I had not been there for months and was struck again by its character: pushing open the door I felt it weigh on sight, smell and hearing. The smell was smoke and sweat, a stale, male odour tartishly overlaid with a cheap lemon-scented air-freshener like a taxi and dusted from time to time with a trace of Trouble for Men. The sound was the laid-back aphrodisiac pop music which, as the films had no sound-track, played continuously and repetitively to enhance the mood and cover the quieter noises made by the customers. The look of the place changed in the first minute or so, as I waited just inside the door for my eyes to accustom themselves to the near dark. The only light came from the small screen, and from a dim yellow ‘Fire Exit’ sign. I had once taken this exit, which led to a fetid back staircase with a locked door at the top. Smoke thickened the air and hung in the projector’s beam. It was important to sit near the back, where it was darker and more went on, but also essential to avoid the attentions of truly gruesome people. Slightly encumbered with my bag I moved into a row empty except for a heavy businessman at the far end. It was not a very good house, so I settled down to watch and wait. Occasionally cigarettes were lit and the men shifted in their seats and looked around; the mood faltered between tension and lethargy.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  4Charles Nantwich’s house was in a street off Huggin Hill, so narrow that it had been closed to traffic and was no longer marked in the London A-Z; it was a cobbled cul-de-sac obstructed at its open end by two dented aluminum bollards padlocked to the ground. Halfway down on the left rose the tall façade of purplish London brick, the dormers behind its upper parapet looking out over the roofs of the surrounding semi-derelict buildings. It was an elegant post-Fire merchant’s house, prosperously plain, the only ostentation the door-case, with its delicately glazed fanlight and heavy projecting hood, the richly scrolled brackets of which were clogged with generations of white gloss paint. Much of the glass in the tall windows appeared to be original: warped, glinting and nearly opaque. I waited opposite for a minute, surprisingly taken back, by its air of secrecy and exclusion, to the invalidish world of Edwardian ghost stories, to a world where people never went out. Though close to Cannon Street, Upper Thames Street and the approach to Southwark Bridge, this little knot of side streets was very quiet. Drivers avoided the narrow gauge of its alleyways, and much of it seemed to have been given over to somnolent trades—a bespoke tailor, a watch repairer. One or two of the premises were warehouses; some had battened-up windows or displayed bleached and cracked signs for businesses long defunct. Though the buildings were eighteenth- or seventeenth-century, the streets were medieval, and, sloping quite steeply towards the Thames, gave the unsettling feeling that they could not long avoid being swept away. Skinner’s Lane, ending in a wall topped with spikes like spurs, half hidden amid tufts of brilliant yellow alyssum, had a mortal mood to it, and gave Charles’s residence the eccentric rectitude of a colonial staying on, unflaggingly keeping up appearances. I rang the bell twice before the door was opened by a man in shirt-sleeves and an apron, who let me in and then seemed to think better of it. ‘His Lordship expecting you, is he?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘Yes, William Beckwith. He asked me to come for tea.’ ‘First I’ve heard of it,’ the man said unsmilingly. ‘You’d better wait here.’ He went off with an ambiguous tread, his sergeant-majorish bearing infected with an ambling carelessness.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I was drawn the more to this aim by my love of things foreign; I liked to deal with the barbarians. This great country lying between the mouths of the Danube and the Borysthenes, a triangular area of which I have covered at least two sides, is one of the most remarkable regions of the world, at least for us who are born on the shores of the Interior Sea and are used to the clear, dry line of southern landscape, with its hills and promontories. At times there I worshipped the goddess Earth in the way that we here worship the goddess Rome; I am speaking not so much of Ceres as of a more ancient divinity, anterior even to the invention of the harvest. Our Greek and Latin lands, everywhere supported by bone-structure of rock, have the trim beauty of a male body; the heavy abundance of the Scythian earth was that of a reclining woman. The plain ended only where the sky began. My wonder never ceased in presence of the rivers: that vast empty land was but a slope and a bed for their waters. Our rivers are short; we never feel far from their sources; but the enormous flow which ended there in confused estuaries swept with it the mud of an unknown continent and the ice of uninhabitable regions. The cold of Spain's high plateaus is second to none, but this was the first time that I found myself face to face with true winter, which visits our countries but briefly. There it sets in for a long period of months; farther north it must be unchanging, without beginning and without end. The evening of my arrival in camp the Danube was one immense roadway of ice, red at first and then blue, furrowed by the inner working of currents with tracks as deep as those of chariots. We made use of furs to protect ourselves from the cold. The presence of that enemy, so impersonal as to be almost abstract, produced an indescribable exaltation, and a feeling of energy accrued. One fought to conserve body heat as elsewhere one fights to keep one's courage. There were days when the snow effaced the few differences in level on the steppes; we galloped in a world of pure space and pure atoms. The frozen coating gave transparency to the most ordinary things, and the softest objects took on a celestial rigidity. Each broken reed was a flute of crystal.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The dinner-jacketed M C completed his announcement and stepped down, a balloon-bellied referee in white shirt and trousers that lacked any visible means of support squeezed between the ropes, and a few moments later the first couple of lads sprang into the ring. There’s something about boxing which always moves me, although I know it is the lowest of sports, degrading the spectator as much as the fighter. For all its brutality, and the danger of those blows to the head, those upward twisting punches that are so tellingly called cuts and which tear the fronds of the brain known as the substantia nigra , an inner damage more terrible than that of pouchy, sewn-up eyes, mangled ears and flattened noses, it has about it a quality that I would not be the first to call noble. Boys’ boxing, of course, is not nearly so awful. The bouts are short, the refereeing paternal and attentive. Any moderately heavy punch is followed by a standing count, and fights are swiftly brought to an end if there are signs of stunning or bleeding. It maintains too, in some ideal, Greek way, an ethos of sport rather than violence. In the hall tonight the Limehouse supporters far outnumbered the St Albans visitors—and the place was small enough for individual voices shouting their encouragement to be heard, just as they might have been decades before in hymns or prayers in the same building. But when the fights were over, and the referee held the boys’ huge gloved hands in his smaller fingers, jerking aloft the winner’s arm as the result was announced, there was a touching mood of friendship, the boys embracing, patting each other clumsily with their upholstered fists, clasping the hands of the cutmen and the trainers in their gentle paws. In the first fight, between two fourteen-year-olds, the Limehouse youngster had started well, but it was a sloppy affair, the St Albans boy always retreating to the ropes and clinching with his opponent rather than putting up a fight. In the second break I strolled off round the back and came in again on the side where the judges’ table was, just below the ringside. A lean sixty-year-old man, with no forehead and grey pointed sideburns that curved across his cheeks like a Roman helmet, was standing talking with some parents in the audience. When he turned round I saw the words ‘Limehouse Boys’ Club’ on the back of his sweatshirt. Just as the bell rang I said, ‘Excuse me, can you tell me where I can find Mr Shillibeer?’ He looked at me stonily, not out of aggression but out of slowness. ‘Bill? Yeah, he’s out the back somewhere, I should say.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  The risen Christ as an experiential reality. Paul’s conviction that God had raised Jesus was grounded in his own experience. We wrote about this in Chapter 1 as we described Paul as a Jewish Christ mystic. His Damascus experience as reported in Acts plus references in his own letters affirm that Paul had experienced the risen Jesus, that, in his own words, “I have seen the Lord” and “he appeared to me.” We saw this already in Chapter 3. Thus for Paul, the resurrection of Jesus was an experience. We should almost certainly use the plural, for we are confident that Paul had several experiences of the post-Easter Jesus. That God raised Jesus is the presupposition of all of Paul’s letters, but he writes about it at length only in 1 Corinthians 15. The chapter contains some surprises. Near its beginning, Paul writes: “I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received” (15.3). The language most plausibly suggests that what follows is a very early Christian tradition that Paul had “received,” most likely soon after his Damascus experience. Perhaps even the pre-Damascus Paul had heard this, for he knew enough about the Jesus movement to persecute it. Then, following brief references to Jesus dying for our sins and being buried and raised, he provides a list of those to whom the risen Christ appeared: He appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. (15:5–8) There are at least three surprises. First, Paul’s Damascus experience happened at least a few years after the forty days of appearances reported in Acts. Clearly, Paul regarded experiences of the risen Christ as continuing rather than being confined to that brief period of time. Moreover, his phrase “Last of all…he appeared also to me” need not be understood to mean that such experiences stopped with him. Rather, it probably means that the last experience he cited in the list was his own.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Nothing could have been more in contradiction to the views which I was beginning to hold about war, but those barbarous rites creating bonds of life and death between the affiliates all served to flatter the most secret aspirations of a young man impatient of the present, uncertain as to the future, and thereby open to the gods. My initiation took place in a turret constructed of wood and reeds on the banks of the Danube, with Marcius Turbo, my fellow officer, for sponsor. I remember that the weight of the bull in its death throes nearly brought down the latticed floor beneath which I lay to receive the bloody aspersion. In recent years I have reflected upon the dangers which this sort of near-secret society might entail for the State under a weak ruler, and I have finally restricted them, but I admit that in presence of an enemy they give their followers a strength which is almost godlike. Each of us believed that he was escaping from the narrow limits of his human state, feeling himself to be at the same time himself and his own adversary, at one with the god who seems to be both the animal victim and the human slayer. Such fantastic dreams, which sometimes terrify me now, were not so very different from the theories of Heraclitus upon the identity of the mark and the bow. They helped me in those days to endure life. Victory and defeat were inextricably mixed like rays of the same sun. These Dacian footsoldiers whom I crushed under my horse's hoofs, those Sarmatian cavalrymen overthrown in the close combat of later years when our rearing horses tore at each other's chests, were all struck down the more easily if I identified myself with them. Had my body been abandoned on the battlefield, stripped of its attire, it would not have differed greatly from theirs. The shock of the final sword thrust would have been the same. I am confessing to you here some extraordinary thoughts, among the most secret of my life, and a strange intoxication which I have never again experienced under that same form. A certain number of deeds of daring, which would have passed unnoticed, perhaps, if performed by a simple soldier, won me a reputation in Rome and a sort of renown in the army. But most of my so-called acts of prowess were little more than idle bravado; I see now with some shame that, mingled with that almost sacred exaltation of which I was just speaking, there was still my ignoble desire to please at any price, and to draw attention upon myself. It was thus that one autumn day when the Danube was swollen by floods I crossed the river on horseback, wearing the full heavy equipment of our Batavian auxiliaries. For this feat of arms, if it was a feat, my horse deserved credit more than I.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I spent the next few months getting ready to leave. My aunt and uncle’s friend got me that job at a local floor tile distribution warehouse, and I worked there during the summer—driving a forklift, getting tile shipments ready for transport, and sweeping a giant warehouse. By the end of the summer, I’d saved enough not to worry about the move to New Haven. The day I moved felt different from every other time I’d moved away from Middletown. I knew when I left for the Marines that I’d return often and that life might bring me back to my home town for an extended period (indeed it did). After four years in the Marines, the move to Columbus for college hadn’t seemed all that significant. I’d become an expert at leaving Middletown for other places, and each time I felt at least a little forlorn. But I knew this time that I was never really coming back. That didn’t bother me. Middletown no longer felt like home. On my first day at Yale Law School, there were posters in the hallways announcing an event with Tony Blair, the former British prime minister. I couldn’t believe it: Tony Blair was speaking to a room of a few dozen students? If he came to Ohio State, he would have filled an auditorium of a thousand people. “Yeah, he speaks at Yale all the time,” a friend told me. “His son is an undergraduate.” A few days after that, I nearly bumped into a man as I turned a corner to walk into the law school’s main entrance. I said, “Excuse me,” looked up, and realized the man was New York governor George Pataki. These sorts of things happened at least once a week. Yale Law School was like nerd Hollywood, and I never stopped feeling like an awestruck tourist. The first semester was structured in a way to make life easy on students. While my friends in other law schools were overwhelmed with work and worrying about strict grading curves that effectively placed you in direct competition with your classmates, our dean asked us during orientation to follow our passions, wherever they might lead, and not worry so much about grades. Our first four classes were graded on a credit/no credit basis, which made that easy. One of those classes, a constitutional law seminar of sixteen students, became a kind of family for me. We called ourselves the island of misfit toys, as there was no real unifying force to our team—a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia, the supersmart daughter of Indian immigrants, a black Canadian with decades’ worth of street smarts, a neuroscientist from Phoenix, an aspiring civil rights attorney born a few minutes from Yale’s campus, and an extremely progressive lesbian with a fantastic sense of humor, among others—but we became excellent friends. That first year at Yale was overwhelming, but in a good way.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Orst, we say, we find the aesthete par excellence. As we stood at his door on that April morning (and in a light rain that had just begun to fall) we were at once in possession of the gauge of his claim to be considered the doyen of all the artistic recluses of our time. It was for us to ponder at what cost to his seclusion, and so to his art, an invitation like our own might have been made. Our readers will know something of the unhappy circumstances that have befallen this remarkable painter in the years since his last exhibitions in London, and will be in a position to understand the dictates, in his life as in his art, of a heart, and an eye, subjected to so violent a shock: his has been, in the words of one of his contemporaries, "un veuvage precoce"—a premature widowhood, indeed; and one that has imposed upon him its own high and unwavering demands. There are those (a few in Belgium herself, though more, we admit, on our own neighbouring shores) who continue to question M. Orst's standing in the first rank of modern artists; and some who are all too ready to consign his productions to the midden of depravity, along with those of M. Felicien Rops and one or two others, to be spoken of only as one speaks of the art of the criminal or the madman. To be sure, that M. Orst's paintings—and his admirable sculpture in plaster and gesso, not to mention his abundant work on the stone—have value as testimony to a fertile mind subjected to pressures of exceptional severity, cannot be denied; what we do deny, absolutely, is the inherent unworthiness of his subjects or of the dark sensibility which all his work reveals. Some thoughts such as these, as we say, passed through our mind as we waited at the doorway of the Villa Hermes; which, in due course, was opened by a young woman in a pale costume (reminiscent of the hygienic dress of Ancient Greek maidens, and styled according to M. Orst's own design), who indicated to us to enter. We gave our name, and she withdrew soundlessly—we had already been apprised that all the servants of the house are encouraged not to speak, and to make themselves understood, as far as is possible, by gesture.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It was only in the course of designing it, he said, in the incessant small changes to his plans, in the conjuring of the perfect solitude from light and space and the exact positioning of objets d'art, that he had worked out to his own satisfaction what it meant to him to be an artist, and what the life of an artist, once so impetuously embarked upon, might in the end demand of him. It was not hard, under the spell of his gently modulated delivery and pierced by the momentary glint of his sharp eye through a heavy pince-nez, surrounded, what is more, by some of the most striking products of his genius, to feel the incontrovertible hand of his particular destiny. When we left the dining-room, in order to be shown M. Orst's library, we were witness to a most surprising ritual, in which after every meal not only the various dishes and plates but also the table and chairs, and in fact the whole furniture of the room, were removed from it by the servants, leaving it as an unsullied temple of his vision. The study of the Villa Hermes is a charming room, in which M. Orst conducts his business with those connoisseurs who follow and collect his work, and which contains the large cabinet in which he keeps his prints. We remarked that the drawers of this cabinet were somewhat cryptically labelled with Hebrew hieroglyphs; and it was with some humour that M. Orst, noticing our eyes upon it, declared "that no one would ever know what lay in there", and that many a rich collector had offered him a fortune for a chance to choose some item from among its contents. He did, however, throw open a further door into his "dark room", most magnificently equipped for the treatment of photographic plates, and which seemed to us indeed to be the dark crucible of his art. I turned to the photograph at the head of the article: it was grey on grey, the windows pewtery and opaque, the dead light of certain spring days. The young trees in the garden in front were orderly, suburban. "Une petite forteresse de reve", one old acquaintance had called it; another saw it as a crystallisation of Orst's cold, loyal nature, his "British" reserve and desire not to be too intimately known. For some reason I found myself thinking of it on the morning of his death: I imagined Paul running, cycling, to the house and hearing the news, a doctor making a brief last visit; and then the servants who communicated by gesture, stunned into natural silence, closing curtains and shutters, while the telephone rang, and the tables and chairs were left in the dining-room all day. Chapter 18 "I'm afraid he's not back yet. But come in." "Oh."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  In some of the little etchings people were hinted at in the dark hatching but not quite defined, like figures seen tilted against the rain in the blur from a moving car. There was "Le Carrosse de l'Archeveque", where the spidery last light came in at the coach's window, but it was hard to know if the dark bulks on either side were benighted travellers, cloaked and veiled, or merely spectral presences against the dim upholstery. There were glimpses of legends that I didn't know, or maybe no one knew: I had to take them on trust like manifestations from the beyond, to be scried and construed according to my needs. Often the titles were mere phrases, taken perhaps from a tale or poem, "II resta debout devant la troisieme porte", "Encore dans la chambre de ma vieille parente"; a scene in which a man stumbled down a spiral ramp into deepening darkness bore the frightening inscription, "Que fera-t-il là, l'insatiable?" I had a sense of mysteries without solutions, or sometimes of ecstatic solutions to problems that had never been formulated. There was a series on "The Kingdom by the Sea: d'apres Edgar Poe", that had no bearing on my memory of the poem, and another on "The Kingdom of Allemonde": the instinct for lost realms and haunted, ailing royalty was deep. Allemonde was a dream-terrain of sunless forests and ruined towers, steeped in a mood of fate, though somehow without causality; the groping figures on cliff-tops and stairways seemed too passive to be tragic—at times a flare lit them against the dusk and lent them a certain pathos, like marionettes. I had pages of the catalogue beside me in typescript, with their scrupulous details of date and measurement, and provenances that often trailed into appropriate vagueness, present whereabouts unknown. I had to confirm some quotations from a volume of Legendes flamandes that Orst had illustrated. It had just enough purpose to it to keep up my self-esteem: that is to say now and then Paul had made a mistake, an extract was not from the page his note claimed it was, or a name was misspelt—little lapses in scholarship that made me useful and were changing my understanding of him. We both seemed to know that this dusty, fiddly checking was in a way intimate work, it steadied some private tremor: just the years going by, perhaps. I was reading the story of the False Chaplain. A great Knight was married to a beautiful Lady, and they lived in a castle by the sea. The Knight went out hunting and generally doing good, and the Lady walked in her garden or sat with her women and made lovely tapestries. All seemed well, but as the years went by they were troubled by one thing: they had no children. And however hard they prayed, nothing could alter that fact.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Oh last night. I was driving home, full of these kinds of thoughts. I’d just been on one of those really appalling calls, to certify someone dead—suicide—at least three weeks ago—locked room—in this weather. You can imagine—no, I think you can’t imagine actually. One could hardly go into the room … I was coming along the Park, about nine o’clock—it was very heavy and still, you remember. The Creation was on the wireless, the Karajan from Salzburg last year, you know, with José van Dam, gloriously good. And suddenly it was that unspeakably sublime bit ‘Seid fruchtbar, Alle’—go forth and multiply, fill the heavens and the seas and so on? I thought I’d never heard anything more beautiful and profound—I was in hysterics—I had to pull over and put on my hazard lights and I sat there weeping and weeping until it got on to a jolly section, which it always does with Haydn, bless him.’ ‘It is a good bit.’ ‘Unutterably great. Did we use to listen to it? I felt as though I knew it but hadn’t heard it for a thousand years. Anyway, back here, I thought what does this all mean? It means we must be as creative as possible—even if we can’t actually have children, we must give ourselves completely to whatever we do, as I’ve always sort of thought, we must make something out of everything we do.’ ‘Quite so.’ ‘And I thought, I must have a man.’ I was relieved that he saw the funny side of it. ‘Of course, I was still on call. All the same I put on some sexier clothes and a bit of mascara and really looked quite nice—a bit bald, but clearly an exceptionally nice guy. I had that old shirt with the button-down pockets that I put my bleep in—it looked like a packet of fags, I hoped. I went off down the Volunteer. I knew I couldn’t get drunk or anything, but I sipped my way down a Pils for about half an hour and then fell quite naturally into chat with a fellow—a Scotsman, but pleasant, black hair, jeans, sweatshirt, that sort of bruised look about the eyes, vulnerable, but dangerous: you know the type. You’ve probably had him, indeed.’ ‘Oh, him …’ I played along. ‘I bought him a drink, we talked about music: he said he played the violin. I said did he know The Creation? He did not, needless to say. I was trying to decide whether to accept a drink if he offered me one when another Scot came up and slapped him on the back and off they went.’ ‘I hope you weren’t put out.’

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Initiations into strange or secret cults (practices tolerated rather than approved, and which the legislator in me regarded with distrust) appealed at that moment of life when dance leaves us reeling and song ends in outcry. In Samothrace I had been initiated into the Mysteries of the Cabiri, ancient and obscene rites as sacred as flesh and blood; at the Cave of Trophonius milk-fed serpents glided about my ankles; the Thracian feasts of Orpheus taught me savage brotherhood rites. The statesman who had imposed severe penalties upon all forms of mutilation now consented to attend the orgies of Cybele: I witnessed the hideous whirling of bleeding dancers; fascinated as a kid in presence of a snake, my young companion watched with terror these men who were electing to answer the demands of age and of sex with a response as final as that of death itself, and perhaps more dreadful. But the height of horror was reached during a stay in Palmyra, where the Arab merchant, Meles Agrippa, entertained us for three weeks in the lap of splendid and barbaric luxury. One day in the midst of the drinking, this Meles, who was a high official in the Mithraic cult but who took somewhat lightly his priestly duties, proposed to Antinous that he share in the blood baptism. The youth knew that I had formerly been inducted in a ceremony of the same kind; he offered himself with fervor as a candidate. I saw no reason to object to this fantasy; only a minimum of purificatory rites and abstinence was required. I agreed to serve myself as sponsor, together with Marcus Ulpius Castoras, my secretary for the Arabian language. We descended into the sacred cave at the appointed hour; the Bithynian lay down to receive the bloody aspersion. But when I saw his body, streaked with red, emerging from the ditch, his hair matted with sticky mud and his face spattered with stains which could not be washed away but had to be left to wear off themselves, I felt only disgust and abhorrence for all such subterranean and sinister cults. Some days later I forbade access to the black Mithraeum for all troops stationed at Emesa. Warnings there were: like Mark Antony before his last battle I heard receding into the night the music of the change of guard as the protecting gods withdrew. ... I heard, but paid no heed. My assurance was like that of a horseman whom some talisman protects from every fall. At Samosata an assembly of lesser kings of the Orient was held under my auspices; during the mountain hunts, Abgar himself, king of Osroëne, taught me the art of falconry; great beats engineered like scenes on a stage drove whole herds of antelope into nets of purple. Antinous was given two panthers for this chase; he had to pull back with all his strength to hold them in as they strained at their heavy yoke of gold.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I shall return later to the strange world of our dreams, for I prefer to speak here of certain experiences of pure sleep and pure awakening which border on death and resurrection. I am trying to recapture the exact sensation of such overpowering sleep as that of boyhood where, still fully clad, one toppled over one's books, transported as if by lightning out of mathematics and the law into the midst of a deep and substantial sleep so filled with unused energy that one tasted, as it were, the very essence of being through the closed eyelids. I evoke the short, sudden snatches of slumber on the bare ground, in the forest after tiring days of hunts; the barking of the dogs would awaken me, or their paws planted on my chest. So total was the eclipse that each time I could have found myself to be someone else, and I was perplexed and often saddened by the strict law which brought me back from so far away to re-enter this narrow confine of humanity which is myself. What are those particularities upon which we lay such store, since they count so little for us when we are liberated in sleep, and since for one second before returning, regretfully, into the body of Hadrian I was about to savor almost consciously that new existence without content and without past? On the other hand, sickness and age have also their prodigies and receive from sleep other forms of benediction. About a year ago, after a singularly exhausting day in Rome, I experienced one of those respites wherein the depletion of one's forces serves to work the same miracle as did the unexploited reserves of former days. I go but rarely to the City now; once there I try to accomplish as much as possible. The day had been disagreeably full: a session at the Senate had been followed by a session in court, and by an interminable discussion with one of the quaestors; then by a religious ceremony which could not be cut short, and upon which it steadily rained. I myself had fitted all these different activities closely together, crowding them in so as to leave between them the least time possible for importunate requests and idle flatteries. The return on horseback was one of my last trips of the kind. I reached the Villa sickened and chilled as we are only when the blood actually refuses, and no longer works in our veins. Celer and Chabrias rushed to my aid, but solicitude can be wearing even when it is sincere. Retiring to my apartment I swallowed a few spoonfuls of a hot broth which I prepare myself, not out of suspicion, as is surmised, but because I thus procure for myself the luxury of being alone. I lay down: sleep seemed as far removed from me as health itself, and as youth or vigor. I dozed off.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Fiction/Literature BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S And Three Stories by Truman Capote Truman Capote created in Holly Golightly a heroine whose name has entered the American idiom and whose style is now part of the literary landscape. Holly knows that nothing bad can ever happen to you at Tiffany’s; her poignancy, wit, and naïveté continue to charm. Also included in this volume are “House of Flowers,” A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory.” Fiction/Literature INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison This searing record of a black man’s journey through contemporary America reveals, in Ralph Ellison’s words, “the sheer rhetorical challenge involved in communicating across our barriers of race and religion, class, color and region.” “The greatest American novel in the second half of the twentieth century … the classic representation of American black experience.” —R. W. B. Lewis Fiction/Literature THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner The tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in American literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. “For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner’s works] are without equal in our time and country.” —Robert Penn Warren Fiction/Literature THE REMAINS OF THE DAY by Kazuo Ishiguro A profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world in postwar England. “One of the best books of the year.” — The New York Times Book Review Fiction/Literature THE WOMAN WARRIOR by Maxine Hong Kingston “A remarkable book.… As an account of growing up female and Chinese-American in California, in a laundry of course, it is anti-nostalgic; it burns the fat right out of the mind. As a dream—of the ‘female avenger’—it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword.” — The New York Times Fiction/Literature What’s next on your reading list? Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now. 1 I came home on the last train. Opposite me sat a couple of London Transport maintenance men, one small, fifty, decrepit, the other a severely handsome black of about thirty-five. Heavy canvas bags were tilted against their boots, their overalls open above their vests in the stale heat of the Underground. They were about to start work! I looked at them with a kind of swimming, drunken wonder, amazed at the thought of their inverted lives, of how their occupation depended on our travel, but could only be pursued, I saw it now, when we were not travelling.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Tootel’s. I recall how Strong, whose figure was pretty well though not excessively attuned to his name, stood up dripping & came and stood beside me. I was not used to taking my clothes off in public: I hung back with my hands clasped in front of me rather than climb into the scummy water out of which this prefect had just arisen. There was something repugnant to me in the water: it was one of the many moments when the sweet, civilised certainties of home were trampled by the stronger, medieval laws of school. ‘Get in, baby,’ said Strong with a sceptical look, drying himself brusquely. Still I hesitated, and I think I was only able to do it because I felt suddenly unaware of myself in the senior boy’s presence. Certainly it never struck me that I could be seen in a sexual light myself. I looked at Strong, and at his red, thick prick, which was thickly overgrown with black hair, as were his legs, all matted & streaked down with the bathwater. I had never been in the proximity of a mature boy before. I suppose I must have stared rather obviously—not out of lust but interest. I think, though I cannot be sure, that Strong took this as a kind of sign, and perhaps he was aware of the spell he had cast. I was not aware of it myself, only now I see that it was the first time that something happened that wd recur with me—a kind of loss of selfconsciousness in the aura of a more beautiful or desired person. My eyes were entranced, & devoured what was before them. In retrospect I think I see the selfconscious way Strong finally wrapped his towel round his waist and called out boisterously to another prefect, ‘Bloody new men!’ I felt a thrill of mastered shock at his language. After that I always got straight in the water: that too was because I had passed through some kind of initiation. I knew that one day I should leave the water for other men younger than myself. I remember how the little islets of scum used to float between one’s legs & hang around one’s kit. I was made to learn my notions, never imagining that they were useless to anyone older than the prefects who tested us on them. I memorised them religiously, & will never forget them, I suppose. My pleasure when challenged for the colours of Chawker’s hatband and came out with the symmetrical ‘plum-straw-plum-light-blue-plum-straw-plum’ was so obvious that the prefect, Stanbridge, tweaked my ears, & made me falter, though not fatally, in reciting the Seven Birthplaces of Homer.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Again I had the sense of his being utterly, blindly at home here, whilst I was stepping cautiously between stacks of books, parchment-shaded standard lamps, little cluttered desks with only an inch or two left to write on. He sank on to the end of a sofa that was slumped and shaped to his person, and gestured me to a hard button-backed chair that resembled a corseted lady. "It's very kind of you to ask to see me, Sir Perry," I said. "My Auntie Tina sends you her . . . best regards" (I couldn't quite come out with "love"). "How is the dear woman?" he said, with a shrewd, humorous look that suggested we both thought she was a bit of a fool. "Very well, thank you." (This was far from being the case, I recalled at once: in fact she'd just had a cancer of the throat diagnosed.) "What a gifted family you are. Novels and belles-lettres: that's your aunt. Lovely singing: that's your father. And now poetry too. You must feel you live on Mount Parnassus." I looked away, abashed by the tribute, and running my eye along the bookshelf beside me: George Merrifield's Love and Earth, Ochre by Violet Riviere, Robert Nichols's Amelia, More Verses by Wayland Strong. The dust lay thick along their tops, like blue-grey felt, but still . . . real books, by real poets. I knew Merrifield's sonnet on "Cider" from Poets of Our Time; indeed Graves claimed I had cribbed from it in my own "Autumn"; but to see the full majestic volume of the man's work was to come a step nearer to the fountainhead. I noticed a thin book of V. L. Edminson's and thought perhaps Sir Perry could clear up a bitter dispute between Graves and me as to V. L. Edminson's sex . . . "Do you walk on the common?" he asked. "Oh yes, sir, we're always going up there. I particularly like it at sunset. It can be quite glorious then." " Glorious —can't it. I don't know what I'd do without the old common. Paulette loves a run-around on the tops. My dear little dog," he explained. I decided against owning up to the bullying Sibelius. "So many different aspects to it, don't you find, the steep bits, the flat bits, the woody bits, the open bits. . . There's a bit for every mood out there! At this time of year the hazelwood is too lovely." "Lovely," I agreed, not actually sure which the hazelwood was, but caught up in the nervous enthusiasm. "Don't you think? I wander up there and sort out my ideas, as I call them. I dare say you do the same. Work out a poem in your head, then scamper back and write it down?"

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Arrian of Nicomedia, one of the best minds of our time, likes to recall to me the beautiful lines of ancient Terpander, defining in three words the Spartan ideal (that perfect mode of life to which Lacedaemon aspired without ever attaining it): Strength, Justice, the Muses. Strength was the basis, discipline without which there is no beauty, and firmness without which there is no justice. Justice was the balance of the parts, that whole so harmoniously composed which no excess should be permitted to endanger. Strength and Justice together were but one instrument, well tuned, in the hands of the Muses. All forms of dire poverty and brutality were things to forbid as insults to the fair body of mankind, every injustice a false note to avoid in the harmony of the spheres. In Germany construction or renovation of camps, fortifications, and roads detained me for nearly a year; new bastions, erected over a distance of seventy leagues, reinforced our frontiers along the Rhine. This country of vineyards and rushing streams was wholly familiar to me: there I recrossed the path of the young tribune who had borne news to Trajan of his accession to power. There, too, beyond our farthest fort, built of logs from the spruce forests, lay the same dark, monotonous horizon, the same world which has been closed to us from the time of the imprudent offensive launched by Augustus' legions, the ocean of trees and that vast reserve of fair-haired men. When the task of reorganization was finished, I descended to the mouth of the Rhine along the Belgian and Batavian plains. Desolate dunes cut by stiff grasses made up this northern landscape; at the port of Noviomagus the houses raised on piles stood abreast ships moored at their doors; seabirds perched on their roofs. I liked those forlorn places, though they seemed hideous to my aides, the overcast sky and the muddy rivers channeling their way through a land without form or visible spark, where no god has yet shaped the clay. I crossed to the Isle of Britain in a ship which was flat as a barge. More than once the wind threw us back toward the coast from which we had sailed: that difficult passage afforded some wonderfully vacant hours. Gigantic clouds rose out of a heavy sea roiled by sand and incessantly stirred in its bed. As formerly in the land of the Dacians and the Sarmatians I had venerated the goddess Earth, I had here a feeling for the first time of a Neptune more chaotic than our own, of an infinite world of waters. In Plutarch I had read a mariner's legend concerning an island in those regions which border the Arctic Sea, where centuries ago the victorious Olympians are said to have exiled the vanquished Titans.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Then Firbank’s hand went into his pocket and flung backwards a scatter of nickel coins. Unsurprisingly the next scene showed the crowd about twenty strong. They were reaching the brow of the hill, capering around, others almost marching, but in a volatile Firbankian way, like some primitive disco dance. They were calling and waving their hands, and then chanting something together—a name, an epithet. The camera, with a certain artistic flair, concentrated on the youngsters: tots and urchins with a droll seriousness to them, rowdy pubescent boys bursting out of children’s clothes, and others, with their wide-eyed Italian faces, gazing into the lens as they half-strode, half-loitered with the crowd, plucking at the sleeve of the heart. And yet it was the mood which fascinated. This marionette of a man, on his last legs, had been picked on by the crowd, yet as they mobbed him they seemed somehow to be celebrating him. He became perhaps for a moment, what he must always have wanted to be, an entertainer. The children’s expressions showed that profoundly true, unthinking mixture of cruelty and affection. There was fear in their mockery, yet the figure at the heart of their charivari took on the likeness not only of a clown, but of a patron saint. It was a rough impromptu kind of triumph. There was a brief tableau in which order had been more or less imposed. The children gathered round Firbank and glared and grinned at the camera; Firbank flapped his hat in his hand and looked hot and bothered. A little girl tugged at his trousers and he pulled his pocket inside-out with a drooping and muffled gesture to say he had no more to give. He smiled too, but showed that he wished it was all over: it was a tiring situation for so childless and singular a man. In the final few seconds he was walking away by himself: there was something decisive and businesslike about him; in spite of everything he was in a hurry, he had work to do.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  James loathed jokes of this kind but he managed a disgusted smile. He’d passed a demanding New Year at Marden once, subsisting entirely on roast potatoes and Stilton, and pretending indifference as chargers of pheasant, goose and almost raw beef were borne in by the staff. Upstairs, my grandfather remembered the name of the doorman who walked along the corridor with us, saying, just at the last moment, ‘And how’s your wife, Roy?’ (Roy being the man’s surname rather than his Christian name). ‘I’m afraid she died, my Lord,’ Roy said in a well-seasoned way. Here was a test for my grandfather, for a merely courtesy concern had turned on him and presented him with a real little tragedy. I stood and watched him pat the man on the back in a brotherly way, and nod his head impressively. ‘They’re pretty terrible, these bereavements,’ he said. ‘And it doesn’t get any better, I’m afraid.’ As Roy said, ‘No, my lord,’ he was already leaving him, having done the convincingly human thing and yet not involved himself in the least. He pulled the door to and placed us, him in the middle, and James nearer the stage. My grandfather was a Director of Covent Garden, and I had seen many operas with him from this same box. Yet I never felt it was a good point to watch the performance from: for the privacy and elevation of the box we paid the cost of seeing the orchestra, a view into the wings and an imperfect vantage on the upper stage. The privacy, anyway, was an ambiguous thing, since the eyes of the stalls dwelt on the boxes as though on the balconies of a royal residence. I was aware of the bad effect this had on me—an affected unawareness of the rest of the house, exaggerated laughter and enthralment in the remarks of my companions. I did not like myself much for this—indeed the box represented to me in some ways the penalties of exposure, discomfort and pitilessness which were paid for privilege. Tonight I sprawled over the red plush sill and let James and my grandfather talk until the lights went down. It was Billy Budd , an opera I recalled as a gauche, almost amateur affair, and I had not in the least expected to enjoy it; and yet, when Captain Vere’s monologue ended and the scene on board the Indomitable opened up, with the men holy-stoning the deck and singing their oppressed, surging chorus, I was covered in goose-flesh. When Billy, press-ganged from his old ship, sang his farewell to his former life and comrades—‘Farewell, old Rights o’ Man , farewell’—the tears streamed down my face.