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 A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  It was also a deliverance from my father. Since he slept all day, I seldom saw him. But sometimes my mother would say, “Your father’s awake. Why don’t you go in and rub his back?” Reluctantly I’d enter the bedroom, in which the drawn curtains stained the late afternoon light. On the bed, face down, lay my naked father under sheets, like a sea monster beached and sick in a tide pool of foam. The mingled smells of night sweat and stale cigar smoke awed me; I toddled out and told my mother he was still sleeping. “No, no,” she said, smiling and guiding me back in. I looked around the room from which I was usually barred. Everything was silent except for his breathing and the tick of his gold pocket watch on the night table beside him. Within my father’s half-closed closet I could see his shoes. I intuited one shoe from no more than a single burning vertical line of light that followed me by traveling glassily across the black leather rondure above the heel. Floating up there, high above the shoes, hung a smoky cashmere Olympus of all his discarded but potential selves: his suits. Now to the bed. I sat beside him and lightly patted his back. He murmured encouragingly and I worked my way up the thickly padded torso to the shoulders. The pores looked huge, some of them specked with black. A film of sweat seemed to be methodically seeping out of him; I sniffed my right hand; it smelled funny. My job seemed to be to creep over him as a lone climber, with nothing but rope and crampons, might assault a glacier. If he was fully awake he didn’t let on, as though a state of torpor were all a father owed a very little son—or at least all the son would accept from such a massive father. He was entirely naked but shrouded up to the waist in sheets. Whereas my sheets were small, sufficient for my cot where I slept in the governing shade and disturbingly intimate smell of my black nurse, these sheets were sculpturally white, vast and twisted, testimony to adult nights of passion or strife.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The November night went on and on endlessly, exactly like that ghost train in my story, dim rolling stock gliding slowly over the clicking place where the tracks switched, the constant bass hum of that somnolent progress passing over that one tenor break, the riveted and rusting bulkheads emblazoned with the mud-spattered logos of distant places, everything stately as destiny. I could hear the night’s freight cars clicking past, and the sky shook out its hair, silver clouds backlit by the moon. In this measured silence Rachel told me about her own conversion from Judaism to the Church of England, an enlightenment she attributed to her chance reading of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters and the simultaneous revelation that Jesus had quite literally died for her sins. She spoke with peculiar emphasis about the nails in Christ’s wrists and hands and she even drew a little sketch on the telephone message pad of how she thought the nails had looked (she’d been doing some research into Aramaic pig iron). When I nodded respectfully but with a visible mote of scorn in my eye, she quite accurately read my thoughts. “Oh, I see, you think I’m some no ’count Baptist, huh, some raving redneck?” She spoke with an unaccustomed crudeness. “Well, I respect your religion,” I spluttered, “but I’m a bit of an agnostic personally and I—” “You’re full of shit,” she told me. She was looking right into my eyes. She was breathing emphatically, as though breath were psychic italic marks. She’d pushed her pageboy back from her face and shoved the sleeve of her madras blouse up to expose a pale biceps. She was halfway up out of her chair and leaning toward me. “Shit,” she said, her eyes darting for a second up to some invisible cue card before fixing me again. I felt she was torn between shyness and holy fury. “Jesus died for you,” she said, “and that’s something the greatest poets, Eliot and Dante and Donne, that’s something they knew—and they weren’t Florida crackers.” “Bravo,” DeQuincey whispered in awe. He turned to me with an isn’t-this-gal-great? grin—“She’s done it again, she’s really done it this time”—and he shook his head in admiring disbelief at the sheer wacky brilliance of his wife’s spiritual daredevilry. Exhausted by her performance, she shrank back into her chair, then rose and toddled off to the dark bedroom beyond. The moment DeQuincey and I were alone he stiffened, which I attributed to the embarrassment he must be feeling about his confession to me of his homosexual past. Not that he was attracted to me, nor I to him, but the possibility of attraction existed now and our sexual self-consciousness richocheted like sunlight in the Hall of Mirrors.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Those other loves which course around them are named Thrones of the divine aspect, because they brought to its completion the first ternary. 12 And thou shouldst know that all have their delight in measure as their sight sinketh more deep into the truth wherein every intellect is stilled. Hence may be seen how the being blessed is founded on the act that seeth, not that which loveth, which after followeth; 13 and the measure of sight is the merit which grace begetteth and the righteous will; and thus from rank to rank the progress goeth. The second ternary which thus flowereth in this eternal spring which nightly Aries doth not despoil, 14 unceasingly unwintereth 15 Hosanna with three melodies which sound in the three orders of gladness, whereof it is three-plied. In that hierarchy are the three divinities, first Dominations, and then Virtues; the third order is of Powers. Then in the two last-save-one up-leapings, Principalities and Archangels whirl; the last consisteth all of Angelic sports. These orders all gaze upward, and downward have such conquering might that toward God all are drawn and all draw. And Dionysius with such yearning set himself to contemplate these orders that he named them and distinguished them as I. But Gregory afterward departed from him, 16 wherefore so soon as he opened his eye m this heaven he smiled at his own self. And if so hidden truth was uttered forth by mortal upon earth, I would not have thee marvel; for he who saw it here above revealed it to him, with much beside of truth about these circles.” 17 1. Mine own = “eyes.” “The heavens declare the glory of God,” Psalm xix. 1; and whoso looketh at them aright perceives that glory. 2. “And it has been shown that this Being [the Divine Being] hath not magnitude, but is without parts and indivisible” (Aristotle). 3. Cf. Canto x. 4. Iris = the rainbow. Cf. Canto xii. 5. thereof, i.e., of the pure spark. 6. “Now from such a principle heaven and earth depend” (Aristotle). Wallace, 39, note 1. 7. “It is not contained in space” Cf. Canto xxx. 8. The Seraphs, who “see more of the First Cause than any other angelic nature” (Conv. ii. 6) and therefore must needs love more. Cf. Canto xxvi. 9. “If thou consider the intensive quantity and not the extensive. For extensive quantity is corporeal and apparent, whereas intensive quantity is spiritual and unapparent” (Benvenuto). 10. North-east, the sky-clearing wind, as opposed to north-west, the sky-clouding wind. The usage of the Latin writers (e.g., Boethius and Virgil) leaves no room to doubt that this is the meaning. 11. If one grain of corn were reckoned for the first square of a chess-board, two for the second, four for the third, etc., it may be seen by a calculation which a logarithmic table will make extremely easy, that the total will be about 18 1/2 million million million. 12.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  For I am not onely of kindred to thy mother by blood, but also by nourice, for wee both descended of the line of Plutarch, lay in one belly, sucked the same paps, and were brought up together in one house. And further there is no other difference betweene us two, but that she is married more honourably than I: I am the same Byrrhena whom you have often heard named among your friends at home: wherfore I pray you to take so much pains as to come with me to my house, and use it as your owne. At whose words I was partly abashed and sayd, God forbid Cosin that I should forsake myne Host Milo without any reasonable cause; but verily I will, as often as I have occasion to passe by thy house, come and see how you doe. And while we were talking thus together, little by little wee came to her house, and behold the gates of the same were very beautifully set with pillars quadrangle wise, on the top wherof were placed carved statues and images, but principally the Goddesse of Victory was so lively and with such excellencie portrayed and set forth, that you would have verily have thought that she had flyed, and hovered with her wings hither and thither. On the contrary part, the image of the Goddesse Diana was wrought in white marble, which was a marvellous sight to see, for shee seemed as though the winde did blow up her garments, and that she did encounter with them that came into the house. On each side of her were Dogs made of stone, that seemed to menace with their fiery eyes, their pricked eares, their bended nosethrils, their grinning teeth in such sort that you would have thought they had bayed and barked. An moreover (which was a greater marvel to behold) the excellent carver and deviser of this worke had fashioned the dogs to stand up fiercely with their former feet, and their hinder feet on the ground ready to fight. Behinde the back of the goddesse was carved a stone in manner of a Caverne, environed with mosse, herbes, leaves, sprigs, green branches and bowes, growing in and about the same, insomuch that within the stone it glistered and shone marvellously, under the brim of the stone hanged apples and grapes carved finely, wherein Art envying Nature, shewed her great cunning. For they were so lively set out, that you would have thought if Summer had been come, they might have bin pulled and eaten; and while I beheld the running water, which seemed to spring and leap under the feet of the goddesse, I marked the grapes which hanged in the water, which were like in every point to the grapes of the vine, and seemed to move and stir by the violence of the streame.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  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. As in Buster Keaton’s films, the hero is forever being thrust into professional and social stances for which he has no training. —Picture Keaton trapped aboard a runaway locomotive headed downhill at terrifying speed, then retrofit this as Buster during his first bisexual three-way—a Buster flummoxed yet neutral-faced and, in the end, limber, ingenious, stoically accommodating. Both these protagonists somehow survive all such trials. Hilarity springs from their abrupt on-the-job training, their over-clever solutions to problems all too plain. We must pull for White’s young hero as he places himself in ever more perilous positions, going after one idealized new friend then the next. What he fails to admit about himself is this: No one alive can resist his campaign to win them. Once he decides, they are his. The sole figure divinely outfitted to withstand such armor-piercing charm? His own father, of course.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  A sweet breeze, itself invariable, was striking on my brow with no greater force than a gentle wind, before which the branches, responsively trembling, were all bending toward that quarter, where the holy mount casts its first shadow; 1 yet not so far bent aside from their erect state, that the little birds in the tops ceased to practise their very art; but, singing, with full gladness they welcomed the first breezes within the leaves, which were murmuring the burden to their songs; even such as from bough to bough is gathered through the pine wood on Chiassi’s shore, when Æolus looses Sirocco forth. 2 Already my slow steps had carried me on so far within the ancient wood, that I could not see whence I had entered; and lo, a stream took from me further passage which, toward the left with its little waves, bent the grass which sprang forth on its bank. All the waters which here are purest, would seem to have some mixture in them, compared with that, which hideth nought; albeit full darkly it flows beneath the everlasting shade, which never lets sun, nor moon, beam there. With feet I halted and with mine eyes did pass beyond the rivulet, to gaze upon the great diversity of the tender blossoms; and there to me appeared, even as on a sudden something appears which, through amazement, sets all other thought astray, a lady 3 solitary, who went along singing, and culling flower after flower, wherewith all her path was painted. “Pray, fair lady, who at love’s beams dost warm thee, if I may believe outward looks, which are wont to be a witness of the heart, may it please thee to draw forward,” said I to her, “towards this stream, so far that I may understand what thou singest. Thou makest me to remember, where and what Proserpine was in the time her mother lost her, and she lost the spring.” 4 As a lady who is dancing turns her round with feet close to the ground and to each other, and hardly putteth foot before foot, she turned toward me upon the red and upon the yellow flowerets, not otherwise than a virgin that droppeth her modest eyes; and made my prayers satisfied, drawing so near that the sweet sound reached me with its meaning. Soon as she was there, where the grass is already bathed by the waves of the fair river, she vouchsafed to raise her eyes to me. I do not believe that so bright a light shone forth under the eyelids of Venus, pierced by her son, against all his wont. 5 She smiled from the right bank opposite, gathering more flowers with her hands, which the high land bears without seed.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X X X I The redeemed are seen, rank above rank, as the petals of the divine rose; and the angels flying between them and God minister peace and ardour to them, for passion is here peaceful and peace passionate. Nor does this angelic multitude intercept the piercing light of God nor the piercing sight of the redeemed. The realm, whose joy no longer needs the stimulus supplied by the fear of losing it or the effort to retain it, centres its look and love on the triune God. Oh! that he would look down on the storm-tossed earth; from the most evil quarter of which Dante coming to that region is smitten dumb by the contrast. Mutely gazing, as the pilgrim at the shrine of his pilgrimage, thinking to tell again what he has seen, Dante after a time turns to question Beatrice, but finds her gone. Bernard, the type of contemplation, or immediate vision, has come at Beatrice’s request, to bring Dante to the goal of his desire, by directing his eyes to that actual vision of divine things in their true forms for which her patient instructions have prepared him. And he first directs his sight to Beatrice herself in her place of glory. To her he pours out his gratitude, while imploring her further protection and praying that he may live and die worthy of her love; whereon she smiles upon him and then turns to God in whom alone is true and abiding union of human souls. Dante now learns who his guide is and gazes with awe-struck wonder on the features of the saint who had seen God while yet on earth; then, at his prompting, he looks above and sees the glory of Mary like the glory of the dawn, faming amongst countless angels—each one having his own specific beauty of light and gesture—and gladdening all the saints. IN FORM, then, of a white rose displayed itself to me that sacred soldiery which in his blood Christ made his spouse; but the other, which as it flieth seeth and doth sing his glory who enamoureth it, and the excellence which hath made it what it is, like to a swarm of bees which doth one while plunge into the flowers and another while wend back to where its toil is turned to sweetness, ever descended into the great flower adorned with so many leaves, and reascended thence to where its love doth ceaseless make sojourn. They had their faces all of living flame, and wings of gold, and the rest so white that never snow reacheth such limit.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  4 All were saying: “Benedictus qui venis”; 5 and, strewing flowers above and around, “Manibus o date lilia plenis.” 6 Ere now have I seen, at dawn of day, the eastern part all rosy red, and the rest of heaven adorned with fair clear sky, and the face of the sun rise shadowed, so that by the tempering of the mists the eye long time endured him: so within a cloud of flowers, which rose from the angelic hands and fell down again within and without, olive-crowned over a white veil, a lady appeared to me, clad, under a green mantle, with hue of living flame. 7 And my spirit, that now so long a time had passed, since, trembling in her presence, it had been broken down with awe, without having further knowledge by mine eyes through hidden virtue which went out from her, felt the mighty power of ancient love. Soon as on my sight the lofty virtue smote, which already had pierced me ere I was out of my boyhood, I turned me to the left with the trust with which the little child runs to his mother when he is frightened or when he is afflicted, to say to Virgil: “Less than a drachm of blood is left in me that trembleth not; I recognize the tokens of the ancient flame.” 8 But Virgil had left us bereft of himself, Virgil sweetest Father, Virgil to whom for my weal I gave me up; nor did all that our ancient mother lost, 9 avail to keep my dew-washed cheeks 10 from turning dark again with tears. “Dante, 11 for that Virgil goeth away, weep not yet, weep not yet, for thou must weep for other sword.” Even as an admiral, who at stern and at bow, comes to see the folk that man the other ships, and heartens them to brave deeds, so on the left side of the car, when I turned me at sound of my name, which of necessity here is recorded, 11 I saw the lady, who first appeared to me veiled beneath the angelic festival, directing her eyes to me on this side the stream. Albeit the veil which fell from her head, crowned with Minerva’s leaves, did not let her appear manifest, queenlike, in bearing yet stern, she continued, like one who speaks and holdeth back the hottest words till the last: “Look at me well; verily am I, verily am I Beatrice. How didst thou deign to draw nigh the mount? knewest thou not that here man is happy?” Mine eyes drooped down to the clear fount; but beholding me therein, I drew them back to the grass, so great a shame weighed down my brow. So doth the mother seem stern to her child, as she seemed to me; for the savour of harsh pity tasteth of bitterness. She was silent, and straightway the angels sang: In te, Domine, speravi”; but beyond “pedes meos” they passed not.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  As in the calm full moons Trivia smileth amongst the eternal nymphs who paint the heaven in each recess, I saw, thousands of lamps surmounting, one sun which all and each enkindled, as doth our own the things we see above; 2 and through the living light outglowed the shining substance so bright upon my vision that it endured it not. O Beatrice, sweet guide and dear! She said to me: “That which o’ercometh thee is power against which nought hath defence. Therein is the wisdom and the might 3 which oped the pathways betwixt heaven and earth, for which there erst had been so long desire.” Even as fire is unbarred from the cloud, because it so dilateth that it hath not space within, and counter to its nature dasheth down to earth, so my mind, grown greater ’mid these feasts, forth issued from itself, and what it then became knoweth not to recall.... “Open thine eyes and look on what I am; thou hast seen things by which thou art made mighty to sustain my smile.” I was as one who cometh to himself from a forgotten vision, and doth strive in vain to bring it back unto his mind, when I heard this proffer, worthy of so great gratitude, as never to be blotted from the book that doth record the past. If now there were to sound all of those tongues which Polyhymnia with her sisters made richest with their sweetest milk, it would not mount, in aiding me, unto the thousandth of the truth, hymning the sacred smile, and how deep-clear it made the sacred aspect. 4 And therefore, figuring Paradise, needs must the sacred poem make a leap, as who should find his pathway intercepted. But whoso thinketh of the weighty theme and of the mortal shoulder which hath charged itself therewith, will think no blame if under it it trembleth. It is no voyage for a little bark, that which my daring keel cleaveth as it goeth, nor for a helmsman who doth spare himselt. “Wherefore doth my face so enamour thee that thou turnest thee not to the fair garden which flowereth beneath the rays of Christ? There is the Rose wherein the Word Divine made itself flesh; there are the Lilies at whose odour the good path was taken.” So Beatrice: and I, who to her counsels was all eager, again surrendered me to the conflict of the feeble brows. As under the sun’s ray, which issueth pure through a broken cloud, ere now mine eyes have seen a meadow full of flowers, when themselves covered by the shade; so beheld I many a throng of splendours, glowed on from above by ardent rays, beholding not the source whence came the glowings. O benign power which dost so imprint them! thou hadst thyself uplifted to yield place there for mine eyes that lacked in power.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  The den was Miri’s favorite room in Natalie’s house, not least because of the seventeen-inch Zenith, inside a pale wood cabinet, the biggest television Miri had ever seen. Her grandmother had a set but it was small with rabbit ears and sometimes the picture was snowy. The furniture in the Osners’ den all matched, the beige sofas and club chairs arranged around a Danish modern coffee table, with its neat stacks of magazines—Life, Look, Scientific American, National Geographic. A cloth bag with a wood handle, holding Mrs. Osner’s latest needlepoint project, sat on one of the chairs. A complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica took up three shelves of the bookcase, along with family photos, including one of Natalie at summer camp, in jodhpurs, atop a sleek black horse, holding her ribbons, and another of her little sister, Fern, perched on a pony. In one corner of the room was a game table with a chess set standing ready, not that she and Natalie knew how to play, but Natalie’s older brother, Steve, did and sometimes he and Dr. Osner would play for hours. She and Natalie sang “White Christmas” along with Kate Smith, then oohed and aahed with the crowd, with the whole country, when the tree was lit, signaling the start of the holiday season. Later, Miri found out her mother had been there to see it live, one of the two thousand spectators. Rusty told Miri she’d been pushed and shoved as the crowd pressed forward until she’d decided it wasn’t worth the effort and left to catch her train to Elizabeth. She could see the tree any old day on her way home from work. —FOR MIRI the real start of the holiday season was her mother’s birthday. Miri was sure Rusty had felt robbed as a kid, having a birthday so close to Hanukkah, but Rusty assured her that no, she’d never minded having a holiday birthday. It made it more special. This year Hanukkah fell at the same time as Christmas, something Miri thought should be the rule, not the exception. She vowed she wouldn’t wait until the last minute to do her shopping, but here she was on Saturday, the day before her mother’s birthday, on a mission that took her downtown to Nia’s Lingerie, a shop on Broad Street. Neither she nor her second best friend, Suzanne Dietz, who smelled of Noxzema year-round and had the best skin of any girl in their crowd, had ever set foot in Nia’s. Just the word lingerie was enough to send them into fits of laughter. It sounded like something Mrs. Osner would say in her southern drawl instead of underwear. Underwear was what Miri and Suzanne bought at Levy Brothers, one of two department stores on Broad Street. Underwear was white cotton. But lingerie —lingerie was something else. Not that there was anything suggestive in Nia’s windows. Not a bra or girdle in sight. And nothing black.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I looked around the room from which I was usually barred. Everything was silent except for his breathing and the tick of his gold pocket watch on the night table beside him. Within my father’s half-closed closet I could see his shoes. I intuited one shoe from no more than a single burning vertical line of light that followed me by traveling glassily across the black leather rondure above the heel. Floating up there, high above the shoes, hung a smoky cashmere Olympus of all his discarded but potential selves: his suits. Now to the bed. I sat beside him and lightly patted his back. He murmured encouragingly and I worked my way up the thickly padded torso to the shoulders. The pores looked huge, some of them specked with black. A film of sweat seemed to be methodically seeping out of him; I sniffed my right hand; it smelled funny. My job seemed to be to creep over him as a lone climber, with nothing but rope and crampons, might assault a glacier. If he was fully awake he didn’t let on, as though a state of torpor were all a father owed a very little son—or at least all the son would accept from such a massive father. He was entirely naked but shrouded up to the waist in sheets. Whereas my sheets were small, sufficient for my cot where I slept in the governing shade and disturbingly intimate smell of my black nurse, these sheets were sculpturally white, vast and twisted, testimony to adult nights of passion or strife. Later, an hour later, he’d descend to his squire’s breakfast, shaved and dressed in a white shirt, silk tie and double-breasted suit, his eyes young, sharp and intelligent in a head I’d seen earlier from an odd, wounded angle. He was now polite to the cook, deferential to my mother and lighthearted and cutting with my sister and me—he who’d been nothing but a felled deity exuding a cold sweat an hour before. This transformation of the mystery man in the tangle of sheets into the bantering gentleman I attributed to the rites of the bathroom mirror and the bracing smell of carbolic soap and witch hazel. How he’d study himself in that mirror, both taps running full blast, as though out of the haze on the glass his true identity might emerge under a swipe of the towel—a cutting of the self if not the full blossoming branch. Dad had a friend of sorts—to him possibly a very minor business associate—whom my sister and I worshipped because he gave us money. “Dollar Bill,” we called him, since he was William and always gave us a dollar each. Though we wanted for nothing and we dimly sensed that our way of living cost many, many dollars, this unseen cash meant nothing to us compared to the actual loot Dollar Bill handed over.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The basin was filled with candy wrappers and paper napkins. Inside, behind padded doors each pierced by a grimy porthole, soared the dark splendors of the theater brushed here and there by the ushers’ traveling red flashlights or feebly, briefly dispelled by the glow of a match held to a forbidden cigarette. The ceiling had been designed to resemble the night sky, the stars were minute bulbs, the moon a yellow crescent. To either side of the screen was a windswept version of a royal box, a gilt throne on a small carpeted dais under a great blown-back stucco curtain topped by a papier-mâché coronet. When I finally held Helen Paper’s hand after sitting beside her for half an hour in the dark, I said to myself, “This hand could be insured for a million dollars.” She surrendered her hand to me, but was I really a likely candidate for it? Was this the way guys became popular? Did certain girls have the guts to tell everyone else, “Look, be nice to this guy. He’s not a nerd. He’s worth it. He’s special”? Or was this date merely some extraordinary favor wangled for me by Tommy, something that would not be repeated? Could it be (and I knew it could) that the Star Chamber of popularity was sealed and that no one would be admitted to it—no one except some casual new prince who belonged there? Tommy was a prince. He had a knack for demanding attention; even when he called the telephone operator for a number, he’d hold her in conversation. Once he even talked her into meeting him after work. The receptionists in offices downtown, salesladies in stores, the mothers of friends—all of them he sized up, mentally undressed, and though this appraisal might seem to be rude, in fact most women liked it. An efficient woman would be sailing past him. He’d grab her wrist. He’d apologize for the intrusion, but he’d also stand very close to her and his smile wouldn’t apologize for a thing. And she, at exactly the moment I would have expected outrage, would flush, her eyes would flutter, not in an experienced way but meltingly, since he’d touched a nerve, since he’d found a way to subvert the social into the sexual—and then she’d smile and rephrase what she was saying in a voice charmingly without conviction. After the movie we went somewhere for a snack and then I walked Helen home. Her beauty stood between us like an enemy, some sort of hereditary enemy I was supposed to fear, but I liked her well enough. Even the fiercest lovers must like each other at least once in a while.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I lowered my eyes but thought prayer sounded rather useless. I stood and thanked him. He walked me to the door and told me to come back. I wondered if he would pick me up into his arms, but he didn’t. I was small enough, but he didn’t. Instead he gave me his hand to shake, which I didn’t really like since I was uncertain about how to shake it. The gesture was also, I recognized, a way of treating me with respect as an independent young man. I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted to be. This precocious role I took in the world was possible only because the world seemed so unreal, the stage transected by lights, its fourth wall missing in order to afford a view to thronged but shadowy spectators. Everything I did was being watched. If I turned right rather than left, someone took careful notice. If I repeated a magic phrase, the words were recorded and obeyed. Those spectators were certainly real, though I did not know them yet, but what they were watching, this dumb show in which I played such a decisive role—it was merely a simulacrum of actual feelings. These tears were paste. What was slowly dawning on me was my extreme importance, something the audience had long ago suspected. Who were they, these spectators? I’d look up into the evening sky to see them ranked in blowing white robes, the hems wet with blood. When I had a fever I could hear them. We moved to a city several hundred miles to the north and there we lived in a luxury hotel, sedate and respectable, a place with goldfish in a low marble pool in the lobby and a small velvet settee on the elevator. On the top floor a valet steamed and pressed clothes in a closet beside the double doors that opened onto a ballroom. The windows of the ballroom were heavily and perpetually draped and curtained, but I discovered a tiny door just two panes high that led out onto a narrow balcony. This balcony obviously was not intended to be used, just a strip of gravel over tar behind an escarpment of stone ornamental urns. In good weather I’d hide on this secret balcony and read; my favorite book was about the lost dauphin. On some days the ballroom was set up with long banquet tables bearing napery and floral arrangements between rows of gilt and velvet chairs. Other days the room would smell of stale cigarette smoke and the tables would have been stripped to their scarred wood tops and pipe-metal bases.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X V I IThe monster Geryon is described; and the Poets leave the rocky margin of the streamlet, and go down, on the right hand, to the place where he has landed himself. Virgil remains with him, and sends Dante, by himself alone (not without significance), to see the last class of sinners that are punished on the burning sand,—the Usurers who have done Violence to Nature and Art. (Canto xi.) They are sitting all crouched up, tears gushing from their eyes; and each of them has a Purse, stamped with armorial bearings, hanging from his neck. Dante looks into the faces of some; but finds it quite impossible to recognize any one of them. He briefly examines their condition, in the way of duty; listens to a few words that make him understand it completely; and then turns away without speaking at all to them. He goes back to his Guide; and Geryon conveys them down to the Eighth Circle. [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] “BEHOLD THE savage beast with the pointed tail, that passes mountains, and breaks through walls and weapons; behold him that pollutes the whole world.” Thus began my Guide to speak to me; and beckoned him to come ashore, near the end of our rocky path; and that uncleanly image of Fraud came onward, and landed his head and bust, but drew not his tail upon the bank. His face was the face of a just man, so mild an aspect had it outwardly; and the rest was all a reptile’s body. He had two paws, hairy to the armpits; the back and the breast, and both the flanks, were painted with knots and circlets: never did Tartars or Turks make cloth with more colours, groundwork and broidery; nor by Arachne1 were such webs laid on her loom. As at times the wherries lie on shore, that are part in water and part on land; and as there amongst the guzzling Germans, the beaver2 adjusts himself to wage his war: so lay that worst of savage beasts upon the brim which closes the great sand with stone. In the void glanced all his tail, twisting upwards the venomed fork, which, as in scorpions, armed the point. My Guide said: “Now must we bend our way a little, to that wicked brute which couches there.” Then we descended on the right, and made ten paces towards the edge, that we might quite avoid the sand and flames; and when we came to him, I saw upon the sand, a little farther onwards, people sitting near the empty space. Here my Master said to me: “That thou mayest carry full experience of this round, go and see the state of these. Let thy talk with them be brief; till thou returnest, I will speak with this beast, that he may lend us his strong shoulders.”

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  When we were come to the temple, the great priest and those which were deputed to carrie the divine figures, but especially those which had long time bin worshippers of the religion, went into the secret chamber of the goddesse, where they put and placed the images according to their ordor. This done, one of the company which was a scribe or interpreter of letters, who in forme of a preacher stood up in a chaire before the place of the holy college, and began to reade out of a booke, and to interpret to the great prince, the senate, and to all the noble order of chivalry, and generally to all the Romane people, and to all such as be under the jurisdiction of Rome, these words following (Laois Aphesus) which signified the end of their divin service and that it was lawfull for every man to depart, whereat all the people gave a great showt, and replenished with much joy, bare all kind of hearbs and garlands of flowers home to their houses, kissing and imbracing the steps where the goddesse passed: howbeit I could not doe as the rest, for my mind would not suffer me to depart one foot away, so attentiv was I to behold the beauty of the goddesse, with remembrance of the great miserie I had endured.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  “May the grace that granteth me to confess me,” I began, “to the veteran fore-fighter, make my thought find expression!” And I followed on: “As wrote for us, O father, the veracious pen of thy dear brother, 5 who, with thee, set Rome on the good track; faith is the substance of things hoped for, and argument of things which are not seen; and this I take to be its quiddity.” 6 Then heard I: “Rightly dost thou deem, if well thou understandest wherefore he placed it amongst the substances, and then amongst the arguments.” 7 And I thereon: “The deep things which grant me here the largess to appear before me, are from the eyes of them below so hidden that their existence is there only in belief, whereon is built the lofty hope; and so of substance it embraceth the intention; 8 and from this belief needs must we syllogize without further sight; therefore it includes the intention of argument.” Then heard I: “If all that is acquired down below by teaching were so understood, there were no room left for the wit of sophist.” Thus was breathed forth from that enkindled love; then did it add: “Right well hath now been traversed this coin’s alloy and weight; but tell me if thou hast it in thy purse.” Whereupon I: “Yea, so bright and round I have it that for me is no perhaps in its impression.” Then issued from the deep light that was glowing there: “This dear gem on which all virtue is up-budt, whence came it to thee?” And I: “The ample shower of the Holy Spirit which is poured over the old and over the new parchments, is syllogism that hath brought it to so sharp conclusion for me, that, compared to it, all demonstration seemeth blunt to me.” Then heard I: “That old and that new proposition which bringeth thee to such conclusion, 9 wherefore dost hold it for divine discourse?” And I: “The proof which doth unfold the truth to me lieth in the works that followed, for which nature ne’er heated iron yet, nor hammered anvil.” The answer came to me: “Say, who assureth thee that these works were? The very script that would attest itself, no other, sweareth it to

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  says to Mason, Thank you for our Gaby. There’s not a dry eye in the house. After the presentation to Mason it feels as if the program is over. People stand and begin to say goodbye to one another, when the doors swing open and Natalie makes her entrance, swooping in like a high-fashion gypsy, the “Queen of New Age,” as she’s known, her Santa Fe jewelry jangling on her wrists and around her neck. A buzz goes through the crowd and people take their seats again. After all, she’s Natalie Renso. She’s famous. You can see her on TV, at readings and book signings, in fashion magazines. Most people don’t know Renso is Osner spelled backward, the kind of code name children come up with in third grade. But it’s worked well for Natalie. She steps up to the podium, waits for the whispering to die down and begins. “It was the winter that changed our lives,” she says. “The winter we learned who we were, and what we were made of.” And that’s it. She doesn’t say a word about Ruby. Just that she’ll be happy to sign books—please write the name of the person you’d like her to sign for on a Post-it. Even Lee Patterson, daughter of the Secretary of War, lines up to get her signature. “My daughter would never forgive me if I didn’t bring her a signed book.” Miri does not get in line. She hangs back. “Did you really sleep with Warren Beatty?” someone asks Natalie. “Why not?” Natalie answers. “Everyone who had the chance did.” She laughs, and the crowd laughs with her. — CHRISTINA DOESN’T LIKE whatever’s going on between Miri and Mason. You’d have to be an idiot to miss it. The two of them making goo-goo eyes at each other all through lunch. Jack tells her to let it be, they’re adults, they’re not going to do anything stupid, anything that would mess up their lives. Instead, she tries to convince Miri to fly home with her and Jack today. The plane is waiting at Teterboro. But Miri says she’s staying another night. “Fine,” Christina says. “I’ll stay and fly back commercial with you tomorrow.” Miri looks at her. “No.” “No? What do you mean, no?” “I mean that’s crazy. Fly back with Jack and I’ll see you day after tomorrow. I

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Although Lolita is less dramatically anti-realistic than Pale Fire, in its own way it is as grandly labyrinthine and as much a work of artifice as that more ostentatiously tricky novel. This is not immediately apparent because Humbert is Nabokov’s most “humanized” character since Luzhin (1930), and Lolita the first novel since the early thirties in which “the end” remains intact. Moreover, Nabokov said that The Enchanter, the 1939 story containing the central idea of Lolita, went unpublished not because of its subject matter but rather because “The little girl wasn’t alive. She hardly spoke. Little by little I managed to give her some semblance of reality.” It may seem anomalous for puppeteer Nabokov, creator of the sham worlds of Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, to worry this way about “reality” (with or without quotation marks); yet one extreme does not preclude the other in Nabokov, and the originality of Lolita derives from this very paradox. The puppet theater never collapses, but everywhere there are fissures, if not gaps, in the structure, crisscrossing in intricate patterns and visible to the discerning eye—that is, the eye trained on Nabokov fictions and thus accustomed to novelistic trompe-l’oeil. Lolita is a great novel to the same extent as Nabokov is able to have it both ways, involving the reader on the one hand in a deeply moving yet outrageously comic story, rich in verisimilitude, and on the other engaging him in a game made possible by the interlacings of verbal figurations which undermine the novel’s realistic base and distance the reader from its dappled surface, which then assumes the aspect of a gameboard (the figurations are detailed in the Notes). As a lecturer, Nabokov was a considerable Thespian, able to manipulate audiences in a similar manner. His rehearsal of Gogol’s death agonies remains in one’s mind: how the hack doctors alternately bled him and purged him and plunged him into icy baths, Gogol so frail that his spine could be felt through his stomach, the six fat white bloodletting leeches clinging to his nose, Gogol begging to have them removed—“Please lift them, lift them, keep them away!”— and, sinking behind the lectern, now a tub, Nabokov for several moments was Gogol, shuddering and shivering, his hands held down by a husky attendant, his head thrown back in pain and terror, nostrils distended, eyes shut, his beseechments filling the large lecture hall. Even the sea of C-minuses in the back of the room could not help being moved. And then, after a pause, Nabokov would very quietly say, in a sentence taken word-for-word from his Gogol, “Although the scene is unpleasant and has a human appeal which I deplore, it is necessary to dwell upon it a little longer in order to bring out the curiously physical side of Gogol’s genius.”

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  For as the Sun in sight that most trembleth, so the remembrance of the sweet smile sheareth my memory of its very self. From the first day when in this life I saw her face, until this sight, my song hath ne’er been cut off from the track; but now needs must my tracking cease from following her beauty further forth in poesy, as at his utmost reach must every artist. Such as I leave her for a mightier proclamation than of my trumpet, which draweth its arduous subject to a close, with alert leader’s voice and gesture, did she again begin: “We have issued forth from the greatest body into the heaven which is pure light, light intellectual full-charged with love, love of true good full-charged with gladness, gladness which transcendeth every sweetness. Here shalt thou see the one and the other soldiery of Paradise, 1 and the one in those aspects which thou shalt see at the last judgment.” As a sudden flash of lightning which so shattereth the visual spirits as to rob the eye of power to realize e’en strongest objects; so there shone around me a living light, leaving me swathed in such a web of its glow that naught appeared to me. “Ever doth the love which stilleth heaven, receive into itself with such like salutation, duly to fit the taper for its flame.” So soon as these brief words came into me I felt me to surmount my proper power; and kindled me with such new-given sight that there is no such brightness unalloyed that mine eyes might not hold their own with it. And I saw a light, in river form, glow tawny betwixt banks painted with marvellous spring. From out this river issued living sparks, and dropped on every side into the blossoms, like rubies set in gold. Then as inebriated with the odours they plunged themselves again into the marvellous swirl, and as one entered issued forth another. “The lofty wish that now doth burn and press thee to have more knowledge of the things thou seest, pleaseth me more the more it swelleth. But of this water needs thou first must drink, ere so great thirst in thee be slaked.” So spoke mine eyes’ sun unto me; then added: “The river and the topaz-gems that enter and go forth, and the smiling of the grasses are the shadowy prefaces of their reality. Not that such things are harsh as in themselves; but on thy side is the defect, in that thy sight not yet exalteth it so high.” 2 Never doth child so sudden rush with face turned to the milk, if he awake far later than his wont, as then did I, to make yet better mirrors of mine eyes, down bending to the wave which floweth that we may better us. And no sooner drank of it mine eye-lids’ rim than into roundness seemed to change its length.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Thus by her sorcery she transformed her body into what shape she would, which when I saw I was greatly astonished, and although I was enchanted by no kind of charm, yet I thought I seemed not to have the likeness of Lucius, for so was I vanished from my senses, amazed in madness, that I dreamed waking, and felt mine eyes to know whether I were asleep or no. But when I was come again to myself, I took Fotis by the hand, and moved it to mine eyes, and said: “I pray thee, while occasion doth serve, that I may have the fruition of the fruits of thy love towards me, and grant me some of this oint- ment. O Fotis, my honey, I pray thee by thy sweet breasts, and I will ever hereafter be bound unto you by amighty gift and obedient to your commandment, if you will but make that I may be turned into a bird, and stand, like Cupid with his wings, beside you my Venus.” Then said Fotis: “ Will you go about to deceive me now, my love, like a fox, and enforce me to work mine own sorrow?! Do hardly now save you, that are without defence, from these she-wolves of Thessaly, and then if you be a bird where shall I seek you? And when shall I see you ?" Then answered I: “God forbid that I should commit such a crime, for though I could fly into the air as an eagle, or though I were the sure messenger or joyful armour-bearer of Jupiter, yet would I have recourse to nest with thee for all that glory of wings: and I swear by the knot of thy amiable hair, that wherewith you have fast bound my spirit, I love not any other person rather than Fotis. Moreover, this cometh to my mind, that if by virtue of the ointment 1 Lit. “to apply the axe to my own legs.” : 133 LUCIUS APULEIUS semel avem talem perunctus induero, domus omnes procul me vitare debere: quam pulchro enim quam- que festivo matronae perfruentur amatore bubone ! Quid, quod istas nocturnas aves, cum penetraverint Larem quempiam, sollicite prehensas foribus videmus affigi ut, quod infaustis volatibus familiae minantur exitium, suis luant cruciatibus? Sed, quod sciscitari paene praeterivi, quo dicto factove rursum exutis pinnulis illis ad meum redibo Lucium?" * Bono animo es quod ad huius rei curam pertinet" ait. * Nam mihi domina singula monstravit, quae possunt rursus in facies hominum tales figuras reformare : nec istud factum putes ulla benivolentia, sed ut ei re- deunti medela salubri possem subsistere. ^ Specta denique quam parvis quamque futilibus tanta res pro- curetur herbulis: anethi modicum cum lauri foliis im- missum rore fontano datur lavacrum et poculum." 24 Haec identidem asseverans summa cum trepida-