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 Folding Star (1994)

  We had nothing to fear beyond birds and rats along the kitchen corridor. In a dank larder the shelves of a dresser were piled with straw and shit like some old colombier; the boards had been ripped from the windows, brambles quested in. The kitchen range held a nest that took me back for a second to the drawings of a childhood nature-book—auburn fieldmice perched on ears of wheat. There were bottles and cans and cigarette-butts of temporary residents, as there must once have been cases of champagne empties and the ash of gaming parties that went on till dawn. KRIS was commemorated here too, with the same phallic totem; I wondered if he was the object of fantasy or the boastful vandal-artist himself. We went down a passage where the paint on the wainscot had shrunk and cracked like the glaze on an old dinner-service: at the end a door with a splintered upper panel swung open on to a descending stair and a shallow cellar full of water. We came back through a side-door into the entrance-hall. It was time for the echoing room—I knew what it must be, the rotunda of the tower. I took charge of the torch at last—just borrowed it a moment and swivelled the beam up the dark walls. The stairs rose from here and were glimpsed again higher up, pausing at an opening with a balcony. The light swept over a cupola and down, and there on the other side the faces were waiting. The artist had painted another balcony for them, cunningly shadowed, and the revellers lounged along it, some gazing upwards, as it might be at stars or fireworks, others leaning on the rail to peer down at new arrivals, whose imagined lanterns charmed and dazzled them. Some of the men had high white collars, buttonholes, cigarettes, the blank sheen of a monocle—supercilious but impassive under the torch's challenge. The women had fans and mantillas or cloaks and tricorn hats; one raised a gloved arm and opened her mouth to sing. Two or three children were dressed as playing-cards, like the gardeners in Alice in Wonderland, and pointed gleefully through the wrought-iron banisters.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Still, the mind of man is reluctant to consider itself as the product of chance, or the passing result of destinies over which no god presides, least of all himself. A part of every life, even a life meriting very little regard, is spent in searching out the reasons for its existence, its starting point, and its source. My own failure to discover these things has sometimes inclined me toward magical explanations, and has led me to seek in the frenzies of the occult for what common sense has not taught me. When all the involved calculations prove false, and the philosophers themselves have nothing more to tell us, it is excusable to turn to the random twitter of birds, or toward the distant mechanism of the stars. VARIUS MULTIPLEX MULTIFORMIS Marullinus, my grandfather, believed in the stars. This tall old man, emaciated and sallow with age, conceded to me much the same degree of affection, without tenderness or visible sign, and almost without words, that he felt for the animals on his farm and for his lands, or for his collection of stones fallen from the sky. He was descended from a line of ancestors long established in Spain, from the period of the Scipios, and was third of our name to bear senatorial rank; before that time our family had belonged to the equestrian order. Under Titus he had taken some modest part in public affairs. Provincial that he was, he had never learned Greek, and he spoke Latin with a harsh Spanish accent which he passed on to me, and for which I was later ridiculed in Rome. His mind, however, was not wholly uncultivated; after his death they found in his house a trunk full of mathematical instruments and books untouched by him for twenty years. He was learned in his way, with a knowledge half scientific, half peasant, that same mixture of narrow prejudice and ancient wisdom which characterized the elder Cato. But Cato was a man of the Roman Senate all his life, and of the war with Carthage, a true representative of the stern Rome of the Republic. The almost impenetrable hardness of Marullinus came from farther back, and from more ancient times. He was a man of the tribe, the incarnation of a sacred and awe-inspiring world of which I have sometimes found vestiges among our Etruscan soothsayers. He always went bareheaded, as I was criticized for doing later on; his horny feet spurned all use of sandals, and his everyday clothing was hardly distinguishable from that of the aged beggars, or of the grave tenant farmers whom I used to see squatting in the sun. They said that he was a wizard, and the village folk tried to avoid his glance.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The ascent was made by night; just as for Aetna, I took with me only a small number of friends used to climbing. My purpose was not simply to accomplish a propitiatory rite in that very sacred sanctuary; I wished to see from its height the phenomenon of dawn, that daily miracle which I never have contemplated without some secret cry of joy. At the topmost point the sun brightens the copper ornaments of the temple and the faces smile in full light while Asia's plains and the sea are still plunged in darkness; for the briefest moment the man who prays on that peak is sole beneficiary of the morning. Everything was prepared for a sacrifice; we climbed with horses at first, then on foot, along perilous paths bordered with broom and shrubs which we knew at night by their pungent perfumes. The air was heavy; that spring was as burning as summer elsewhere. For the first time while ascending a mountain I had trouble breathing; I was obliged to lean for a moment on the shoulder of my young favorite. We were a hundred steps from the summit when a storm broke which Hermogenes had expected for some time, for he was expert in meteorology. The priests came out to receive us under flashes of lightning; the small band, drenched to the skin, crowded around the altar laid for the sacrifice. Just as it was to take place a thunderbolt burst above us and killed both the victim and the attendant with knife in hand. When the first moment of horror had passed, Hermogenes bent with a physician's curiosity over the stricken pair; Chabrias and the high priest cried out in admiration that the man and fawn thus sacrificed by this divine sword were uniting with the eternity of my Genius; that these lives, by substitution, were prolonging mine. Antinous gripping fast to my arm was trembling, not from terror, as I then supposed, but under the impact of a thought which I was to understand only later on. In his dread of degradation, that is to say, of growing old, he must have promised himself long ago to die at the first sign of decline, or even before. I have come to think now that that promise, which so many of us have made to ourselves but without holding to it, went far back for him, to the period of Nicomedia and the encounter at the edge of the spring. It explained his indolence, his ardor in pleasure, his sadness, and his total indifference to all future. But it was still essential that this departure should have no air of revolt, and should contain no complaint. The lightning of Mount Casius had revealed to him a way out: death could become a last form of service, a final gift, and the only one which seemed left for him to give.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "No, no. It was they who arranged for me to go." I thought Paul was cross with me for a moment, then saw that perhaps it was only with himself. "Put simply: when Orst became too infirm to stay at the Villa he had moved back to his sister's house—now, as you know, our Museum. I'm not sure when he contracted the pox. You probably know there was a great spread of it during the war—it may have been soon after he returned from England, in 1919. I suspect the tertiary stage was very delayed, and when it came it was clearly very prolonged. Anyway, Delphine took him in: she was very tough and capable and . . . unsentimental. That would have been in about 1930. She looked after him with her old servant, who was married to the cook—dear old people. The paintings and most of the contents of the Villa were brought over and stored, a lot of them in this house that we're in now, which had been left to Delphine and which stood unused for years. It was she who made the little passageway that you go through from our sitting-room to my office." "Oh!" I said, with slightly more wonder than I could account for. "And there he stayed, painting until he could see no more and taking a long time to die." This was what Helene had hinted at on our evening walk—it seemed the embodiment of something I had always felt about the old town, and found shadowed forth in many of Orst's eerie Uthographs, a sense of dying life, life hidden, haunted and winter-slow. "The trouble came with the new war. Edgard and Delphine's mother had been Jewish—oh, quite assimilated, but Jewish. Obviously, they must have watched the deepening of racehatred among the Belgian fascists with alarm; but when the Germans made their move, it was all so incredibly quick and so feebly resisted, they had to make a plan. She fled to England again, at really the last possible moment—it was almost Dunkirk. She stayed with friends until the end of '44, in Chislehurst—they were old patrons of Edgard's." "Chislehurst!" This trivial detail surprised me much more than the lightning progress of the German army. She could have known aunt Tina. I remembered Orst's love of the legendary sentiment in English art. "Of course there was no way Edgard could be rushed out of the country, so they did the simplest thing, by pretending he no longer existed—which to all intents and purposes and in most people's minds was the case anyway. The cook and her husband stayed on and looked after him, and if asked they would say that he was either dead or in England too." "He lived a kind of ghost existence, a premature ghost."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The three pieces of "Autrefois" didn't fit. Paul had leant them against the wall, side by side, like some classic puzzle, simple in its elements but requiring genius IQ to solve. The left-hand part was the one the Museum had already, the candle-lit image of the woman whose face was seen only in the mirror. It appeared on postcards and posters and I thought of it as an icon in itself. It had its original frame of dull gilt wood. The right-hand wing, the seascape, had been reframed and stood several inches higher, its intense dusk colours heightened by a broad surround of silvery pearwood. The larger middle panel, the deserted town, which had undergone so many vicissitudes, should have had a huge recessed frame, into which the hinged wings could be folded, and a broad plinth. Paul showed me the murky old studio photograph, in which the triptych could be made out, its doors open as if on an altar, and for the first time I caught the shock of its arrangement, the figure of the virgin displaced from the centre, the gothic townscape, such as often clustered behind a Flemish nativity, unpeopled and sepulchral, and where at the edge the donors might have knelt only the grey sea and violet sky. "I'll have to get Mr Pauwels in," said Paul, "our historical framemaker. The right panel has obviously been cleaned quite recently, only last week by the look of it, whereas the dentist's part is relatively filthy and more damaged than I realised when I saw it before. Of course the light was very bad . . . " He appeared both thrilled and forlorn about the work, and inspected it with extraordinary technical thoroughness. I wondered what it was he read in it inch by inch. "When do you think it was painted?" I asked. He stood up and steadied himself with a hand on my shoulder, as though momentarily dizzy. "That's a very good question." We contemplated the slightly pathetic reunion of the three canvases, which now seemed to me like long-separated friends who no longer have much to say to each other. "And one that you should be able to start answering by now," he said, giving me a tutorly shake. "I'm afraid I've only been looking for spelling mistakes," I said. "Well, there's kind of spelling mistake in this." I scanned the pictures again, knowing I wouldn't find it, and gave a shrug. "I suppose the seascape is quite different stylistically." "It is indeed. One can be pretty sure that it was painted at least ten years after the other panels, possibly as late as 1932. His sight was deteriorating steadily then, and he only painted from memory. You can see how broad the handling is, and the composition is of the simplest. I mean, I think it's a very beautiful picture, and a very moving one—his later works sometimes have that kind of force."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I looked out of the window at the drifting gleam of the rain against the purple brick of the gables opposite. The limes had lost their leaves now. My thoughts about the ragged injustice of the story dissolved into the inhospitable weather, with its calm and comforting insistence we should stay inside—a frisson of childish safety. I turned back to the crackling quarto with its precious powder-blue wrappers and enormous margins, and then read Paul's comments on the three illustrations to the False Chaplain. He pointed out how the theme of constancy was one which recurred in Orst's work, and the disturbing way in which the artist seemed to admire the constancy of the Chaplain's obsession with the Lady, more than that of the Lady's love for her husband. She was the focus of all the engravings, white-faced, pale-eyed, swirled in her own hair—a premonition of the Jane Byron figure. The first picture was simply an icon of her, though formally displaced, her head at the top left-hand corner, the rest filled with the oscillations of her hair and the vertical plunge of her gown. In the second she was sewing with her (oddly similar) women and the dark folds of the tapestry lifted in their hands set off the mystic pallor of her face as she paused and stared. In the third she lay on the brink of death in a kind of skewed pieta, the wings of the Knight's cloak sheltering her; his face, though, was out of the picture and the black figure of the Chaplain rose exaltedly behind, with upraised hands and eyes. It was a very fin-de-siecle subversion of an old tale going back to the thirteenth century, and found beyond Flanders in French fabliaux and Italian collections. Its unusual ending attracted Orst, and he had simply had his way with it, giving a hint of perverse sexual triumph to the shaven phallic upright of the priest, and the supine surrender of the female, lips parted, eyelids lowering over eyes that still cast an ecstatic light.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The room we entered was a panelled dining-room with a carved overmantel and a leafy frieze picked out in gold, an effect rather like paint-sprayed holly at Christmas-time. It had the sleepy acoustic quality that some rooms have which are rarely, if ever, used. ‘This is the salle à manger ,’ announced Charles. ‘As you can see that slut Lewis never bothers to dust in here, because I haven’t actually mangé in it for years. It’s a jolly nice table, that, isn’t it.’ It was indeed a very handsome Georgian oak table with ball-and-claw feet, and in the middle stood a silvery statuette of a boy with upraised arms and Donatellesque buttocks, an incongruously kitsch item. ‘That little bit of nonsense is by the same chap who did the willies in the other room. We’ll see some more of his stuff, but come over here first.’ He led me—or I led him—towards a side-table where a green baize cloth covered a square object, perhaps a foot high and eighteen inches long; it might have been a picture in a stand-up frame. He leant forward and tugged the cloth away. It was a display case of dark polished dowling, rather British Museum in appearance, within which stood a tablet of pale sandy stone, a couple of inches thick. On its smooth front face three contrasting heads were incised, full profile, in shallow relief. I inspected it appreciatively, and looked to Charles for information. He was nodding in satisfaction at having turned up something interesting. ‘Fascinating, isn’t it. It’s a stele showing the King Akhnaten.’ I looked again. ‘And who are the other two?’ ‘Ah,’ said Charles with pleasure. ‘They’re King Akhnaten as well.’ He chuckled, though it could by no means be the first time he had explained its mystery. ‘It’s an artist’s sketch, like a notepad or something, but done straight on to the stone. You know about Akhnaten, do you?’ ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’ ‘I thought not, otherwise you would see the significance of it straight away. Like so many bizarre-seeming things, it has its logic. Akhnaten was a rebel. His real name was Amonhotep the Third—Fourth, I can’t remember—but he broke away from the worship of Amon (as in Amonhotep) and made everyone worship the sun instead. Something I’m sure you’d agree with him over,’ he added, patting my wrist. ‘But such apostasy was not in itself enough. Oh no. He had to change the way he looked as well. He shifted the court from Thebes, where it had been for God knows how long, and set it up at Tel-el-Amarna …’ ‘Aha,’ I said, remembering there had been a battle of that name. ‘As it was all made out of mud, it didn’t survive the end of his régime by long, sad to say. But there are bits and pieces in museums. There’s a thing like this at Cairo.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Was it only baffled desire? I knew again, as I had known when a child myself, confronting a man for the first time, that paradox of admiration, of loss of self, of dedication … call it what you will. Back in the sunshine—fiercely hot now, so that I at once put on my topi, & walked out conscious of some inner effort of self-effacement, of humility wrestling with grandeur & compassion—the scamps, repelled from Simon Artz’s door by a fearsome old Arab with a peaked cap and a cane, flocked about me, some pushy & assertive but others festive and friendly, trying to take me by the hand. I had the absurd vision of myself as a doting schoolmaster leading off his charges on some special treat, & for the first time I had to assert myself, strike out airily with my hand to repel the little demons. Then I felt childlike myself, very pink & white, laughable in my indignation, & my authority much too big for me, as if bought in anticipation of my ‘growing into it’. I have omitted to mention the smell, which as soon as the ship docked & the wind it made was stilled, rose to the nostrils from the land. ‘Ah, the East!’ Harrap had said connoisseurially. It is not a smell one could anticipate, or even much care for in itself, but I relished its authenticity at once—a dusty dryness, & a sweetness, a foetor, as it might be near some perpetual meat-market, a smell utterly unhygienic and inevitable. The other streets here might have borne exploring, but I was thirsty & went to sit in the shade of the tea-terrace. The tea, served impractically in a glass, was refreshing, somehow muddy & more sustaining than tea I am used to. All the while there was Sinai, very hazily apparent in the distance, & near to the spectacle of the ship being refuelled, which is done by an endless chain of Egyptians, some in blue or white djellabas, others naked but for a knotted nappy around the loins, lean, by & large, & sinewy. All the while they pass on baskets of coal, their foreman leading them in monotonous chanting, a call raised, a general echoing response, the words, indistinguishable to my Oxford Arabic, intensifying the impression of changeless pharaonic labour.

• 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 Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The short and obscene sentence of Poseidonius about the rubbing together of two small pieces of flesh, which I have seen you copy in your exercise books with the application of a good schoolboy, does no more to define the phenomenon of love than the taut cord touched by the finger accounts for the infinite miracle of sounds. Such a dictum is less an insult to pleasure than to the flesh itself, that amazing instrument of muscles, blood, and skin, that red-tinged cloud whose lightning is the soul. And I admit that the reason stands confounded in presence of the veritable prodigy that love is, and of the strange obsession which makes this same flesh (for which we care so little when it is that of our own body, and which concerns us only to wash and nourish it, and if possible to keep it from suffering) inspire us with such a passion of caresses simply because it is animated by an individuality different from our own, and because it presents certain lineaments of beauty, disputed though they may be by the best judges. Here human logic stops short, as before the revelations of the Mysteries. Popular tradition has not been wrong in regarding love always as a form of initiation, one of the points of encounter of the secret with the sacred. Sensual experience is further comparable to the Mysteries in that the first approach gives to the uninitiated the impression of a ritual which is more or less frightening, and shockingly far removed from the familiar functions of sleeping, eating, and drinking; it appears matter for jest and shame, or even terror. Quite as much as the dance of the Maenads or the frenzy of the Corybantes, love-making carries us into a different world, where at other times we are forbidden to enter, and where we cease to belong as soon as the ardor is spent, or the ecstasy subsides. Nailed to the beloved body like a slave to a cross, I have learned some secrets of life which are now dimmed in my memory by the operation of that same law which ordains that the convalescent, once cured, ceases to understand the mysterious truths laid bare by illness, and that the prisoner, set free, forgets his torture, or the conqueror, his triumph passed, forgets his glory.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  And then afterwards what inflamed me, as much as the guy's big prick and everything, was his gentleness, like being cradled and protected by some great giant. I'm sure in memory I've exaggerated that difference—I must have been fully grown myself; but Willem was a big man. I'm sure there was that class thing, too, which you're supposed to have so much worse than us—the place and the event conspired to make me think of him as a, what's the word, a woodlander." I felt it flourish, from deep nostalgic roots, and cast a dappled shadow across glass and concrete, slow-moving Africans outside discount stores, scaffolders high up. The whole recollection was beautiful, affirmative—it was hard to see why Paul had left it lying so long in the briars and the loam. "So you saw him again." "I probably would have wanted to, because of course I was a young romantic and to me ten minutes with a handsome stranger was clearly the same as true love, and besides it had the romantic complexities of danger, and sin, as I suppose I thought of it then. I can see now that it also conformed to the sense one had in those years that everything important was secret, and so anything secret must surely be important." "It wasn't a game." "Actually, it was he who asked to see me again. I didn't reallse at the time, because to me he was marvellous, but he must have thought himself pretty lucky to get a fresh and well, quite nice-looking seventeen-year-old, don't you think? Anyway, it seemed that we had fallen in love." I was silent, rather shaken. Paul went on quickly, "This probably sounds foolish to you—all I can say is it was wildly unusual then." "Not at all," I said warmly, to allay the recurrent note of uncertainty, as though he felt he couldn't measure up to some fast and cynical standard he imagined me to hold. I couldn't say without condescension how touched I was by his doubting, pedantic candour. We mounted the pavement and swung into the low mouth of a buried car-park. At each turn of the hairpin descent the Alfa's tyres squealed. It wasn't until the fourth or fifth level that spaces showed—Paul backed into a bay and stilled the engine and we sat looking out into the shadowy coffered perspective, shuttered concrete, stripes of yellow light, the weight of silent floors above. "Well, we kept seeing each other, Willem and I. I managed it because I had to. Often I used my visits to poor old Edgard Orst as a cover—I went to him for ten minutes in the afternoon and left the old fellow babbling and confused to cycle out to the Hermitage. We didn't think we dared meet elsewhere—in fact it was the perfect place. He came from a village a mile or two out, and lived with his old father.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  We found ourselves detained in the long and somewhat sepulchral vestibule, which runs to the full depth of the house, and off which open various small rooms. At a number of these a curtain was drawn back to reveal a fragment of an Attic frieze, displayed on a high plinth, or a drawing from the hand of Giovanni Bellini or Sir Edward Burne-Jones. In all the rooms of this ground floor, it should be said, the windows are either placed too high to permit one to see out or else are filled with coloured glass, which serves to create a magical play of symbolic light. The young housemaid returning and beckoning to us, we left the hall and climbed an imposing flight of shallow stairs which brought us at once to a domed ante-chamber, in which a most beautiful bronze figure of Andromeda, chained to her rock, is reflected in a marble pool. Through an archway beyond we were able to glimpse, between curtains of fine old brocade, the lofty space of M. Orst's studio. In front of these curtains runs a curious brass rail, somewhat like that in the sanctuary of a church, which ensures that no one enters unless at M. Orst's express wish; in which case a mechanism causes the barrier to retract into the wall. Being so favoured, we pressed forward into this principal room, which indeed occupies the full height of the back of the house, with the exception of the basement, which on that side is reserved for household offices. We can say at once that the impression of the studio, with its great north window and the accumulation of magnificent and exceptional works displayed on its walls against the sympathetic background of antique tapestry, was superlative. But our closer and more prolonged inspection of the pictures was deferred by the arrival of the painter himself, who stepped forward and greeted us most cordially, as a friend, he was pleased to say, from a country he had long held in especial regard. It was a sign of that regard that he wanted at once to have news of acquaintance of ours in England, and that he seemed content to talk of those bygone days quite as if we had no other purpose in being there. Our fear of disturbing him at his work proved groundless; he was finely dressed and did not, as so many artists do, advertise the nature of his craft by appearing in a pigment-daubed smock and with his palette on his thumb. Indeed, it is said that M. Orst has never been observed at the easel by any stranger. He led us into the dining-room, whose white walls formed a fitting background to a cycle of his paintings on the theme of the Seasons of Life; it was here, over a generous collation, that he spoke to us of his feelings about the Villa he has built as a shrine to his own calling.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He had a neurotic papillon spaniel that aroused Sibelius's interest and would hurtle down the leaf-strewn slopes so that it and the whirled-up leaves seemed one. He would say "Good morning" or "Good afternoon", but I never for a moment thought he knew who I was. Much of his mystique for me came from his house. Blewits was named from the lilac-gilled mushrooms that grew in profusion in its dank spinney, and which he gave almost at random to people from the town. When I was a little boy my mother received a basket of them, and I remembered her anxiously pondering if they were edible, the gift of a good or bad spirit, and then hastily putting them in the bin. Gigantic beech-trees whelmed above the house on the common side and roared thrillingly on windy nights. In winter you could look down through them at the steep red roofs and shingled gables, the air full of rooks and bonfire smoke. In summer everything was hidden; the drive twisted through laurels and rhododendrons, the light was speckled and private. To visit the house was to have the magic access of a dream fused with the proud ordeal of winning a prize. It was late May and the mossy outbuildings were roofed with fallen horse-chestnut flowers. I thought they would be fun to explore, those sheds with small cobwebbed windows and sometimes a chimney: more fun than talking to Sir Perry Dawlish. "Good afternoon, Sir Perry," I kept rehearsing, on my aunt's anxious prompting. "No more cake, thank you, Sir Perry." I had a high regard for "The Months" but even so was not fully convinced that this famous old writer, who had actually known Gordon Bottomley, would want to spend much time on them. The house was very gloomy inside. I was aware that it was a romantic kind of Victorian house, which accounted for the dark oak and stained glass of the hall. At first I could hardly see and was impressed by the confidence with which Dawlish moved around. He had the busy air of someone unused to dealing with children but determined to make a go of it. His voice was high and enthusiastic, with the lost vowel-sounds of an earlier age. We sat in a big muddly room at the back, a sitting-room-cum library that merged into a conservatory with doors open on to a derelict-looking garden.

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

  It may be in fact that these very impressive changes for the better are made possible by the divorce, which provides a window of escape. But the young person must have the will and strength to climb through this window, something I’ll say more about later. As I left Larry that day in the restaurant, I realized with awe that I was witnessing a transformation in almost every aspect of this young man’s personality. But I left him still wondering what lay ahead in his relationships with women; he had not yet seriously addressed this part of his life. No End in Sight CAROL’S STORY IS instructive because it shows what happens to children from chaotic families when there is no turnaround. The children live in turmoil whether or not their parents get divorced. Without some intervention—help from a parent who recovers, a sudden self-realization that life could be better, or anything else that prevents a young adult from following in the shoes of their self-destructive parents—the entry into adulthood is fraught with problems. After graduating with a B.A. in psychology when she was twenty-five, Carol spent a couple of years working in mental health settings but found herself unsuited for the work. A job at a shelter for abused women and their children overwhelmed her with sad memories. A friend got her a job in retail, selling a line of popular cosmetics. Here, Carol’s flair for organization and her people-pleasing skills shone. She quickly rose to becoming a buyer for a major department store in downtown San Francisco. She had some difficulty from the outset in working with her supervisor and other people in authority, but her talents outshone her problems and it was assumed that she would improve as she matured. These were glory days in Carol’s life. She loved the glitter of the elegant stores, the traveling, and the huge trade shows. She spent long hours working and released pent-up energy going out with friends to discos at night. “I must have gone home with over fifty men in those days,” she recalled with a mixture of pride and shame. “I liked attracting them. I knew it was dangerous but it was thrilling to go home with someone who’s last name I didn’t even know. There was something about that atmosphere of attraction and danger and not knowing that really turned me on. I’d say now that I was almost addicted to it. But I always kept the upper hand.” Carol sighed deeply. “But I hit a low point after awhile. It was when I was turning thirty-one and I was tired and strung out after living in the fast lane for so long. I was feeling empty and jaded and it took more and more drinking and partying to make me feel high. Plus, my judgment was slipping.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  And Aristeas has carved under my direction, in rather rough stonework, that young head so imperious and proud. There are the posthumous portraits, where death has left his mark, those great faces with the knowing lips, laden with secrets which I no longer share, because they are no longer those of the living. There is the bas-relief where the Carian Antonianos has transposed to a divine and melancholy shade the vintager clothed in a tunic of raw silk, his friendly dog nuzzling against his bare leg. And that almost intolerable mask, the work of a sculptor of Gyrene, where pleasure and pain meet on the same face, and seem to break against each other like two waves on the same rock. And those small clay figures sold for a penny which have served as a part of the imperial propaganda: Tellus Stabilita, the Genius of the Pacified Earth in the guise of a reclining youth who holds fruits and flowers. Trahit sua quemque voluptas. Each to his own bent; likewise each to his aim or his ambition, if you will, or his most secret desire and his highest ideal. My ideal was contained within the word beauty, so difficult to define despite all the evidence of our senses. I felt responsible for sustaining and increasing the beauty of the world. I wanted the cities to be splendid, spacious and airy, their streets sprayed with clean water, their inhabitants all human beings whose bodies were neither degraded by marks of misery and servitude nor bloated by vulgar riches; I desired that the schoolboys should recite correctly some useful lessons; that the women presiding in their households should move with maternal dignity, expressing both vigor and calm; that the gymnasiums should be used by youths not unversed in arts and in sports; that the orchards should bear the finest fruits and the fields the richest harvests. I desired that the might and majesty of the Roman Peace should extend to all, insensibly present like the music of the revolving skies; that the most humble traveller might wander from one country, or one continent, to another without vexatious formalities, and without danger, assured everywhere of a minimum of legal protection and culture; that our soldiers should continue their eternal pyrrhic dance on the frontiers; that everything should go smoothly, whether workshops or temples; that the sea should be furrowed by brave ships, and the roads resounding to frequent carriages; that, in a world well ordered, the philosophers should have their place, and the dancers also. This ideal, modest on the whole, would be often enough approached if men would devote to it one part of the energy which they expend on stupid or cruel activities; great good fortune has allowed me a partial realization of my aims during the last quarter of a century.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I could see in this passage and return the mathematical demonstration of those same mysteries which Eleusis represents in mere fable and symbol. In our times the Spike of Virgo is no longer at the point of the map where Hipparchus marked it, but such variation itself completes a cycle, and serves to confirm the astronomer's hypotheses. Slowly, ineluctably, this firmament will become again what it was in Hipparchus' time; it will be again what it is in the time of Hadrian. Disorder is absorbed in order, and change becomes part of a plan which the astronomer can know in advance; thus the human mind reveals its participation in the universe by formulating such exact theorems about it, just as it does at Eleusis, by ritual outcry and dance. Both the man and the stars which are the objects of his gaze roll inevitably toward their ends, marked somewhere in the sky; but each moment of that descent is a pause, a guide mark, and a segment of a curve itself as solid as a chain of gold. Each movement in space brings us back to a point which, because we happen to be on it, seems to us a center. From the nights of my childhood, when Marullinus first pointed out to me the constellations above, my curiosity for the world of the spheres has not abated. In the watches of camp life I looked with wonder at the moon as it raced through the clouds of barbarian skies; in later years, in the clear nights of Attica, I listened while Theron of Rhodes, the astronomer, explained his system of the world. In mid-Aegean, lying flat on the deck of a ship, I have followed the slow oscillation of the mast as it moved among the stars, swaying first from the red eye of Taurus to the tears of the Pleiades, then from Pegasus to the Swan. I answered as well as I could the naïve questions so gravely put by the youth gazing with me at that same sky. Here at the Villa I have built an observatory, but I can no longer climb its steps. Once in my life I did a rarer thing. I made sacrifice to the constellations of an entire night. It was after my visit to Osroës, coming back through the Syrian desert: lying on my back, wide awake but abandoning for some hours every human concern, I gave myself up from nightfall to dawn to this world of crystal and flame. That was the most glorious of all my voyages. Overhead shone the great star of the constellation of Lyra, destined to be the polar star for men who will live tens of thousands of years after we have ceased to be.

• 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.