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 Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

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

• From The Folding Star (1994)

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

• From The Folding Star (1994)

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

• From The Folding Star (1994)

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

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

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

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

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

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

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

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

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

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

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

• From The Folding Star (1994)

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

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

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

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

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

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

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

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  There was no one about but me, dulled to the cold by cognac but lucid and suggestible. I thought of the place in summer, jostling with randy youngsters, indistinguishable shrieks from the water's edge: but for once I was content for all that to be in the past. I was applying myself to the subtler connoisseurship of the out-of-season, days without warmth and nights without encounters, empty pleasure-grounds and the violence of the tides. I turned along a short pier and propped myself for a while above the pounding, self-rebuffing blackness. The unseen water's ejaculations awed me: I felt barely connected to the town's ghost facade or the land that lay beyond it. I pictured the dark ploughed distances there, farms and villages secured against the torrents of wind and rain, a blurred lamp swinging. Then there were towns with wind-rocked belfries, the street where I lived. The light in the yard would be throwing its pale stripe across my ceiling. With time the eye would grow accustomed to the shadow and make out the solemn bulk of table and chairs. How spectral the abandoned room was, no rhythmic gasping would ruffle the Spanish girls tonight. I remembered clearly something Paul had said about Orst's prints, how they were the mirror of a northern world, silent, wintry, interior, remote from the outdoor brilliance of the south. They were adressés aux esprits de silence, discreet signals between one solitude and another; their sombre vaguenesses and mystic gleams were images too of the world of their collectors, the inward vigil they kept before the precious sheets, their trembling attunement to the indefinable. So that Orst's tenacious remembrance of Jane was an ideal form of the collectors' passion: he flattered their archaic yearnings and enrolled them among the rich in spirit, scorners of the vulgar modern world and what he termed its demolishing wealth. I felt the poetry of the thing tonight, perched above the breakers and the dim phosphorescence of the returning foam. I knew nothing about this country, to me it was a dream-Belgium, it was Allemonde, a kingdom of ruins and vanished pleasures, miracles and martyrdoms, corners where the light never shone. Not many would recognise it, but some would. I seemed to have lost Luc in it. It was his wildness that had brought me to him and now it had taken him away. I studied my situation with a certain aesthetic amazement. Chapter 20 Helene was back from her honeymoon in Rome and Naples, and radiating a new self-esteem; it showed in the lethargy of her movements, the unembarrassed glow that came to her cheeks, her evident sense of returning to a quaint little world whose rules she observed with a new irony.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Achilles Tatius exposes the internal logic of the genre and tests whether the reader will believe in it simply because it is good theater. He is willing to lay bare the purely artificial, literary substance animating his characters. Leucippe’s sudden and inexplicable transformation from a willing young girl curious about eros into a romantic heroine capable of the most soaring defenses of chastity is an example. More darkly, the creation of a doppelgänger for Leucippe, an “ill-starred” prostitute who is beheaded in Leucippe’s place, is an accomplishment without equal in the ancient romances. In the riddle of the severed head, which hangs, unexplained, over much of the narrative, Achilles confronts the reader with the mysterious dispensations of fate. The brilliance of this creation ensures us that the arch tone Achilles maintains across his romance is not postmodern camp before its time, but instead a serious engagement with the deepest social and cosmological assumptions of romance. The manipulation of romantic protocols is a sincere way of questioning the Fortune that presides over the order of romance—in fact, over the world. This story, with its intricate knowingness, promises the ability to confront the theodicy that underlies literature, through literature.21 The Ethiopian Tale of Heliodorus makes equally canny use of the generic conventions underlying the inviolability of the heroine’s body. The Ethiopian Tale is as self-aware as Leucippe and Clitophon, but the effect achieved by the author’s consciousness is an air of baroque grandeur rather than keen lightness. The Ethiopian Tale is the latest of the erotic romances that survive, and there are compelling reasons to place it sometime in the second half of the fourth century. The Ethiopian Tale deliberately builds an aura of latest and greatest. All of the conventional themes are allowed to unravel, in stately fashion. By far the longest of the erotic romances, it is unique in weaving two story patterns into a single narrative. At one level it is the story of Theagenes and Charicleia, their separation and endurance, their eventual union. The Ethiopian Tale is also a homeward journey for Charicleia, who gradually discovers her true identity as the princess of Ethiopia. In the sophistication of its narrative architecture, The Ethiopian Tale is without peer among the ancient novels. But it is also distinctive in its fixation on male bodily purity, and in general its chilly tone toward the pleasures of the flesh. The Ethiopian Tale very consciously redeploys the traditional armory of the erotic romance, but in the service of a hieratic vision of human life.22

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  To test these observations, Patricelli created a remotely controlled, robotic, stuffed female bowerbird model, which she dubbed a “fembot.” The fembots produced such natural-looking standing, crouching, head-rotating, and wing-fluffing movements that they completely fooled male bowerbirds, as Patricelli’s videos of males copulating with the fembots demonstrate. By placing the fembot in the bower and regulating its posture and movements, Patricelli was able to confirm her hypotheses that (1) female Satin Bowerbirds are communicating their comfort levels to displaying males by crouching, (2) some males modulated their display intensity to put the females more at ease, and (3) those males who can regulate their display intensity to keep females more comfortable are ultimately the most successful at attracting mates. Why should female Satin Bowerbirds be less threatened by aggressive displays performed by more attractive males with more appealing bowers? If what is at stake is the indirect, genetic cost of sexual coercion—that is, male offspring who will be less appealing to females and therefore less likely to perpetuate her genes—then, evolutionarily speaking, females should be more comfortable with the risks posed by an attractive male. Forced copulations from less attractive males will create the same risk of physical harm, that is, the same direct costs. However, the more attractive mates provide a lower risk of the indirect, genetic costs of sexual coercion. Thus, Patricelli’s fembot experiments provide strong support for the idea that bowers function to protect females from the indirect costs of sexual coercion. From Patricia Brennan’s artificial duck vaginas to Gail Patricelli’s fembots, the science of mate choice takes us down some creative paths! And like the ducks, the bowerbirds teach us a whole new way in which to understand the freedom of choice. Here, sexual autonomy is an evolutionary engine of beauty. [image file=image_rsrc3NS.jpg] CHAPTER 7Bromance Before RomanceIt’s extraordinary enough to realize that female mate choice has produced the explosion of beauty we’ve seen in male manakins and bowerbirds. It’s even more amazing to think that female mating preferences could have had a profound impact on male social relations and that this happened even though, as I’ll discuss in this chapter, much of the resulting male behavior is something the females themselves never witness. But in the case of the manakins, this is exactly what has occurred over the course of evolutionary time. The social relationships among males in a manakin lek have evolved into a virtual bromance—long-term, socially engaged relationships that sublimate and moderate competition—and it’s all come about, I think, because of the female pursuit of sexual autonomy. Recognizing females as the active agents in the origin of lekking goes against most of the traditional thinking about why the lek-breeding system evolved. But we will see that entertaining this possibility provides a productive new way to understand the complexity and diversity of the highly unusual behaviors of male manakins and of the variations in lek social organization as well.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Structurally the romances are stories of adversity and adventure that resolve happily in marriage. In the prelude to the final book of his romance, Chariton signaled the shift from misadventure to resolution in revealing terms: “No longer shall we have piracy and slavery, trials and battles, grisly suicide, war or captivity, but righteous passions and legitimate marriages.” Throughout the narrative the heroine faces grave dangers that call into question her status. The heroine of romance is a recognizable social type; her essence precedes her individuality. She is beautiful, of free and noble birth, and in the prime of her marriageable years. Preferably the heroine is superlatively beautiful and impeccably wellborn. Callirhoe, for instance, was the daughter of the leading citizen of Syracuse, and she was the “glory of all Sicily,” with a “beauty that was not human but divine.” Anthia, at fourteen, was “in the very bloom of her body’s beauty,” a beauty that “was an astonishment, far beyond all the other virgins.” In Leucippe and Clitophon, we first encounter Leucippe through the eyes of her lover, Clitophon, who dilates on the experience of such superhuman beauty. In Daphnis and Chloe, the drama revolves around the fact that the protagonists were exposed as infants and raised by simple peasants; Chloe, even as a sheepherder, is supremely if naively charming, but it is only in the very last sequence of the story that her true identity, as a daughter of the town’s gentry, was revealed. In fact, once she was literally scrubbed of her rural grime and properly dressed, it was indisputably obvious that her rustic parents did not in reality produce “such a maiden as that.”10 The heroine is free, but her status is not merely an external attribute describing her current condition. Though the heroine is routinely subjected to enslavement, she retains her free nature. The heroine’s freedom is objective, a quality of her being that is apparent even to other characters in the romance. When tomb raiders abducted Callirhoe, they were worried that it would be obvious from her appearance that they had kidnapped a free person. “Her beauty isn’t human and won’t go unnoticed. Will we say, ‘She’s a slave’—who would believe that once they’ve seen her?” The man who buys her immediately perceives her true status. “It is impossible for anybody who is not free by nature to be beautiful.” In the Ephesian Tale, Anthia’s master gives her to a fellow slave, a goatherd, but she manages to convince him to pity her “good birth.” When Leucippe is enslaved in Ephesus, she throws herself at the feet of her mistress, Melite, who instantly recognized, despite her tattered appearance, that the girl was not really a slave. “Even among such travails your beauty proclaims your good birth.” In The Ethiopian Tale, status is such an objective quality that, after a battle, the victors ransom the free captives and keep the slaves in slavery!11

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Here’s what happens when the female Argus arrives at a male’s court. The male first performs several preliminary displays, which include a ritualized pecking at the ground and elaborate, stylized strutting on his bright red legs. Eventually, he rushes around her in wide circles with his wings hunched up at an angle that exposes their upper surfaces. Then, without warning, when he is just a foot or two away from the female, the male transforms himself instantly into an entirely different shape, revealing unimaginably intricate color patterns on his four-foot-long wing feathers. In what biologists have come to refer to, with inexplicable reserve, as the “frontal movement,” the male bows down to the female, unfurling the elaborate feathers of his open wings into a huge hemispherical disk that extends forward, over his head, and partly surrounds the female from one side. In 1926, the pioneering Dutch animal behaviorist Johan Bierens de Haan compared this cone to the shape of an inverted umbrella blown out by a gust of wind. In this extraordinary posture, the male tucks his head under one of his wings and peeks out at the female from behind the gap in his feathers formed at the “wrist” of his wing to gauge her reaction to his display. The deep blue of the facial skin that surrounds the male’s tiny black eye will be just visible to the female through the gap in his flexing wings. To support this extraordinary posture, the male perches athletically with one set of talons in front of the other like a sprinter in starting blocks. While bowing before the female, he raises his rear, cocks his long tail feathers, and pumps them rhythmically up and down so that the female can get sporadic glimpses of them over the top of the inverted cone of his wing feathers, or in the gap that sometimes opens up between the left and the right wings. The tips of the cone of wing feathers wave over the female’s head like a mini portable amphitheater. After repeated, throbbing shakes of the inverted feathery cone, lasting a total of two to fifteen seconds, the male transforms back into a “normal” bird shape and resumes his ritualized pecking of the ground for a few seconds before repeating the display. [image "The “frontal movement” display of the male Great Argus." file=image_rsrc3MS.jpg] The “frontal movement” display of the male Great Argus.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  The elaborate aesthetic capacities of birds are more than a vivid characteristic of living species. The coevolved desire for beauty might have made the evolution of birds possible in the first place. As spectacular as that realization may be, there is more! About sixty-six million years ago, an enormous meteor hit the earth, leaving a crater 110 miles wide near what is now Chicxulub, Yucatán, Mexico. The cascade of environmental and ecological changes that followed this impact led to a mass extinction of terrestrial and aquatic life on earth including, most famously, the dinosaurs. Of course, we now know that the dinosaurs did not go extinct. Rather, three dinosaur lineages survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous; they were the flying ancestors of the three main lineages of living birds. These three lineages would later thrive, diversify (one explosively), and evolve into more than ten thousand species of birds that inhabit the planet today. Why did birds survive the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, and other dinosaurs did not? This is a tough problem, but we can be certain that merely having feathers was not enough, because there were many other lineages of feathered theropods that did not survive the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary—including the fully plumaged raptor dinosaurs, like Velociraptor, the ornithomimids, and the troodontids. In fact, the only lineages of dinosaurs to survive the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction were species that could fly with their feathers. Perhaps the capacity to fly allowed these birds to escape or avoid the worst ecological consequences of the Chicxulub impact or to disperse rapidly and find ephemeral refuges in the ecological chaos that followed. We don’t know for sure. However, were it not for their ability to fly, the ancestors of the modern birds would likely have gone extinct along with all the other dinosaurs. Thus, the potentially aesthetic innovation of planar feathers facilitated the evolution of flight and the avian dinosaur survival of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. It’s harder to imagine a bigger possible impact for the role of beauty and desire in the history of life. Throughout this book, I have argued that most of the abundant beauty in nature is likely to be meaningless and arbitrary and presents nothing to choosers other than the opportunity to be admired and preferred. But the investigation of the evolution of aesthetic complexity, innovation, and decadence demonstrates that this perspective is not a bleak, frivolous, or nihilistic view of the role of beauty in the natural world. In fact, the more we investigate the history of life from an aesthetic perspective, the more we will discover that aesthetic coevolution has had a powerful, innovative, and decisive impact on the quantity and form of biological diversity. When mating preferences are unconstrained by the narrow task of providing adaptive advantages, beauty and desire are free to explore and to innovate, and thereby transform the natural world. Thankfully, as a result, today we have the birds.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  At last he made me hand over "The Months" and leaving me to browse went off to a chair at the brighter end of the room. I got out the Merrifield volume, which bore the inscription "To Perry Dawlish from 'the Old Rogue'—George Merrifield, May Day 1928: knowing that he will go far . . . " I turned to the list of contents, hoping to find "Cider", which I knew by heart anyway (it was the unobvious rhyme of oozing with refusing in the sestet that I had stolen); but it wasn't in Love and Earth, which was perhaps an earlier collection. I realised for the first time just how large Merrifield's output was. I was awed by the book and its associations, and wondered why its author was known as the Old Rogue. I imagined him like Toad of Toad Hall, with goggles and a cigar, motoring recklessly from one Sussex alehouse to another. I kept peeping towards the window, trying to read Dawlish's reactions. He was in profile, and partly canopied by a broad-leaved plant that sprawled across the glass above him. He seemed to be paying each sonnet the very closest attention. Or had he perhaps fallen into a quiet doze? It occurred to me that he might have died. No—another page was shuffled under. I wondered which month he'd reached. I was aware that some months were stronger than others, which was why the sequence began with September, like a school year. I thought it unlikely that he would be very critical of them, but I would have to be sensible and take his criticism with eagerness and resolution when it came. One time I glanced up and found he was looking at me and slowly nodding, pausing to find the most tactful opening. "Marvellous," he said. "Simply marvellous, you've really got it. Really. I do congratulate you. You understand the sonnet, as few nowadays do. And every one of them has some memorable effect. 'When all is frozen to the rover's call' is a splendid line." And he said it again, to bring out what he heard as the "wintry echo" of all and call. I thought it was the best line of the lot myself, and saw it gaining something like proverbial status with Dawlish's endorsement. "There's absolutely no doubt about it, Edward," he said, with those gestures of regret that sometimes heighten the effect of praise; "You are a writer. A born writer, I would say. I see a very bright future for you indeed."