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)

  "No, they were among the lucky ones." He gave me a surprisingly bright grin. "Our little threesome became quite close, in time. They stayed on with us until after the war, until we knew for certain that their parents had been . . . exterminated. We became inseparable, in that way that teenagers do—with a secret language, each of us half in love with the others, and full of rivalry too, which sometimes burst out in dreadful rows. Those were the occasions when I first heard my own faults described without mercy. Of course our all being under the same roof made it very intense and inescapable. There being three of us gave us a sense of mysterious power, to ourselves and to outsiders. It also made it hard to do anything independently, or in a couple without the third. I don't know if you've experienced anything similar." I rocked my head and raised my eyebrows to say, "Have I ever." "You've guessed the point of the story, I'm sure"—and for once I thought I had. "Well, Monica I suppose must have been Lilli." Paul gave a sighing smile, and looked down, so that I wondered for a moment if I was wrong. He said, "I won't pretend I wasn't fairly anxious when she came back. We'd lost touch after I'd gone to England. She went back to the country, and married very soon. It was natural, she wanted her new life. But within a few days we'd each remembered how the other ticked; we were both somewhat raw from our bereavements, we had disagreements, just as we always had. To be honest, it has often been very difficult for us. The most important thing was that Marcel got on so well with her. I could see he was a way for her to come to terms with the city again, at least as far as it was possible for her to. They took each other for long walks, which must have brought back terrible thoughts for her, the whole mood of those years, and the subterfuge that had allowed her to survive when all her family had been annihilated. She used to come back in with Marcel, exhausted, gripping his hand tight—obviously he didn't realise what he meant to her. She never said so to me, indeed she's never spoken of it at all, but I'm sure he helped her to see things through his eyes—I mean, with a certain freshness, and optimism. He seemed to forget his own woes, too, when he had her to protect him." I thought, why did no one tell me? I might never have found out. I scurried back over various semi-drunken mealtimes, thinking I might have said something awful. "And what happened to the boy?"

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I believe many of them died. And all this going on nearly in my lifetime! The sheer evil of it oppressed my heart as I went through the village, putting things to right, rewarding & punishing & laying down the law. At least our justice is felt to be justice. Even so, these days I halt the lash in mid-air, am ready almost to extend a comradely hand instead. Not to be too friendly —that was poor old Fryer’s constant caveat. There’s a great deal in it—not to be the schoolmaster mocked for his absurdity who only wants to be loved. At sundown I went up to the little police parade-ground to see the famous stones—famous, at any rate, to us, & talked about from time to time in Khartoum. There they were, most unmomentous like many famous things, two short pillars of reddish rock, buffed up, & often touched one felt, so that they have a glow like marble. The story as I had heard it was that an Egyptian officer, posted out here for a long time, had gone crazy with the sun & the isolation, shot a colleague & then turned his revolver on himself. It was viewed, certainly, as a warning, but in fact it intrigued me & made me the keener to come, partly because I thrive on the very solitude & emptiness it was meant as a warning against; but also because I never believed the story. Heat & loneliness may have played their part, but for the young man to kill his comrade there must have been some deeper, odder, fiercer reason to it. I see it romantically—one of those intense, amorous Mohammedan friendships that no one talks of or even guesses at in England, but which flourish here with an almost startling luxuriance. One sees them everywhere, in town, among the tribesmen, in my own little retinue, of course … poetical, chivalrous amitiés which none the less must operate on some principle quite beyond the European mind. Perhaps it is just my European mind that insists on this heated little mélodrame —but I see a passion & a festering discontent, a flaring noonday of violence, the remoteness of these stony hills, these fingers & fists thrust up out of the desert, threatening the unspoken balance & courtliness of the affair … Well, we shall never know. The stones were erected in their memory, which suggests that their fellow officers responded to something deeper & more poetic in the case.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Met him at the Savoy. He belongs to another age—even then he belonged to another age.’ ‘I’ve been reading him recently.’ ‘Do you find him pretty maddening?’ ‘I’m keen on him, actually. I have a friend who’s a great fan.’ ‘He always had a small following,’ explained Charles, as though this were something rather sinister. ‘I only met him once, not long before he died. He drank most frightfully and never ate a crumb. Did you want something to eat?’ ‘No, thank you.’ ‘That’s very much what he would have said. He went off abroad—he liked Africa: That’s what we were supposed to have in common. We did write to each other—just one letter each way, I think. Then I was out of the country of course. I heard about his death years later, from Gerald Berners. He was with him at the time as far as I recall.’ ‘You don’t still have his letter?’ I asked, preparing for disappointment, and disparaging the possibility in my own mind. ‘Perhaps,’ said Charles. I didn’t want to bother or bore him. It was something he declined to see the interest in. I thought of how thrilled James would be to know about this: he had once paid hundreds of pounds in an auction for some postcards by Firbank saying almost nothing at all. ‘If you go to the bookcase,’ Charles said, ‘you’ll find one of his books.’ He went on talking as I scanned the shelves and I interrupted him as I spotted it and pulled open the tall door with its trembling panes of old glass. It was The Flower Beneath the Foot , in a still crisp, slightly torn grey wrapper with a drawing of a nun on the front. It felt deliciously light, cool and precious in my hand. Reverently, almost timidly, turning to the frontispiece, which was a drawing of the author protected by that sexy tissue that was strewn throughout Ronald Staines’s photographs, I found it to fall open half-way through, where a small cream envelope was packed right into the stitching. I took it out gently. It was addressed to Charles at Khartoum, in violet ink and large round writing, and bore at the top left-hand corner the pictorial device of the ‘Grand Hotel, Helouan’: a group of palm trees reflected in the Nile, a single distant pyramid, and a houseboat going by. The postmark, orthographically at variance, was ‘Hilwan-les-Bains’, with a blurred date in 1926. ‘What have you found there?’ said Charles, with a hint of possessiveness in his voice. I handed him the envelope with some excitement. It was empty. ‘Hey-ho,’ he said philosophically. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, old darling. Why don’t you keep the book, though.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  soy-grit Stroganoff. “Yes, Venus—for Anya’s a walk-in.” “What’s a walk-in? Is that somebody who comes in with out a reservation?” He smiled at me with his dark smudged hair, his graphite eyes, infinitely patient. He had an unusually high forehead, like Eraserhead, but cute. My hand reached to ward him through the bright vegetarian air, and our pointer fingers touched with a spark like the fingers of those burly naked gods in that famous, who did it, da Vinci, Michelan gelo? “Hi, I’m Carla, Carla Moran.” “Yes.” He nodded knowingly. “I’m Steven. A walk-in is an enlightened soul who returns to Earth by taking over the body of a lesser soul who no longer wishes to inhabit it. The enlightened soul meets with the unhappy soul on the astral plane and says, ‘Hey, I can help you out.’ And so the body survives a suicide or a violent accident, then reawakens with the walk-in soul who works to raise the consciousness of mankind. Lots of ge niuses and humanitarians through the years were walk-ins— Albert Schweitzer, Benjamin Franklin, Beethoven, the guy who invented the atom bomb. Anya took over the body of a twelve-year-old girl—-from Tennessee—who died in a car wreck.” I swallowed the last spoonful of goat-milk ice cream, it had a gamy afterbite like buckwheat or deer, but you got used to it. “Wow!” “Anya’s an advanced soul—very advanced—here to bring the ancient spiritual teaching of Venus to Earth—she’s written a book about it, One Touch of Venus." Later I would sleep with Steven, later I would hear of Anya dancing on a table in a leopardskin bodysuit, cleavage Venu- sians never dreamed of, later I would hear how she fucked like a big blond cat, clawing and screeching From Venus she came— but that first time in Veggie Kingdom I was so starstuck I dropped my water glass—CRASH—Anya turned toward me

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I looked at him humorously. ‘Go into what?’ He was unlocking a door under the shadow of the cantilevered stairs and groping for the light switch. ‘Come down here. Whoopsy! That’s it.’ In front of us a narrow staircase ran steeply down between unplastered rubble walls. It was a squeeze for us side by side, and I tended to be half a step behind, as he, one hand on the rope banister, committed himself with a heavy, lurching tread to each new stair. ‘This is the most remarkable thing,’ he said in a tone of enthusiasm. ‘Oh, he’ll like this, won’t he. There’s no other house in the world that has anything like this. Come along in, come along in.’ He took on for a moment the air of a horror-film villain, muttering gleeful asides while leading his victim into the trap. The stairs turned a corner, and we went down two or three more steps and under a rough wooden lintel into a cool, mildewy darkness. Various fleeting ideas, tinged with alarm, went through my mind as I stood and brushed at my upper arm where it had rubbed against the chalky staircase wall. Then Charles found the second light switch and the darkness fled, revealing a squarish quite lofty cellar room. Though it contained nothing at all there were two remarkable things about it. The walls, which were plastered and painted cream, had a continuous frieze running round, which, being above head height, looked tastefully classical at a glance but, like the library over-door, were homosexual parodies when inspected close to. And the floor, uneven, pitted in places, was a mosaic. We made our way along the walls on old drugget, through which the roughness of the floor obtruded, so that I was afraid of Charles stubbing his toe or even twisting his ankle. On the further side of the room he stopped. ‘You see it best from here,’ he explained. The colours were very subdued, the white almost a light brown, the reds rusty like dried blood. ‘Now, what do you make out?’ I thought about it; it was evidently a Roman pavement—a relic of some riverside palace or temple? I knew nothing about Roman London, had forgotten all but a handful of images from some illustrated lectures that Gavin had given several years before. In the top quarter was a large bearded face, with open mouth and the vestiges of neck and shoulders above a broad rent in the fabric where the tesserae merged into the restorer’s grey cement. To the left at the bottom stylised fish shapes, like an emblem of Pisces, could be made out, sliding past each other; and to the right, and above, the upper parts of two figures could be seen, the one in front turning to the one behind with open, choric mouth as they dissolved into the nothingness beyond the broken edge of the pavement.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  1I 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. As we went home and sank into unconsciousness gangs of these men, with lamps and blow-lamps, and long-handled ratchet spanners, moved out along the tunnels; and wagons, not made to carry passengers, freakishly functional, rolled slowly and clangorously forwards from sidings unknown to the commuter. Such lonely, invisible work must bring on strange thoughts; the men who walked through every tunnel of the labyrinth, tapping the rails, must feel such reassurance seeing the lights of others at last approaching, voices calling out their friendly, technical patter. The black was looking at his loosely cupped hands: he was very aloof, composed, with an air of massive, scarcely conscious competence—I felt more than respect, a kind of tenderness for him. I imagined his relief at getting home and taking his boots off and going to bed as the day brightened around the curtains and the noise of the streets built up outside. He turned his hands over and I saw the pale gold band of his wedding-ring. All the gates but one at the station were closed and I, with two or three others, scuttled out as if being granted an unusual concession. Then there were the ten minutes to walk home. The drink made it seem closer, so that next day I would not remember the walk at all. And the idea of Arthur, too, which I had suppressed to make it all the more exciting when I recalled it, must have driven me along at quite a lick.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The courtroom filled up, and I started getting my papers together. They brought Walter into the courtroom, the signal that the hearing was about to begin. That’s when I heard Mrs. Williams call my name. “No, Attorney Stevenson, you didn’t hear me. I said I’m here.” She spoke very loudly, and I was a little confused and embarrassed. I turned around and smiled at her. “No, Mrs. Williams, I did hear you, and I’m so glad you’re here.” When I looked at her, though, it was as if she was in her own world. The courtroom was packed, and the bailiff brought the court to order as the judge walked in. Everyone rose, as is the custom. When the judge took the bench and sat down, everyone else in the courtroom sat down as well. There was an unusually long pause as we all waited for the judge to say something. I noticed people staring at something behind me, and that’s when I turned around and saw that Mrs. Williams was still standing. The courtroom got very quiet. All eyes were on her. I tried to gesture to her that she should sit, but then she leaned her head back and shouted, “I’m here!” People chuckled nervously as she took her seat, but when she looked at me, I saw tears in her eyes. In that moment, I felt something peculiar, a deep sense of recognition. I smiled now, because I knew she was saying to the room, “I may be old, I may be poor, I may be black, but I’m here. I’m here because I’ve got this vision of justice that compels me to be a witness. I’m here because I’m supposed to be here. I’m here because you can’t keep me away.” I smiled at Mrs. Williams while she sat proudly. For the first time since I started working on the case, everything we were struggling to achieve finally seemed to make sense. It took me a minute to realize that the judge was calling my name, impatiently asking me to begin. — The last day of hearings went well. There were a half-dozen people who had been jailed or imprisoned with Ralph Myers whom Ralph had told he was being pressured to give false testimony against Walter McMillian. We found most of them and had them testify. They were consistent in what they related. Isaac Dailey, who had been falsely accused by Myers of committing the Pittman murder, explained how Myers had falsely implicated Walter in the Pittman crime. Myers had confided to Dailey after he was arrested that he and Karen had discussed pinning the Pittman murder on Walter. “He related to us that he and Karen did the killing and, ah, plotted together to put it off on Johnny D.”

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Bill takes me to see my first play, the Orson Welles pro duction of Macbeth, with an all-black cast, at the Lafayette Theater, on 13 2nd Street and Seventh Avenue, in Harlem. I do not remember if I had already read Macbeth. My im pression is that I read the play when Bill told me she was taking me to see it. In any case, before the curtain rose, I knew the play by heart. I don't think that the name, Shakespeare, meant very much to me in those years. I was not yet intimidated by the name that was to come later. I had read a play which took place in Scotland. Bill had not warned me-she may not have known-that Welles had transposed the play to Haiti. I am still about twelve or thirteen. I can be fairly certain about all this, because my life changed so violently when I entered the church, and I entered the church around the time of fourteen. When I entered the church, I ceased going to the theater. It took me awhile to realize that I was working in one. 500 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK There is an enormous difference between the stage and the screen: but I may never be able to be articulate as concerns this difference because the first time I ever really saw black actors at work was on the stage: and it is important to em phasize that the people I was watching were black, like me. Nothing that I had seen before had prepared me for this which is a melancholy comment indeed, but I cannot be blamed for an ignorance which an entire republic had delib erately inculcated. The distance between oneself-the audience-and a screen performer is an absolute: a paradoxical absolute, masquerad ing as intimacy. No one, for example, will ever really know whether Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis or Humphrey Bogart or Spencer Tracy or Clark Gable-or John Wayne can, or could, really act, or not, nor does anyone care: acting is not what they are required to do. Their acting ability, so far fr om being what attracts their audience, can often be what drives their audience away. One does not go to see them act: one goes to watch them be. One does not go to see Humphrey Bogart, as Sam Spade: one goes to see Sam Spade, as Humphrey Boga1't. I don't wish, here, to belabor a point to which we shall, presently, and somewhat elaborately, be com pelled to return: but, no one, I read somewhere, a long time ago, makes his escape personality black.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  If this seems to be saying that the life of the theater and the life of the church are dependent on maverick fr eak poets and visionaries, I can only point out that these difficult creatures are also our flesh and blood, and are also created by our need and out of an impulse more mysterious than our desire. In the darkened Lafayette Theater-that moment when the house lights dim in the theater is not at all like the dimming of the house lights in the movies-I watched the narrow, hor izontal ribbon of light which connects the stage curtain to the floor of the stage, and which also separates them. That narrow ribbon of light then contains a mystery. That mystery may contain the future-you are, yourself, suspended, as mortal as that ribbon. No one can possibly know what is about to hap pen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time. For this reason, although I did not know this, I had never before, in the mm'ies, been aware of the audience: in 502 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK the movies, we knew what was going to happen, and, if we wanted to, we could stay there all afternoon, seeing it happen over and over again. But I was aware of the audience now. Everyone seemed to be waiting, as I was waiting. The curtain rose. Between three and four years later, that is, around the time that I was seventeen, my best fr iend, Emile, took me to a movie at the Irving Place Theater, a Russian movie, since America and Russia were allies then. My fr iend is a Jew-an American Jew, of Spanish descent: he was then, and is today, one of the most honest and honorable people I have ever known. He took me to the movie because he was trying to help me leave the church. I had not been to a film, or a theater fr om the time of my conversion, which came hard upon the heels of Macbeth. At this time of my life, Emile was the only fr iend I had who knew to what extent my ministry tormented me. I knew that I could not stay in the pulpit. I could not make my peace with that particular lie-a lie, in any case, for me. I did not want to become Baby-Face Martin-I could see that coming, and, indeed, it demanded no spectacular perception, since I found myself surrounded by what I was certain to become. But nei ther did I know how to leave-to jump: it could not be ex plained to my brothers and sisters, or my mother, and my father had begun his descent into the valley. Emile took me to this film, of which I remember only a close-up of a tam bourine. I played the tambourine, in church: the tambourine on the screen might as well have been Gabriel's trumpet.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I would be speaking at noon with a couple of other people. * * * The VVAW sent me to do a lot of speeches after that and soon I was on television all the time. On one network there was a big argument with a producer who didn’t want a disfigured veteran on her show. “We’ve seen enough of that,” she told me over the phone. “Every night for the last couple of years people have seen it on the six o’clock news and they’re tired of it.” She tried to be nice and told me that she had read a book called Johnny Got His Gun , so she knew what I was all about, but she didn’t think it would be tasteful at all to let the people of L.A. see a crippled kid on a Sunday morning. I was at a rally a few weeks later when Donald Sutherland began to read the last couple of pages of the book the woman had talked to me about, the one about the kid in World War I who gets blown to hell like myself and loses almost everything, he’s just a hulk, a slab of meat. Sutherland began to read the passage and something I will never forget swept over me. It was as if someone was speaking for everything I ever went through in the hospital. It was as if the book was speaking about me, my wound and the hell it had been coming back and learning to live with it. I began to shake and I remember there were tears in my eyes. Just before Sutherland was finished I found myself pushing my chair toward the stage and telling them that I wanted to be lifted up the steps. “I have a poem,” I told them. “I have a poem I wrote about the vets who threw their medals away and I want to read it.” They broke all the rules and hoisted my chair up on the stage. I went up to the microphone and started reading. The crowd cheered when I was finished and again I had tears in my eyes. I said a couple of words I can’t remember. For the next couple of weeks the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. There were all sorts of clubs and schools wanting to hear me speak. I wrote the names and addresses down on pieces of paper and all over the walls of the apartment. * * * I went totally into speaking out against the war after that. I went into it the same way I’d gone into everything else I’d wanted to do in my life—the way I’d gone into pole vaulting or baseball or the marines. But this was something that meant much more than being an athlete or a marine.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I made a forced decision to read the little history Paul Echevin had written. I knew I knew nothing about this painter beyond a few details on book-jackets, a decadent poster or two perhaps at university—his famous Sphinx that ramps and bridles and circles Oedipus' legs with its tawny tail; or the oddly appealing Purgatory where each gaunt figure stoops under the weight of its own Chimera, a domestic-looking hybrid like a mother's thick fur stole with feet and long-toothed head still on. The refined asymmetry and social elegance of the portraits in this room—all of members of his family, it turned out—came as something of a surprise. I learned that Orst had been born in this house in 1865, the son of an eminent civil lawyer. His childhood had been secluded, the family pious and old-fashioned but not uncultured, the house cluttered and démodé in its furnishings and rich in the patterned and storied Flemish fabrics that were to appear so often in Edgard's pictures. We were to imagine him and his sister Delphine playing in the sequestered garden with its sixteenth-century mulberry trees, two introspective children lost in their own world of chivalry, playing sometimes quite apart, acting out their private legends. (At this point the various belfries of the town, slightly staggered and clangingly unaware of each other, began to sound the hour.) In the far wall was the postern giving on to the outer defensive canal, a door always locked, but the source again, so Echevin proposed, for the repeated imagery of the doorway in Orst's work—a mystic threshold, apparently, on to who knew what, as in his masterpiece "La Porte Entr'ouverte". As a young man he went to Brussels to study law, but in a first surprising show of independence gave it up after a year and managed to enrol, on the strength of some romantic designs for Hamlet, at the Academie des Beaux-Arts. A marked strain of Anglophilia brought him to lodge in the quartier Leopold, with the British colony—and much of the success of his earlier years was due to galleries and collectors in London and Liverpool and Glasgow. Burne-Jones was an influence, an admirer and, in his last years, when Orst would spend the two or three months of the exhibition season in England, a friend. Orst joined, in its own final years, the group of Belgian Symbolists who called themselves, like the first squad for some irregular ball-game, "Les XX". In 1898 he had made designs for The Merchant of Venice in Brussels and painted a life-size full-length of the Portia, Jane Byron, a Scottish actress with the abundant red hair and pale heavy-jawed beauty of the period.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It was about that time that music, which had always been around me, and was identified, through the scent of polish in the sitting-room, with the very air I breathed, gained a new and independent grip on me; I suppose it was love that made me see a Mozart concerto or a lyrical and exultant Schumann symphony not simply as a wonder in itself but as a kind of explanation of life. Like love it seemed to admit me to a new dimension of luminous purpose: music raised my expectations to an ideal level that other friends found comic or unbelievable if they weren't initiates themselves. At school we were played some bits of Janacek, which were the most convulsively life-like music I had ever heard. I gathered up the scraps of Supraphon record-sleeve information, cryptically condensed and obscured by translation, that were all that could be found out by an English boy, and was amazed by the lateness of his flowering and the fact that this bristling old gent should be the one to confirm everything I felt at seventeen about life and sex and being out at night with winds and stars. And what were my father's thoughts as he sat limply in his armchair, head back, eyes on a different distance, later on sometimes slipping into noiseless defenceless sleep? He was only fifty-five, only lately robbed by chemicals of the thick black hair we had always had in common; he hadn't reached his late phase yet. He started singing as a young man in the Navy: I imagined his mess-mates gathered round him or lying solemn in their bunks as he crooned some old salt-water ballad and their ship slid on through the moonlit toy sea of a British war-film. He must imagine those days too, I thought, rather than look forward to the final sudden crisis; but I knew he would never say. There was a beautiful accidental integrity about the galaxy of thoughts inside that listening head. Almost everything he knew and felt had never been spoken, never sung, never known to another soul.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  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. 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.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The manor of Givrecourt is a low old house, from the time of Charles V, with tall old trees about it, a mighty bam and stables and a hamlet of ancient cottages. It lies in a safe declivity among the pine woods and oak forests, the bleak sandy heaths and upland bogs of that high country so astonishing to a child reared on the level Flemish plain, with only the theatre of the skies and the plains of the sea itself for contrast. In Flanders, for those with an eye for landscape, there is extent without contour; a design ruled by the single and inflexible horizontal, which cuts the picture in two and advances indefinitely before and all around, and is not without its force and grandeur. But here the straight line was everywhere turned awry—in the quaint old work in stone and plaster and the time-worn floors of the manor-house itself, in the gnarled and ancient giants of the Forest of St Hilaire, whose boughs dropped wearily to earth and then rose up again in fantastic forms, in the rocky outcrops above, which reared against the sunset like wind-bitten visages of heathen gods. I have been at Givrecourt since then in other seasons: when the woods were full of snow, or in the autumn twilight—loveliest and most tragic of times. Among the pictures I have lately exhibited in London were a number of studies of a pond there among the pines, done on a spring morning or in the winter dusk; as well as others of the village people as the evening finds them, the forester in the lane, the gamekeeper ready with his bag and gun. They were said by some to lack the merits that they discerned in my work before, and by some to show a wish on my part to leave behind the legendary subjects that are for several of us the highest calling. But to me they are merely further expressions of an idea that lies beyond legend, and to which legend offers the most inexhaustible and luminous forms. I mean of course the little door each picture opens upon mystery, upon the unknown and the unknowable. To the admirer of my mysteries, the silent pond and lanes of Givrecourt may serve as thresholds to the ineffable as surely as my Medusa and my Percival. And if it be objected that my gamekeeper and my sacristan have voices of their own and call out to us in tones that break that subtle harmony, I can say only that they are also the voices of my childhood, and that the imponderable harmonies of childhood linger beneath all that I attempt to do. The article was dated October 1898. I knew that a year later he would have met Jane Byron, and that she would be dead.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I asked her what was it like, and though her answer was restricted to days among the ruins of the Forum or Pompeii it was clear that the real wonders had taken place, and kept on taking place, in the up-to-date privacy of the hotel. "Paul's found a funny box," she said, and her chuckle, too, came with more confidence of there being something to chuckle about. I was sceptical, of course, but still I envied her; I kissed her on the cheek to associate myself with luck and happiness. The box didn't look funny, as it stood on the floor by Paul's desk. It was tuck-box sized, with the lid flung back because the restraining leather strap had perished. He had taken a piece of coloured glass from it and was rubbing it gently in his handkerchief. I came round and craned over. "You'll be interested in this, dear," he said, as if I'd been Marcel, and held up a ruby-coloured lozenge, with a clasp at the top. "It looks like a bit off a chandelier," I said. "Mm. I think it probably was." He laid it on his blotter beside another identical piece. "There. The price of a virtuous woman is far above rubies." "I'm sure." I looked into the jumble of the box, neck-chains, costume jewellery, remnants of peacock-patterned silk. "Kundry's ear-rings," said Paul. "You'll find some other familiar things in there." And he nodded to show that I could have the treat of looking. I squatted and rummaged disparagingly, as I might have done at a fleamarket. There were cheap brooches with rusted hasps, a crystal ball, a moulting fur cap ("Le toquet de vair"!), the beaded blue vell of "L'Infini", that tore as I lifted it, a slender wand with a bird on top—I knew it from Orst's "Osiris", though not how the resting hawk was an infant's wooden toy. It was real junk that would never have passed muster at one of Theo's fancy-dress balls. At the bottom lay the collar of medals, that heavy treasure that had held up the chins of both the Janes in their different poses, the antique profiles blurred by time and the inscriptions rubbed down to vestigial runes. I lifted it out with a sceptical smile, but surprised at how much it weighed: the medallions were thick, and the setting too was of some dull metal, inlaid with flat pink stones. It slumped round my two hands as I held it up to Paul; it would have pinched the women's white necks with its embossed edges and hidden hinges. He took it from me in a priestly way and stood it on the desk, saying quietly, "Now that is old, at least the medals . . . " They still showed emperors' curtalled names, garlanded pillars, chariot-wheels—a miniature clamour, a very distant triumph. I wasn't sure if the collar was beautiful or hideous, poignant or shocking: like an Orst painting it was somehow all these things at once.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I went out later and walked in the damp, buffeting air to the end of the town. The night was cloudy, the sea invisible save when it thumped like a distant bomb-blast on the sea-wall below and sent up drenching spouts into the lamplight of the promenade. 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

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  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.

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

  As children and teenagers, Larry and the others did not stand out as being resilient or special in any regard. 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 SightCAROL’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.”

• 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.