Bewilderment

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 Divine Comedy (1950)

  And as the cranes go chanting their lays, making a long streak of themselves in the air: so I saw the shadows come, uttering wails, borne by that strife of winds; whereat I said: “Master, who are those people, whom the black air thus lashes?” “The first of these concerning whom thou seekest to know,” he then replied, “was Empress 1 of many tongues. With the vice of luxury she was so broken, that she made lust and law alike in her decree, to take away the blame she had incurred. She is Semiramis, of whom we read that she succeeded Ninus, and was his spouse; she held the land which the Soldan rules. That other is she who slew herself in love, 2 and broke faith to the ashes of Sichæus; next comes luxurious Cleopatra. 3 Helena 4 see, for whom so long a time of ill revolved; and see the great Achilles, 5 who fought at last with love; see Paris, Tristan”; 6 and more than a thousand shades he showed to me, and pointing with his finger, named to me those whom love had parted from our life. After I had heard my teacher name the olden dames and cavaliers, pity came over me, and I was as if bewildered. I began: “Poet, willingly would I speak with those two 7 that go together, and seem so light upon the wind.” And he to me: “Thou shalt see when they are nearer to us; and do thou then entreat them by that love, which leads them; and they will come.” Soon as the wind bends them to us, I raised my voice: “O wearied souls! come to speak with us, if none denies it.” As doves called by desire, with raised and steady wings come through the air to their loved nest, borne by their will: so those spirits issued from the band where Dido is, coming to us through the malignant air; such was the force of my affectuous cry. “O living creature, gracious and benign; that goest through the black air, visiting us who stained the earth with blood. if the King of the Universe were our friend, we would pray him for thy peace; seeing that thou hast pity of our perverse misfortune. Of that which it pleases thee to hear and to speak, we will hear and speak with you, whilst the wind, as now, is silent for us. The town, 8 where I was born, sits on the shore, where Po descends to rest with his attendant streams. Love, which is quickly caught in gentle heart, took him with the fair body of which I was bereft; and the manner still afflicts me. Love, which to no loved one permits excuse for loving, took me so strongly with delight in him, that, as thou seest, even now it leaves me not.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Thus being astonished and dismayed, nay dumb- founded with the longing that did torment me, though I found no beginning nor indeed any trace to satisfy my curious desire, I went nevertheless from door to door, and at length, like some luxurious person strolling at my ease, I fortuned unawares to come into the market-place, where I espied a certain woman accompanied with a great many servants, walking apace, towards whom I drew nigh and viewed her precious stones set with gold and her garments woven with the same in such sort that she seemed to be some noble matron: and there was an old man which followed her : who (as soon as he had espied me) said: * Verily this is Lucius," and then. he came and embraced me, and by and by he went unto his mistress, and whispered in her ear, and came to me again, saying: * How is it, Lucius, that you will not salute your dear cousin and friend ? " To whom I answered: “Sir, I dare not be so bold as to take acquaintance of an unknown woman." Howbeit as half ashamed with blushes and hanging head I drew back, she turned her gaze upon me and said : “ Behold how he resembleth the same noble dignity as his modest mother Salvia:doth; behold his countenance and body agreeing thereto in each point, behold his comely stature, his graceful slender- ness, his delicate colour, his hair yellow and not too foppishly dressed, his grey and quick eyes shining like unto the eagle's, his blooming countenance in all points, and his grave and comely gait." And moreover she said: “O Lucius, I have nourished thee with mine own proper hands, and why not? For I am not only of kindred unto thy mother by blood, but also her foster-sister; for we are both. descended of the line of Plutarch, sucked the same 51 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  As soone as night was past, and the day began to spring, I fortuned to awake, and rose out of my bed as halfe amazed, and very desirous to know and see some marvellous and strange things, remembring with my selfe that I was in the middle part of all Thessaly, whereas by the common report of all the World, the Sorceries and Inchauntments are most used, I oftentimes repeated with my self the tale of my companion Aristomenus touching the manner of this City, and being mooved by great desire, I viewed the whole scituation thereof, neither was there any thing which I saw there, but that I did beleeve to be the same which it was indeed, but every thing seemed unto me to be transformed and altered into other shapes, by the wicked power of Sorcerie and Inchantment, insomuch that I thought that the stones which I found were indurate, and turned from men into that figure, and that the birds which I heard chirping, and the trees without the walls of the city, and the running waters, were changed from men into such kinde of likenesses. And further I thought that the Statues, Images and Walls could goe, and the Oxen and other brute beasts could speake and tell strange newes, and that immediately I should see and heare some Oracles from the heavens, and from the gleed of the Sun. Thus being astonied or rather dismayed and vexed with desire, knowing no certaine place whither I intended to go, I went from street to street, and at length (as I curiously gazed on every thing) I fortuned unwares to come into the market place, whereas I espied a certaine woman, accompanied with a great many servants, towards whom I drew nigh, and viewed her garments beset with gold and pretious stone, in such sort that she seemed to be some noble matron. And there was an old man which followed her, who as soon as he espied me, said to himself, Verily this is Lucius, and then he came and embraced me, by and by he went unto his mistresse and whispered in her eare, and came to mee againe saying, How is it Lucius that you will not salute your deere Cousin and singular friend? To whom I answered, Sir I dare not be so bold as to take acquaintance of an unknown woman. Howbeit as halfe ashamed I drew towards her, and shee turned her selfe and sayd, Behold how he resembleth the very same grace as his mother Salvia doth, behold his countenance and stature, agreeing thereto in each poynt, behold his comely state, his fine slendernesse, his Vermilion colour, his haire yellow by nature, his gray and quicke eye, like to the Eagle, and his trim and comely gate, which do sufficiently prove him to be the naturall childe of Salvia. And moreover she sayd, O Lucius, I have nourished thee with myne owne proper hand: and why not?

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] WHILE WE WERE thus advancing, one in front of the other, along the brink, often the good Master said: “Give heed, let my skill avail thee.” On my right shoulder the sun was beating, that already with his rays was changing the whole face of the west from azure to white; and with my shadow, ruddier I made the flames appear, and even at so slight a sign many shades I saw, as they passed, give heed. This was the cause which gave them an opening to speak of me; and one to the other they began to say: “He doth not seem a shadowy body.” Then certain of them made towards me, so far as they could, ever on their guard not to come forth where they would not be burned. “O thou that goest behind the others,1 not for being slacker but perchance for reverence, make answer unto me who in thirst and fire do burn; nor alone to me is thine answer needful, for all these have greater thirst for it than Indian or Ethiop for cold water. Tell us how it is that thou makest of thee a wall against the sun, as if thou wert not yet caught within death’s net.” Thus spake one of them to me, and already would I have revealed myself, had I not been intent on another strange thing which then appeared; for through the midst of the fiery path, people were coming with their faces opposite to these, who made me pause in wonderment. There I see on either side each shade make haste, and one kiss the other without staying, satisfied with short greeting: even so within their dark battalions one ant rubs muzzle with another, perchance to spy out their way and their fortune. Soon as they break off the friendly greeting, ere the first step there speeds onward, each one strives to shout loudest, the new people, “Sodom and Gomorrah,”2 and the other: “Pasiphaë3 enters the cow that the young bull may haste to her lust.” Then like cranes that should fly, some to the Rhipean mountains,4 others towards the sands; these shy of the frost, those of the sun, the one people passes on, the other comes away, and weeping they return to their former chants, and to the cry which most befits them; and those very same who had entreated me, drew close to me as before, intent on listening in their appearance. I, who twice had seen their desire, began: “O souls, certain of having, whenever it may be, a state of peace, my members have not remained yonder, green or ripe, but here are with me, with their blood and with their joints. Hence upward I go to be blind no longer; there is a lady above who winneth grace for us,5 wherefore I bring my mortal body through your world.

• From Querelle (1953)

  " Those traits, poorly interpreted, combined to create a picture of a faggot such as none of the masons could ever have seen. All they knew about the "autnies" and "fairies'' was what they said about them themselves, what Theo used to say, a hysterical babble of catch phrases : "Sure as hell, that's a pederast's pet! . . . You take it straight, sideways, or inbetween? . . . To the highest bidder, eh? . . . 'Why don't you just fuck off to your sugar daddy, you ain't fit to work here! . . ." While they were able to spout this stuff with the greatest of ease, it did not really represent any reality. As their emotions weren't involved in the subject, no conversation could 149 I QUERELLE ever add to their knowledge of it, but they found it engrossing nevertheless. \Vhat we want to say is that it was exactly this ignorance that left them in a slightly troubled state, indestructible by its very imprecision and haziness : unknown, finally, for lack of a name, yet visible in a thousand reflections. They were unanimous in suspecting the existence of a universe that was both abominable and marvelous, and they felt themselves hovering on the brink of it. Their distance from that universe was, in fact, the same that separates you from the word you are trying to ren1ember, the one floating around at the back of your mind : ''I have it on the tip of my tongue." \Vhen they had to talk about Gil, they gave each one of those characteristics of his that reminded them, no matter how superficially, of what they knew about homosexuals, such a caricaturistic treatment that the result turned out to be a horrifyingly naturalistic image of a young male prostitute. They talked about the goings-on between Gil and Theo. "They were inseparable." ''But then they must have had some sort of argmnent. Maybe Gil had been doing a number with someone else . . . " At first they never thought of mentioning Roger. Only when one ·of the detectives said : "And what about that young boy who was with Gil on the afternoon of the murder?" they came up with their stories about Roger's visits to the building site. It was a great new vein to quarry. In their opinion, "those guys" were an amorphous bunch, not much to choose between them, and thus they considered it quite natural for an eighteen-yearold youngster to blithely disengage himself from the arms of a forty-year-old 1nason to go and n1ake love to a child of fifteen. "You never saw him with a sailor?" Well, they weren't sure, but they supposed they had. It wasn't always so easy to distinguish people in the fog. But there were far too many sailors in the city of Brest for Gil not to hav� known several. Besides, he used to wear bell-bottom pants, like a sailor. tso I JEAN GENET

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  because his son, deformed in his whole body and worse in mind, and who was born in shame, he has put there in place of its true shepherd.” If more he said, or if he was silent, I know not, so far already had he raced beyond us; but this I heard and was pleased to retain. And he who was my succour in every need, said: “Turn thee hither, see two of them that come biting at sloth.” Last of them all they said: “The people for whom the sea opened, were dead ere Jordan saw its heirs”;17 and: “That folk who endured not the toil to the end with Anchises’ son, gave them up to a life inglorious.”18 Then, when those shades were so far parted from us, that they could be seen no more, a new thought was set within me, wherefrom many and divers others sprang; and so from one to another I rambled, that I closed mine eyes for very wandering, and thought I transmuted into dream. 1. The apprehensive faculty receives the impression (intenzione) of the concrete thing, form and material alike (see intention, Par. xxiv, note 8, for this word with a different sense). According to Albertus Magnus, “the intention is not part of the thing like the form, but rather the appearance of the whole thing as apprehended.” [Thus, the form of a statue would not be affected by the nature of the material—marble, bronze, &c., but the intention would].—Cf. Par. iv, note 4. 2. form, i.e. its essential principle.3. The circle of fire.4. All chance or action is regarded in the Aristotelian philosophy as motion. The act of love is a spiritual as distinct from a local movement.5. These lines contain a definition of the human soul. Thomas Aquinus says that “rational souls” are “forms which are in a certain sense separated, but yet have to abide in material”; which he explains by adding that the intellect is separated inasmuch as it is not “the act of any bodily organ, as the visual power is of the eye” (see Canto XXV, note 6), but is nevertheless the vital principle of a (human) body. Cf., further, Bonaventura: “Spiritual substances [i.e., beings) are either completely joined to bodies, as is the case with brute souls, or joined separately to them, as are rational souls, or completely separated from them, as are celestial spirits which the philosophers call intelligence, and we call angels.”

• From Escape (2007)

  Shannon was very matter-of-fact. “Aunt Naomi’s spankings are way too hard. They’re so bad, they’re ridiculous. Mom’s spankings are so soft you have to pretend that you’re crying. But Aunt Charlotte’s spankings are just right.” I didn’t think a spanking could ever be just right. So I asked Shannon what she meant. “It’s like this,” she said. “You never know how many swats you are going to get from the other moms, but Aunt Charlotte gives you two swats for every year old you are. If you scream really loud, she thinks she’s hurting you and doesn’t swat as hard.” Shannon’s optimism brought a new mood to the orchard. She got about a dozen brothers and sisters together and told them they needed to play the game they always did when they were getting a spanking from Aunt Charlotte. She ran through the drill. First they had to act extremely sorry for what they had done. Then they had to promise that if Aunt Charlotte would forgive them, they’d never again do whatever they’d done. If Aunt Charlotte still insisted on spanking them, everyone would act scared, start crying, and beg her not to. This sometimes made Aunt Charlotte feel guilty enough to reduce the number of swats. When it was time to spank those involved in the punch theft, we all trooped inside. I lucked out. Even though I’d had some punch, I got to stay downstairs with some of the others who weren’t being spanked. I was surprised by the volume of screaming coming from upstairs. I said to my cousin Jayne, “I thought that Aunt Charlotte’s spankings were just right. It sounds like she’s killing everyone.” Jayne told me, “They are just trying to make her think she’s killing them. If everyone in the room screams loudly enough, then the person getting the swats has less screaming to do and gets a spanking that doesn’t hurt very bad. We always do this to Aunt Charlotte.” “What about with Aunt Elaine?” I asked. Jayne looked at me like I was a little bit crazy. “No, we don’t need to bother her because you can’t usually feel her spankings. And we don’t do it to my mother because she doesn’t buy the act.” I nodded. Aunt Charlotte probably thought that day that she was giving everyone a correction. But for those involved, this was just another game. Nevertheless, it was a game I had no interest in playing. Minutes after the spankings ended, everyone marched downstairs, and shortly all of us were laughing and smiling again. It was as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and for us it hadn’t. School Days

• From Escape (2007)

  Cathleen and Merril arrived. He ordered the children to stop grabbing food. Cathleen became a drill sergeant at this point and started making kids sit in the grass until it was their turn. She ordered them to stop shouting and pushing one another. Barbara and Tammy soon made their appearance on the scene. Barbara said to Merril, “Let’s go over to that restaurant and have some real breakfast and some coffee. Cathleen and Carolyn can handle things here.” Cathleen seemed quiet and remote. She had just spent her first night with Merril but seemed not to want to discuss it. I suspected that she was upset because Merril was ignoring her and not treating her like a wife. She’d finally slept with him and the next morning he was eager to take off with Barbara and Tammy to eat breakfast while leaving Cathleen behind to babysit. Faunita was the next wife to surface. She complained about having to put thirty kids to bed by herself and said they needed more hotel rooms. Ruth came down to breakfast with Nathan’s wife, who was trying to take care of her. Ruth couldn’t walk straight. She went over to a shrub with some purple flowers and picked a ridiculously large bunch for her hair. We tried to get her to eat some breakfast, but she refused. Then she decided she wanted to run around the parking lot for some exercise before we started driving to Yuma. Nathan’s wife tried to dissuade her but had no luck. Ruth took off, running in circles. We could follow the big bouquet of purple flowers as it bobbed around the parking lot. I felt that I was part of something so strange it belonged to another realm. We were a traveling road show of freaks and noisy children. Before I married Merril, my life had been relatively normal with moments of strangeness. Now it was surreal, with occasional bursts of reality. Merril, Barbara, and Tammy came back from breakfast. They were laughing and acting so righteous. They told us we were not “keeping sweet,” a religious phrase we said to one another to remind us not to react to things that made us mad. We had been taught to believe that reacting in anger could cause a person to lose the spirit of God.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Black Boy is the study of the growing up of a Negro boy in the Deep South, and is one of the major American autobiographies. I had never thought of it, as Scnghor clearly did, as one of the major African autobiographies, only one more document, in fact, like one more book in the Bible, speaking of the African's long persecution and exile. Scnghor chose to overlook several gaps in his argument, not the least of which was the fact that Wright had not been in a position, as Europeans had been, to remain in contact with his hypothetical African heritage. The Grcco-Roman tradition had, after all, been written down; it was by this means that it had kept itself alive. Granted that there was something African in Black Boy, as there was undoubtedly something African in all American Negroes, the great question of what this was, and how it had survived, remained wide open. Moreover, Black Boy had been written in the English language which Americans had inherited fr om England, that is, if you like, PRINCES AND POWERS 1 55 fr om Greece and Rome; its fo rm, psychology, moral attitude, preoccupations, in short, its cultural validity, were all due to fo rces which had nothing to do with Africa. Or was it simply that we had been rendered unable to recognize Africa in it? fo r, it seemed that, in Senghor's vast re-creation of the world, the fo otfall of the African would prove to have covered more territory than the fo otfall of the Roman. Thursday's great event was Aime Cesaire's speech in the afternoon, dealing with the relation between colonization and culture. Cesaire is a caramel-colored man fr om Martinique, probably around fo rty, with a great tendency to roundness and smoothness, physically speaking, and with the rather vaguely benign air of a schoolteacher. All this changes the moment he begins to speak. It becomes at once apparent that his curious, slow-moving blandness is related to the grace and patience of a jungle cat and that the intelligence behind those spectacles is of a very penetrating and demagogic order. The cultural crisis through which we are passing today can be summed up thus, said Cesaire: that culture which is strong est fr om the material and technological point of view threatens to crush all weaker cultures, particularly in a world in which, distance counting for nothing, the technologically weaker cul tures have no means of protecting themselves.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  I seemed as though I were one of the house of Proserpina and of the family of death, insomuch that I could not sufficiently expresse the forme of this new sight, so far was I amased and astonied thereat: for why, the bodies of the three slaine men were no bodies, but three blown bladders mangled in divers places, and they seemed to be wounded in those parts where I remembred I wounded the theeves the night before. Whereat the people laughed exceedingly: some rejoyced marvellously at the remembrance thereof, some held their stomackes that aked with joy, but every man delighted at this passing sport, so passed out of the theatre. But I from the time that I uncovered the bodies stood stil as cold as ice, no otherwise than as the other statues and images there, neither came I into my right senses, until such time as Milo my Host came and tooke mee by the hand, and with civil violence lead me away weeping and sobbing, whether I would or no. And because that I might be seene, he brought me through many blind wayes and lanes to his house, where he went about to comfort me, beeing sad and yet fearfull, with gentle entreaty of talke. But he could in no wise mitigate my impatiency of the injury which I conceived within my minde. And behold, by and by the Magistrates and Judges with their ensignes entred into the house, and endeavoured to pacify mee in this sort, saying, O Lucius, we are advertised of your dignity, and know the genealogie of your antient lineage, for the nobility of your Kinne doe possesse the greatest part of all this Province: and thinke not that you have suffered the thing wherfore you weepe, to any reproach and ignominy, but put away all care and sorrow out of your minde. For this day, which we celebrate once a yeare in honour of the god Risus, is alwaies renowned with some solemne novel, and the god doth continually accompany with the inventor therof, and wil not suffer that he should be sorrowfull, but pleasantly beare a joyfull face. And verily all the City for the grace that is in you, intend to reward you with great honours, and to make you a Patron. And further that your statue or image may be set up for a perpetuall remembrance.

• From Escape (2007)

  “Carolyn, right after you married Father, all of Barbara’s children were talking about you being the wife to travel with him. They were hoping that she would stay home with them. They all want their mother. They’re excited because now they think there’s a chance they might have a mom.” I asked Audrey what Barbara in fact did as Merril’s traveling secretary. “When I’ve been in the office, all I’ve ever seen her do is color flowers and call Father on the radio every two minutes. She’d take him drinks on the job and then go out to dinner with him every night.” I told Audrey that I thought the last thing Barbara wanted in Page was another of Merril’s wives. “I haven’t gotten one warm feeling or gesture from her,” I said. “I don’t think she’s happy that I married her husband.” Audrey didn’t miss a beat. “Of course she’s not happy about you marrying Father. She’s been his only wife ever since he married her, and you might change that.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and looked at Audrey in shock. “What do you mean, she is your father’s only wife?” Audrey suddenly looked stricken. “I think I have said too much already. We really should be getting home.” My head was spinning. Why didn’t Audrey want to talk to me any more about what was going on in this strange family I’d just married into? For eighteen years, I’d always known where I stood and what was expected of me. Even though my mother was abusive, I grew up in a home that was very structured, and my father was exceedingly well organized. But in less than two weeks, ever since I’d asked my father if I could go to college, my world had turned upside down. That weekend was tense. Merril spent one night in my bedroom. He didn’t interact with the rest of the family at all. He and Barbara went into town on Saturday and spent the rest of the day in her bedroom talking. He didn’t say goodbye to anyone when he left for Page on Monday morning. Nancy, one of Merril’s daughters, went with him. I was hoping this meant she might be taking Margaret’s job. More than anything, I wanted to stay in college. It was absolutely the only chance I had to make something of myself. It was a tiny plot of solid ground on which I would have at least a foothold on a future.

• From Escape (2007)

  I looked at my cousins as if to say, Who are they? Shannon started laughing. “Those are Merril Jessop’s daughters and they own the school.” “It’s obvious that they own the hallway,” I said. My cousin Jayne chimed in, “Oh, they’re not as bad as they look. They do a lot of funny things, trying to be so superior and pious.” “Funnier than the way they dress?” I asked, thinking of those blue sports shoes. “Does everyone at school dress that way?” Jayne and Shannon were giggling again. “No,” Shannon said. “Not everyone dresses like that, just the nusses and the wanna-be nusses.” I looked blank. I had no idea what Shannon was talking about. “We call everyone who dresses that way nusses,” she said. Jayne jumped in. “It all started out when we called them righteousnesses. People who didn’t dress like them or want to be like them were called hoods. Righteousnesses was too long, so we shortened it to nusses.” I could see that the nusses were going to be one of the strangest components to the strange school year of 1984–85. Registration day was huge for me because I had been out of school for a year. The split in our community was now in its seventh year. One of the consequences was that many families pulled their children out of the private high school so they would not be contaminated by the children of the families on the other side of the divide who supported Uncle Roy. As a result, many boys wound up working on construction jobs instead of going to high school. The girls who were forbidden to go to the private high school were confined to their homes. Most of the girls who were kept out of school were disappointed because they had wanted an education and a diploma before they were assigned to a marriage. They knew their futures were being shortchanged. I had been working at my father’s office during my year away from school, which was at least better than being stuck at home doing babysitting and chores. I was diligent about my correspondence courses but eager to get back into the classroom. I was thrilled when the Colorado City High School opened. I realized as I stood in the registration line that I didn’t have any friends on the Uncle Roy side of the split even though my parents supported him. I had gone against their wishes and maintained friendships with children whose parents supported the brethren, the side that believed that disciples should assist the prophet in interpreting God’s word.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  My first sight of the analytic couch constituted the primal scene, for only its existence jarred me into recognizing that the world is governed by a minority, the sexually active, and that they hold sway over a huge majority of the nonsexual, those people too young or too old or too poor or homely or sick or crazy or powerless to be able to afford sexual partners (or the luxury of systematic, sustained and shared introspection, so sexual in its own way). All advertisements and films and songs are addressed to sexuals, to their rash whims and finicky tastes, but these communications cleverly ignore nonsexuals, those pale, penniless, underdeveloped bodies, blue nipples flung like two test drops of ink from a new pen across the blotting paper of a chest, or high, hairless buttocks, unmolded by hands into something lovely, something enticing, left pure and formless like butcher’s lard. The patient who always preceded me was the lady in the Persian-lamb coat; she left behind the peculiar perfumed smell of the paper tissues she wept into, a weak solution of those chemical towels handed out after lobster in family restaurants, and the heavier, more aggressive and I suppose offensive smell of her stubbed-out cigarettes (eight or nine in the sterling-silver cupped hand that served as the ashtray). These smells and the ghosts of smoke circulating through the sunlight, colloidal souvenirs, seemed to be the echoes of a just-completed drama by Racine in which lambent passions had glowed within the glass chimney of formal measures, in which all the action must occur offstage and is merely reported here and the only permissible emotions are the great ones—incestuous longings, guilt, and the impulse to murder—whereas the dimmer, more usual feelings of sloth, boredom, spleen, irritability are airily dismissed. For psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen “King Lear,” never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert’s father’s timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the secondrate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen. I am saying all this in order to explain how bewildered I was by Farlow’s hysterical letter. I knew his wife had died but I certainly expected him to remain, throughout a devout widowhood, the dull, sedate and reliable person he had always been. Now he wrote that after a brief visit to the U.S. he had returned to South America and had decided that whatever affairs he had controlled at Ramsdale he would hand over to Jack Windmuller of that town, a lawyer whom we both knew. He seemed particularly relieved to get rid of the Haze “complications.” He had married a Spanish girl. He had stopped smoking and had gained thirty pounds. She was very young and a ski champion. They were going to India for their honeymonsoon. Since he was “building a family” as he put it, he would have no time henceforth for my affairs which he termed “very strange and very aggravating.” Busybodies—a whole committee of them, it appeared—had informed him that the whereabouts of little Dolly Haze were unknown, and that I was living with a notorious divorcee in California. His father-in-law was a count, and exceedingly wealthy. The people who had been renting the Haze house for some years now wished to buy it. He suggested that I better produce Dolly quick. He had broken his leg. He enclosed a snapshot of himself and a brunette in white wool beaming at each other among the snows of Chile.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I asked her news of Fred, and Marilyn said she’d lost touch with him, that the last she had heard he was still living with an Indian tribe in the Yucatán, where he’d gone to write his stories. And I recalled that when I was thirteen I’d run into him at the public library after not seeing him for a year. But he was no longer contained in his blue vest and brown jacket with his hair tousled but cut—no, now he was a wild man, something strapped with hemp to his back, his hair and beard flowing red and gray over his shoulders, his calves wrapped up to the knees in orange and red rags, feet shod in boots with cleats, eyes still big and averted behind glasses now mended with tape and his hands much redder and bigger and flatter somehow, as though he’d hammered each finger flat. I didn’t recognize him, but he touched me on the shoulder; and when I looked up into those eyes peering a foot to one side of me and saw the acne scars above the sprouting whiskers and heard his dull, mechanical and very soft voice, the sound of a voice choking on its own phlegm—well, then I knew him but didn’t want to, so drastically transformed was he. If he’d had an iguana on his shoulder he couldn’t have been more exotic. He told me he’d been in Mexico for a few months and was heading back there soon, that he had no money but lived by doing odd jobs—that this precariousness was necessary to his art. Before, in the shop, his dull muttering and his magnified, frozen eyes had seemed pitiable signs of shyness, but such an interpretation had fitted him only in his scruffy bourgeois guise, had fitted the sound of the clanking radiator and the smell of reheated coffee. Now that he was released out of his confining shop and had turned himself into a gaudy fetish, into a hank of streaked hair and bright rags, now his gaze seemed paralyzed by grandeur and his voice remote only because it was the sound of divinity. As a little boy I’d recognized that my imaginary playmate, Tom, was free but only by virtue of enduring total isolation; now Fred (but was this huge, mumbling, godlike bum really Fred?), now this new Fred was telling me mendicancy was the price of making art.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X I V As vibrations pass outward and inward in a vessel filled with water, when disturbed by a blow, so the speech of the blessed spirits passed from Thomas in the circumference to Beatrice in the centre, and then back from her to the circumference. Dante has now become accustomed to the spirit world freed from those limitations of corporeal sense-organs of which he is himself still conscious, and the perplexity is diffusing itself within him, though not yet precipitated into definite thought, as to how it can be that the resurrection of the body shall not reimpose limitations and weariness upon the now emancipated souls, making the very glory of heaven painful. Or will that glory be then tempered? Beatrice requests an answer for this yet unspoken and even unthought demand; and when all have sung a hymn of praise, Solomon tells how human nature includes body and soul, and therefore the disembodied soul is less complete than the whole person when the soul shall be reclad with the glorified body. When more complete it will be more pleasing to God, and will so receive more of his grace (above its merit, though not given without relation thereto), and will thus see him more adequately and therefore love him more warmly and therein have greater joy, expressed in more dazzling brightness. But the organs of sense will be incapable of pain or weariness; no excess of delight will be beyond their joyous grasp. The souls quiver in response to the reference to the resurrection. A third circle shows itself, first in dubious faintness then with a sudden flash, at the very moment when Dante and his guide pass into the rea-glowing Mars. A cross gleams white athwart the red planet, whereon Christ flashes in such fashion as tongue may not tell. Souls in light move and pass upon the limbs of the cross, uttering divine melody and singing hymns of victory but half comprehended by Dante, yet more entrancing than aught that he had hitherto experienced; experienced hitherto, but he had not yet looked upon the beloved eyes of his guide in this fifth heaven, and therefore he must not be taken, by implication, to place the heavenly song above the ever-deepening beauty of Beatrice’s eyes FROM CENTRE to circumference and again from circumference to centre vibrates the water in a rounded vessel according as ’tis smitten from without or from within. Into my mind this thought dropped sudden, just as the glorious life of Thomas held its peace, because of the resemblance that sprang from his discourse, and then from Beatrice’s, whom to begin thus after him it pleased: “This man hath need, and telleth it you not, neither with voice, nor as yet with his thought, to track another truth unto its root.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Tim was the agent who humanized Mrs. Scott for me. If he loved her, if he could let her tickle him, if he could cling to her knee as she read to him, then she must not be a monster, all appearances to the contrary. When I dropped by their apartment in the afternoon she always had the curtains drawn and was always sunk into a stupor on an old, feeble couch broken in the shanks and bleeding from the arms. Mrs. Scott squatted heavily on this piece of furniture, her chin on her palm, as though she were Death meditating on its latest convert. Sometimes I’d want just to fly through, to kiss Tim or to leave my Latin assignment with her husband, but she couldn’t be ignored. She drank in all the oxygen around her and reversed the magnetism of all metals; one was drawn to her even by the fillings in one’s teeth. Her hair was black and dirty and cut into a pageboy only because hair must be worn in some style; undoubtedly she would have preferred it thick with twigs and matted with mud. She always wore a formless madras blouse flown like a flag announcing defeat over the battlements of her corpulent body. Her teeth overlapped. Her eyeteeth were unusually long and pointed and wet. Mrs. Scott was a poet. Her husband also wrote verse. It was understood between them that his lines were very learned but a bit dry and completely the work of the conscious mind, hence inferior. He was of the school of T. S. Eliot—classic, ironic, religious. Her poems, which appeared seldom but then cataclysmically after a night white with lightning, had been purloined from the danker, more sulfurous regions of the unconscious. She spoke with the lentor of alligators through skeins of Spanish moss white and frangible with death; epochs of prehistory bubbled voluptuously and broke with gluey smackings in the lower regions of her sinister art. On the day after one of her nights of vision I’d find her panting with fatigue on the couch, her eyes ringed in black, her smile slightly goofy with sanctity, a reminder that silly once meant “blessed.” I stood in front of the cobra throne, her couch, and said, “I understand from Mr. Scott that you’ve written a wonderful poem.” “Wonderful?” she asked, aghast, chuckling silently, her many teeth various beiges, yellows and browns, even the odd blue. “Did he say wonderful?” By now her body was heaving under the madras blouse with horrific scorn. “Well, I don’t mean to get him into trouble,” I said nervously. “That’s probably not the word he used; I just gathered that he’s crazy about your new poem.” The terrible silent chuckle continued behind clouds of smoke. The Cumaean Sybil swayed hysterically over the tripod. “Do you think I might hear it sometime?” I asked, my question unexpectedly sounding rude and trivial to my own ears.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Although this was the town where I’d been born and spent every summer, I’d never explored it on my own. The library, the bookstore, Symphony Hall, the office, the dry cleaner’s, the state liquor commission, the ball park, my school, the department stores, that glass ball of a restaurant perched high up there—these I’d been to hundreds of times with my father and stepmother, but I’d always been escorted by them, like a prisoner, through the shadowy, dangerous city. And yet I’d known all along it was something mysterious and anguished beyond my experience, if not my comprehension. We had a maid, Blanche, who inserted bits of straw into her pierced ears to keep the holes from growing shut, sneezed her snuff in a fine spray of brown dots over the sheets when she was ironing and slouched around the kitchen in her worn-down, backless slippers, once purple but now the color and sheen of a bare oak branch in the rain. She was always uncorseted under her blue cotton uniform; I pictured her rolling, black and fragrant, under that fabric and wondered what her mammoth breasts looked like. Although she had a daughter five years older than I (illegitimate, or so my stepmother whispered significantly), Blanche sounded like a young girl as she hummed to a Negro station. When she moved from one room to the next, she unplugged the little Bakelite radio with the cream-colored grille over the brown speaker cloth and took it with her. That music excited me, but I thought I shouldn’t listen to it too closely. It was “Negro music” and therefore forbidden—part of another culture more violent and vibrant than mine but somehow inferior yet no less exclusive. Charles, the handyman, would emerge from the basement sweaty and pungent and, standing three steps below me, lecture me about the Bible, the Second Coming and Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey and Langston Hughes. Whenever I said something, he’d laugh in a steady, stylized way to shut me up and then start burrowing back into his obsessions. He seemed to know everything, chapter and verse—Egyptians, Abyssinians, the Lost Tribe, Russian plots, Fair Deal and New Deal—but when I’d repeat one of his remarks at dinner, my father would laugh (this, too, was a stylized laugh) and say, “You’ve been listening to Charles again. That nigger just talks nonsense. Now don’t you bother him, let him get on with his work.” I never doubted that my father was right, but I kept wondering how Dad could tell it was nonsense.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O I Subject matter and invocation. The sun is in the equinoctial point. It is midday at Purgatory and midnight at Jerusalem, when Dante sees Beatrice gazing at the sun and instinctively imitates her gesture, looking away from her and straight at the sun. The light glows as though God had made a second sun, and Dante now turns once more to Beatrice who is gazing heavenward. As he looks his human nature is transmuted to the quality of heaven and he knows not whether he is still in the flesh or no. They pass through the sphere of fire and hear the harmonies of heaven, but Dante is bewildered because he knows not that they have left the earth, and when enlightened by Beatrice he is still perplexed to know how he can rise, counter to gravitation. Beatrice, pitying the delirium of his earthly mind, explains to him the law of universal (material and spiritual) gravitation. All things seek their true place, and in the orderly movement thereto, and rest therein, consists the likeness of the universe to God. Man’s place is God, and to rise to him is therefore natural to man. It is departing from him that (like fire darting downwards) is the anomaly that needs to be explained. THE ALL-MOVER’S glory penetrates through the universe, and regloweth in one region more, and less in another. 1 In that heaven which most receiveth of his light, have I been; and have seen things which whoso descendeth from up there hath not knowledge nor power to re-tell: because, as it draweth nigh to its desire, our intellect sinketh so deep, that memory cannot go back upon the track. Nathless, whatever of the holy realm I had the power to treasure in my memory, shall now be matter of my song. O good Apollo, 2 for the crowning task, make me a so-fashioned vessel of thy worth, as thou demandest for the grant of thy beloved laurel. Up till here one peak of Parnassus 3 hath sufficed me; but now, with both the two, needs must I enter this last wrestling-ground. Into my bosom enter thou, and so breathe as when thou drewest Marsyas from out what sheathed his limbs. 4 O divine Virtue, if thou dost so far lend thyself to me, that I make manifest the shadow of the blessed realm imprinted on my brain, thou shalt see me come to thy chosen tree and crown me, then, with the leaves of which the matter and thou shalt make me worthy. So few times, Father, is there gathered of it, for triumph or of Cæsar or of poet,—fault and shame of human wills,— that the Peneian frond 5 should bring forth gladness in the joyous Delphic deity, when it sets any athirst for itself. A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark; perchance, after me, shall prayer with better voices be so offered that Cirrha 6 may respond.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  When the yeare was ended, and the goddesse warned me againe to receive this new order and consecration, I marvailed greatly what it should signifie, and what should happen, considering that I was a sacred person already, but it fortuned that while I partly reasoned with my selfe, and partly examining the thing with the Priests and Bishops, there came a new and marvailous thought in my mind, that is to say, I was onely religious to the goddesse Isis, but not sacred to the religion of great Osiris the soveraigne father of all the goddesses, between whom, although there was a religious unitie and concord, yet there was a great difference of order and ceremony. And because it was necessary that I should likewise be a minister unto Osiris, there was no long delay: for in the night after, appeared unto me one of that order, covered with linnen robes, holding in his hands speares wrapped in Ivie, and other things not convenient to declare, which then he left in my chamber, and sitting in my seate, recited to me such things as were necessary for the sumptuous banket of mine entrie. And to the end I might know him againe, he shewed me how the ankle of his left foote was somewhat maimed, which caused him a little to halt. After that I manifestly knew the will of the God Osiris, when mattins was ended, I went from one to another, to find him out which had the halting marke on his foote, according as I learned by my vision; at length I found it true: for I perceived one of the company of the Priests who had not onely the token of his foote, but the stature and habite of his body, resembling in every point as he appeared in the night: he was called Asinius Marcellus, a name not much disagreeing from my transformation. By and by I went to him, which knew well enough all the matter, as being monished by like precept in the night: for the night before as he dressed the flowers and garlands about the head of the god Osiris, he understood by the mouth of the image which told the predestinations of all men, how he had sent a poore man of Madura, to whom he should minister his sacraments, to the end hee should receive a reward by divine providence, and the other glory, for his vertuous studies. When I saw my selfe this deputed unto religion, my desire was stopped by reason of povertie, for I had spent a great part of my goods in travell and peregrination, but most of all in the Citie of Rome, whereby my low estate withdrew me a great while.