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.

Page 16 of 69 · 20 per page

• 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 A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I could peer out through it onto a sidewalk bright with mica chips and frost, the permanent glitter and the passing. A radio played a rumba. 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. And what finally became of him and his stories?

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X X I V The souls gather in amazement round the living man; who utters a surmise to his friend that Statius is perchance lingering on his way for the sake of Virgil’s companionship; and then questions him concerning his sister Piccarda, and learns that she is already in heaven. The souls are so emaciated as to be barely recognizable, and Forese names a number of them as he points them out to Dante; an office which they accept with complacency, for recognition can bring no added shame, but may bring sympathy or aid to souls in Purgatory. Amongst then is Bonagiunta da Lucca, a poet of the old school of Guittone of Arezzo, who mutters a prophecy concerning a child of the name of Gentucca, whose gracious offices to Dante when she comes to woman’s state, shall give him tender associations with that city of Lucca which he and others have so fiercely denounced. Then he questions Dante as to the secret of the new school of Tuscan poetry which has superseded the one to which he belonged, and learns that it lies in the principle of trying not to say things beautifully, but to say beautiful things truly; a cricitism in which he acquiesces with full content and satisfaction. Then all the other souls sweep forward, while Forese, like a straggler from a caravan, remains behind to question Dante as to his expected term of life, to hear his lamentations over the state of Florence, to utter a prophecy of the death of his relative Corso Donati, and then to speed forward to rejoin his companions, leaving Dante to follow the two great poets. The pilgrims now pass another tree like the one already encountered. They hear that it is a shoot from the one whereof Eve tasted the fruit; and from amongst its foliage warning examples of gluttonous excess are rehearsed. After a lengthened march in silent thought, they are startled by the blinding glory of the angel guardian, whose wing wafts a breath laden as with perfume of flowers on a May morning upon Dante’s brow; and the pilgrims hear the blessing pronounced on those whose hunger is measured by righteousness. NEITHER DID our speech make the going, nor the going, more slow; but, talking we went bravely on, even as a ship driven by a fair wind. And the shades, that seemed things twice dead, drew in wonderment at me through the pits of their eyes, aware of my being alive. And I, continuing my discourse, said: “Perchance he goeth upward more slowly than he would do, for another’s sake.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Long scrolls, rubbings from Han Dynasty tombs, pictured featureless warriors standing in tall, narrow chariots under stiff fans and drawn along by surprisingly small ponies twisting nervously in their traces—a whole traffic jam of military chariots describing interlocking curves, fan beside palmetto fan, one horse’s neck dipping behind and below another’s raised hoof. The artist had been at least as interested in the abstract pattern as in the subject and as a consequence had turned a dusty pandemonium into immaculate machinery. I studied these details because I had so long to wait (I’d arrived early and the doctor was running about an hour behind schedule). At last he emerged with a red-nosed woman in a green dress who was humble, even cringing. She slipped into a full-length black coat made of the wool of unborn lambs; once she’d extinguished the color of her dress she regained her composure and accomplished an unsniveling exit. Dr. O’Reilly smiled at me, teeth spaced and white, lips full and raw, gnawed raw, it seemed, under full mustaches, his hair white and to his shoulders—a startling length in those days. His costume also gave one pause: a piece of rope to hold up baggy, stained trousers, bare feet in hemp sandals, a great tent of a minutely and intermittently pleated lime-green Havana shirt containing his corpulence, and in the stubby fingers of his right hand a dirty hanky he kept pressing to his red, raw face, for though we were still in midwinter, sweat lent an incongruous dazzle to his face. “Come in, come in,” he said, stepping aside to usher me into the inner office, a soundproofed cube with one wall all glass looking out on a garden and a small replica of the Kamakura Buddha, gilt everywhere save for a lap full of new snow. “See that log and that hatchet?” the doctor said, pointing to a palisaded enclosure just to the right of the garden. “My patients dub the log Mom or Dad as the case may be, usually Mom, and then have a grand ol’ time hacking away at her.” His small blue eyes, veined in red, rotated dryly in their sockets to take in my reaction to the idea of murder—except his act of “observation” was so stagy it preempted the need for another response. There was nothing about this actor that couldn’t be read from the top balcony. I declined the analytic couch’s invitation to the voyage and chose an earthbound chair that faced the desk. Not that I wasn’t eager to test the couch’s splendors, which I instinctively (and I hazard astutely) equated with those of sexuality.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “Your half brothers.” She didn’t want to look but she couldn’t help herself. The boys were little, maybe four and six. The wife was blond, pretty, not put-together-pretty like Corinne, but casual pretty. She was younger, with chubby cheeks, wearing Capri pants and a shirt. Posed like a movie star—leaning back against a tree with one foot on the ground and the other leg bent at the knee, her foot up against the tree, making it look as if the bottom half of that leg were missing. Miri passed the photo back without commenting. “Jeffrey and Josh,” Frekki said. “Those are your brothers’ names.” “What’s your wife’s name?” Miri asked Mike Monsky. “Adela.” “Adela. What kind of name is that?” “It’s an old family name.” “Is she Jewish?” “That’s a personal question, Miri,” Frekki said. “I thought we were getting personal.” “She’s half, but we’re raising the boys Jewish,” Mike Monsky said. “I work in my father-in-law’s business.” As if she cared enough to ask, What business? He told her anyway. She knew he would. “Shoe stores,” he said. “He’s got a chain of shoe stores.” Did that mean Mike Monsky was rich? As if he could read her mind he added, “He’s got two sons working in the business, besides me. We were all in the Pacific together.” “Uncle Henry was in the war. He got shot in the leg.” “I’m sorry to hear that,” Mike Monsky said. “How about you?” Miri asked. “Did you get shot?” “No, I was lucky.” “Rusty says they used to call you ‘Lucky.’ ” This was a complete lie. She didn’t know why she said it. “Really? I never heard that.” “Neither did I,” Frekki said. “Lucky you didn’t get caught getting someone pregnant before Rusty.” She was getting in too deep now. “That’s a joke, right?” Mike Monsky asked. She shrugged. “If you say so.” “My daughter’s got a great sense of humor,” Mike said to Frekki, who just shook her head. Then he turned back to Miri and smiled. She didn’t want to like his smile but she did. “Please stop calling me your daughter,” she told him. “You don’t know me.” “You’re right. But I hope I’ll have the chance to remedy that.” Frekki looked at her watch. “I don’t want to break this up but I’ve got to get home. We have company coming for dinner. Don’t forget,” she reminded Mike, “seven-thirty, in a tie and jacket.” “Go ahead,” Mike Monsky told Frekki. “I’ll make sure Miri gets home safe and sound and I’ll see you later.” “Take the Cadillac.” Frekki passed her car keys to him. “I’ll take the Buick.” In the car, he turned on the radio. Pete Seeger and the Weavers were singing “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You”—a song that perfectly described her feelings about today. She bet he was sorry he’d turned to that station. Maybe he did it so he wouldn’t have to talk to her on the drive home.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Her father, distraught, said, “Planes come so low over our place you could make a malted milk from the vibrations.” Mr. Zahler worked at Zahler Brothers Potato Market in Newark. But the block-long pile of death and destruction providen tially spared the 48 children asleep in the Janet Home, virtually next door to the ill-fated apartment house. Only a block away were two schools, Vail-Deane and Pingry, which would have been occupied by hundreds of students a few hours later. Young Heroes from JanetMany owe their lives to a group of four boys from the Janet Memorial Home. Led by 16-year-old Mason McKittrick, the teenagers rushed from their building and were the first to offer assistance. Ignoring flames and the threat of further explosion, they pulled survivors out of the wreckage. Setting up an assembly line, they passed the injured to others, who transferred them to safety, many of them laid out on gym mats, awaiting medical attention. —MIRI READ HENRY’S STORY, then read it again. Swollen cream puff? She’d always thought of cream puffs as soft and sweet. But Henry was using it to describe something hard and horrible. She worried, for a minute, he was losing his mind. Or was it that when something so unimaginable happens you need to find a new way to help people see it? [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00032.jpg] [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00032.jpg] NO VALENTINE’S WEDDINGBOSTON, FEB. 13 (UPI) — Plans for a Valentine’s Day wedding went awry because a tall bride-to-be has disappeared after leaving a note to her still taller fiancé, and her engagement ring pinned to a pillow. She said she just couldn’t go through with the ceremony. Walter James Curran, 27, of Philadelphia, waited in a hotel room for some word of his fiancée, Kathleen Lorna Flynn, 23. The Valentine’s Day wedding scheduled for Thursday was to climax a romance that began at a convention of tall people’s clubs last year in Kansas City. Curran, a strapping six-foot-five engineer, made a radio appeal last night, urging his five-foot-eleven fiancée to return. Mrs. Barton Flynn said her daughter “simply vanished into thin air” on a shopping trip, after getting out of the family automobile. 23 [image "image" file=Image00005.jpg] [image file=Image00005.jpg] MiriMiri tried to imagine what went wrong. What would make Kathleen, the tall bride-to-be, decide at the last minute she didn’t want to marry Walter? Had she come to her senses and realized all they had in common was their height? Did she find him hopelessly boring? Or maybe she wasn’t attracted to him. Maybe she was disgusted by the idea of having sex with him. Maybe she didn’t like the way he smelled or the way he chewed his food or the way he mispronounced certain words. Maybe she never wanted to get married in the first place but her mother told her she’d better find somebody soon or she was going to wind up an old maid.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  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: “Pasiphaë 3 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. But—so may your greater desire soon be satisfied, so that the heaven may house you which is filled with love and broadest spreads— 6 tell me that I may yet trace it on paper, who are ye and what is that throng which is going away behind your backs?” Not otherwise the dazed highlander grows troubled and stares about speechless, when rough and savage he enters the city, than each shade did in its appearance; but after they were unladen of their bewilderment, which in lofty hearts soon is calmed, “Blessed thou,” began again the shade that first did ask of me, “who, for a holier life, art embarking knowledge of our borders! The people who come not with us offended in that for which Cæsar of old in his triumph heard ‘Regina’ called out against him; 7 therefore they part from us crying out ‘Sodom’ reproving themselves as thou hast heard, and aid the burning by their shame.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Ecce transcurso signifero circulo sol magnus annum compleverat, et quietem meam rursus interpellat numinis benefici cura pervigilis et rursus teletae, rursus sacrorum commonet. Mirabar quid rei temp taret, quid pronuntiaret futurum ; quidni? Plenissime iamdudum videbar initiatus. Ac dum religiosum scrupulum partim apud meum sensum disputo, partim. sacratorum consiliis examino, novum mirum- que plane comperior, deae quidem me tantum sacris imbutum at magni dei deumque summi parentis, invicti Osiris, necdum sacris illustratum. Quamquam enim connexa, immo vero inunita ratio numinis reli- gionisque esset, tamen teletae discrimen interesse maximum: prohinc me quoque peti magno etiam deo famulum sentire deberem. Nec diu res in ambiguo stetit: nam proxuma nocte vidi quendam de sacratis, linteis iniectum, qui thyrsos et hederas et tacenda quaedam gerens ad ipsos meos Lares collocaret, et occupato sedili meo religionis amplae denuntiaret 586 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK XI by chariot, I arrived at that holy city about the twelfth day of December in the evening. And the greatest desire which I had there was daily to make my prayers to the sovereign goddess Isis, who, by reason of the place where her temple was builded, was called Campensis,! and continually is adored of the people of Rome: her minister and worshipper was I, a stranger to her church, but not unknown to her religion. When now the sun had passed through all the signs of heaven and the year was ended, and that the goddess warned me again in my sleep to receive a new order and consecration, I marvelled greatly what it should signify and what should happen, considering that I was most fully an initiate and sacred person already. But it fortuned that while I partly reasoned with myself, and partly examined the perplexity of my conscience with the priests and bishops, there came a new and marvel- lous thought to my mind: that is to say, that I was only religious to the goddess Isis, but not yet sacred to the religion of great Osiris, the sovereign father of all the gods; between whom, although there was a religious concord or even unity, yet there was a great difference of order and ceremony, and so I thought that I should likewise believe myself to be called to be a minister unto Osiris. There was no long delay of doubt; for in the night after appeared unto me one of that order, covered with linen robes, holding in his hands spears wrapped in ivy, and other things not convenient to declare, which he left in my chamber, and sitting in my seat, recited to me such things as were necessary for the sumptuous banquet of my religious entry. And to the end I might 1 The temple of Isis was in the Campus Martius. 587 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Speak, Memory only reinforces what is suggested by Nabokov’s visibly active participation in the life of his fiction, as in Invitation to a Beheading when Cincinnatus strains to look out of his barred window and sees on the prison wall the telling, half-erased inscription, “You cannot see anything. I tried it too”, written in the neat, recognizable hand of the “prison director”—that is, the author—whose intrusions involute the book and deny it any reality except that of “book.” The word “involution” may trouble some readers, but one has only to extend the dictionary definition. An involuted work turns in upon itself, is self-referential, conscious of its status as a fiction, and “allégorique de lui-měme”—allegorical of itself, to use Mallarmé’s description of one of his own poems. An ideally involuted sentence would simply read, “I am a sentence,” and John Barth’s short stories “Title,” “Life-Story,” and “Menelaiad” (in Lost in the Funhouse, 1968) come as close to this dubious ideal as any fiction possibly can. The components of “Title,” for example, sustain a miraculous discussion among themselves, sometimes even addressing the author: “Once upon a time you were satisfied with incidental felicities and niceties of technique.” Characters in involuted works often recognize that their authenticity is more than suspect. In Raymond Queneau’s Les Enfants du Limon (1938), Chambernac is a lycée headmaster who has been collecting material for a monumental work on “literary madmen,” L’Encyclopédie des sciences inexactes. By the last chapter he has abandoned hope of getting it published, but he then is approached in a café by “un type” (Queneau, as it turns out, who identifies himself by name) and offers to turn the manuscript over for use in a novel Queneau is writing, one of whose characters is a headmaster, and so forth. A similar infinite regress exists in Chapter Four of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1872), the creator’s (and Creator’s) role now played by the sleeping Red King. When Alice moves to waken the King, Tweedledee stops her: “He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming about?” Alice said, “Nobody can guess that.” “Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?” “Where I am now, of course,” said Alice. “Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!” “If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!” “I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if I’m only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?” “Ditto,” said Tweedledum. “Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee. He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn’t help saying “Hush! You’ll be waking him, I’m afraid, if you make so much noise.” “Well, it’s no use your talking about waking him,” said Tweedledum, “when you’re only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you’re not real.”

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  He that lay prone, thrusts forward his sharpened visage, and draws back his ears into the head, as the snail does its horns; and his tongue, which was before united and apt for speech, cleaves itself; and in the other the forked tongue recloses; and the smoke now rests. The soul that had become a brute, fled hissing along the valley, and after it the other talking and sputtering. Then he turned his novel shoulder towards it, and said to the other: “Buoso shall run crawling, as I have done, along this road!” Thus I beheld the seventh ballast change and rechange; and here let the novelty excuse me, if my pen goes aught astray. And though my eyes were somewhat perplexed, and my mind dismayed, those could not flee so covertly, But that I well distinguished Puccio Sciancato: and it was he alone, of the three companions that first came, who was not changed; the other was he whom thou, Gaville, lamentest.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The oddly prepubescent curve of her back, her ricey skin, her slow languorous columbine kisses kept me from mischief. It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art. One rather mysterious spree that had interesting repercussions I must notice. I had abandoned the search: the fiend was either in Tartary or burning away in my cerebellum (the flames fanned by my fancy and grief) but certainly not having Dolores Haze play champion tennis on the Pacific Coast. One afternoon, on our way back East, in a hideous hotel, the kind where they hold conventions and where labeled, fat, pink men stagger around, all first names and business and booze—dear Rita and I awoke to find a third in our room, a blond, almost albino, young fellow with white eyelashes and large transparent ears, whom neither Rita nor I recalled having ever seen in our sad lives. Sweating in thick dirty underwear, and with old army boots on, he lay snoring on the double bed beyond my chaste Rita. One of his front teeth was gone, amber pustules grew on his forehead. Ritochka enveloped her sinuous nudity in my raincoat—the first thing at hand; I slipped on a pair of candy-striped drawers; and we took stock of the situation. Five glasses had been used, which, in the way of clues, was an embarrassment of riches. The door was not properly closed. A sweater and a pair of shapeless tan pants lay on the floor. We shook their owner into miserable consciousness. He was completely amnesic. In an accent that Rita recognized as pure Brooklynese, he peevishly insinuated that somehow we had purloined his (worthless) identity. We rushed him into his clothes and left him at the nearest hospital, realizing on the way that somehow or other after forgotten gyrations, we were in Grainball. Half a year later Rita wrote the doctor for news. Jack Humbertson as he had been tastelessly dubbed was still isolated from his personal past. Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischievous of muses!

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X X V I I I After Beatrice’s discourse Dante, gazing upon her eyes, is suddenly aware of the reflection in them of a thing which was not in his sight or thought, and on turning to see what it may be he perceives a point of intensest light with nine concentric circles wheeling around it; swift and bright in proportion to their nearness to the point. Beatrice, quoting Aristotle’s praise concerning God, declares that Heaven and all Nature hang upon that point, and bids Dante note the burning love that quickens the movement of the inmost circle. Thereon Dante at once perceives that the nine circles represent the Intelligences or angelic orders connected with the nine revolving heavens, but cannot see why the outmost, swiftest, widest sweeping end most divine heaven should correspond with the inmost and smallest angelic circle. Beatrice explains that the divine substance of the heavens being uniform that heaven which is materially greate est has in it the most of excellence; but it is the excellence, not the size, that is essential. In like manner swiftness and brightness are the measure of the excellence of the angelic circles, and therefore the inmost of them which is swiftest and brightest represents those intelligences that love and know most; and the spiritual correspondence is complete between the two diverse spatial presentations. Thus the relativity of space-conceptions is suggested. God may be conceived as the spaceless centre of the universe just as well as the all-embracer. Dante, now enlightened, sees the circles shoot out countless sparks that follow them in their whirling; and hears them all sing Hosanna; while Beatrice further explains how the swift joy of the angels is proportioned to their sight, their sight to their merit, won by grace and by exercise of will; whereas love is not the foundation but the inevitable consequence of knowledge. She has explained the three hierarchies and nine orders of the Angels, as Dionysius (enlightened by his own intense passion of contemplation, and instructed by Paul who had been rapt to heaven) had set them forth. Gregory, having departed from the scheme of Dionysius, smiled at his own error when be beheld this heaven.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “Let me give you a few details, it won’t take a moment. Now let me see [rummaging among her papers]. She is defiant toward Miss Redcock and impossibly rude to Miss Cormorant. Now here is one of our special research reports: Enjoys singing with group in class though mind seems to wander. Crosses her knees and wags left leg to rhythm. Type of by-words: a two-hundred-forty-two word area of the commonest pubescent slang fenced in by a number of obviously European polysyllables. Sighs a good deal in class. Let me see. Yes. Now comes the last week in November. Sighs a good deal in class. Chews gum vehemently. Does not bite her nails though if she did, this would conform better to her general pattern—scientifically speaking, of course. Menstruation, according to the subject, well established. Belongs at present to no church organization. By the way, Mr. Haze, her mother was—? Oh, I see. And you are—? Nobody’s business is, I suppose, God’s business. Something else we wanted to know. She has no regular home duties, I understand. Making a princess of your Dolly, Mr. Haze, eh? Well, what else have we got here? Handles books gracefully. Voice pleasant. Giggles rather often. A littly dreamy. Has private jokes of her own, transposing for instance the first letters of some of her teachers’ names. Hair light and dark brown, lustrous—well [laughing] you are aware of that, I suppose. Nose unobstructed, feet high-arched, eyes—let me see, I had here somewhere a still more recent report. Aha, here we are. Miss Gold says Dolly’s tennis form is excellent to superb, even better than Linda Hall’s, but concentration and point-accumulation are just “poor to fair.” Miss Cormorant cannot decide whether Dolly has exceptional emotional control or none at all. Miss Horn reports she—I mean, Dolly—cannot verbalize her emotions, while according to Miss Cole Dolly’s metabolic efficiency is superfine. Miss Molar thinks Dolly is myopic and should see a good ophthalmologist, but Miss Redcock insists that the girl simulates eye-strain to get away with scholastic incompetence. And to conclude, Mr. Haze, our researchers are wondering about something really crucial. Now I want to ask you something. I want to know if your poor wife, or yourself, or anyone else in the family—I understand she has several aunts and a maternal grandfather in California?—oh, had!—I’m sorry—well, we all wonder if anybody in the family has instructed Dolly in the process of mammalian reproduction. The general impression is that fifteen-year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity. All right—fourteen. You see, Mr. Haze, Beardsley School does not believe in bees and blossoms, and storks and love birds, but it does believe very strongly in preparing its students for mutually satisfactory mating and successful child rearing. We feel Dolly could make excellent progress if only she would put her mind to her work. Miss Cormorant’s report is significant in that respect. Dolly is inclined to be, mildly speaking, impudent. But all feel that primo, you should have your family doctor tell her the facts of life and, secundo, that you allow her to enjoy the company of her schoolmates’ brothers at the Junior Club or in Dr. Rigger’s organization, or in the lovely homes of our parents.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Brian stared at me coldly as if I were his sworn enemy. For the life of me, I cannot remember our parting words to each other. My father and I had an afternoon and evening left before our return flight to New York. We rented a car and drove to Tijuana, where we bought a slightly soiled pi$nTata—a shocking-pink donkey. We walked the streets together commenting on the “local color,” making predictable remarks about the poverty of the people and the opulence of the churches. My father is a still good-looking man who seems about fifteen years younger than his sixty years, is vain about his physique and thinning hair, and walks with a springing up-and-down motion which has also become my characteristic walk. We look alike, walk alike, are both addicted to puns and wisecracks, and yet somehow can scarcely communicate. We are always slightly abashed in each other’s presence—as if we each knew a terrible secret about our relationship, but could not speak of it. What could this secret be? I remember him knocking on the wall between our bedrooms to comfort me and assuage my fear of the dark. I remember him changing my sheet when I wet my bed at age three, and making me hot milk when I was eight and had insomnia. I remember him telling me once (after I witnessed a terrifying fight between my parents) that they would stay together “for my sake...” but if there was more—a childhood seduction or a primal scene—my overanalyzed memory still does not go back that far. Sometimes the smell of a cake of soap (or some other homely substance) will suddenly bring back a long-forgotten memory from childhood. And then I will find myself wondering how many other memories are hidden from me in the recesses of my own brain; indeed my own brain will seem to be the last great terra incognita, and I will be filled with wonder at the prospect of some day discovering new worlds there. Imagine the lost continent of Atlantis and all the submerged islands of childhood right there waiting to be found. The inner space we have never adequately explored. The worlds within worlds within worlds. And the marvelous thing is that they are waiting for us. If we fail to discover them, it is only because we haven’t yet built the right vehicle—spaceship or submarine or poem—which will take us to them. It’s for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write? My writing is the submarine or spaceship which takes me to the unknown worlds within my head. And the adventure is endless and inexhaustible. If I learn to build the right vehicle, then I can discover even more territories.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  This faux Brooklyn accent belonged to neither Howard nor Kiki, and had only arrived in Levi’s mouth three years earlier, as he turned twelve. Jerome and Zora had been born in England, Levi in America. But all their various American accents seemed, to Howard, in some way artificial – not quite the products of this house of his wife. None, though, was as inexplicable as Levi’s. Brooklyn? The Belseys were located two hundred miles north of Brooklyn. Howard  On Beauty felt very close to commenting on it this morning (he had been warned by his wife not to comment on it), but now Levi appeared from the hallway and disarmed his father with a gappy smile before biting the top off a muffin he held in his hand. ‘Levi,’ said Kiki, ‘honey, I’m interested – do you know who I am? Pay any attention at all to anything that goes on around here? Remember Jerome? Your brother? Jerome no here? Jerome cross big sea to place called England?’ Levi held a pair of sneakers in his hands. These he shook in the direction of his mother’s sarcasm and, scowling, sat down to begin putting them on. ‘So? And what? I know about Kippses? I don’t know nothing about no Kippses.’ ‘Jerome – go to school.’ ‘Now I’m Jerome too?’ ‘Levi – go to school .’ ‘Man, why you gotta be all . . . I just ahks a question, that’s all, and you gotta be all . . .’ Here Levi provided an inconclusive mime that gave no idea of the missing word. ‘Monty Kipps. The man your brother’s been working for in England,’ conceded Kiki wearily. It was interesting to Howard to see how Levi had won this concession, by meeting Kiki’s corrosive irony with its opposite. ‘See?’ said Levi, as if it was only by his efforts that decency and sense could be arrived at. ‘Was that hard?’ ‘So is that a letter from Kipps?’ asked Zora, coming back down the stairs and up behind her mother’s shoulder. In this pose, the daughter bent over the mother, they reminded Howard of two of Picasso’s chubby water-carriers. ‘Dad, please , I’ve got to help with the reply this time – we’re going to destroy him. Who’s it for? The Republic ?’ ‘No. No, it’s nothing to do with that – it’s from Jerome, actually. Getting married,’ said Howard, letting his robe fall open, turning away. He wandered over to the glass doors that looked out on to their garden. ‘To Kipps’s daughter. Apparently it’s funny. Your mother thinks it’s hilarious.’  kipps and belsey ‘No, honey,’ said Kiki. ‘I think we just established that I don’t think it’s hilarious – I don’t think we know what’s happening – this is a seven-line e-mail. We don’t know what that even means , and I’m not gonna get all hepped up about – ’

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  The mountain now shakes as with an earthquake, and a mighty cry of “Glory to God in the highest” rises from all its terraces; startled and perplexed by which, though bidden by Virgil not to fear, Dante swiftly pursues his path.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  How many other versions of our reality were there? My version, Brian’s, his parents’, my parents’, the doctors’, the nurses’, the social workers’…There were an infinite number of versions, an infinite number of realities. Brian and I had been through a nightmare together, and now it turned out that we had been through nothing together. We had entered an experience through the same door, but then wandered off into separate tunnels, staggered through separate darknesses alone, and emerged finally at opposite ends of the earth. Brian stared at me coldly as if I were his sworn enemy. For the life of me, I cannot remember our parting words to each other. My father and I had an afternoon and evening left before our return flight to New York. We rented a car and drove to Tijuana, where we bought a slightly soiled pi$nTata—a shocking-pink donkey. We walked the streets together commenting on the “local color,” making predictable remarks about the poverty of the people and the opulence of the churches. My father is a still good-looking man who seems about fifteen years younger than his sixty years, is vain about his physique and thinning hair, and walks with a springing up-and-down motion which has also become my characteristic walk. We look alike, walk alike, are both addicted to puns and wisecracks, and yet somehow can scarcely communicate. We are always slightly abashed in each other’s presence—as if we each knew a terrible secret about our relationship, but could not speak of it. What could this secret be? I remember him knocking on the wall between our bedrooms to comfort me and assuage my fear of the dark. I remember him changing my sheet when I wet my bed at age three, and making me hot milk when I was eight and had insomnia. I remember him telling me once (after I witnessed a terrifying fight between my parents) that they would stay together “for my sake…” but if there was more—a childhood seduction or a primal scene—my overanalyzed memory still does not go back that far. Sometimes the smell of a cake of soap (or some other homely substance) will suddenly bring back a long-forgotten memory from childhood. And then I will find myself wondering how many other memories are hidden from me in the recesses of my own brain; indeed my own brain will seem to be the last great terra incognita , and I will be filled with wonder at the prospect of some day discovering new worlds there. Imagine the lost continent of Atlantis and all the submerged islands of childhood right there waiting to be found. The inner space we have never adequately explored. The worlds within worlds within worlds. And the marvelous thing is that they are waiting for us. If we fail to discover them, it is only because we haven’t yet built the right vehicle—spaceship or submarine or poem—which will take us to them. It’s for this, partly, that I write.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  9Her girl friends, whom I had looked forward to meet, proved on the whole disappointing. There was Opal Something, and Linda Hall, and Avis Chapman, and Eva Rosen, and Mona Dahl (save one, all these names are approximations, of course). Opal was a bashful, formless, bespectacled, bepimpled creature who doted on Dolly who bullied her. With Linda Hall the school tennis champion, Dolly played singles at least twice a week: I suspect Linda was a true nymphet, but for some unknown reason she did not come—was perhaps not allowed to come—to our house; so I recall her only as a flash of natural sunshine on an indoor court. Of the rest, none had any claims to nymphetry except Eva Rosen. Avis was a plump lateral child with hairy legs, while Mona, though handsome in a coarse sensual way and only a year older than my aging mistress, had obviously long ceased to be a nymphet, if she ever had been one. Eva Rosen, a displaced little person from France, was on the other hand a good example of a not strikingly beautiful child revealing to the perspicacious amateur some of the basic elements of nymphet charm, such as a perfect pubescent figure and lingering eyes and high cheekbones. Her glossy copper hair had Lolita’s silkiness, and the features of her delicate milky-white face with pink lips and silverfish eyelashes were less foxy than those of her likes—the great clan of intra-racial redheads; nor did she sport their green uniform but wore, as I remember her, a lot of black or cherry dark—a very smart black pullover, for instance, and high-heeled black shoes, and garnet-red fingernail polish. I spoke French to her (much to Lo’s disgust). The child’s tonalities were still admirably pure, but for school words and play words she resorted to current American and then a slight Brooklyn accent would crop up in her speech, which was amusing in a little Parisian who went to a select New England school with phoney British aspirations. Unfortunately, despite “that French kid’s uncle” being “a millionaire,” Lo dropped Eva for some reason before I had had time to enjoy in my modest way her fragrant presence in the Humbert open house. The reader knows what importance I attached to having a bevy of page girls, consolation prize nymphets, around my Lolita. For a while, I endeavored to interest my senses in Mona Dahl who was a good deal around, especially during the spring term when Lo and she got so enthusiastic about dramatics. I have often wondered what secrets outrageously treacherous Dolores Haze had imparted to Mona while blurting out to me by urgent and well-paid request various really incredible details concerning an affair that Mona had had with a marine at the seaside. It was characteristic of Lo that she chose for her closest chum that elegant, cold, lascivious, experienced young female whom I once heard (misheard, Lo swore) cheerfully say in the hallway to Lo—who had remarked that her (Lo’s) sweater was of virgin wool: “The only thing about you that is, kiddo …” She had a curiously husky voice, artificially waved dull dark hair, earrings, amber-brown prominent eyes and luscious lips. Lo said teachers had remonstrated with her on her loading herself with so much costume jewelry. Her hands trembled. She was burdened with a 150 I.Q. And I also know she had a tremendous chocolate-brown mole on her womanish back which I inspected the night Lo and she had worn low-cut pastel-colored, vaporous dresses for a dance at the Butler Academy.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  My father and I had an afternoon and evening left before our return flight to New York. We rented a car and drove to Tijuana, where we bought a slightly soiled pi$nTata—a shocking-pink donkey. We walked the streets together commenting on the “local color,” making predictable remarks about the poverty of the people and the opulence of the churches. My father is a still good-looking man who seems about fifteen years younger than his sixty years, is vain about his physique and thinning hair, and walks with a springing up-and-down motion which has also become my characteristic walk. We look alike, walk alike, are both addicted to puns and wisecracks, and yet somehow can scarcely communicate. We are always slightly abashed in each other’s presence—as if we each knew a terrible secret about our relationship, but could not speak of it. What could this secret be? I remember him knocking on the wall between our bedrooms to comfort me and assuage my fear of the dark. I remember him changing my sheet when I wet my bed at age three, and making me hot milk when I was eight and had insomnia. I remember him telling me once (after I witnessed a terrifying fight between my parents) that they would stay together “for my sake…” but if there was more—a childhood seduction or a primal scene—my overanalyzed memory still does not go back that far. Sometimes the smell of a cake of soap (or some other homely substance) will suddenly bring back a long-forgotten memory from childhood. And then I will find myself wondering how many other memories are hidden from me in the recesses of my own brain; indeed my own brain will seem to be the last great terra incognita, and I will be filled with wonder at the prospect of some day discovering new worlds there. Imagine the lost continent of Atlantis and all the submerged islands of childhood right there waiting to be found. The inner space we have never adequately explored. The worlds within worlds within worlds. And the marvelous thing is that they are waiting for us. If we fail to discover them, it is only because we haven’t yet built the right vehicle—spaceship or submarine or poem—which will take us to them. It’s for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write? My writing is the submarine or spaceship which takes me to the unknown worlds within my head. And the adventure is endless and inexhaustible. If I learn to build the right vehicle, then I can discover even more territories. And each new poem is a new vehicle, designed to delve a little deeper (or fly a little higher) than the one before.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  13. An opponent of the empire [Marcellus, the Roman consul, was one of Cæsar’s most violent opponents].C A N T O V I IAfter repeatedly embracing Virgil, only because he is a Mantuan, Sordello questions him further; and on hearing who he is, after a moment’s pause, amazed and half-incredulous, falls at his feet to embrace his knees. In answer to Sordello, Virgil rehearses in words of deepest pathos the nature of his mission and the state of the souls in Limbo who practised the moral, but were never clad with the theological, virtues. In answer to Virgil’s questioning concerning the way, Sordello expounds the law of the mount which suffers no soul to ascend while the sun is below the horizon; and he offers to lead the pilgrims, ere the now approaching sunset, to a fitting place of rest, where they shall find noteworthy souls. In a little lap or dell of the mountain they find the pensive souls of kings and rulers who had neglected their higher functions for selfish ease or selfish war. Now they are surrounded by every soothing beauty of nature; but relief from the serious cares of life, which erst they sought unduly, is now an anguish to them, and their yearning goes forth to the active purgation of the seven terraces of torment above them. With the enumeration of the kings—old enemies singing in harmony, and fathers mourning over the sins of their still living sons—are mingled tributes to the worth, or gibes at the degeneracy of the reigning monarchs, and reflections on the unlikeness of sons and fathers. [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] AFTER THE GREETINGS dignified and glad had been repeated three and four times, Sordello drew him back, and said: “Who art thou?” “Ere to this mount were turned those spirits worthy to ascend to God, my bones by Octavian1 had been buried. I am Virgil; and for no other sin did I lose heaven than for not having faith”:2 thus answered then my Leader. As one who seeth suddenly a thing before him whereat he marvels, who believes, and believes not, saying: “It is, it is not”; such seemed he, and forthwith bent his brow, and humbly turned back towards my Leader, and embraced him where the inferior clasps. “O glory of the Latins,” said he, “by whom our tongue showed forth all its power, O eternal praise of the place whence I sprang, what merit or what favour showeth thee to me? If I am worthy to hear thy words, tell me if thou comest from Hell, and from what cloister.” “Through all the circles of the woeful realm,” answered he him, “came I here. A virtue from heaven moved me, and with it I come. Not for doing, but for not doing,2 have I lost the vision of the high Sun, whom thou desirest, and who too late by me was known.