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 Collected Essays (1998)

  The culture which had produced Senghor seemed, on the face of it, to have a greater coherence as regarded assumptions, tradi tions, cus toms, and beliefs than did the Western culture to which it stood in so problematical a relation. And this might very well mean that the cultur e represented by Senghor was healthier than the cult ure represented by the hall in which he spoke . But the leap to this conclusion, than which nothing would have seemed easier, was frustrated by the question of just what health is in relation to a culture. Senghor's culture, fo r ex ample, did not seem to need the lonely activity of the singular intelligence on which the cultural life-the moral life-of the West depends. And a really cohesive society, one of the at tributes, perhaps, of what is taken to be a "healthy" culture, has, generally, and, I suspect, necessarily, a much lower level of tolerance fo r the maverick, the dissenter, the man who steals the fire, than have societies in which, the common ground of belief having all but vanished, each man, in awful and brutal isolati on, is fo r himself, to flower or to per ish. Or, not impossibly, to make real and fruitful again that vanished common ground, which, as I take it, is nothing more or less than the cult ur e itself, endangered and rendered nearly inac cessible by the complexities it has, itself, inevitably created. Nothing is mo re undeniable than the fact that cultur es 152 NOB OD Y KNOW S MY NAME vanish, undergo crises; are, in any case, in a perpetual state of change and fermentation, being perpetually driven, God knows where, by fo rces within and without. And one of the results, surely, of the present tension between the society rep resented by Senghor and the society represented by the Salle Descartes was just this perceptible drop, during the last dec ade, of the Western level of tolerance. I wondered what this would mean-for Mri ca, fo r us. I wondered just what effect the concept of art expressed by Senghor would have on that renaissance he had predicted and just what transformations this concept itself would under go as it encount ered the com plexities of the century into which it was moving with such speed. The evening debate rang perpetual changes on two ques tions. These questio ns-each of which splintered, each time it was asked, into a thousand more-were, first: What is a culture?

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  One could perceive his slight polite disappointment that James was not more beautiful. The ego was smartly suited, buttoned up, and though at any moment I expected some rude eruption, a comic photographer’s surprise the split second before the flash, the most explosive thing about him was the pink of his socks. Charles was already there, glass in hand, at the end of lunch, and I introduced him to James, whose enthusiasm was precisely modulated to disguise the intimate knowledge he had of him from me. We strolled through at Charles’s pace into the studio, and I heard him saying to James: ‘So you’re the Firbank fellow, eh? I knew him, of course—though not well, not well …’ Staines let down a roll of white paper from the ceiling and had us sit in a row in front of the projector on its high table. As he turned the main lights out and began to speak I was reminded strongly of those scenes, early on in thrillers, when the agent is briefed and shown film clips of leading suspects, taken largely from the back of moving cars. ‘I’m going to show you a short piece of film which I believe will interest you all. It’s part of a whole lot of home-movie stuff I’ve just bought at Christie’s. Most of it’s too madly dull for words—you know, gay young things arsing around with no shame. I just thought it might be fun, and give me some sort of ideas for some Twenties and Thirties—er—pictures I want to make. And then in amongst it there was this fragment—quite exceptional …’ The bright white square at which we had been looking was convulsed with running black and grey, and white flashes. The first thing we could make out was a brief and static view of a lake with steep woods around it. The light in the picture was strangely bleak, and a hundred little lines ran up and down the screen. Even so there was something mysterious about that seemingly black circle of water. Remembered books suggested it was an extinct volcano. ‘Aha,’ said Charles, very smugly. The camera angle jumped to include, possibly by mistake, the bonnet of an early-looking motorcar. ‘You know where we are, Charles,’ said Staines from behind the purring projector. ‘Oh yes—Lake Nemi. Unmistakable.’ There was then a shot held unnecessarily long, of a tin sign saying ‘Genzano—Città Infiorita’. ‘I think we all know where we are now,’ Staines added patly. An old peasant in a hat and carrying a stick as tall as himself limped into view, looking troublesome. The following sequences took place presumably in the precipitous streets of Genzano. Here was the car again, drawn up outside what might have been the town’s smartest café.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He was coming to Montgomery on Sunday to preach in his own church. Montgomery is the cradle of the Confederacy, an unlucky distinction which no one in Montgomery is allowed to forget. The White House which symbolized and housed that short lived government is still standing, and "people," one of the Montgomery ministers told me, "walk around in those halls and cry." I do not doubt it, the people of Montgomery having inherited nothing less than an ocean of spilt milk. The boycott had been over for a year by the time I got there, and had been ended by a federal decree outlawing segregation in the busses. Therefore, the atmosphere in Montgomery was extraordinary. I think that I have never been in a town so aimlessly hostile, so baffled and demoralized. Whoever has a stone to fling, and flings it, is then left without any weapons; and this was (and remains) the situation of the white people in Montgomery. OTHER ESSAYS I took a bus ride, for example, solely in order to observe the situation on the busses. As I stepped into the bus, I sud denly remembered that I had neglected to ask anyone the price of a bus ride in Montgomery, and so I asked the driver. He gave me the strangest, most hostile of looks, and turned his face away. I dropped fifteen cents into the box and sat down, placing myself, delicately, just a little forward of the center of the bus. The driver had seemed to feel that my ques tion was but another Negro trick, that I had something up my sleeve, and that to answer my question in any way would be to expose himself to disaster. He could not guess what I was thinking, and he was not going to risk further personal demoralization by trying to. And this spirit was the spirit of the town. The bus pursued its course, picking up white and Negro passengers. Negroes sat where they pleased, none very far back; one large woman, carrying packages, seated herself directly behind the driver. And the whites sat there, ignoring them, in a huffY, offended silence. This silence made me think of nothing so much as the si lence which follows a really serious lovers' quarrel: the whites, beneath their cold hostility, were mystified and deeply hurt. They had been betrayed by the Negroes, not merely because the Negroes had declined to remain in their "place," but be cause the Negroes had refi.1sed to be controlled by the town's image of them. And, without this image, it seemed to me, the whites were abruptly and totally lost. The very foundations of their private and public worlds were being destroyed. I had never heard King preach, and I went on Sunday to hear him at his church. This church is a red brick structure, with a steeple, and it directly faces, on the other side of the street, a white, domed building.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  gotta take a piss.” 1 jumped up and grabbed his sleeve. “Wait, Steven, I told her some things, but not about you and me.” “That’s what you think.” He shook me off and slammed the door. I went over to the sink for a glass of water, not that I was thirsty, but in the movies they’re always offering distressed people water. “Your son’s dead, here have a glass of water.” As I lift the forest-green tumbler to my lips, I hear the sound of horse hooves pounding densely packed medieval earth, the rattling of windows, willow branches lashing against the panes. A crack opens up in the linoleum, then a golden face emerges with seven glowing green eyes arranged in the shape of a cross. I stoop down and push the middle one, it swirls and steams with molten blood and a pit opens at my feet that extends to the beginning of time and the Earth’s hellish core. The colors in the room brighten, glow, swirl, then sag and drip, a glowing blankness. I step around the pit toward the bed, suddenly naked, staring straight into another world where mirrors register monkey heads, my toenails painted blood red. I float downward onto the mattress, gently, the mattress is cold and hard, a marble slab, no dialogue but a thousand fat white candles, their flames lapping the air. Steven enters wearing nothing but his 501s, biceps inflated, he paints ancient symbols on my midriff with a red brush, cold tickle, his face more angular—bestial—than usual as he mounts me, and then I see it his giant lizardy eye, I let out a little scream Oh! His carefully manicured claws, two inches long, lumines cent green, brush my cheeks, his horns reach skyward, his long ears droop downward straight to hell, the vertical fur rows in his brows up and down up and down his huge mouthful of teeth his acres of gums, lava red, gleaming with demon cum, it leaks out all his orifices whenever he’s aroused desperate times he throws his head back, fucks me slowly and clumsily,

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Schweit zer.) They cited the hospitals built, and the schools-! was to sec some of these later, too. Every once in a while someone might be made uneasy by the color of my skin, or an expres sion on my face, or I might say something to make him un easy, or I might, arbitrarily (there was no reason to suppose that they wanted me), claim kinship with the Arabs. Then, I was told, with a generous smile, that I was different: le noir Americain est tres evolue, voyons! But the Arabs were not like me, they were not "civilized" like me. It was something of a shock to hear myself described as civilized, but the accolade thirsted for so long had, alas, been delivered too late, and I TAKE ME TO THE WA TER was fascinated by one of several inconsistencies. I have never heard a Frenchman describe the United States as civilized, not even those Frenchmen who like the States. Of course, I think the truth is that the French do not consider that the world contains any nation as civilized as France. But, leaving that aside, if so crude a nation as the United States could produce so gloriously civilized a creature as myself , how was it that the French, armed with centuries of civilized grace, had been un able to civilize the Arab? I thought that this was a very cun ning question, but I was wrong, because the answer was so simple: the Arabs did not wish to be civilized. Oh, it was not possible for an American to understand these people as the French did; after all, they had got on well together for nearly one hundred and thirty years. But they had, the Arabs, their customs, their dialects, languages, tribes, regions, another re ligion, or, perhaps, many religions-and the French were not raciste, like the Americans, they did not believe in destroying indigenous cultures. And then, too, the Arab was always hid ing something; you couldn't guess what he was thinking and couldn't trust what he was saying. And they had a different attitude toward women, they were very brutal with them, in a word they were rapists, and they stole, and they carried knives. But the French had endured this for more than a hun dred years and were willing to endure it for a hu ndred years more, in spite of the fact that Algeria was a great drain on the national pocketbook and the fact that any Algerian-due to the fact that Algeria was French, was, in fact, a French depar tement, and was damn well going to stay that way-was free to come to Paris at any time and jeopardize the economy and prowl the streets and prey on French women. In short, the record of French generosity was so exemplary that it was im possible to believe that the children could seriously be bent on revolution. Impossible for a Frenchman, perhaps, but not for me.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It’s all come horrifically at the same time. And we’re only kids ourselves,’ I huffed. James felt entitled to draw on professional language. ‘I guess if those things are building up and building up, when they erupt there will be a bit of a mess. There will be pockmarks,’ he seventeenth-centurily went on. I got him to play me some more positive music, some courtly, phlegmatic Haydn; and I turned the conversation round artificially to more general subjects. We watched a mirthless comedy on the television from beginning to end. It was only when we were in bed, and I was now dry-throated and woozy-headed from the drink, that I came back to the subject. ‘It’s the way we didn’t know about it,’ I murmured. ‘The gruesome incongruity of it.’ ‘Isn’t there a kind of blind spot,’ James said, ‘for that period just before one was born? One knows about the Second World War, one knows about Suez, I suppose, but what people were actually getting up to in those years … There’s an empty, motiveless space until one appears on the scene. What do you know about your own family anyway? They’re such secretive organisms, I can’t be doing with them.’ I felt his erection—the idiot emblem of the day—yearning against my thigh, and waited resignedly as his hands wandered down towards my own. It was a curious experience, for while he stroked he seemed instinctively to be feeling for other symptoms, exercising that slight pressure which discovers a tender kidney or a swollen gland. He was rather fastidious when he reached his objective too. I turned on my front, and he gave a little humorous sigh and tipped his forehead against mine while I told him of a thing that happened on the train. It was while I was coming to see him and had taken place just in front of me, an ordinary thing and yet calmly beyond the turmoil of my own mood, in fact wonderfully self-sufficient and entire. Among the crowd that got on at Tottenham Court Road were a black couple with a baby: they took the two places against the glass partition, so that the man and I sat—as I had done with Gabriel shortly before—knee to knee. Once he had looked at me politely as I shifted to make room for him he had no interest in me at all—and I hardly took notice of him. His wife held the impassive and very young child in her arms: despite the heat it was dressed in a quilted one-piece suit, but with the hood back. My thoughts were all elsewhere, though I saw the man, about thirty, I suppose, lean over the baby’s open flawless face, and smile down on it, out of pure pleasure and love. His fingertips moved from his own softly bearded lips and gently stroked and almost held within their span his child’s lolling wispy head.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Our Lord having retired from the multitude, and being in a place apart, was engaged in prayer. As it is said, And it came to pass, as he was alone praying. For He ordained Himself as an example of this, instructing His disciples by an easy method of teaching. For I suppose the rulers of the people ought to be superior also in good deeds, to those that are under them, ever holding converse with them in all necessary things, and treating of those things in which God delights. BEDE. Now the disciples were with the Lord, but He alone prayed to the Father, since the saints may be joined to the Lord in the bond of faith and love, but the Son alone is able to penetrate the incomprehensible secrets of the Father’s will. Every where then He prays alone, for human wishes comprehend not the counsel of God, nor can any one be a partaker with Christ of the deep things of God. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Now His engaging in prayer might perplex His disciples. For they saw Him praying like a man, Whom before they had seen performing miracles with divine power. In order then to banish all perplexity of this kind, He asks them this question, not because He did not know the reports which they had gathered from without, but that He might rid them of the opinion of the many, and instil into them the true faith. Hence it follows, And he asked them, saying, Whom say the people that I am? BEDE. Rightly does our Lord, when about to enquire into the faith of the disciples, first inquire into the opinion of the multitudes, lest their confession should appear not to be determined by their knowledge, but to be formed by the opinion of the generality, and they should be considered not to believe from experience, but like Herod to be perplexed by different reports which they heard. AUGUSTINE. (de Con. Ev. l. ii. c. 53.) Now it may raise a question, that Luke says that our Lord asked His disciples, Whom do men say that I am, at the same time that He was alone praying, and they also were with Him; whereas Mark says, that they were asked this question by our Lord on the way; but this is difficult only to him who never prayed on the way. AMBROSE. But it is no trifling opinion of the multitude which the disciples mention, when it is added, But they answering said, John the Baptist, (whom they knew to be beheaded;) but some say, Elias, (whom they thought would come,) but others say that one of the old Prophets is risen again. But to make this enquiry belongs to a different kind of wisdom from ours, for if it were enough for the Apostle Paul to know nothing but Christ Jesus, and Him crucified, what more can I desire to know than Christ? (1 Cor. 2:2.)

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AUGUSTINE. (Tract. xxxviii. s. 11) Our Lord having said, If ye believe not that I am, ye shall die in your sins; they enquire of Him, as if wishing to know in whom they are to believe, that they might not die in their sin: Then said they unto Him, Who art Thou? For when Thou saidst, If ye believe not that I am, Thou didst not add, who Thou art. But our Lord knew that these were some who would believe, and therefore after being asked, Who art Thou? that such might know what they should believe Him to be, Jesus saith unto them, The beginning, who also speak to you; not as if to say, I am the beginning, but, Believe Me to be the beginning; as is evident from the Greek, where beginning is feminine. Believe Me then to be the beginning, but ye die in your sins: for the beginning cannot be changed; it remains fixed in itself, and is the source of change to all things. (Tract. xxxix. 1, 2). But it is absurd to call the Son the beginning, and not the Father also. And yet there are not two beginnings, even as these are not two Gods. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Son; not being either the Father, or the Son. Yet Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God, one Light, one beginning. (Tract. xxxviii. 11). He adds, Who also speak to you, i. e. Who humbled Myself for your sakes, and condescended to those words. Therefore believe Me to be the beginning; because that ye may believe this, not only am I the beginning, but I also speak with you, that ye may believe that I am. For if the Beginning had remained with the Father in its original nature, and not taken upon it the form of a servant, how could men have believed in it? Would their weakly minds have taken in the spiritual Word, without the medium of sensible sound? BEDE. In some copies we find, Who also speak to you; but it is more consistent to read for (quia), not, who (qui): in which case the meaning is: Believe Me to be the beginning, for for your sakes have I condescended to these words. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. liii. 1) See here the madness of the Jews; asking after so long time, and after all His miracles and teaching, Who art Thou? What is Christ’s answer? From the beginning I speak with you; as if to say, Ye do not deserve to hear any thing from Me, much less this thing, Who I am. For ye speak always, to tempt Me. But I could, if I would, confound and punish you: I have many things to say, and to judge of you.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  I try to highlight for them how little they’ve seen, urging them to recover their curiosity and catch a glimpse behind the walls that barricade the other. In truth, we never know our partner as well as we think we do. Mitchell reminds us that even in the dullest marriages, predictability is a mirage. Our need for constancy limits how much we are willing to know the person who’s next to us. We are invested in having him or her conform to an image that is often a creation of our own imagination, based on our own set of needs. “One thing about him is that he’s never anxious. He’s like a rock. I’m so neurotic.” “He’s too much of a wimp to leave me.” “She doesn’t put up with any of my shit.” “We’re both very traditional. Even though she has a PhD, she really likes staying home with the kids.” We see what we want to see, what we can tolerate seeing, and our partner does the same. Neutralizing each other’s complexity affords us a kind of manageable otherness. We narrow down our partner, ignoring or rejecting essential parts when they threaten the established order of our coupledom. We also reduce ourselves, jettisoning large chunks of our personalities in the name of love. Yet when we peg ourselves and our partners to fixed entities, we needn’t be surprised that passion goes out the window. And I’m sorry to say that the loss is on both sides. Not only have you squeezed out the passion, but you haven’t really gained safety, either. The fragility of this manufactured equilibrium becomes obvious when one partner breaks the rules of the contrivance and insists on bringing more authentic parts of himself into the relationship. This is what happened to Charles and Rose. Married for almost four decades, they’ve had a lot of time to define one another. Charles is mercurial, a provocateur, and a playful seducer. He is a passionate man in need of a container, someone to help him channel the unbridled energies that distract him. “If it weren’t for Rose, I don’t think I would have the career and family I have today,” he says. Rose is strong, independent, and clearheaded. She possesses a kind of natural equanimity that calibrates his intemperateness. As they describe it, she is the solid; he, the fluid. The few times Rose ventured into passionate territory before meeting Charles, she found it overwhelming. It left her depleted and unhappy. What he represents for her is passion that she doesn’t have to own. What scares Rose is the loss of control and what scares Charles is that he enjoys the loss of control too much. The complementarity of their relationship allows them to flourish within a bounded space.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  There is a sense in which it can be said that my black flesh is the flesh that St. Paul wanted to have mortified. There is a sense in which it can be said that very long ago, for a complex of reasons, but among them power, the Christian personality split itself in two, split itself into dark and light, in fact, and it is now bewildered, at war with itself, is literally unable to comprehend the force of such a woman as Mahalia Jackson, who docs not sound like anyone in Canterbury Ca thedral, unable to accept the depth of sorrow, out of which a Ray Charles comes, unable to get itself in touch with itself, with its selfless totality. From my point of view, it seems to me that the flesh and the spirit arc one; it seems to me that when you mortifY the one, you have mortified the other. It would seem to me that the morality by which the Christian Church claims to live, I mean the public morality, that mo rality governing our sexual relations and the structure of the family, is terribly inadequate for what the world, and people in the world, must deal with now. One of the things that happened, it seems to me, with the rise of the Christian Church, was precisely the denial of a cer tain kind of spontaneity, a certain kind of joy, a certain kind of fr eedom, which a man can only have when he is in touch with himself, his surroundings, his women and his children. It seems to me that this shows very crucially in the nature, the WHITE RACISM OR WORLD COMMUNITY? 755 structure of our politics and in the personalities of our chil dren, who would like to learn, if I may put it this way, how to sing the blues, because the blues are not a racial creation, the blues are an historical creation produced by the confron tation precisely between the pagan, the black pagan from M rica, and the alabaster cross.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  In 1946, Bonnie South and Papaw were lovers. I’m not sure what this meant in Jackson at the time—whether they were preparing for an engagement or just passing the time together. Bonnie had little to say of Papaw besides the fact that he was “very handsome.” The only other thing Bonnie South recalled was that, at some point in 1946, Papaw cheated on Bonnie with her best friend—Mamaw. Mamaw was thirteen and Papaw sixteen, but the affair produced a pregnancy. And that pregnancy added a number of pressures that made marriage the most sensible behavior for teenagers in love.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Charles was not following me. ‘It was naughty to keep back so much—though I kept thinking you would be bound to learn about all that from other people. I felt sure our friend Bill, for instance, would spill the beans.’ ‘Bill’s a pretty careful, secretive character,’ I said, my benign and contemptuous views of him appearing to me suddenly at the same time. ‘We’ll still be the most terrific friends, won’t we? I mean, it has been worth it, even if, you know …’ ‘Of course it has.’ I didn’t want to get caught up in all this today. ‘What brought you into the Club?’ ‘Oh—a meeting. Very dull, I’m afraid. And you’ve been swimming, I imagine. Gosh how I envy you,’ he unnaturally rushed on. ‘There’s nothing like it, is there? It’s one’s real element. It was a thing one missed most frightfully inside—you know.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I must say this coffee’s quite revolting. I must get them to do something about it. Maurice you say? I’ve seen him before, of course. And now I think I’d better shuffle home. You couldn’t, my dear …?’ I gave him my arm, and we made our way slowly up to the hall. I knew that, although he came to meetings and could get the coffee changed, he valued being seen with some young thing more, as a sign that he belonged and was wanted. I felt my familiar bafflement with him, and that our meeting had not been at all as I hoped. It was so brief and profitless. ‘You won’t kind of believe me when I say this,’ he began. ‘But old Ronnie Staines has found something most frightfully interesting. Not what you’re thinking; indeed quite the opposite, by all accounts. I’m going to go and see it tomorrow after lunch. Ronnie said actually he wondered if you would come. And I think—I daren’t tell you more—that you should bring that friend of yours you’ve told me about, the Prancing Nigger buff, you know.’ ‘It’s an invitation I could normally resist—but Ronnie has promised me some pictures, which I must go soon to collect. I suppose I could do it all at once.’ It was typical of my friendship with Charles that I told him nothing about what really mattered to me while he had laid himself bare, systematically, decade by decade. ‘I was going to mention it to you: my friend James, the Firbank buff, has got into a bit of trouble with the law, picked up by a policeman who just happens to be one of Ronald’s porno models. I don’t know, I thought it might be useful to get hold of the photos.’ Charles absorbed this information with the narrowed eyes and thoughtful nod of someone beyond surprise at human duplicity; but he said nothing. ‘So I will come. But honestly Charles, I’m not on for any more bellboys-get-it-up-the-bum stuff. I’ve had it up to here with all that lately. If not to here.’

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  The doctor’s office has placed her on hold. She doesn’t look happy. I put a CD in the player, turned low to not interfere with her call. The hole in the CD would fit over her nipple, just snug enough to stay on, like a piece of jewelry. The CD itself would cover her areola, but only barely. I could get one of the two-CD sets out; then they’d match. The White Album might look nice. She thuds behind me and I spin around. She has dropped the phone, gone to her hands and knees, breasts spreading out where they meet the floor like beanbags. Help me, she says. Get them back on the phone. I can’t stand up anymore. I move to the phone, stand in front of it so she can’t see me. With my finger I hang up silently. I speak one-half of an imag inary conversation. The doctor is out. I make it plausible. There is no immediate danger. They will send an ambulance as soon as they can, since the condition is obviously not urgent. I put the receiver down, turn around and gasp. What I am looking at is a fair approximation of an earthball with a person lying on top of it. Her feet do not touch the ground. She is floating atop her breasts, arms and feet hanging off, waving ineffectively. I walk around to see her face. She is shaking her head dully, eyes wide and mouth open, in com plete disbelief. She recovers when I work my fingers around her waist, pressing in against ballooned tissue to unfasten her jeans. Hey, she says, what’s going on back there? I’m taking off your pants, I say. I think you’ll be more com fortable. When is the ambulance coming? she asks, and I realize I have probably wasted a good made-up conversation.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Not a few astounded Americans, unable to call their em bassy, spent the night in jail, and steady offenders were escorted to the border. After the first street riot, or its after math, one witnessed in Paris, one took a new attitude toward the Paris paving stones, and toward the cafe tables and chairs, and toward the Parisians, indeed, who showed no signs, at such moments, of being among the earth's most cerebral or civilized people. Paris hotels had never heard of central heat ing or hot baths or showers or clean towels and sheets or ham and eggs; their attitude toward electricity was demonic-once one had seen what they thought of as wiring one wondered why the city had not, long ago, vanished in flame; and it soon became clear that Paris hospitals had never heard of Pasteur. Once, in short, one found oneself divested of all the things that one had fled from, one wondered how people, meaning, above all, oneself, could possibly do without them. And yet one did, of course, and in the beginning, and spo radically, thereafter, found these privations a subject for mirth. One soon ceased expecting to be warm in one's hotel room, and read and worked in the cafes. The French, at least insofar as student hotels are concerned, do not appear to understand the idea of a social visit. They expect one's callers to be vastly more intimate, if not utilitarian, than that, and much prefer that they register and spend the night. This aspect of Parisian life would seem vastly to simplify matters, but this, alas, is not the case. It merely makes it all but impossible to invite anyone to your hotel room. Americans do not cease to be Puritans when they have crossed the ocean; French girls, on the other hand, contrary to legend, tend, preponderantly, to be the marrying kind; thus, it was not long before we brave voyagers rather felt that we had been turned loose in a fair in which there was not a damn thing we could buy, and still less that we could sell. And I think that when we began to be frightened in Paris, to feel baffled and betrayed, it was because we had failed, after all, somehow, and once again, to make the longed-for, mag ical human contact. It was on this connection with another human being that we had felt that our lives and our work depended. It had failed at home. We had thought we knew 666 OTHER ESSAYS why. Everyone at home was too dry and too frightened, mer cilessly pinned beneath the thumb of the Puritan God.

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

  I was in a poor rural county in Alabama after another trip to pull records in a death penalty case when I was invited to speak at a small African American church. Only about two dozen people showed up. One of the community leaders introduced me, and I went to the front of the church and began my talk about the death penalty, increasing incarceration rates, abuse of power within prisons, discriminatory law enforcement, and the need for reform. At one point, I decided to talk about my encounter with the police in Atlanta, and I realized that I was getting a bit emotional. My voice got shaky, and I had to rein myself in to finish my remarks. During the talk, I noticed an older black man in a wheelchair who had come in just before the program started. He was in his seventies and was wearing an old brown suit. His gray hair was cut short with unruly tufts here and there. He looked at me intensely throughout my presentation but showed no emotion or reaction during most of the talk. His focused stare was unnerving. A young boy who was about twelve had wheeled him into the church, probably his grandson or a relative. I noticed that the man occasionally directed the boy to fetch things for him. He would wordlessly nod his head, and the boy seemed to know that the man wanted a fan or a hymnal. After I finished speaking, the group sang a hymn to end the session. The older man didn’t sing but simply closed his eyes and sat back in his chair. After the program, people came up to me; most folks were very kind and expressed appreciation for my having taken the time to come and talk to them. Several young black boys walked up to shake my hand. I was pleased that people seemed to value the information I shared. The man in the wheelchair was waiting in the back of the church. He was still staring at me. When everyone else had left, he nodded to the young boy, who quickly wheeled him up to me. The man’s expression never changed as he approached me. He stopped in front of me, leaned forward in his wheelchair, and said forcefully, “Do you know what you’re doing?” He looked very serious, and he wasn’t smiling. His question threw me. I couldn’t tell what he was really asking or whether he was being hostile. I didn’t know what to say. He then wagged his finger at me, and asked again. “Do you know what you’re doing?” I tried to smile to defuse the situation but I was completely baffled. “I think so….” He cut me off and said loudly, “I’ll tell you what you’re doing. You’re beating the drum for justice!” He had an impassioned look on his face. He said it again emphatically, “You’ve got to beat the drum for justice.”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Aldo looked modestly down at this, giving the impression that some vast show-business career had sprung from that ordinary but fateful encounter. ‘Do you like the art?’ he appealed. ‘Um, some of them are rather striking, aren’t they? I haven’t really had a chance to see … the ones upstairs …’—he craned round—‘some of them are rather strong meat, perhaps , for me!’ Aldo was rather delighted to be given a cue and produced a remark of the kind that pass for jokes among people who can barely speak the same language: ‘Ah yes, you see, I am a butcher.’ Gavin smiled and I explained that Staines had found him while doing some studies of working people in Smithfield. ‘I was carrying half a cow,’ said Aldo, ‘all covered in blood. Ronnie said I looked like bacon.’ There were a few seconds of puzzlement before I worked it out: ‘I expect he meant that you looked like a Bacon.’ But it was going to take too much explaining. Aldo continued pleasantly with an account of portering opportunities in offal and the many under-the-counter benefits of his trade (some nice heart or brains one day, the next perhaps some good fresh liver). I found my eyes resting with momentary respect on the chalked-up menu of alfalfa-sprout salad, chickpea casserole, lentil and parsnip pie … ‘ Sorry , William, Gavin Croft-Parker, what an honour, Aldo poppet …’—Staines was among us, clutching at hands, emphatically friendly and humble on his great night. ‘Do forgive me. There was that dullest of men from the whatsit, Bright City Lights, whatever it’s called. Apparently everyone’s opinion is simply made by consulting his organ, so you have to be dreamily dreamily compliant and answer all his dreary dreary questions. So ignorant,’ Staines whispered, ‘he’d no idea what a pyx was; and as for a scapular … he said, “Do you mean the collarbone?” I said “I don’t—and anyway it isn’t the collarbone, it’s the shoulderblade.” Clearly he was never a Catholic, and then I’ve ticked him off and he’ll say something vile in his article just because I’ve made him feel small.’ He took a swig from his glass. ‘Still, I suppose it’ll only be half an inch under the “Gay Listings” ’ (a prophecy with which I was bound to agree). ‘I must have a look upstairs,’ said Gavin, weaving away from us, and I nodded to him, realising he was going altogether. When I turned back Staines was negligently fondling Aldo’s muscly shoulder and gazing distractedly around the crowded room.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was a false impression, as I found when my stop came and, slipping the book into my jacket pocket and taking up my bag, I went out onto a busy platform and then into a crowded modern high street with mothers shopping, babies in push-chairs blocking the way, traffic lights, delivery vans, the alarming bleep of pedestrian crossings. It was like an anonymous, exemplary street, with a range of nameable activities, drawn to teach vocabulary in a foreign language. I was amazed to think it was in the city where I lived, and consulted my A-Z surreptitiously so as not to set off with faked familiarity in the wrong direction. The culture shock was compounded as a single-decker bus approached showing the destination ‘Victoria and Albert Docks’. Victoria and Albert Docks! To the people here the V and A was not, as it was in the slippered west, a vast terracotta-encrusted edifice, whose echoing interiors held ancient tapestries, miniatures of people copulating, dusty baroque sculpture and sequences of dead and spotlit rooms taken wholesale from the houses of the past. How different my childhood Sunday afternoons would have been if, instead of showing me the Raphael Cartoons (which had killed Raphael for me ever since), my father had sent me to the docks, to talk with stevedores and have them tell me, with much pumping and flexing, the stories of their tattoos. I soon saw where I was going, three squat towers which rose above the rooftops of the street: they were some distance away and the shops had turned to curtained terraces by the time I branched off. At the end of a short side-street a narrow ginnel with concrete bollards led into the surprisingly wide area in which the blocks of flats stood. I wondered why they had been forced up to twenty storeys or so when they could easily have spread across the empty ground which they now overshadowed, where the streets which they replaced must once have run. With surreal bookishness the three towers had been named Casterbridge, Sandbourne and Melchester. To get to Sandbourne I wandered across the worn-out grass on a natural path eroded by feet and children’s bikes. In the odorous stillness of the day I thought of the tracks that threaded Egdon Heath, and of benign, elderly Sandbourne, with its chines and sheltered beach-huts. Away to the left a group of kids were skateboarding up the side of a concrete bunker. I somehow expected them to shout obscenities, and was glad I had come ordinarily dressed, in a sports shirt, an old linen jacket, jeans and daps. The buildings, prefabricated units slotted and pinned together, showed a systematic disregard for comfort and relief, for anything the eye or heart might fix on as homely or decent.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  We never considered that we’d be lucky to land a job at Armco; we took Armco for granted. Many kids seem to feel that way today. A few years ago I spoke with Jennifer McGuffey, a Middletown High School teacher who works with at-risk youth. “A lot of students just don’t understand what’s out there,” she told me, shaking her head. “You have the kids who plan on being baseball players but don’t even play on the high school team because the coach is mean to them. Then you have those who aren’t doing very well in school, and when you try to talk to them about what they’re going to do, they talk about AK. ‘Oh, I can get a job at AK. My uncle works there.’ It’s like they can’t make the connection between the situation in this town and the lack of jobs at AK.” My initial reaction was: How could these kids not understand what the world was like? Didn’t they notice their town changing before their very eyes? But then I realized: We didn’t, so why would they? For my grandparents, Armco was an economic savior—the engine that brought them from the hills of Kentucky into America’s middle class. My grandfather loved the company and knew every make and model of car built from Armco steel. Even after most American car companies transitioned away from steel-bodied cars, Papaw would stop at used-car dealerships whenever he saw an old Ford or Chevy. “Armco made this steel,” he’d tell me. It was one of the few times that he ever betrayed a sense of genuine pride. Despite that pride, he had no interest in my working there: “Your generation will make its living with their minds, not their hands,” he once told me. The only acceptable career at Armco was as an engineer, not as a laborer in the weld shop. A lot of other Middletown parents and grandparents must have felt similarly: To them, the American Dream required forward momentum. Manual labor was honorable work, but it was their generation’s work—we had to do something different. To move up was to move on. That required going to college. And yet there was no sense that failing to achieve higher education would bring shame or any other consequences. The message wasn’t explicit; teachers didn’t tell us that we were too stupid or poor to make it. Nevertheless, it was all around us, like the air we breathed: No one in our families had gone to college; older friends and siblings were perfectly content to stay in Middletown, regardless of their career prospects; we knew no one at a prestigious out-of-state school; and everyone knew at least one young adult who was underemployed or didn’t have a job at all. In Middletown, 20 percent of the public high school’s entering freshmen won’t make it to graduation. Most won’t graduate from college. Virtually no one will go to college out of state.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I had met the whole flock of them little by little, including Sister Antolina who wore a truss and who apparently was the high priestess of the cult of onanism. They had all had a crush on Sister Antolina at one time or another. And Arline with the chocolate eclair mug wasn’t the first of the little group to go to the insane ayslum. I don’t say it was masturbation that drove them there but certainly the atmosphere of the convent had something to do with it. They were all spoiled in the egg. Before the afternoon was over my old friend MacGregor walked in. He arrived looking glum as usual and complaining about the advent of old age, though he was hardly past thirty. When I told him about Arline he seemed to liven up a bit. He said he always knew there was something wrong with her. Why? Because when he tried to force her one night she began to weep hysterically. It wasn’t the weeping as much as what she said. She said she had sinned against the Holy Ghost and for that she would have to lead a life of continence. Recalling the incident he began to laugh in his mirthless way. “I said to her—well you don’t need to do it if you don’t want . . . just hold it in your hand. Jesus, when I said that I thought she’d go clean off her nut. She said I was trying to soil her innocence—that’s the way she put it. And at the same time she took it in her hand and she squeezed it so hard I damned near fainted. Weeping all the while, too. And still harping on the Holy Ghost and her ‘innocence,’ I remembered what you told me once and so I gave her a sound slap in the jaw. It worked like magic. She quieted down after a bit, enough to let me slip it in, and then the real fun commenced. Listen, did you ever fuck a crazy woman? It’s something to experience. From the instant I got it in she started talking a blue streak. I can’t describe it to you exactly, but it was almost as though she didn’t know I was fucking her. Listen, I don’t know whether you’ve ever had a woman eat an apple while you were doing it . . . well, you can imagine how that affects you. This one was a thousand times worse. It got on my nerves so that I began to think I was a little queer myself. . . . And now here’s something you’ll hardly believe, but I’m telling you the truth. You know what she did when we got through? She put her arms around me and she thanked me. . . . Wait, that isn’t all. Then she got out of bed and she knelt down and offered up a prayer for my soul. Jesus, I remember that so well.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Every one is so utterly, confoundedly not himself that you become automatically the personification of the whole human race, shaking hands with a thousand human hands, cackling with a thousand different human tongues, cursing, applauding, whistling, crooning, soliloquizing, orating, gesticulating, urinating, fecundating, wheedling, cajoling, whimpering, bartering, pimping, caterwauling, and so on and so forth. You are all the men who ever lived up to Moses, and beyond that you are a woman buying a hat, or a bird cage, or just a mouse trap. You can lie in wait in a show window, like a fourteen-carat gold ring, or you can climb the side of a building like a human fly, but nothing will stop the procession, not even umbrellas flying at lightning speed, nor double-decked walruses marching calmly to the oyster banks. Broadway, such as I see it now and have seen it for twenty-five years, is a ramp that was conceived by St. Thomas Aquinas while he was yet in the womb. It was meant originally to be used only by snakes and lizards, by the horned toad and the red heron, but when the great Spanish Armada was sunk the human kind wriggled out of the ketch and slopped over, creating by a sort of foul, ignominious squirm and wiggle the cuntlike cleft that runs from the Battery south to the golf links north through the dead and wormy center of Manhattan Island. From Times Square to Fiftieth Street all that St. Thomas Aquinas forgot to include in his magnum opus is here included, which is to say, among other things, hamburger sandwiches, collar buttons, poodle dogs, slot machines, gray bowlers, typewriter ribbons, orange sticks, free toilets, sanitary napkins, mint jujubes, billiard balls, chopped onions, crinkled doilies, manholes, chewing gum, sidecars and sourballs, cellophane, cord tires, magnetos, horse liniment, cough drops, feenamint, and that feline opacity of the hysterically endowed eunuch who marches to the soda fountain with a sawed-off shotgun between his legs.