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 Untrue (2018)

  When she first arrived at her Himba field site in Namibia in 2009, Scelza began a survey of the mothers she intended to interview, gathering their marital and reproductive histories. “Who’s your husband? Is he your first husband? How many kids do you have?”—the basics every anthropologist asks of her subjects in the field in order to get an accurate demographic portrait of the population. But Scelza quickly found herself having an experience not unlike Kim Hill’s with the Aché, many of whom told him, as he diligently worked on kinship charts, that they had more than one father. Early in the interview and data collection process, a woman informed Scelza, “This child is from my husband, and these two children are omoka.” Confused, Scelza asked her Himba translator what the word meant. It meant “to go to the far place to get water,” he explained. Seeing the anthropologist’s confusion, the translator elaborated that “going to the far place to get water” might be a way of creating cover, so to speak, when heading off to a tryst. Omoka child means a child “from the far place we go to get water”—a child a married woman conceives during an affair, or one born out of wedlock. The women knew whether they were having omoka children by counting back from the day of their last menstrual period and figuring out whom they’d had sex with and when. Scelza had read about polygyny among the Himba, and that the women had lovers just like the men did. But this term was something new. She continued to press her translator, who insisted that, yes, the term was in common usage since, after all, many married women had children by men other than their husbands. And sure, he told her, go ahead and ask the Himba anything you want about these arrangements and practices. Married men and women alike will speak to you openly about their lovers and who fathered which child, he assured her. Scelza told me that at first she suspected she might be misunderstanding the meaning of the word omoka and all it suggested. But as she continued asking women about their marital and reproductive histories, many of them repeated the term omoka, confirming that the practice was far from uncommon. A married Himba woman who is pregnant, in other words, is likely to have become so by a man other than the one she is married to. And a married woman with a child may well have had it by a man other than her husband. And nobody seems to think much of it.

• From Untrue (2018)

  And whereas the rest of us may view love as water in a well, and feel that there comes a point where we scrape the bottom of the well and there is nothing left—call this a “scarcity model” of love and desire—the polyamorous believe in what they call a “bounty model.” As polyamory activist and educator Mischa Lin asked me, would we say of our children “One has to go. There isn’t enough room in my heart for two kids”? When we make a new friend, do we send the others packing with the explanation “Sorry, I only have enough energy and bandwidth for one”? We do not. And this is evidence enough for poly practitioners that love, lust, and feelings of connection are nearly endlessly plentiful, not finite, and can and do grow expansively, even exponentially, if we let them. Kaupp was saying that when someone calls him and says, “We’re poly. Can you help us?” he responds, “Sure. Why don’t you all come in?” Sometimes, he noted, the couch in his office was very crowded. I wrote on my laptop, in all caps, “BRAVE OR CRAZY?” I meant the people themselves, and Kaupp. When I returned to the center after a break, the attendees were several minutes into watching a video of a therapy session Kaupp had done a year or so earlier with a throuple. The man, perhaps in his early forties, had dark hair and sat on a sofa between a wiry brunette and a rounded, sad-looking blonde. My immediate impression was that the woman with dark hair was on the outside in a way that made me feel almost despondent on her behalf. As the man and the blonde woman held hands and stared into each other’s eyes, the dark-haired woman said things like “I want us to be rooted and sustainable. I want to build our bond, and I want to keep opening.” The man and the blonde continued to gaze at each other and seemed to me to almost be doing a pair-bonded eye roll as the brunette went on. The brunette placed her hand on the man’s shoulder, and he turned toward her briefly. I wanted to take a swipe at him as he said, “I don’t know what the hell is going on.” Kaupp asked the blonde woman how she was feeling. “I’m afraid of getting pushed out again,” she said. “I’m confused about what you both need and scared about the future. I don’t know what the boundaries are and what we want this to look like.”

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

  Both Augustine and his Pelagian opponents reworked immemorial assumptions about the body in the service of radical ideas; their dispute unfolded within an intellectual vanguard vying for the helm of a successful revolution, not unlike that between Trotsky and Stalin; this too was a struggle between a purist party and a more cunning faction. The Augustinian coup, which saw the demise of the naive psychology of early Christianity, was just one of the two breaking points for absolute free will in late antiquity. The other, which was to have greater purchase in the Greek-speaking east, was no less driven by the expansion of the church. The mainstreaming of the religion brought the Christian leadership face-to-face with the blunt reality of sexual coercion. Given the centrality of sexual exploitation in the Roman Empire, what is notable is that the early church maintained a deafening silence on the problem of sexual coercion in the centuries after the Pauline mission. Clement of Alexandria was the first to notice the “miserable creatures” sold into the flesh trade, and Lactantius evinced an empty sympathy for women forced into the brothel. The truth is that vulnerable men and women, boys and girls, probably had shown up at the doorsteps of Christian house-churches long before the problem enters our field of vision. It has been provocatively asked, given the presumptive sexual abuse of slaves, what their status was in a religious community with a deeply ritual sense of purity and pollution; had not Paul unambiguously counseled that the fornicator be cast from the body of the church? What about those who were fornicators by force? Ingenious answers have been devised, but the glaring fact is precisely that we do not know. As a persecuted, minority sect struggling to survive in a hostile environment, the church managed to avoid definitive answers to these questions for over three centuries. Over the fourth century, though, against the backdrop of Christian triumph, amid the Christianization of society, the problem of systemic sexual exploitation became increasingly difficult to avoid. The missionary success of the church imperiled the fragile silence. The pastoral wing of the church was forced to confront the social mechanics of sexuality in the Mediterranean. In the golden age of Christian free will, bishops came to realize that their gospel of freedom rang hollow in the face of the complex social realities of sexuality.72

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I learned not to wait for my victim to die, but to eat into him while he was talking to me. Often when I walked away from an unfinished meal I discovered that it was nothing more than an old friend minus an arm or a leg. I sometimes left him standing there—a trunk full of stinking intestines. Being of the city, of the only city in the world and no place like Broadway anywhere, I used to walk up and down staring at the floodlit hams and other delicacies. I was a schizerino from the sole of my boots to the tips of my hair. I lived exclusively in the gerundive, which I understood only in Latin. Long before I had read of her in the Black Book I was cohabiting with Hilda, the giant cauliflower of my dreams. We traversed all the morganatic diseases together and a few which were ex cathedra . We dwelt in the carcass of the instincts and were nourished by ganglionic memories. There was never a universe, but millions and billions of universes, all of them put together no bigger than a pinhead. It was a vegetal sleep in the wilderness of the mind. It was the past, which alone comprises eternity. Amidst the fauna and flora of my dreams I would hear long distance calling. Messages were dropped on my table by the deformed and the epileptic. Hans Castorp would call sometimes and together we would commit innocent crimes. Or, if it were a bright freezing day, I would do a turn in the velodrome with my Presto bike from Chemnitz, Bohemia.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  But why? To what end? Whither? Whence? I would set the alarm clock in order to be up and about at a certain hour, but why up and about? Why get up at all? With that little trowel in my hand I was working like a galley slave and not the slightest hope of reward involved. Were I to continue straight on I would dig the deepest hole any man had ever dug. On the other hand, if I had truly wanted to get to the other side of the earth, wouldn’t it have been much simpler to throw away the trowel and just board an airplane for China? But the body follows after the mind. The simplest thing for the body is not always easy for the mind. And when it gets particularly difficult and embarrassing is that moment when the two start going in opposite directions. Laboring with the trowel was bliss: it left the mind completely free and yet there was never the slightest danger of the two being separated. If the she-animal suddenly began groaning with pleasure, if the she-animal suddenly began to throw a pleasurable conniption fit, the jaws moving like old shoelaces, the chest wheezing and the ribs creaking, if the she-bugger suddenly started to fall apart on the floor, to the collapse of joy and over-exasperation, just at the moment, not a second this side or that, the promised tableland would heave in sight like a ship coming up out of a fog and there would be nothing to do but plant the stars and stripes on it and claim it in the name of Uncle Sam and all that’s holy. These misadventures happened so frequently that it was impossible not to believe in the reality of a realm which was called Fuck, because that was the only name which might be given to it, and yet it was more than fuck and by fucking one only began to approach it. Everybody had at one time or another planted the flag in this territory, and yet nobody was able to lay claim to it permanently. It disappeared overnight—sometimes in the twinkling of an eye. It was No Man’s Land and it stank with the litter of invisible deaths. If a truce were declared you met in this terrain and shook hands or swapped tobacco. But the truces never lasted very long. The only thing that seemed to have permanency was the “zone between” idea. Here the bullets flew and the corpses piled up; then it would rain and finally there would be nothing left but a stench. This is all a figurative way of speaking about what is unmentionable. What is unmentionable is pure fuck and pure cunt: it must be mentioned only in de luxe editions, otherwise the world will fall apart. What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.

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

  The apologists were Christians speaking in the vernacular of Greek philosophy. None of them was quite so striking, or as successful, as Clement. More than any other Christian of the age, he belongs alongside his learned polytheistic contemporaries. He was a figure of Mediterranean horizons, born perhaps in Greece, passing time in Italy, but settling in the polyglot metropolis of Alexandria. He was thus a contemporary, and neighbor, of Achilles Tatius. Like so many of his competitors, Clement wore his erudition heavily: his work quotes no fewer than 348 different classical authors and cites Plato some six hundred times. Clement has fully absorbed the eclectic Hellenic nostalgia that was characteristic of his age, mainly to reject it. He had little patience for the “great throng” of “accursed sophists” who loomed so large in the civic culture of the period, or for their “useless rivers of words, with scarcely a drop of sense.” The scriptures, he believed, counseled the Christian “to use the wisdom of the world but not to abide in it.” Clement would offer a guide to the Christian life that was not afraid to affirm the “doctrine of the Greeks as necessary, at the right moments.”41 Clement’s ostentatious mobilization of Greek paideia for a Christian purpose has occasioned endless debate over how successfully he has resisted the seductions of Hellenic thought. Clement himself had no doubt that he was passing on, untainted, “the true tradition of blessed teaching” handed down from the apostles to his teachers. Clement quotes the scriptures more than five thousand times, and he is one of the first known Christians to have produced commentaries on the sacred writings. Yet the prevailing view is that Clement’s work bears the stamp of his secular erudition. The problem matters greatly for the history of sexuality, for no Christian before him has left such an extensive and minutely detailed record of his attitudes toward the proper use of the body. In Clement’s writings, Stoic, Platonic, and Pythagorean language mingles with Christian tradition. The flip side of this coin is Clement’s place in the Christian tradition, for Clement is perched at a crucial transition point in early Christianity. Some have seen Clement as the faded voice of a lost cause, others as a portent of gathering ecclesiastical powers eager to meddle in the bedroom. The problem of how to situate Clement is the problem of how to define the essence and trajectory of early Christian sexual morality altogether.42

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “Yeah, I guess.” Connie pulled herself out of the mattress, readjusted her weight and sank in at another angle. “It’s just…the whole conversation was a vivid reminder of what it was like for me back then. Because of the thing with Franklin too. I don’t remember if I ever told you about him, but just before the thing with Alice happened, he made this monstrous come-on to me, saying how much he loved me, going on and on about how beautiful and special I was, literally trying to drag me onto his mattress—it was bewildering, and I didn’t quite trust it, and as it turned out, I was right. After a week of this he suddenly disappeared, and the next time I spoke to him, like two weeks later, he told me he was getting married to somebody named Emily, which he did.” “Another fine human being.” “But the thing about Franklin was that he had been a friend of mine up to that point. He virtually got me published in New York magazine. That’s why it felt so awful. It was as if he and Alice had simultaneously decided—” Deana left her carrots and, putting her fingers on Connie’s lips, pitched the two of them into the center of the mattress. “God, you must be really depressed. I haven’t heard you talk like this for ages.” She stroked Connie’s hair and smoothed her eyebrows. The mattress rasped and squeaked as they curled against each other like kittens in a shoe box. — “Franklin invited me to a party where Alice will be. I don’t know what to do.” “Are you still thinking about that?” They had just finished their take-out Chinese meal. Small white containers ranged over the table with fork handles protruding erectly from their centers; little balls of hardening rice trailed from container to plate; the cats circled beneath them with stiff, ardent steps. Deana was still lazily eating her spareribs and drinking her Vita-C. “Connie, if this woman is such a bad memory, why don’t you just forget it? Why dwell on her? She isn’t in your life anymore.” Connie looked at the bright, cold flower of broccoli splayed prettily on the edge of her plate. “The thing is, Alice and I had a good time together. We’d go out to the movies, and then go for coffee and talk about the movie for hours, analyzing every character and gesture and the use of music and so on. I can remember when she ordered an anchovy sandwich and one of those sweet almond drinks and said, ‘Whenever I’m with you I feel like eating stuff that’s really fun and really bad for me.’ ” “Hmpf,” said Deana. “And then there was the time that she and Roger paid for my airfare so I could visit them at their summer cottage in Pennsylvania.” “So why don’t you go to Weston’s party and see her?”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Perhaps in reading this, one has still the impression of chaos but this is written from a live center and what is chaotic is merely peripheral, the tangential shreds, as it were, of a world which no longer concerns me. Only a few months ago I was standing in the streets of New York looking about me as years ago I had looked about me; again I found myself studying the architecture, studying the minute details which only the dislocated eye takes in. But this time it was like coming down from Mars. What race of men is this, I asked myself. What does it mean? And there was no remembrance of suffering or of the life that was snuffed out in the gutter, only that I was looking upon a strange and incomprehensible world, a world so removed from me that I had the sensation of belonging to another planet. From the top of the Empire State Building I looked down one night upon the city which I knew from below: there they were, in true perspective, the human ants with whom I had crawled, the human lice with whom I had struggled. They were moving along at a snail’s pace, each one doubtless fulfilling his microcosmic destiny. In their fruitless desperation they had reared this colossal edifice which was their pride and boast. And from the topmost ceiling of this colossal edifice they had suspended a string of cages in which the imprisoned canaries warbled their senseless warble. At the very summit of their ambition there were these little spots of beings warbling away for dear life. In a hundred years, I thought to myself, perhaps they would be caging live human beings, gay, demented ones, who would sing about the world to come. Perhaps they would breed a race of warblers who would warble while the others worked. Perhaps in every cage there would be a poet or a musician so that life below might flow on unimpeded, one with the stone, one with the forest, a rippling creaking chaos of null and void. In a thousand years they might all be demented, workers and poets alike, and everything fall back to ruin as has happened again and again. Another thousand years, or five thousand, or ten thousand, exactly where I am standing now to survey the scene, a little boy may open a book in a tongue as yet unheard of and about this life now passing, a life which the man who wrote the book never experienced, a life with deducted form and rhythm, with beginning and end, and the boy on closing the book will think to himself what a great race the Americans were, what a marvelous life there had once been on this continent which he is now inhabiting. But no race to come, except perhaps the race of blind poets, will ever be able to imagine the seething chaos out of which this future history was composed. Chaos! A howling chaos!

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  ‘Please make Mac a better Christian,’ she said. And me lying there with a limp cock listening to her. I didn’t know whether I was dreaming or what. ‘Please make Mac a better Christian!’ Can you beat that?” “What are you doing tonight?” he added cheerfully. “Nothing special,” I said. “Then come along with me. I’ve got a gal I want you to meet. . . . Paula . I picked her up at the Roseland a few nights ago. She’s not crazy—she’s just a nymphomaniac. I want to see you dance with her. It’ll be a treat . . . just to watch you. Listen, if you don’t shoot off in your pants when she starts wiggling, well then I’m a son of a bitch. Come on, close the joint. What’s the use of farting around in this place?” There was a lot of time to kill before going to the Roseland so we went to a little hole in the wall over near Seventh Avenue. Before the war it was a French joint; now it was a speakeasy run by a couple of wops. There was a tiny bar near the door and in the back a little room with a sawdust floor and a slot machine for music. The idea was that we were to have a couple of drinks and then eat. That was the idea . Knowing him as I did, however, I wasn’t at all sure that we would be going to the Roseland together. If a woman should come along who pleased his fancy—and for that she didn’t have to be either beautiful or sound of wind and limb—I knew he’d leave me in the lurch and beat it. The only thing that concerned me, when I was with him, was to make sure in advance that he had enough money to pay for the drinks we ordered. And, of course, never let him out of my sight until the drinks were paid for. The first drink or two always plunged him into reminiscence. Reminiscences of cunt to be sure. His reminiscences were reminiscent of a story he had told me once and which made an indelible impression upon me. It was about a Scotchman on his deathbed. Just as he was about to pass away his wife, seeing him struggling to say something, bends over him tenderly and says—“What is it, Jock, what is it ye’re trying to say?” And Jock, with a last effort, raises himself wearily and says: “Just cunt . . . cunt . . . cunt.” That was always the opening theme, and the ending theme, with MacGregor. It was his way of saying—futility . The leitmotif was disease, because between fucks, as it were, he worried his head off, or rather he worried the head off his cock.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  When he arrived in the morning Hymie first sharpened his pencils; he did this religiously no matter how many calls were coming in, because, as he explained to me later, if he didn’t sharpen the pencils first thing off the bat they would never get sharpened. The next thing was to take a glance out the window and see what the weather was like. Then, with a freshly sharpened pencil he made a little box at the head of the slate which he kept beside him and in it he gave the weather report. This, he also informed me, often turned out to be a useful alibi. If the snow were a foot thick or the ground covered with sleet, even the devil himself might be excused for not shuffling the waybills around more speedily, and the employment manager might also be excused for not filling up the holes on such days, no? But why he didn’t take a crap first instead of plugging in on the switchboard soon as his pencils were sharpened was a mystery to me. That too he explained to me later. Anyway, the day always broke with confusion, complaints, constipation and vacancies. It also began with loud smelly farts, with bad breaths, with ragged nerves, with epilepsy, with meningitis, with low wages, with back pay that was overdue, with worn-out shoes, with corns and bunions, with flat feet and broken arches, with pocketbooks missing and fountain pens lost or stolen, with telegrams floating in the sewer, with threats from the vice-president and advice from the managers, with wrangles and disputes, with cloudbursts and broken telegraph wires, with new methods of efficiency and old ones that had been discarded, with hope for better times and a prayer for the bonus which never came. The new messengers were going over the top and getting machine-gunned; the old ones were digging in deeper and deeper, like rats in a cheese. Nobody was satisfied, especially not the public. It took ten minutes to reach San Francisco over the wire, but it might take a year to get the message to the man whom it was intended for—or it might never reach him. The Y. M. C. A., eager to improve the morale of working boys everywhere in America, was holding meetings at noon hour and wouldn’t I like to send a few spruce-looking boys to hear William Carnegie Asterbilt Junior give a five-minute talk on service. Mr. Mallory of the Welfare League would like to know if I could spare a few minutes some time to tell me about the model prisoners who were on parole and who would be glad to serve in any capacity, even as messengers. Mrs. Guggenhoffer of the Jewish Charities would be very grateful if I would aid her in maintaining some broken-down homes which had broken down because everybody was either infirm, crippled or disabled in the family. Mr.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I looked at the screen and I realized: Teddy was dark. I am light; I have olive skin. But the camera can’t expose for light and dark at the same time. So when you put me on a black-and-white screen next to a black person, the camera doesn’t know what to do. If the camera has to pick, it picks me as white. My color gets blown out. In this video, there was a black person and a white person. But still: It was me. The picture wasn’t great, and my facial features were a bit blurry, but if you looked closely: It was me. I was Teddy’s best friend. I was Teddy’s only friend. I was the single most likely accomplice. You had to at least suspect that it was me. They didn’t. They grilled me for a good ten minutes, but only because they were so sure that I had to know who this white kid was. “Trevor, you’re Teddy’s best friend. Tell us the truth. Who is this kid?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t recognize him at all?” “No.” “Teddy never mentioned him to you?” “Never.” At a certain point Mrs. Vorster just started running through a list of all the white kids she thought it could be. “Is it David?” “No.” “Rian?” “No.” “Frederik?” “No.” I kept waiting for it to be a trick, for them to turn and say, “It’s you!” They didn’t. At a certain point, I felt so invisible I almost wanted to take credit. I wanted to jump up and point at the TV and say, “Are you people blind?! That’s me! Can you not see that that’s me?!” But of course I didn’t. And they couldn’t. These people had been so fucked by their own construct of race that they could not see that the white person they were looking for was sitting right in front of them. Eventually they sent me back to class. I spent the rest of the day and the next couple of weeks waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for my mom to get the call. “We’ve got him! We figured it out!” But the call never came. [image file=image_rsrc2UF.jpg] South Africa has eleven official languages. After democracy came, people said, “Okay, how do we create order without having different groups feel like they’ve been left out of power again?” English is the international language and the language of money and of the media, so we had to keep that. Most people were forced to learn at least some Afrikaans, so it’s useful to keep that, too. Plus we didn’t want the white minority to feel ostracized in the new South Africa, or else they’d take all their money and leave.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  There was no template of expectations out of which, granted the crucifixion of Jesus, one might have anticipated the sophisticated range of interpretation that the early Christian movement in fact produced, understanding the death of Jesus as a messianic victory and connecting it with the long-awaited divine return. For that we must look elsewhere. The larger picture of how Jews were reading their scriptures and how Jesus’s followers came to reread them in the light of his death and resurrection are topics to which we must return in the next part of the book. For the moment we must glance, in conclusion, at the world of the first Christians themselves. Approaching the New Testament Here, perhaps to our surprise, we find a bewildering range of material. We do not always stop to acknowledge the extraordinary explosion of new ideas and new understandings of old ones that occurred in the first fifty years of the faith. Turning the pages of the early Christian writings sometimes seems like turning the tube of a kaleidoscope: the same colors and shapes, but in constantly shifting combinations and patterns. Nothing in the ancient world, whether Jewish or non-Jewish, prepares us for the sudden flurry of themes and images that tumble over one another as the early Christians tried to express and interpret what had just happened to Jesus, the world, and themselves. Simply to set these out one by one will show what I mean. Each one will be explored further in Part Three, but it is important here to note them, if only because, though all readers of the New Testament realize how significant it all is, it is surprisingly difficult to give a coherent account of what is going on. I think this is in part because, as we saw in the previous chapter, many theologians and preachers have homed in on one part of the question only and have not succeeded in integrating the rest. I will not offer a comprehensive treatment either. But I hope that my later argument will go some way to revealing a deeper coherence among these early Christian writings than is sometimes imagined. The New Testament meets us with complex and puzzling information about the cross in both outline and detail. Many have struggled to fit together what the four gospels present (a story of Jesus announcing God’s kingdom and then going to his death) with what the letters appear to present (a story of God acting through the death of Jesus to save sinners). Within the gospels themselves, many have found it difficult to see how Jesus’s kingdom announcement and his approaching death somehow belong together.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Had I been a dud, just a poor honest bugger who wanted to work his balls off for so much a week, they wouldn’t have offered me the jobs they did, nor would they have handed me cigars or taken me to lunch or lent me money, as they frequently did. I must have had something to offer which perhaps unknowingly they prized beyond horsepower or technical ability. I didn’t know myself what it was, because I had neither pride, nor vanity, nor envy. About the big issues I was clear, but confronted by the petty details of life I was bewildered. I had to witness this same bewilderment on a colossal scale before I could grasp what it was all about. Ordinary men are often quicker in sizing up the practical situation: their ego is commensurate with the demands made upon it: the world is not very different from what they imagine it to be. But a man who is completely out of step with the rest of the world is either suffering from a colossal inflation of his ego or else the ego is so submerged as to be practically nonexistent. Herr Nagel had to dive off the deep end in search of his true ego; his existence was a mystery, to himself and to everyone else. I couldn’t afford to leave things hanging in suspense that way—the mystery was too intriguing. Even if I had to rub myself like a cat against every human being I encountered, I was going to get to the bottom of it. Rub long enough and hard enough and the spark will come! The hibernation of animals, the suspension of life practiced by certain low forms of life, the marvelous vitality of the bedbug which lies in wait endlessly behind the wallpaper, the trance of the Yogi, the catalepsy of the pathologic individual, the mystic’s union with the cosmos, the immortality of cellular life, all these things the artist learns in order to awaken the world at the propitious moment. The artist belongs to the X root race of man; he is the spiritual microbe, as it were, which carries over from one root race to another. He is not crushed by misfortune, because he is not a part of the physical, racial scheme of things. His appearance is always synchronous with catastrophe and dissolution; he is the cyclical being which lives in the epicycle. The experience which he acquires is never used for personal ends; it serves the larger purpose to which he is geared. Nothing is lost on him, however trifling. If he is interrupted for twenty-five years in the reading of a book he can go on from the page where he left off as though nothing had happened in between. Everything that happens in between, which is “life” to most people, is merely an interruption in his forward round.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “Yeah, I guess.” Connie pulled herself out of the mattress, readjusted her weight and sank in at another angle. “It’s just…the whole conversation was a vivid reminder of what it was like for me back then. Because of the thing with Franklin too. I don’t remember if I ever told you about him, but just before the thing with Alice happened, he made this monstrous come-on to me, saying how much he loved me, going on and on about how beautiful and special I was, literally trying to drag me onto his mattress—it was bewildering, and I didn’t quite trust it, and as it turned out, I was right. After a week of this he suddenly disappeared, and the next time I spoke to him, like two weeks later, he told me he was getting married to somebody named Emily, which he did.” “Another fine human being.” “But the thing about Franklin was that he had been a friend of mine up to that point. He virtually got me published in New York magazine. That’s why it felt so awful. It was as if he and Alice had simultaneously decided—” Deana left her carrots and, putting her fingers on Connie’s lips, pitched the two of them into the center of the mattress. “God, you must be really depressed. I haven’t heard you talk like this for ages.” She stroked Connie’s hair and smoothed her eyebrows. The mattress rasped and squeaked as they curled against each other like kittens in a shoe box. — “Franklin invited me to a party where Alice will be. I don’t know what to do.” “Are you still thinking about that?” They had just finished their take-out Chinese meal. Small white containers ranged over the table with fork handles protruding erectly from their centers; little balls of hardening rice trailed from container to plate; the cats circled beneath them with stiff, ardent steps. Deana was still lazily eating her spareribs and drinking her Vita-C. “Connie, if this woman is such a bad memory, why don’t you just forget it? Why dwell on her? She isn’t in your life anymore.” Connie looked at the bright, cold flower of broccoli splayed prettily on the edge of her plate. “The thing is, Alice and I had a good time together. We’d go out to the movies, and then go for coffee and talk about the movie for hours, analyzing every character and gesture and the use of music and so on. I can remember when she ordered an anchovy sandwich and one of those sweet almond drinks and said, ‘Whenever I’m with you I feel like eating stuff that’s really fun and really bad for me.’ ” “Hmpf,” said Deana. “And then there was the time that she and Roger paid for my airfare so I could visit them at their summer cottage in Pennsylvania.” “So why don’t you go to Weston’s party and see her?”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  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. ‘Please make Mac a better Christian,’ she said. And me lying there with a limp cock listening to her. I didn’t know whether I was dreaming or what. ‘Please make Mac a better Christian!’ Can you beat that?” “What are you doing tonight?” he added cheerfully. “Nothing special,” I said. “Then come along with me. I’ve got a gal I want you to meet. . . . Paula. I picked her up at the Roseland a few nights ago. She’s not crazy—she’s just a nymphomaniac. I want to see you dance with her. It’ll be a treat . . . just to watch you. Listen, if you don’t shoot off in your pants when she starts wiggling, well then I’m a son of a bitch. Come on, close the joint. What’s the use of farting around in this place?” There was a lot of time to kill before going to the Roseland so we went to a little hole in the wall over near Seventh Avenue. Before the war it was a French joint; now it was a speakeasy run by a couple of wops. There was a tiny bar near the door and in the back a little room with a sawdust floor and a slot machine for music. The idea was that we were to have a couple of drinks and then eat. That was the idea. Knowing him as I did, however, I wasn’t at all sure that we would be going to the Roseland together. If a woman should come along who pleased his fancy—and for that she didn’t have to be either beautiful or sound of wind and limb—I knew he’d leave me in the lurch and beat it. The only thing that concerned me, when I was with him, was to make sure in advance that he had enough money to pay for the drinks we ordered.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  She’s telling me about her father, about the strange life they led at the edge of Sherwood Forest where she was born, or at least she was telling me about this, but now it’s about Henriette again, or is it Dostoevski?—I’m not sure—but anyway, suddenly I realize that she’s not talking about any of these any more but about a man who took her home one night and as they stood on the stoop saying good-night he suddenly reached down and pulled up her dress. She pauses a moment as though to reassure me that this is what she means to talk about. I look at her bewilderedly. I can’t imagine by what route we got to this point. What man? What had he been saying to her? I let her continue, thinking that she will probably come back to it, but no, she’s ahead of me again and now it seems the man, this man, is already dead, a suicide, and she is trying to make me understand that it was an awful blow to her, but what she really seems to convey is that she is proud of the fact that she drove a man to suicide. I can’t picture the man as dead; I can only think of him as he stood on her stoop lifting her dress, a man without a name but alive and perpetually fixed in the act of bending down to lift up her dress. There is another man who was her father and I see him with a string of race horses, or sometimes in a little inn just outside Vienna; rather I see him on the roof of the inn flying kites to while the time away. And between this man who was her father and the man with whom she was madly in love I can make no separation. He is someone in her life about whom she would rather not talk, but just the same she comes back to him all the time, and though I’m not sure that it was not the man who lifted up her dress neither am I sure that it wasn’t the man who committed suicide. Perhaps it’s the man whom she started to talk about when we sat down to eat. Just as we were sitting down I remember now that she began to talk rather hectically about a man whom she had just seen entering the cafeteria. She even mentioned his name, but I forgot it immediately. But I remember her saying that she had lived with him and that he had done something which she didn’t like—she didn’t say what—and so she had walked out on him, left him flat, without a word of explanation. And then, just as we were entering the chop suey joint, they ran into each other and she was still trembling over it as we sat down in the little booth. . . . For one long moment I have the most uneasy sensation.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  About the big issues I was clear, but confronted by the petty details of life I was bewildered. I had to witness this same bewilderment on a colossal scale before I could grasp what it was all about. Ordinary men are often quicker in sizing up the practical situation: their ego is commensurate with the demands made upon it: the world is not very different from what they imagine it to be. But a man who is completely out of step with the rest of the world is either suffering from a colossal inflation of his ego or else the ego is so submerged as to be practically nonexistent. Herr Nagel had to dive off the deep end in search of his true ego; his existence was a mystery, to himself and to everyone else. I couldn’t afford to leave things hanging in suspense that way—the mystery was too intriguing. Even if I had to rub myself like a cat against every human being I encountered, I was going to get to the bottom of it. Rub long enough and hard enough and the spark will come! The hibernation of animals, the suspension of life practiced by certain low forms of life, the marvelous vitality of the bedbug which lies in wait endlessly behind the wallpaper, the trance of the Yogi, the catalepsy of the pathologic individual, the mystic’s union with the cosmos, the immortality of cellular life, all these things the artist learns in order to awaken the world at the propitious moment. The artist belongs to the X root race of man; he is the spiritual microbe, as it were, which carries over from one root race to another. He is not crushed by misfortune, because he is not a part of the physical, racial scheme of things. His appearance is always synchronous with catastrophe and dissolution; he is the cyclical being which lives in the epicycle. The experience which he acquires is never used for personal ends; it serves the larger purpose to which he is geared. Nothing is lost on him, however trifling. If he is interrupted for twenty-five years in the reading of a book he can go on from the page where he left off as though nothing had happened in between. Everything that happens in between, which is “life” to most people, is merely an interruption in his forward round. The eternality of his work, when he expresses himself, is merely the reflection of the automatism of life in which he is obliged to lie dormant, a sleeper on the back of sleep, waiting for the signal which will announce the moment of birth. This is the big issue, and this was always clear to me, even when I denied it. The dissatisfaction which drives one on from one word to another, one creation to another, is simply a protest against the futility of postponement. The more awake one becomes, as artistic microbe, the less desire one has to do anything.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  At first she was big and velvety, like the jaguar, with that silky, deceptive strength of the feline species, the crouch, the spring, the pounce; then she grew emaciated, fragile, delicate, almost like a cornflower, and with each change thereafter she went through the subtlest modulations—of skin, muscle, color, posture, odor, gait, gesture, et cetera. She changed like a chameleon. Nobody could say what she really was like because with each one she was an entirely different person. After a time she didn’t even know herself what she was like. She had begun this process of metamorphosis before I met her, as I later discovered. Like so many women who think themselves ugly she had willed to make herself beautiful, dazzlingly beautiful. To do this she first of all renounced her name, then her family, her friends, everything which might attach her to the past. With all her wits and faculties she devoted herself to the cultivation of her beauty, of her charm, which she already possessed to a high degree but which she had been made to believe were nonexistent. She lived constantly before the mirror, studying every movement, every gesture, every slightest grimace. She changed her whole manner of speech, her diction, her intonation, her accent, her phraseology. She conducted herself so skilfully that it was impossible even to broach the subject of origins. She was constantly on her guard, even in her sleep. And, like a good general, she discovered quickly enough that the best defense is attack. She never left a single position unoccupied; her outposts, her scouts, her sentinels were stationed everywhere. Her mind was a revolving searchlight which was never dimmed. Blind to her own beauty, her own charm, her own personality, to say nothing of her identity, she launched her full powers toward the fabrication of a mythical creature, a Helen, a Juno, whose charms neither man nor woman would be able to resist. Automatically, without the slightest knowledge of legend, she began to create little by little the ontological background, the mythic sequence of events preceeding the conscious birth. She had no need to remember her lies, her fictions—she had only to bear in mind her role. There was no lie too monstrous for her to utter, for in her adopted role she was absolutely faithful to herself. She did not have to invent a past: she remembered the past which belonged to her. She was never outflanked by a direct question since she never presented herself to an adversary except obliquely. She presented only the angles of the ever-turning facets, the blinding prisms of light which she kept constantly revolving. She was never a being, such as might finally be caught in repose, but the mechanism itself, relentlessly operating the myriad mirrors which would reflect the myth she had created. She had no poise whatsoever; she was eternally poised above her multiple identities in the vacuum of the self.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I could see by the way she sat on the edge of her chair and bobbed her head that she was only waiting for him to catch his breath in order to inform him that the pastor—her pastor, who was an Episcopalian—had just returned from Europe and that they were going to have a fair in the basement of the church where she would have a little booth fitted up with doilies from the five-and-ten-cent store. In fact, no sooner had he paused a moment than she let loose—about the canals of Venice, the snow in the Alps, the dog carts in Brussels, the beautiful liverwurst in Munich. She was not only religious, my sister, but she was clean daffy. Grover had just slipped in something about having seen a new heaven and a new earth . . . for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away , he said, mumbling the words in a sort of hysterical glissando in order to unburden himself of an oracular message about the New Jerusalem which God had established on earth and in which he, Grover Watrous, once foul of speech and marred by a twisted foot, had found the peace and the calm of the righteous. “There shall be no more death . . .” he started to shout when my sister leaned forward and asked him very innocently if he liked to bowl because the pastor had just installed a beautiful new bowling alley in the basement of the church and she knew he would be pleased to see Grover because he was a lovely man and he was kind to the poor. Grover said that it was a sin to bowl and that he belonged to no church because the churches were godless; he had even given up playing the piano because God needed him for higher things. “He that overcometh shall inherit all things,” he added, “and I will be his God , and he shall be my son.” He paused again to blow his nose in a beautiful white handkerchief, whereupon my sister took the occasion to remind him that in the old days he always had a running nose but that he never wiped it. Grover listened to her very solemnly and then remarked that he had been cured of many evil ways. At this point the old man woke up and, seeing Grover sitting beside him large as life, he was quite startled and for a moment or two he was not sure, it seemed, whether Grover was a morbid phenomenon of dream or an hallucination, but the sight of the clean handkerchief brought him quickly to his wits. “Oh, it’s you!” he exclaimed. “The Watrous boy, what? Well, what in the name of all that’s holy are you doing here?” “I came in the name of the Holy of Holies,” said Grover unabashed.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  When he arrived in the morning Hymie first sharpened his pencils; he did this religiously no matter how many calls were coming in, because, as he explained to me later, if he didn’t sharpen the pencils first thing off the bat they would never get sharpened. The next thing was to take a glance out the window and see what the weather was like. Then, with a freshly sharpened pencil he made a little box at the head of the slate which he kept beside him and in it he gave the weather report. This, he also informed me, often turned out to be a useful alibi. If the snow were a foot thick or the ground covered with sleet, even the devil himself might be excused for not shuffling the waybills around more speedily, and the employment manager might also be excused for not filling up the holes on such days, no? But why he didn’t take a crap first instead of plugging in on the switchboard soon as his pencils were sharpened was a mystery to me. That too he explained to me later. Anyway, the day always broke with confusion, complaints, constipation and vacancies. It also began with loud smelly farts, with bad breaths, with ragged nerves, with epilepsy, with meningitis, with low wages, with back pay that was overdue, with worn-out shoes, with corns and bunions, with flat feet and broken arches, with pocketbooks missing and fountain pens lost or stolen, with telegrams floating in the sewer, with threats from the vice-president and advice from the managers, with wrangles and disputes, with cloudbursts and broken telegraph wires, with new methods of efficiency and old ones that had been discarded, with hope for better times and a prayer for the bonus which never came. The new messengers were going over the top and getting machine-gunned; the old ones were digging in deeper and deeper, like rats in a cheese. Nobody was satisfied, especially not the public. It took ten minutes to reach San Francisco over the wire, but it might take a year to get the message to the man whom it was intended for—or it might never reach him. The Y. M. C. A., eager to improve the morale of working boys everywhere in America, was holding meetings at noon hour and wouldn’t I like to send a few spruce-looking boys to hear William Carnegie Asterbilt Junior give a five-minute talk on service. Mr. Mallory of the Welfare League would like to know if I could spare a few minutes some time to tell me about the model prisoners who were on parole and who would be glad to serve in any capacity, even as messengers. Mrs. Guggenhoffer of the Jewish Charities would be very grateful if I would aid her in maintaining some broken-down homes which had broken down because everybody was either infirm, crippled or disabled in the family. Mr.