Boredom

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Then I'd be thrown over his knee, my legs kicked wide apart, and the spanking would go on until the Queen was tired of it. It hurt very much as I'm sure you know, and it only further humiliated me. But as I became more and more desperately bored in my hours of solitude, I commenced to look upon it as an interlude. I began to think about the pain, the various stages of it. There were the first few cracks of the paddle, not so painful at all. Then, as they came on harder and harder, the aching, the stinging, I found myself wriggling and trying to escape the blows, though I'd sworn I wouldn't. I'd remind myself to be still only to slip into writhing again, which amused the Queen immensely. When I was very sore, I felt very tired, tired of the struggle, and the Queen knew then I was most vulnerable. She would touch me. Her hands felt very delicious on my welts though I hated her. Then she'd stroke my organ, telling me in my ear what ecstasies I might enjoy in serving her. I would receive her full attention, she said, and be bathed and babied by the grooms, instead of roughly scrubbed and hung on the wall. I would weep sometimes because I couldn't stop myself. The Pages would laugh. The Queen thought it was all quite laughable, too. Then I would be returned to the wall to be broken down by more interminable boredom. "Now all this time, I never saw the other slaves punished by the Queen. She would carry out her pleasures and games in her many parlors. Sometimes I would hear cries and blows through the doors, but seldom. "But, as I began to exhibit an erect and craving organ in spite of myself, and began to actually look forward to the terrible spankings...in spite of myself...these two interludes not being connected as yet in my mind...she brought in a slave now and then for her amusement. "I can't tell you the rages of jealousy I felt the first time I had to witness a slave punished. This was a young Prince Gerald, whom she adored in those days. He was sixteen, and had the roundest, smallest buttocks. They were irresistible to the Pages, and the grooms, as yours are..." Beauty blushed at this. "Don't count yourself unlucky. Listen to what I say about the boredom," Alexi said, and he kissed her tenderly. "As I was saying, this slave was brought in and the Queen stroked and teased him shamelessly.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  As no one was paying any attention to him, and no one apparently needed him, he quietly slipped away into the little room where the refreshments were, and again had a great sense of comfort when he saw the waiters. The little old waiter pressed him to have something, and Levin agreed. After eating a cutlet with beans and talking to the waiters of their former masters, Levin, not wishing to go back to the hall, where it was all so distasteful to him, proceeded to walk through the galleries. The galleries were full of fashionably dressed ladies, leaning over the balustrade and trying not to lose a single word of what was being said below. With the ladies were sitting and standing smart lawyers, high school teachers in spectacles, and officers. Everywhere they were talking of the election, and of how worried the marshal was, and how splendid the discussions had been. In one group Levin heard his brother’s praises. One lady was telling a lawyer: “How glad I am I heard Koznishev! It’s worth losing one’s dinner. He’s exquisite! So clear and distinct all of it! There’s not one of you in the law courts that speaks like that. The only one is Meidel, and he’s not so eloquent by a long way.” Finding a free place, Levin leaned over the balustrade and began looking and listening. All the noblemen were sitting railed off behind barriers according to their districts. In the middle of the room stood a man in a uniform, who shouted in a loud, high voice: “As a candidate for the marshalship of the nobility of the province we call upon staff-captain Yevgeney Ivanovitch Apuhtin!” A dead silence followed, and then a weak old voice was heard: “Declined!” “We call upon the privy councilor Pyotr Petrovitch Bol,” the voice began again. “Declined!” a high boyish voice replied. Again it began, and again “Declined.” And so it went on for about an hour. Levin, with his elbows on the balustrade, looked and listened. At first he wondered and wanted to know what it meant; then feeling sure that he could not make it out he began to be bored. Then recalling all the excitement and vindictiveness he had seen on all the faces, he felt sad; he made up his mind to go, and went downstairs. As he passed through the entry to the galleries he met a dejected high school boy walking up and down with tired-looking eyes. On the stairs he met a couple—a lady running quickly on her high heels and the jaunty deputy prosecutor. “I told you you weren’t late,” the deputy prosecutor was saying at the moment when Levin moved aside to let the lady pass. Levin was on the stairs to the way out, and was just feeling in his waistcoat pocket for the number of his overcoat, when the secretary overtook him. “This way, please, Konstantin Dmitrievitch; they are voting.”

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "I'm your slave, my Prince," she said. But he would only moan and press his face into her neck, and seemed bereft. "I love you," she implored him, and then he laid her down on the bed, and drawing up beside her, took his wine from the bedside stand and, gazing at the fire, seemed for a long time to be thinking. PRINCE ALEXI BEAUTY DREAMED a dream of boredom. She roamed the castle in which she had lived all her life, with nothing to do, and now and then paused in a deep window seat to watch the tiny figures of the peasants in the fields below gathering the fresh mown grass into haystacks. The sky was cloudless and she disliked the look of it, its sameness and vastness. It seemed she could not find anything to do that hadn't been done a thousand times before, and then suddenly there came to her ears a sound she could not identify. She followed the sound, and through a doorway saw an old woman, bent and ugly, plying a strange contraption. It was a great turning wheel with a thread that was winding itself upon a spindle. "What is it?" Beauty asked with great interest. "Come see for yourself," said the old woman, who had the most remarkable voice, because it was young and strong and so unlike her visage. It seemed Beauty had only just touched this marvelous machine with its whirring wheel when she fell down in a great swoon, and all about her heard the world weeping. "...sleep, sleep for a hundred years!" And she wanted to cry out, "Unbearable, worse than death," for it seemed some great deepening of the ennui she had struggled against ever since she could remember, the wandering from room to room... But she awoke. She was not at home. She was lying in the bed of her Prince, and she felt the prickling of the jeweled coverlet beneath her. The room was full of the leaping shadows of the fire, and she saw the gleam of the carved posts of the bed, and the drapery fallen about her in rich colors. She felt herself animated and flushed with desire, and she rose up, so eager was she to lose the weight and texture of her dream, and she realized that the Prince was not beside her. But there he was, by the fire, his elbow against the stone above it which bore a great crest with crossed swords. He wore his brilliant red velvet cloak still and his high turned down leather boots with their pointed toes, and his face was sharpened with brooding. The pulse between her legs quickened. She stirred, and gave some faint little sigh so that he awoke from his thoughts and approached her.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  He would have me removed from the shackles that held me to the wall, as I kicked and struggled frantically. Then I'd be thrown over his knee, my legs kicked wide apart, and the spanking would go on until the Queen was tired of it. It hurt very much as I'm sure you know, and it only further humiliated me. But as I became more and more desperately bored in my hours of solitude, I commenced to look upon it as an interlude. I began to think about the pain, the various stages of it. There were the first few cracks of the paddle, not so painful at all. Then, as they came on harder and harder, the aching, the stinging, I found myself wriggling and trying to escape the blows, though I'd sworn I wouldn't. I'd remind myself to be still only to slip into writhing again, which amused the Queen immensely. When I was very sore, I felt very tired, tired of the struggle, and the Queen knew then I was most vulnerable. She would touch me. Her hands felt very delicious on my welts though I hated her. Then she'd stroke my organ, telling me in my ear what ecstasies I might enjoy in serving her. I would receive her full attention, she said, and be bathed and babied by the grooms, instead of roughly scrubbed and hung on the wall. I would weep sometimes because I couldn't stop myself. The Pages would laugh. The Queen thought it was all quite laughable, too. Then I would be returned to the wall to be broken down by more interminable boredom. "Now all this time, I never saw the other slaves punished by the Queen. She would carry out her pleasures and games in her many parlors. Sometimes I would hear cries and blows through the doors, but seldom. "But, as I began to exhibit an erect and craving organ in spite of myself, and began to actually look forward to the terrible spankings...in spite of myself...these two interludes not being connected as yet in my mind...she brought in a slave now and then for her amusement. "I can't tell you the rages of jealousy I felt the first time I had to witness a slave punished. This was a young Prince Gerald, whom she adored in those days. He was sixteen, and had the roundest, smallest buttocks. They were irresistible to the Pages, and the grooms, as yours are..." Beauty blushed at this. "Don't count yourself unlucky. Listen to what I say about the boredom," Alexi said, and he kissed her tenderly.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Some mornings, I questioned how I could get through eight hours of stink and dirt and din and boredom. At 8:00 A.M. I would set my mind for two hours, saying to myself, you can last two hours, and then there will be a coffee break. I’d read for ten minutes, and then I’d set myself for another two hours, thinking, now all right, you can last two hours until lunch. After lunch, when the machines behind us kicked over, I felt a little refreshed after my sardine sandwich, but those two hours were the hardest of the day. It was a long time until the 2:30 break. But finally, I could tell myself, now you can make it for two more hours and then you’ll be free. Sometimes I stood waiting for the freight elevator in the early morning half-dark with the other workers, anxiously hoping it wouldn’t stall and the time clock tick over into red. I tried to propel myself back out of the alley and toward home, because I knew I could not possibly go through another day like the day before. But the elevator came, and I got on with the others. There were women who had worked at the plant for the entire ten years it had been open. I would not get paid for three weeks, and my meager hoard of money was running dangerously low. (It was customary in factories in Stamford to hold back your first week’s pay until you left your job, as a deposit, so to speak, on your space.) It did not cover coffee breaks. Sometimes I would stay right at the machines and read the book I brought. Ginger would bop off to the relative cleanliness of the reading room to talk with the other women. One day she clued me in. “You better get your bottom off that chair in your breaks, girl, before you get stuck to it. You can go crazy like that.” Those were my sentiments, exactly. With different motivations in mind, my forewoman, Rose, also advised me on my off-work habits. Pulling me aside at lunchtime, and with an archly significant smile, she told me that she thought I was a bright girl and could go places except I went to the bathroom too much. The cutters made piecework bonuses on their work, but Ginger and I did not. One day the men had hassled me all morning, saying I was not giving them their readings fast enough, and was holding up their cuttings. At 10:00 A.M. they trooped downstairs for coffee, leaving their machines running. Under the cover of the noise, I dropped my head over the nape of the X-ray machine and burst into tears. At that point, Ginger appeared, having forgotten her change purse under the hamper of her machine. She punched me gently on the arm. “See that? What’d I tell ya? You can go nuts with all that reading.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  And like the time we enlisted an old poppa-san to guide us through the mine fields out on the Batangan Peninsula. The old guy walked with a limp, slow and stooped over, but he knew where the safe spots were and where you had to be careful and where even if you were careful you could end up like popcorn. He had a tightrope walker's feel for the land beneath him—its surface tension, the give and take of things. Each morning we'd form up in a long column, the old poppa-san out front, and for the whole day we'd troop along after him, tracing his footsteps, playing an exact and ruthless game of follow the leader. Rat Kiley made up a rhyme that caught on, and we'd all be chanting it together: Step out of line, hit a mine; follow the dink, you're in the pink. All around us, the place was littered with Bouncing Betties and Toe Poppers and booby-trapped artillery rounds, but in those five days on the Batangan Peninsula nobody got hurt. We all learned to love the old man. It was a sad scene when the choppers came to take us away. Jimmy Cross gave the old poppa-san a hug. Mitchell Sanders and Lee Strunk loaded him up with boxes of C rations. There were actually tears in the old guy's eyes. "Follow dink," he said to each of us, "you go pink." If you weren't humping, you were waiting. I remember the monotony. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and the heat and the endless paddies. Even in the deep bush, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders. You'd be sitting at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you'd feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet, except it wasn't water, it was a sort of acid, and with each little droplet you'd feel the stuff eating away at important organs. You'd try to relax. You'd uncurl your fists and let your thoughts go. Well, you'd think, this isn't so bad. And right then you'd hear gunfire behind you and your nuts would fly up into your throat and you'd be squealing pig squeals. That kind of boredom.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  And this made our steps so scant, that the waning orb of the moon regained its bed to sink again to rest ere we were forth from that needle’s eye. But when we were free and on the open above, where the mount is set back, I wearied and both uncertain of our way, we stood still on a level place more solitary than roads through deserts. From its edge where it borders on the void, to the foot of the high bank which sheer ascends, a human body would measure in thrice; and so far as mine eye could wing its flight, now on the left now on the right side, such this cornice appeared to me. Thereon our feet had not yet moved, when I discerned that circling bank (which, being upright, lacked means of ascent) to be of pure white marble, and adorned with sculptures so that not only Polycletus,2 but Nature there would be put to shame. The angel that came to earth with the decree of peace wept for since many a year, which opened heaven from its long ban, before us appeared so vividly graven there in gentle mien, that it seemed not an image which is dumb. One would have sworn that he was saying: Ave, for there she was fashioned who turned the key to open the supreme love.3 And in her attitude were imprinted these words, Ecce ancilla Dei, as expressly as a figure is stamped on wax. “Keep not thy mind only on one place,” said the sweet Master, who had me on that side where folk have the heart; wherefore I moved my face about, and saw behind Mary, on that side of me where he was who was urging me on, another story set in the rock, wherefore I crossed by Virgil and drew me nigh, that it might be displayed to mine eyes. There was graven on the very marble the cart and the oxen drawing the sacred ark, whereby we fear an office not committed to us. In front appeared people; and the whole divided into seven choirs, to two of my senses, made the one say “no,” the other, “yes, they do sing.” In the like wise, at the smoke of the incense which there was imaged, eyes and nose were made discordant with yes and no. There went before the blessed vessel the lowly Psalmist, dancing, girt up;4 and more and less than king was he in that case. Figured opposite at a window of a great palace was Michal, looking on even as a woman scornful and sad. I moved my feet from the place where I stood, to scan closely another story which behind Michal shone white before me. There was storied the high glory of the Roman prince whose worth moved Gregory to his great victory; of Trajan the emperor I speak;5 and a poor widow was at his bridle in the attitude of tears and of grief.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  “Those women weren’t even shopping but simply going to stores, for lack of anything better to do,” Blume later said of her fellow New Jersey moms. Shopping didn’t do it for Judy. It didn’t do it for Betty Friedan either, who lived an hour away in Rockland County, New York. In 1963, mother of three Friedan published The Feminine Mystique , which described housewives’ ennui as “the problem that has no name.” Friedan argued that during World War II, when American women had flooded the workforce while the men went to war, they had been happier. Then, after D-Day, they had been corralled back into their homes. They subsisted on a substanceless media diet that told them they should entertain no ambitions beyond their “feminine” duties: Preparing gourmet meals. Scrubbing the floors until they sparkled. Cultivating their children’s interests. Making it all seem lovely and effortless, so that it appeared, at five o’clock every day, as if they had been gift-wrapped just for their husbands. Middle-class women were told they were lucky, that they led more pampered lives than any other species in the history of the world. “The American housewife—freed by science and the labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother… was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children and her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment,” Friedan wrote of the cultural messages housewives received. But then, Friedan asks: Why were so many women secretly dying inside? They were miserable because they were bored, Friedan argued. More than bored—they were suffocating. And to top it all off, these women felt guilty about being unhappy. They yearned to understand why their comfortable, cosseted lives didn’t nourish them. “I feel as if I don’t exist,” one interview subject confessed to Friedan. Many suffered from unexplained illnesses. The “housewife’s syndrome” or “housewife’s blight,” Friedan called it, describing a constellation of symptoms that appeared separately or all together: crippling exhaustion, anxiety, restlessness, teariness, lethargy, skin conditions. Judy had pounding headaches and migraines that sent her to bed in the middle of the day. She had year-round sore throats, rashes, and other allergic reactions for no apparent reason. “If you want to know about my illnesses, read Wifey ,” Blume said in the 1990 book Presenting Judy Blume . “It was another side of my life that I wanted to share.” In Wifey , Blume’s first novel for adults, published in 1978, she references her weird afflictions in the character of Sandy Pressman: a stifled and sexually frustrated housewife who seeks fulfillment in a series of R-rated, extramarital affairs. Early on in the book, Sandy looks in the mirror to discover a crop of heart-shaped bumps erupting across her face. Despite taking a course of penicillin, she gets sicker. “Ten days later it returned, but much worse.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  But my face just gets so puffy.” She stuck her hand in a box of Kleenex and pulled out a stack. “You know, in a way, I’m glad we didn’t have to get her embalmed. That’s just creepy. She was just a sack of bones, anyway. She probably weighed half of what I weigh now. Well, maybe not half exactly. But she was super skinny. Skinnier than Kate Moss, even.” She stuck the tissues in her coat pocket and turned off the lights. We went out the kitchen door into the garage. There was a storage freezer in the corner, shelves of tools and flowerpots and ski boots, a few old bikes, stacks of blue plastic storage bins along one wall. “It’s unlocked,” Reva said, motioning to a small silver Toyota. “This was my mom’s car. I started it last night. Hopefully I can start it again now. She hadn’t been driving it, obviously.” Inside, it smelled like menthol rub. There was a polar bear bobblehead on the dash, an issue of the New Yorker and a bottle of hand cream on the passenger seat. Reva started the car, sighed, clicked the garage door opener clipped to the visor, and started crying. “See? I warned you,” she said, taking out the wad of tissues. “I’m just going to cry while the car heats up. Just a sec,” she said. She cried on, gently shaking under her puffy jacket. “There, there,” I said, sucking down the coffee. I was intensely bored of Reva already. This would be the end of our friendship, I felt. Sometime soon, my cruelty would go too far, and now that her mother was dead, Reva’s head would start to clear of its superficial nonsense. She’d probably go back into therapy. She’d realize that we had no good reason to be friends, and that she would never get what she needed from me. She’d send me a long letter explaining her resentments, her mistakes, explaining how she had to let me go in order to move on with her life. I could already imagine her phrasing. “I’ve come to realize that our friendship is no longer serving me”—that was language her therapist would have taught her —“which is not a criticism of you.” But of course it was about me: I was the friend in the friendship she was describing. As we drove through Farmingdale, I wrote my reply to her would-be “Dear John” letter in my head. “I got your note,” I would begin. “You have confirmed what I’ve known about you since college.” I tried to think of the worst thing I could say about a person. What was the cruelest, most cutting, truest thing? Was it worth saying?

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  At the kitchen table, Simon sat with his skinny legs crossed, reading the paper. Hartjes came in through the side door (the front door had been bolted for as long as Hartjes had known him). Simon did not look up. He was a tall man, very pale, with thinning white-blond hair. He was just shy of middle age, a little under forty. Hartjes was younger, twenty-five. Two years before, they had met at a party, as people do, and they had fucked three times on three separate occasions, each a little worse, not to any degree that would have made any of the individual incidents awful, but when taken together they represented a doomed enterprise. A year earlier, after the last time they’d had sex, Hartjes said it would be best if they were just friends, and Simon said, “Sure, okay, sure.” But it was clear even then that Simon expected that Hartjes would change his mind, and sometimes he grew irritated that it was taking so long. “It’s getting warmer,” Hartjes said after he had washed his hands and sat down with a glass of water. “So it is,” Simon said from behind the paper. “And the river’s thawed,” Hartjes said. “So it is.” “And then I decided to kill myself,” Hartjes said. “So do it,” Simon said, not letting Hartjes have the satisfaction. “Some friend.” “I can get you a rope.” “Only if you cut me down after,” Hartjes said, putting his head on the table, which smelled like ground pepper and flour. “Har-dee-har-har.” Hartjes looked up and saw Simon watching him and beyond Simon into the front hall, where the stairs ran up to the second floor. There were pears in a bowl on the table. Hartjes put his cheek against his forearm and gazed out the window over the sink, into the tall pine trees and the gathering dusk. The kitchen was warm. The goats had come around the house and were trotting around the backyard, Guy and Bertram chasing two of the fatter hens. Simon lifted a cigarette from the ashtray and lit it. “I just hate the spring,” he said. “Well, with luck, we’ll all freeze to death long before then,” Simon said, knitting the paper together and apart. “What are you reading about over there?” “War, famine, misery, and two for one at the co-op.” Hartjes felt little kick in his gut. “What’s two for one at the co-op?” “Apples,” Simon said, lowering the paper so that Hartjes could see his expression. “They charged me full price!” “Racists.” “It’s probably about class,” Hartjes said grimly. “Oh, it’s about class, is it? I was raised poor, don’t you know. Maybe they’ll give me the two-for-one.” “I was raised poor. Poor me,” Hartjes said. “Yeah, but nobody expects me to have been raised poor. But look at me now. I live in a manse.” “You live in a shotgun house on a county road.” “A manse.” “My mother died, did I tell you?”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Our family lethargy seemed aimless, but actually it had a sort of routine to it. We rose at one, listened to the kids screaming, played with them a bit, ate an enormous brunch of tropical fruit, yogurt, eggs, cheeses, and Arabic coffee, read the Paris Herald-Tribune around the holes the censor had cut in it. (Any mention of Israel or Jews was prohibited—as were movies by those two notable Israelites, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Elizabeth Taylor.) Then we began debating how to spend the day. In that, we were about as united as Arabs planning an attack on Israel. On any given occasion, you could lay bets that everyone in the household would have a different preference. Chloe would suggest the beach; Pierre, Byblos; Lalah, Baalbek; the oldest boys, the archaeological museum; the littler kids, the amusement park; and Randy would veto everything. By the time we went through the full debate, it would be too late to go anywhere anyway. So we’d have supper and then either watch Bonanza on TV (with Arabic and French subtitles which covered nearly the whole screen), or go to some cruddy movie on Hamra Street. On some occasions our afternoon debate was interrupted by the arrival of Pierre’s mother and aunts—three ancient ladies in black (with gigantic bosoms and fuzzy mustaches) who looked so much alike you could hardly tell them apart. They would have made a great singing group except that they only had one song. It went: “How you like Lebanon? Lebanon better than New York?” And they played it over and over just to make sure you got the words. Oh they were nice enough, but not terribly easy to converse with. As soon as they arrived, Louise (the maid) would appear with coffee, Pierre would suddenly remember a business engagement, and Randy (pleading her delicate condition) would disappear into the bedroom for a nap. Lalah and Chloe and I were left to cope, ringing endless changes on the refrain “Yes—Lebanon is better than New York.” I don’t know whether it was the heat, the humidity, the presence of my family, the effect of being “in enemy territory,” or my depression over Charlie—but I seemed to have no will to get up and do anything at all. I felt as if I had been transported to the land of the Lotus Eaters and would die in Beirut of sheer inertia. One day segued into the next, the weather was oppressive, and there didn’t seem to be any point in fighting the desire to sit around, bicker with the family, think about having clap, and watch TV. It finally took a crisis to lurch us all into action.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Claire talked on in her loopy way about the earth and its poetry, and her students nodded thoughtfully, but an unmistakable torpor had descended. They would have preferred to hear more about Mick Jagger, or Sam Shepard, the man she’d gone to Montana for, as they already knew from their Googling. Land did not interest them too much. Theirs was the poetry of character, of romantic personalities, of broken hearts and emotional warfare. Claire, who had experienced more than enough of this in her life, populated her poems these days with New England foliage, wildlife, creeks, valleys and mountain ranges. These poems had proved less popular than the sexualized verse of her youth. The food arrived. Claire was still speaking about the land. Zora, who had been clearly brooding on something, now spoke up. ‘But how do you avoid falling into pastoral fallacy – I mean, isn’t it a depoliticized reification, all this beauty stuff about landscape? Virgil, Pope, the Romantics. Why idealize?’ ‘Idealize?’ repeated Claire uncertainly. ‘I’m not sure I really . . . You know, what I’ve always felt is, well, for instance, in The Georgics – ’ ‘The what?’ ‘Virgil . . . in The Georgics , nature and the pleasures of the pastoral are essential to any . . .’ began Claire, but Zora had already stopped listening. Claire’s kind of learning was tiresome to her. Claire didn’t  the anatomy lesson know anything about theorists, or ideas, or the latest thinking. Sometimes Zora suspected her of being barely intellectual. With her, it was always ‘in Plato’ or ‘in Baudelaire’ or ‘in Rimbaud’, as if we all had time to sit around reading whatever we fancied. Zora blinked impatiently, visibly tracking Claire’s sentence, waiting for a period or, failing that, a semicolon in which to insert herself again. ‘But after Foucault,’ she said, seeing her chance, ‘where is there to go with that stuff ?’ They were having an intellectual argument. The table was excited. Lena bounced on her heels to keep the blood circulating. Claire felt very tired. She was a poet. How had she ever ended up here, in one of these institutions, these universities, where one must make an argument for everything, even an argument for wanting to write about a chestnut tree? ‘Boo.’ Claire and the rest of the table looked up. A tall, handsome brown boy, with five or six guys hanging right behind him, stood by their table. Levi, unfazed by this kind of focused attention, acknowledged it with a nod. ‘Eleven thirty, out front, a’right?’ Zora agreed quickly, willing him away. ‘ Levi? Is that you? ’ ‘Oh, hi, Mizz Malcolm.’ ‘My God . Look at you! So that’s what all that swimming is for. You’re huge !’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Er . . . yeah . . . hear something . . . OK, well, actually there’s this group I been hearing a lot about . . . they Haitian . . . their name is hard to say – I’ll write it down like how I hear it.’ Carl looked disappointed. He bent over Levi as Levi phonetically wrote the name on a Post-it. Afterwards Carl took up the little piece of paper and frowned at it. ‘Oh . . . well, that ain’t my area, man – I bet you Elisha’ll know, though – she does the world music. Elisha! Let me go find her – I’ll ask her. This is the name?’ ‘Something like that,’ said Levi. Carl left the room. Levi hadn’t been comfortable in his seat for a few minutes – now he remembered why. He lifted up and pulled the newspaper from his pocket. He was still restless. He hadn’t brought his iPod out with him today, and he had no personal resources to cope with being alone without music. It never even occurred to him that the paper in front of him might afford a distraction. ‘You Levi?’ said Elisha. She stretched out her hand, and Levi stood up and shook it. ‘I can’t believe it – you’re one of the first visitors to this fine resource,’ she said chidingly. ‘And then you got to go and make some rare request. Couldn’t just ask for Louis Armstrong. No, sir.’ ‘But don’t be searching if it’s like a big hassle or a problem,’ said Levi, embarrassed now to be here. Elisha laughed easily. ‘Isn’t either. We’re glad to have you. It’ll take a little while for me to have a look through our records, that’s all. We’re not completely computerized . . . not yet . You can go and come back if you like – it might be about ten, fifteen minutes, though.’ ‘Stay, man,’ pressed Carl. ‘I been going stir crazy in here today.’ Levi did not especially want to stay, but it was more effort to be rude. Elisha left to go through her archives. Levi sat back down in her seat. ‘So – what’s up?’ asked Carl. But just then a loud beep came from Carl’s computer. A look of hungry anticipation broke out over his face. ‘Oh, Levi – sorry, man, one minute – e-mail.’  on beauty and being wrong Levi sat back in his chair, bored, as Carl typed frantically with two fingers. He felt the despondency universities had long inspired in him. He had grown up in them; he had known their book stacks and storage cupboards and quads and spires and science blocks and tennis courts and plaques and statues. He felt sorry for the people who found themselves trapped in such arid surroundings. Even as a small child he was absolutely clear that he would never, ever enrol at one himself. In universities, people forgot how to live.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  With Brian? Alone? Our family lethargy seemed aimless, but actually it had a sort of routine to it. We rose at one, listened to the kids screaming, played with them a bit, ate an enormous brunch of tropical fruit, yogurt, eggs, cheeses, and Arabic coffee, read the Paris Herald-Tribune around the holes the censor had cut in it. (Any mention of Israel or Jews was prohibited—as were movies by those two notable Israelites, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Elizabeth Taylor.) Then we began debating how to spend the day. In that, we were about as united as Arabs planning an attack on Israel. On any given occasion, you could lay bets that everyone in the household would have a different preference. Chloe would suggest the beach; Pierre, Byblos; Lalah, Baalbek; the oldest boys, the archaeological museum; the littler kids, the amusement park; and Randy would veto everything. By the time we went through the full debate, it would be too late to go anywhere anyway. So we’d have supper and then either watch Bonanza on TV (with Arabic and French subtitles which covered nearly the whole screen), or go to some cruddy movie on Hamra Street. On some occasions our afternoon debate was interrupted by the arrival of Pierre’s mother and aunts—three ancient ladies in black (with gigantic bosoms and fuzzy mustaches) who looked so much alike you could hardly tell them apart. They would have made a great singing group except that they only had one song. It went: “How you like Lebanon? Lebanon better than New York?” And they played it over and over just to make sure you got the words. Oh they were nice enough, but not terribly easy to converse with. As soon as they arrived, Louise (the maid) would appear with coffee, Pierre would suddenly remember a business engagement, and Randy (pleading her delicate condition) would disappear into the bedroom for a nap. Lalah and Chloe and I were left to cope, ringing endless changes on the refrain “Yes—Lebanon is better than New York.” I don’t know whether it was the heat, the humidity, the presence of my family, the effect of being “in enemy territory,” or my depression over Charlie—but I seemed to have no will to get up and do anything at all. I felt as if I had been transported to the land of the Lotus Eaters and would die in Beirut of sheer inertia. One day segued into the next, the weather was oppressive, and there didn’t seem to be any point in fighting the desire to sit around, bicker with the family, think about having clap, and watch TV. It finally took a crisis to lurch us all into action. It was a minor crisis admittedly—but any crisis would have served. It began simply.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Ah. That’s a shame,’ said Zora politely, but she wasn’t disappointed. He was striking, but wholly void of sex appeal. She thought, strangely, of that boy in the park. Why can’t respectable boys like this look more like boys like that? ‘And you’re at Wellington, yeah?’ asked Michael, without betraying any genuine curiosity. Zora met his eyes, made small and dull behind corrective glass, as her own were. ‘Yeah . . . went to my dad’s place . . . not very adventurous, I guess. And it looks like I’m going to be an Art History major, actually.’ ‘Which is, of course,’ announced Monty, ‘the field in which I started. I curated the first American exhibition of the Caribbean ‘‘primitives’’ in New York in . I have the largest collection of Haitian art in private hands outside of that unfortunate island.’ ‘Wow. All to yourself – that must be great.’ But Monty Kipps was clearly a man aware of his own comic potential; he was on guard against any irony, attentive to its approach. He had made his statement in good faith and would not allow it to be satirized retrospectively. He gave a long pause before he replied. ‘It’s satisfying to be able to protect important black art, yes.’ His daughter rolled her eyes. ‘Great if you like Baron Samedi staring at you from every corner of the house.’ It was the first time Victoria had spoken. Zora was surprised by her voice, which, like her father’s, was loud and low and forthright, out of sync with her coquettish appearance. ‘Victoria is currently reading the French philosophers . . .’ said her father drily, and began to list contemptuously several of Zora’s own lodestars. ‘Right, right, I see . . .’ murmured Zora through this. She had drunk one glass of wine too many. One extra glass made her like this, nodding in agreement before a person’s point was finished,  On Beauty and always aiming for exactly this tone, that of the world-weary almost European bourgeois, for whom, at nineteen, all things were familiar. ‘. . . And I’m afraid it’s making her hate art in a dull way. But hopefully Cambridge will straighten her out.’ ‘ Dad .’ ‘And in the meantime she will audit some classes here – I’m sure you’ll run across each other, from time to time.’ The girls looked at one another without much enthusiasm at the prospect. ‘I don’t hate ‘‘art’’, anyway – I hate your art,’ countered Victoria. Her father patted her shoulder soothingly, a move she shrugged off as a much younger child might. ‘I guess we don’t really hang much stuff around the house,’ said Zora, looking around at the empty walls, wondering how she got on to the one topic she had wanted to avoid. ‘Dad’s more into conceptual art, of course. We have totally extreme taste in art – like most of the pieces we own, we can’t really show in the house.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  shit ON,’ he said, in the ‘nerd’ voice with which black comedians sometimes imitate white people. ‘Well . . . you’re in luck, young man, ’cos we about to bring on the poetry, the Spoken Word, the rap, the rhyming – we gon’ do alla that for you. Bring on the poetry . I love that . . . Now: tonight it’s up to y’all who wins – we got a jeroboam of champagne – yeah, thank you, Mr Wellington, there’s your vocabulary word-for-the-day – a jeroboam of champagne, which basically means a whole lot of alcohol . And you guys got to choose who wins it – all you got to do is make some noise for your favourite. We got a show for you tonight. We got some Caribbean brothers in the house, we got some African brothers in the house, we got people gonna hit it in French , in Portuguese – I am reliably informed we got the United Nations of Spoken Word up in here tonight, so, you people be privileged in the extreme . Yeah, that’s right,’ said Doc Brown, responding to the whoops and whistles. ‘We getting inter national on yo’ ass . You know how we do.’ Thus did the show begin. There was support for the first artist, a young man who rhymed stiffly but spoke eloquently of America’s latest war. After this came a gawky, lanky girl with ears that thrust through the poker-straight curtains of her long hair. Claire suppressed her own hatred of elaborate metaphor and managed to enjoy the girl’s cruel, witty verse about all the useless men she’d known. But then three boys, one after the after, recounted macho tales of street life, the final boy speaking in Portuguese. Here Claire’s attention petered out. It happened that Zora was sat right in front of her at an evocative angle, her face presenting itself to Claire in profile. Without wanting to, Claire found herself examining it. How much of the girl’s father was here! The slight over-bite, the long face, the noble nose! She was getting fat, though; inevitably  the anatomy lesson she would go the way of her mother. Claire rebuked herself for this thought. It was wrong to hate the girl, as it was wrong to hate Howard, or to hate herself. Hate would not help this. It was personal insight that was required. Twice a week at six thirty Claire drove into Boston, to Dr Byford’s house in Chapel Hill, and paid him eighty dollars an hour to help her seek out personal insight. Together they tried to comprehend the chaos of pain Claire had unleashed. If one good thing had come out of the past twelve months, it was these sessions: of all her psychiatrists over the years, it was Byford who had brought her closest to breakthrough. So far this much was clear: Claire Malcolm was addicted to self-sabotage.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  It’ll take a little while for me to have a look through our records, that’s all. We’re not completely computerized . . . not yet . You can go and come back if you like – it might be about ten, fifteen minutes, though.’ ‘Stay, man,’ pressed Carl. ‘I been going stir crazy in here today.’ Levi did not especially want to stay, but it was more effort to be rude. Elisha left to go through her archives. Levi sat back down in her seat. ‘So – what’s up?’ asked Carl. But just then a loud beep came from Carl’s computer. A look of hungry anticipation broke out over his face. ‘Oh, Levi – sorry, man, one minute – e-mail.’  on beauty and being wrong Levi sat back in his chair, bored, as Carl typed frantically with two fingers. He felt the despondency universities had long inspired in him. He had grown up in them; he had known their book stacks and storage cupboards and quads and spires and science blocks and tennis courts and plaques and statues. He felt sorry for the people who found themselves trapped in such arid surroundings. Even as a small child he was absolutely clear that he would never, ever enrol at one himself. In universities, people forgot how to live. Even in the middle of a music library, they had forgotten what music was. Carl hit ‘Return’ with a pianist’s flourish. He sighed happily. He said, ‘Oh, man .’ He seemed to have overestimated Levi’s curiosity about the lives of other people. ‘Know who that was?’ he prompted finally. Levi shrugged. ‘Remember that girl? I first saw her when I was with you. The one with the booty that was just . . .’ Carl kissed the air. Levi did his best to look unimpressed. One thing he couldn’t stand was brothers boasting about their ladies. ‘That was her , man. I asked someone her name and found her in the college book. Easy as that. Victoria. Vee . She driving me crazy, man – she e-mails like . . .’ Carl lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘She so dirty. Photos and all’a that. She got a body like . . . I don’t even have any words for what she got. She be like sending me . . . well – you want to see something? Takes a minute to download.’ Carl clicked his mouse a few times and then began to turn his screen round. Levi had seen a quarter of a breast when they both heard Elisha coming down the hall. Carl whipped his computer back to face him, switched off the screen and picked up the newspaper. ‘Hey, Levi,’ said Elisha. ‘We got lucky. I found what you’re looking for. You want to come with me?’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  People had been telling Kiki this her whole life. She supposed she was lucky that way – there are worse things to be told. But the fact remained: as a sentence it was really beginning to bore the hell out of her. ‘Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I can not be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.’ ‘Right,’ said Jerome sadly. ‘And I love you too, baby. I’m just fine .’ ‘You can feel bad,’ said Jerome, and coughed the frog from his throat. ‘I mean, that’s not illegal.’ A fire engine went by, wailing. It was one of the old, shiny, brass-and-red-paint engines of Jerome’s childhood. He could see it and its fellows in his mind’s eye: six of them parked in the courtyard at the end of the Belseys’ road, ready for an emergency. As a child he used to go over the hypothetical moment when his family would be saved from fire by white men climbing through the windows. ‘I just wish I was there.’ ‘Oh, you’re busy. Levi’s here. Not ,’ said Kiki cheerily, wiping fresh tears from her eyes, ‘that I see hide nor hair of Levi. We just do bed, breakfast and the laundry for that boy.’ ‘Meanwhile I’m drowning in dirty laundry here.’ Kiki was silent trying to picture Jerome right now: where he was sitting, the size of his room, where the window was and what it looked out upon. She missed him. For all his innocence, he was her  the anatomy lesson ally. You don’t have favourites among your children, but you do have allies. ‘And Zora’s here. I’m fine .’ ‘Zora . . . please . She wouldn’t piss on somebody if they were on fire.’ ‘Oh, Jerome, that’s not true. She’s just angry with me – it’s normal.’ ‘ You’re not the one she should be angry with.’ ‘Jerome, you just get to class and don’t be sweating about me . Takes a giant .’ ‘Amen,’ said Jerome, in the comic way of the Belseys when they were putting on their ancestral Deep South voices, and Kiki echoed him, laughing. Amen! And then to ruin everything that had gone before Jerome said, in all seriousness, ‘God bless you, Mom.’ ‘Oh, baby, please . . .’ ‘Mom, just take the blessing, OK? It’s not viral. Look, I’m late for class – I’ve got to go.’

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Our family lethargy seemed aimless, but actually it had a sort of routine to it. We rose at one, listened to the kids screaming, played with them a bit, ate an enormous brunch of tropical fruit, yogurt, eggs, cheeses, and Arabic coffee, read the Paris Herald-Tribune around the holes the censor had cut in it. (Any mention of Israel or Jews was prohibited—as were movies by those two notable Israelites, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Elizabeth Taylor.) Then we began debating how to spend the day. In that, we were about as united as Arabs planning an attack on Israel. On any given occasion, you could lay bets that everyone in the household would have a different preference. Chloe would suggest the beach; Pierre, Byblos; Lalah, Baalbek; the oldest boys, the archaeological museum; the littler kids, the amusement park; and Randy would veto everything. By the time we went through the full debate, it would be too late to go anywhere anyway. So we’d have supper and then either watch Bonanza on TV (with Arabic and French subtitles which covered nearly the whole screen), or go to some cruddy movie on Hamra Street. On some occasions our afternoon debate was interrupted by the arrival of Pierre’s mother and aunts—three ancient ladies in black (with gigantic bosoms and fuzzy mustaches) who looked so much alike you could hardly tell them apart. They would have made a great singing group except that they only had one song. It went: “How you like Lebanon? Lebanon better than New York?” And they played it over and over just to make sure you got the words. Oh they were nice enough, but not terribly easy to converse with. As soon as they arrived, Louise (the maid) would appear with coffee, Pierre would suddenly remember a business engagement, and Randy (pleading her delicate condition) would disappear into the bedroom for a nap. Lalah and Chloe and I were left to cope, ringing endless changes on the refrain “Yes—Lebanon is better than New York.” I don’t know whether it was the heat, the humidity, the presence of my family, the effect of being “in enemy territory,” or my depression over Charlie—but I seemed to have no will to get up and do anything at all. I felt as if I had been transported to the land of the Lotus Eaters and would die in Beirut of sheer inertia. One day segued into the next, the weather was oppressive, and there didn’t seem to be any point in fighting the desire to sit around, bicker with the family, think about having clap, and watch TV. It finally took a crisis to lurch us all into action.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The place was smelly and oppressive, but the grown-ups, their tongues loosened by martinis, settled in for a long stay. The two women, seated next to each other, talked Paris fashions and assured each other no one would wear the Parachute. Mr. Cork, more Republican than the republic, was discerning a Communist conspiracy in every national mishap. I could see my father wasn’t convinced, least of all by Mr. Cork’s ardor; Dad took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes and nodded rhythmically through the harangue, his polite way of shielding himself from a loudmouth, of immigrating inward. Little Peter had turned a celery stalk from the relish tray into an Indian canoe and Kevin was sniping at it from the chalky promontory of a flour-dusted dinner roll; the massacre was carried out in whispered sound effects. “Kevin O’Malley Cork, how many times must I tell you not to play with your food!” “Aw, Maw.” On and on the meal devolved. The organist’s pale forehead glittering under his black wig, his teeth bared, he moved from a pathetic “Now Is the Hour” with copious vibrato into a “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah” with a Latin beat. The waitress tempted everyone with pie—stewed apples and cinnamon enclosed in envelopes of pastry that looked like pressed Leatherette, each wedge, of course, à la mode. Coffee for the grownups, more milk for the kids. The bill. The argument over it. The change. The second cigar. The mints. The toothpicks. The crème de menthe frappés and the B and B’s. More coffee. The tip. “Good night, folks. Hurry back!” Another tip for the organist, who nods grateful acknowledgment while staying right in there with “Kitten on the Keys.”