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 Cleanness (2020)

  G. was quiet for a moment, keeping his eyes on the table. When I told him, he went on, it was by accident, almost, I told him all at once and without any plan. We were alone for the first time in weeks, out of the city, at a house my parents keep up on Vitosha. I knew the area he meant, I thought, a band of exclusive neighborhoods built up the side of the mountain, each year climbing farther up; it was just a half-hour drive from Sofia but it was like a different world, with its own climate free of the congestion and noise of the center. This was a few weeks ago, he said, we had gone up on a Friday for a quick trip, we were coming back on Saturday. But we planned to spend the whole day there, and it was still morning, and it had been a wonderful night. G. was quiet for a while, and then, What was I thinking, he said, speaking to himself more than to me. He had waved the waitress away when she approached, the cups in front of us were empty and cold. G. had his cigarettes but I was empty-handed, and suddenly I felt that I should make some gesture of comfort or encouragement, though I wasn’t sure how much encouragement I wanted to give. I had heard enough of his story, I wanted to leave the restaurant and the thick air that made my eyes and my throat ache, I wanted him to stop talking, I wanted to go home.

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

  My belief, reinforced by twenty years of practice, is that in the course of establishing security, many couples confuse love with merging. This mix-up is a bad omen for sex. To sustain an élan toward the other, there must be a synapse to cross. Eroticism requires separateness. In other words, eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other. In order to commune with the one we love, we must be able to tolerate this void and its pall of uncertainties. With this paradox to chew on, consider another: desire is often accompanied by feelings that would seem to cramp love’s style. Aggression, jealousy, and discord come to mind, for starters. I will explore the cultural pressures that shape domesticated sex, making it fair, equal, and safe, but also producing many bored couples. I’d like to suggest that we might have more exciting, playful, even frivolous sex if we were less constrained by our cultural penchant for democracy in the bedroom. To buttress this notion, I take the reader on a detour into social history. We’ll see that contemporary couples invest more in love than ever before; yet, in a cruel twist of fate it is this very model of love and marriage that is behind the exponential rise in the divorce rate. Here it behooves us to question whether traditional marital structures can ever meet the modern mandate, especially when “till death do us part” entails a life span double that of past centuries. The magic elixir that’s meant to make this possible is intimacy. We’ll get to the bottom of this by looking through various lenses, but here it’s worth pointing out that the stereotype of women as entirely romantic and men as sexual conquistadors should have been dispelled a long time ago. The same goes for any ideas that cast women as longing for love, essentially faithful, and domestically inclined, and men as biologically non-monogamous and fearful of intimacy. As a result of social and economic changes that have occurred in recent western history, traditional gender lines have been circumvented, and these qualities are now seen in both men and women. While stereotypes can hold considerable truth, they fall short of capturing the complexities of contemporary relationships. I seek a more androgynous approach to love. As a couples therapist, I have inverted the usual therapeutic priorities. In my field we are taught to inquire about the state of the union first and then ask how this is manifested in the bedroom. Seen this way, the sexual relationship is a metaphor for the overall relationship. The underlying assumption is that if we can improve the relationship, the sex will follow. But in my experience, this is often not the case.

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

  Ratu is a twenty-two-year-old college student at an Ivy League university. She is the daughter of a doctor and a computer programmer, both Indian immigrants, whose years of hard work have paid off in an upmarket lifestyle. Ratu spent twelve years in the highly competitive public schools of New York City, and now hopes to follow her mother into medicine. I met Ratu’s mother at a friend’s going-away party. When I told her the subject of my book, she urged me to interview her daughter. “What I hear from my daughter? It is just unbelievable. So bleak, the way these children treat each other. You really want to know what is going on? You should talk to her. I cannot get my head around it.” I knew I had to meet Ratu, and I did. Bright and articulate, she was like a spokesperson for one of those generations with a letter attached to it—X or Y or whatever they’re up to now. She gave me an illuminating description of the sexual scene on campus. “We don’t really have time to date. So the quick fix is the Friday or Saturday night hookup. You go to a party or you go to a bar; everyone gets drunk, really drunk, and everyone pairs off. It’s over and done with by the time Monday rolls around, after everyone has shared hookup stories over lunch. ‘Hookup’ is sort of a broad term that covers everything from just fooling around to oral sex to full-on sex. “The ideal college relationship is the ‘friends-with-benefits’ scenario. You have a close male friend who you have a lot of fun with and with whom there is a bit of sexual tension. It starts one night when you’re both drunk and run into each other at a bar or something. You go home together, have sex (great or not so great, it doesn’t matter) and then pretend it didn’t happen. The next week this is repeated with the same person, and so on and so forth, until you feel as though you don’t need the pretense of going out and getting drunk. Instead you just call him when you feel like hooking up or if you’re just bored.” This is what Ratu and her friends unapologetically refer to as the booty call. There is an emotional downside, even to this stunningly abbreviated form of coupling. “There comes a point,” Ratu says, “when one party gets more involved than the other and it’s time for the uncomfortable talk. Ground rules are established: this is simply a friends-with-benefits scenario, nothing more, nothing less; and if he or she isn’t OK with that, then it’s over. And then you move on to another friend. We try very hard not to let our emotions get in the way,” says Ratu without a trace of irony.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  So I moved to the terrace where my father and my aunts took turns, on the threshold, at greeting our guests. An imaginary line divided into two parts, with all the young people on one side and their elders on the other, separated as oddly as too different fluids in one and the same container. The young people, all thin, stood about, not very firmly rooted to the ground, and danced according to an exact and almost mechanical pattern; while their stout elders, on the other half of the terrace, sat together in a crowd that had no conventions, eating pickled kidney beans and spitting out the skins onto the floor, all talking loudly and at the same time. Nobody paid any attention to me: I belonged to neither group and understood none of their games. The younger men had set up a phonograph on a chair and were dancing in a kind of frenzy, cutting in all the time on the same few girls and trying to have all the fun they could during the evening. As for the elders, they sat around some twenty tables that were grouped close together and, with a kind of slow concentration, ate, drank, and joked. All our guests were thus occupied, each with his own pleasure. My father and Joseph, his workman, had set up electric wiring across the terrace, but what could the poor blinking of these lights do, against the background of a sky that was too bright, when my imagination had led me to expect brilliant lighting effects and fireworks for the occasion? I was bored. Joseph, with a woman’s apron around his loins, kept running between the kitchen and the tables, a serious expression on his sweating face. Satisfied with the routine of the party that was going so perfectly according to plan, my father wandered from one group of guests to another. True, it was his party too. Two hundred people, he would say later, and food enough for all and more! Bina, the eldest son of our second-floor neighbors, suddenly found me between two dances and teased me gently: “Don’t you want to join us in the dance?” To his smiling invitation, I gave no reply. Like all the others, he had stolen my own party away from me. I was unaccustomed to sitting up late and now the night was well advanced. The hour of congratulations was past. I had been warned that our guests, full of food and drunk, would sleep where they happened to be, all over the terrace and our apartment. So I left them my bed and went to sleep at Uncle Aroun’s. ~ 7. CHOSEN OUT OF MANY ~

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  The “sex recession” can still feel deeply paradoxical: not only are young people generally more sex-positive and more educated about safe sex than previous generations, but facilitating sex is the easiest it’s ever been. From the comfort of my own toilet, I can coordinate a hookup as mindlessly as I can order my third delivery meal of the day. I can use an app designed for sex and dating, or I can jaunt over to the “other” folder of my Twitter DMs, where a lively assortment of come-ons and penis photos await my consideration. I could set something up with one of those guys! My choices, it would seem, are endless. And yet. As any depressed person with a vacuum cleaner can tell you, just because an activity seems to require little effort doesn’t mean it will happen. Every task I hate—paying bills, going to the pharmacy, scouting sex partners—is streamlined on my phone. Nothing has ever been easier than anything, in the history of everything. And yet, and yet, and yet. Janet Brito, a sex therapist in Hawaii, told me that while many of her clients who report dissatisfying sex lives are middle-aged, she sees a large contingent of millennials struggling for distinctly millennial reasons. “They feel connected via social media and don’t have the urge to form intimate relationships, as they seem to find fulfillment in other relationships where their emotional needs are getting met,” she said. “They are busy pursuing other projects, careers, hobbies, and do not have the time to date—in some cases, due to increased social media communication and having very busy schedules.” At first, her reasoning sounded like yet another way to scold young people for adopting new technology, music, and fashions that rot our brains and erode social mores. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that, yes, my phone does help sustain the delusion of a vibrant social life. I cobble together small online flirtations—a retweet from a glasses-wearing musician here, a DM from a high school crush there—into a vital imagined romantic life, one that requires far less of me than a real one. I scavenge for that pleasing ding of validation without needing to leave my home to meet a stranger who could be a murderer or five inches shorter than advertised.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  I am glad dating apps exist. I’m too tired to go to bars, let alone go to bars with an agenda. It is not Hinge’s fault that, during a recent three-minute stretch of oral sex, I wondered if the charming throw blanket I’d seen on the Anthropologie website would go on sale soon, nor is it responsible for the other things that make sex hard to enjoy, like the body-shaming, slut-shaming, and general sex negativity that more screen time forces us to digest more of. While writing this chapter and generally minding my own business, the Instagram algorithm served me a video of a Bible influencer dancing behind text that read, “When you realize the ‘independent woman’ role culture sold you was negatively impacting God’s design for your marriage.” (This same influencer, who instructs on how to “protect your purity” while married, also makes cutesy videos about why you shouldn’t have friends of the opposite sex if you want to preserve “emotional oneness” with your husband.) It’s clear to me that the primary sexual saboteur is not dating apps but apps at large, and their near-total monopolization of our attention, even in the (rare) instances we’re not scrolling. To be clear, moralizing around technology is my nightmare. I refuse to idealize decades past, where we may have been more ~*present*~ in the absence of smartphones but also sanitary pads came with belts and every marginalized group had fewer rights. The positive impacts of technology and, more specifically, the internet, on quality of life are innumerable. Social media networks foster community-building and information-disseminating that couldn’t happen otherwise. Given the heteronormative horrors of contemporary sexual education, the internet is the only safe place for many people to access medically accurate, trans-inclusive information about sexual health. For young queer people who cannot safely come out, social media offers what can be lifesaving community. On a neurological level, studies have shown that the connections we make on social media are processed just like the ones we make in the offline world, and “carry over from the internet to shape ‘real-world’ sociality.”1 What is relatively new, and ominous, is technology’s capacity to rewire our brains, including the neural pathways where we seek and process pleasure. The apps that populate our smartphones are modeled after slot machines, in order to best monopolize (and commodify) our attention, making it harder for us to appreciate slower, less-immediate pleasures in the offline world.2 Anyone who has ever tried to read a book, only to reflexively check Twitter every three minutes, can recognize that smartphones have eroded our attention spans. For most of us, who need time and buildup to experience sexual pleasure, this is bad news: If we require fifteen to twenty minutes of clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm, but have an attention span of three to five, sexual satisfaction will remain out of reach, no matter how skilled our partners, no matter how expensive our sex toys, no matter how vocal our sex-positivity.

• 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.”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “Merry Christmas,” Reva said in a voice mail. “I’m here at the hospital, but I’m coming back to town for the office party tomorrow. Ken will be there, of course. . . .” I deleted her message and went back to sleep. • • • CHRISTMAS DAY, around nightfall, I woke up on the sofa in a restless fog. Unable to sleep or use my hands to work the remote or open the bottle of temazepam, I went out to get my fix of coffee. Downstairs, the doorman sat reading the paper on his little stool. “Merry Christmas,” he yawned, turning the page, barely looking up at me. The sidewalks were piled high with snow. A foot-wide pathway had been shoveled from the entrance of my building to the bodega. My slippers were brown suede with shearling on the inside, and the salt on the ground stained them with white crusts. I kept my head down, away from the biting air and the joy of the holiday. I didn’t want to be reminded of Christmases past. No associations, no heartstrings snagged on a tree in a window, no memories. Since it had turned cold, I’d lived in flannel pajamas, the big down-filled ski jacket. Sometimes I even slept in that jacket because I kept the temperature inside the apartment so low. The Egyptian on duty gave me my coffees for free that night because the ATM had run out of cash. Stacks of old, unsold newspapers were piled up against a broken window next to the fridge of milk and sodas. I read the headlines slowly, my eyes blurring and crossing as I stared. The new president was going to be hard on terrorists. A Harlem teenager had thrown her newborn baby down a sewage drain. A mine caved in somewhere in South America. A local councilman was caught having gay sex with an illegal immigrant. Someone who used to be fat was now extremely thin. Mariah Carey gave Christmas gifts to orphans in the Dominican Republic. A survivor of the Titanic died in a car crash. I had a vague notion that Reva was coming over that night. She probably wanted to pretend to want to cheer me up. “I’ll pay you back for a pack of Parliaments,” I told the Egyptian. “Plus a Klondike bar. And these M&M’s.” I pointed to the peanut kind. He nodded okay. I looked down through the sliding glass cover of the freezer where all the ice cream and popsicles were kept. There was stuff frozen solid at the bottom that had been there for years, embedded in the white fuzz of ice. A glacial world. I stared at the mountains of ice crystals and spaced out for a minute imagining that I was down there, climbing the ice,

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Once the seduction is over, there is the danger that disenchantment will set in and ruin all your hard work (24: Beware the aftereffects). If you are after a relationship, then you must constantly re-seduce the victim, creating tension and releasing it. If your victim is to be sacrificed, then it must be done swiftly and cleanly, leaving you free (physically and psychologically) to move on to the next victim. Then the game begins all over. Give Them Space to Fall— The Pursuer Is Pursued If your targets become too used to you as the ag- gressor, they will give less of their own energy, and the tension will slacken. You need to wake them up, turn the tables. Once they are under your spell, take a step back and they will start to come after you. Begin with a touch of aloofness, an unexpected nonappearance, a hint that you are growing bored. Stir the pot by seeming interested in someone else. Make none of this explicit; let them only sense it and their imagination will do the rest, creating the doubt you desire. Soon they will want to possess you physically, and restraint will go out the window. The goal is to have them fall into your arms of their own will. Create the illusion that the seducer is being seduced. Seductive Gravity In the early 1840s, the center of attention in the French art world was a young woman named Apollonie Sabatier. She was so much the natural beauty that sculptors and painters vied to immortalize her in their works, and she was also charming, easy to talk to, and seductively self-sufficient— men were drawn to her. Her Paris apartment became a gathering spot for writers and artists, and soon Madame Sabatier—as she came to be known, Omissions, denials, although she was not married—was hosting one of the most important lit- deflections, deceptions, diversions, and humility— erary salons in France. Writers such as Gustave Flaubert, the elder Alexan- all aimed at provoking this dre Dumas, and Theophile Gautier were among her regular guests. second state, the secret of Near the end of 1852, when she was thirty, Madame Sabatier received true seduction. Vulgar seduction might proceed by an anonymous letter. The writer confessed that he loved her deeply. Wor- persistence, but true seduc-ried that she would find his sentiments ridiculous, he would not reveal his tion proceeds by absence. . name; yet he had to let her know that he adored her. Sabatier was used to . . It is like fencing: one such attentions—one man after another had fallen in love with her—but needs a field for the feint. Throughout this period,

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  As for the elders, they sat around some twenty tables that were grouped close together and, with a kind of slow concentration, ate, drank, and joked. All our guests were thus occupied, each with his own pleasure. My father and Joseph, his workman, had set up electric wiring across the terrace, but what could the poor blinking of these lights do, against the background of a sky that was too bright, when my imagination had led me to expect brilliant lighting effects and fireworks for the occasion? I was bored. Joseph, with a woman’s apron around his loins, kept running between the kitchen and the tables, a serious expression on his sweating face. Satisfied with the routine of the party that was going so perfectly according to plan, my father wandered from one group of guests to another. True, it was his party too. Two hundred people, he would say later, and food enough for all and more! Bina, the eldest son of our second-floor neighbors, suddenly found me between two dances and teased me gently: “Don’t you want to join us in the dance?” To his smiling invitation, I gave no reply. Like all the others, he had stolen my own party away from me. I was unaccustomed to sitting up late and now the night was well advanced. The hour of congratulations was past. I had been warned that our guests, full of food and drunk, would sleep where they happened to be, all over the terrace and our apartment. So I left them my bed and went to sleep at Uncle Aroun’s. ~ 1. THE CITY ~ My name is Benillouche, Alexandre Mordekhai. How galling the smiles of my classmates! In our alley, and at the Alliance School, I hadn’t known how ridiculous, how revealing, my name could be. But at the French lycée I became aware of this at once. From then on, the mere sound of my own name humiliated me and made my pulse beat faster. Alexandre: brassy, glorious, a name given to me by my parents in recognition of the wonderful West and because it seemed to them to express their idea of Europe. My schoolmates sneered and blared “Alexandre” like a trumpet blast: Alexan-ndre! With all my strength, I then hated them and my name. I hated them, but I believed they were right, and I was furious with my parents for having chosen this stupid name for me. Mordekhai (colloquially, I was called Mridakh) signified my share in the Jewish tradition. It had been the formidable name of a glorious Maccabee and also of my grandfather, a feeble old man who never forgot the terrors of the ghetto. Call yourself Peter or John, and by simply changing your clothes you can change your apparent status in society. But in this country, Mridakh is as obstinately revealing as if one shouted out: “I’m a Jew!”

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  would have managed to buy the harshest critics and make them talk-show celebrities. There is no concrete evidence about the loss of energy in the regime. Indeed, the narrative suggests a remarkable level of energy toward all kinds of state developments, especially in economics and architecture. But one may at least wonder about the “happiness” of Solomon’s community (1 Kgs 4:20; 10:8), which reflects the happiness of satiation. It is at least thinkable that happiness characterized by satiation is not the same as the joy of freedom. It is evident that immunity to any transcendent voice and disregard of neighbor leads finally to the disappearance of passion. And where passion disappears there will not be any serious humanizing energy. [13] While the late critical dating of Ecclesiastes is not to be doubted, one may hypothesize that the tradition was intuitively correct in assigning that teaching to Solomon. [14] I believe that the mood of world-weariness, satiation, boredom, and vanity in that literature is reflective of the Solomonic situation. To the extent that Ecclesiastes reflects a situation of alienation, it likely speaks of a situation like that of Solomon. Solomon had set out to counter the world of Moses’ community of liberation and he had done so effectively. He had traded a vision of freedom for the reality of security. He had banished the neighbor for the sake of reducing everyone to servants. He had replaced covenanting with consuming, and all promises had been reduced to tradable commodities. Every such trade-off made real energy less likely. That is to make a harsh judgment upon a cultural reality that can, on the other hand, make certain positive claims for itself. But we are not engaged in a study of the royal consciousness on its own terms. We are here considering the meaning of prophetic alternative, an alternative to a social world void of criticism and energy. At the same time, we must at least pay attention to the theological contribution of this period in order to be alert to what is there so as not to overstate the prophetic perspective. We may discern two major theological contributions from the period, both of which are important for biblical faith and for the Christian tradition. First, there is little doubt that creation faith is fully and formally articulated by the

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Lo to behold: H.H. toys with the worn interjection, “Lo and behold,” as Lolita did much earlier (And behold). detective: Trapp (Quilty). un ricanement: French, a sneer. Alice Adams: the title of a 1921 novel by Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) about a small-town girl who pines for better things. Browns: “Browns” reappear here, here, and here. Cokes: the 1958 edition did not capitalize the trademark; the error has been corrected. intacta: H.H. uses the Latin form of the common word “intact,” but invokes its less common meaning, “untouched virgin.” boy friend: Quilty. bearded scholar: “Another little bit of prophecy” (see The Bearded Woman read our jingle and now she is no longer single), said Nabokov. “Lots of bearded young scholars around these days.” la pomme de sa canne: French; the round knob of a cane. Mirana: H.H.’s father had owned a Mirana hotel; see Mirana. Proteus of the highway: Quilty; from Greek mythology; a prophetic sea-god in Poseidon’s service, who would assume different shapes when seized. remises: carriage houses. Melmoth: a triple allusion. There is no such car; it is named after the four-volume Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), by Charles Robert Maturin (1782–1824), Irish clergyman and writer (also identified in Keys, p. 31). In his Eugene Onegin Commentary, Nabokov calls Maturin’s Melmoth a “gloomy vagabond” (Vol. II, p. 352). “The book, although superior to [Monk] Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe, is essentially second-rate, and Pushkin’s high regard for it (in the French version) is the echo of a French fashion,” writes Nabokov (ibid., p. 353). Nabokov’s paraphrase of the “action” of Melmoth the Wanderer (ibid.) underscores the humor of naming H.H.’s car after it: [John Melmoth] and his uncle are descendants of the diabolical Melmoth the Traveler (“Where he treads, the earth is parched! Where he breathes, the air is fire! Where he feeds, the food is poison! Where he turns his glance, is lightning.... His presence converts bread and wine into matter as viperous as the suicide foam of the dying Judas ...”). John discovers a moldering manuscript. What follows is a long tale full of tales within tales—shipwrecks, madhouses, Spanish cloisters—and here I begin to nod. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Melmoth’s nature is marked by pride, intellectual glorying, “a boundless aspiration after forbidden knowledge,” and a sarcastic levity that makes of him “a Harlequin of the infernal regions.” Maturin used up all the platitudes of Satanism, while remaining on the side of the conventional angels. His hero enters into an agreement with a Certain Person who grants him power over time, space, and matter (that Lesser Trinity) under the condition that he tempt wretches in their hour of extremity with deliverance if they exchange situations with him.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Twins are indeed an unusual event. I made fun of their absurd play in front of the babies as they tried to make them laugh, rolling their eyes like clowns and grunting. A few guests remembered me too and uttered some kind remarks, but I felt, quite unjustly, that they were being hypocritical or condescending. So I moved to the terrace where my father and my aunts took turns, on the threshold, at greeting our guests. An imaginary line divided into two parts, with all the young people on one side and their elders on the other, separated as oddly as too different fluids in one and the same container. The young people, all thin, stood about, not very firmly rooted to the ground, and danced according to an exact and almost mechanical pattern; while their stout elders, on the other half of the terrace, sat together in a crowd that had no conventions, eating pickled kidney beans and spitting out the skins onto the floor, all talking loudly and at the same time. Nobody paid any attention to me: I belonged to neither group and understood none of their games. The younger men had set up a phonograph on a chair and were dancing in a kind of frenzy, cutting in all the time on the same few girls and trying to have all the fun they could during the evening. As for the elders, they sat around some twenty tables that were grouped close together and, with a kind of slow concentration, ate, drank, and joked. All our guests were thus occupied, each with his own pleasure. My father and Joseph, his workman, had set up electric wiring across the terrace, but what could the poor blinking of these lights do, against the background of a sky that was too bright, when my imagination had led me to expect brilliant lighting effects and fireworks for the occasion? I was bored. Joseph, with a woman’s apron around his loins, kept running between the kitchen and the tables, a serious expression on his sweating face. Satisfied with the routine of the party that was going so perfectly according to plan, my father wandered from one group of guests to another. True, it was his party too. Two hundred people, he would say later, and food enough for all and more! Bina, the eldest son of our second-floor neighbors, suddenly found me between two dances and teased me gently: “Don’t you want to join us in the dance?” To his smiling invitation, I gave no reply. Like all the others, he had stolen my own party away from me. I was unaccustomed to sitting up late and now the night was well advanced.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  Rena stopped and Niki jumped out, cut the tab of one with a pocketknife. “Clothes.” She and Yvonne handed the bags up to me in the back. They were heavier than I’d thought, must have had appliances in the bottom. Yvonne lifted them easily, she was strong as a man. Niki swung the bags, a practiced move. “I’m so tired,” Yvonne said, as we started off again. “I hate my life.” She filled the coffee cup, gulped it down, filled it again and handed it to me. It was instant, hot and too strong. Behind the wheel, Rena dragged on her cigarette, she held it like a pencil. “I told you get rid. What you need baby? Cow.” Rena Grushenka. Rock music and American slang both twenty years out of date, discount Stoli from Bargain Circus. She trained her black magpie eyes on the curb with its neatly arrayed trash cans and recycling bins. She could see in the dark with those eyes. This morning she wore a necklace of silver milagros, arms, hands, and legs. You were supposed to pin them to the velvet skirts of the Virgin to pray, but to Rena they were just pawned body parts. “Hey, turnip people,” she called out the window as we squeezed past an old Cadillac double-parked, a Mexican couple emptying somebody’s recycling. Bagged cans and bottles crammed their trunk and backseat. “Dobro utro, kulaks.” She laughed with her mouth wide open, her gold inlays glinting. They stared at us without expression as we clattered by. Rena sang along with Mick in her thick accent, tapping on the blue steering wheel with the inside of her ring, craning her neck in and out like a chicken. She had a deep voice, a good ear. Niki yawned and stretched in the other captain’s chair. “I need a ride back to work sometime to pick up my truck. Werner took me to his place last night.” She grinned her lop-toothed smile. Rena sipped from her Winchell’s cup. “The knackwurst.” “Four times,” Niki said. “I can hardly walk.” Werner, supposedly a German rock promoter, came to the Bavarian Gardens, where Niki worked three nights a week, though she wasn’t twenty-one. She had a fake ID from one of Rena’s friends. “You should bring knackwurst. I got to meet.” “Fat chance of that,” Niki said. “He gets one look at you bitches, he’ll be on the first plane back to Frankfurt.” “You’re just afraid he’ll see you’re a man,” Yvonne said. Their talk went on like this, ceaseless as waves. I leaned on my forearms against the oxidized blue console between the front seats. Before me lay a collage of debris, like a forest floor: empty black Sobranie packages, fliers in Spanish, a little brush full of black hair, a key ring with a blue rubber coin purse, the kind you squeeze on the sides and the mouth opens up. I played with it, making it sing along to the tape.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I don’t know how it will end. She is younger than she said. We were afraid at first her parents would make trouble for Fred. He asks me to take care of her in the evening. I have taken her to the movies, but the truth is, she bores me. She is so young. We have nothing to say to each other. She is jealous of you. She read what Fred wrote about you. ‘We’re all expecting the goddess today.’ ” I laugh and tell him what I have been thinking. I can see in his face how uninterested he is in Paulette, although he admits it is the first time he is indifferent. “Why, Paulette is nothing,” he says. “I wrote that letter enthusiastically because I enjoyed their enthusiasm, participated in it.” This became a subject of teasing. It was an ordeal for me to go to Clichy to meet Paulette. I was afraid of her and I had wanted to bring her a gift, because she was a foreign presence, a new person in our Clichy life, living there in the way I would like to be living. She was nothing but a child, thin and graceless, but temporarily attractive because she had just been made woman by Fred, and because she was in love. Henry and I enjoyed their childish cooing for a while and then got tired of them, and for the remaining days I spent in Clichy we fled from them. One night when I arrived, Henry had a stomach ache. I had to take care of him as I do of Hugo—hot towels, massage. He was lying on the bed, showing a beautiful white stomach. He slept a while and awoke cured. We read together. We had an amazing fusion. I slept in his arms. In the morning he awoke me with caresses, mumbling something about my expression. Henry’s other face, with which he may someday repudiate all this, is for the moment impossible for me to visualize. Just before this, I had one visit with Allendy, in which I clearly showed a retrogression. I returned to him a rubber préventif he advised me to wear. Interpretation: I wanted to show him I was in a mood of repentence for my “loose life.” This, because Joaquin was taken ill with appendicitis, giving me a feeling of guilt. Then I confessed that certain practices in sexual games do not really appeal to me, like penis sucking, which I do to please Henry. In connection with this, I remembered that a few days preceding my liaison with Henry I couldn’t swallow food. I had a feeling of nausea. Since food and sexuality have a connection, Allendy believes I showed an unconscious resistance to sexuality.

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  There is certainly nothing in the Prologue to indicate that his sights were set on university students, although, of course, he would later release at Paris for general consumption all that he had then completed of the Summa. In any case, there was nothing in 1266-1267 to suggest that Thomas would ever again return to Paris or, in fact, teach in any university whatever. All that he says in the Prologue is that he found existing expositions of theology inadequate. They were a hindrance under three heads for beginners. They indulged in a multitude of useless questions, articles, and arguments. They did not give the essentials of Christian teaching in an ordered fashion but only as these came up in whatever text the writers were commenting on (secundum quod requirebat librorum expositio) or whenever the writers seized on a particular point and dilated on it (vel secundum quod se praebebat occasio disputandi). Finally, writers treated these fundamentals in so many places that the result on the part of the hearers was aversion and boredom. It is often assumed that Thomas is here speaking of texts such as the Bible and the Sentences, but on the surface his plaint, rather, is against writings or commentaries on texts (“ea quae scripta sunt a diversis”) and the procedures employed by their authors (“secundum quod requirebat librorum expositio . . . vel se praebebat occasio disputandi”). Père Chenu and others, however, understand the Prologue as “a reflection on the current teaching method,” where the teacher was bound to the text (librorum expositio) and the principal in a quaestio disputata to “the contingent circumstances of controversy” (occasio disputandi).29 Yet although the subject of this part of the Prologue is texts by various authors (“ea quae scripta sunt a diversis”) and not authoritative texts from the tradition (“ea quae traduntur”), there is a possible ambiguity in the passage, as though Thomas were speaking on two levels at once. For his complaint against the longueurs and disorder in the writings on theology in question ends with a seeming reference to classrooms and teaching (“eorumdem frequens repetitio et fastidium et confusionem generabat in animis auditorum”) rather than, as one would have expected, to reading and studying. If, as well may be, the Prologue has this second edge, criticism on the part of Thomas of his own Dominican educational system is not to be ruled out in favor of the more obvious setting of universities and studia generalia—if, that is, “expositio librorum” also means “teaching a text” and “occasio disputandi” also denotes disputations and disputed questions (“quaestiones disputatae”). For as we know from Humbert of Romans in his Liber a few years earlier, “expositions” of texts (Thomas’s own Expositio in Job, for example) and “disputations” (complete with “opponentes” and “respondentes” and even invited guests) were very much part of the Dominican curriculum.

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  These criticisms by Thomas may even betray a memory of some remarks of his former General there on the office of Lector. Where, for example, Humbert cautions the Lector, when teaching the Bible, the Historiae, and the Sententiae, to keep to the text, to avoid “too many divisions of the matter and frivolous expositions,” and to strive always for the sake of the hearers (“auditores”) after “useful and intelligible questions” (quaestionum utilium intelligentiam), Thomas notes the hazard of a multitude of “useless questions, articles, and arguments” (inutilium quaestionum, articulorum et argumentorum). Again, where Humbert gives advice on the care to be taken to select “useful subjects” for the regular conventual disputations, Thomas underlines the “occasional” role, with respect to the fundamentals of theology, which disputations played. Finally, and more significantly, where Humbert begs the Lector, for the good of his auditores, to refrain from the boring prolixity that is bound to result from too excessive repetition (“a fastidiosa prolixitate quae accidere solet ex nimia repetitione eiusdem”), Thomas likewise makes the point that frequent repetition of the same things tended to generate confusion in the minds of the readers (“eorumdem frequens repetitio et fastidium et confusionem generabat in animis auditorum”).30 On the view, then, of both commentaries on theological texts (the primary plaint, as it seems, of the Prologue) and teaching methods (a secondary or at least implied plaint), the “beginners” there are just as likely to have been Thomas’s students at Santa Sabina and his Dominican brethren in general as beginners at large or in the studia generalia and universities. And even if the Prologue was simply concerned with current methods of teaching theology, then these are as arguably Dominican as those described by Humbert in his Liber are explicitly, and would have been recognizable as such by any of Thomas’s colleagues. But probably it was the drawbacks to the commentaries and glosses in use at the time in the Dominican order that stirred him more than anything else to write his Summa. Remembering his own four years at Orvieto as Lector, and the pronounced summist tradition of practical theology within the order, it is therefore not at all unreasonable to suggest that the texts by various authors (“quae a diversis scripta sunt”) that principally impeded the novitii and incipientes of his Prologue are just as likely to have been the various summae of Dominican authorship to which the young students and the body of fratres communes had to turn for their theology as the better-known or standard treatises of the universities and schools.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  So I moved to the terrace where my father and my aunts took turns, on the threshold, at greeting our guests. An imaginary line divided into two parts, with all the young people on one side and their elders on the other, separated as oddly as too different fluids in one and the same container. The young people, all thin, stood about, not very firmly rooted to the ground, and danced according to an exact and almost mechanical pattern; while their stout elders, on the other half of the terrace, sat together in a crowd that had no conventions, eating pickled kidney beans and spitting out the skins onto the floor, all talking loudly and at the same time. Nobody paid any attention to me: I belonged to neither group and understood none of their games. The younger men had set up a phonograph on a chair and were dancing in a kind of frenzy, cutting in all the time on the same few girls and trying to have all the fun they could during the evening. As for the elders, they sat around some twenty tables that were grouped close together and, with a kind of slow concentration, ate, drank, and joked. All our guests were thus occupied, each with his own pleasure. My father and Joseph, his workman, had set up electric wiring across the terrace, but what could the poor blinking of these lights do, against the background of a sky that was too bright, when my imagination had led me to expect brilliant lighting effects and fireworks for the occasion? I was bored. Joseph, with a woman’s apron around his loins, kept running between the kitchen and the tables, a serious expression on his sweating face. Satisfied with the routine of the party that was going so perfectly according to plan, my father wandered from one group of guests to another. True, it was his party too. Two hundred people, he would say later, and food enough for all and more! Bina, the eldest son of our second-floor neighbors, suddenly found me between two dances and teased me gently: “Don’t you want to join us in the dance?” To his smiling invitation, I gave no reply. Like all the others, he had stolen my own party away from me. I was unaccustomed to sitting up late and now the night was well advanced. The hour of congratulations was past. I had been warned that our guests, full of food and drunk, would sleep where they happened to be, all over the terrace and our apartment. So I left them my bed and went to sleep at Uncle Aroun’s. ~ 7. CHOSEN OUT OF MANY ~

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  ‘Mine’s done up in Algerian style,’ the Pal persisted. ‘It’s no longer in the fashion, but I don’t mind - especially as the furniture is hired. You’ll be sure to recognize many of the photos I’ve put up: and then there’s the portrait of La Loupiote.... Come and have a look at it. Please do.’ ‘I’d like to. Let’s go!’ On the threshold he hailed a taxi. * But d’you never have your motor? Why haven’t you got your motor? It’s really quite extraordinary how people with motors never have their motor! ’ She gathered up her faded black skirts, caught the string of her lorgnette in the clasp of her bag, dropped a glove, and submitted to the stares of the passers-by with the lack of embarrassment of a Negro- Cheri, standing at her side, received several insulting smiles and the admiring condolences of a young woman, who called out: ‘Lord, what a waste of good material!’ In the taxi, patiently and half asleep, he endured the old thing’s tattle. And then some of her stories were soothing: the one about the ridiculous little dog which had held up the return from the races in 1897, and then Mere La Berche eloping with a young bride on the day of her wedding in 1893. ‘ That’s it over there. This door’s stuck, Cheri, I can’t get out. I warn you, there’s not much light in the passage, nor, for that matter, is there much out here. ... It’s only a ground-floor flat, when all’s said and done! ... Wait where you are a second.’ He waited, standing in the semi-darkness. He heard the jingle of keys, the wheezy old creature’s gasps for breath and then her fussy servant’s voice, ‘I’m lighting up. ... Then you’ll find yourself in a familiar landscape. I’ve got electricity, of course. ... There, let me introduce you to my little morning-room, which is also my large drawing-room! ’ He went in, and, from kindness — hardly bothering to glance at it - praised the room; it had a low ceiling and reddish walls, kippered by the smoke of innumerable cigars and cigarettes. Instinctively, he looked all round for the window, barricaded by shutters and curtains. ‘ You can’t see in here? You’re not an old night-bird like your Pal. Wait, I’ll switch on the top light.’ ‘ Don’t bother. .., I’ll just come in and —’ He broke off, staring at the most brightly lit wall, covered with small frames and photographs pinned through the four comers. The Pal began to laugh. ‘ What did I say about a familiar landscape! I was quite sure you’d enjoy looking at them. You haven’t got that one, have you?’

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Jim moves into a vacant garage. Garden implements are dark and strange, like dormant weapons. Immediately someone is with him. Others squat before others. Someone holds a vial of amyl under Jim's nose. He sniffs, the scene explodes in sex. Now he stands by the partition between two buildings— until he notices that only a few feet away two men are fucking. He moves away. The lights of cars cruising the alleys entrap the walking figures, suspend them for moments in crystal light filtered through mist. Now Jim is with a handsome man in an outdoor patio left unlocked. A garden table there, iron-grillwork chairs. Dark windows stare blankly. The two bodies advance, slowly as if not to violate the mesmerized rhythm of the mysterious hunt outside. Both cocks, aroused but spent, touch limply. In the alley again, Jim looks at his watch. Not yet near dawn. VOICE OVER: Four Factions of the Rear Guard VOICE OVER: Four Factions of the Rear Guard 1 I ATTEND A DINNER of gay gentlemen and icy ladies. Our host is a little man who adores collecting people. He looks like a gay monk. On a black and white tiled floor multiplied by mirrors, he's explaining breathlessly in the corridor who the combatants will be tonight: “Oh, the usual Los Angeles royalty— though of course they're all from Pasadena—and our darling Dusty, an ex-Busby Berkeley chorus boy—he'll be 5000 years old in February, and the poor thing still thinks he's the cutest thing in dyed feathers! You'll adore Natasha, she's a Russian duchess, simply devastated by the revolution, and now she's a lab technician but she reads cards. And the wife of Herman von Dern? She never says an intelligent word. Oh, there is a strange little man all in white and one emerald, I think he's famous but God only knows what for!—he's here with his muscleman protégé, a Mr Somebody (you two might like each other)…. Oh, yes, and Otto, a clairvoyant from Orange County. Simply marvelous with earthquakes. Do you know Billy Adams?—the son of Alexa Alexandra?— the silent-movie star? Most people don't know it, but she was a deafmute, and you can imagine what the talkies did to her. And some others— …” He pauses for breath; we're at the ornate door to his apartment. He turns suddenly to me and says: “Oh, and I want to tell you I adore your book!” “Which one?” I ask, somewhat irritated; I've written five, and people still refer to my “book.” “ City of Night , of course,” he says—inevitably. “Oh, it was forward of me to call you out of nowhere—but how else? how else? But let's do go in.