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 Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  A certain Rumanian lieutenant used to be sent off by Edmee to look for concentrated disinfectant and absorbent cotton wool, or again to press a demand upon Ministers — ‘What the government refuses point-blank to a Frenchman, a foreigner gets every time,’ she affirmed. He used to bore Cheri stiff by cracking up the duties of a soldier, fit or nearly fit, and the paradisal purity of the Coictier Hospital. Ch£ri went along there with Edmee, sniffed the smells of antiseptics which relentlessly suggest underlying putrefaction, recognized a comrade among the‘ Trench Feet’, and sat down on the edge of his bed, forcing himself to assume the cordiality prescribed by war novels and patriotic plays. He knew well enough, all the same, that a man in sound health, who had come through unscadied, could find no peer or equal among the crippled. Wherever he looked, he saw the fluttering white wings of the nurses, the red-brick colour of the faces and hands upon the sheets. An odious sense of impotence weighed upon him. He caught himself guiltily stiffening one of his arms as if held in a sling, or dragging one of his legs. But the next moment he could not help taking a deep breath and picking his way between the recumbent mummies with the light step of a dancer. He was forced reluctantly to reverence Edmee, because of her authority as a non-commissioned angel, and her aura of whiteness. She came across the ward, and, in passing, put a hand on Cheri’s shoulder; but he knew that the desire behind this gesture of tenderness and delicate possession was to bring a blush of envy and irritation to the cheek of a young dark-haired nurse who was gazing at Cheri with the candour of a cannibal. He felt bored, and consumed by the feeling of weariness that makes a man jib at the serried ranks of masterpieces before him as he is being dragged round a museum. The plethora of whiteness, thrown off from the ceiling and reflected back from the tiled floor, blotted out all comers, and he felt sorry for the men lying there, to whom shade would have been a charity, though no one offered it. The noonday hour imposes rest and privacy upon the beasts of the field, and the silence of deep woodland undergrowth upon the birds of the air, but civilized men no longer obey the dictates of the sun. Cheri took a few steps towards his wife, with the intention of saying: ‘Draw the curtains, install a punkah, take away that macaroni from the poor wretch who’s blinking his eyes and breathing so heavily, and let him eat his food when the sun goes down. Give them shade, let them have any colour you like, but not always and everywhere this eternal white.’ With the arrival of Doctor Arnaud, he lost his inclination to give advice and make himself useful.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  2I was eleven years old when my father decided that the tutoring I had had, and was still having, at home might be profitably supplemented by my attending Tenishev School. This school, one of the most remarkable in St. Petersburg, was a comparatively young institution of a much more modern and liberal type than the ordinary Gymnasium, to which general category it belonged. Its course of study, consisting of sixteen “semesters” (eight Gymnasium classes), would be roughly equivalent in America to the last six years of school plus the first two years of college. Upon my admittance, in January 1911, I found myself in the third “semester,” or in the beginning of the eighth grade according to the American system. School was taught from the fifteenth of September to the twenty-fifth of May, with a couple of interruptions: a two-week intersemestral gap—to make place, as it were, for the huge Christmas tree that touched with its star the pale-green ceiling of our prettiest drawing room—and a one-week Easter vacation, during which painted eggs enlivened the breakfast table. Since snow and frost lasted from October well into April, no wonder the mean of my school memories is definitely hiemal. When Ivan the first (who vanished one day) or Ivan the second (who was to see the time when I would send him forth on romantic errands) came to wake me around 8 A.M., the outside world was still cowled in brown hyperborean gloom. The electric light in the bedroom had a sullen, harsh, jaundiced tinge that made my eyes smart. Leaning my singing ear on my hand and propping my elbow on the pillow, I would force myself to prepare ten pages of unfinished homework. On my bed table, next to a stocky lamp with two bronze lion heads, stood a small unconventional clock: an upright container of crystal within which black-numbered, ivory-white, pagelike lamels flipped from right to left, each stopping for a minute the way commercial stills did on the old cinema screen. I gave myself ten minutes to tintype the text in my brain (nowadays it would take me two hours!) and, say, a dozen minutes to tub, dress (with Ivan’s help), scutter downstairs, and swallow a cup of tepid cocoa from the surface of which I plucked off by the center a round of wrinkled brown skin. Mornings were botched, and such things as the lessons in boxing and fencing that a wonderful rubbery Frenchman, Monsieur Loustalot, used to give me had to be discontinued.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Another independent writer was Ivan Bunin. I had always preferred his little-known verse to his celebrated prose (their interrelation, within the frame of his work, recalls Hardy’s case). At the time I found him tremendously perturbed by the personal problem of aging. The first thing he said to me was to remark with satisfaction that his posture was better than mine, despite his being some thirty years older than I. He was basking in the Nobel prize he had just received and invited me to some kind of expensive and fashionable eating place in Paris for a heart-to-heart talk. Unfortunately I happen to have a morbid dislike for restaurants and cafés, especially Parisian ones—I detest crowds, harried waiters, Bohemians, vermouth concoctions, coffee, zakuski, floor shows and so forth. I like to eat and drink in a recumbent position (preferably on a couch) and in silence. Heart-to-heart talks, confessions in the Dostoevskian manner, are also not in my line. Bunin, a spry old gentleman, with a rich and unchaste vocabulary, was puzzled by my irresponsiveness to the hazel grouse of which I had had enough in my childhood and exasperated by my refusal to discuss eschatological matters. Toward the end of the meal we were utterly bored with each other. “You will die in dreadful pain and complete isolation,” remarked Bunin bitterly as we went toward the cloakroom. An attractive, frail-looking girl took the check for our heavy overcoats and presently fell with them in her embrace upon the low counter. I wanted to help Bunin into his raglan but he stopped me with a proud gesture of his open hand. Still struggling perfunctorily—he was now trying to help me—we emerged into the pallid bleakness of a Paris winter day. My companion was about to button his collar when a look of surprise and distress twisted his handsome features. Gingerly opening his overcoat, he began tugging at something under his armpit. I came to his assistance and together we finally dragged out of his sleeve my long woolen scarf which the girl had stuffed into the wrong coat. The thing came out inch by inch; it was like unwrapping a mummy and we kept slowly revolving around each other in the process, to the ribald amusement of three sidewalk whores. Then, when the operation was over, we walked on without a word to a street corner where we shook hands and separated. Subsequently we used to meet quite often, but always in the midst of other people, generally in the house of I. I. Fondaminski (a saintly and heroic soul who did more for Russian émigré literature than any other man and who died in a German prison). Somehow Bunin and I adopted a bantering and rather depressing mode of conversation, a Russian variety of American “kidding,” and this precluded any real commerce between us. I met many other émigré Russian authors. I did not meet Poplavski who died young, a far violin among near balalaikas.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  by people on foot, who, coming from Oleron, wish to pass the Gave. The abbot, very well pleased at their incurring an expense which would increase the number of pilgrims, fur- nished them with workmen ; but he was so miserly that he would not contribute a farthing of his own. The workmen, however, having declared that it would take at least ten or twelve days to construct the bridge, the company began to grow tired. Parlamente, the wife of Hircan, always active and never melancholy, having asked her husband's permis- sion to speak, said to old dame Oisille, " I am surprised, madam, that you, who have so much experience that you fill the place of a mother to the rest of us women, do not devise some amusement to mitigate the annoyance we shall suffer from so long a delay ; for unless we have something agree- able and virtuous to occupy us, we are in danger of falling sick." "What is still worse," said Longarine, the young widow, " we shall grow cross, which is an incurable malady ; the more so as there is not one of us but has cause to be extremely sad, considering our several losses." " Everyone has not lost her husband like you," said Enna- suite, laughing. " To have lost servants is not a matter to break one's heart, since they can easily be replaced. How- ever, I am decidedly of opinion that we should pass the time away as agreeably as we can." Nomerfide, her companion, said it was a very good idea, and that if she passed one day without amusement, she should be dead the next. The gentlemen all warmly approved of the proposal, and begged dame Oisille to direct what was to be done. " You ask a thing of me, my children," replied the old lady, " which I find very difficult. You want me to invent an amusement which shall dissipate your ennui. I have been in search of such a remedy all my life long, and I have never found but one, which is the reading of Holy Writ. It is in §uch reading that the mind finds its true and perfect joy 8 PROLOGUE

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  Hanno Buddenbrook still let his forehead rest on his crossed arms. So they sat in silence for a while. Suddenly, somewhere in the distance, a dull humming sounded, which quickly became a roar and within half a minute it was threatening to roll over... "The people," Kai said bitterly. 'Lord, my God, how quickly they are finished! Less than ten minutes shortened the hour..." He descended from the lectern and went to the door to mingle with those who came. As for Hanno, he raised his head for just a moment, grimaced, and just sat there. It came, with slurping, pounding and a tangle of male voices, trebles and overturning alternating organs, flooded up the stairs, spilled over the corridor and also streamed into this room, which was suddenly filled with life, movement and noise. They came in, the young people, Hanno's and Kai's comrades, the junior high school students, about twenty-five in all, strolled to their places with their hands in their pockets or swinging their arms and opened their Bibles. There were pleasant and confiscated physiognomies, some that looked well and healthy and others that looked precarious, tall, strong rascals who soon wanted to be merchants or even go to sea and didn't care about anything anymore, and little ones above her old age advanced nerds, who excelled in subjects requiring memorization. But Adolf Todtenhaupt, the leader, knew everything; he had never owed an answer in his lifetime. This was partly because of his quiet, passionate industry, partly because the teachers were careful not to ask him anything he might not have known. It would have hurt and shamed her, it would have shaken her belief in human perfection to see Adolf Todtenhaupt fall silent... He had a strangely hunched skull, to which blond hair was glued smooth as a mirror, grey, black-rimmed eyes and long, brown ones Hands sticking out of the too-short sleeves of his neatly brushed jacket. He sat down next to Hanno Buddenbrook, smiled softly and a little slyly and bade the neighbor a good morning, accommodating the prevailing jargon which distorted the word into a bold and careless tone. Then, while everyone around him was chattering, getting ready, yawning and laughing, he began to work silently on the class register, manipulating the pen in an incomparably correct way with slender and straight fingers. After the lapse of two minutes footsteps were heard outside, the occupants of the front pews rose unhurriedly from their seats, and further back this and that followed their example, while others did not let themselves be disturbed in their occupations and hardly noticed that Mr Headteacher Ballerstedt came into the room, hung his hat on the door and went to the lectern. He was in his forties with a likeable embon point, with a large bald head, a reddish-yellow, short beard, a rosy complexion and a mixed expression of unction and comfortable sensuality about his moist lips.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  This formula roughly expresses the phenomena, it is true, but cannot possibly be an elementary psychic law; and it is certain that, in great part at least, the foreshortening of the years as we grow older is due to the monotony of memory's content, and the consequent simplification of the backward-glancing view. In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse. So much for the apparent shortening of tracts of time in retrospect. They shorten in passing whenever we are so fully occupied with their content as not to note the actual time itself. A day full of excitement, with no pause, is said to pass 'ere we know it.' On the contrary, a day full of waiting, of unsatisfied desire for change, will seem a small eternity. Tædium, ennui, Langweile, boredom, are words for which, probably, every language known to man has its equivalent. It comes about whenever, from the relative emptiness of content of a tract of time, we grow attentive to the passage of the time itself. Expecting, and being ready for, a new impression to succeed; when it fails to come, we get an empty time instead of it; and such experiences, ceaselessly renewed, make us most formidably aware of the extent of the mere time itself. [541] Close your eyes and simply wait to hear somebody tell you that a minute has elapsed. The full length of your leisure with it seems incredible. You engulf yourself into its bowels as into those of that interminable first week of an ocean voyage, and find yourself wondering that history can have overcome many such periods in its course. All because you attend so closely to the mere feeling of the time per se, and because your attention to that is susceptible of such fine-grained successive subdivision. The odiousness of the whole experience comes from its insipidity; for stimulation is the indispensable requisite for pleasure in an experience, and the feeling of bare time is the least stimulating experience we can have. [542] The sensation of tædium is a protest, says Volkmann, against the entire present. Exactly parallel variations occur in our consciousness of space.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  I felt as if I were being visited by the ghost of Christmas future, and the ghost was saying, “Hey, Don, you’re going to end up like this guy: A yuppie Christian writer with no backbone!” [image "9780785263708_0104_002" file=Image00037.jpg] I think my desire to believe in a god other than Jesus had mostly to do with boredom. I wanted something new. I wanted something fresh to think about, to believe, to twiddle around in my mind. I understand the plight of the children of Israel, to be honest. Moses goes off to talk to God, he doesn’t come back for a while, and so the people demand a god they can see and touch—a god they can worship with the absolute certainty it exists. So they build a golden cow (odd choice, but to each his own). Moses comes back from talking with God and finds the children of Israel worshiping a false god, so he goes postal. I imagined myself as the children of Israel when Moses comes down off of the mountain. “What are you doing, Don?” Moses asks. “Worshiping a golden cow.” “Why? Why would you reject the one true God?” “Because I don’t get to see Him or talk to Him. I am not even certain that He exists.” “Are you on crack, Don? Weren’t you there when God parted the Red Sea? Weren’t you there when God fed us from the ground, made water from a rock, led us with a cloud?” Moses screams. “Calm down, Mosey. Listen, man, you always go up and talk to God and come back with a sunburn, and you have God hover around your tent in a cloud, and you have God turn your staff into a snake, and we get nothing. Nothing! It’s not like we have this personal communication going with God, you know, Moses. We are just sheep out here in the desert, and, honestly, we were better off as slaves to the Egyptians. That is where your God brought us. We need a god too. We need a god to worship. We need a god to touch and feel and interact with in a very personal way. So I made a cow. You can also wear it as a necklace.” “Don,” Moses responds, “before I put you to death and send you home to the one true God, I want you to understand something. I want you to understand that God has never been nor ever will be invented. He is not a product of any sort of imagination. He does not obey trends. And God led us out of Egypt because you people cried out to Him. He was answering your prayers because He is a God of compassion. He could have left you to Satan. Don’t complain about the way God answers your prayers. You are still living on an earth that is run by the devil. God has promised us a new land, and we will get there.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  with all the indulgent, loving and compassionate superiority of the lowly over the noble, who seeks salvation. They were by no means stupid creatures, and in their small, ugly, shriveled parrot heads sat blank, softly veiled brown eyes, which looked out at the world with a strange expression of gentleness and knowledge... Their hearts were full of wonderful and mysterious knowledge. They knew that in our last hour all our loved ones who have gone before God come singing and blissfully to pick us up. They spoke the word "the Lord" with the ease and originality of the first Christians, who had heard the "About a little thing, then you will see me" from the Master's own mouth. They had the strangest theories about inner lights and forebodings, about telepathy and wanderings of thought ... because Lea, one of them, was deaf and nevertheless almost always knew what was being talked about. Since Lea Gerhardt was deaf, it was usually she who read on Jerusalem evenings; the ladies also thought they were beautiful and touchingly read. She took from her purse an ancient book, which was ridiculously and disproportionately much taller than it was wide, and contained in the front, engraved in copper, the superhumanly plump-cheeked portrait of her ancestor, and she took it in both hands and read, so that she might hear herself a little. in a terrible voice that sounded like the wind caught in the stovepipe: "If Satan wants to devour me..." So! thought Tony Grünlich. What Satan would want to devour them! But she said nothing, held on to the pudding for her part and wondered whether one day she would be as ugly as the two Miss Gerhardts. She wasn't happy, she was bored and annoyed with the pastors and missionaries, whose visits might have increased after the Consul's death and who, in Tony's opinion, ran the house too much and got too much money. The latter matter concerned Thomas; but he said nothing about it, while his sister murmured now and then to herself about people eating widows' houses and praying long prayers. She hated these black gentlemen most bitterly. As a mature woman who had learned life and was no longer a fool, she found herself unable to believe in her absolute holiness. "Mother!" she said; 'Oh God, one shouldn't say anything bad about one's neighbour... well, I know it! But there is one thing I must say, and I would be surprised if life hadn't taught you that, and that is that not everyone who wears a long skirt and says 'Lord, Lord!' is always spotless!" It remained unexplained how Thomas reacted to such truths, which his sister defended with tremendous emphasis. But Christian had no opinion at all; he limited himself to observing the gentlemen with a wrinkled nose, in order to deliver their copies to the club or to the family afterwards... But it is true that Tony suffered most from the spiritual guests.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  By themselves such variations in intensity would leave us liable to confound more vivid representations in the distance with fainter ones nearer the present, but from this mistake the temporal signs save us; where the memory-continuum is imperfect such mistakes continually occur. On the other hand, where these variations are slight and imperceptible, though the memory-continuum preserves the order of events intact, we have still no such distinct appreciation of comparative distance in time as we have nearer to the present, where these perceptive effects are considerable. . . . Locke speaks of our ideas succeeding each other 'at certain distances not much unlike the images in the inside of a lantern turned round by the heat of a candle,' and 'guesses' that 'this appearance of theirs in train varies not very much in a waking man.' Now what is this 'distance' that separates a from b, b from c, and so on ; and what means have we of knowing that it is tolerably constant in waking life? It is, probably, that, the residuum of which I have called a temporal sign; or, in other words, it is the movement of attention from a to b ." Nevertheless, Mr. Ward does not call our feeling of this movement of attention the original of our feeling of time, or its brain-process the brain-process which directly causes us to perceive time. He says, a moment later, that " though the fixation of attention does of course really occupy rime, it is probably not in the first instance perceived as time—i.e. as continuous 'protensity,' to use a term of Hamilton's—but as intensity. Thus, if this supposition be true, there is an element in our concrete time-perceptions which has no place in our abstract conception of Time. In Time physically conceived there is no trace of intensity; in time psychically experienced, duration is primarily an intensive magnitude, and so far literally a perception." Its 'original' is, then, if I understand Mr. Ward, something like a feeling which accompanies, as pleasure and pain may accompany, the movements of attention. Its brain-process must, it would seem, be assimilated in general type to the brain-processes of pleasure and pain. Such would seem more or less consciously to be Mr. Ward's own view, for he says: "Everybody knows what it is to be distracted by a rapid succession of varied impressions, and equally what it is to be wearied by the slow and monotonous recurrence of the same impressions. Now these 'feelings' of distraction and tedium owe their characteristic qualities to movements of attention.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  There is a law, he says, by which the apparent length of an interval at a given epoch of a man's life is proportional to the total length of the life itself. A child of 10 feels a year as 1/10 of his whole life—a man of 50 as 1/50, the whole life meanwhile apparently preserving a constant length. This formula roughly expresses the phenomena, it is true, but cannot possibly be an elementary psychic law; and it is certain that, in great part at least, the foreshortening of the years as we grow older is due to the monotony of memory's content, and the consequent simplification of the backward-glancing view. In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse. So much for the apparent shortening of tracts of time in retrospect . They shorten in passing whenever we are so fully occupied with their content as not to note the actual time itself. A day full of excitement, with no pause, is said to pass 'ere we know it.' On the contrary, a day full of waiting, of unsatisfied desire for change, will seem a small eternity. Tædium , ennui , Langweile , boredom , are words for which, probably, every language known to man has its equivalent. It comes about whenever, from the relative emptiness of content of a tract of time, we grow attentive to the passage of the time itself. Expecting, and being ready for, a new impression to succeed; when it fails to come, we get an empty time instead of it; and such experiences, ceaselessly renewed, make us most formidably aware of the extent of the mere time itself.[541] Close your eyes and simply wait to hear somebody tell you that a minute has elapsed. The full length of your leisure with it seems incredible. You engulf yourself into its bowels as into those of that interminable first week of an ocean voyage, and find yourself wondering that history can have overcome many such periods in its course. All because you attend so closely to the mere feeling of the time per se , and because your attention to that is susceptible of such fine-grained successive subdivision.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  You went to Obersalzbrunn, to Ems and Baden-Baden, to Kissingen, from there you even made an educational and entertaining trip via Nuremberg to Munich, through Salzburg via Ischl to Vienna, via Prague, Dresden, Berlin home ... and although Madame Grünlich was forced to undergo strict treatment in the baths because of a nervous indigestion that she had recently begun to notice, and she found these trips a highly desirable change, for she made no secret of the fact that she was a little bored at home. "Oh, my God, you know how life goes, father!" she said, looking thoughtfully at the ceiling... "Of course I've known life... but that's why it's a somewhat bleak prospect for me, always having to sit at home here like a silly thing. I hope you don't think that I don't like being with you, papa ... I should have had a beating, it would be the greatest ingratitude! But as it is in life, you know..." Above all, however, she resented the ever more religious spirit that filled her sprawling father's house, for the consul's pious inclinations became more and more evident as he grew old and sickly, and as the consul grew older, she too began to pursue them to find a taste for the spirit. Graces had always been customary in the Buddenbrooks' house; but now the law had existed for a long time that mornings and evenings the family and the servants would gather in the breakfast room to hear a passage from the Bible from the master of the house. Besides, the visits of pastors and missionaries increased from year to year, for the dignified patrician house in Meng Street, where, by the way, one dined so excellently, was in the Lutheran world and Reformed clergy, long known as a hospitable haven to the internal and external missions, and from all parts of the fatherland black-clad and long-haired gentlemen occasionally came to linger a few days... of godly conversation, some nourishing meals, and sounding support for holy purposes certainly. Even the preachers of the city went out and in as family friends... Tom was far too discreet and understanding to even smile, but Tony was simply mocking himself, yes, unfortunately she made a point of ridiculing the clergy whenever she got the chance. Sometimes, when the consul suffered from migraines, it was up to Madame Grünlich to take care of the housekeeping and set the menu. One day, when a strange preacher, whose appetite aroused the general joy, was visiting the house, she insidiously ordered bacon soup, the city special dish, a bouillon prepared with sour herbs, in which the whole luncheon meal: ham, potatoes, sour plums, baking pears, cauliflower, peas, beans, turnips and other things, along with the fruit sauce, which no one in the world could enjoy who wasn't used to it from childhood. »Does it taste good? Is it tasty, Mr. Pastor?” Tony kept asking… “No?

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  Nothing is going to change in the Congo until you and I figure out what is wrong with the person in the mirror. 3 Magic The Problem with Romeo WHEN I WAS A CHILD MY MOTHER TOOK ME TO see David Copperfield the magician. I think she had a crush on him. It was the same year he made the Statue of Liberty disappear on national television. Later he made a plane disappear and later still he got engaged to Claudia Schiffer. David Copperfield said, at the beginning of the show, that there is no such thing as magic. Everything he would do would be an illusion. He got into a box and his sexy assistants turned the box upside down. When they opened it again he wasn’t there. He made a lady levitate. He turned a tiger into a parrot, then back to a tiger, only the wrong color for a tiger, then back to the right color. Everybody gasped. There was a man in front of me with a fat head, so I had to lean over to see. Later I became a magician myself. My mother bought me a magic set, and I studied the book that came with it. I could make three pieces of string turn into one long piece and one long piece into three pieces. I made a nickel pass through a plate. I guessed whatever card you pulled out of a deck. I was amazing. I was going to get very good at it, hire a sexy assistant and move to Vegas. After a few months, though, I got frustrated because everything that was magic was only a trick, meaning it wasn’t really magic, it was an illusion. I decided to grow up and become an astronaut with a sexy assistant. I imagined myself in a fancy white astronaut outfit with a girl who looks like Katie Couric gazing sheeplike at me while I worked levers and buttons on our flying saucer. Every few minutes Katie would wipe my brow. Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they’re shy. I have one friend who is so shy she wets her pants if you look at her. She doesn’t really wet her pants, but she practically does. She is very good-looking, too, but never goes out because she is so shy. If you didn’t know her pretty well, you wouldn’t think she wants to do anything but hide in a closet. You wouldn’t think she wants to be anybody people look at, but she told me after I got to know her that she wanted to be an actress. After you get to know her you forget how shy she is, so I told her to go and be an actress; she certainly is good-looking enough to be an actress. But later I thought that might not be a good idea because she’d probably get up in front of people and start crying or something because she is so shy.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  I think my desire to believe in a god other than Jesus had mostly to do with boredom. I wanted something new. I wanted something fresh to think about, to believe, to twiddle around in my mind. I understand the plight of the children of Israel, to be honest. Moses goes off to talk to God, he doesn’t come back for a while, and so the people demand a god they can see and touch—a god they can worship with the absolute certainty it exists. So they build a golden cow (odd choice, but to each his own). Moses comes back from talking with God and finds the children of Israel worshiping a false god, so he goes postal. I imagined myself as the children of Israel when Moses comes down off of the mountain. “What are you doing, Don?” Moses asks. “Worshiping a golden cow.” “Why? Why would you reject the one true God?” “Because I don’t get to see Him or talk to Him. I am not even certain that He exists.” “Are you on crack, Don? Weren’t you there when God parted the Red Sea? Weren’t you there when God fed us from the ground, made water from a rock, led us with a cloud?” Moses screams. “Calm down, Mosey. Listen, man, you always go up and talk to God and come back with a sunburn, and you have God hover around your tent in a cloud, and you have God turn your staff into a snake, and we get nothing. Nothing! It’s not like we have this personal communication going with God, you know, Moses. We are just sheep out here in the desert, and, honestly, we were better off as slaves to the Egyptians. That is where your God brought us. We need a god too. We need a god to worship. We need a god to touch and feel and interact with in a very personal way. So I made a cow. You can also wear it as a necklace.” “Don,” Moses responds, “before I put you to death and send you home to the one true God, I want you to understand something. I want you to understand that God has never been nor ever will be invented. He is not a product of any sort of imagination. He does not obey trends. And God led us out of Egypt because you people cried out to Him. He was answering your prayers because He is a God of compassion. He could have left you to Satan. Don’t complain about the way God answers your prayers. You are still living on an earth that is run by the devil. God has promised us a new land, and we will get there. Your problem is not that God is not fulfilling, your problem is that you are spoiled.”

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  He had opened the Old Testament behind the back of the man in front of him, read it with an expression of consummate innocence and devoted thoughtfulness, then stared at a point on the wall and spoke, translating what he saw into a helpless, modern German with faltering and squeaking coughs... There was something extremely disgusting about him but Herr Ballerstedt praised him greatly for all his efforts. The student Wasservogel had it good in life insofar as most of the teachers praised him willingly and above his merits, to show him, themselves and the others that their ugliness in no way led them to injustice... And the religion lesson continued. Various young people were also called upon to share their knowledge To evict Job, the man in the land of Uz, and Gottlieb Kassbaum, son of the merchant Kassbaum who had an accident, received an excellent grade in spite of his broken family circumstances, because he was able to determine with accuracy that Job had seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yokes of cattle, had five hundred donkeys and a great many servants. Then the Bibles could be opened, most of which were already open, and the reading continued. Whenever there was a passage that Mr. Ballerstedt thought needed explanation, he would splutter, say, "Well..." and, after the usual preparations, give a short lecture, mixed with general moral considerations, on the point in question. Nobody listened to him. Peace and sleepiness reigned in the room. The heat had become quite intense from the constant heating and the gas lamps, and the air was already quite spoiled by these twenty-five bodies breathing and steaming. The warmth, the gentle hum of the flames and the monotonous voice of the reader wrapped themselves around the bored brains and lulled them into dull dreamy bliss. In addition to his Bible, Kai Graf Mölln also had Edgar Allan Poe's "Incomprehensible Events and Mysterious Deeds" open in front of him and was reading them with his head resting on his aristocratic and not entirely clean hand. Hanno Buddenbrook sat leaning back and slumped and stared at the Book of Job with slack mouth and swimming, hot eyes, the lines and letters of which blurred into a blackish swarm. Sometimes, when he remembered the motif of the Grail or the walk to the Minster, he slowly lowered his eyelids and felt an inward sob. And his heart prayed that it might be possible that this safe and peaceful morning hour would never come to an end. propped his head on his aristocratic and not entirely clean hand.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  He was a medium-sized, dark-haired man, with an exceedingly yellow complexion, two ridges on his forehead, a hard and greasy beard and hair. He always looked tired and unwashed, but that was probably due to deception. He taught science, but his major was mathematics, and he was considered a major thinker on the subject. He loved to speak of the philosophical passages of the Bible, and at times, in a good and dreamy mood, would deign to give strange expositions of mysterious Scriptures before juniors and juniors... But he was also a reserve officer, and he was enthusiastic about it. As a civil servant who was also in the military, Director Wulicke put him on good terms. Of all the teachers, he believed in discipline the most, scrutinized the front of the students who were standing to attention with a critical eye and demanded short and sharp answers. This mixture of mysticism and dashing was a little off-putting... The fair copies were shown, and Doctor Marotzke went about tapping each notebook with his finger, while certain students who hadn't written anything showed him completely different books or old works without his noticing. Then he began the lesson; and as Ovid has just said on occasion, the twenty- five young people now overwhelmed their zeal with regard to boron, chlorine, or strontium to report. Hans Hermann Kilian was commended for knowing that BaSO 4 or heavy spar is the most common counterfeiting agent. In general, he was the best because he wanted to be an officer. Hanno and Kai didn't know anything, and in Doctor Marotzke's notebook they fared badly. And when the exams, interrogations and testimonies were over, everyone's interest in the chemistry lesson was as good as exhausted. Doctor Marotzke started doing a few experiments, popping a little and developing colored fumes, but that was just to fill up the rest of the lesson. Finally he dictated the workload to be learned for the next time. Then the doorbell rang, and the third hour was over. Everyone was in good spirits, except for Petersen, who had been hit today, because now came a merry hour that no soul need fear and which promised nothing but mischief and amusement. It was English with the candidate Modersohn, a young philologist who had been working in the institution on a trial basis for a few weeks or, as Kai Graf Mölln put it, was doing a guest performance on engagement. But he had little chance of being hired; it was all too cheerful in his hours...

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I had been waiting now at Holland Park for a long time. I was far too familiar with its typical social mix: girls with pearls and pink stockings, some arrogant-looking Italian youths and a grand, pouchy old couple were also waiting, though the train they would get into would be quite heavily peopled with blacks and Indians coming in from Acton to the West End. That was the saving grace of the Central Line, the way that beyond Shepherd’s Bush and Liverpool Street, it veered off at either end to outlying towns to the north. I stood for a minute or more with my toes over the platform’s edge, looking down into the concrete gully where a whole family of nervous, sooty little mice shot back and forth as if themselves operated by electricity. Then, thinking again about the abolished stations at the British Museum and Wood Green, I wandered along and looked, tourist-like, at the Underground map. It was a clever piece of work, all the lines being made to run either up and down, from left to right, or at forty-five degrees, so that the whole thing became a set of dissolving and interpenetrating parallelograms. It was perhaps only of that very stretch of the Central Line which I always travelled that its fastidious rectilinearity gave a true picture: from Shepherd’s Bush to Liverpool Street the line had that Roman straightness which I so admired above ground and which below contributed to the great speed the trains sometimes got up. In rush-hour congestion though, the trains collected behind each other, and there would be long, numbing waits in the tunnels. Then I hated the Underground. My fondness for it was anyway somewhat forced, and my concern with the smaller details of its history and performance had been worked up artificially to give it some faint aesthetic interest after I had been banned from driving. (Unhappily, I had had a few too many glasses of Pimm’s when I was caught by my blind spot, twitching out to overtake and smacking into a little old car that was trundling past me, invisible in either of my mirrors … My mother was now using my Lancia for her forays into Fordingbridge and for her occasional journeys up to London from the ranch in Hants.) So I made the best of the Tube, and found it often sexy and strange, like a gigantic game of chance, in which one got jammed up against many queer kinds of person. Or it was a sort of Edward Burra scene, all hats and buttocks and seaside postcard lewdery. Whatever, one always had to try and see the potential in it.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  The window beside him was made of two long panes, the upper of which slid down, though whatever latch or catch should have held it was broken, and we had lodged bits of paper in the corners to hold it open. He reached up, curling his fingers around the top edge, and hauled himself to his feet, standing on the bench so that his head was above the lowered pane; he stared out over the fields we passed, his view unencumbered by the clouded glass. The train had picked up speed, and his hair was pushed about in the moving air. He began playing a game, turning his head quickly and repeatedly from right to left, focusing his sight on an object and following it as we passed; it was something I had done, too, staring out of windows on long trips in the car. Poor boy, I thought, he had nothing at all to do, no toys or books, though perhaps he was too young for books, and with the prospect of many hours to fill. He turned away from the window, facing the back wall, and reached up toward the metal rack where we had placed our luggage. Then, taking the edge of the rack in both hands, he lifted himself up, his right leg striking out for the window, seeking purchase. This woke his grandmother, who grabbed the leg nearest her and tugged on it, saying Dolu , down, saying it again when he dropped to the seat but remained standing. Sit down, she said, you’re bothering these people, they want to read, and it was true that we had stopped reading, having turned to look instead at the two of them; but I didn’t feel bothered, he was more interesting than my book. I’m bored, he said, skuka mi e , it’s a long trip, I want to do something. His grandmother sighed. It’s not so long, she said, other children manage to sit and to be good. I’ll never sit, the boy cried, squaring his shoulders, and he repeated the word never, nikoga , separating each of the syllables, throwing them like little punches in the air. I laughed, I couldn’t help it, and the man across from me laughed too; even the grandmother smiled, it was too charming to resist. The boy looked surprised at our laughter, as if he had forgotten about us, and then he glanced at each of us in turn with his enormous smile, thrilled with the impression he had made. Only my mother was left out, and she reached urgently across to grip my arm, asking what he had said, wanting to know before the moment passed.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  For the next few minutes I watched as the man leaned forward and back and the fly was covered and revealed. Almost every time the coat was lifted it made another movement upward toward the point where the man’s shoulder met the glass; Don’t do that, I said under my breath, that’s the wrong way. It was ridiculous to care so much, I knew, it was just a fly, why should it matter; but it did matter, at least while I watched it. That’s all care is, I thought, it’s just looking at a thing long enough, why should it be a question of scale? This seemed like a hopeful thought at first, but then it’s hard to look at things, or to look at them truly, and we can’t look at many at once, and it’s so easy to look away. Downtown, at Orlov Most, Eagle Bridge, the bus finally got less crowded, with half or so of the passengers stepping off and many fewer getting on. The woman beside me stood up, much to my relief, and the man leaning against the glass left too, moving with the others to escape the bus. I looked eagerly for the housefly, and when I saw no sign of it I stood, before the new riders climbed on, and scanned the floor to see if it had fallen. But there was nothing there either, and I sat down again at a loss. There were only a few more stops before we entered Gotse Delchev and turned onto residential streets, and since I was unfamiliar with the route now I moved to be near the door, where I leaned out to read the name of each station that we passed. But I needn’t have worried; the polyclinic had its own stop and several people got off there, leaving the bus almost empty as we stepped down into the snow. It was a broad gray concrete structure of four or five stories, much larger than the clinic near the school, nearly a hospital. The steps leading up to the entrance were perilous, packed with ice, as was the unusable wheelchair ramp to my left. I climbed up carefully, planting both feet on a single stair before chancing another, feeling how easily I could lose my footing, feeling elderly, and wondering how the genuinely infirm could possibly manage. The ground floor of the building was a large, echoing space that seemed unfinished; the floors were untreated, little more than concrete, the walls coated in bare plaster. There was no reception or information desk, only a large notice board with the departments organized by floor, the doctors’ names on long plastic strips that could be taken out and replaced.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Valérie came forward with a smile of welcome. She was not beautiful nor was she imposing, but her limbs were very per- fectly proportioned, which gave her a fictitious look of tallness. She moved well, with the quiet and unconscious grace that sprang from those perfect proportions. Her face was humorous, placid and worldly; her eyes very kind, very blue, very lustrous. She was dressed all in white, and a large white fox skin was clasped round her slender and shapely shoulders. For the rest she had masses of thick fair hair, which was busily ridding itself of its hairpins; one could see at a glance that it hated restraint, like the flat it was in rather splendid disorder. She said: ‘ I’m so delighted to meet you at last, Miss Gordon, do come and sit down. And please smoke if you want to,’ she added quickly, glancing at Stephen’s tell-tale fingers. Brockett said: ‘ Positively, this is too splendid! I feel that you're going to be wonderful friends.’ Stephen thought: ‘ So this is Valérie Seymour.’ No sooner were they seated than Brockett began to ply their hostess with personal questions. The mood that had incubated in the motor was now becoming extremely aggressive, so that he fidgeted about on his chair, making his little inadequate ges- tures. ‘ Darling, you’re looking perfectly lovely! But do tell me, what have you done with Polinska? Have you drowned her in the blue grotto at Capri? I hope so, my dear, she was such a bore and so dirty! Do tell me about Polinska. How did she behave when you got her to Capri? Did she bite anybody before you drowned her? I always felt frightened; I loathe being bitten!’ 280 THE WELL OF LONELINESS Valérie frowned: ‘I believe she’s quite well.’ ‘Then you have drowned her, darling!’ shrilled Brockett. And now he was launched on a torrent of gossip about people of whom Stephen had never even heard: < Pat’s been deserted — have you heard that, darling? Do you think she’ll take the veil or cocaine or something? One never quite knows what may happen next with such an emotional temperament, does one? Arabella’s skipped off to the Lido with Jane Grigg. The Grigg’s just come into pots and pots of money, so I hope they'll be de- liriously happy and silly while it lasts — I mean the money. . . . Oh, and have you heard about Rachel Morris? They say. . . X He flowed on and on like a brook in spring flood, while Valérie yawned and looked bored, making monosyllabic answers.

• From Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women (Erotic Fiction) (2006)

  “Perhaps we should leave it where it lies in its incorrigible heat,” added the third. “In time, I think, it will rehabilitate to something much more palatable.” So saying, the three set out for a morning walk in the woods, where they leisurely wandered about, amusing themselves with anecdotes about the wildlife that dwelled there. The animals scampered about happily, unsuspecting of any insult in the barons’ mocking innuendos. While the barons were thus discharged, Goldilocks discovered their secluded cottage. As she was not often of the mind to address her subjects directly, she approached the house cautiously. Very stealthily, so as not to be discovered, she advanced toward the back of the cottage and peered into a window. This glimpse did not provide the verification she sought, however, so she proceeded to another window, and then another, until she was finally satisfied that the house was, for the moment, abandoned. Goldilocks crept up to the front entryway and put her ear against the door. There was not a sound to be heard within. Next she ventured a timid knock, to which there was no response. She tentatively turned the doorknob and, delighted to find the door unlocked, she opened it up and poked her head inside. After a moment, she stepped into the house and closed the door behind her. Once inside the cottage, Goldilocks immediately noticed the porridge, dished out in bowls upon the table. As she was unmindful of the offense she committed by entering the barons’ cottage uninvited, it should not shock the reader that Goldilocks would further impose by tasting their food, which was so carefully laid out that she imagined it must have been intended for a guest such as herself to eat. Indeed, it would have seemed downright rude not to have done so. Besides, one can learn quite a lot about persons by the food that they eat, she reasoned neatly. And so, without further thought or consideration over the matter, she seated herself before one of the bowls and lifted the spoon to her lips. “Oh,” she exclaimed, jerking back. “This is too hot!” She pulled out her notebook and jotted down a few words. Then she moved to the second bowl to taste of it. But she nearly choked on that one as well, remarking, “This is too cold.” Again she scribbled in her notebook. But the third bowl was more to her liking, and she said, “This is just right!” She made another quick notation before finishing the contents of that bowl.