Confusion

Passages

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

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• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  169 the producer. The Father—one of the six characters—argues that ¿ ctional characters are more “real” than living ones, since they are ¿ xed eternally, while a living person is constantly changing and subject to the À ux of time. The idea of art being immortal while humans are transient is not in itself a brand new one; it can be found in Shakespeare’s sonnets and in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” among many other works. Pirandello, however, puts it to different use. Pirandello, in a preface to the play, says that whenever a reader opens Dante’s Inferno, Francesca will drift down from the dark wind in her circle of Hell and tell the Pilgrim her story; and it will always be for the ¿ rst time—just as the Mother in Pirandello’s play at one point makes an agonized cry, always for the ¿ rst time. In the play each of the six characters sees events and other characters differently from each other. Each character has a sense of who he or she is and what has happened, but their readings do not match up, which is why it takes so long to get even a provisional draft of their story. The playwright suggests that any one character is no more correct than another; there are as many versions of the story as there are characters in the play. Each character is in fact many different characters: each has his or her own sense of who he or she is, but each is also what other characters think he or she is. There is no guarantee that a character’s sense of himself or herself is more accurate than those of other characters. Every self is what it has been at different times and what it has seemed to other characters at different times. This is illustrated by one of the scenes that was written for the six characters—a scene that occurs in Madame Pace’s shop—which each character reads in a different way. The Daughter thinks of the Father as a reprehensible character; he thinks of himself as a decent character who got caught in an aberration which was “out of character” for him. There is no ¿ nal way to resolve these differences. The play leaves its audience with several questions: What is a self, apart from what it does from moment to moment? Who is right about the Father? Is there a real self that stands outside of things that it does? In exploring these themes, Pirandello is participating in a larger debate that was going on in the ¿ rst part of the century about the “self” and what it is. Joseph Wood Krutch, in Modernism in Modern Drama , argued in 1953

• From Escape (2007)

  Truman was Barbara’s talkative nine-year-old son who was a grade behind in school. When he returned from the bathroom, the big Greyhound bus was gone. He tried not to attract any attention and sat alone on the sidewalk. After a while one of the cashiers inside noticed him and wondered if he might have been part of the busload of kids dressed in strange clothing that had stopped by earlier. Truman told her he’d been on the bus. The cashier took him inside and called the police. When the police arrived they began questioning him. (Truman recapped this for us after he was rescued, and it was a story told and retold in the family for at least five years.) As he told us the story, Truman said that when he was asked where he lived, he said, “At the creek.” He told the officers, “My dad’s name is Father, and sometimes I hear people calling my mom Barbara.” The police asked if he was on a school trip with other children. Truman told them, “Of course not. It is only my father’s family. We don’t take other families with us.” He said he had fourteen brothers but he didn’t know how many sisters, except that there were more girls than boys. At the police station the questioning continued. Somehow the officers figured out that Truman’s father owned a construction company called General Rock and Sand, in Page, Arizona. With that information as a starting point, police were able to get the license number for Merril’s van. When the police officer asked Truman why his family was taking a vacation, he said, “It’s because father just married two new wives and he is taking them on a honeymoon with the whole family.” An alert went out with the license number of Merril’s van. We had driven several hours beyond Flagstaff without Truman. I was thinking what a relief it would be to finally get to Phoenix and sleep when I heard sirens from a police car and saw the flashing lights. Merril’s van pulled over and so did the bus. The officers spoke to Merril, who then boarded the bus. When he got back in the van he said, “Well, I guess we left Truman at one of the rest stops in Flagstaff. I’ve sent the bus on to the hotel and Nathan will get everyone settled in for the night. We are going to drive back to Flagstaff and get Truman.”

• From Escape (2007)

  The surgeon called Ruth and explained how serious his condition was. While his vital signs were good, he still was not stable. Ruth called Merril and asked if she could go to the hospital. She wanted to do what was right for Luke. Merril ripped into her and told her he had everything under control. Her only concern, he pointed out, should be to do the will of her husband. After Ruth called, Merril called his oldest son, Fred. Fred’s second wife, Josette, was in the hospital with her sick baby. She went to check on Luke and asked him how he was doing. He said he felt better. While they were chatting, the surgeon arrived and mistook Josette for Luke’s mother. “I’m so glad you finally found a way to get to the hospital,” she said. “I’ve been doing everything I can to get ahold of you!” “How do you think he’s doing?” Josette asked out of genuine curiosity. The surgeon went through a detailed explanation of Luke’s condition, explaining that even though he was holding his own, there was still a possibility that his spleen could rupture, which might require emergency surgery. After she’d finished explaining Luke’s status, the surgeon told Josette that she didn’t look young enough to have a seventeen-year-old son. “Oh, I’m not old enough to be Luke’s mother. I’m not his mother.” The surgeon looked stricken. “Then who are you?” Josette didn’t want to say she was the second wife of Luke’s half brother. So she said she was just a friend from Colorado City who was in the hospital with her sick baby and had dropped in to say hello. The surgeon nearly lost it at this point. She was angry and frustrated that she couldn’t connect with one of Luke’s parents. It compromised her ability to ensure that he got the best care. She saw it as a matter of life and death. Luke was less concerned. He was getting hungry. Because he might need to have surgery, he was only getting IV fluids. Merril and Barbara decided at the end of the day in Las Vegas that they were too tired to make the trip to see Luke and postponed it for another day. Merril called Leroy and asked him to go back to the hospital. When he did, he found his brother watching TV. “I’m so hungry I could die,” Luke said. “Well, a man can’t live on no food. Let’s go out and get you something to eat.” Leroy helped Luke get up and disconnected his IV. He fished his clothes out of the plastic bag in the closet and the two boys walked past the nursing station and out of the hospital. Leroy bought a big steak dinner for the two of them.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I lowered my eyes but thought prayer sounded rather useless. I stood and thanked him. He walked me to the door and told me to come back. I wondered if he would pick me up into his arms, but he didn’t. I was small enough, but he didn’t. Instead he gave me his hand to shake, which I didn’t really like since I was uncertain about how to shake it. The gesture was also, I recognized, a way of treating me with respect as an independent young man. I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted to be. This precocious role I took in the world was possible only because the world seemed so unreal, the stage transected by lights, its fourth wall missing in order to afford a view to thronged but shadowy spectators. Everything I did was being watched. If I turned right rather than left, someone took careful notice. If I repeated a magic phrase, the words were recorded and obeyed. Those spectators were certainly real, though I did not know them yet, but what they were watching, this dumb show in which I played such a decisive role—it was merely a simulacrum of actual feelings. These tears were paste. What was slowly dawning on me was my extreme importance, something the audience had long ago suspected. Who were they, these spectators? I’d look up into the evening sky to see them ranked in blowing white robes, the hems wet with blood. When I had a fever I could hear them. We moved to a city several hundred miles to the north and there we lived in a luxury hotel, sedate and respectable, a place with goldfish in a low marble pool in the lobby and a small velvet settee on the elevator. On the top floor a valet steamed and pressed clothes in a closet beside the double doors that opened onto a ballroom. The windows of the ballroom were heavily and perpetually draped and curtained, but I discovered a tiny door just two panes high that led out onto a narrow balcony. This balcony obviously was not intended to be used, just a strip of gravel over tar behind an escarpment of stone ornamental urns. In good weather I’d hide on this secret balcony and read; my favorite book was about the lost dauphin. On some days the ballroom was set up with long banquet tables bearing napery and floral arrangements between rows of gilt and velvet chairs. Other days the room would smell of stale cigarette smoke and the tables would have been stripped to their scarred wood tops and pipe-metal bases.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  And yet I’d known all along it was something mysterious and anguished beyond my experience, if not my comprehension. We had a maid, Blanche, who inserted bits of straw into her pierced ears to keep the holes from growing shut, sneezed her snuff in a fine spray of brown dots over the sheets when she was ironing and slouched around the kitchen in her worn-down, backless slippers, once purple but now the color and sheen of a bare oak branch in the rain. She was always uncorseted under her blue cotton uniform; I pictured her rolling, black and fragrant, under that fabric and wondered what her mammoth breasts looked like. Although she had a daughter five years older than I (illegitimate, or so my stepmother whispered significantly), Blanche sounded like a young girl as she hummed to a Negro station. When she moved from one room to the next, she unplugged the little Bakelite radio with the cream-colored grille over the brown speaker cloth and took it with her. That music excited me, but I thought I shouldn’t listen to it too closely. It was “Negro music” and therefore forbidden—part of another culture more violent and vibrant than mine but somehow inferior yet no less exclusive. Charles, the handyman, would emerge from the basement sweaty and pungent and, standing three steps below me, lecture me about the Bible, the Second Coming and Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey and Langston Hughes. Whenever I said something, he’d laugh in a steady, stylized way to shut me up and then start burrowing back into his obsessions. He seemed to know everything, chapter and verse—Egyptians, Abyssinians, the Lost Tribe, Russian plots, Fair Deal and New Deal—but when I’d repeat one of his remarks at dinner, my father would laugh (this, too, was a stylized laugh) and say, “You’ve been listening to Charles again. That nigger just talks nonsense. Now don’t you bother him, let him get on with his work.” I never doubted that my father was right, but I kept wondering how Dad could tell it was nonsense. What mysterious ignorance leaked out of Charles’s words to poison them and render them worthless, inedible? For Charles, like me, haunted the library; I watched his shelf of books in the basement rotate. And Charles was a high deacon of his church, the wizard of his tribe; when he died his splendid robes overflowed his casket. That his nonsense made perfect sense to me alarmed me—was I, like Charles, eating the tripe of knowledge while Dad sat down to the steak?

• From Escape (2007)

  Another woman became upset when she heard this. She started accusing us of not following the prophet’s will. It had become illegal to say the word fun. Warren Jeffs had banished that word from all use. So if we were being silly or lighthearted in any way, we could be reported as being in rebellion to the prophet. This kind of tension was new to me. I’d never been to a coffee at Linda’s where women censored themselves or criticized something another woman said. These clandestine get-togethers were the one place we could really be ourselves and talk openly. I was very confused. When I said something negative about Warren, my cousin Jayne kicked me under the table. I looked at her as if to say, What’s your problem? Jayne just put her finger up to her mouth. I was at a complete loss. The woman who was upset about the reference to Jim Jones left. We all concluded that those who were upset about the “drinking the punch” comment had already taken a few swigs. After she did, the conversation became more freewheeling. I learned about secret tapings that had been going on. Men would be called into Warren’s office and asked their views on a religious topic or issue. He’d then play a taped conversation in which they’d talked about the same issue, usually in a cell phone conversation. If there was a disparity between what the man said and what Jeffs had preached to believers, he’d be put on notice that he had to get in harmony with the prophet. (Men had also begun reporting on one another to Warren to try to get in his good graces so they wouldn’t be kicked out of the community.) I also learned about how Warren had bugged the meetinghouse of a rival FLDS bishop in Canada. None of us felt comfortable with any of this, but we were not going to bring it up with our husbands because it could get us in trouble if word got around that we were questioning Warren. Someone else talked about a woman we all knew who was caught having an affair with a young boy after her husband was given a new wife. Because of the affair, she was told that she had committed a sin unto death. Despite the fact her husband had been taken from her, she was still considered his property and he would rule her destiny in the afterlife. Because of her adultery, she was condemned to be a servant to him and his wives in heaven for all eternity. Warren banished her to her uncle’s home, where she lived, in effect, under house arrest. She was not allowed to be a mother to her children and could only see them on short, supervised visits if her husband gave his approval. There could never be forgiveness for her in this life. She was condemned to die the second death and her soul would be destroyed forever.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  Craig moved quickly to comply. He sat on his repositioned towel and draped his arm around my other shoulder. I took a deep breath, looked at Daddy, over to Craig and back at Daddy. What’s with me? Prickly fingers were kneading my stomach, just like before a final exam I wasn’t prepared for. Only now my abdomen was a cauldron sending flashes of hot fire throughout my body. Don’t I even get a vote? Guess not. I’m not Daddy’s slave—I didn’t sign a contract giving him absolute authority and power. Still, I’m his boy—I passed my qualifying exams long ago. And we discuss lots of things, like picking TV shows, even coming here. He must’ve really fallen for Craig. Shit! Guess I’ll just gave to play along and see what happens. Fuck! Do I really have any choice? Daddy rested his free hand on my knee. “It’s okay, boy.” Craig withdrew his hand, folded his palms in his lap and lowered his head. “I should leave,” he mumbled. I looked over at him. Aside from Daddy, he was the only man I had met who possessed the sublime mixture of passion, compassion and beauty I desired. He wore his selfless mantle well, even in wet, skimpy Speedos, no regal robes required. “Don’t leave,” I whispered. Now what? Then, like the chorus from Verdi’s Nabucco, “Fly thought, on golden wings,” a compelling concept rose to my consciousness. “Daddy’s love, my love, yeah, like…like our love, can grow to include others,” I mumbled sotto voce. Craig and Daddy looked at each other. “Let’s hightail it to our room and explore this situation,” Daddy suggested. I stood. Craig slowly rose and hugged me, tentative at first, but I melded into him and he squeezed the breath from me. Daddy stepped into his clown pants, I slid into my beach bum shorts and Craig wrapped his towel around his waist. We packed our crap and hiked back to our condo, swaggering as close as our paraphernalia would allow, but with no hands free to clutch and swing. We passed under tall palm trees, all trimmed to a fair-thee-well and coconut-free, of course, to protect the tourists, past lush, manicured gardens with a panoply of plants, none of which I recognized, except orchids and huge white and yellow trumpet bushes. We provoked a few stares, but so fuckin’ what? I was escorted by two gorgeous hunks, perfect candidates for Buckingham Palace Guards. A thought surfaced: Some Daddies have a stable of boys; can a boy have more than one Daddy? We scuttled across the lobby and past the SHIRTS REQUIRED sign. Daddy forced a closing elevator door open, and we squeezed into the crowded lift, our backs and chests sporting a few droplets of water and stubborn grains of sand, to a few “Humpfs.” Tough shit, prim and proper prudes! We added our masculine aroma to a metallic shell that imprisoned the stench of perfume, aftershave, and aloha shirts drenched with perspiration and cigar smoke.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  She didn’t know much about dating women, either. She had recently broken up with a man named Peter, after he asked her to marry him and move to Belize. Every time he kissed her, she could feel a part of herself looking away from him, toward something else that she could not then make out. But when, after three years together, he had asked her to marry him, two things suddenly resolved into sharper focus—that she had been with him only because being with him was easier than no longer being with him, and that she’d been waiting for a moment when this would no longer be the case. Sigrid lifted her glass and examined it, but she didn’t seem like she was in a rush to change the subject. She had the sturdy, upright patience of an elementary-school teacher. Her eyes were very green, Marta noticed. “You’re not much of an Anne Boleyn,” Sigrid said, and the name darted through Marta’s mind like a swift silver fish. There was something there, a glimmer of recognition—or, no, maybe just a desire to have the conversation over with. She had not thought much about history in some time, in years, really. She had studied chemical engineering as an undergraduate and now she worked at a waste-processing plant in Baraboo. She might have told Sigrid this, except that the look on Sigrid’s face, with its precise concentration, wedged inside her like a splinter. “Definitely not Catherine Howard.” “I don’t know who they are, but I’ll take your word for it,” Marta said. The wine was too sweet for her. She didn’t much like wine. She preferred Coors or Old Milwaukee, beer of the pale, weak variety. It may have been the result of spending all her time in college around engineers, who drank shitty beer and leaned over their notebooks and parsed their calculations long into the night. She had often woken up on their couches smelling sour and raw, with rulers stuck to her thighs. That’s how she had met Peter and fallen in with him: they saw each other so much that it seemed natural that they should date, and when he asked her to the movies, she’d said, Okay, all right, sounds good. On that first date with Sigrid, she was still sad about Peter, and uneasy, and if this was how dating women was going to be, a series of increasingly esoteric questions, she wasn’t sure she liked it that much, either. “This won’t work,” Sigrid said, and Marta felt a little pulse of fear. “What won’t work?” “This,” she said, gesturing wildly. “You retreating, falling into silence. It won’t work.” “I’m sorry,” Marta said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say or do. I don’t know anything about Henry the Eighth, or whoever.” “That’s fine,” Sigrid said. “You say that, except I told you before, when you asked me, that I didn’t know much about it.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Two developments were unfolding within me, or rather two quite different stories about a single life were getting told. In one, Dr. O’Reilly’s version, I was wrestling with my unconscious, an immense, dark brother who seeped around me when I was awake, flowed over me when I slept, who sometimes invaded my body, caused my pen or tongue to slip, who erased a name from the blackboard of memory—a force with a baby’s features, greedy orifices, a madman’s cunning and an animal’s endurance, a Caliban as quicksilver as Ariel. This doppelganger was determined to confine me to what I’d already experienced and to deny me adventure, as though life were a cynical editor of gothic romances who demanded that every novel conform to a formula, who might accept slight variations in detail so long as the plot remained the same. O’Reilly’s job was to outwit this brilliant tyrant. While I observed the rounds in this psychoanalytic struggle, a quite different, less lurid, more scattered sort of story was taking place within me, one that lacked narrative drive or even direction. It sprang up without warning like mushrooms after rain; it came and went, circled around itself, died away and then was crawling like moss over the rock face of my will. Like a whole rootless plantation of algae, it washed in tides of longing and self-loathing. For the real movements of a life are gradual, then sudden; they resist becoming anecdotes, they pulse like quasars from long-dead stars to reach the vivid planet of the present, they drift like fog over the ship until the spread sails are merely panels of gray in grayer air and surround becomes object, as in those perceptual tests where figure and ground reverse, the kissing couple in profile turn into the outlines of the mortuary urn that holds their own ashes. Time wears down resolve—then suddenly violence, something irrevocable flashes out of nowhere, there are thrashing fins and roiled, blood-streaked water, death floats up on its side, eyes bulging. If I had the skill I’d write about the way that place—the cold corridors of the school, its symmetrical parterres of snow, the replicas of the “Discobulos” and “Dying Gaul”—how that place became the espalier which my moods crept up. I’d find a way to connect moods to weather, to rhyme books I was reading with bouts of illness I endured, to link pop tunes of the moment with persistent fantasies I concocted (I was Rimbaud; Verlaine loved me so much he fired on me; I endured, lonely, smoking cigarettes on an African beach), I’d place Buddhism over Hesse, divide a laugh I borrowed from a popular senior with an incurable rash on my left ankle I scratched day after day—all figures in an algebraic equation in which X would stand for Stimmung and Y for truth.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  I stewed the tomatoes and added a bunch of spices and stuff. No meat.” “It smells so good,” he said. The sauce had a rich texture as she turned it over and over itself, stirring quickly so that a skin didn’t form. The pot itself was battered and gray, probably lifted from some thrift shop or Salvation Army. “You’re welcome to have some!” “I’d love to,” he said. Each of them had a bowl of the pasta and Sophie’s tomato sauce. Lionel didn’t remember seeing any at the potluck last night, but then there’d been so many options, and he hadn’t been especially hungry. He ate slowly, chewing through the whole-wheat noodles and sucking the sauce from them discreetly. He enjoyed the heat of the food, the way its flavor settled beneath the pain of his tongue burning. Chewing also made his cheek sting, and he found himself faintly aroused by the discomfort, thinking each time his jaws shifted of how Charles had bitten him. Charles sucked down the food so fast that Lionel doubted he even tasted it. Sophie also ate quickly, but neatly. She had a small piece of fish on the side, but she hadn’t offered him any. Lionel put his head down and tried to focus on the act of eating. Lifting his fork to his mouth and getting the food inside. Chewing it. Swallowing. Looking pleased and complacent. Content. “Do the dishes, Charlie,” Sophie said after they were done. She took both her bowl and Lionel’s, and she handed them to Charles, who didn’t even blink. He took the bowls to the kitchen and turned on the faucet. Sophie stretched and drummed her hands against her stomach. “I’m full.” “That was great,” he said. “Thanks.” “Where’s your roommate?” “Oh, who knows? She’s probably in a lab somewhere. She studies chemistry.” “Cool,” Lionel said. “Chemistry is intense.” “She’s intense,” Sophie said. “Way intense.” “Is that bad?” “No, she’s great. I like her a lot, but . . . well.” “I think I get that,” Lionel said. He wondered if this was how people saw him. Intense. Way intense. If they said things like I like him a lot, but . . . well. The pause hanging off like something heavy with meaning. Was it weird that he was here, that he’d accepted her invitation to come along? He was never really sure when people were being polite or when they were actually being nice. Since his time at the hospital, his life had become a series of outstretched hands, gently guiding, so it was hard, even now, to tell when someone wanted him to come along or when they didn’t.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “You’d think Pupi were here himself,” Miri heard one of the guests say, reminding her that Uncle Henry was dancing with Leah to the real, live Pupi at the Riviera. Miri had to admit Tewky Purvis was a good dancer, the way he twirled Rusty but never lost control, the way Rusty was able to follow his every move. As far as Miri knew, the only place Rusty danced was in her bedroom, though sometimes she’d turn on the record player in the living room and try to get Miri to be her partner. As a little girl, Miri had loved to jitterbug with her mother, but not anymore. Miri preferred to watch Steve Osner dancing with Phil Stein’s cousin Kathy, who wore a dark-green strapless velvet dress. She laughed a lot, and when she did, her dark eyes sparkled and crinkled up. You could tell Steve was gaga over her. Maybe she was gaga over Steve, too, even though she was a year ahead of him, already a college girl. Miri could recognize love now, or maybe it was attraction she recognized—either way, she knew it when she saw it. She could feel it when it was in the air and it was in the air around Steve Osner and Kathy Stein. Natalie gave her a nudge. They were sitting on the steps leading up to the kitchen. “See those earrings my mother’s wearing?” Corinne was dancing with Dr. O. “Daddy gave them to her for Hanukkah. She let me try them on. She said someday I’ll find a husband who’ll give me diamond earrings. Then she reminded me for the millionth time, it’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich boy as a poor boy, which is interesting, considering Daddy was a poor boy who had to work his way all through school. She said even though some people say diamonds aren’t important, they are. I didn’t tell her I’m never getting married.” “Since when?” Miri asked, surprised. “Since I promised Ruby my career as a dancer would always come first.” “Do you think you should be making promises to someone who’s…” She stopped herself just in time. “I told you,” Natalie said, annoyed. “She’s not dead. She’s living inside me.” “But what does that mean?” Natalie shook her head. “You’re not even trying to understand.” Miri wanted to understand what Natalie was trying to tell her. For all she knew it was possible. Just because she’d never heard of having a dead person living inside you, didn’t mean it couldn’t happen. She’d read about spirits, about ghosts. Not that she believed they were real. No, she argued with herself, this thing with Natalie was crazy. It was impossible. Natalie was going nuts. Maybe she should tell someone. But Natalie trusted her with her secret. If she told, she’d be betraying her best friend, wouldn’t she? Or would she be helping her? Miri wasn’t sure. This was a secret she wished she’d never heard.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  11 And if thy idle thoughts had not been Elsan waters about thy mind, and their pleasantness a Pyramus to the mulberry, by so many circumstances alone thou wouldst recognize in the tree morally, God’s justice in the ban. But because I see thy mind turned to stone and, stonelike, such in hue that the light of my word dazes thee, 12 I also will that thou bear it away within thee, and if not written at least outlined, for the reason that the pilgrim’s staff is brought back wreathed with palm.” 13 And I: “Even as wax under the seal, that the imprinted figure changeth not, my brain is now stamped by you. But why doth your longed-for word soar so far beyond my sight, that the more it straineth the more it loses it?” “That thou mayst know,” she said, “that School which thou hast followed, and see how its teaching can keep pace with my word; and mayst see your way so far distant from the divine way, as the heaven which highest speeds is removed from earth.” Wherefore I answered her: “I remember not that I e’er estranged me from you, nor have I conscience thereof that gnaws me.” “And if thou canst not remember it,” smiling she answered, “now bethink thee how thou didst drink of Lethe this very day;

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The November night went on and on endlessly, exactly like that ghost train in my story, dim rolling stock gliding slowly over the clicking place where the tracks switched, the constant bass hum of that somnolent progress passing over that one tenor break, the riveted and rusting bulkheads emblazoned with the mud-spattered logos of distant places, everything stately as destiny. I could hear the night’s freight cars clicking past, and the sky shook out its hair, silver clouds backlit by the moon. In this measured silence Rachel told me about her own conversion from Judaism to the Church of England, an enlightenment she attributed to her chance reading of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters and the simultaneous revelation that Jesus had quite literally died for her sins. She spoke with peculiar emphasis about the nails in Christ’s wrists and hands and she even drew a little sketch on the telephone message pad of how she thought the nails had looked (she’d been doing some research into Aramaic pig iron). When I nodded respectfully but with a visible mote of scorn in my eye, she quite accurately read my thoughts. “Oh, I see, you think I’m some no ’count Baptist, huh, some raving redneck?” She spoke with an unaccustomed crudeness. “Well, I respect your religion,” I spluttered, “but I’m a bit of an agnostic personally and I—” “You’re full of shit,” she told me. She was looking right into my eyes. She was breathing emphatically, as though breath were psychic italic marks. She’d pushed her pageboy back from her face and shoved the sleeve of her madras blouse up to expose a pale biceps. She was halfway up out of her chair and leaning toward me. “Shit,” she said, her eyes darting for a second up to some invisible cue card before fixing me again. I felt she was torn between shyness and holy fury. “Jesus died for you,” she said, “and that’s something the greatest poets, Eliot and Dante and Donne, that’s something they knew—and they weren’t Florida crackers.” “Bravo,” DeQuincey whispered in awe. He turned to me with an isn’t-this-gal-great? grin—“She’s done it again, she’s really done it this time”—and he shook his head in admiring disbelief at the sheer wacky brilliance of his wife’s spiritual daredevilry. Exhausted by her performance, she shrank back into her chair, then rose and toddled off to the dark bedroom beyond. The moment DeQuincey and I were alone he stiffened, which I attributed to the embarrassment he must be feeling about his confession to me of his homosexual past. Not that he was attracted to me, nor I to him, but the possibility of attraction existed now and our sexual self-consciousness richocheted like sunlight in the Hall of Mirrors.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  And yet I’d known all along it was something mysterious and anguished beyond my experience, if not my comprehension. We had a maid, Blanche, who inserted bits of straw into her pierced ears to keep the holes from growing shut, sneezed her snuff in a fine spray of brown dots over the sheets when she was ironing and slouched around the kitchen in her worn-down, backless slippers, once purple but now the color and sheen of a bare oak branch in the rain. She was always uncorseted under her blue cotton uniform; I pictured her rolling, black and fragrant, under that fabric and wondered what her mammoth breasts looked like. Although she had a daughter five years older than I (illegitimate, or so my stepmother whispered significantly), Blanche sounded like a young girl as she hummed to a Negro station. When she moved from one room to the next, she unplugged the little Bakelite radio with the cream-colored grille over the brown speaker cloth and took it with her. That music excited me, but I thought I shouldn’t listen to it too closely. It was “Negro music” and therefore forbidden—part of another culture more violent and vibrant than mine but somehow inferior yet no less exclusive. Charles, the handyman, would emerge from the basement sweaty and pungent and, standing three steps below me, lecture me about the Bible, the Second Coming and Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey and Langston Hughes. Whenever I said something, he’d laugh in a steady, stylized way to shut me up and then start burrowing back into his obsessions. He seemed to know everything, chapter and verse—Egyptians, Abyssinians, the Lost Tribe, Russian plots, Fair Deal and New Deal—but when I’d repeat one of his remarks at dinner, my father would laugh (this, too, was a stylized laugh) and say, “You’ve been listening to Charles again. That nigger just talks nonsense. Now don’t you bother him, let him get on with his work.” I never doubted that my father was right, but I kept wondering how Dad could tell it was nonsense. What mysterious ignorance leaked out of Charles’s words to poison them and render them worthless, inedible? For Charles, like me, haunted the library; I watched his shelf of books in the basement rotate. And Charles was a high deacon of his church, the wizard of his tribe; when he died his splendid robes overflowed his casket. That his nonsense made perfect sense to me alarmed me—was I, like Charles, eating the tripe of knowledge while Dad sat down to the steak?

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  contradict. Many a time ere now, my brother, hath it come to pass that to flee peril things were done, against the grain, that were unmeet to do; so did Alcmæon, moved by his father’s prayer, slay his own mother, 15 and not to sacrifice his filial piety became an impious son. At this point, I would have thee think, violence receiveth mixture from the will, and they so work that the offences may not plead excuse. The absolute will consenteth not to the ill, but yet consenteth in so far as it doth fear, should it draw back, to fall into a worse annoy. Wherefore, when Piccarda expresseth this, she meaneth it of the absolute will, and I of the other; so that we both speak truth together.” 16 Such the rippling of the sacred stream which issued from the Spring whence all truth down-floweth; and being such, it set at peace one and the other longing. “O love of the primal Lover, O divine one,” said I then, “whose speech o’erfloweth me and warmeth, so that more and more it quickeneth me, my love hath no such depth as to suffice to render grace for grace; but may he who seeth it, and hath the power, answer thereto. Now do I see that never can our intellect be sated, unless that Truth shine on it, beyond which no truth hath range. Therein it resteth as a wild beast in his den so soon as it hath reached it; and reach it may; else were all longing futile. Wherefore there springeth, like a shoot, questioning 17 at the foot of truth; which is a thing that trusteth us towards the summit, on from ridge to ridge. This doth invite me and giveth me assurance, with reverence, lady, to make question to thee as to another truth which is dark to me. I would know if man can satisfy you so for broken vows, with other goods, as not to weigh too short upon your balance.” Beatrice looked on me with eves filled so divine with sparks of love, that my vanquished power turned away, and I became as lost with eyes downcast. 1. Daniel divined the dream Nebuchadnezzar had dreamed as well as the interpretation of it (Daniel ii). So Beatrice knew what problems were exercising Dante’s mind as well as what were the solutions. 2. In the Timæus which was accessible to Dante in the Latin paraphrase of Chalcidius. Dante’s direct knowledge of Plato was doubtless confined to this one dialogue. The doctrine ascribed to Plato, implicitly here and explicitly in Conv. ii. 14 and iv. 21 (compare Eclogue ii), goes somewhat beyond the warrant of the text either in the Greek or Latin. 3. Piato’s doctrine (as understood by Dante) is poisonous because it ascribes to the admitted influences of the heavenly bodies such a pre-potency as would be fatal to the free will, and therefore to mortality. Cf. Purg. xvi and xviii. Epist. viii. 4.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Navy blue was as close as it got. Still, who knew what they’d find inside? Miri had clipped an ad from the Daily Post : THIS SEASON GIVE HER NYLON TRICOT BY VANITY FAIR. She wasn’t sure about nylon tricot but the ad from Nia’s showed a half-slip for $3.99, something her mother might appreciate since she’d been complaining about the worn-out elastic waistbands of hers. A single chime announced the opening of the door as Miri and Suzanne entered the shop. Inside, it was busy with holiday shoppers but not overwhelming the way it would be at Levy’s or Goerke’s, the other downtown department store. The shoppers, all women, talked in hushed voices. A small white Christmas tree with silver ribbons threaded through its branches, topped by a silver angel, sat on the display table. Satin bedroom slippers and delicate bed jackets in pale colors were arranged around the tree. Who wore bed jackets? Rusty had a woolly robe and two flannel nightgowns for winter, and a seersucker robe and a few cotton nightgowns for summer. Maybe movie stars who were served breakfast in bed wore bed jackets. But there were no movie stars in Elizabeth, New Jersey. None that Miri knew of, anyway. Even Mrs. Osner didn’t have a bed jacket. If she did it wasn’t hanging in her closet, because Miri had been through that closet a hundred times, ever since she and Natalie had become best friends two years ago. Miri and Suzanne were still babysitting partners and ate lunch at the same cafeteria table every day—they just weren’t bests. “Can I help you?” a pretty young woman asked Miri. “Are you Nia?” Miri hadn’t planned to say that. It just slipped out. “I’m Athena, her daughter. What can I show you today?” Athena —Miri didn’t know anyone named Athena. Such an exotic name. Wasn’t Athena the Greek goddess of wisdom, arts and something else, maybe war? She’d loved her book of Greek mythology in fifth grade. Uncle Henry had given it to her. Every night they’d taken turns reading myths to each other. “Are you looking for something special?” Athena asked. When Miri didn’t answer, Suzanne nudged her. “It’s my mother’s birthday,” Miri said, coming back to the moment, “and I was thinking of a half-slip, maybe a nylon tricot half-slip.” Before Miri had the chance to dig the ad from her purse, Athena said, “I have just what you’re looking for. What size does your mother wear?” “She’s either a small or a medium, depending.” “Really, a small?” Athena said, as if a mother couldn’t possibly be a small. “She’s five-five, a hundred and fifteen pounds.” Miri knew everything about her mother, every detail of her life, except for one, and she wasn’t going to waste her time thinking of that today. Athena brought out a few half-slips. “Double slits,” she said, holding up one. By Vanity Fair, $3.99. “This is the nylon tricot. Feel how soft it is.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X I X As morning approaches Dante has a vision of the Siren, whose filthiness Virgil, at the exhortation of a lady from heaven, exposes. Dante is roused by Virgil’s repeated summons. The sun is fully up, and the pilgrim, deep in thought, advances to the next stair, where once again he feels the breath of the angel’s wing, and hears the blessing of them that mourn. Dante is still plunged in his reverie, from which Virgil rouses him by question, explanation, and admonition. They who have yielded to the Siren,—foul but seeming fair,—must expiate their offences in the three remaining circles. Let Dante tread the earth like a man and raise his eyes to the heavens above. And so they reach the fifth circle. There the souls of the avaricious and prodigal cleave to the pavement, no longer in sordid love, but in the anguished sense that they are unworthy to look upon aught more fair; and the limbs which had bound themselves on earth are now held in helpless captivity. Virgil inquires the way, and from the form in which the answer is given Dante gathers the law of Purgatory, hereafter to be more fully confirmed, which permits souls to pass without delay or scathe through any circles of the mount wherein sins are purged by which they themselves are unstained. He silently asks Virgil’s leave to stay and question the soul that has spoken. It is Pope Adrian V who for little over a month bore the weight of the papal mantle, scarce tolerable to him who would keep it from defilement; and in answer to Dante’s tender entreaty he expounds the nature of the penalties of this circle. He himself had been given over to avarice till he reached the summit of human greatness, saw its emptiness and turned in penitence to God. When Dante speaks again, Adrian perceives that he has knelt down, in reverence to Peter’s successor; whereon he bluntly bids him straighten his legs, and explains that no formal or official position or relation, however close or however august, has place in the spirit world, where personality is stripped of office. Then he urges Dante to pass on and leave his penitence undisturbed, making a reference to his niece who had married one of Dante’s future friends the Malaspini; which reference the pilgrim may, if he so choose, interpret as a request for prayers for the departed soul. IN THE HOUR when the day’s heat, overcome by Earth or at times by Saturn, can no more warm the cold of the moon; when the geomancers see their Fortuna Major, rising in the East, before the dawn, by a way which short time remains dark to it, 1 there came to me in a dream, 2 a stuttering woman, with eyes asquint, and crooked on her feet, with maimed hands, and of sallow hue.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Rachel had been brought up by her father, a Miami real estate investor of a cruelty that surpassed description, though incest, starvation and frequent beatings were hinted at. His evil nature I confused with his daughter’s poetic genius. Whereas DeQuincey sniggered, stuttered and shrugged his way through his gruesome account, never more than a wisecrack away from pain, Rachel refused to tell her story, but when she relented she proceeded with great gravity. Each of them, in fact, competed for my sympathy. One night I told the Scotts of my struggles against homosexuality and of my present effort to be cured through psychoanalysis. Although I maintained a flippant tone about sex, the Scotts both stood as I spoke, then came over to my kitchen chair, drew me to my feet and embraced me, tears in their eyes. “You poor boy,” Mr. Scott said again and again, searching my face for the stigmata of mental illness. “You poor, poor boy. But surely you haven’t acted on these impulses, have you?” It took a moment for me to realize they hoped I had only thought about sex with men but never actually engaged in it. I assured them I was very experienced, though I wasn’t. I exaggerated the depth of my depravity. Although I was content to accept their sympathy, I didn’t want them to pity me for crimes I had merely contemplated. My admission put them off a bit, as though the fact of sex were a coarse redundancy and the idea of it quite sinful enough. My confession spurred them on to more daring feats of self-disclosure. I learned that DeQuincey had also been homosexual briefly, a period just before his marriage and conversion, a period adumbrated as a time of faltering, of humiliation, exhaustion and confusion, of bouts of madness alternating with briefer and briefer zones of lucidity, as an accelerating train leaving the station might roll faster and faster under dim lamps before plunging into the blackout of night. Now he was no longer homosexual, not in any way, nor did he ever experience even the slightest twitch of forbidden desire. This complete change he attributed to Christ and Rachel. The November night went on and on endlessly, exactly like that ghost train in my story, dim rolling stock gliding slowly over the clicking place where the tracks switched, the constant bass hum of that somnolent progress passing over that one tenor break, the riveted and rusting bulkheads emblazoned with the mud-spattered logos of distant places, everything stately as destiny. I could hear the night’s freight cars clicking past, and the sky shook out its hair, silver clouds backlit by the moon. In this measured silence Rachel told me about her own conversion from Judaism to the Church of England, an enlightenment she attributed to her chance reading of C.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O I V Piccarda has left Dante entangled in two perplexities. Why are the nuns shorn of what had else been the full measure of their glory because they were torn against their will from the cloister? And if the inconstant moon is the abode of such as have left their vows unfulfilled, was Plato right after all in saying that men’s souls come down from the planets connatural with them, and return thereto? This latter speculation might lead to dangerous heresy, and Beatrice hastens to explain that the souls who come to meet Dante in the several spheres all have their permanent abiding place with God and the Angels in the Empyrean. Their meeting places with Dante are but symbolical of their spiritual state. But Plato may have had in mind the divine influences that, through the agency of the planets, act upon men’s dispositions and produce good or ill effects which should be credited to them rather than to the human will. And indeed it was a confused perception of these divine influences that led men into idolatry. The other difficulty is removed by a distinction between what we wish to do and what, under pressure, we consent to do; for if we consent we cannot plead violence in excuse, although we have done what we did not wish to do. More questions are started in Dante’s mind, for only in the all-embracing truth of God can the human mind find that restful possession which its nature promises it. Short of that each newly acquired truth leads on to further questions. Beatrice, who had sighed at Dante’s previous bewildered questions, smiles approval now, for he asks her a question as to vows which has some spiritual import. BETWEEN TWO foods, distant and appetizing in like measure, death by starvation would ensue ere a free man put either to his teeth. So would a lamb stand still between two cravings of fierce wolves, in equipoise of dread; so would a dog stand still between two hinds. Wherefore, if I held my peace I blame me not, (thrust in like measure either way by my perplexities) since ’twas necessity, nor yet commend me. I held my peace, but my desire was painted on my face, and my questioning with it, in warmer colours far than if set out by speech. And Beatrice took the part that Daniel took when he lifted Nebuchadnezzar out of the wrath that had made him unjustly cruel, 1 and she said: “Yea, but I see how this desire and that so draweth thee, that thy eagerness entangleth its own self, and therefore breathes not forth. Thou arguest: If the right will endureth, by what justice can another’s violence sheer me the measure of desert? And further matter of perplexity is given thee by the semblance of the souls returning to the stars, as Plato’s doctrine hath it.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Murder Mystery Lightning flashes, the power dies, and when the electricity comes back on again a dinner guest is folded over the dessert course with a dagger in her back. The handle of the blade is inlaid with precious gems, but her tiara is missing. When the undercover detective reveals herself—the plucky reporter, of course!—the mystery deepens: the cost of the gems in the handle of the knife far outweighs the value of the stolen tiara, whose diamonds were merely glass. Who among them would give up a tool of such immeasurable value to take something so worthless? And so boldly, in front of so many people? The plucky reporter paces on the Persian carpet in front of the suspects. Was it Heathcliff, the brawny dockworker turned mob boss? Ethan, the foppish social climber with eyes like the distant radiance of Mars? Samson, the experimental artist with a murky and enigmatic past? The reporter crosses dozens of times in front of a slight, blonde woman sitting in the corner, but never includes her on the list. The blonde woman is leaning back with flinty cool, following the action. She nods and listens, and every so often tilts her chin in the direction of the plucky reporter and lets loose a dazzling smile. The plucky reporter turns to Samson with a trembling, gloved finger. Samson stands to defend himself. Ethan begins shouting, Heathcliff glowers. And no one pays attention to the blonde woman, who stands and walks toward the corpse of the dinner guest. She grips the blade with both hands and pulls it out like King Arthur deflowering the stone. The body of the dinner guest, whose eyes are wide and wet with betrayal, lifts with the movement and then slams back down on the place setting, lemon cake squashed against her bosom. The blonde woman wipes the blood off the blade onto the dinner guest’s dress and replaces it in her purse. Everyone continues to argue as she walks out the front door and into the night. IV The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember. —Sarah Manguso Dream House as Stopgap Measure She gets into your MFA program and will leave the Dream House to come to Iowa City. She talks about moving in with you. You coo with excitement over the phone, but when you hang up you feel like you did when you were a kid and your brother launched a baseball into your nose: warm blood down the back of your throat; milk, and metal.