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 Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Almost crying now, he shouted to the crowd that they couldn’t give up in Vietnam. “We have to win . . . ” he said, his voice still shaking; then pausing, he pointed his finger at him and Eddie Dugan, “. . . because of them! ” Suddenly it was very quiet and he could feel them looking right at him, sitting there in his wheelchair with Eddie all alone. It seemed everyone—the cub scouts, the boy scouts, the mothers, the fathers, the whole town—had their eyes on them and now he bent his head and stared into his lap. The commander left the podium to great applause and the speeches continued, but the more they spoke, the more restless and uncomfortable he became, until he felt like he was going to jump out of his paralyzed body and scream. He was confused, then proud, then all of a sudden confused again. He wanted to listen and believe everything they were saying, but he kept thinking of all the things that had happened that day and now he wondered why he and Eddie hadn’t even been given the chance to speak. They had just sat there all day long, like he had been sitting in his chair for weeks and months in the hospital and at home in his room alone, and he wondered now why he had allowed them to make him a hero and the grand marshal of the parade with Eddie, why he had let them take him all over town in that Cadillac when they hadn’t even asked him to speak. These people had never been to his war, and they had been talking like they knew everything, like they were experts on the whole goddamn thing, like he and Eddie didn’t know how to speak for themselves because there was something wrong now with both of them. They couldn’t speak because of the war and had to have others define for them with their lovely words what they didn’t know anything about. He sat back, watching the men who ran the town as they walked back and forth on the speakers’ platform in their suits and ties, drinking their beer and talking about patriotism. It reminded him of the time in church a few Sundays before, when Father Bradley had suddenly pointed to him during the middle of the sermon, telling everyone he was a hero and a patriot in the eyes of God and his country for going to fight the Communists. “We must pray for brave boys like Ron Kovic,” said the priest. “And most of all,” he said, “we must pray for victory in Vietnam and peace throughout the world.” And when the service was over, people came to shake his hand and thank him for all he had done for God and his country, and he left the church feeling very sick and threw up in the parking lot.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I lifted it out with a sceptical smile, but surprised at how much it weighed: the medallions were thick, and the setting too was of some dull metal, inlaid with flat pink stones. It slumped round my two hands as I held it up to Paul; it would have pinched the women's white necks with its embossed edges and hidden hinges. He took it from me in a priestly way and stood it on the desk, saying quietly, "Now that is old, at least the medals . . . " They still showed emperors' curtalled names, garlanded pillars, chariot-wheels—a miniature clamour, a very distant triumph. I wasn't sure if the collar was beautiful or hideous, poignant or shocking: like an Orst painting it was somehow all these things at once. It was a fetish that had become a relic, and engaged both of us perhaps with a mixture of respect and distaste. I leant forward to turn it round and pretended not to notice Paul's quick covered yawn. It was Lilli's day off. Marcel had been in bed with a stifling cold since our return from the coast, so Paul and I had a bowl of soup at the desk. Paul carried on reading a journal beside him; sometimes he set down his spoon with a frown and scribbled something in the margin. He seemed very dissatisfied with much that he read. I fancied a bit more of a break than this—if it hadn't been for the freezing mist, I'd have gone for a walk and a cigarette and probably a drink and an abrupt surrender to the bitter vacancy that our lamplight feebly held off. I scraped up the last of the sollp with a childish racket and started a conversation more determinedly than I need have done. "Where is it Lilli goes when she's not here?" Paul dabbed at his lips with his napkin. "Didn't I tell you? She goes to her sister-in-law's farm." "Oh yes. Where is that?" He waved a hand abstractedly. "It's . . . the other side of Roeselare. It takes a while on the bus." I found I liked it better when she wasn't around. There was something uncommunicative about her, and so in a way repressive. Everyone who knew her said how marvellous she was; I said the same if the occasion arose, but in fact I hadn't quite seen where her gift lay. "I do think she's wonderful," I said. "Oh, I'm glad. You couldn't not like her," said Paul—and added, "I was afraid she might be a little severe with you. I wasn't sure how she'd take to having another member of the family to look after." I smiled and looked down, pleased but also dimly suspicious of the process of mutual courtesy I had activated.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Helene was telling me about the white pictures," I said, not without a certain nervousness. I saw his twinge of weary annoyance. "Yes, I'm afraid that's all a lot of nonsense," he said, as though determined to be reasonable. "I refuse to show them as finished works—they're only prepared canvases in many cases. Helene, bless her, was very taken in by a young art-historian from Paris who worked here for a while and started giving them titles like 'Dans la Neige'. The fact is, Orst couldn't see. As you must have realised he was riddled with syphilis, he tried bravely to keep on painting, almost as a kind of optical experiment, while the fog closed in. If they do have any interest then it's purely medical." "I see. I'd no idea—that he had syphilis." "He could still paint, with vision, as it were, up until about '33. The other two panels can be dated much earlier, as they're both copied from known photographs. As for the syphilis, yes, of course." "I suppose I should have worked it out," I said uncertainly. "I don't think you mention it in the guide, do you?" "I've never laboured the point. I mean, it's known, obviously. I'm afraid I'm of the school that rather disapproves of publicising artists' private lives," he said, with an unhappy stiffness that was quite at odds with his normal shy cleverness. "I'm not sure." "You forget that I knew him; and—I'm sorry, I don't know why I'm lecturing you. It's simply a matter I have strong views on." I spread my hands to deny any wish to contradict him; though it was surprising to learn that the monkish Orst, the exquisite recluse, had been the victim of this quaint, almost romantic, sexual disease. I thought Paul could tell from my expression that I was going to want to know more. "It's ironic of course", he went on, "that he could never see very well anyway—at least from about Marcel's age onwards." "Really. Well, I've noticed the thickness of his glasses. But his work is usually so incredibly fine." "Oh, close up he was all right, his sight was superhuman, but anything more than a few feet away gave him increasing trouble. He was just very myopic, as so many artists of all kinds are." Paul squinted sympathetically at the pictures against the wall, and I felt as if my own short sight had been flatteringly vindicated and explained. "I remember he said to me when he was completely blind how strange it was that into his fifties he had had an eye like a microscope." "So what about the portraits, and the landscapes even?"

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I'm sure there's still a lot to do. Has Paul shown you any of the very late pictures, painted when Orst was going blind?" "No, but I haven't really even looked at all the pictures in the Museum." "There are hundreds more up in the old storage attic. Sometimes you see a very big one that's going to an exhibition being winched down outside on the hoist, in a great big box, of course." "What's special about the late ones?" "Paul doesn't like to show them. They're not really finished, at least not like the earlier ones which are so brilliantly painted, they're almost like photographs—well, of course, he based most of them on photographs as you know. Then at the end he tried to paint what things actually looked like as he was losing his sight. The landscapes became blurred and clouded over, and you have the sense he couldn't really see the canvas, either. I think they're very moving—in a way I like them more than the other ones, which slightly bore me after a while" (this said with a pretend-guilty wince). "But Paul for some reason can't decide about them." "So are they going in the catalogue?" She gave her touching, oddly sexy little chuckle. "I wonder." "Well, I must find out," I said stiffly. "Mm, do." We emerged through a gateway at the edge of a wide canal-basin, where half a dozen glass-roofed tourist-boats were tethered one beyond the other. There was a delicious sense of being left behind, the season over. We leant on a railing and looked down through dropped brown chestnut-fans into a shadowy saloon. "I think Orst's death must have left . . . a mark on Paul's mind. I think that may be something to do with it." I shook my head, aggrieved at my own ignorance. "I've no idea what happened." "I'm sorry, I don't know what you know. Yes, Paul, as he's probably told you, used to know Orst, he used to go and look after him when he was a boy, and read to him, I think. Orst apparently never saw Paul, or said he thought he could see him sometimes through a mist. He used to get him to describe things to him at great length, including his own pictures, which must have been like doing the catalogue already, and Orst could remember them all . . . Then he was murdered by the Germans, and it must have been a bit like losing a father, or an uncle perhaps, for Paul." "He was murdered by the Germans. It doesn't say anything about that in the booklet at the Museum." "I know." "But it does sound a quite major point of interest in the painter's story . . ." Helene raised her shoulders for a few moments. "Was he Jewish, I suppose?" "I'm sure he was partly.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I realised I was flinching with envy from Paul's account. I thought of my own two months of paralysed trepidation with Luc, nothing in them beyond talk, and the pointless wondering, now, if I should have moved at once, leaned very early on into his milky coffee breath . . . "Then one day I was walking to school with Maurice. We were crossing the Grote Markt, making our usual jokes about the soldiers—just to ourselves; there was a group of them quite near, the local militia, and I knew already, just because I loved him and would have known the shape of him among a hundred strangers, that one of them was Willem. He had his back to me, he was talking with his fellows, smoking—how stupid they were, Maurice and I agreed, and how little time they had left, now that the Allies had landed in France and would be here within weeks. We had an image of huge, blond, actually rather Aryan-looking Americans sweeping into town on tanks, mowing down the Fascists at the same time as they gathered us up to ride with them above the crowd. That was my image, anyway. I think I rather hoped for a, well, a special relationship with one of the Liberators. And now I was plunged into confusion—I don't know, my guilt was suddenly ten times deeper, it was proved, it was in uniform; but at the same time there was a defiant thrill, as if I was a kind of double agent myself; and then there was the thought that this great big boy really, who was moved by strong passions of his own and was rather daring, a bit of an original, was about to be swept away by the good Americans and Canadians—I wanted to hold their advance back, perhaps the Germans would rally. Then a moment later I knew again that I was hopelessly wrong." Paul's knuckles were white on the wheel, he was staring narrowly forwards like someone driving too fast through fog, weighing urgency against prudence. "Did he see you then?"

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Then Staines would touch some part of him and Bobby would nod and raise his eyebrows, as if to say there was no limit to what these queens would do. I was some way through my second drink when Staines asked us all to go through —not to the dining-room (‘We will have a special meal later’) but to the studio. I got an unpleasant feeling that we were all going to watch a sex film, and that with this company it would be most embarrassing and anaphrodisiac. Charles took my arm, more to connect me to himself than as a prop: he was clipping us together and hardly leant on me at all. There was an odd and rather revolting attitude of suppressed expectancy on everyone’s face, and I saw that I was the only one who did not know for sure what was going on. I was more confused in the studio, where there was a noise of other people, and we hovered for a while as our host rushed off with a great air of professionalism and urgency. The romantic Edwardian backdrop, with its balustrade and overhanging cloudy branches, was in position, and in front of it the fat-cushioned chaise-longue from the garden. A couple of blond teenagers in wing-collars and tight, striped pants were sitting there, passing what was left of a thick joint back and forth, cupped under the hand, as doormen keep their illicit fag from view or from the rain. Lights and reflectors in an arc defined a kind of acting area, divided from us by a clutter of chairs. ‘Everybody got a drink?’ said Bobby, very heartily. ‘For God’s sake sit down. This could take hours.’ Charles seated himself on a creaking old carver, and looked around a bit fussily for me to pull up a chair beside him. Aldo sat down neatly on my other side, and drew protectively on his long drink. Beyond him Bobby extended his legs from one chair to another. My ignorance and foreboding added to the social discomfort and I leant over to whisper to Charles: ‘Who are these boys?’ He looked startled. ‘What, these boys? But … you don’t know them? I thought …’ He tugged out a handkerchief from his breast pocket and ran it back and forth under his nose. ‘Most naughty and wicked boys.’ He coughed, as if discretion forbade him to say more, and then tucked the hanky away. ‘More important, what are they going to do?’ ‘Oh …’ I felt foolish, reddened a little; was annoyed too, but really peculiarly drunk. One of the boys, better-looking, I thought, was flicking at the other’s fringe with his fingertips. The other smiled woozily, and gripped himself between the legs.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Wouldn't it be a good idea if the black and white basketball teams played each other? And there wouldn't be any trouble about the dance afterward, because all the fellows would invite their own dates. Did I think they should go south to work on voting registration this summer, or should they stay home and work in their own communities? Some of them wanted to get a discussion started on open housing-on Proposition Fourteen-and would I come and speak and answer questions? What do you do about older people who arc very nice, really, but who just-well, who just don't seem to understand the issues-what do you say to them, what do you do? And the black kids: It's another way of life-you have to understand that. Yeah, a whole lot of TO BE BAPTIZED black people arc going to put you down, you have to under stand that. Man, I know my mother don't really want to come to your church. We got more life in om' church. Mr. B., Brother Malcolm says that no people in history have ever been respected who did not own their own land. What do you say about that, and how arc we going to lfet the land? My parents think I shouldn't be sitting in and demonstrating and all that, that I should be getting an education first. What do you think about that? Mr. B., what do you say to an older black man who just feels discouraged about everything? Mr. B., what arc we going to do about the dope traffic in the ghetto? Mr. B., do you think black people should join the Army? Mr. B., do you think the Muslims arc right and we should be a separate state? Mr. B., have you ever been to Africa? Mr. B., don't you think the first thing our people need is unity? How can we trust those white people in Washington? they don't really care about black people. Mr. B., what do you think of integration? Don't you think it might just be a trap, to brainwash black people? I come to the conclusion that the man just ain't never going to do ri ght. He a devil, just like Malcolm says he is. I told my teacher I wasn't going to salute the flag no more don't you think I was right? You mean, if we have a dance after the basketball game, all the brothers is going to have to dance with the same lfirl all night? What about the white guys? Oh, they can dance with yotn' girl. Laughter, embarrassment, bewildered ill-feeling. Mr. B., What do you think of intermar riage? Real questions can be absurdly phrased, and probably can be answered only by the questioner, and, at that, only in time.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Well, I won't spin it out, but I crept round, and the trees were all coming into leaf—you couldn't see far through the wood, and I couldn't in fact see anybody at all. I wondered what I would do if I did meet someone, and exactly how it was that whatever they did was done. If ever I go back there—oh, with Lilli and Marcel, on a Sunday morning!—I hear the wind in the trees and that reminds me in an instant of what it was like, alone, entering an empty avenue. The light was beginning to go, and so, I thought, must I; I knew that after dark was more likely to be the time, but I started to think none the less that my inadvertent school informant was wrong about the place. Then I saw a man stride across the glade straight in front of me—a young man, I would think now, probably about twenty-five, but old to a boy of course." I sighed resentfully, and remembered my own provoking faux-pas about Paul's age, out at St Vaast. "He caught sight of me and without slowing up called out a greeting, and went on into the trees. "I wasn't sure quite what had happened. I stood there for some time weighing up things like what time it was against the obvious fact that he appealed to me, even if he wasn't my absolute ideal; which in turn was balanced by the likelihood that he was only out for a walk—a workman from town perhaps. But in that case there could certainly be no harm in following him. "So I did take the path under the trees, and there, just a few paces on, the man had stopped—he was half-hidden by a great beech-trunk he was leaning behind. And so—one thing happened; and then another thing . . ." I felt slightly cheated by this brisk curtailment, as though the dusk and the foliage hid these happenings from me—but perhaps glad, too, that Paul hadn't forced himself to say. I merely hummed approval. "Well, they were the first shocks of sexual reality for me—a man's large hands, a man's rough chin and cheeks, as well as all the rest. I was not a little confused, my dear Edward, and terribly aware of doing wrong. But I found I was excited by the risk. And then afterwards what inflamed me, as much as the guy's big prick and everything, was his gentleness, like being cradled and protected by some great giant. I'm sure in memory I've exaggerated that difference—I must have been fully grown myself; but Willem was a big man. I'm sure there was that class thing, too, which you're supposed to have so much worse than us—the place and the event conspired to make me think of him as a, what's the word, a woodlander."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Eh? Oh, you're very clever." Paul smiled. "But not quite clever enough!" I frowned and he stooped beside me; I was in his breath as he looked very closely at the picture. "You have to think what hotel our friend would be likely to choose for a romantic escape with his lover. And right next to the Kursaal, too, for Jane, who loved to gamble." "I've never been to Ostend, where I assume it is, except getting off the ferry to come here." I was trying to think what other sorts of drome there were. A velodrome? The Belgians were keen cyclists. Or perhaps it was the beginning of the word. "The Dromedary Hotel?" was my unconfident attempt. Paul stood back. "No matter. It was the Hotel Andromeda. It really doesn't matter, though it was a favourite legend of his." "Did he see himself as rescuing Jane from something? I suppose her jealous husband . . ." "It's possible. Actually, I don't think it was the rescue side that interested him, he was much keener on the idea of the chained-up woman. He had a bronze Andromeda at the Villa—school of de Vries, a beautiful thing, but with a very long and heavy chain that hung down the pedestal in a loop." "Anyway", I said after a moment, "he certainly didn't rescue her on the most important occasion."

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I am not of those who say that their actions bear no resemblance to them. Indeed, actions must do so, since they alone give my measure, and are the sole means of engraving me upon the memory of men, or even upon my own memory (and since perhaps the very possibility of continuing to express and modify oneself by action may constitute the real difference between the state of the living and of the dead). But there is between me and these acts which compose me an indefinable hiatus, and the proof of this separation is that I feel constantly the necessity of weighing and explaining what I do, and of giving account of it to myself. In such an evaluation certain works of short duration are surely negligible; yet occupations which have extended over a whole lifetime signify just as little. For example, it seems to me as I write this hardly important to have been emperor. Besides, a good three-quarters of my life escapes this definition by acts: the mass of my wishes, my desires, and even my projects remains nebulous and fleeting as a phantom; the remainder, the palpable part, more or less authenticated by facts, is barely more distinct, and the sequence of events is as confused as that of dreams. I have a chronology of my own which is wholly unrelated to anything based on the founding of Rome, or on the era of the Olympiads. Fifteen years with the armies have lasted less long than a single morning at Athens; there are people whom I have seen much of throughout my life whom I shall not recognize in Hades. Planes in space overlap likewise: Egypt and the Vale of Tempe are near, indeed, nor am I always in Tibur when I am here. Sometimes my life seems to me so commonplace as to be unworthy even of careful contemplation, let alone writing about it, and is not at all more important, even in my own eyes, than the life of any other person. Sometimes it seems to me unique, and for that very reason of no value, and useless, because it cannot be reduced to the common experience of men. No one thing explains me: neither my vices nor my virtues serve for answer; my good fortune tells more, but only at intervals, without continuity, and above all, without logical reason.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I was seized with curiosity to investigate those intermediate regions where the soul and the flesh intermingle, where dream echoes reality, or sometimes even precedes it, where life and death exchange attributes and masks. My physician Hermogenes disapproved of such experiments, but nevertheless he acquainted me with a few practitioners who worked along these lines. I tried with them to find the exact seat of the soul and the bonds which attach it to the body, and to measure the time which it takes to detach itself. Some animals were sacrificed to this research. The surgeon Satyr us took me into his hospital to witness death agonies. We speculated together: is the soul only the supreme development of the body, the fragile evidence of the pain and pleasure of existing? Is it, on the contrary, more ancient than the body, which is modeled on its image and which serves it momentarily, more or less well, as instrument? Can it be called back inside the flesh, re-establishing with the body that close union and mutual combustion which we name life? If souls possess an identity of their own, can they be interchanged, going from one being to another like a segment of fruit or the sip of wine which two lovers exchange in a kiss? Every philosopher changes his opinion about these things some twenty times a year; in my case skepticism contended with desire to know, and enthusiasm with irony. But I felt convinced that our brain allows only the merest residue of facts to filter through to us: I began to be more and more interested in the obscure world of sensation, dark as night, but where blinding suns mysteriously flash and revolve. Near this same period Phlegon, who was a collector of ghost stories, told us one evening the tale of The Bride of Corinth, vouching for its authenticity. That adventure, wherein love brings a soul back to earth and temporarily grants it a body, moved each one of us, though at different depths. Several tried to set up a similar experiment: Satyrus attempted to evoke his master Aspasius, with whom he had made one of those pacts (never kept) according to which those who die promise to give information to the living. Antinous made me a promise of the same nature, which I took lightly, having no reason to believe that the boy would not survive me. Philo sought to bring back his dead wife. I permitted the names of my father and my mother to be pronounced, but a certain delicacy kept me from evoking Plotina. Not one of these attempts succeeded. But some strange doors had been opened. A few days before the departure from Antioch I went to offer sacrifice, as in other years, on the summit of Mount Casius.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He lifted my glasses off, as if to make it impossible for me to leave, and put them on himself, saying now he would have "Edward's view of the world". I left him wincing and recoiling at the steep-down sharpness of things, and stepped into the other room, hesitant, with an outstretched hand, not noticing what I was doing. I opened the cupboard to get my leather jacket; it hung there obscurely beside Cherif’s vulgar coat, which still gave off the expensive new smell of opera cloakrooms. My life seemed to be one of understandings based on sex and misunderstandings based on love. Out in the street, shouldering my bulky hold-all, unshaven, whistling that trite song that was played over and over in the Cassette, the song the man had whistled on my neck the day I arrived, "See Me Tonight"—"seamy tonight" I thought each time—I came round a corner and saw Paul leaving an old house across the way. Again, the fleeting impulse to go on as if I hadn't seen him: I was too scruffy, too seamy, really. "I say," he called out. "Good morning, Paul." "You look as if you're eloping." "Only as far as the washerama, I'm afraid." "I've just been to see Pauwels about the frame. He's got to get the right gilt to match. I've given him the photograph to go on for the design." "Oh good." It was almost as if my approval were being sought. "Where is the laundry thing by the way?" I gestured generally towards the area of the shopping streets. "Isn't it rather a bore?" "It's not especially fascinating." Though there had been some nice working lads there last time, folding up old-fashioned winter drawers. "If you don't mind the walk, you could do it at our house. Lilli's always got the machine going." "It's sweet of you. But there's such a lot," I said, stooping and shrugging under the burden. "It's not all mine," I warned candidly. "And there's something I want to show you too," he said. We walked on in silence for a while, adjusting to being outdoors together for the first time. I felt more observant, filled with a slightly precious regard for my surroundings, as though Paul owned the place and were graciously making it available. "I was quite wrong the other day," he said, clearly himself unmindful of the splendour of the main square. "I'm sorry. I could see you thinking something wasn't right." "Was I? I'm sure there's no need to apologise." "There is because I was being inconsistent. You asked me about the white pictures and I got snappy about sex and said that artists' private lives didn't matter or should be kept secret and then I started testing you with questions which are actually all to do with the artist's private life." "I think I thought," I said carefully, "that you felt a special respect for this artist, because of having known him."

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I sighed. “I don’t know. There’s never been many other women in the world I could identify with. But I sure as hell don’t feel like a guy, either. I don’t know what I am. It makes me feel crazy.” Edna nestled against my shoulder. “I know, honey, I really do. I don’t think ve ever had a butch lover who hasn’t felt torn up in the same way.” “Yeah,” I shrugged, “but it’s different for me because I’m living as a man. I don’t even know if ?’m still butch anymore.” She nodded. “It’s true that you and Rocco have a tough time figuring out how to be yourselves and still live. But believe me, honey, you’re not alone in the feeling that you’re not a man of a woman.” 236 = Leslie Feinberg I sighed. “T don’t like being neither.” Edna moved her face close to mine. “You’re more than just neither, honey. There’s other ways to be than either-or. It’s not so simple. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many people who don’t fit. You’re beautiful, Jess, but I don’t have words to help people see that.” “T wish everything could go back to the way it was,” I told her. Edna looked off into the distance. “I don’t,” she said. “I don’t want to go back to the bars and the fights. I just want a place to be with the people I love. I want to be accepted for who I am, and not just in the gay world.” I felt left out of the fantasy. “What about me? Can I be accepted too?” Edna lifted my hand to her mouth and kissed my fingers. “I’m not accepted till you are.” I smiled. “It’s a nice dream. How do we make it happen?” “T don’t know,” she said. ““That’s the problem.” Edna stretched her thigh across my hip. Her lips rested on my T-shirt. “I wish I could save you,” she whispered. “I wish I could be everything that’s been taken from you.” I laughed. “Just be my lover.” Edna leaned on one elbow and looked me in the eye. “You wish I could save you, don’t your” “No,” I lied, afraid of losing her. She sat up. “I don’t know how you couldn’t. It terrifies me when I think how little you have, how much you must need. I don’t have that much to give you.” I rolled over and wrapped my arms around her waist. “Then I’ll try to need less.” She grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled my head back until I looked her in the eyes. “Oh, Jess. I’m so sorry ?m hurting you. Don’t you think I know how much it’s hurt you when I couldn’t let you touch me after that first time? And I don’t know how to tell you that it has nothing to do with you.”

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  apologist If you asked me about my father then—the years he lived in a doorway, in a shelter, in an ATM—I’d say, Dead , I’d say, Missing , I’d say, I don’t know where he is . I’d say whatever I felt like saying, and it would all be true. I don’t know him, I’d say, my mother left him shortly after I was born, or just before. But this story did not hold still for long. It wavered. Even before he became homeless I’d heard whispers, sensed he was circling close, that we were circling each other, like planets unmoored. I knew he drove a cab, maybe my mother told me that, though she said almost nothing about him, except that it was better he wasn’t around. I even knew what kind, a Town Taxi, a black and white. In my early twenties, after I dropped out of college and moved to Boston, I would involuntarily check the driver of each that passed, uncertain what it would mean, what I would do, if it was my father behind the wheel. I knew he lived in a rooming house on Beacon Hill, I’d heard about it a couple years before they evicted him, before he moved into his cab, leasing it twenty-four hours at a stretch, before he blacked out on a vodka jag, hit someone or something , before they took his license away. The day he was evicted was the first face-to-face I had with him as an adult, the second time in my life I can remember meeting him—he’d called on the phone, told me to get over to his room with my truck. It was the first time I’d heard his voice on the phone. Two months later he appeared at the shelter where I worked and demanded a bed. The Pine Street Inn was and still is the largest homeless shelter in Boston. State-of-the-art. When my father arrived I’d already been working there for three years, first as a counselor, then as a caseworker. He wasn’t homeless when I first started—marginal, sure, but not homeless. I remember the day he arrived the nights could still be cold. He raised his arms to enter, because every “guest” has to be frisked—no bottles, no weapons. This is the first rule. Ask me about him now and I’ll say, Housed . Twelve years. Subsidized. A Section 8. A disability. I’ll thank you for paying his rent, unless you’re also a Section 8. Unless by the time you read this he’s been evicted again. Ask now and I’ll say he’s a goddamned tree stump, it’ll take dynamite to get rid of that motherfucker. Before he lost his room I could have met him, if I’d chosen to, at any time. He was never difficult to find. No one is, really.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  According to the children when they were young and after they’d reached adulthood, no single father discussed or bothered to explain his past violent behavior during the visits. Nor were they instructed to do so by the courts or the mediators. Many didn’t even admit that they had been violent. Some said that maybe they had hit the children’s mother just once. Others denied it completely. Not one father said that he was sorry. No single father admitted that his behavior was wrong. Not one tried to convey any moral principles to his children. This vehement or blanket denial of events that the children had seen with their own eyes was terribly confusing. As some told me later, their pitiful confrontation—“But Daddy, I saw you!”—was met with ice-cold stares. Such children were unable to trust their own observations and withdrew in anguish with an impaired sense of reality and conscience. Since the mothers often did not discuss the violence either, the child’s traumatic experience was never touched. To compound matters, this conspiracy of silence was reinforced by court policy. Judges and mediators are often hostile to allegations of domestic violence, which almost always come from the mother. They may consider these accusations vengeful or manipulative strategies to withhold the child. So who is left to help the children who deep down know what they witnessed and are thoroughly confused, distressed, and lost? They have no say in proceedings that presumably center on their best interests. Who speaks for the child or to the child? The courts have a window of opportunity to help children deal with issues of morality and controlling aggression, yet, incredibly, they turn away from what may be their most important task.4 There is no mechanism for bringing domestic violence to light except in a custody battle. How many judges instruct violent fathers to help their vulnerable children? How many magistrates tell women how important it is to advise their daughters how to avoid the perils of abusive relationships? A small number of courts require perpetrators of abuse who sue for custody or unsupervised visitation to complete classes in curbing violent impulses, but such courses rarely address how parents should or could help their children. The children, alas, are lost in the shadows. I’m not suggesting that children should be barred from visiting fathers who were violent in their marriages. We know this kind of ruling can boomerang. A father who is a forbidden figure can become, in the child’s heart and mind, an epic hero or martyr. But I am suggesting that we should undertake programs to counsel children and parents in these issues before the visits are allowed. When violence occurs behind closed doors, as we know it does, it is very difficult to reach these families. But when a divorce occurs, violent families including these children can and should be given help. (I’ll discuss providing help to violent families further in the conclusions.)

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  All this is equipment of unequal value; the tools are more or less dulled; but I have no others: it is with them that I must fashion for myself as well as may be some conception of my destiny as man. When I consider my life, I am appalled to find it a shapeless mass. A hero's existence, such as is described to us, is simple; it goes straight to the mark, like an arrow. Most men like to reduce their lives to a formula, whether in boast or lament, but almost always in recrimination; their memories oblingingly construct for them a clear and comprehensible past. My life has contours less firm. As is commonly the case, it is what I have not been which defines me, perhaps, most aptly: a good soldier, but not a great warrior; a lover of art, but not the artist which Nero thought himself to be at his death; capable of crime, but not laden with it. I have come to think that great men are characterized precisely by the extreme position which they take, and that their heroism consists in holding to that extremity throughout their lives. They are our poles, or our antipodes. I have occupied each of the extremes in turn, but have not kept to any one of them; life has always drawn me away. And nevertheless neither can I boast, like some plowman or worthy carter, of a middle-of-the-road existence. The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance. I strive to retrace my life to find in it some plan, following a vein of lead, or of gold, or the course of some subterranean stream, but such devices are only tricks of perspective in the memory. From time to time, in an encounter or an omen, or in a particular series of happenings, I think that I recognize the working of fate, but too many paths lead nowhere at all, and too many sums add up to nothing. To be sure, I perceive in this diversity and disorder the presence of a person; but his form seems nearly always to be shaped by the pressure of circumstances; his features are blurred, like a face reflected in water.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  And relatedly, why are so few kids who grow up the way I did—“disadvantaged,” to use the vocabulary of the day—making it to our society’s elite institutions. The book I wrote is an effort to answer that question in in credibly personal ways, and as I often tell people, I was initially uncomfortable with that. Indeed, even the process of finding endorsers—part of which forced me to send the book to strangers—made me want to gag. But I wrote the book the way I did because I thought it would make my argument more compelling—that if people experienced these problems through the perspectives of real people, they might appreciate their complexity. Hillbilly Elegy ’s reception makes me think this was a wise decision. Interestingly, many of the family members I interviewed had an analogous reaction. “I was pretty open with you,” one of them explained, “because I didn’t think anyone would read it. Who’d want to hear our family story?” Judging by the largely positive reception, it turns out that many people did. Admittedly, “largely positive” is not the same as “completely positive,” and my book has its fair share of critics. It’s conventional for people to say they were surprised by criticism, but I wasn’t. I was definitely surprised that many people read the book—our initial print run was ten thousand copies, and we’re approaching two million now—but I knew that if the book was successful, there would eventually be blowback. With a few exceptions, I’ve tried to avoid commenting on those reactions. A respected social scientist once told me that a book is like a baby. Eventually it leaves the house and you can’t control the way people interact with it. But I’ve also found that critics occasionally react to the book in contradictory ways. If I haven’t been surprised by the fact of criticism, I have occasionally been confused by that conflict. I’ve heard, for instance, from someone on the Left that my book is a victim-blaming piece of anti-government libertarianism and then, in the very same week , from someone on the Right that my book’s premises, if accepted, would justify a massive expansion of government welfare programs. Both of these things can’t possibly be true. I tried to lay my cards explicitly on the table in one of the later chapters of the book: I am a conservative, one who doubts that the 1960s approach to welfare has made it easier for our country’s poor children to achieve their dreams. But those of us on the Right are deluding ourselves if we fail to acknowledge that it did accomplish something else: it prevented a lot of suffering, and made it possible for people like Mamaw to access food and medicine when they were too poor, too old, or too sick to buy it themselves. This ain’t nothing.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I visited him on most holidays and spent every other weekend at his house. Though I loved seeing aunts, uncles, and cousins who hadn’t been part of my life in years, the basic segregation of my two lives remained. Dad avoided Mom’s side of the family, and vice versa. Lindsay and Mamaw appreciated Dad’s new role in my life, but they continued to distrust him. To Mamaw, Dad was the “sperm donor” who had abandoned me at a critical juncture. Although I, too, resented Dad for the past, Mamaw’s stubbornness didn’t make things any easier. Still, my relationship with Dad continued to develop, and so did my relationship with his church. The downside of his theology was that it promoted a certain segregation from the outside world. I couldn’t listen to Eric Clapton at Dad’s house—not because the lyrics were inappropriate but because Eric Clapton was influenced by demonic forces. I’d heard people joke that if you played Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” backward, you’d hear some evil incantation, but a member of Dad’s church spoke about the Zeppelin myth as if it were actually true. These were quirks, and at first I understood them as little more than strict rules that I could either comply with or get around. Yet I was a curious kid, and the deeper I immersed myself in evangelical theology, the more I felt compelled to mistrust many sectors of society. Evolution and the Big Bang became ideologies to confront, not theories to understand. Many of the sermons I heard spent as much time criticizing other Christians as anything else. Theological battle lines were drawn, and those on the other side weren’t just wrong about biblical interpretation, they were somehow unchristian. I admired my uncle Dan above all other men, but when he spoke of his Catholic acceptance of evolutionary theory, my admiration became tinged with suspicion. My new faith had put me on the lookout for heretics. Good friends who interpreted parts of the Bible differently were bad influences. Even Mamaw fell from favor because her religious views didn’t conflict with her affinity for Bill Clinton. As a young teenager thinking seriously for the first time about what I believed and why I believed it, I had an acute sense that the walls were closing in on “real” Christians. There was talk about the “war on Christmas”—which, as far as I could tell, consisted mainly of ACLU activists suing small towns for nativity displays. I read a book called Persecution by David Limbaugh about the various ways that Christians were discriminated against. The Internet was abuzz with talk of New York art displays that featured images of Christ or the Virgin Mary covered in feces. For the first time in my life, I felt like a persecuted minority. All of this talk about Christians who weren’t Christian enough, secularists indoctrinating our youth, art exhibits insulting our faith, and persecution by the elites made the world a scary and foreign place.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Caught between various dad candidates, Lindsay and I never learned how a man should treat a woman. Chip may have taught me how to tie a fishing hook, but I learned little else about what masculinity required of me other than drinking beer and screaming at a woman when she screamed at you. In the end, the only lesson that took was that you can’t depend on people. “I learned that men will disappear at the drop of a hat,” Lindsay once said. “They don’t care about their kids; they don’t provide; they just disappear, and it’s not that hard to make them go.” Mom perhaps sensed that Bob was regretting his decision to take on an additional child, because one day she called me into the living room to speak on the phone with Don Bowman, my biological father. It was a short but memorable conversation. He asked if I remembered wanting to have a farm with horses and cows and chickens, and I answered that I did. He asked if I remembered my siblings—Cory and Chelsea—and I did a little bit, so I said, “Kind of.” He asked if I’d like to see him again. I knew little about my biological father and barely recalled my life before Bob adopted me. I knew that Don had abandoned me because he didn’t want to pay child support (or so Mom said). I knew that he was married to a woman named Cheryl, that he was tall, and that people thought I looked like him. And I knew that he was, in Mamaw’s words, a “Holy Roller.” That was the word she used for charismatic Christians who, she claimed, “handled snakes and screamed and wailed in church.” This was enough to pique my curiosity: With little religious training, I was desperate for some exposure to a real church. I asked Mom if I could see him, and she agreed, so in the same summer that my legal father walked out of my life, my biological one walked back in. Mom had come full circle: Having cycled through a number of men in an effort to find me a father, she had settled on the original candidate. Don Bowman had much more in common with Mom’s side of the family than I expected. His father (and my grandfather), Don C. Bowman, also migrated from eastern Kentucky to southwest Ohio for work. After marrying and starting a family, my grandfather Bowman died suddenly, leaving behind two small children and a young wife. My grandmother remarried, and Dad spent much of his childhood in eastern Kentucky with his grandparents. More than any other person, Dad understood what Kentucky meant to me, because it meant the same thing to him. His mom remarried early, and though her second husband was a good man, he was also very firm and an outsider—even the best stepparents take some getting used to. In Kentucky, among his people and with plenty of space, Dad could be himself.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  tion, as a matter of fact. Not that she had any plan to actually touch this man. She was just curious. That was all. She wanted to understand how someone so ugly could also be so confident. She wanted to study him. Once inside he began to fondle her immediately, squeezing her breasts as if testing them for done ness. She pushed him away and laughed and said he’d gotten the wrong idea, would he like coffee? A drink? And wasn’t it warm for early May? He peeled off his shirt and threw it on the floor. Such hair! He was going to shed all over. Worse. Now he let his pants drop without ceremony, leaving his naked body exposed before her like a strange primordial land scape that had no relationship to sex as she knew it. She stood there, then, sun streaming through her kitchen window, and wondered how such an event could have hap pened to her, how she could find herself with such an ugly naked fat man in her kitchen. It had not been her plan. He was very fat. His great stomach, round and solid-looking, obscured any view of his cock. Then she saw it nestling there, his little manhood, so shy, pink, so painfully small even though it was fully erect, like a snail hiding beneath the shadow of his paunch. Possibly the sight of it awoke some maternal instinct in her, for when he took her hands and drew her to him, pushing her to her knees, she didn’t resist. How amazing, the audacity of it! He wasn’t ashamed of his tiny thing, he was actually expecting her to worship it! He was so small, so exposed, that in her confusion she felt a kind of tenderness toward this man. There was no help for her but to eat him. She may have felt pity. Then she realized at once that she could take both the cock and the pre cious balls into her mouth at once, that she could enjoy the whole salad at the same time. The knowledge swept away her curiosity, her pity. She gobbled him up. Even the taste of his