Contempt

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 Macho Sluts (1988)

  “And how did she have you?” “What’s it to you?” “That depends on how bad you miss it. Maybe twenty, maybe a laugh. Tell me.” Her “lover” was a closeted sadist, a very well-camouflaged pervert. You can do that if you are gainfully employed. She worked as a carpenter on the lobster shift so she had an allocation for private living space. In this wee cottage, she had built a dog-house and a rack and many other sordid devices. She had plucked Ms Ingénue from an orientation for apprentices, sensing which way her far-from-reedy self could be bent. Our tail-wagging, panting little woofer spent every possible minute with her, and when she did she was always in a wooden set of stocks and had a plug up her butt. Much was made of leashes and spanking bad puppies. She slept in the aforementioned doggie-hut, and did all her drinking and eating out of little dishes on the floor. I shudder to think where she performed her baser functions. I was charmed. Unfortunately, the puppy had become an apprentice in earnest and had to report for a daylight shift, so her pragmatic trainer gave her the gate, and went out and got a mutt that was more available. “You really are disgusting,” I crooned, kicking her feet apart under the table. “What a lovely little freak you are. Letting her push you around that way. What did we have a revolution for if women are going to wallow in this reactionary masochism? Hmm? It’s decadent, diseased, self-indulgent, immature, impractical.” “At least I never did it for money,” she said. Her defiance made my blood run hot. I jerked my gloves out from under my epaulet and smacked her across the face. She didn’t try to put her knees back together. So I loomed up across the table and stuffed the gloves into her mouth. She cried out, so I tamped them in a little further, using four fingers while I held her head. “I have a problem with the idea that I should spend two years nurturing a snotty-nosed bawling baby until group care will take it away and turn it into a heroine of the future,” I said. “So I can’t be a member in good standing of our beloved republic, Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean. Plus I don’t seem to be able to hide my unconventional sexual proclivities. Like a taste for making twisted cases of arrested development like you toe the line. You like the way those gloves taste? I ought to work you over with my belt, bitch. But if you had to discipline a lost cause like yourself, you’d want to be paid, too.” Tears were running down her face. She took her hands off the table, made fists inside her jacket pockets, and came back with a ten in each hand. She shoved them at me across the table, little crumpled paper balls, confessions that her need was stronger than shame.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  The word pornography, derived from the ancient Green porne and graphos, means ‘writing about whores.’ Porne means … the lowest class of whore, which in ancient Greece was the brothel slut available to all male citizens … The word pornography does not mean ‘writing about sex’ or ‘depictions of the erotic’ … or any other such euphemism. It means the graphic depiction of women as vile whores … In the male system, women are sex; sex is the whore. Buying her is buying pornography. Having her is having pornography … Seeing her sex, especially her genitals, is seeing pornography … Wanting her means wanting pornography. Being her means being pornography. Never mind that the term “pornography” was coined by Victorians, not by the ancient Greeks. (This was first pointed out to me by Gayle Rubin. More information on the etymology of the term appears in Walter Kendrick’s The Secret Museum, Viking, 1987.) Never mind that the anti-porn movement has done at least as much as “the male system” to make “whores” seem vile in the popular imagination. This book is available to anyone, male or female, who can pay for it or steal it. It will certainly seem vile to many people. Therefore, this book is a whore. And I wrote it, knowing that meant being a pornographer, being a whore. After all, “Being her [the whore] means being pornography.” What’s one more stigmatized identity? In my time, I’ve even been a lesbian housewife. Feminists who believe there was once a matriarchy say that prostitutes were once also priestesses. In some societies, every woman had to enter the temple of the goddess and receive payment for her sexual services before she could marry. Some women never left the temple. These priestesses did not simply perform rituals to guarantee the fertility of people, their herds and fields. They taught the receiving and giving of pleasure. I don’t know if I believe this. But I do believe the flesh should not be despised. If the flesh is not sacred, holy, then we are trapped in the muck of the profane, because the body is all we have. All knowledge, reason, truth, beauty, it is all reducible to physical sensation and actions performed by the agency of the flesh. Now that the goddess has no more temples, now that prostitutes are defiled women who represent the epitome of the patriarchy’s power instead of sacred women who represent the power of the Triune Goddess, it is surely ironic that it is someone who resembles nothing so much as the Venus of Willendorf in overalls, who rises up to rebuke us. It’s a feminist cliché that women are divided into virgins and whores, and set against each other. There is no mention in anti-porn rhetoric of how much the hatred voiced by “respectable” women puts the slut in danger, how much “nice” women’s jealousy and fear of being identified with her isolates the slut and makes it possible for her to be exploited and abused.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  said Tommy Dukes. "I'd like to know what the tie is.... The tie that binds _us_ just now is mental friction on one another. And, apart from that, there's damned little tie between us. We bust apart, and say spiteful things about one another, like all the other damned intellectuals in the world. Damned everybodies, as far as that goes, for they all do it. Else we bust apart, and cover up the spiteful things we feel against one another by saying false sugaries. It's a curious thing that the mental life seems to flourish with its roots in spite, ineffable and fathomless spite. Always has been so! Look at Socrates, in Plato, and his bunch round him! The sheer spite of it all, just sheer joy in pulling somebody else to bits.... Protagoras, or whoever it was! And Alcibiades, and all the other little disciple dogs joining in the fray! I must say it makes one prefer Buddha, quietly sitting under a bo-tree, or Jesus, telling his disciples little Sunday stories, peacefully, and without any mental fireworks. No, there's something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in spite and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit." "I don't think we're altogether so spiteful," protested Clifford. "My dear Clifford, think of the way we talk each other over, all of us. I'm rather worse than anybody else, myself. Because I infinitely prefer the spontaneous spite to the concocted sugaries; now they _are_ poison; when I begin saying what a fine fellow Clifford is, etc, etc, then poor Clifford is to be pitied. For God's sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don't say sugaries, or I'm done." "Oh, but I do think we honestly like one another," said Hammond. "I tell you we must ... we say such spiteful things to one another, about one another, behind our backs! I'm the worst." "And I do think you confuse the mental life with the critical activity. I agree with you, Socrates gave the critical activity a grand start, but he did more than that," said Charlie May, rather magisterially. The cronies had such a curious pomposity under their assumed modesty. It was all so _ex cathedra_, and it all pretended to be so humble. Dukes refused to be drawn about Socrates. "That's quite true, criticism and knowledge are not the same thing," said Hammond. "They aren't, of course," chimed in Berry, a brown, shy young man, who had called to see Dukes, and was staying the night. They all looked at him as if the ass had spoken.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  And he soon became rather superb, somewhat lordly with the nurse. She had rather expected it, and he played up without knowing. So susceptible we are to what is expected of us! The colliers had been so like children, talking to her, and telling her what hurt them, while she bandaged them, or nursed them. They had always made her feel so grand, almost super-human in her administrations. Now Clifford made her feel small, and like a servant, and she accepted it without a word, adjusting herself to the upper classes. She came very mute, with her long, handsome face, and downcast eyes, to administer to him. And she said very humbly: "Shall I do this now, Sir Clifford? Shall I do that?" "No, leave it for a time, I'll have it done later." "Very well, Sir Clifford." "Come in again in half an hour." "Very well, Sir Clifford." "And just take those old papers out, will you?" "Very well, Sir Clifford." She went softly, and in half an hour she came softly again. She was bullied, but she didn't mind. She was experiencing the upper classes. She neither resented nor disliked Clifford; he was just part of a phenomenon, the phenomenon of the high-class folks, so far unknown to her, but now to be known. She felt more at home with Lady Chatterley, and after all it's the mistress of the house matters most. Mrs. Bolton helped Clifford to bed at night, and slept across the passage from his room, and came if he rang for her in the night. She also helped him in the morning, and soon valeted him completely, even shaving him, in her soft, tentative woman's way. She was very good and competent, and she soon knew how to have him in her power. He wasn't so very different from the colliers after all, when you lathered his chin, and softly rubbed the bristles. The stand-offishness and the lack of frankness didn't bother her, she was having a new experience. Clifford, however, inside himself, never quite forgave Connie for giving up her personal care of him to a strange hired woman. It killed, he said to himself, the real flower of the intimacy between him and her. But Connie didn't mind that. The fine flower of their intimacy was to her rather like an orchid, a bulb stuck parasitic on her tree of life, and producing, to her eyes, a rather shabby flower.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "All the lot. Their spunk is gone dead. Motorcars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck the last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with india rubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people! It's all a steady sort of bolshevism just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing. Money, money, money! All the modern lot get their real kick out of killing the old human feeling out of man, making mincemeat of the old Adam and the old Eve. They're all alike. The world is all alike: kill off the human reality, a quid for every foreskin, two quid for each pair of balls. What is cunt but machine-fucking!--It's all alike. Pay 'em money to cut off the world's cock. Pay money, money, money to them that will take spunk out of mankind, and leave 'em all little twiddling machines." He sat there in the hut, his face pulled to mocking irony. Yet even then, he had one ear set backwards, listening to the storm over the wood. It made him feel so alone. "But won't it ever come to an end?" she said. "Ay, it will. It'll achieve its own salvation. When the last real man is killed, and they're _all_ tame: white, black, yellow, all colours of tame ones: then they'll _all_ be insane. Because the root of sanity is in the balls. Then they'll all be _insane_, and they'll make their grand _auto da fé_. You know _auto da fé_ means _act of faith_? Ay well, they'll make their own grand little act of faith. They'll offer one another up." "You mean kill one another?" "I do, duckie! If we go on at our present rate then in a hundred years' time there won't be ten thousand people in this island: there may not be ten. They'll have lovingly wiped each other out." The thunder was rolling further away. "How nice!" she said. "Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else. And if we go on in this way, with everybody, intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and workers all frantically killing off the last human feeling, the last bit of their intuition, the last healthy instinct; if it goes on in algebraical progression, as it is going on: then ta-tah! to the human species! Good-bye! darling! the serpent swallows itself and leaves a void, considerably messed up, but not hopeless. Very nice! When savage wild dogs bark in Wragby, and savage wild pit-ponies stamp on Tevershall pit-bank! _te deum laudamus!_" Connie laughed, but not very happily. "Then you ought to be pleased that they are all bolshevists," she said. "You ought to be pleased that they hurry on towards the end." "So I am. I don't stop 'em. Because I couldn't if I would." "Then why are you so bitter?"

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "I suppose you heard as Miss Allsopp was married last week! Would you ever! Miss Allsopp, old James's daughter, the boot-and-shoe Allsopp. You know they built a house up at Pye Croft. The old man died last year from a fall: eighty-three, he was, an' nimble as a lad. An' then he slipped on Bestwood Hill, on a slide as the lads 'ad made last winter, an' broke his thigh, and that finished him, poor old man, it did seem a shame. Well he left all his money to Tattie: didn't leave the boys a penny. And Tattie, I know, is five years--yes, she's fifty-three last autumn. And you know they were such Chapel people, my word! She taught Sunday School for thirty years, till her father died. And then she started carrying on with a fellow from Kinbrook, I don't know if you know him, an oldish fellow with a red nose, rather dandified, Willcock, 'as works in Harison's woodyard. Well, he's sixty-five if he's a day, yet you'd have thought they were a pair of young turtle-doves, to see them, arm in arm, and kissing at the gate: yes, an' she sitting on his knee right in the bay window on Pye Croft Road, for anybody to see. And he's got sons over forty: only lost his wife two years ago. If old James Allsopp hasn't risen from his grave, it's because there is no rising: for he kept her that strict! Now they're married and gone to live down at Kinbrook, and they say she goes round in a dressing-gown from morning to night, a veritable sight. I'm sure it's awful, the way the old ones go on! Why they're a lot worse than the young, and a sight more disgusting. I lay it down to the pictures, myself. But you can't keep them away. I was always saying: go to a good instructive film, but do for goodness sake keep away from these melodramas and love films. Anyhow keep the children away! But there you are, the grownups are worse than the children: and the old ones beat the band. Talk about morality! nobody cares a thing. Folks does as they like, and much better off they are for it, I must say. But they're having to draw their horns in nowadays, now th' pits are working so bad, and they haven't got the money. And the grumbling they do, it's awful, especially the women. The men are so good and patient! What can they do, poor chaps! But the women, oh, they do carry on! They go and show off, giving contributions for a wedding present for Princess Mary, and then when they see all the grand things that's been given, they simply rave: who's she, any better than anybody else! Why doesn't Swan & Edgar give me _one_ fur coat, instead of giving her six. I wish I'd kept my ten shillings! What's she going to give _me_, I should like to know?

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "But you cared for her?" she insisted. "Cared?" he grinned. "Perhaps you care for her now," she said. "Me!" His eyes widened. "Ah no, I can't think of her," he said quietly. "Why?" But he shook his head. "Then why don't you get a divorce? She'll come back to you one day," said Connie. He looked up at her sharply. "She wouldn't come within a mile of me. She hates me a lot worse than I hate her." "You'll see she'll come back to you." "That she never shall. That's done! It would make me sick to see her." "You will see her. And you're not even legally separated, are you?" "No." "Ah well, then she'll come back, and you'll have to take her in." He gazed at Connie fixedly. Then he gave the queer toss of his head. "You may be right. I was a fool ever to come back here. But I felt stranded, and had to go somewhere. A man's a poor bit of a wastrel, blown about. But you're right. I'll get a divorce and get clear. I hate those things like death, officials and courts and judges. But I've got to get through with it. I'll get a divorce." And she saw his jaw set. Inwardly she exulted. "I think I will have a cup of tea now," she said. He rose to make it. But his face was set. As they sat at table she asked him: "Why did you marry her? She was commoner than yourself. Mrs. Bolton told me about her. She could never understand why you married her." He looked at her fixedly.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "Well, hear how he goes on: 'It is thus slowly passing, with a slowness inconceivable in our measures of time, to new creative conditions, amid which the physical world, as we at present know it, will be represented by a ripple barely to be distinguished from nonentity.'" She listened with a glisten of amusement. All sorts of improper things suggested themselves. But she only said: "What silly hocus-pocus! As if his little conceited consciousness could know what was happening as slowly as all that! It only means _he_'s a physical failure on the earth, so he wants to make the whole universe a physical failure. Priggish little impertinence!" "Oh, but listen! Don't interrupt the great man's solemn words! 'The present type of order in the world has risen from an unimaginable past, and will find its grave in an unimaginable future. There remains the inexhaustive realm of abstract forms, and creativity with its shifting character ever determined afresh by its own creatures, and God, upon whose wisdom all forms of order depend.' There, that's how he winds up!" Connie sat listening contemptuously. "He's spiritually blown out," she said. "What a lot of stuff! Unimaginables, and types of order in graves, and realms of abstract forms, and creativity with a shifty character, and God mixed up with forms of order! Why it's idiotic!" "I must say, it is a little vaguely conglomerate, a mixture of gases, so to speak," said Clifford. "Still, I think there is something in the idea that the universe is physically wasting and spiritually ascending." "Do you? Then let it ascend, so long as it leaves me safely and solidly physically here below." "Do you like your physique?" he asked. "I love it!" And through her mind went the words: It's the nicest, nicest woman's arse as is! "But that is really rather extraordinary, because there's no denying it's an encumbrance. But then I suppose a woman doesn't take a supreme pleasure in the life of the mind." "Supreme pleasure?" she said, looking up at him. "Is that sort of idiocy the supreme pleasure of the life of the mind? No thank you! Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind: when the body is really wakened to life. But so many people, like your famous wind-machine, have only got minds tacked on to their physical corpses." He looked at her in wonder. "The life of the body," he said, "is just the life of the animals." "And that's better than the life of professional corpses. But it's not true! The human body is only just coming to real life. With the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and Jesus finished it off. But now the body is coming really to life, it is really rising from the tomb. And it will be a lovely, lovely life in the lovely universe, the life of the human body."

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "Well, hear how he goes on: 'It is thus slowly passing, with a slowness inconceivable in our measures of time, to new creative conditions, amid which the physical world, as we at present know it, will be represented by a ripple barely to be distinguished from nonentity.'" She listened with a glisten of amusement. All sorts of improper things suggested themselves. But she only said: "What silly hocus-pocus! As if his little conceited consciousness could know what was happening as slowly as all that! It only means _he_'s a physical failure on the earth, so he wants to make the whole universe a physical failure. Priggish little impertinence!" "Oh, but listen! Don't interrupt the great man's solemn words! 'The present type of order in the world has risen from an unimaginable past, and will find its grave in an unimaginable future. There remains the inexhaustive realm of abstract forms, and creativity with its shifting character ever determined afresh by its own creatures, and God, upon whose wisdom all forms of order depend.' There, that's how he winds up!" Connie sat listening contemptuously. "He's spiritually blown out," she said. "What a lot of stuff! Unimaginables, and types of order in graves, and realms of abstract forms, and creativity with a shifty character, and God mixed up with forms of order! Why it's idiotic!" "I must say, it is a little vaguely conglomerate, a mixture of gases, so to speak," said Clifford. "Still, I think there is something in the idea that the universe is physically wasting and spiritually ascending." "Do you? Then let it ascend, so long as it leaves me safely and solidly physically here below." "Do you like your physique?" he asked. "I love it!" And through her mind went the words: It's the nicest, nicest woman's arse as is! "But that is really rather extraordinary, because there's no denying it's an encumbrance. But then I suppose a woman doesn't take a supreme pleasure in the life of the mind." "Supreme pleasure?" she said, looking up at him. "Is that sort of idiocy the supreme pleasure of the life of the mind? No thank you! Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind: when the body is really wakened to life. But so many people, like your famous wind-machine, have only got minds tacked on to their physical corpses." He looked at her in wonder. "The life of the body," he said, "is just the life of the animals." "And that's better than the life of professional corpses. But it's not true! The human body is only just coming to real life. With the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and Jesus finished it off. But now the body is coming really to life, it is really rising from the tomb. And it will be a lovely, lovely life in the lovely universe, the life of the human body."

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  He looked at her weirdly, without an answer. It was obvious he couldn't even accept the fact of the existence of Mellors, in any connection with his own life. It was sheer, unspeakable, impotent hate. "And do you mean to say you'd marry him?--and bear his foul name?" he asked at length. "Yes, that's what I want." He was again as if dumbfounded. "Yes!" he said at last. "That proves that what I've always thought about you is correct: you're not normal, you're not in your right senses. You're one of those half-insane, perverted women who must run after depravity, the _nostalgie de la boue_." Suddenly he had become almost wistfully moral, seeing himself the incarnation of good, and people like Mellors and Connie the incarnation of mud, of evil. He seemed to be growing vague, inside a nimbus. "So don't you think you'd better divorce me and have done with it?" she said. "No! You can go where you like, but I shan't divorce you," he said idiotically. "Why not?" He was silent, in the silence of imbecile obstinacy. "Would you even let the child be legally yours, and your heir?" she said. "I care nothing about the child." "But if it's a boy it will be legally your son, and it will inherit your title, and have Wragby." "I care nothing about that," he said. "But you _must_! I shall prevent the child from being legally yours, if I can. I'd so much rather it were illegitimate, and mine: if it can't be Mellors'." "Do as you like about that." He was immovable. "And won't you divorce me?" she said. "You can use Duncan as a pretext! There'd be no need to bring in the real name. Duncan doesn't mind." "_I_ shall never divorce you," he said, as if a nail had been driven in. "But why? Because I want you to?" "Because I follow my own inclination, and I'm not inclined to." It was useless. She went upstairs, and told Hilda the upshot. "Better get away tomorrow," said Hilda, "and let him come to his senses." So Connie spent half the night packing her really private and personal effects. In the morning she had her trunks sent to the station, without telling Clifford. She decided to see him only to say good-bye, before lunch. But she spoke to Mrs. Bolton. "I must say good-bye to you, Mrs. Bolton, you know why. But I can trust you not to talk." "Oh, you can trust me, your Ladyship, though it's a sad blow for us here, indeed. But I hope you'll be happy with the other gentleman." "The other gentleman! It's Mr. Mellors, and I care for him. Sir Clifford knows. But don't say anything to anybody. And if one day you think Sir Clifford may be willing to divorce me, let me know, will you? I should like to be properly married to the man I care for."

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "Quite, Hammond, quite! But if someone starts making love to Julia, you begin to simmer; and if he goes on, you are soon at boiling point."... Julia was Hammond's wife. "Why, exactly! So I should be if he began to urinate in a corner of my drawing-room. There's a place for all these things." "You mean you wouldn't mind if he made love to Julia in some discreet alcove?" Charlie May was slightly satirical, for he had flirted a very little with Julia, and Hammond had cut up very roughly. "Of course I should mind. Sex is a private thing between me and Julia; and of course I should mind anyone else trying to mix in." "As a matter of fact," said the lean and freckled Tommy Dukes, who looked much more Irish than May, who was pale and rather fat: "As a matter of fact, Hammond, you have a strong property instinct, and a strong will to self-assertion, and you want success. Since I've been in the army definitely, I've got out of the way of the world, and now I see how inordinately strong the craving for self-assertion and success is in men. It is enormously over-developed. All our individuality has run that way. And of course men like you think you'll get through better with a woman's backing. That's why you're so jealous. That's what sex is to you ... a vital little dynamo between you and Julia, to bring success. If you began to be unsuccessful you'd begin to flirt, like Charlie, who isn't successful. Married people like you and Julia have labels on you, like travellers' trunks. Julia is labelled _Mrs. Arnold. B. Hammond_ ... just like a trunk on the railway that belongs to somebody. And you are labelled Arnold. B. Hammond, _C/o Mrs. Arnold. B. Hammond_. Oh, you're quite right, you're quite right! The life of the mind needs a comfortable house and decent cooking. You're quite right. It even needs posterity. But it all hinges on the instinct for success. That is the pivot on which all things turn." Hammond looked rather piqued. He was rather proud of the integrity of his mind, and of his _not_ being a timeserver. None the less, he did want success. "It's quite true, you can't live without cash," said May. "You've got to have a certain amount of it to be able to live and get along ... even to be free to _think_ you must have a certain amount of money, or your stomach stops you. But it seems to me you might leave the labels off sex. We're free to talk to anybody; so why shouldn't we be free to make love to any woman who inclines us that way?" "There speaks the lascivious Celt," said Clifford.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Clifford left them alone, and she learnt to do the same: she just went by without looking at them, and they stared as if she were a walking wax figure. When he had to deal with them, Clifford was rather haughty and contemptuous; one could no longer afford to be friendly. In fact he was altogether rather supercilious and contemptuous of anyone not in his own class. He stood his ground, without any attempt at conciliation. And he was neither liked nor disliked by the people: he was just part of things, like the pit-bank and Wragby itself. But Clifford was really extremely shy and self-conscious now he was lamed. He hated seeing anyone except just the personal servants. For he had to sit in a wheeled chair or a sort of bath-chair. Nevertheless he was just as carefully dressed as ever, by his expensive tailors, and he wore the careful Bond Street neckties just as before, and from the top he looked just as smart and impressive as ever. He had never been one of the modern lady-like young men: rather bucolic even, with his ruddy face and broad shoulders. But his very quiet, hesitating voice, and his eyes, at the same time bold and frightened, assured and uncertain, revealed his nature. His manner was often offensively supercilious, and then again modest and self-effacing, almost tremulous. Connie and he were attached to one another, in the aloof modern way. He was much too hurt in himself, the great shock of his maiming, to be easy and flippant. He was a hurt thing. And as such Connie stuck to him passionately. But she could not help feeling how little connection he really had with people. The miners were, in a sense, his own men; but he saw them as objects rather than men, parts of the pit rather than parts of life, crude raw phenomena rather than human beings along with him. He was in some way afraid of them, he could not bear to have them look at him now he was lame. And their queer, crude life seemed as unnatural as that of hedgehogs. He was remotely interested; but like a man looking down a microscope, or up a telescope. He was not in touch. He was not in actual touch with anybody, save, traditionally, with Wragby, and, through the close bond of family defence, with Emma. Beyond this nothing really touched him. Connie felt that she herself didn't really, not really touch him; perhaps there was nothing to get at ultimately; just a negation of human contact.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  In fact everything was a little ridiculous, or very ridiculous: certainly everything connected with authority, whether it were in the army or the government or the universities, was ridiculous to a degree. And as far as the governing class made any pretensions to govern, they were ridiculous too. Sir Geoffrey, Clifford's father, was intensely ridiculous, chopping down his trees, and weeding men out of his colliery to shove them into the war; and himself being so safe and patriotic; but also, spending more money on his country than he'd got. When Miss Chatterley--Emma--came down to London from the Midlands to do some nursing work, she was very witty in a quiet way about Sir Geoffrey and his determined patriotism. Herbert, the elder brother and heir, laughed outright, though it was his trees that were falling for trench props. But Clifford only smiled a little uneasily. Everything was ridiculous, quite true. But when it came too close and oneself became ridiculous too...? At least people of a different class, like Connie, were earnest about something. They believed in something. They were rather earnest about the Tommies, and the threat of conscription, and the shortage of sugar and toffee for the children. In all these things, of course, the authorities were ridiculously at fault. But Clifford could not take it to heart. To him the authorities were ridiculous _ab ovo_, not because of toffee or Tommies. And the authorities felt ridiculous, and behaved in a rather ridiculous fashion, and it was all a mad hatter's tea party for a while. Till things developed over there, and Lloyd George came to save the situation over here. And this surpassed even ridicule, the flippant young laughed no more. In 1916 Herbert Chatterley was killed, so Clifford became heir. He was terrified even of this. His importance as son of Sir Geoffrey and child of Wragby was so ingrained in him, he could never escape it. And yet he knew that this too, in the eyes of the vast seething world, was ridiculous. Now he was heir and responsible for Wragby. Was that not terrible? And also splendid at the same time, perhaps, purely absurd? Sir Geoffrey would have none of the absurdity. He was pale and tense, withdrawn into himself, and obstinately determined to save his country and his own position, let it be Lloyd George or who it might. So cut off he was, so divorced from the England that was really England, so utterly incapable, that he even thought well of Horatio Bottomley. Sir Geoffrey stood for England and Lloyd George as his forebears had stood for England and St. George: and he never knew there was a difference. So Sir Geoffrey felled timber and stood for Lloyd George and England, England and Lloyd George.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white. These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies. The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury. I think you know.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Silence fell. The four men smoked. And Connie sat there and put another stitch in her sewing.... Yes, she sat there! She had to sit mum. She had to be quiet as a mouse, not to interfere with the immensely important speculations of these highly-mental gentlemen. But she had to be there. They didn't get on so well without her; their ideas didn't flow so freely. Clifford was much more edgy and nervous, he got cold feet much quicker in Connie's absence, and the talk didn't run. Tommy Dukes came off best; he was a little inspired by her presence. Hammond she didn't really like; he seemed so selfish in a mental way. And Charles May, though she liked something about him, seemed a little distasteful and messy, in spite of his stars. How many evenings had Connie sat and listened to the manifestations of these four men! these, and one or two others. That they never seemed to get anywhere didn't trouble her deeply. She liked to hear what they had to say, especially when Tommy was there. It was fun. Instead of men kissing you, and touching you with their bodies, they revealed their minds to you. It was great fun! But what cold minds! And also it was a little irritating. She had more respect for Michaelis, on whose name they all poured such withering contempt, as a little mongrel arriviste, and uneducated bounder of the worst sort. Mongrel and bounder or not, he jumped to his own conclusions. He didn't merely walk round them with millions of words, in the parade of the life of the mind. Connie quite liked the life of the mind, and got a great thrill out of it. But she did think it overdid itself a little. She loved being there, amidst the tobacco smoke of those famous evenings of the cronies, as she called them privately to herself. She was infinitely amused, and proud too, that even their talking they could not do without her silent presence. She had an immense respect for thought ... and these men, at least, tried to think honestly. But somehow there was a cat, and it wouldn't jump. They all alike talked at something, though what it was, for the life of her she couldn't say. It was something that Mick didn't clear, either. But then Mick wasn't trying to do anything, but just get through his life, and put as much across other people as they tried to put across him. He was really anti-social, which was what Clifford and his cronies had against him. Clifford and his cronies were not anti-social; they were more or less bent on saving mankind, or on instructing it, to say the least. There was a gorgeous talk on Sunday evening, when the conversation drifted again to love. "Blest be the tie that binds Our hearts in kindred something-or-other"--

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The king, feeling himself healed, said, 'Damsel, you have well earned your husband'; whereto she answered, 'Then, my lord, I have earned Bertrand de Roussillon, whom I began to love even in the days of my childhood and have ever since loved over all.' The king deemed it a grave matter to give him to her; nevertheless, having promised her and unwilling to fail of his faith, he let call the count to himself and bespoke him thus: 'Bertrand, you are now of age and accomplished [in all that behoveth unto man's estate];[200] wherefore it is our pleasure that you return to govern your county and carry with you a damsel, whom we have given you to wife.' 'And who is the damsel, my lord?' asked Bertrand; to which the king answered, 'It is she who hath with her medicines restored to us our health.' [Footnote 200: _Fornito_, a notable example of what the illustrious Lewis Carroll Dodgson, Waywode of Wonderland, calls a "portmanteau-word," a species that abounds in mediæval Italian, for the confusion of translators.] Bertrand, who had seen and recognized Gillette, knowing her (albeit she seemed to him very fair) to be of no such lineage as sorted with his quality, said all disdainfully, 'My lord, will you then marry me to a she-leach? Now God forbid I should ever take such an one to wife!' 'Then,' said the king, 'will you have us fail of our faith, the which, to have our health again, we pledged to the damsel, who in guerdon thereof demanded you to husband?' 'My lord,' answered Bertrand, 'you may, an you will, take from me whatsoever I possess or, as your liegeman, bestow me upon whoso pleaseth you; but of this I certify you, that I will never be a consenting party unto such a marriage.' 'Nay,' rejoined the king, 'but you shall, for that the damsel is fair and wise and loveth you dear; wherefore we doubt not but you will have a far happier life with her than with a lady of higher lineage.' Bertrand held his peace and the king let make great preparations for the celebration of the marriage. The appointed day being come, Bertrand, sore against his will, in the presence of the king, espoused the damsel, who loved him more than herself. This done, having already determined in himself what he should do, he sought leave of the king to depart, saying he would fain return to his county and there consummate the marriage; then, taking horse, he repaired not thither, but betook himself into Tuscany, where, hearing that the Florentines were at war with those of Sienna, he determined to join himself to the former, by whom he was joyfully received and made captain over a certain number of men-at-arms; and there, being well provided[201] of them, he abode a pretty while in their service. [Footnote 201: _i.e._ getting good pay and allowances (_avendo buona provisione_).]

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  said Tommy Dukes. "I'd like to know what the tie is.... The tie that binds _us_ just now is mental friction on one another. And, apart from that, there's damned little tie between us. We bust apart, and say spiteful things about one another, like all the other damned intellectuals in the world. Damned everybodies, as far as that goes, for they all do it. Else we bust apart, and cover up the spiteful things we feel against one another by saying false sugaries. It's a curious thing that the mental life seems to flourish with its roots in spite, ineffable and fathomless spite. Always has been so! Look at Socrates, in Plato, and his bunch round him! The sheer spite of it all, just sheer joy in pulling somebody else to bits.... Protagoras, or whoever it was! And Alcibiades, and all the other little disciple dogs joining in the fray! I must say it makes one prefer Buddha, quietly sitting under a bo-tree, or Jesus, telling his disciples little Sunday stories, peacefully, and without any mental fireworks. No, there's something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in spite and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit." "I don't think we're altogether so spiteful," protested Clifford. "My dear Clifford, think of the way we talk each other over, all of us. I'm rather worse than anybody else, myself. Because I infinitely prefer the spontaneous spite to the concocted sugaries; now they _are_ poison; when I begin saying what a fine fellow Clifford is, etc, etc, then poor Clifford is to be pitied. For God's sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don't say sugaries, or I'm done." "Oh, but I do think we honestly like one another," said Hammond. "I tell you we must ... we say such spiteful things to one another, about one another, behind our backs! I'm the worst." "And I do think you confuse the mental life with the critical activity. I agree with you, Socrates gave the critical activity a grand start, but he did more than that," said Charlie May, rather magisterially. The cronies had such a curious pomposity under their assumed modesty. It was all so _ex cathedra_, and it all pretended to be so humble. Dukes refused to be drawn about Socrates. "That's quite true, criticism and knowledge are not the same thing," said Hammond. "They aren't, of course," chimed in Berry, a brown, shy young man, who had called to see Dukes, and was staying the night. They all looked at him as if the ass had spoken.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  “We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any,” writes Solzhenitsyn. “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.” This is the foundation of the Dream—its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works. There is some passing acknowledgment of the bad old days, which, by the way, were not so bad as to have any ongoing effect on our present. The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one’s eyes and forgetting the work of one’s hands. To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning toward something murkier and unknown. It is still too difficult for most Americans to do this. But that is your work. It must be, if only to preserve the sanctity of your mind. — The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are. I think of that summer that you may well remember when I loaded you and your cousin Christopher into the back seat of a rented car and pushed out to see what remained of Petersburg, Shirley Plantation, and the Wilderness. I was obsessed with the Civil War because six hundred thousand people had died in it. And yet it had been glossed over in my education, and in popular culture, representations of the war and its reasons seemed obscured. And yet I knew that in 1859 we were enslaved and in 1865 we were not, and what happened to us in those years struck me as having some amount of import. But whenever I visited any of the battlefields, I felt like I was greeted as if I were a nosy accountant conducting an audit and someone was trying to hide the books.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  Bradlaugh’s name and his so- called atheism. I read some book about it, the name of which I forget. It had no effect on me, for I had already crossed the Sahara of atheism. Mrs. Besant who was then very much in the limelight, had turned to theism from atheism. I had read her book How I became a Theosophist. It was about this time that Bradlaugh died. He was buried in the Working Cemetery. I attended the funeral, as I believe every Indian residing in London did. A few clergymen also were present to do him the last honours. On our way back from the funeral we had to wait at the station for our train. A champion atheist from the crowd heckled one of these clergymen. ‘Well sir, you believe in the existence of God?’ ‘I do,’ said the good man in a low tone. ‘You also agree that the circumference of the Earth is 28,000 miles, don’t you?’ said the atheist with a smile of self-assurance. ‘Indeed.’ ‘Pray tell me then the size of your God and where he may be?’ ‘Well, if we but knew, He resides in the hearts of us both.’ ‘Now, now, don’t take me to be a child,’ said the champion with a triumphant look at us. The clergyman assumed a humble silence. This talk still further increased my prejudice against atheism. 23.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Now Connie would sometimes plead a headache as an excuse for going up to her room after dinner. "Perhaps Mrs. Bolton will play piquet with you," she said to Clifford. "Oh, I shall be perfectly all right. You go to your own room and rest, darling." But no sooner had she gone, than he rang for Mrs. Bolton, and asked her to take a hand at piquet or bezique, or even chess. He had taught her all these games. And Connie found it curiously objectionable to see Mrs. Bolton, flushed and tremulous like a little girl, touching her queen or her knight with uncertain fingers, then drawing away again. And Clifford, faintly smiling with a half-teasing superiority, saying to her: "You must say _j'adoube_!" She looked up at him with bright, startled eyes, then murmured shyly, obediently: "_J'adoube!_" Yes, he was educating her. And he enjoyed it, it gave him a sense of power. And she was thrilled. She was coming bit by bit into possession of all that the gentry knew, all that made them upper class: apart from the money. That thrilled her. And at the same time, she was making him want to have her there with him. It was a subtle deep flattery to him, her genuine thrill. To Connie, Clifford seemed to be coming out in his true colours: a little vulgar, a little common, and uninspired; rather fat. Ivy Bolton's tricks and humble bossiness were also only too transparent. But Connie did wonder at the genuine thrill which the woman got out of Clifford. To say she was in love with him would be putting it wrongly. She was thrilled by her contact with a man of the upper class, this titled gentleman, this author who could write books and poems, and whose photograph appeared in the illustrated newspapers. She was thrilled to a weird passion. And his "educating" her roused in her a passion of excitement and response much deeper than any love affair could have done. In truth, the very fact that there could _be_ no love affair left her free to thrill to her very marrow with this other passion, the peculiar passion of _knowing_, knowing as he knew. There was no mistake that the woman was in some way in love with him: whatever force we give to the word love. She looked so handsome and so young, and her grey eyes were sometimes marvellous. At the same time, there was a lurking soft satisfaction about her, even of triumph, and private satisfaction. Ugh, that private satisfaction! How Connie loathed it! But no wonder Clifford was caught by the woman! She absolutely adored him, in her persistent fashion, and put herself absolutely at his service, for him to use as he liked. No wonder he was flattered!