Contentment

Passages

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

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• From The Girls (2016)

  glad for her company. “I don’t like the drive, anyway,” Sasha said, gamely adapting to the situation. “I get sick on those small roads. He drives so crazy, too. Super fast.” She leaned up against the counter, yawning. “Tired?” I said. She told me that she had been trying polyphasic sleep but had to quit. “It was too weird,” she said. Her nipples were apparent through her shirt. “Polyphasic sleep?” I said, pulling my own robe tight in a prudish surge. “Thomas Jefferson did it. You sleep in hour bursts, like, six times a day.” “And you’re awake the rest of the time?” Sasha nodded. “It’s kind of great, the first couple of days. But I crashed hard. It seemed like I’d never sleep normal again.” I couldn’t link the girl I’d overheard the night before to the girl in front of me, talking about sleep experiments. “There’s enough hot water in the kettle if you want some,” I said, but Sasha shook her head. “I don’t eat in the mornings, like a ballerina.” She glanced at the window, the sea a pewter sheet. “Do you ever swim?” “It’s really cold.” I had only seen the occasional surfer venture into the waves, their bodies sheathed in neoprene, hoods over their heads. “So you’ve gone in?” she asked. “No.” Sasha’s face moved with sympathy. Like I was missing out on some obvious pleasure. But no one swam, I thought, feeling protective of my life in this borrowed house, the local orbits of my days. “There are sharks out there, too,” I added. “They don’t really attack humans,” Sasha said, shrugging. She was pretty, like a consumptive, eaten by an internal heat. I tried to spot some pornographic residue of the night before, but there was nothing. Her face as pale and blameless as a lesser moon. —

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Sometimes the architect would come to the hotel in the evening and then would ensue long discussions. Bending over the little mahogany table, he and Stephen would study the plans intently, for she wished to preserve the spirit of the place intact, despite alterations. She decided to have an Empire study with grey walls and curtains of Empire green, for she loved the great roomy writing tables that had come into being with the first Napoleon. The walls of the salle à manger should be white and the curtains brown, while Puddle’s round sanctum in its turret should have walls and paintwork of yellow, to give the illusion of sunshine. And so absorbed did Stephen become in these things, that she scarcely had time to notice Jonathan Brockett’s abrupt departure for a mountain top in the Austrian Tyrol. Having suddenly come to the end of his finances, he must hasten to write a couple of plays that could be produced in London that winter. He sent her three or four picture postcards of glaciers, after which she heard nothing more from him. At the end of August, when the work was well under way, she and Puddle fared forth in the motor to visit divers villages and towns, in quest of old furniture, and Stephen was surprised to find how much she enjoyed it. She would catch herself whistling as she drove her car, and when they got back to some humble auberge in the evening, she would want to eat a large supper. Every morning she diligently swung her dumb-bells; she was getting into condition for fencing. She had not fenced at all since leaving Morton, having been too much engrossed in her work while in London; but now she was going to fence before Buisson, so she diligently swung her dumb-bells. During these two months of holiday-making she grew fond of the wide-eyed, fruitful French country, even as she had grown fond of Paris. She would never love it as she loved the hills and the stretching valleys surrounding Morton, for that love was somehow a part of her being, but she gave to this France, that would give her a home, a quiet and very sincere affection. Her heart grew more grateful with every mile, for hers was above all a grateful nature. They returned to Paris at the end of October. And now came the selecting of carpets and curtains; of fascinating blankets from the Magasin de Blanc—blankets craftily dyed to match any bedroom; of fine linen, and other expensive things, including the copper batterie de cuisine, which latter, however, was left to Puddle.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  At last the army of workmen departed, its place being taken by a Breton ménage—brown-faced folk, strong-limbed and capable looking—a mother, father and daughter. Pierre, the butler, had been a fisherman once, but the sea with its hardships had prematurely aged him. He had now been in service for several years, having contracted rheumatic fever which had weakened his heart and made him unfit for the strenuous life of a fisher. Pauline, his wife, was considerably younger, and she it was who would reign in the kitchen, while their daughter Adèle, a girl of eighteen, would help both her parents and look after the housework. Adèle was as happy as a blackbird in springtime; she would often seem just on the verge of chirping. But Pauline had stood and watched the great storms gather over the sea while her men were out fishing; her father had lost his life through the sea as had also a brother, so Pauline smiled seldom. Dour she was, with a predilection for dwelling in detail on people’s misfortunes. As for Pierre, he was stolid, kind and pious, with the eyes of a man who has looked on vast spaces. His grey stubbly hair was cut short to his head en brosse, and he had an ungainly figure. When he walked he straddled a little as though he could never believe in a house without motion. He liked Stephen at once, which was very propitious, for one cannot buy the good-will of a Breton. Thus gradually chaos gave place to order, and on the morning of her twenty-seventh birthday, on Christmas Eve, Stephen moved into her home in the Rue Jacob on the old Rive Gauche, there to start her new life in Paris. 2 All alone in the brown and white salle à manger, Stephen and Puddle ate their Christmas dinner. And Puddle had bought a small Christmas tree and had trimmed it, then hung it with coloured candles. A little wax Christ-child bent downwards and sideways from His branch, as though He were looking for His presents—only now there were not any presents. Rather clumsily Stephen lit the candles as soon as the daylight had almost faded. Then she and Puddle stood and stared at the tree, but in silence, because they must both remember. But Pierre, who like all who have known the sea, was a child at heart, broke into loud exclamations. ‘Oh, comme c’est beau, l’arbre de Noël!’ he exclaimed, and he fetched the dour Pauline along from the kitchen, and she too exclaimed; then they both fetched Adèle and they all three exclaimed: ‘Comme c’est beau, l’arbre de Noël!’ So, that after all the little wax Christ-child did not very much miss His presents . That evening Pauline’s two brothers arrived—they were Poilus stationed just outside Paris—and they brought along with them another young man, one Jean, who was ardently courting Adèle.

• From The Girls (2016)

  My eyes were closed as I floated, and I only opened them when I heard thrashing beyond the tree line. A deer, maybe. I tensed, stirring uneasily in the water. I didn’t think that it could be a person: we didn’t worry about those kinds of things. Not until later. And it was a dalmatian anyway, the creature that came trotting out of the trees and right up to the pool’s edge. He regarded me soberly, then started to bark. The dog was strange looking, speckled and spotted, and it barked with high, human alarm. I knew it belonged to the neighbors on our left, the Dutton family. The father had written some movie theme song, and at parties I had heard the mother hum it, mockingly, to a gathered group. Their son was younger than me—he often shot his BB gun in the yard, the dog yelping in agitated chorus. I couldn’t remember the dog’s name. “Get,” I said, splashing halfheartedly. I didn’t want to have to haul myself out of the water. “Go on.” The dog kept barking. “Go,” I tried again, but the dog just barked louder. — My cutoffs were damp from my swimsuit by the time I made it to the Dutton house. I’d put on my cork sandals, grimed with the ghost of my feet, and taken the dog by the collar, the ends of my hair dripping. Teddy Dutton answered the door. He was eleven or twelve, his legs studded with scabs and scrapes. He’d broken his arm last year falling from a tree, and my mother had been the one to drive him to the hospital: she’d muttered darkly that his parents left him alone too much. I had never spent much time with Teddy, beyond the familiarity of being young at neighborhood parties, anyone under age eighteen herded together in a forced march to friendship. Sometimes I’d see him riding his bike along the fire road with a boy in glasses: he’d once let me pet a barn kitten they’d found, holding the tiny thing under his shirt. The kitten’s eyes were leaky with pus, but Teddy had been gentle with it, like a little mother. That was the last time I’d spoken to him. “Hey,” I said when Teddy opened the door. “Your dog.” Teddy was gaping at me like we hadn’t been neighbors our whole lives. I rolled my eyes a little at his silence.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  But unless there’s a God, where do some of us find even the little courage we possess? Martin stared out of the window in silence. 3 Mary was growing gentle again; infinitely gentle she now was at times, for happiness makes for gentleness, and in these days Mary was strangely happy. Reassured by the presence of Martin Hallam, re-established in pride and self-respect, she was able to contemplate the world without her erstwhile sense of isolation, was able for the moment to sheathe her sword, and this respite brought her a sense of well-being. She discovered that at heart she was neither so courageous nor so defiant as she had imagined, that like many another woman before her, she was well content to feel herself protected; and gradually as the weeks went by, she began to forget her bitter resentment . One thing only distressed her, and this was Stephen’s refusal to accompany her when she went to Passy; she could not understand it, so must put it down to the influence of Valérie Seymour who had met and disliked Martin’s aunt at one time, indeed the dislike, it seemed, had been mutual. Thus the vague resentment that Valérie had inspired in the girl, began to grow much less vague, until Stephen realized with a shock of surprise that Mary was jealous of Valérie Seymour. But this seemed so absurd and preposterous a thing, that Stephen decided it could only be passing, nor did it loom very large in these days that were so fully taken up by Martin. For now that his eyesight was quite restored he was talking of going home in the autumn, and every free moment that he could steal from his aunt, he wanted to spend with Stephen and Mary. When he spoke of his departure, Stephen sometimes fancied that a shade of sadness crept into Mary’s face, and her heart misgave her, though she told herself that naturally both of them would miss Martin. Then too, never had Mary been more loyal and devoted, more obviously anxious to prove her love by a thousand little acts of devotion. There would even be times when by contrast her manner would appear abrupt and unfriendly to Martin, when she argued with him over every trifle, backing up her opinion by quoting Stephen—yes, in spite of her newly restored gentleness, there were times when she would not be gentle with Martin. And these sudden and unforeseen changes of mood would leave Stephen feeling uneasy and bewildered, so that one night she spoke rather anxiously: ‘Why were you so beastly to Martin this evening?’ But Mary pretended not to understand her: ‘How was I beastly? I was just as usual.’ And when Stephen persisted, Mary kissed her scar: ‘Darling, don’t start working now, it’s so late, and besides . . .’

• From The Girls (2016)

  college I had never heard of. Who waxed her legs in the bathroom with a complicated device that filled the apartment with the humidity of camphor. Her attendant unguents and hair oils, the fingernails whose lunar surfaces she studied for signs of nutritional deficiencies. At first, she seemed unhappy with my presence. The awkward hug she offered, like she was grimly accepting the task of being my new mother. And I was disappointed, too. She was just a girl, not the exotic woman I’d once imagined—everything I’d thought was special about her was actually just proof of what Russell would call a straight world trip. Tamar did what she was supposed to. Worked for my father, wore her little suit. Aching to be someone’s wife. But then her formality quickly melted away, the veil of adulthood she wore as temporarily as a costume. She let me rummage through the quilted pouch that held her makeup, her blowsy perfume bottles, watching with the pride of a true collector. She pushed a blouse of hers, with bell sleeves and pearl buttons, onto me. “It’s just not my style anymore.” She shrugged, picking at a loose thread. “But it’ll look good on you, I know. Elizabethan.” And it did look good. Tamar knew those things. She knew the calorie count of most foods, which she recited in sarcastic tones, like she was making fun of her own knowledge. She cooked vegetable vindaloo. Pots of lentils coated with a yellow sauce that gave off an unfamiliar brightness. The roll of powdery antacids my father swallowed like candy. Tamar held out her cheek for my father to kiss but swatted him away when he tried to hold her hand. “You’re all sweaty,” she said. When my father saw that I had noticed, he laughed a little but seemed embarrassed. My father was amused at our collusion. But it sometimes shook out so we were laughing at him. Once Tamar and I were talking about Spanky and Our Gang, and he chimed in. Like the Little Rascals, he figured. Tamar and I looked at each other. “It’s a band,” she said. “You know, that rock-and-roll music the kids like.” And my father’s confused, orphaned face set us off again. —

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  Until we became familiar enough to belong to the Store and it to us, we were locked up in a Fun House of Things where the attendant had gone home for life. Each year I watched the field across from the Store turn caterpillar green, then gradually frosty white. I knew exactly how long it would be before the big wagons would pull into the front yard and load on the cotton pickers at daybreak to carry them to the remains of slavery's plantations. During the picking season my grandmother would get out of bed at four o'clock (she never used an alarm clock) and creak down to her knees and chant in a sleep-filled voice, “Our Father, thank you for letting me see this New Day. Thank you that you didn't allow the bed I lay on last night to be my cooling board, nor my blanket my winding sheet. Guide my feet this day along the straight and narrow, and help me to put a bridle on my tongue. Bless this house, and everybody in it. Thank you, in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, Amen.” Before she had quite arisen, she called our names and issued orders, and pushed her large feet into homemade slippers and across the bare lye-washed wooden floor to light the coal-oil lamp. The lamplight in the Store gave a soft make-believe feeling to our world which made me want to whisper and walk about on tiptoe. The odors of onions and oranges and kerosene had been mixing all night and wouldn't be disturbed until the wooded slat was removed from the door and the early morning air forced its way in with the bodies of people who had walked miles to reach the pickup place. “Sister, I'll have two cans of sardines.” “I'm gonna work so fast today I'm gonna make you look like you standing still.” “Lemme have a hunk uh cheese and some sody crackers.” “Just gimme a coupla them fat peanut paddies.” That would be from a picker who was taking his lunch. The greasy brown paper sack was stuck behind the bib of his overalls. He'd use the candy as a snack before the noon sun called the workers to rest. In those tender mornings the Store was full of laughing joking, boasting and bragging. One man was going to pick two hundred pounds of cotton, and another three hundred. Even the children were promising to bring home fo' bits and six bits. The champion picker of the day before was the hero of the dawn. If he prophesied that the cotton in today's field was going to be sparse and stick to the bolls like glue, every listener would grunt a hearty agreement. The sound of the empty cotton sacks dragging over the floor and the murmurs of waking people were sliced by the cash register as we rang up the five- cent sales.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  asking, “And how is the boy?,” and tried to draw me out a little. The meal always finished with the minister’s favorite dish of rice pudding, and he usually fell silent as he enjoyed it. Once dinner was over he lay down on the sofa to rest for an hour, or in fine weather he would sit out under the apple tree in the front garden looking down the valley, as well satisfied with his week’s work as the Lord God of Sabaoth after the creation of the world. Before evening prayers he went to his rolltop desk and took out the tin box in which he kept the calendar published by the Calvinist Methodists of Wales, a gray little book already worn rather threadbare and listing the Sundays and church festivals for the years 1928 to 1946, in which he had made regular entries against every date week by week, removing the thin solid ink pencil from the back of the book, moistening its tip with his tongue, and very slowly and neatly, like a schoolboy under supervision, noting down the name of the chapel where he had preached that day and the biblical passage he had taken as his text, for instance, under 20 July 1939: The Tabernacle, Llandrillo—Psalms CXLVII, 4, ‘He telleth the number of the stars: he calleth them all by their names’; under 3 August 1941: Chapel Uchaf, Gilboa —Zephaniah III, 6, ‘I have cut off the nations: their towers are desolate; I made their streets waste, that none passeth by’; and under 21 May 1944: Chapel Bethesda, Corwen—Isaiah XLVIII, 18, ‘O that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments! then had thy peace been as a river and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea!’ The last entry in this little book, which is among those few of the minister’s possessions to have passed into my hands after his death and through which I have often glanced recently, said Austerlitz, was made on one of the additional leaves inserted at the end and is dated 7 March 1952. It runs: Bala Chapel—Psalms CII, 6, ‘I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.’ For the most part, of course, these Sunday sermons, and I must have heard over five hundred of them, went over my head when I was a child, but even if the meaning of the various words and phrases was a mystery to me for a long time, and whether Elias delivered them in English or Welsh, I did understand that his subject was the sinfulness and punishment of mankind, fire and ashes and the approaching end of the world. However, said Austerlitz, in my memory Calvinist eschatology is linked not so much to these biblical images of destruction as to what I saw with my own eyes when I was out with Elias. Many of his younger colleagues in the ministry had been called up into the army soon after the beginning of the war, and consequently at least every other Sunday he had to go and preach to another congregation, often quite a long way off. At first we drove across country in a little two-seater trap drawn by an almost snow- white pony, and in accordance with Elias’s usual custom he would sit hunched up in the blackest of moods on the outward journey. On the way back, however,

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Augustine furnished the chief materials for the mystics of the Middle Ages as he did for the scholastics. It was he who said, "Thou hast made us for thyself and the heart is restless till it rests in Thee." For Aristotle, the mystics substituted Dionysius the Areopagite, the Christian Neo-Platonist, whose works were made accessible in Latin by Scotus Erigena.1420 The mystical element was strong in the greatest of the Schoolmen, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventura. The Middle Ages took Rachel and Leah, Mary and Martha as the representatives of the contemplative and the active life, the conventual and the secular life, and also of the mystic and scholastic methods. Through the entire two periods of seven years, says Peter Damiani,1421 Jacob was serving for Rachel. Every convert must endure the fight of temptation, but all look forward to repose and rest in the joy of supreme contemplation; that is, as it were, the embraces of the beautiful Rachel. These two periods stand for the Old and New Testament, the law and the grace of the Gospel. He who keeps the commandments of both at last comes into the embraces of Rachel long desired. Richard of St. Victor devotes a whole treatise to the comparison between Rachel and Leah. Leah was the more fertile, Rachel the more comely. Leah represented the discipline of virtue, Rachel the doctrine of truth. Rachel stands for meditation, contemplation, spiritual apprehension, and insight; Leah for weeping, lamentation, repining, and grief. Rachel died in giving birth to Benjamin. So reason, after the pangs of ratiocination, dies in giving birth to religious devotion and ardor.1422 This comparison was taken from Augustine, who said that Rachel stands for the joyous apprehension of the truth and, for that reason, was said to have a good face and beautiful form.1423 St. Bernard spoke of the fellowship of the active and contemplative life as two members of the same family, dwelling together as did Mary and Martha.1424 The scholastic theology was developed in connection with the school and the university, the mystic in connection with the convent. Clairvaux and St. Victor near Paris were the hearth-stones of mysticism. Within cloistral precincts were written the passionate hymns of the Middle Ages, and the eucharistic hymns of Thomas Aquinas are the utterances of the mystic and not of the Schoolman. The leading mystical divines of this period were Bernard, Hugo and Richard of St. Victor, and Rupert of Deutz. Mystical in their whole tendency were also Joachim of Flore, Hildegard and Elizabeth of Schönau, who belong in a class by themselves. § 104. St. Bernard as a Mystic. For literature, see § 65, also, Ritschl: Lesefrüchte aus d. hl. Bernard, in Studien u. Kritiken, 1879, pp. 317–335.—J. Ries (Rom. Cath.): D. geistliche Leben nach der Lehre d. hl. Bernard, Freib., 1906, p. 327.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  All that did not matter; he was directly and completely under his father’s power as long as his father lived. If ever a people knew what parental discipline was, the Romans did; and when the writer to the Hebrews talked about the way in which a human father disciplined his son, his readers knew very well what he was talking about. So, the writer insists that we must look on all the hardships of life as the discipline of God and as sent to work not for our harm but for our ultimate and highest good. To prove his point, he quotes Proverbs 3:11–12. There are many ways in which people look at the discipline which God sends. (1) They may resign themselves to it and accept it. That is what the Stoics did. They held that nothing in this world happens outside the will of God; therefore, they argued, there is nothing to do but to accept it. To do anything else is simply to batter one’s head against the walls of the universe. That is possibly the acceptance of supreme wisdom; but nonetheless it is the acceptance not of a parent’s love but of a parent’s power. It is not a willing but a defeated acceptance. (2) People may accept discipline with the grim sense of getting it over as soon as possible . A certain famous Roman said: ‘I will let nothing interrupt my life.’ To accept discipline like that is to regard it as something that is inflicted on us which is to be struggled through with defiance and certainly not with gratitude. (3) People may accept discipline with the self-pity which leads in the end to collapse . Some people, when they are caught up in a difficult situation, give the impression that they are the only people in the world whom life ever hurt. They are lost in their self-pity. (4) People may accept discipline as a punishment which they resent . It is strange that, at this time, the Romans saw in national and personal disasters nothing but the vengeance of the gods. Lucan the poet wrote: ‘Happy were Rome indeed, and blessed citizens would she have, if the gods were as much concerned with caring for men as they are with exacting vengeance from them.’ The historian Tacitus held that the disasters of the nation were proof that the interest of the gods lay not in people’s safety but in their punishment. There are still people who regard God as vindictive. When something happens to them or to those whom they love, their question is: ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ And the question is asked in such a tone as to make it clear that they regard the whole matter as an unjust punishment from God.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  A marble fountain long since choked with weeds, stood in the centre of what had been a lawn. In the farthest corner of the garden some hand had erected a semi-circular temple, but that had been a long time ago, and now the temple was all but ruined. The house itself would need endless repairs, but its rooms were of careful and restful proportions. A fine room with a window that opened on the garden, would be Stephen’s study; she could write there in quiet; on the other side of the stone-paved hall was a smaller but comfortable salle à manger; while past the stone staircase a little round room in a turret would be Puddle’s particular sanctum. Above there were bedrooms enough and to spare; there was also the space for a couple of bathrooms. The day after Stephen had seen this house, she had written agreeing to purchase. Valérie rang up before leaving Paris to inquire how Stephen had liked the old house, and when she heard that she had actually bought it, she expressed herself as being delighted. ‘We’ll be quite close neighbours now,’ she remarked, ‘but I’m not going to bother you until you evince, not even when I get back in the autumn. I know you’ll be literally snowed under with workmen for months, you poor dear, I feel sorry for you. But when you can, do let me come and see you—meanwhile if I can help you at all. . . .’ And she gave her address at St. Tropez. And now for the first time since leaving Morton, Stephen turned her mind to the making of a home. Through Brockett she found a young architect who seemed anxious to carry out all her instructions. He was one of those very rare architects who refrain from thrusting their views on their clients. So into the ancient, deserted house in the Rue Jacob streamed an army of workmen, and they hammered and scraped and raised clouds of dust from early morning, all day until evening—smoking harsh caporal as they joked or quarrelled or idled or spat or hummed snatches of song. And amazingly soon, wherever one trod one seemed to be treading on wet cement or on dry, gritty heaps of brick dust and rubble, so that Puddle would complain that she spoilt all her shoes, while Stephen would emerge with her neat blue serge shoulders quite grey, and with even her hair thickly powdered.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “But we can try making one out in the yard,” I said. — The sandy lot behind the garage was sheltered from the wind, wet leaves matted on the seats of plastic chairs. There had once been a fire pit of sorts, the stones scattered among the senseless archaeological relics of family life: add-ons to forgotten toys, a chewed-looking shard of Frisbee. We were both distracted by the hustle of preparation, tasks that allowed for companionable silence. I found a stack of three-year-old newspapers in the garage and a bundle of wood from the general store in town. Sasha toed the stones back into a circle. “I was always bad at this,” I said. “There’s something you’re supposed to do, right? Some special shape with the logs?” “Like a house,” Sasha said. “You’re supposed to make it look like a cabin.” She used her foot to neaten the ring. “We used to camp a lot in Yosemite when I was little.” Sasha was the one who actually got the fire going: squatting in the sand, keeping up a steady stream of breath. Gentling the flames until there was a satisfying burn. We sat down in the plastic chairs, their surfaces stippled from sand and wind. I pulled mine close to the fire—I wanted to feel hot, to sweat. Sasha was quiet, looking at the jump of flames, but I could sense the whir of her mind, the faraway place she had disappeared to. Maybe she was imagining what Julian was doing up in Garberville. The musky futon he’d sleep on, using a towel for a blanket. All part of the adventure. How nice it must be to be a twenty-year-old boy. “That stuff Julian was talking about,” Sasha said, clearing her throat like she was embarrassed, though her interest was obvious. “Were you, like, in love with that guy or something?” “Russell?” I said, poking at the fire with a stick. “I didn’t think about him like that.” It was true: the other girls had circled around Russell, tracking his movements and moods like weather patterns, but he stayed mostly distant in my mind. Like a beloved teacher whose home life his students never imagined.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  It never dawns upon them to ask: ‘What is God trying to teach me and to do with me through this experience?’ (5) So we come to the last attitude. People may accept discipline as coming from a loving father . The fourth-century biblical scholar Jerome said a paradoxical but true thing: ‘The greatest anger of all is when God is no longer angry with us when we sin.’ He meant that the supreme punishment is when God leaves us alone as unteachable. Christians know that ‘a father’s hand will never cause his child a needless tear’ and that everything can be utilized to make us wiser and better men and women. As Robert Browning wrote in ‘Rabbi ben Ezra’: Then welcome each rebuff That turns earth’s smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! Be our joy three-parts pain! Strive and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! For thence – a paradox Which comforts while it mocks – Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail; What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me. A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale. We shall stop feeling self-pity and resentment and end our rebellious complaining if we remember that there is no discipline of God which does not arise out of love and is not aimed at good. THE TERROR OF THE OLD AND THE GLORY OF THE NEW Hebrews 12:18–24 It is not to something that can be touched that you have come, to a flaming fire, to mist and gloom and storm blast, and to the blare of a trumpet, and to a voice which spoke such words that those who heard it begged that not another word should be further spoken unto them, for they could not bear the command: ‘If even a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.’ So terrifying was the apparition that Moses said: ‘I am in utter fear and trembling.’ But you have come to Mount Sion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to ten thousands of angels gathered in glad assembly, to the assembly of the honoured ones whose names are in the registers of heaven, to that God who is judge of all, to the spirits of just men who have come to that goal for which they were created, and to Jesus, the mediator of the new covenant, to the sprinkled blood which has a message greater than the blood of Abel. T HIS passage is a contrast between the old and the new.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She decided to have an Empire study with grey walls and curtains of Empire green, for she loved the great roomy writing tables that had come into being with the first Napoleon. The walls of the salle à manger should be white and the curtains brown, while Puddle’s round sanctum in its turret should have walls and paintwork of yellow, to give the illusion of sunshine. And so absorbed did Stephen become in these things, that she scarcely had time to notice Jonathan Brockett’s abrupt departure for a mountain top in the Austrian Tyrol. Having suddenly come to the end of his finances, he must hasten to write a couple of plays that could be produced in London that winter. He sent her three or four picture postcards of glaciers, after which she heard nothing more from him. At the end of August, when the work was well under way, she and Puddle fared forth in the motor to visit divers villages and towns, in quest of old furniture, and Stephen was surprised to find how much she enjoyed it. She would catch herself whistling as she drove her car, and when they got back to some humble auberge in the evening, she would want to eat a large supper. Every morning she diligently swung her dumb-bells; she was getting into condition for fencing. She had not fenced at all since leaving Morton, having been too much engrossed in her work while in London; but now she was going to fence before Buisson, so she diligently swung her dumb-bells. During these two months of holiday-making she grew fond of the wide-eyed, fruitful French country, even as she had grown fond of Paris. She would never love it as she loved the hills and the stretching valleys surrounding Morton, for that love was somehow a part of her being, but she gave to this France, that would give her a home, a quiet and very sincere affection. Her heart grew more grateful with every mile, for hers was above all a grateful nature. They returned to Paris at the end of October. And now came the selecting of carpets and curtains; of fascinating blankets from the Magasin de Blanc—blankets craftily dyed to match any bedroom; of fine linen, and other expensive things, including the copper batterie de cuisine, which latter, however, was left to Puddle. At last the army of workmen departed, its place being taken by a Breton ménage—brown-faced folk, strong-limbed and capable looking—a mother, father and daughter. Pierre, the butler, had been a fisherman once, but the sea with its hardships had prematurely aged him.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  the trained gardeners, a certain number of assistants who suffered from disabilities or required to have their minds set at rest by some quiet pursuit. I cannot say, said Austerlitz, why I began to recover in some degree out at Romford in the course of those months, whether it was because of the people in whose company I found myself, who though they all bore the scars of their mental sufferings often seemed carefree and very cheerful, or the constant warm, humid atmosphere in the greenhouses, the mossy, forest-ground fragrance filling the air, the rectilinear patterns presented to the eye, or simply the even tenor of the work itself, the careful pricking out and potting up of seedlings, transplanting them when they had grown larger, looking after the cold frames and watering the trays with a fine hose, which I liked perhaps best of all. At the time when I was working as an assistant gardener in Romford, said Austerlitz, I began to spend my evenings and weekends poring over the heavy tome, running to almost eight hundred close-printed pages, which H. G. Adler, a name previously unknown to me, had written between 1945 and 1947 in the most difficult of circumstances, partly in Prague and partly in London, on the subject of the setting up, development, and internal organization of the Theresienstadt ghetto, and which he had revised several times before it was brought out by a German publishing house in 1955. Reading this book, which line by line gave me an insight into matters I could never have imagined when I myself visited the fortified town, almost entirely ignorant as I was at that time, was a painstaking business because of my poor knowledge of German, and indeed, said Austerlitz, I might well say it was almost as difficult for me as deciphering an Egyptian or Babylonian text in hieroglyphic or cuneiform script. The long compounds, not listed in my dictionary, which were obviously being spawned the whole time by the pseudo- technical jargon governing everything in Theresienstadt had to be unraveled syllable by syllable. When I had finally discovered the meaning of such terms and concepts as Barackenbestandteillager, Zusatzkostenberechnungsschein, Bagatellreparaturwerkstatte, Menagetransportkolonnen, Ktichenbeschwerdeorgane, Reinlichkeitsreihenuntersuchung, and Entwesungstibersiedlung—to my _ surprise, Austerlitz articulated these heterogeneous German compounds unhesitatingly and without the slightest trace of an accent—when I had worked out what they meant, he continued, I had to make just as much of an effort to fit the presumptive sense of my reconstructions into the sentences and the wider context, which kept threatening to elude me, first because it quite often took me until midnight to master a single page, and a good deal was lost in this lengthy process, and second because in its almost futuristic deformation of social life the ghetto system had something incomprehensible and unreal about it, even though Adler describes it down to the last detail in its objective actuality.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  A rotating crew of young girls scaled and cleaned the catch and busy women in starched aprons salted and rolled the fish in corn meal, then dropped them in Dutch ovens trembling with boiling fat. On one corner of the clearing a gospel group was rehearsing. Their harmony packed as tight as sardines, floated over the music of the county singers and melted into the songs of the small children's ring games. “Boys, don'chew let that ball fall on none of my cakes, you do and it'll be me on you.” “Yes, ma'am,” and nothing changed. The boys continued hitting the tennis ball with pailings snatched from a fence and running holes in the ground, colliding with everyone. I had wanted to bring something to read, but Momma said if I didn't want to play with the other children I could make myself useful by cleaning fish or bringing water from the nearest well or wood for the barbecue. I wandered into a retreat by accident. Signs with arrows around the barbecue pit pointed MEN, WOMEN, CHILDREN toward fading lanes, grown over since last year. Feeling ages old and very wise at ten, I couldn't allow myself to be found by small children squatting behind a tree. Neither did I have the nerve to follow the arrow pointing the way for WOMEN. If any grownup had caught me there, it was possible that she'd think I was being “womanish” and would report me to Momma, and I knew what I could expect from her. So when the urge hit me to relieve myself, I headed toward another direction. Once through the wall of sycamore trees I found myself in a clearing ten times smaller than the picnic area, and cool and quiet. After my business was taken care of, I found a seat between two protruding roots of a black walnut tree and leaned back on its trunk. Heaven would be like that for the deserving. Maybe California too. Looking straight up at the uneven circle of sky, I began to sense that I might be falling into a blue cloud, far away. The children's voices and the thick odor of food cooking over open fire were the hooks I grabbed just in time to save myself. Grass squeaked and I jumped at being found. Louise Kendricks walked into my grove. I didn't know that she too was escaping the gay spirit. We were the same age and she and her mother lived in a neat little bungalow behind the school. Her cousins, who were in our age group, were wealthier and fairer, but I had secretly believed Louise to be the prettiest female in Stamps, next to Mrs. Flowers. “What you doing sitting here by yourself, Marguerite?” She didn't accuse, she asked for information. I said that I was watching the sky. She asked, “What for?” There was obviously no answer to a question like that, so I didn't make up one. Louise reminded me of Jane Eyre.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  No, instead they must just stand and gape at the tree, as though with its candles and Christ-child and all, it were some strange exotic plant in Kew Gardens. Then Anna called her people by name, and to each one she gave the gifts of that Christmas; and they thanked her, thanked Stephen and thanked Sir Philip; and Sir Philip thanked them for their faithful service, as had always been the good custom at Morton for more years than Sir Philip himself could remember. Thus the day had passed by in accordance with tradition, every one from the highest to the lowest remembered; nor had Anna forgotten her gifts for the village—warm shawls, sacks of coal, cough mixture and sweets. Sir Philip had sent a cheque to the vicar, which would keep him for a long time in cricketing flannels; and Stephen had carried a carrot to Raftery and two lumps of sugar to the fat, aged Collins, who because he was all but blind of one eye, had bitten her hand in place of his sugar. And Puddle had written at great length to a sister who lived down in Cornwall and whom she neglected, except on such memory-jogging occasions as Christmas, when somehow we always remember. And the servants had gorged themselves to repletion, and the hunters had rested in their hay-scented stables; while out in the fields, sea-gulls, come far inland, had feasted in their turn on humbler creatures—grubs and slugs, and other unhappy small fry, much relished by birds and hated by farmers. Night closed down on the house, and out of the darkness came the anxious young voices of village schoolchildren: ‘Noël, Noël—’ piped the anxious young voices, lubricated by sweets from the lady of Morton. Sir Philip stirred the logs in the hall to a blaze, while Anna sank into a deep chair and watched them. Her hands that were wearied by much ministration, lay over the arms of the chair in the firelight, and the firelight sought out the rings on her hands, and it played with the whiter flames in her diamonds. Then Sir Philip stood up, and he gazed at his wife, while she stared at the logs not appearing to notice him; but Stephen, watching in silence from her corner, seemed to see a dark shadow that stole in between them—beyond this her vision was mercifully dim, otherwise she must surely have recognized that shadow. 2 On New Year’s Eve Mrs. Antrim gave a dance in order, or so she said, to please Violet, who was still rather young to attend the hunt balls, but who dearly loved gaiety, especially dancing.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  When hounds checked and the field collected together, he would make little jokes to amuse his daughter, he would rack his brain for these poor little jokes, in order that people should see Stephen laughing. Sometimes he would whisper: ‘Let ’em have it hot, Stephen, that youngster you’re on loves a good bit of timber—don’t mind me, I know you won’t damage his knees, just you give ’em a lead and let’s see if they’ll catch you!’ And because it was seldom indeed that they caught her, his sore heart would know a fleeting contentment. Yet people begrudged her even this triumph, pointing out that the girl was magnificently mounted: ‘Anyone could get there on that sort of horse,’ they would murmur, when Stephen was out of hearing. But small Colonel Antrim, who was not always kind, would retort if he heard them: ‘Damn it, no, it’s the riding. The girl rides, that’s the point; as for some of you others—’ And then he would let loose a flood of foul language. ‘If some bloody fools that I know rode like Stephen, we’d have bloody well less to pay to the farmers,’ and much more he would say to the same effect, with rich oaths interlarding his every sentence—the foulest-mouthed master in the whole British Isles he was said to be, this small Colonel Antrim. Oh, but he dearly loved a fine rider, and he cursed and he swore his appreciation. Even in the presence of a sporting bishop one day, he had failed to control his language; indeed, he had sworn in the face of the bishop with enthusiasm, as he pointed to Stephen. An ineffectual and hen-pecked little fellow—in his home he was hardly allowed to say ‘damn.’ He was never permitted to smoke a cigar outside of his dark, inhospitable study. He must not breed Norwich canaries, which he loved, because they brought mice, declared Mrs. Antrim; he must not keep a pet dog in the house, and the ‘Pink ’Un’ was anathema because of Violet. His taste in art was heavily censored, even on the walls of his own water-closet, where nothing might hang but a family group taken sixteen odd years ago with the children. On Sundays he sat in an uncomfortable pew while his wife chanted psalms in the voice of a peacock. ‘Oh come, let us sing unto the Lord,’ she would chant, as she heartily rejoiced in the strength of her salvation. All this and a great deal more he endured, indeed most of his life was passed in endurance—had it not been for those red-letter days out hunting, he might well have become melancholic from boredom. But those days, when he actually found himself master, went far to restore his anæmic manhood, and on them he would speak the good English language as some deep-seated complex knew it ought to be spoken—ruddily, roundly, explosively spoken, with elation, at times with total abandon—especially if he should chance to remember Mrs.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  14 The barrenness of Stamps was exactly what I wanted, without will or consciousness. After St. Louis, with its noise and activity, its trucks and buses, and loud family gatherings, I welcomed the obscure lanes and lonely bungalows set back deep in dirt yards. The resignation of its inhabitants encouraged me to relax. They showed me a contentment based on the belief that nothing more was coming to them, although a great deal more was due. Their decision to be satisfied with life's inequities was a lesson for me. Entering Stamps, I had the feeling that I was stepping over the border lines of the map and would fall, without fear, right off the end of the world. Nothing more could happen, for in Stamps nothing happened. Into this cocoon I crept. For an indeterminate time, nothing was demanded of me or of Bailey. We were, after all, Mrs. Henderson's California grandchildren, and had been away on a glamorous trip way up North to the fabulous St. Louis. Our father had come the year before, driving a big, shiny automobile and speaking the King's English with a big city accent, so all we had to do was lie quiet for months and rake in the profits of our adventures. Farmers and maids, cooks and handymen, carpenters and all the children in town, made regular pilgrimages to the Store. “Just to see the travelers.” They stood around like cutout cardboard figures and asked, “Well, how is it up North?” “See any of them big buildings?” “Ever ride in one of them elevators?” “Was you scared?” “Whitefolks any different, like they say?” Bailey took it upon himself to answer every question, and from a corner of his lively imagination wove a tapestry of entertainment for them that I was sure was as foreign to him as it was to me. He, as usual, spoke precisely. “They have, in the North, buildings so high that for months, in the winter, you can't see the top floors.” “Tell the truth.” “They've got watermelons twice the size of a cow's head and sweeter than syrup.” I distinctly remember his intent face and the fascinated faces of his listeners. “And if you can count the watermelon's seeds, before it's cut open, you can win five zillion dollars and a new car.” Momma, knowing Bailey, warned, “Now Ju, be careful you don't slip up on a not true.” (Nice people didn't say “lie.”) “Everybody wears new clothes and have inside toilets. If you fall down in one of them, you get flushed away into the Mississippi River. Some people have iceboxes, only the proper name is Cold Spot or Frigidaire. The snow is so deep you can get buried right outside your door and people won't find you for a year. We made ice cream out of the snow.” That was the only fact that I could have supported.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  So now they were launched upon the stream that flows silent and deep through all great cities, gliding on between precipitous borders, away and away into no-man’s-land—the most desolate country in all creation. Yet when they got home they felt no misgivings, even Stephen’s doubts had been drugged for the moment, since just at first this curious stream will possess the balm of the waters of Lethe. She said to Mary: ‘It was quite a good party; don’t you think so?’ And Mary answered naïvely: ‘I loved it because they were so nice to you. Brockett told me they think you’re the coming writer. He said you were Valérie Seymour’s lion; I was bursting with pride—it made me so happy!’ For answer, Stephen stooped down and kissed her. CHAPTER 451B y February Stephen’s book was rewritten and in the hands of her publisher in England. This gave her the peaceful, yet exhilarated feeling that comes when a writer has given of his best and knows that that best is not unworthy. With a sigh of relief she metaphorically stretched, rubbed her eyes and started to look about her. She was in the mood that comes as a reaction from strain, and was glad enough of amusement; moreover the spring was again in the air, the year had turned, there were sudden bright days when the sun brought a few hours of warmth to Paris. They were now no longer devoid of friends, no longer solely dependent upon Brockett on the one hand, and Mademoiselle Duphot on the other; Stephen’s telephone would ring pretty often. There was now always somewhere for Mary to go; always people who were anxious to see her and Stephen, people with whom one got intimate quickly and was thus saved a lot of unnecessary trouble. Of them all, however, it was Barbara and Jamie for whom Mary developed a real affection; she and Barbara had formed a harmless alliance which at times was even a little pathetic. The one talking of Jamie, the other of Stephen, they would put their young heads together very gravely. ‘Do you find Jamie goes off her food when she’s working?’ ‘Do you find that Stephen sleeps badly? Is she careless of her health? Jamie’s awfully worrying sometimes.’ Or perhaps they would be in a more flippant mood and would sit and whisper together, laughing; making tender fun of the creatures they loved, as women have been much inclined to do ever since that rib was demanded of Adam. Then Jamie and Stephen would pretend to feel aggrieved, would pretend that they also must hang together, must be on their guard against feminine intrigues. Oh, yes, the whole business was rather pathetic.