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 Hours (1998)

  She pushes open the florist’s door, which always sticks slightly, and walks in, a tall woman, broad-shouldered amid the bunches of roses and hyacinths, the mossy flats of paperwhites, the orchids trembling on their stalks. Barbara, who has worked in the shop for years, says hello. After a pause, she offers her cheek for a kiss. “Hello,” Clarissa says. Her lips touch Barbara’s skin and the moment is suddenly, unexpectedly perfect. She stands in the dim, deliciously cool little shop that is like a temple, solemn in its abundance, its bunches of dried flowers hanging from the ceiling and its rack of ribbons trailing against the back wall. There was that branch tapping the windowpane and there was another, though she’d been older, five or six, in her own bedroom, this branch covered with red leaves, and she can remember thinking back reverently, even then, to that earlier branch, the one that had seemed to excite the music downstairs; she remembers loving the autumn branch for reminding her of the earlier branch, tapping against the window of a house to which she would never return, which she could not otherwise remember in any of its particulars. Now she is here, in the flower shop, where poppies drift white and apricot on long, hairy stems. Her mother, who kept a tin of snowy French mints in her purse, pursed her lips and called Clarissa crazy, a crazy girl, in a tone of flirtatious admiration. “How are you?” Barbara asks. “Fine, just fine,” she says. “We’re having a little party tonight, for a friend who’s just won this big-deal literary award.” “The Pulitzer?” “No. It’s called the Carrouthers Prize.” Barbara offers a blank expression that Clarissa understands is meant as a smile. Barbara is forty or so, a pale, ample woman who came to New York to sing opera. Something about her face—the square jaw or the stern, inexpressive eyes—reminds you that people looked essentially the same a hundred years ago. “We’re a little low right now,” she says. “There’ve been about fifty weddings this week.” “I don’t need much,” Clarissa says. “Just a few bunches of something or other.” Clarissa feels inexplicably guilty about not being a better friend to Barbara, though they know each other only as customer and saleswoman. Clarissa buys all her flowers from Barbara, and sent her a card a year ago, when she heard of her breast-cancer scare. Barbara’s career has not gone as planned; she lives somehow on her hourly wages (a tenement, probably, with the bathtub in the kitchen) and she has escaped cancer, this time. For a moment Mary Krull hovers over the lilies and roses, preparing to be appalled at what Clarissa will spend. “We’ve got some beautiful hydrangeas,” Barbara says.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Dan lets Richie remove the burnt-out candles before guiding his son’s hands in slicing the cake. Laura watches. The dining room seems, right now, like the most perfect imaginable dining room, with its hunter-green walls and its dark maple hutch holding a trove of wedding silver. The room seems almost impossibly full: full of the lives of her husband and son; full of the future. It matters; it shines. Much of the world, whole countries, have been decimated, but a force that feels unambiguously like goodness has prevailed; even Kitty, it seems, will be healed by medical science. She will be healed. And if she’s not, if she’s past help, Dan and Laura and their son and the promise of the second child will all still be here, in this room, where a little boy frowns in concentration over the job of removing the candles and where his father holds one up to his mouth and exhorts him to lick off the frosting. Laura reads the moment as it passes. Here it is, she thinks; there it goes. The page is about to turn. She smiles at her son, serenely, from a distance. He smiles back. He licks the end of a burnt-out candle. He makes another wish. Mrs. Woolf She tries to concentrate on the book in her lap. Soon she and Leonard will leave Hogarth House and move to London. It has been decided. Virginia has won. She struggles to concentrate. The beef scraps have been scraped away, the table swept, the dishes washed. She will go to the theater and concert halls. She will go to parties. She will haunt the streets, see everything, fill herself up with stories. ... life; London ... She will write and write. She will finish this book, then write another. She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts. She thinks, suddenly, of Vanessa’s kiss. The kiss was innocent—innocent enough—but it was also full of something not unlike what Virginia wants from London, from life; it was full of a love complex and ravenous, ancient, neither this nor that. It will serve as this afternoon’s manifestation of the central mystery itself, the elusive brightness that shines from the edges of certain dreams; the brightness which, when we awaken, is already fading from our minds, and which we rise in the hope of finding, perhaps today, this new day in which anything might happen, anything at all. She, Virginia, has kissed her sister, not quite innocently, behind Nelly’s broad, moody back, and now she is in a room with a book on her lap. She is a woman who will move to London.

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

  First he read the "Advertisements" while leisurely finishing his morning cigarette. Then he fetched an old cognac from the lower shelf of the desk, stretched out his arms to give himself freedom of movement, said, "Well! ' and, wagging his tongue between his teeth, went about his work in good spirits. His English letters were extraordinarily fluent and effective, for just as he spoke English, quintessentially, unchosenly, indifferently and effortlessly dabbled along, so he wrote it. In accordance with his nature, he lent words to the mood in the family circle that filled him. "The tradesman's class is a beautiful, really gratifying profession," he said. "Solid, frugal, industrious, comfortable ... I was really born for it! And as a member of the house, you know... in short, I feel better than ever. You come into the office fresh in the morning, you look through the newspaper, smoke, think about this and that and how good it is, take your cognac and just do a bit of work. Lunchtime comes, you eat with your family, rest, and then it's back to work... You write, you have good, smooth, clean company paper, a good pen... ruler, paper knife, stamp, everything is of the best kind, neat... and with that you do everything, diligently, one after the other, one after the other, until you finally pack up. Tomorrow is another day. And when you go up to supper you feel so pervasively content...every limb feels content...the hands feel content...!" "God, Christian!" Tony cried. "You're making a fool of yourself! The hands feel satisfied..." "After all! Yes! So you don't know that? I mean…” And getting worked up in an effort to express this, to explain this… “You close your fist, you know… it's not very strong because you're tired from work. But it's not damp... It doesn't annoy you... It feels good and comfortable in itself... There's a sense of self-sufficiency... You can sit very still and not get bored..." Everyone was silent. Then Thomas said, quite casually, to hide his disgust: "It seems to me that one doesn't work so that . . ." But he broke off, didn't repeat anything. "I, at least, have other goals in mind," he added. However, Christian, whose eyes wandered,overheardthis, because he was in thought, and soon he began to tell a story from Valparaiso, a murder and manslaughter affair in which he had been personally present ... "But then the fellow pulls out the knife - -" For some reason were Stories like that, which Christian was rich in, and which Madame Grünlich was extremely amused by, while the Consul, Klara and Klothilde were horrified and Mamsell Jungmann and Erika listened open-mouthed, Thomas always received without applause. He used to accompany her with cool and mocking remarks, and gave the clear appearance that he thought Christian was exaggerating and blasphemous... which he certainly wasn't; but he told with verve and colour.

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

  you didn't even let me finish, or you would already know that I'm willing and ready to accommodate you as the circumstances require, and that I'll add 10,000 to the 70,000 by hand." “So 80,000 …” said Herr Grünlich; and then he made a movement of the mouth as if to say: Not too much; but it is enough. Agreement was reached in the most amiable manner, and the Consul rattled as he rose, content with the large bunch of keys in his trousers pocket. It wasn't until the 80,000 that he had reached the "traditional cash dowry level." – Thereupon Herr Grünlich took his leave and left for Hamburg. Tony felt little of their new situation. Nobody prevented her from dancing at the Möllendorpfs, Langhals', Kistenmakers and at home, skating on the Burgfelde and the Travenwiesen and accepting the homage of the young gentlemen ... In mid-October she had the opportunity to attend the engagement party that was held at the Möllendorpfs in honor of the eldest son and Julchen Hagenström. "Tom!" she said. 'I'm not going. It's outrageous!' But she went anyway and had a great time. Moreover, with the strokes of the pen she had added to the family history, she had obtained permission to make larger-scale commissions with the consul or alone in all the shops in the city and to take care of her dowry, a noble dowry. For days sat in the breakfast room at the window two seamstresses, who hemmed, embroidered monograms and ate a lot of country bread with green cheese... "Did the linen come from Lentfoehr, Mama?" "No, my child, but here are two dozen tea napkins." "Nice. – And he had promised to send it by this afternoon. My God, the sheets need to be hemmed!” "Mamsell Bitterlich asks for the tips for the pillowcases, Ida." "In the linen closet on the right in the hallway, Tonychen, my dear." "Line--!" »Could you like to jump yourself, my darling…« "Oh God, if I'm getting married to walk the stairs myself..." "Have you thought about the wedding toilet, Tony?" » Moirée antique , Mama!... I won't dare without moirée antique !« So passed October, November. Herr Grünlich appeared at Christmas time to spend Christmas Eve with the Buddenbrook family, and he didn't turn down the invitation to the old Krögers' party either. His conduct towards his bride was filled with the delicacy that one was entitled to expect from him. No unnecessary celebration! No social handicap! No tactless caresses! A whispered, discreet kiss on the forehead in the presence of his parents had sealed the engagement... Tony was a little surprised at times that his happiness now seemed to hardly match the desperation he had displayed at their refusals. He merely looked at her with a cheerful, possessive expression...

• From The Hours (1998)

  She knows that a poet like Richard would move sternly through the same morning, editing it, dismissing incidental ugliness along with incidental beauty, seeking the economic and historical truth behind these old brick town houses, the austere stone complications of the Episcopal church and the thin middle-aged man walking his Jack Russell terrier (they are suddenly ubiquitous along Fifth Avenue, these feisty, bowlegged little dogs), while she, Clarissa, simply enjoys without reason the houses, the church, the man, and the dog. It’s childish, she knows. It lacks edge. If she were to express it publicly (now, at her age), this love of hers would consign her to the realm of the duped and the simpleminded, Christians with acoustic guitars or wives who’ve agreed to be harmless in exchange for their keep. Still, this indiscriminate love feels entirely serious to her, as if everything in the world is part of a vast, inscrutable intention and everything in the world has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but is simply the sight and feel of the thing itself. This determined, abiding fascination is what she thinks of as her soul (an embarrassing, sentimental word, but what else to call it?); the part that might conceivably survive the death of the body. Clarissa never speaks to anyone about any of that. She doesn’t gush or chirp. She exclaims only over the obvious manifestations of beauty, and even then manages a certain aspect of adult restraint. Beauty is a whore, she sometimes says. I like money better. Tonight she will give her party. She will fill the rooms of her apartment with food and flowers, with people of wit and influence. She will shepherd Richard through it, see that he doesn’t overtire, and then she will escort him uptown to receive his prize. She straightens her shoulders as she stands at the corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the light. There she is, thinks Willie Bass, who passes her some mornings just about here. The old beauty, the old hippie, hair still long and defiantly gray, out on her morning rounds in jeans and a man’s cotton shirt, some sort of ethnic slippers (India? Central America?) on her feet. She still has a certain sexiness; a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm; and yet this morning she makes a tragic sight, standing so straight in her big shirt and exotic shoes, resisting the pull of gravity, a female mammoth already up to its knees in the tar, taking a rest between efforts, standing bulky and proud, almost nonchalant, pretending to contemplate the tender grasses waiting on the far bank when it is beginning to know for certain that it will remain here, trapped and alone, after dark, when the jackals come out. She waits patiently for the light.

• From The Hours (1998)

  It isn’t failure to be in these rooms, in your skin, cutting the stems of flowers. It isn’t failure but it requires more of you, the whole effort does; just being present and grateful; being happy (terrible word). People don’t look at you on the street anymore, or if they do it is not with sexual notions of any sort. You are not invited to lunch by Oliver St. Ives. Outside the narrow kitchen window the city sails and rumbles. Lovers argue; cashiers ring up; young men and women shop for new clothes as the woman standing under the Washington Square Arch sings iiiii and you snip the end off a rose and put it in a vase full of hot water. You try to hold the moment, just here, in the kitchen with the flowers. You try to inhabit it, to love it, because it’s yours and because what waits immediately outside these rooms is the hallway, with its brown tiles and its dim brown lamps that are always lit. Because even if the door to the trailer had opened, the woman inside, be she Meryl Streep or Vanessa Redgrave or even Susan Sarandon, would have been simply that, a woman in a trailer, and you could not possibly have done what you wanted to do. You could not have received her, there on the street; taken her in your arms; and wept with her. It would be so wonderful to cry like that, in the arms of a woman who was at once immortal and a tired, frightened person just emerged from a trailer. What you are, more than anything, is alive, right here in your kitchen, just as Meryl Streep and Vanessa Redgrave are alive somewhere, as traffic grumbles in from Sixth Avenue and the silver blades of the scissors cut juicily through a dark green stalk. That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all. It seemed that she could kiss her grave, formidable best friend down by the pond, it seemed that they could sleep together in a strange combination of lust and innocence, and not worry about what, if anything, it meant. It was the house, really, she thinks.

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

  The sun was scorching on the grass, giving off that hot, spicy smell of clover and herbs, in which blue flies were buzzing and darting about. A monotonous, muffled roar came from the sea, in the distance little heads of foam flashed now and then. 'What are you reading?' asked Tony. The young man took the book in both hands and quickly leafed through it from back to front. 'Oh, that's not for you, Miss Buddenbrook! All blood and guts and misery... Look, this is from Pulmonary edema the speech, in German: stick flow. The air sacs in the lungs are filled with such a watery liquid that it is extremely dangerous and occurs in pneumonia. When it's bad, you can't breathe and you just die. And it's all treated very coolly, condescendingly..." "Yes, fie! ... But if you want to become a doctor ... I'll make sure that you become our family doctor when Grabow retires later, watch out!" "Ha!... And what are you reading, if I may ask, Miss Buddenbrook?" "Do you know Hoffmann?" asked Tony. “The one with the conductor and the golden pot? Yes, that's very pretty... But, you know, it's probably more for ladies. Men have to read something different today.« "Now I have to ask you something," Tony said after a few steps and made up his mind . “Namely, what is your first name? I haven't understood him once... it's making me really nervous! I've been mulling it over..." "You've been mulling it over?" 'Oh yes - now don't complicate things for me! It is probably not proper for me to ask; but of course I’m curious… By the way, as long as I’m alive I don’t need to know.” "Well, my name's Morten," he said, blushing like never before. "Morten? That is pretty!" "So! pretty …" 'Yes, my God ... it's prettier than if your name was Hinz or Kunz. It's something special, something foreign..." 'You are a romantic, Mademoiselle Buddenbrook; You've read too much Hoffmann... Yes, the thing is quite simple: my grandfather was half Norwegian and his name was Morten. I was baptized after him. That's all …" Tony stepped gingerly through the tall, sharp reeds that stood at the edge of the bare beach. The row of wooden Beach pavilions with their cone-shaped roofs lay in front of them and gave a clear view of the beach chairs, which stood closer to the water and around which families were lying in the warm sand: ladies with blue protective pins and volumes from the library, gentlemen in light-colored suits, the idle figures with their walking sticks drawing in the sand, tanned children with big straw hats on their heads shoveling, rolling, digging for water, baking cakes with wooden moulds, boring tunnels, wading bare-legged into the low waves and launching ships... To the right towered the wooden building of the Bathing facility out to sea. "Now we're marching straight towards the Möllendorpf Pavilion," said Tony.

• From The Hours (1998)

  She goes to the window, parts the filmy white curtains, raises the blinds. There, below, is the V-shaped plaza, with its fountain and struggling rosebushes, its empty stone benches. Again, Laura feels as if she’s entered a dream—a dream in which she looks onto this peculiar garden, so uninhabited, at a little past two in the afternoon. She turns from the window. She takes off her shoes. She puts her copy of Mrs. Dalloway on the glass-topped night table, and lies on the bed. The room is full of the particular silence that prevails in hotels, a tended silence, utterly unnatural, layered over a substratum of creaks and gurglings, of wheels on carpet. She is so far away from her life. It was so easy. It seems, somehow, that she has left her own world and entered the realm of the book. Nothing, of course, could be further from Mrs. Dalloway’s London than this turquoise hotel room, and yet she imagines that Virginia Woolf herself, the drowned woman, the genius, might in death inhabit a place not unlike this one. She laughs, quietly, to herself. Please, God, she says silently, let heaven be something better than a room at the Normandy. Heaven would be better furnished, it would be brighter and grander, but it might in fact contain some measure of this hushed remove, this utter absence inside the continuing world. Having this room to herself seems both prim and whorish. She is safe here. She could do anything she wanted to, anything at all. She is somehow like a newlywed, reclining in her chamber, waiting for . . . not her husband, or any other man. For someone. For something. She reaches for her book. She has marked her place with the silver bookmark (“To My Bookworm, With Love”) given her by her husband several birthdays ago. With a sensation of deep and buoyant release, she begins reading. She remembered once throwing a sixpence into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking toward Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow on the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  [image file=image_rsrc13G.jpg] My wife took, unnoticed, this picture, unposed, of me in the act of writing a novel in our hotel room. The hotel is the Établissement Thermal at Le Boulou, in the East Pyrenees. The date (discernible on the captured calendar) is February 27, 1929. The novel, Zashchita Luzhina (The Defense), deals with the defense invented by an insane chess player. Note the pat pattern of the tablecloth. A half-empty package of Gauloises cigarettes can be made out between the ink bottle and an overful ashtray. Family photos are propped against the four volumes of Dahl’s Russian dictionary. The end of my robust, dark-brown penholder (a beloved tool of young oak that I used during all my twenty years of literary labors in Europe and may rediscover yet in one of the trunks stored at Dean’s, Ithaca, N. Y.) is already well chewed. My writing hand partly conceals a stack of setting boards. Spring moths would float in through the open window on overcast nights and settle upon the lighted wall on my left. In that way we collected a number of rare Pugs in perfect condition and spread them at once (they are now in an American museum). Seldom does a casual snapshot compendiate a life so precisely. Many years ago, in St. Petersburg, I remember being amused by the Collected Poems of a tram conductor, and especially by his picture, in uniform, sturdily booted, with a pair of new rubbers on the floor beside him and his father’s war medals on the photographer’s console near which the author stood at attention. Wise conductor, farseeing photographer! [image file=image_rsrc13H.jpg] A snapshot taken by my wife of our three-year-old son Dmitri (born May 10, 1934) standing with me in front of our boardinghouse, Les Hesperides, in Mentone, at the beginning of December 1937. We looked it up twenty-two years later. Nothing had changed, except the management and the porch furniture. There is always, of course, the natural thrill of retrieved time; beyond that, however, I get no special kick out of revisiting old émigré haunts in those incidental countries. The winter mosquitoes, I remember, were terrible. Hardly had I extinguished the light in my room than it would come, that ominous whine whose unhurried, doleful, and wary rhythm contrasted so oddly with the actual mad speed of the satanic insect’s gyrations. One waited for the touch in the dark, one freed a cautious arm from under the bedclothes—and mightily slapped one’s own ear, whose sudden hum mingled with that of the receding mosquito. But then, next morning, how eagerly one reached for a butterfly net upon locating one’s replete tormentor—a thick dark little bar on the white of the ceiling!

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

  Some the gap negates as quite irrelevant. Each swims in a felt fringe of relations of which the aforesaid gap is the term. Or instead of a definite gap we may merely carry a mood of interest about with us. Then, however vague the mood, it will still act in the same way, throwing a mantle of felt affinity over such representations, entering the mind, as suit it, and tingeing with the feeling of tediousness or discord all those with which it has no concern. Relation, then, to our topic or interest is constantly felt in the fringe, and particularly the relation of harmony and discord, of furtherance or hindrance of the topic. When the sense of furtherance is there, we are 'all right;' with the sense of hindrance we are dissatisfied and perplexed, and cast about us for other thoughts. Now any thought the quality of whose fringe lets us feel ourselves 'all right,' is an acceptable member of our thinking, whatever kind of thought it may otherwise be. Provided we only feel it to have a place in the scheme of relations in which the interesting topic also lies, that is quite sufficient to make of it a relevant and appropriate portion of our train of ideas. For the important thing about a train of thought is its conclusion . That is the meaning , or, as we say, the topic of the thought. That is what abides when all its other members have faded from memory. Usually this conclusion is a word or phrase or particular image, or practical attitude or resolve, whether rising to answer a problem or fill a pre-existing gap that worried us, or whether accidentally stumbled on in revery. In either case it stands out from the other segments of the stream by reason of the peculiar interest attaching to it. This interest arrests it, makes a sort of crisis of it when it comes, induces attention upon it and makes us treat it in a substantive way. The parts of the stream that precede these substantive conclusions are but the means of the latter's attainment. And, provided the same conclusion be reached, the means may be as mutable as we like, for the 'meaning' of the stream of thought will be the same. What difference does it make what the means are? "Qu'importe le flacon, pourvu qu'on ait l'ivresse? " The relative unimportance of the means appears from the fact that when the conclusion is there, we have always forgotten most of the steps preceding its attainment. When we have uttered a proposition, we are rarely able a moment afterwards to recall our exact words, though we can express it in different words easily enough.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Walter says of course he’ll come, and he’ll bring Evan if Evan feels up to it, though Evan, of course, may choose to husband his energies for dancing. Richard will be furious to hear that Walter has been invited, and Sally will certainly side with him. Clarissa understands. Little in the world is less mysterious than the disdain people often feel for Walter Hardy, who’s elected to turn forty-six in baseball caps and Nikes; who makes an obscene amount of money writing romance novels about love and loss among perfectly muscled young men; who can stay out all night dancing to house music, blissful and inexhaustible as a German shepherd retrieving a stick. You see men like Walter all over Chelsea and the Village, men who insist, at thirty or forty or older, that they have always been chipper and confident, powerful of body; that they’ve never been strange children, never taunted or despised. Richard argues that eternally youthful gay men do more harm to the cause than do men who seduce little boys, and yes, it’s true that Walter brings no shadow of adult irony or cynicism, nothing remotely profound, to his interest in fame and fashions, the latest restaurant. Yet it is just this greedy innocence Clarissa appreciates. Don’t we love children, in part, because they live outside the realm of cynicism and irony? Is it so terrible for a man to want more youth, more pleasure? Besides, Walter is not corrupt; not exactly corrupt. He writes the best books he can—books full of romance and sacrifice, courage in the face of adversity—and surely they must offer real comfort to any number of people. His name appears constantly on invitations to fund-raisers and on letters of protest; he writes embarrassingly lavish blurbs for younger writers. He takes good, faithful care of Evan. These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody’s little display of genius. She refuses to stop enjoying Walter Hardy’s shameless shallowness, even if it drives Sally to distraction and has actually inspired Richard to wonder out loud if she, Clarissa, isn’t more than a little vain and foolish herself. “Good,” Clarissa says. “You know where we live, right? Five o’clock.” “Five o’clock.” “It needs to be early. The ceremony’s at eight, we’re having the party before instead of after. Richard can’t manage late nights.”

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

  But when Herr Marcus said to a staid workman: "Do you understand me?" it sounded so completely impossible that his pillion, across from him at the desk, simply began to laugh which sign the whole office gave itself up to merriment. Thomas Buddenbrook, full of the wish to preserve and increase the luster of the company, which corresponded to its old name, loved to use his person in the daily struggle for success, because he knew well that he had his secure and elegant demeanor, his winning amiability, his skilful tact in conversation owed many good deals. "A businessman must not be a bureaucrat!" he said to Stephan Kistenmaker - from "Kistenmaker & Söhne" - his former schoolmate, whose intellectually superior friend he remained, and who listened to his every word and then passed it on as his own opinion … “Personality is part of it, that’s mine Taste. I don't think that great success can be achieved from a buck...at least it wouldn't bring me much joy. Success doesn't just want to be calculated at the desk... I always feel the need to direct the course of things very presently with my eyes, mouth and gestures... it with the direct influence of my will, my talent, my luck, as you like to call it , to dominate. But unfortunately it is gradually going out of fashion, this personal intervention by the merchant... Time is passing, but I think it is leaving the best behind... Traffic is becoming easier and easier, prices are known more and more quickly... The risk is decreasing and with it profit... Yes, the old people had it different. My grandfather, for example … he drove four horses to southern Germany, the old gentleman with his powder head and his escarpins, as a Prussian army supplier. And then he roamed around and flexed his tricks and made an incredible amount of money, cratemaker! - Oh, I'm almost afraid that the merchant's existence will become more and more banal as time goes on..." So he sometimes complained, and that's why it was basically his favorite business when he very occasionally, perhaps on a family walk, went into a mill and chatted with the owner, who felt honored, and lightly, en passant , in a good mood, made a good contract with him... His pillion was far from such a thing. . . . As for Christian, at first he seemed to devote himself to his work with real zeal and pleasure; yes, he seemed exceedingly well and content in it, and for several days had a way of eating with relish, smoking his short pipe, and adjusting his shoulders in his English jacket, which gave expression to his comfortable satisfaction. In the morning he went down to the office at about the same time as Thomas and sat down diagonally opposite in his adjustable armchair next to Herr Marcus and his brother, because he had an armchair like the two bosses.

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

  The phenomena shade off so gradually into cases where this is obviously absurd, that the presumption (quite apart from a priori 'scientific' prejudice) is great against its being true. The case of Lurancy Vennum is perhaps as extreme a case of 'possession' of the modern sort as one can find.[318] Lurancy was a young girl of fourteen, living with her parents at Watseka, Ill., who (after various distressing hysterical disorders and spontaneous trances, during which she was possessed by departed spirits of a more or less grotesque sort) finally declared herself to be animated by the spirit of Mary Roff (a neighbor's daughter, who had died in an insane asylum twelve years before) and insisted on being sent 'home' to Mr. Roff's house. After a week of 'homesickness' and importunity on her part, her parents agreed, and the Roffs, who pitied her, and who were spiritualists into the bargain, took her in. Once there, she seems to have convinced the family that their dead Mary had exchanged habitations with Lurancy. Lurancy was said to be temporarily in heaven, and Mary's spirit now controlled her organism, and lived again in her former earthly home. "The girl, now in her new home, seemed perfectly happy and content, knowing every person and everything that Mary knew when in her original body, twelve to twenty-five years ago, recognizing and calling by name those who were friends and neighbors of the family from 1852 to 1865, when Mary died, calling attention to scores, yes, hundreds of incidents that transpired during her natural life. During all the period of her sojourn at Mr. Roff's she had no knowledge of, and did not recognize, any of Mr. Vennum's family, their friends or neighbors, yet Mr. and Mrs. Vennum and their children visited her and Mr. Roff's people, she being introduced to them as to any strangers. After frequent visits, and hearing them often and favorably spoken of, she learned to love them as acquaintances, and visited them with Mrs. Roff three times. From day to day she appeared natural, easy, affable, and industrious, attending diligently and faithfully to her household duties, assisting in the general work of the family as a faithful, prudent daughter might be supposed to do, singing, reading, or conversing as opportunity offered, upon all matters of private or general interest to the family." The so-called Mary whilst at the Roffs' would sometimes 'go back to heaven,' and leave the body in a 'quiet trance,' i.e., without the original personality of Lurancy returning. After eight or nine weeks however, the memory and manner of Lurancy would sometimes partially, but not entirely, return for a few minutes. Once Lurancy seems to have taken full possession for a short time. At last, after some fourteen weeks, comformably to the prophecy which 'Mary' had made when she first assumed 'control,' she departed definitively and the Lurancy-consciousness came back for good. Mr.

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

  Setting the mind to remember a thing involves a continual minimal irradiation of excitement into paths which lead thereto, involves the continued presence of the thing in the 'fringe' of our consciousness. Letting the thing go involves withdrawal of the irradiation, unconsciousness of the thing, and, after a time, obliteration of the paths. A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. I mean that in learning by heart (for example), when we almost know the piece, it pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, then to look at the book again. If we recover the words in the former way, we shall probably know them the next time; if in the latter way, we shall very likely need the book once more. The learning by heart means the formation of paths from a former set to a later set of cerebral word-processes: call 1 and 2 in the diagram the processes in question; then when we remember by inward effort, the path is formed by discharge from 1 to 2, just as it will afterwards be used. But when we excite 2 by the eye, although the path 1—2 doubtless is then shot through also, the phenomenon which we are discussing shows that the direct discharge from 1 into 2, unaided by the eyes, ploughs the deeper and more permanent groove. There is, moreover, a greater amount of tension accumulated in the brain before the discharge from 1 to 2, when the latter takes place unaided by the eye. This is proved by the general feeling of strain in the effort to remember 2; and this also ought to make the discharge more violent and the path more deep. A similar reason doubtless accounts for the familiar fact that we remember our own theories, our own discoveries, combinations, inventions, in short whatever 'ideas' originate in our own brain, a thousand times better than exactly similar things which are communicated to us from without. A word, in closing, about the metaphysics involved in remembering. According to the assumptions of this book, thoughts accompany the brain's workings, and those thoughts are cognitive of realities. The whole relation is one which we can only write down empirically, confessing that no glimmer of explanation of it is yet in sight. That brains should give rise to a knowing consciousness at all, this is the one mystery which returns, no matter of what sort the consciousness and of what sort the knowledge may be. Sensations, aware of mere qualities, involve the mystery as much as thoughts, aware of complex systems, involve it. To the platonizing tradition in philosophy, however, this is not so.

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

  But he was hardly aware of the strange appearance of the guest with his enormous watch pendants and his loden jacket and the goatee beard on the harmonium when he raised his head attentively, and no sooner had the name been mentioned, which he had heard Frau Antonien say often enough, than he glanced quickly at his sister and greeted Herr Permaneder with his most endearing kindness... He didn't wait Place. They immediately went down to the mezzanine, where Mamsell Jungmann had laid the table and was humming the samovar - a real samovar, a gift from Pastor Tiburtius and his wife. "Ös tuats enk light," said Herr Permaneder, as he sat down and surveyed the selection of cold dishes on the table... Here and there, at least most of the time, he helped himself the most harmless facial expression of the second person when addressed. "It's not exactly Hofbräu, Mr. Permaneder, but at least it's more enjoyable than our local brew." And the Consul poured him some of the brown, foaming Porter, which he himself used to drink at this time of year. "I don't care, Herr Nachbohr!" said Herr Permaneder while chewing and didn't notice the horrified look Mamsell Jungmann gave him. But he enjoyed the porter with such reticence that the Consul brought up a bottle of red wine, whereupon he became noticeably more cheerful and began chatting with Frau Grünlich again. Because of his stomach he sat quite far away from the table, kept his legs wide apart and usually let one of his short arms with his plump, white hand hang down vertically on the back of the chair, while he, his thick head with the seal's mustache a little laid to one side, listening to Tony's speeches and replies with an expression of sullen complacency and a candid blink of the chinks in his eyes. With dainty movements she cut up patties for him, something he had absolutely no practice with, and didn't hold back on this or that reflection on life... "Oh God, how sad it is, Mr. Permaneder, that everything good and beautiful in life passes so quickly!" she said, referring to her stay in Munich, put down her knife and fork for a moment and looked gravely at the ceiling. By the way, every now and then she made funny and talentless attempts to speak in Bavarian dialect... During the meal there was a pounding and the clerk delivered a telegram. The Consul read it, slowly letting the long tip of his mustache slip through his fingers, and although one could see that he was occupied with the contents of the despatch, he asked in the lightest of tones: "How's business, Mr. Permaneder ?..." "It's good," he said to the apprentice immediately, and the young man disappeared.

• From The Hours (1998)

  She goes back upstairs stealthily, so as not to attract Nelly (why does she always feel so secretive around servants, so guilty of crimes?). She gets to her study, quietly closes the door. Safe. She opens the curtains. Outside, beyond the glass, Richmond continues in its decent, peaceful dream of itself. Flowers and hedges are attended to; shutters are repainted before they require it. The neighbors, whom she does not know, do whatever it is they do behind the blinds and shutters of their red brick villa. She can only think of dim rooms and a listless, overcooked smell. She turns from the window. If she can remain strong and clear, if she can keep on weighing at least nine and a half stone, Leonard will be persuaded to move back to London. The rest cure, these years among the delphinium beds and the red suburban villas, will be pronounced a success, and she will be deemed fit for the city again. Lunch, yes; she will have lunch. She should have breakfast but she can’t bear the interruption it would entail, the contact with Nelly’s mood. She will write for an hour or so, then eat something. Not eating is a vice, a drug of sorts—with her stomach empty she feels quick and clean, clearheaded, ready for a fight. She sips her coffee, sets it down, stretches her arms. This is one of the most singular experiences, waking on what feels like a good day, preparing to work but not yet actually embarked. At this moment there are infinite possibilities, whole hours ahead. Her mind hums. This morning she may penetrate the obfuscation, the clogged pipes, to reach the gold. She can feel it inside her, an all but indescribable second self, or rather a parallel, purer self. If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance, and when she is very fortunate she is able to write directly through that faculty. Writing in that state is the most profound satisfaction she knows, but her access to it comes and goes without warning. She may pick up her pen and follow it with her hand as it moves across the paper; she may pick up her pen and find that she’s merely herself, a woman in a housecoat holding a pen, afraid and uncertain, only mildly competent, with no idea about where to begin or what to write. She picks up her pen. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Mrs. Brown Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

• From The Hours (1998)

  “There was a lovely coat for Angelica at Harrods,” Vanessa says. “But then nothing for the boys, and it seemed so unfair. I suppose I shall give her the coat for her birthday, but then of course she’ll be cross because she believes coats ought to come to her anyway, as a matter of course, and not be presented as gifts.” Virginia nods. At the moment, she can’t seem to speak. There is so much in the world. There are coats at Harrods; there are children who will be angry and disappointed no matter what one does. There is Vanessa’s plump hand on her cup and there is the thrush outside, so beautiful on its pyre; so like millinery. There is this hour, now, in the kitchen. Clarissa will not die, not by her own hand. How could she bear to leave all this? Virginia prepares to offer some wisdom about children. She has scant idea what she’ll say, but she will say something. She would like to say, It is enough. The teacups and the thrush outside, the question of children’s coats. It is enough. Someone else will die. It should be a greater mind than Clarissa’s; it should be someone with sorrow and genius enough to turn away from the seductions of the world, its cups and its coats. “Perhaps Angelica—” Virginia says. But here’s Nelly to the rescue; furious, triumphant, back from London with a parcel containing the China tea and sugared ginger. She holds the package aloft, as if she would hurl it. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Bell,” she says with an executioner’s studied calm. Here is Nelly with the tea and ginger and here, forever, is Virginia, unaccountably happy, better than happy, alive, sitting with Vanessa in the kitchen on an ordinary spring day as Nelly, the subjugated Amazon queen, Nelly the ever indignant, displays what she’s been compelled to bring. Nelly turns away and, although it is not at all their custom, Virginia leans forward and kisses Vanessa on the mouth. It is an innocent kiss, innocent enough, but just now, in this kitchen, behind Nelly’s back, it feels like the most delicious and forbidden of pleasures. Vanessa returns the kiss. Mrs. Dalloway “Poor Louis.” Julia sighs with a surprisingly elderly mixture of rue and exhausted patience, and she seems, briefly, like a figure of ancient maternal remonstrance; part of a centuries-long line of women who have sighed with rue and exhausted patience over the strange passions of men. Briefly, Clarissa can imagine her daughter at fifty: she will be what people refer to as an ample woman, large of body and spirit, inscrutably capable, decisive, undramatic, an early riser. Clarissa wants, at that moment, to be Louis; not to be with him (that can be so thorny, so difficult) but to be him, an unhappy person, a strange person, faithless, unscrupulous, loose on the streets. “Yes,” she says. “Poor Louis.” Will Louis spoil the party for Richard? Why did she ask Walter Hardy?

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

  Since he also has funny head movements like a bird and is quite talkative, I always call him "the magpie"; but Grünlich forbids me to do so, because he says the magpie steals, but Herr Kesselmeyer is a man of honour. When walking, he bends down and flails his arms. His downy feathers only go halfway down the back of his head, and from there his neck is all red and cracked. There's something so very happy about him! Sometimes he slaps me on the cheek and says: You good little woman, what a godsend for Grünlich that heshegot! Then he pulls out a pair of pince-nez (he always has three of them with him, on long cords that keep getting tangled on his white waistcoat), slaps them on his nose, which he crinkles all over, and gapes at me like that happily that I laugh out loud in his face. But he doesn't mind that at all. Grünlich himself is very busy, drives to town in our little yellow car in the morning and often comes home late. Sometimes he sits with me and reads the newspaper. If we're going in company, for example to see Kesselmeyer or Consul Goudstikker on Alsterdamm or Senator Bock on Rathausstrasse, we have to hire a carriage. I've often asked Grünlich to buy a coupe, because that's what's needed out here. He half-promised me, too, but oddly enough, he doesn't like socializing with me at all, and apparently doesn't like it when I talk to the people of town. Should he be jealous? Our villa, which I have already described to you in detail, dear Mama, is really very pretty and has been made even more beautiful by the recent purchase of furniture. You wouldn't have any objections to the salon on the mezzanine floor: all in brown silk. The dining-room next door is very handsomely paneled; the chairs cost 25 Kurant marks each. I'm sitting in the Pensee room that serves as a living room. Then there is a smoking and games room. The hall, the other half across the corridor occupies the ground floor, has now been given yellow blinds and looks elegant. Upstairs are bedrooms, bathrooms, dressing rooms and servants' quarters. We have a little groom for the yellow car. I'm pretty happy with the two girls. I don't know if they are completely honest; but thank God I don't have to watch every threesome! In short, everything is as our name deserves. But now something is coming, dear Mama, the most important thing, which I have saved for last. Because some time ago I felt a little strange, you know, not quite healthy and yet still different; on occasion I told Doctor Klaassen. This is a very small person with a big head and an even bigger bow hat.

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

  "What a bosom!" he said; and to this Consul Döhlmann added an excessively rude joke, which only caused the gentlemen to laugh briefly and dismissively through their noses. Then the waiting waiter was called. "I've finished the bottle, Schröder," said Doehlmann. 'We might as well pay up. It has to happen one day... And you, Christian? Well, Gieseke will probably pay for you.« Here, however, Senator Buddenbrook revived. Wrapped in his collared coat, he had his hands in his lap and the cigarette in his corners of mouth, sat almost without interest; but suddenly he sat up and said sharply: "Don't you have any money with you, Christian? Then you will allow me to explain the trifle.” Umbrellas were opened and we stepped out from under the tent roof to stroll a bit... – Now and then Frau Permaneder visited her brother. Then the two of them would go for a walk to the »Mövenstein« or the »Seetempel«, whereby for unknown reasons Tony Buddenbrook got into an enthusiastic and vaguely rebellious mood. She repeatedly emphasized the freedom and equality of all people, summarily rejected any hierarchy of estates, threw harsh words against privilege and arbitrariness, and expressly demanded that merit should be crowned. And then she got down to her life. She spoke well, she entertained her brother very well. As long as she walked the earth, this happy creature had not needed to swallow anything, not the slightest thing, and to endure it in silence. She hadn't said nothing to any flattery or insult that life had said to her. All, every happiness and every sorrow, she had poured out in a flood of banal and childishly important words that perfectly satisfied her need to communicate. Her stomach wasn't quite healthy, but her heart was light and free - she didn't know how much. Nothing unspoken consumed her; no silent experience burdened her. And that's why she didn't have anything to bear with her past. She knew that she had had troubled and bad fates, but none of that had left her feeling heavy or tired, and basically she didn't believe in it at all. But since it seemed to be a well-established fact, she took advantage of it by bragging about it and talking about it with a mighty serious air... She scolded, she called people by their names in honest indignation, who had detrimentally affected her life - and consequently that of the Buddenbrook family - and whose number had become quite considerable in the course of time. "Tear Trieschke!" she cried. "Greenish! permaneder! Tiburtius! wine gift! Hagenstroms! The prosecutor! The Severin! What filous, Thomas, God will punish you one day, I will keep my faith!« When they got up to the "Sea Temple," dusk was already falling; autumn was advanced. They stood in one of the chambers that opened onto the bay, in which it smelled of wood, like in the bathing establishment's cabins, and whose rough-hewn walls were covered with inscriptions, initials, hearts, verses.

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

  and we are effectively like herrings. So why - isn't it?' He spoke in a tone of slight indignation, with an expression and hand gestures that said: You'll see... I don't have to put up with it... I would be stupid ... since, thank God, there is not a lack of what is absolutely necessary to remedy the situation ... 'Now I wanted to wait,' he went on, 'I wanted to wait until Zerlina and Bob needed a house, and only then would I give them mine and think about something bigger; but . Two more years at the most... You're young - the better! But in short, why should I wait for her and let the golden opportunity that is presently before me pass me by? There really wouldn't be any good sense in it..." There was assent in the room, and the conversation stopped a little on this family matter, this forthcoming marriage; for as advantageous marriages between siblings were not uncommon in the city, no one took offense at them. They asked about the young people's plans, plans that even included honeymoon... They were thinking of going to the Riviera, to Nice, etc. They felt like it - and so why not, right?... The younger children too mentioned, and the Consul spoke of them with ease and pleasure, lightly and with a shrug. He himself had five children and his brother Moritz had four: sons and daughters... yes, thank you very much, they were all well. Besides, why shouldn't they be well, right? In short, they were fine. And then he got back to the growing family and the crampedness of his home... "Yes, this is different!" he said. 'I could see that on the way up here - the house is a pearl, a pearl without question, assuming the comparison holds up at these dimensions, ha! ha!... Already the wallpaper here... I confess to you, ma'am, I constantly admire the wallpaper as I speak. A charming room effectively! If I think... this is where you've been allowed to spend your life..." ... Already the wallpaper here ... I confess to you, ma'am, as I speak I constantly admire the wallpaper. A charming room effectively! If I think... this is where you've been allowed to spend your life..." ... Already the wallpaper here ... I confess to you, ma'am, as I speak I constantly admire the wallpaper. A charming room effectively! If I think... this is where you've been allowed to spend your life..." "With a few interruptions - yes," said Frau Permaneder in that special throaty voice that she sometimes had at her command. "Interruptions - yes," the Consul repeated with a courteous smile. Then he glanced at Senator Buddenbrook and Herr Gosch, and as the two gentlemen were engaged in conversation, he drew his chair closer to Frau Permaneder's sofa seat and leaned towards her so that the heavy blow of his nose was now just under hers sounded.