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 Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The sandglass proved to me that I had slept barely an hour, but a brief moment of complete repose, at my age, is equal to sleep which formerly lasted throughout half a revolution of the stars; my time is measured from now on in much smaller units. An hour had sufficed to accomplish the humble and unexpected prodigy: the heat of my blood was rewarming my hands; my heart and my lungs had begun to function with a kind of good will, and life was welling up like a spring which, though not abundant, is faithful. Sleep, in so short a time, had repaired my excesses of virtue with the same impartiality which it would have applied to the repair of my vices. For the divinity of the great restorer consists in bestowing his benefits upon the sleeper without concern for him, exactly as water charged with curative powers cares not at all who may drink from its source. But if we think so little about a phenomenon which absorbs at least a third of every life it is because a certain modesty is needed to appreciate its gifts. Asleep, Caius Caligula and Aristides the Just are alike; my important but empty privileges are forgotten, and nothing distinguishes me from the black porter who lies guard at my door. What is our insomnia but the mad obstinacy of our mind in manufacturing thoughts and trains of reasoning, syllogisms and definitions of its own, refusing to abdicate in favor of that divine stupidity of closed eyes, or the wise folly of dreams? The man who cannot sleep, and I have had only too many occasions for some months to establish the point for myself, refuses more or less consciously to entrust himself to the flow of things. Brother of Death. . . . Isocrates was wrong, and his sentence is a mere exercise in rhetoric. I begin to have some acquaintance with death; it has other secrets, more alien still to our present condition as men. And nevertheless, so intricate and so profound are these mysteries of absence and partial oblivion that we feel half assured that somewhere the white spring of sleep flows into the dark spring of death.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  In the kitchen Lilli (could I call her that?) was chopping vegetables at the table, whilst Marcel sat opposite, picking bits and being indulgently ticked off. I thought how innocent he was and how Lilli and he carried on like a parody of a mother and child. I wondered what form his passion for Sibylle took, what images enshrined it in his mind. He gave me a friendly greeting, as though I wasn't his teacher any more—an uncle, perhaps. He'd got used to having me around; it showed in his work, which was lazier but better. And as for me, I was charmed to be in their warm kitchen, stuffing my washing hurriedly into their capable machine, accepting an offer of coffee, all ready to be absorbed into these simple Saturday rhythms. "Will you be working on the picture?" Lilli asked. I hadn't planned to do anything of the kind—but if Paul wanted me to . . . It would be a few more hours away from Cherif. "I'm going to take Edward for a walk," he said. "There are some things I want to show him, my dear Lilli." And she smiled warily. We followed the curve of the streets at the town's edge. Paul had put on a dark hat, which gave him an adventurous look, almost a kind of glamour, with his mild pale dome eclipsed, and a subtle air of self-mockery too. I realised he was excited. "I don't have your splendid raven locks," he said. I strode alongside in the mood of suppressed annoyance that precedes being given a surprise. "That's the old Altidore house, by the way," he said, as we passed a long building with an arched entrance and tall gables of cut brick. It had the plaque of the regional water-board beside the door, and office lighting glowed inside the warped old windows; but high up there were gothic As in the brickwork. I tried not to show how immoderately interested in it I was. "When did they sell it?" It was a sudden troubling possibility that Luc had spent his early childhood there. But in fact his gambling grandfather had made the move to Long Street before the war. The Germans had used the house as a local headquarters, Paul said, and the fifteenth-century woodwork had been wantonly damaged before their departure. It was the first time I had heard him refer to the Occupation that must have hatched his own adolescence so darkly. A nice crew-cut soldier with the bulk of a body-builder came slowly striding towards us—as often happened in these empty streets I saw him some way off: there was time for interest and self-consciousness to quicken or be mastered as you approached each other, strangers crossed with a heightened sense of promise. He was wearing camouflage gear over a roll-necked jersey, the dappled trousers tucked into socks and boots—he looked fit, supple and compact. Charmingly he wore tortoise-shell glasses.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Apparently his mother used to start sing-songs in the car and his father and he had sometimes remembered the practice since—they sang the same old Flemish folksongs as they had ten years and more ago. With us it had been hymns, all the way to Cornwall in the Humber's leathery heat, my father putting them deliberately to the wrong tune. I always chose grand Chestertonian ones, "Take not thy thunder from us", "Smite us and save us all", whilst Charlie reluctantly nominated the Geography Hymn. Sometimes we boosted the sunshine mood with "Summer Holiday" or "The sun has got his hat on"—a phrase that always troubled me with its counter-suggestion of cloud. Most difficult and lesson-like were rounds, in which you couldn't merge in the general din but came in alone and on time, although Charlie dragged and forgot and sang flat. "White sand and grey sand. White sand and grey sand. Who'll buy my white sand? Who'll buy my grey sand?" The words were always drivel but you had to pipe them out and hold your own amongst the unfriendly circling of the others. The hotel was stifling and deserted, but the sea had a grim beauty, seen from the window, while the hard valanced beds seemed to promise a cloudy luxury. I lay down while Marcel was in the bathroom, hearing only the hiss of the shower and the creak of the pipes. It was a lull in the chase, like one of the puzzling calm intermittences in love itself. I was still unused to hotels, I wanted to stay here for days, for months, perhaps, forgotten by the staff—they would wake us in spring with coffee, and newspapers like April Fool editions, full of just-possible absurdities. I dreamt that Gordon Bottomley was staying at the same hotel. I was filled with emotion, and took Luc to see him in his room. The poet was vigorous and well-preserved, and busily at work on a verse play which he had started in the 1930s and which was now over a thousand pages long. He threw open a wicker hamper in which the curling bundles of manuscript were carried from place to place. He said how much this work had cost him, what he had given up, of ordinary pleasures and griefs, in order to find time to get it right. I spoke to him about a poem of his that my father had sung in a setting by Finzi, but when he asked me what it was called my mind went blank: I said I thought it was called "Mud" and he said "Oh yes", though neither of us was convinced.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  So if you want me to use the word masturbation, I’ll use it. Let’s just call it masturbation with a partner. I mean, plain old mas turbation was never this exciting. I don’t always fuck the sink, that’s for special occasions. But I love to press the shaft of my dick against the top of the sink while I grab my abs with one hand and my balls with the other. And sometimes I lean against the sink while I slide a dildo into my ass. I can feel the sink warming against my thighs. I always used to press my dildo against the wall and then slide onto it, but now I’ve got lots of variations. The other day I put rhe dildo up on rhe sink, stood on rhe edge of rhe bathrub, and sat on the dildo. I watched myself right up against the mirror. I could see my facial muscles relax as I got closer to coming. Then when I came, I shot all over myself and almost fell into the sink, which was funny and almost romantic. Usu ally, though, I shoot right into the drain and then just wash my cum down. Though now the drain’s starting to clog. And I can’t seem to get that vitamin E lotion off the edge of the sink; even when I wash with soap it still feels a bit slimy. (My friends are going to read this and they’re going to want to use the kitchen sink, but oh well.) The view is one of the most important parts. When I’m jerking off in the sink, I’m right up against the mirror. Some times I can pretend that I’m watching that Warhol movie I’ve never seen, the one that’s just Joe Dallesandro jerking off from the waist up. I can watch all the different expressions on my face, study my eyes. Watch my jaw clench or slacken as I come and my eyes roll back. The sink makes me feel good about myself. There’s nothing getting in the way of my body becoming my own object of de sire. I look in the mirror and think, Who’s that hot boy? I tease my tits until they pop up, bite my armpits, smack my chest as

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  There I meditated on those men, of whom I knew nothing but from whom I sprang, and whose race would end with me. In Rome they were enlarging my mausoleum, since Decrianus had cleverly redrawn the plans; they are still at work upon it, even now. The idea for those circular galleries came from Egypt, and likewise the ramps descending to underground chambers; I had conceived of a colossal tomb to be reserved not for myself alone, or for my immediate successors, but as the eventual resting-place of future emperors for centuries to come; princes yet to be born have thus their places already marked in this palace of death. I saw also to the ornamentation of the cenotaph erected on the Field of Mars in memory of Antinous; a barge from Alexandria had discharged its loads of sphinxes and obelisks for this work. A new project long occupied me, and has not ceased to do so, namely, the construction of the Odeon, a model library provided with halls for courses and lectures to serve as a center of Greek culture in Rome. I made it less splendid than the new library at Ephesus, built three or four years before, and gave it less grace and elegance than the library of Athens, but I intend to make this foundation a close second to, if not the equal of, the Museum of Alexandria; its further development will rest with you. In working upon it I often think of the library established by Plotina in Trajan's Forum, with that noble inscription placed by her order over its door: Dispensary to the Soul. The Villa was near enough completion to have my collections transported to it, my musical instruments and the several thousand books purchased here and there in the course of my travels. I gave a series of banquets where everything was assembled with care, both the menu for the repasts and the somewhat restricted list of my guests. My goal was to have all in harmony with the calm beauty of these gardens and these halls, to have fruits as exquisite as the music, and the sequence of courses as perfect as the chasing on the silver plates. For the first time I took an interest in the choice of foods, giving orders that the oysters must come from Lucrinus and the crayfish be taken from the rivers of Gaul. My dislike of the combined pomposity and negligence which too often characterize an emperor's table led me to rule that all viands be shown to me before they were presented to any of my guests, even to the least of them.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Trying to deny our self-absorbed nature, trying to pretend we are somehow more altruistic than others, makes it impossible for us to transform ourselves. Third and most important, we must begin to make the transformation into the healthy narcissist . Healthy narcissists have a stronger, even more resilient sense of self. They tend to hover closer to the top of the scale. They recover more quickly from any wounds or insults. They do not need as much validation from others. They realize at some point in life that they have limits and flaws. They can laugh at these flaws and not take slights so personally. In many ways, by embracing the full picture of themselves, their self-love is more real and complete. From this stronger inner position, they can turn their attention outward more often and more easily. This attention goes in one of two directions, and sometimes both. First, they are able to direct their focus and their love into their work, becoming great artists, creators, and inventors. Because their outward focus on the work is more intense, they tend to be successful in their ventures, which gives them the necessary attention and validation. They can have moments of doubt and insecurity, and artists can be notoriously brittle, but work stands as a continual release from too much self-absorption. The other direction healthy narcissists take is toward people, developing empathic powers. Imagine empathy as the realm lying at the very top of the scale and beyond—complete absorption in others. By our very nature, we humans have tremendous abilities to understand people from the inside out. In our earliest years, we felt completely bonded with our mother, and we could sense her every mood and read her every emotion in a preverbal way. Unlike any other animal or primate, we also had the ability to extend this beyond the mother to other caregivers and people in our vicinity. This is the physical form of empathy that we feel even to this day with our closest friends, spouses, or partners. We also have a natural ability to take the perspective of others, to think our way inside their minds. These powers largely lie dormant because of our self-absorption. But in our twenties and beyond, feeling more confident about ourselves, we can begin to focus outward, on people, and rediscover these powers. Those who practice this empathy often become superior social observers in the arts or sciences, therapists, and leaders of the highest order. The need to develop this empathy is greater than ever. Various studies have indicated a gradual increase in levels of self-absorption and narcissism in young people since the late 1970s, with a much higher spike since 2000. Much of this can be attributed to technology and the internet. People simply spend less time in social interactions and more time socializing online, which makes it increasingly difficult to develop empathy and sharpen social skills.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The house is a kind of frame for living in or discipline for thought—so that its few furnishings, the book-case, a rather hideous rug, the photograph of the king, seem unnecessary embarrassments. I find myself quite as austere as a hermit for those hours when I am alone, & I want nothing. Or if I have been with the chiefs, eating & drinking & reciting to them, as they seem relentlessly to require, from the Thousand & One Nights , I return to this little box of shadows, to the fringed globe of the shamadan , the little folding captain’s chair, with a sense of enchantment. And Taha is waiting, never snoozing or yawning, but squatting in perfect, illiterate silence. His beauty is enhanced by his watchfulness, which is never impertinent or burdensome; it is an almost abstract form of attention, a condition of life to him. Though he only joined me for this tour I feel already with him, as I imagine long-married couples do, a complete freedom from self-consciousness, & as I sit & write, or merely gaze at the moon & stars, his eyes, which are always upon me, are weightless, demand nothing, are themselves dark globes in which lamp & stars are distantly reflected! And then I remember that he knows nothing of this, as I know nothing of him. I look across at him & smile, & after a second he smiles back, begins to rise, but I gesture to him to stay put. There is a momentary uncertainty, but as he settles again it disperses & is forgotten. May 31, 1926: Terrific drama yesterday, as Taha was bitten by a scorpion … I was just coming home: the heat had become too intense & I had failed to resolve a contention between two men over a pig—a pig which had been given to one of them as a reward for his prompt payment of taxes. I was in no doubt of that, & the pig was branded, but the other chap, a rather svelte character with a distinctly flirtatious manner, said that this admirable tax payer had owed him a pig—indeed, owed him two pigs, & he thought it was only his right to take it. The whole issue will need further attention.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  So if we don’t tell anybody at all, then she’ll never find out.’ ‘Good,’ said Rupert. He was clearly dissatisfied. We went into the sitting-room. ‘I think it would be better if you stayed in the bedroom, darling,’ I said to Arthur. ‘This child’s mother is coming round. We’ve agreed to keep it all a secret.’ He left the room directly, and I heard him shut the bedroom door. ‘I expect Mummy will be here any moment,’ I said. My nephew was determined and casual. ‘Can we go on looking at the pictures?’ he asked. ‘All right,’ I agreed. Then another thought struck me. ‘How long were you here before I arrived?’ ‘I was here for about twenty minutes—before you arrived.’ ‘Perhaps best to pretend to Mummy that I found you on the doorstep. Otherwise she’ll wonder how you got in—or why I didn’t ring her sooner.’ He looked at his large, rather adult watch. ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ he said. We sat down side by side, and I lifted the album on to my knee. It was one of a set in which my grandfather had had all his loose and various collection of snaps, taken over a long life, mounted. He had had more volumes bound than he needed and gave one to me. It had the generous proportions of an Edwardian album, many, many broad dark grey pages, tied in with thick silk cords which knotted at the edge outside, the whole protected with weighty boards covered with green leather, tooled with flowers around the border, and with a pompous but impressive ‘B’ beneath a coronet in the centre. ‘How far did you get?’ I asked, offering to open it halfway through. ‘Let’s start again,’ Rupert urged. We’d once spent an hour looking through this album together, and I had had the impression that he was committing it to memory, working out the connections. It was a sort of book of life to him, and I was the authoritative expounder of its text. The early part was fairly random, this scion of the family photograph collection being merely the duplicates and duds. There was me with a cap and a brace on my teeth, at my tother; there were Philippa and I in our bathing costumes in Brittany (a windy day by the look of it); me in my shorts in the garden at Marden, my grandfather and my mother in deckchairs behind, looking cross. ‘There’s Great Grandpa, look: I don’t think he was in a very good mood, do you?’ Rupert giggled, and banged his heels against the front of the sofa. ‘Then it’s Winchester.’ ‘Hooray!’ cried Rupert, who, though an independent child, was still strongly patriotic about such things as the school from which, one day, he would doubtless run away. ‘Now can you find me in this one?’ I asked.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  This was something so unusual that it seemed to bring my whole life before my mind's eye. What I dreaded was Cherif’s return, some maudlin rapprochement or pretence that nothing serious had gone wrong. Or it could be poor troubled Paul, I supposed, in search of the solace I alone seemed able to offer him. But what if Luc was standing there, fluffily unshaven, greasy-haired, hungry . . . ? I crossed the room assuring myself it was only Marcel, who had got the time of a lesson wrong, or forgotten it was the holidays. Outside, in a vision of unbruised youth and beauty, were Alejo and Agustín. So I had been forgiven? The former, in one of his bright silk waistcoats, like a wicked prefect, kissed me on both cheeks, while his cousin extended a hand stiffly, but with a slight smile: he gave the impression of having been coaxed round and of relying entirely on Alejo as a chaperon. Still, I felt in some way blessed by them, ridiculously moved to find myself in their thoughts. "Agustin wants to ask you something," said Alejo. I shrugged and spread my hands to say "Anything, anything." "Both my sisters say, would you like to come to their party." "And . . . " prompted Alejo. "And I invite you too." "And so do I." "Oh . . . it's terribly sweet of you." "It is for Christmas, and also for my sister's, um, onomastic . . . holiday," said Agustin, glad of this further rationale for their gesture. "I'm very touched, please thank your sisters, it would have been wonderful to meet them at last, but the truth is I'm tied up with something here." I was aware of their both looking curiously past me into the grim fug of the room. "And then any moment I have to go out to meet a friend on the other side of town. But thank you, thank you, my friends." For a minute I was Scrooge playing Mr Brownlow. "I hope you'll have a very happy time." I caught on Agustin's incomparable face the glow of a double satisfaction. I couldn't have borne the party, simple social sweetness was beyond me these days; yet by the time I skulked out through the yard, aware I was noticed from my neighbours' window, a hunched figure in the dusk, I had begun to feel humiliated by their offer, like some difficult old widower invited to share the family turkey. I saw I was shy, too, of dancing with unknown girls. After the tinny carols in the streets, the automated mania of the shoppers, the limbo of Christmas, garish but dank, it was like reaching home to push open the heavy door of the bar, to hear the spring sweep it shut behind me, to move again in the slowed rotations of this other limbo, in its deep-sea gloom of copper and green.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  was busy putting his money where his mouth was, and now he never had to work again. I was a regular guest, and while you never knew everyone, I had enough buddies, male and female, to feel relaxed and comfortable. The atmosphere was a sort of postcollege hip thing—people two or five or even ten years out of school try ing to recapture the feeling of freedom and belonging of those undergraduate days. Dressing down was the absolute rule. The guy in the mus cle shirt and hightops might be a corporate lawyer on the fast track to partner, and the woman in the tie-dyed shirt and clogs could easily be a buttoned-down drone with Anderson Con sulting. I was in grad school at the time, so as I saw it I had a right to wear loose jeans and sandals and a legalize pot T-shirt. There was plenty of sex at these parties. Not as much as you might hear about the next day, of course, but I know how to separate fact from bragging, and there was plenty of fact. All those people trooping up and down the stairs to the second floor weren’t inspecting Kindle’s famous record collection or checking out the new wallpaper in his study. I guess I got about my fair share. I didn’t try as hard as some guys, and sometimes that works out better anyway. My God, with guys like Jerry Shaughnessy or Guido the Italian Stallion, if they didn’t have a real solid line on some trim by ten or eleven you could see the panic in their eyes, like a hunter on the last day of deer season. My normal pattern was to wait un til things thinned out a bit, maybe one A.M. or so, and then take a casual look around to see who might be available. Lately it had been Amy Hauder more often than not, and I sensed I might be drifting into a relationship in my usual aimless way. We were down in the basement, where the laid-back cool

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

  FIVEWhen There’s No One to Set an ExampleAs I reached more of the adult children in the study and had a chance to talk to them, my thoughts kept drifting back to Karen. After all, she had prompted the whole project with her visit to my home on the eve of her wedding. And so when I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of a nationally known child treatment center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the fall of 1998, I jumped at the chance. This would give me a golden opportunity to look up Karen, who had settled there with her new husband. Her Christmas cards had kept me up to date. The wedding and honeymoon had gone perfectly. Six months after the wedding she sent me a somewhat cryptic note—“Dear Judy, So far so good! Warm regards, Karen.” As I puzzled over it, I figured that it reflected her characteristic caution about expecting good things to last. Her job was going well, her husband, Gavin, had been promoted, and they’d bought a house. The next year she wrote to say that she was pregnant. And her last card contained a picture of her baby, Maya, who would now be two years old. Karen also included a couple of lines about her decision to quit work full-time and how she had struggled with the change. I drove to Karen’s house with questions racing through my head, the kind that can only be asked by having seen her life unfold for a quarter of a century. What happens to a caregiver child when she finds a healthy relationship in adulthood? Are there residues from her early experiences? Can she ever break free of that role? Have Karen’s early fears of betrayal affected her marriage? Has she learned to be less serious and more light-hearted or is her grave demeanor a permanent aspect of her personality? I was especially interested to see Karen as a mom. To be honest, I was surprised by her decision to have a child so soon after her marriage. After all, she had spent so many years of her life bringing up her mother’s children. She could have said, “Been there, done that.” AS SOON AS I pulled my rental car into the driveway, Karen came out the front door and ran over to greet me. She looked different—more settled, a tiny bit heavier, still stunning. She was wearing jeans and a loose green pullover and straddled a little girl with ash-blond hair on her right hip. We embraced and then Karen threw her free arm out in a huge arc. “Look at all this. Can you believe it?” “This” was a sprawling ranch-style house with three bedrooms, large front yard, shade trees, a swing set, and a two-car garage filled with bicycles, camping gear, and other paraphernalia of a family that enjoys the outdoors, plus a spectacular garden.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  That she would ask me to move with her to Dayton, that she seemed genuinely surprised by my resistance, and that she would subject me to such a one-sided introduction to a therapist meant that Mom didn’t understand something about the way that Lindsay and I ticked. Lindsay once told me, “Mom just doesn’t get it.” I initially disagreed with her: “Of course she gets it; it’s just the way she is, something she can’t change.” After the incident with the therapist, I knew that Lindsay was right. Mamaw was unhappy when I told her that I planned to live with Dad, and so was everyone else. No one really understood it, and I felt unable to say much about it. I knew that if I told the truth, I’d have a few people offering their spare bedrooms, and all of them would submit to Mamaw’s demand that I live permanently with her. I also knew that living with Mamaw came with a lot of guilt, and a lot of questions about why I didn’t live with my mom or dad, and a lot of whispers from a lot of people to Mamaw that she just needed to take a break and enjoy her golden years. That feeling of being a burden to Mamaw wasn’t something I imagined; it came from a number of small cues, from the things she muttered under her breath, and from the weariness she wore like a dark piece of clothing. I didn’t want that, so I chose what seemed like the least bad option. In some ways, I loved living with Dad. His life was normal in precisely the way I’d always wanted mine to be. My stepmom worked part-time but was usually home. Dad came home from work around the same time each day. One of them (usually my stepmom but sometimes Dad) made dinner every night, which we ate as a family. Before each meal, we’d say grace (something I’d always liked but had never done outside of Kentucky). On weeknights, we’d watch some family sitcom together. And Dad and Cheryl never screamed at each other. Once, I heard them raise their voices during an argument about money, but slightly elevated volumes were far different from screaming. On my first weekend at Dad’s house—the first weekend I had ever spent with him when I knew that, come Monday, I wouldn’t be going somewhere else—my younger brother invited a friend to sleep over. We fished in Dad’s pond, fed horses, and grilled steaks for dinner. That night, we watched Indiana Jones movies until the early-morning hours. There was no fighting, no adults hurling insults at one another, no glass china shattering angrily against the wall or floor. It was a boring evening. And it epitomized what attracted me to Dad’s home. What I never lost, though, was the sense of being on guard. When I moved in with my father, I’d known him for two years.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Armco’s people sat on the boards of many of the important local organizations, and it helped to fund the schools. And it employed thousands of Middletonians who, like my grandfather, earned a good wage despite a lack of formal education. Armco earned its reputation through careful design. “Until the 1950s,” writes Chad Berry in his book Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles , “the ‘big four’ employers of the Miami Valley region—Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati, Champion Paper and Fiber in Hamilton, Armco Steel in Middletown, and National Cash Register in Dayton—had had serene labor relations, partly because they . . . [hired] family and friends of employees who were once migrants themselves. For example, Inland Container, in Middletown, had 220 Kentuckyians on its payroll, 117 of whom were from Wolfe County alone.” While labor relations no doubt had declined by the 1980s, much of the goodwill built by Armco (and similar companies) remained. The other reason most still call it Armco is that Kawasaki was a Japanese company, and in a town full of World War II vets and their families, you’d have thought that General Tojo himself had decided to set up shop in southwest Ohio when the merger was announced. The opposition was mostly a bunch of noise. Even Papaw—who once promised he’d disown his children if they bought a Japanese car—stopped complaining a few days after they announced the merger. “The truth is,” he told me, “that the Japanese are our friends now. If we end up fighting any of those countries, it’ll be the goddamned Chinese.” The Kawasaki merger represented an inconvenient truth: Manufacturing in America was a tough business in the post-globalization world. If companies like Armco were going to survive, they would have to retool. Kawasaki gave Armco a chance, and Middletown’s flagship company probably would not have survived without it. Growing up, my friends and I had no clue that the world had changed. Papaw had retired only a few years earlier, owned stock in Armco, and had a lucrative pension. Armco Park remained the nicest, most exclusive recreation spot in town, and access to the private park was a status symbol: It meant that your dad (or grandpa) was a man with a respected job. It never occurred to me that Armco wouldn’t be around forever, funding scholarships, building parks, and throwing free concerts. Still, few of my friends had ambitions to work there. As small children, we had the same dreams that other kids did; we wanted to be astronauts or football players or action heroes. I wanted to be a professional puppy-player-wither, which at the time seemed eminently reasonable. By the sixth grade, we wanted to be veterinarians or doctors or preachers or businessmen. But not steelworkers. Even at Roosevelt Elementary—where, thanks to Middletown geography, most people’s parents lacked a college education—no one wanted to have a blue-collar career and its promise of a respectable middle-class life.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  oteinemauga, taking Pali’s moist brown hand and touching it to his dry cheek. Mr. and Mrs. Saolefaleotcinemauga beamed smiles like tropic birds floating slowly across their high faces: Mr. Saolefa- leoteinemauga staunch as the sides of Savaii and Mrs. Saolefa- leoteinemauga a single column of devotion and prayer. “Take care of our boy.” Pali, six foot five, looked down at the five- foot-five Reverend. “I will,” said the Reverend, and lowered his head in a few words of thanksgiving while his eyes traced the ascending lines of Pali’s thighs. Summer in Minnesota was hot and green. Then, as happens annually in Minnesota during the third week of October, win ter descended swiftly with snow and ice. Christmas came and went. Pali was invited to spend part of winter break with the Reverend Knarffssen and his son Gregg, the assistant pastor. Pali wondered about the rumor that Gregg and the Reverend were not actually related by blood but by common interest, as he noted the difference in physical appearance during the first sauna the three of them took together. In fact, the three of them were sitting naked in the Pastor’s basement within fifteen minutes of Pali’s arrival, coming into the house after the drive from the seminary in town with Gregg. The Pastor, bounding down the stairs in his bathrobe, invited Pali to join them for their afternoon invigorating Swedish sauna. Before you could say, Uff dal, Pali was on a high pine bench pouring spring water from a wooden dipper, watching eucalyptus-scented steam rise between him and his nude hosts. Pali wore a towel, having been brought up a mod est Christian Samoan. “I would have thought that being Polynesian,” said the Pas

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  In the worst hours of apathy and dejection I would go for solace to Hartford's fine museum, seeking out a Canaletto painting of Rome, the Pantheon standing brown and gold against the blue sky of a late afternoon in summer; and each time I would come away from it comforted, and once again at peace. About the year 1941 I had discovered by chance, in an artists' supply shop in New York, four Piranesi engravings which G . . . and I bought. One of them, a View of Hadrian's Villa which I had not known before, is an interior of the chapel of Canopus, from which were taken in the Seventeenth Century the Antinous in Egyptian style and the accompanying basalt statues of priestesses, all to be seen today in the Vatican. The foreground shows a round structure, burst open like a skull, from which fallen trees and brush hang vaguely down, like strands of hair. The genius of Piranesi, almost mediumistic, has truly caught the element of hallucination here: he has sensed the long-continued rituals of mourning, the tragic architecture of an inner world. For several years I looked at this drawing almost daily, without a thought for my former enterprise, which I supposed that I had given up. Such are the curious detours of what is called oblivion. In the spring of 1947, while sorting over some papers I burned the notes taken at Yale; they seemed to have become by that time completely useless. Still, Hadrian's name appears in an essay on Greek myth which I wrote in 1943 and which Roger Caillois published during those war years in Les Lettres Franfaises, in Buenos Aires. Then in 1945 the figure of the drowned Antinous, borne along somehow on that Lethean current, came again to the surface in an unfinished essay, Canticle of the Soul and its True Freedom, written just before the advent of a serious illness. Keep in mind that everything recounted here is thrown out of perspective by what is left unsaid: these notes serve [Hadrian 324a.jpg] Interior of the Pantheon, Rome Engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi [Hadrian 324bc.jpg] Temple of Canope Engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi [Hadrian 324d.jpg] Foundation Wall of Hadrian�s Tomb, Rome Engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi only to mark the lacunae. There is nothing, for example, of what I was doing during those difficult years, nor of the thinking, the work, the worries and anxieties, or the joys; nor of the tremendous repercussion of external events and the perpetual testing of oneself upon the touchstone of fact.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Those who know his ways greet each announcement with a delight unshared by the novice; in my first week at the club the disdainful announcement that ‘Mr Beckwith has a man in reception’ had brought a round of silly laughter as I walked, blushing, from the gym. And the pool is a busy place. Except for certain mournful periods—early afternoons, Sunday evenings—there is a crowd: friends are racing, practised divers arch into the water making barely a splash, the agile avoid the slow, groups sit in a dripping line on the edge, feet flicking the water, cocks shrunken by the cold sticking up comically in their trunks. Miles of serious swimming are wound up in those twenty-five yards each day, and though some dally between lengths, of most you see only the heave of breaststrokers’ backs, the misted goggles and gasping, half-averted mouths of crawlers, the incessant cleaving movements of their arms, and the bubbling wakes of their feet. I went to swim most days, sometimes after exercises on the mats in the gym or a shortish turn in the weights room. It was a bizarre occupation, numbing and yet satisfying. I swam fast, alternating crawl and breaststroke, with a length of butterfly every ten. My mind would count its daily fifty lengths as automatically as a photocopier; and at the same time it would wander. Absorbed in thought I barely noticed the half-hour—one unfaltering span of pure physical exercise—elapse. This evening I thought of Arthur a lot, running real and projected conversations through my mind as I tumble-turned from length into length through the cool, gloomy water. A week had gone by since we’d met, a week spent in bed, or trailing naked from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen; sleeping at irregular times, getting drunk, watching movies on the video. I was engrossed in him. He was still strange to me, though, and much less predictable than I was. Perhaps he felt stifled in the flat. After hours of languid vacancy he would spring up and run from room to room, tapping door-frames and chair-backs as he went. Sometimes he ploughed through the stations on the hi-fi till he found some music to dance to, and would swarm around wearing nothing but my school straw hat, or a towel which he flirted about or shook like a fetish.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  me ask you, have you had any ... relief tonight?” “Nope. With me it’s all give and no take. I just give and give and then give some more.” She giggled. “Would you like some take, for a change?” she asked shyly. “God yes.” “Okay, you just lie still and let me take care of you.” I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling in happy exhaus tion as Amira unzipped my jeans and delicately extracted my cock. She crouched over me, her dark hair shielding her face as if by modesty. Her tongue was warm and soft, her motions tentative and unpracticed. She held my cock gently inside her mouth, like she was afraid of damaging it, and moved her head up and down in a slow and steady rhythm. In the state I was in, it was enough. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to drift along patiently with the sensation. “Here it comes,” I said. Amira lifted her head and took over with her hand, stroking my slippery cock with a firm grip. I groaned and spilled out my load in a prolonged spasm of pleasure. When it was over, the room seemed to be spinning in lazy circles, and I felt drugged. I lay there limply while Amira cleaned me with a towel and zipped me up. “You’re an angel,” I said. She smiled. “If my mother could see me right now, she wouldn’t think so.” The next morning I was hung over, sore, and vaguely de pressed. Instead of leaving me fulfilled, the escapade sent me into a funk that lasted for weeks. I remember thinking that Amira had it right—it was much better to let a fantasy remain a fantasy, and to remain true to your morals. I called up Amira a few days later and asked her out. She turned me down, politely but firmly, which only reinforced my feelings for her. I obsessed over her for a while, and then I eventually came to my senses. Still, I was shocked when, a year later, I heard that she was dropping out of law school because she was pregnant. Today I look back at the incident with a strange mixture of distaste and pride. Should you act out an extreme fantasy when you have the chance? You’re asking the wrong guy—I still haven’t decided yet.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Other considerations came slowly to mind during the night which followed Iollas' death; life has given me much, or at least I have known how to obtain a great deal from it; in this moment as in the time of my felicity, but for wholly opposite reasons, it seems to me that existence has nothing more to offer: I am not sure, however, that I have not something more to learn from it. I shall listen for its secret instructions to the end. All my life long I have trusted in the wisdom of my body; I have tried to distinguish between and enjoy the varied sensations which this friend has provided me: I no longer refuse the death agony prepared for me, this ending slowly elaborated within my arteries and inherited perhaps from some ancestor, or born of my temperament, formed little by little from each of my actions throughout my life. The time of impatience has passed; at the point where I now am, despair would be in as bad taste as hope itself. I have ceased to hurry my death. There is still much to be done. My estates in Africa, inherited from my mother-in-law, Matidia, must be turned into models of agricultural development; the peasants of Borysthenes, the village established in Thrace in memory of a good horse, are entitled to aid after a severe winter; on the contrary, subsidies should not be granted to the rich cultivators of the Nile Valley, who are ever ready to take advantage of the emperor's solicitude. Julius Vestinus, prefect of Education, sends me his report on the opening of public grammar schools. I have just completed the revision of Palmyra's commercial code: it takes everything into account, from the entrance fees for caravans to the tax set for prostitutes. At the moment, we are assembling a congress of physicians and magistrates to determine the utmost duration of a pregnancy, thus putting an end to interminable legal squabbles. Cases of bigamy are increasing in number in the veterans' settlements; I am doing my best to persuade these men not to make wrong use of the new laws which permit them to marry, and I counsel them to abstain prudently from taking more than one wife at a time! In Athens a Pantheon is in process of construction on the model of the Pantheon in Rome; I am composing the inscription to be placed on its walls, and shall enumerate therein (as examples and commitments for the future) my services to the Greek cities and to barbarian peoples; the services rendered to Rome are matters of course.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Rome would be perpetuating herself in the least of the towns where magistrates strive to demand just weight from the merchants, to clean and light the streets, to combat disorder, slackness, superstition and injustice, and to give broader and fairer interpretation to the laws. She would endure to the end of the last city built by man. Humanitas, Libertas, Felicitas: those noble words which grace the coins of my reign were not of my invention. Any Greek philosopher, almost every cultured Roman, conceives of the world as I do. I have heard Trajan exclaim, when confronted by a law which was unjust because too rigorous, that to continue its enforcement was to run counter to the spirit of the times. I shall have been the first, perhaps, to subordinate all my actions to this "spirit of the times", to make of it something other than the inflated dream of a philosopher, or the slightly vague aspirings of some good prince. And I was thankful to the gods, for they had allowed me to live in a period when my allotted task consisted of prudent reorganization of a world, and not of extracting matter, still unformed, from chaos, or of lying upon a corpse in the effort to revive it. I enjoyed the thought that our past was long enough to provide us with great examples, but not so heavy as to crush us under their weight; that our technical developments had advanced to the point of facilitating hygiene in the cities and prosperity for the population, though not to the degree of encumbering man with useless acquisition; that our arts, like trees grown weary with the abundance of their bearing, were still able to produce a few choice fruits. I was glad that our venerable, almost formless religions, drained of all intransigence and purged of savage rites, linked us mysteriously to the most ancient secrets of man and of earth, not forbidding us, however, a secular explanation of facts and a rational view of human conduct. It was, in sum, pleasing to me that even these words Humanity, Liberty, Happiness, had not yet lost their value by too much misuse. I see an objection to every effort toward ameliorating man's condition on earth, namely that mankind is perhaps not worthy of such exertion. But I meet the objection easily enough: so long as Caligula's dream remains impossible of fulfillment, and the entire human race is not reduced to a single head destined for the axe, we shall have to bear with humanity, keeping it within bounds but utilizing it to the utmost; our interest, in the best sense of the term, will be to serve it.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Glad to hear it, Will,’ he replied, following me round the little maze of banked lockers. I found one that was free, slung my bag into it, and began to undress. Bill stood by me, amicable, massive, flushed, his head and shoulders still rinsed with sweat. There was a kind of handsomeness lost in his heavy, square face. He sat down on the bench, where he could politely talk while also watching me take my clothes off. It was typical of his behaviour, discreet, but not prurient: his was the old-fashioned ethos of a male community, delighting in men, but always respectful and fraternal. I knew he would never ask a personal question. ‘That boy Phil’s coming on well,’ he said. ‘Very nice definition. Said he was a bit loose after being off for a spell, but I should say he’d put on a centimetre or two this week alone.’ Phil, I knew, was a lad he had a bit of a soft spot for; I’d seen him hanging around to count for him when he was on the machines, and because Phil was genuinely interested in his own body Bill was always able to engage him in earnest analyses of methods and results. I could see, too, that Phil, who was shy and stocky, might be a tricky proposition, and sensed some resistance in him to Bill’s cheery and paternal chatter across the crowded shower room. ‘Phil’s all very well,’ I suggested, ‘but he’s the plump type: he’ll always have to work hard.’ I pulled off my T-shirt and Bill shook his head. ‘I’d like to see you do some more work,’ he said with a sucking in of his breath. ‘You’ve got the makings of something really choice.’ I looked down, as it were modestly, at my lean torso, the smooth, tight tits, the little fuse of hair running down to my belt. The swimming-pool at the Corry is reached down a spiral staircase from the changing-rooms. It is the most subterraneous zone of the Club, its high coffered ceiling supporting the floor of the gym above. Corinthian pillars at each corner are an allusion to ancient Rome, and you half expect to see the towel-girt figures of Charlton Heston and Tony Curtis deep in senatorial conspiracy. Instead, a bored attendant paces around the narrow mosaic border of the pool in flip-flops. The water comes to within an inch or so of the margin, and any waves run over the floor, which glistens and, being uneven, holds little cold puddles. Some regulation, I suspect, stipulates how many turns around the pool the attendant must take each hour, for he combines his vigilance with relaxing in the spectators’ seats and reading a book; after a longish spell of this he will then trot around the pool for a minute or two as if to make up his ration. I have never known, or known of, any occasion on which his services were needed.