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 Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  b. Against bitterness; They shall call the people to the mountain; there shall they sacrifice the victims of justice; they shall suck as milk the abundance of the sea and the hidden treasures of the sands. Deut. 33:19. The men of the city said to Eliseus, Behold the situation of this city is very good, as thou, my lord, seest; but the waters are very bad and the ground barren. And he said, Bring me a new vessel and put salt into it. And when they had brought it, he went out to the spring of the waters and cast the salt into it, and said, Thus saith the Lord, I have healed these waters, and there shall be in them no more death or barrenness. And the waters were healed to this day, according to the word of Eliseus which he spoke. 4 Kings 2:19–22. They stoned Stephen, invoking and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And falling on his knees he cried with a loud voice, saying, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this he fell asleep in the Lord. Acts 7:58, 59. c. Against sadness; After ten days their faces appeared fairer and fatter than all the children that ate of the king’s meat. Dan. 1:15. A glad heart maketh a cheerful countenance. Prov. 15:13. Now this I say, he who soweth sparingly shall also reap sparingly; and he who soweth in blessings shall also reap of blessings, every one as he hath determined in his heart: not with sadness or of necessity, for God loveth a cheerful giver. 2 Cor. 9:6, 7. (3) The effect; a. Forgiveness; Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins. St. Luke 11:3. b. Healing; This is the bread that cometh down from Heaven; that if any man eat of it he may not die. St. John 6:50. c. The Body of Christ; We being many are one bread, one body, all who partake of that one bread. 1 Cor. 10:17. Thanksgiving

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Down a slope, a flagged path stepped cautiously, putting the same foot first every time, through an iris garden; under beeches; and then was transformed into a fast-moving earthy trail patterned with rough imprints of horse hooves. The gardens and parks seemed to move ever faster as our child’s legs grew longer, and when he was about four, the trees and flowering shrubs turned resolutely toward the sea. Like a bored Stationmaster seen standing alone on the speed-clipped platform of some small station at which one’s train does not stop, this or that gray park watchman receded as the park streamed on and on, carrying us south toward the orange trees and the arbutus and the chick-fluff of mimosas and the pâte tendre of an impeccable sky. Graded gardens on hillsides, a succession of terraces whose every stone step ejected a gaudy grasshopper, dropped from ledge to ledge seaward, with the olives and the oleanders fairly toppling over each other in their haste to obtain a view of the beach. There our child kneeled motionless to be photographed in a quivering haze of sun against the scintillation of the sea, which is a milky blur in the snapshots we have preserved but was, in life, silvery blue, with great patches of purple-blue farther out, caused by warm currents in collaboration with and corroboration of (hear the pebbles rolled by the withdrawing wave?) eloquent old poets and their smiling similes. And among the candy-like blobs of sea-licked glass—lemon, cherry, peppermint—and the banded pebbles, and the little fluted shells with lustered insides, sometimes small bits of pottery, still beautiful in glaze and color, turned up. They were brought to you or me for inspection, and if they had indigo chevrons, or bands of leaf ornament, or any kind of gay emblemata, and were judged precious, down they went with a click into the toy pail, and, if not, a plop and a flash marked their return to the sea. I do not doubt that among those slightly convex chips of majolica ware found by our child there was one whose border of scrollwork fitted exactly, and continued, the pattern of a fragment I had found in 1903 on the same shore, and that the two tallied with a third my mother had found on that Mentone beach in 1882, and with a fourth piece of the same pottery that had been found by her mother a hundred years ago—and so on, until this assortment of parts, if all had been preserved, might have been put together to make the complete, the absolutely complete, bowl, broken by some Italian child, God knows where and when, and now mended by these rivets of bronze.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  The end of the matter was that the neighbour went home much more disposed to wish that she had such a husband than to pity her good friend. When the uphol- sterer came home, his wife repeated to him the whole conversation she had had with her neighbour. " It is well for you, my dear," he replied, "that you are a good and sensible woman ; but for that we should have been separated long ago. But I trust that by God's grace we shall love each other in time to come as much as we have in the past, and that to His glory, and to our own comfort and satisfaction." " Amen, my dear," said the good woman. " I hope, too, that you will never find me fail to do my part to- wards maintaining the good understanding between us.* * Dunlop thinks that this novel was probably taken from the fabliau of some Trouveur, who had obtained it from the East, as it corresponds with the story of the Shopkeeper's Wife in Nakshebi's Persian tales, known bv the name of Tooti Nameh, or Tales of a Parrot. The Queen of Navarre's version of the story has beeq 396 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE {Ncroel 45 One must be very incredulous, ladies, if, after hearing so true a story, one were of opinion that there was as much wickedness in you as in men ; though, to say the truth, without wronging anyone, one cannot help coming to the conclusion with regard to tlie man and woman in question, that neither the one nor the other was good for anything. 1 " This man was prodigiously wicked," said Parla- mente ; " for on the one hand he deceived his wife, and on the other his servant." " You cannot have rightly understood the story," said Hircan; "for it states that he satisfied them both in one morning : a great feat, considering the contrariety of their interests." " In that respect, he was doubly a knave," replied Parlamente, " to satisfy the simplicity of the one by a lie, and the malice of the other by an act of vice. But I am quite aware that such as these will always be par- doned when they have such judges as you." " I assure you, however," rejoined Hircan, " that I will never undertake anything so great or so difficult, for provided I satisfy you, my day will not have been ill employed." " If mutual love does not content the heart," returned Parlamente, "all the rest cannot do so." " That is true," said Simontault. " I am persuaded imitated by Lafontaine, under the title of La Servante Justifi^e. He was particularly struck by an exceedingly comic reiteration of the phrase, ' It was I, gossip," in the dialogue between the sfmple-witted wife and her neighbour, and says in his opening lines :

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  The final stage in the course of my vague navigation would come when I reached the island of my bed. From the veranda or drawing room, where life was going on without me, my mother would come up for the warm murmur of her goodnight kiss. Closed inside shutters, a lighted candle, Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, something-something little child, the child kneeling on the pillow that presently would engulf his humming head. English prayers and the little icon featuring a sun-tanned Greek Catholic saint formed an innocent association upon which I look back with pleasure; and above the icon, high up on the wall, where the shadow of something (of the bamboo screen between bed and door?) undulated in the warm candlelight, a framed aquarelle showed a dusky path winding through one of those eerily dense European beechwoods, where the only undergrowth is bindweed and the only sound one’s thumping heart. In an English fairy tale my mother had once read to me, a small boy stepped out of his bed into a picture and rode his hobbyhorse along a painted path between silent trees. While I knelt on my pillow in a mist of drowsiness and talc-powdered well-being, half sitting on my calves and rapidly going through my prayer, I imagined the motion of climbing into the picture above my bed and plunging into that enchanted beechwood—which I did visit in due time. 4A bewildering sequence of English nurses and governesses, some of them wringing their hands, others smiling at me enigmatically, come out to meet me as I re-enter my past.

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

  If they get blocked or cut, paths formerly more resistant become the least resistant paths under the changed conditions. It must never be forgotten that a current that runs in has got to run out somewhere; and if it only once succeeds by accident in striking into its old place of exit again, the thrill of satisfaction which the consciousness connected with the whole residual brain then receives will reinforce and fix the paths of that moment and make them more likely to be struck into again. The resultant feeling that the old habitual act is at last successfully back again, becomes itself a new stimulus which stamps all the existing currents in. It is matter of experience that such feelings of successful achievement do tend to fix in our memory whatever processes have led to them; and we shall have a good deal more to say upon the subject when we come to the Chapter on the Will. My conclusion then is this: that some of the restitution of function (especially where the cortical lesion is not too great) is probably due to genuinely vicarious function on the part of the centres that remain; whilst some of it is due to the passing off of inhibitions. In other words, both the vicarious theory and the inhibition theory are true in their measure. But as for determining that measure, or saying which centres are vicarious, and to what extent they can learn new tricks, that is impossible at present. FINAL CORRECTION OF THE MEYNERT SCHEME. And now, after learning all these facts, what are we to think of the child and the candle-flame, and of that scheme which provisionally imposed itself on our acceptance after surveying the actions of the frog? (Cf. pp. 21-3, supra.) It will be remembered that we then considered the lower centres en masse as machines for responding to present sense-impressions exclusively, and the hemispheres as equally exclusive organs of action from inward considerations or ideas; and that, following Meynert, we supposed the hemispheres to have no native tendencies to determinate activity, but to be merely superadded organs for breaking up the various reflexes performed by the lower centres, and combining their motor and sensory elements in novel ways. It will also be remembered that I prophesied that we should be obliged to soften down the sharpness of this distinction after we had completed our survey of the farther facts. The time has now come for that correction to be made. Wider and completer observations show us both that the lower centres are more spontaneous, and that the hemispheres are more automatic, than the Meynert scheme allows. Schrader's observations in Goltz's Laboratory on hemisphereless frogs [83] and pigeons [84] give an idea quite different from the picture of these creatures which is classically current. Steiner's [85] observations on frogs already went a good way in the same direction, showing, for example, that locomotion is a well-developed function of the medulla oblongata.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  The Fremont House, Kendrick’s hotel was near the Michigan Street Depot. In those days when Chicago had barely 300,000 inhabitants, it was an hotel of the second class. Mr. Kendrick had told me that his uncle, a Mr. Cotton really owned the House, but left him the chief share in the management, adding “What uncle says, goes always.” In the course of time, I understood the nephew’s loyalty; for Mr. Cotton was really kindly and an able man of business. My duties as night-clerk were simple; from eight at night till six in the morning, I was master in the office and had to apportion bedrooms to the incoming guests and give bills and collect the monies due from the outgoing public. I set myself at once to learn the good and bad points of the hundred odd bedrooms in the house and the arrival and departure times of all the night trains. When guests came in, I met them at the entrance, found out what they wanted and told this or that porter or bellboy to take them to their rooms. However curt or irritable they were, I always tried to smooth them down and soon found I was succeeding. In a week Mr. Kendrick told me that he had heard golden opinions of me from a dozen visitors. “You have a dandy night-clerk,” he was told; “Spares no pains … pleasant manners … knows everything ... “some” clerk; yes, sir!” My experience in Chicago assured me that if one does his very best, he comes to success in business in a comparatively short time; so few do all they can. Going to bed at six, I was up every day at 1 o’clock for dinner as it was called and after dinner I got into the habit of going into the billiard-room at one end of which was a large bar. By five o’clock or so, the billiard-room was crowded and there was no one to superintend things, so I spoke to Mr. Kendrick about it and took the job on my own shoulders. I had little to do but induce newcomers to await their turn patiently and to mollify old customers who expected to find tables waiting for them. The result of a little courtesy and smiling promises was so marked that at the end of the very first month the bookkeeper, a man named Curtis, told me with a grin that I was to get sixty dollars a month and not forty dollars as I had supposed. Needless to say the extra pay simply quickened my desire to make myself useful. But now I found the way up barred by two superiors, the bookkeeper was one and the steward, a dry taciturn Westerner named Payne was the other. Payne bought everything and had control of the dining-room and waiters while Curtis ruled the office and the bellboys. I was really under Curtis; but my control of the billiard-room gave me a sort of independent position.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  As soon as I had written out the Bradlaugh story, Smith took me down to the “Press” office and introduced me to the chief editor, a Captain Forney: indeed the paper then was usually called “Forney’s Press” though already some spoke of it as “The Philadelphia Press.” Forney liked my portrait of Bradlaugh and engaged me as a reporter on the staff and occasional descriptive writer at fifty dollars a week, which enabled me to save all the money coming to me from Lawrence. One day Smith talked to me of Emerson and confessed he had got an introduction to him and had sent it on to the philosopher with a request for an interview. He wished me to accompany him to Concord: I consented, but without any enthusiasm: Emerson was then an unknown name to me; Smith read me some of his poetry and praised it highly though I could get little or nothing out of it. When young men now show me a similar indifference, my own experience makes it easy for me to excuse them. They know not what they do! is the explanation and excuse for all of us. One bright fall day Smith and I went over to Concord and next day visited Emerson. He received us in the most pleasant, courteous way: made us sit and composed himself to listen. Smith went off at score, telling him how greatly he had influenced his life and helped him with brave encouragement: the old man smiled benignantly and nodded his head, ejaculating from time to time: “Yes, yes!” Gradually Smith warmed to his work and wanted to know why Emerson had never expressed his views on sociology or on the relations between Capital and Labor. Once or twice the old gentleman cupped his ear with his hand; but all he said was: “Yes, Yes! or I think so” with the same benevolent smile. I guessed at once that he was deaf; but Smith had no inkling of the fact for he went on probing, probing while Emerson answered pleasant nothings quite irrelevantly. I studied the great man as closely as I could. He looked about five feet nine or ten in height, very thin, attenuated even, and very scrupulously dressed: his head was narrow though long, his face bony; a long, high, somewhat beaked nose was the feature of his countenance:—a good conceit of himself, I concluded, and considerable will-power, for the chin was well-defined and large; but I got nothing more than this and from his clear steadfast gray eyes, an intense impression of kindness and good will, and why shouldn’t I say it? of sweetness even, as of a soul lifted high above earth’s carking cares and stragglings. “A nice old fellow”, I said to myself, “but deaf as a post.”

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

  It was hard to get away for vacations but they managed some camping trips. They’d close the store for two weeks in the summer and we’d tour the national parks. Mom was always real happy to get back to a shower and her kitchen. But early on it seemed like they enjoyed each other and there wasn’t much tension. ” Like remembering their play, most of the people raised in well-functioning intact families also remembered family holidays, vacations, and other social occasions that brought the family together. They described the abundance of good food, noise, loving interest from grandparents, and mischievous fighting with cousins. They also recalled tensions and some open antagonism among different family members. But these were secondary to the warm glow of the get-togethers. Family vacations were especially memorable. Camping trips were the best-loved vacations among these children who later recalled their escapades and misadventures. The children knew when one of the adults, like Gary’s mother, did not share their enthusiasm. One young man guffawed when he recalled how his mom decided to do gourmet cooking over a campfire. Some of their fondest memories were about several families getting together to go camping, hiking, fishing, or boating. These were important communal experiences and the children were proud to do their share of the chores and planning. One young woman remembered how pleased she was that her parents invited her best friend whose parents were divorcing. As I searched my memory I was hard put to recall children of divorce talking happily, after the divorce, about any holidays or family vacations. Thanksgiving and Christmas posed annual dilemmas. Along with the goodies came the question—whose turn is it to spend which holiday where? For many, these occasions were a mixed bag. Some recalled visiting grandparents alone without their parents, which gave many children a sense of belonging to an extended family, something youngsters in intact families took for granted. Most loved their grandparents very much. These were happy times in their grandparents’ home that were long remembered. Some children liked spending separate vacations with their dad and his new family while others hated summer vacations because they were forced to go visit one parent under court order. Family celebrations like graduations, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and birthdays could be very happy. But they could also be marred by continuing tensions between parents, new lovers, and ex-partners.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Although I had been composing these chapters in the erratic sequence reflected by the dates of first publication given above, they had been neatly filling numbered gaps in my mind which followed the present order of chapters. That order had been established in 1936, at the placing of the cornerstone which already held in its hidden hollow various maps, timetables, a collection of matchboxes, a chip of ruby glass, and even—as I now realize—the view from my balcony of Geneva lake, of its ripples and glades of light, black-dotted today, at teatime, with coots and tufted ducks. I had no trouble therefore in assembling a volume which Harper & Bros. of New York brought out in 1951, under the title Conclusive Evidence; conclusive evidence of my having existed. Unfortunately, the phrase suggested a mystery story, and I planned to entitle the British edition Speak, Mnemosyne but was told that “little old ladies would not want to ask for a book whose title they could not pronounce.” I also toyed with The Anthemion which is the name of a honeysuckle ornament, consisting of elaborate interlacements and expanding clusters, but nobody liked it; so we finally settled for Speak, Memory (Gollancz, 1951, and The Universal Library, N.Y., 1960). Its translations are: Russian, by the author (Drugie Berega, The Chekhov Publishing House, N.Y., 1954), French, by Yvonne Davet (Autres Rivages, Gallimard, 1961), Italian, by Bruno Oddera (Parla, Ricordo, Mondadori, 1962), Spanish, by Jaime Piñeiro Gonzáles (¡Habla, memoria!, 1963) and German, by Dieter E. Zimmer (Rowohlt, 1964). This exhausts the necessary amount of bibliographic information, which jittery critics who were annoyed by the note at the end of Nabokov’s Dozen will be, I hope, hypnotized into accepting at the beginning of the present work. While writing the first version in America I was handicapped by an almost complete lack of data in regard to family history, and, consequently, by the impossibility of checking my memory when I felt it might be at fault. My father’s biography has been amplified now, and revised. Numerous other revisions and additions have been made, especially in the earlier chapters. Certain tight parentheses have been opened and allowed to spill their still active contents. Or else an object, which had been a mere dummy chosen at random and of no factual significance in the account of an important event, kept bothering me every time I reread that passage in the course of correcting the proofs of various editions, until finally I made a great effort, and the arbitrary spectacles (which Mnemosyne must have needed more than anybody else) were metamorphosed into a clearly recalled oystershell-shaped cigarette case, gleaming in the wet grass at the foot of an aspen on the Chemin du Pendu, where I found on that June day in 1907 a hawkmoth rarely met with so far west, and where a quarter of a century earlier, my father had netted a Peacock butterfly very scarce in our northern woodlands.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  I would put myself to sleep by the simple act of identifying myself with the engine driver. A sense of drowsy well-being invaded my veins as soon as I had everything nicely arranged—the carefree passengers in their rooms enjoying the ride I was giving them, smoking, exchanging knowing smiles, nodding, dozing; the waiters and cooks and train guards (whom I had to place somewhere) carousing in the diner; and myself, goggled and begrimed, peering out of the engine cab at the tapering track, at the ruby or emerald point in the black distance. And then, in my sleep, I would see something totally different—a glass marble rolling under a grand piano or a toy engine lying on its side with its wheels still working gamely. A change in the speed of the train sometimes interrupted the current of my sleep. Slow lights were stalking by; each, in passing, investigated the same chink, and then a luminous compass measured the shadows. Presently, the train stopped with a long-drawn Westinghousian sigh. Something (my brother’s spectacles, as it proved next day) fell from above. It was marvelously exciting to move to the foot of one’s bed, with part of the bedclothes following, in order to undo cautiously the catch of the window shade, which could be made to slide only halfway up, impeded as it was by the edge of the upper berth. Like moons around Jupiter, pale moths revolved about a lone lamp. A dismembered newspaper stirred on a bench. Somewhere on the train one could hear muffled voices, somebody’s comfortable cough. There was nothing particularly interesting in the portion of station platform before me, and still I could not tear myself away from it until it departed of its own accord. Next morning, wet fields with misshapen willows along the radius of a ditch or a row of poplars afar, traversed by a horizontal band of milky-white mist, told one that the train was spinning through Belgium. It reached Paris at 4 P.M., and even if the stay was only an overnight one, I had always time to purchase something—say, a little brass Tour Eiffel, rather roughly coated with silver paint—before we boarded, at noon on the following day, the Sud-Express which, on its way to Madrid, dropped us around 10 P.M. at the La Négresse station of Biarritz, a few miles from the Spanish frontier.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Pull yourself together, for heaven’s sake. Dan wraps his arm around her hips. Laura feels the meaty, scented solidity of him. She is sorry. She is aware, more than ever, of his goodness. He says, “This is great. This is perfect.” She strokes the back of his head. His hair is slick with Vitalis, slightly coarse, like an otter’s pelt. His face, stubbled now, has a sweaty shine, and his well-tended hair has relaxed enough to produce a single oily forelock, about the width of a blade of grass, that dangles to a point just above his brows. He has removed his tie, unbuttoned his shirt; he exudes a complex essence made up of sweat, Old Spice, the leather of his shoes, and the ineffable, profoundly familiar smell of his flesh—a smell with elements of iron, elements of bleach, and the remotest hint of cooking, as if deep inside him something moist and fatty were being fried. Laura says to Richie, “Did you make a wish, too?” He nods, though the possibility had not occurred to him. It seems he is always making a wish, every moment, and that his wishes, like his father’s, have mainly to do with continuance. Like his father, what he wants most ardently is more of what he’s already got (though, of course, if asked about the nature of his wishes, he would immediately rattle off a long list of toys, both actual and imaginary). Like his father he senses that more of this is precisely what they may very well not get. “How would you like to help me cut the cake?” his father says. “Yes,” Richie answers. Laura brings dessert plates and forks from the kitchen. Here she is, in this modest dining room, safe, with her husband and child, as Kitty lies in a hospital room waiting to hear what the doctors have found. Here they are, this family, in this place. All up and down their street, all up and down multitudes of streets, windows shine. Multitudes of dinners are served; the victories and setbacks of a multitude of days are narrated. As Laura sets the plates and forks on the table—as they ring softly on the starched white cloth—it seems she has succeeded suddenly, at the last minute, the way a painter might brush a final line of color onto a painting and save it from incoherence; the way a writer might set down the line that brings to light the submerged patterns and symmetry in the drama. It has to do, somehow, with setting plates and forks on a white cloth. It is as unmistakable as it is unexpected.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  This sweetness, as you have seen in the Nineteenth Meditation, has power against three evils of the world: a, false sweetness in using pleasant things; b, bitterness in bearing trials; c, sadness about doing good. 4. The Body of Jesus strengthens the faithful in the work of God. It lifts them up, and heartens them so that they do not fear. If we go on bravely, yet humbly, we shall reach our journey’s end in safety. N. These four fruits are set forth in the miracle by which Eliseus raised the son of the Sunamitess to life. By the boy is signified the faithful soul; by Eliseus, our Lord, who joins Himself to the soul like a seal on wax. He puts His eyes upon our eyes, because He enlightens our understanding; He warms our flesh, because He enkindles our hearts with love; He puts His mouth on our mouth, because He delights the taste of our memory with sweetness of the Spirit; He puts His hands upon our hands, because He helps us to persevere in good works to the end. Thus He perfects the whole man, and brings him safely to everlasting life. The Voice of the Holy Ghost ii. About defects of grace; 1. Want of self-knowledge; Darkness was upon the face of the deep. Gen. 1:2. The heart is perverse above all things, and unsearchable: who can know it? I am the Lord who searches the heart. Jer. 17:9. Who can understand sins? From my secret sins cleanse me, O Lord. Ps. 18:13. Why seest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, and seest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how sayest thou to thy brother, Let me cast the mote out of thy eye, and behold a beam is in thine own eye? St. Matt. 7:3, 4. 2. Our want of brotherly love; Because iniquity hath abounded, the love of many shall grow cold. St. Matt. 24:12. The cold north wind bloweth, and the water is congealed into crystal: upon every gathering together of waters it shall rest, and shall clothe the waters as a breastplate. Ecclus. 43:22. He that hath the substance of this world and shall see his brother in need, and shall shut up his compassion from him, how doth the love of God abide in him? My little children, let us not love in word nor in tongue, but in deed and in truth. 1 John 3:17, 18. Let every man take heed of his neighbour, and let him not trust in any brother of his; for every brother will utterly supplant, and every friend will walk deceitfully. And a man shall mock his brother, and they will not speak the truth; for they have taught their tongues to speak lies; they have laboured to commit iniquity. Thy habitation is in the midst of deceit: through deceit they have refused to know Me, saith the Lord. Jer. 9:4–6.

• From The Hours (1998)

  You said four, didn’t you?” “Yes, and by four o’clock I meant the four o’clock that arrives almost five hours from now, now being exactly eight minutes past eleven. The twelve-thirty train would get you to London a few minutes past one. The two-thirty would deposit you back here just after three, quite promptly and safely, with the tea and ginger in hand. Am I miscalculating?” “No,” says Nelly. She takes a turnip from the bowl and cuts off its end with a practiced flick of the knife. So, Virginia thinks, she would like to slit my throat; just so, with an off hand stroke, as if killing me were another of the domestic chores that stand between her and sleep. That is how Nelly would murder, competently and precisely, the way she cooks, following recipes learned so long ago she does not experience them as knowledge at all. At this moment she would gladly cut Virginia’s throat like a turnip because Virginia neglected her own duties and now she, Nelly Boxall, a grown woman, is being punished for serving pears. Why is it so difficult dealing with servants? Virginia’s mother managed beautifully. Vanessa manages beautifully. Why is it so difficult to be firm and kind with Nelly; to command her respect and her love? Virginia knows just how she should enter the kitchen, how her shoulders should be set, how her voice should be motherly but not familiar, something like that of a governess speaking to a beloved child. Oh, let’s have something more than pears, Nelly, Mr. Woolf is in a mood today and I’m afraid pears won’t do nearly enough to sweeten his disposition. It should be so simple. She will give Clarissa Dalloway great skill with servants, a manner that is intricately kind and commanding. Her servants will love her. They will do more than she asks. Mrs. Brown L ife, London, this moment of June. She begins sifting flour into a blue bowl. Outside the window is the brief interlude of grass that separates this house from the neighbors’; the shadow of a bird streaks across the blinding white stucco of the neighbors’ garage. Laura is briefly, deeply pleased by the shadow of the bird, the bands of brilliant white and green. The bowl on the counter before her is a pale, chalky, slightly faded blue with a thin band of white leaves at the rim. The leaves are identical, stylized, slightly cartoonish, canted at rakish angles, and it seems perfect and inevitable that one of them has suffered a small, precisely triangular nick in its side. A fine white rain of flour falls into the bowl. “There we are,” she says to Richie. “Do you want to see?” “Yes,” he answers. She kneels to show him the sifted flour. “Now. We have to measure out four cups. Oh, my. Do you know how many four is?” He holds up four fingers. “Good,” she says. “Very good.”

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

  No, that was lovely!« But when the consul drank with the poet, a very fine red colored her delicate complexion, because she had probably noticed the polite reverence he had paid her side with the "Venus Anadyomene" ... Seventh Chapter The general cheerfulness had now reached its peak, and Herr Koppen clearly felt the need to undo a few buttons on his waistcoat; but unfortunately that was not possible, because even the old gentlemen didn't allow themselves such things. Lebrecht Kröger was still sitting just as upright in his place as at the beginning of the meal, Pastor Wunderlich remained white and shapely, old Buddenbrook had reclined a little, but kept the finest decency, and only Justus Kröger was evidently a little drunk. Where was Doctor Grabow? The consul got up very inconspicuously and walked away, for down there the seats of Mamsell Jungmann, Doctor Grabow and Christian had become vacant, and from the columned hall there was almost a sound of suppressed wailing. She quickly left the hall behind the girl who had served butter, cheese and fruit – and truly, there in the semidarkness, little Christian sat, lay or crouched on the round upholstered bench that stretched around the central column and groaned softly and heartbreaking. "Oh God, Madamchen!" said Ida, who was standing with the doctor, "Christian, the little boy, is so sick..." "I'm nauseous, Mama, I'm damn nauseous!" Christian whimpered, while his round, deep-set eyes darted back and forth over his oversized nose. He had only uttered the "damn" out of excessive desperation, but the Consul said: "If we use such words, the good Lord will punish us with even greater nausea!" Doctor Grabow felt the pulse; his good face seemed to have grown even longer and softer. "A little indigestion . . . nothing of importance - Madame Consul!" he comforted. And then he went on in his slow, pedantic tone of voice: 'It might be best to put him to bed ... a little powder for children, perhaps a cup of chamomile tea to perspire ... And a strict diet, - Madame Consul? Like I said, strict diet. A little pigeon - a little French bread..." "I don't want a pigeon!" Christian exclaimed, beside himself. “I don't ever-ever want to eat anything again! I'm nauseous, I'm damn nauseous!” The strong word seemed to bring him relief, he uttered it with such fervor. Doctor Grabow smiled to himself, with an indulgent and almost melancholy smile. Oh, he would eat again, the young man! He would live like everyone else. He would, like his fathers, relatives and acquaintances, spend his days sedentary, consuming four times as select heavy and good things now... Well, God bless! He, Friedrich Grabow, was not the one who would overthrow the habits of all these good, wealthy and comfortable merchant families. He would come when called and recommend a strict diet for a day or two - a little dove, a slice of French bread ...

• From The Hours (1998)

  One page, she decides; just one. She isn’t ready yet; the tasks that lie ahead (putting on her robe, brushing her hair, going down to the kitchen) are still too thin, too elusive. She will permit herself another minute here, in bed, before entering the day. She will allow herself just a little more time. She is taken by a wave of feeling, a sea-swell, that rises from under her breast and buoys her, floats her gently, as if she were a sea creature thrown back from the sand where it had beached itself—as if she had been returned from a realm of crushing gravity to her true medium, the suck and swell of saltwater, that weightless brilliance. She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright. For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? over twenty,—one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar, the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June. How, Laura wonders, could someone who was able to write a sentence like that—who was able to feel everything contained in a sentence like that—come to kill herself ? What in the world is wrong with people? Summoning resolve, as if she were about to dive into cold water, Laura closes the book and lays it on the nightstand. She does not dislike her child, does not dislike her husband. She will rise and be cheerful.

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

  Fresh and in the best of spirits, she entered the porch in her white piqué dress. Frau Schwarzkopf sat alone with her son at the coffee table, which had already been partially cleared. She wore a blue checked kitchen apron over her brown dress. A basket of keys stood in front of her. 'A thousand pardons,' she said, standing up, 'for not waiting, Mamsell Buddenbrook! We're up early, we simple folk. There's a hundred things to do... Schwarzkopf is in his office... Isn't it, Mamsell isn't cross?" For his part, Tony apologized. 'You don't have to think I always sleep this late. I have a very bad conscience. But last night's punch..." Here the young son of the house began to laugh. He was standing behind the table, his short wooden pipe in his hand. The newspaper was in front of him. "Yes, it's your fault," said Tony; »Good morning!... You kept toasting with me... Now I only earn cold coffee. I should have had breakfast and bathed by now..." 'No, that would be too early for a young lady! At seven the water was still pretty cold, you know; 11 degrees...that cuts a bit after the bed warmth..." 'How do you know I want a lukewarm bath, monsieur ?' And Tony sat down at the table. "You kept my coffee warm, Ms. Schwarzkopf!... But I'll pour it myself... thank you very much!" The housewife watched as her guest ate the first bites. 'And Mamsell slept well the first night? Yes, my god, the mattress is filled with seaweed... we're simple folk... But for now, bon appétit and have a great morning. Mamsell will certainly meet many acquaintances on the beach... If it is pleasant, my son will accompany you there. I'm sorry I'm no longer keeping you company, but I have to check on dinner. I've got a bratwurst... We'll give it the best we can." "I'll stick to the honeycomb," Tony said when the two were alone. "You see, you know what you're swallowing!" The young blackhead stood up and laid his pipe on the porch rail. 'But do smoke! No, that doesn't bother me at all. When I come home to breakfast, Papa's cigar smoke is always in the room... Tell me,' she asked suddenly, 'is it true that an egg is worth a quarter pound of meat?' He blushed all over. "Are you kidding me, Fraulein Buddenbrook?" he asked between laughter and anger. "I got a rebuke from Father last night for my shoptalk and self-importance, as he said..." 'But I asked innocently enough?!' Tony stopped eating for a moment in dismay. “Pompousness! How can one say such a thing!... I would like to know something... My God, I am a goose, you see! With Sesemi Weichbrodt I was always among the laziest. And you know, I think, so much . You are in strange company, show yourself from your best side, use your words and try to please - that's obvious ...

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  There were five bathrooms in our country house, and a medley of venerable washstands (one of these I would seek out in its dark nook whenever I had been crying, so as to feel on my swollen face which I was ashamed to show, the healing touch of its groping jet while I stepped on the rusty pedal). Regular baths were taken in the evening. For morning ablutions, the round, rubber English tubs were used. Mine was about four feet in diameter, with a knee-high rim. Upon the lathered back of the squatting child, a jugful of water was carefully poured by an aproned servant. Its temperature varied with the hydrotherapeutic notions of successive mentors. There was that bleak period of dawning puberty, when an icy deluge was decreed by our current tutor, who happened to be a medical student. On the other hand, the temperature of one’s evening bath remained pleasantly constant at 28° Réaumur (95° Fahrenheit) as measured by a large kindly thermometer whose wooden sheathing (with a bit of damp string in the eye of the handle) allowed it to share in the buoyancy of celluloid goldfishes and little swans.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one’s position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo’s natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighboring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur—all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus. That summer I was still far too young to evolve any wealth of “cosmic synchronization” (to quote my philosopher again). But I did discover, at least, that a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time. In the course of the languid rambles that accompanied the making of my first poem, I ran into the village schoolmaster, an ardent Socialist, a good man, intensely devoted to my father (I welcome this image again), always with a tight posy of wild flowers, always smiling, always perspiring. While politely discussing with him my father’s sudden journey to town, I registered simultaneously and with equal clarity not only his wilting flowers, his flowing tie and the blackheads on the fleshy volutes of his nostrils, but also the dull little voice of a cuckoo coming from afar, and the flash of a Queen of Spain settling on the road, and the remembered impression of the pictures (enlarged agricultural pests and bearded Russian writers) in the well-aerated classrooms of the village school which I had once or twice visited; and—to continue a tabulation that hardly does justice to the ethereal simplicity of the whole process—the throb of some utterly irrelevant recollection (a pedometer I had lost) was released from a neighboring brain cell, and the savor of the grass stalk I was chewing mingled with the cuckoo’s note and the fritillary’s takeoff, and all the while I was richly, serenely aware of my own manifold awareness.

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

  The only thing to be heard was the steady, peaceful sound of the porter raking the gravel in the spa garden downstairs, and the buzzing of a fly, which persistently stormed the pane between the blind and the window, and whose shadows were shot in long zigzag lines on the striped canvas saw... silence! The lonely sound of the rake and monotonous hum! And this gently enlivened peace soon filled little Johann with the delicious feeling of that quiet, well-tended, and distinguished seclusion of the bath, which he loved so much. No, praise God, none of the bare worsted skirts came here, grammar, not here because it was pretty expensive out here... A fit of joy made him jump out of bed and run barefoot to the window. He pulled up the blind, opened one wing by releasing the white-lacquered hook, and watched the fly fly away over the gravel paths and rose beds of the spa gardens. The music temple, surrounded by boxwood in a semicircle, stood empty and silent opposite the hotel buildings. The "field of lights," so named after the lighthouse that loomed somewhere to the right, stretched out beneath the whitish-tinged sky until its short grass, broken by patches of bare earth, gave way to tall and hard beach-growth and then to sand, there, where one could distinguish the rows of small wooden private pavilions and basket chairs that looked out to sea. She lay there, the sea, in peace and morning light, in bottle-green and blue, smooth and curly stripes, and a steamer came along from Copenhagen between the red-painted buoys that marked its fairway, without one having to know whether its name was "Najad" or "Friederike Oeverdieck." And Hanno Buddenbrook again drew in deeply and with quiet bliss the fragrant breath that the sea sent across to him and greeted her tenderly with his eyes, with a silent, grateful and loving greeting. And then the day began, the first of those miserable twenty-eight days, which at first seemed like eternal bliss and, when the first ones were over, passed away so desperately quickly... Breakfast was on the balcony or under the big chestnut tree that stood down in front of the children's playground , where the big swing hung – and everything, the smell that came from the hastily washed tablecloth when the waiter spread it out, the tissue paper serviettes, the strange bread, the fact that the eggs weren’t cooked with bony ones like at home , but ate with ordinary teaspoons and from metal cups - everything delighted little Johann. And what followed was all free and easily ordered, a wonderfully idle and nurturing good life that was undisturbed and instead of a slimy wooden floor, the soft, wavy sand floor flattered the soles, and Consul Hagenstrom's sons were far, very far, in Norway or the Tyrol. The Consul loved to go on a longer vacation trip in the summer - and so why not, right?

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

  yes, yes - and assure you in good conscience that it meant nothing for this time. As young as he was he had held the hand of many a brave citizen in his own,hisOffice chair or, after some suffering, in his solid old bed, God bid himself. A blow, it was then said, a paralysis, a sudden and unforeseen death ... yes, yes, and he, Friedrich Grabow, could have calculated them before them, all the many times when it "had nothing to do with it," where he might was not even called, when perhaps after dinner, when one had returned to the office, a small, strange dizziness had reported itself ... Well, God bless! He, Friedrich Grabow, wasn't the one who disdained stuffed turkeys. That breaded ham with shallot sauce today had been delicious, damn it, and then, just as you were panting, the pletten pudding - macaroons, raspberries and egg foam, yes, yes... A little pigeon - a little French bread..." Eighth Chapter Inside the dining room there was excitement. 'Well bekomm's, mesdames et messieurs , blessed meal! Over there, for lovers, a cigar and a sip of coffee for all of us and, if Madame is generous, a liqueur... The billiards, at the back, are at everyone's disposal, of course; Jean, I assume you'll take the lead into the Secret Annex... Madame Köppen, - the honor..." Chatting, satisfied, and in the best of spirits, exchanging wishes for a blessed meal, they went back through the large double doors into the landscape room. But the consul didn't go over there first, but immediately gathered the gentlemen who were fond of billiards around him. "You don't want to risk a game, father?" No, Lebrecht Kröger stayed with the ladies, but Justus could go to the back... Senator Langhals, Köppen, Grätjens and Doctor Grabow also held on to the consul, while Jean Jacques Hoffstede wanted to follow: “Later, later! Johann Buddenbrook wants to play the flute, I'll have to wait and see... Au revoir, messieurs... " As they walked through the columned hall, the six gentlemen could still hear the first notes of the flutes in the landscape room, accompanied by the consul on the harmonium, a small, bright, graceful melody that floated thoughtfully through the wide rooms. The Consul listened as long as anything could be heard. He would have loved to have stayed behind in the landscape room in order to indulge his dreams and feelings in an armchair with these sounds; only the obligation to host ... "Bring some cups of coffee and cigars to the billiard room," he said to the girl following him, who was walking across the forecourt. “Yes, Line, coffee, you? Coffee!' Herr Koppen repeated in a voice that came from a full stomach and tried to pinch the girl's red arm. He said the K at the back of his throat as if he were already swallowing and tasting.