Desire

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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  And besides, the rock music was so loud that no one would have heard. I suddenly wanted Bennett as badly as I had wanted Adrian a few minutes before. And Bennett was gone. We left the discotheque and headed for Adrian’s car. A funny thing happened on the way to his pension. Or rather: ten funny things happened. We got lost ten times. And each of those times was unique— not just the same wrong turns over and over. Now that we were stuck with each other for eternity, fucking immediately didn’t seem quite as important. “I’m not going to tell you about all the other men I’ve fucked,” I said, being brave. “Good,” he said, fondling my knee. So instead, he proceeded to tell me about the other women he’d fucked. Some bargain. First there was May Pei, the Chinese girl Bennett reminded him of. “She may pay and then she may not pay,” I said. “Don’t think that wasn’t thought of.” “I’m sure it was. But the question is—did she pay?” “Well, I did. She fucked me up for years after that.” “You mean, after she stopped seeing you, she still fucked you. Some trick. The phantom fuck. You could patent that, you know. Arrange to get people fucked by famous figures of the past: Napoleon, Charles II, Louis XIV...sort of like Dr. Faustus fucking Helen of Troy....” I loved being silly with him. “Shut up, cunt—and let me finish about May...” and then, turning to me amid a screeching of brakes: “God—you’re beautiful....” “Keep your fucking eyes on the road,” I said, delighted. — My conversations with Adrian always seemed like quotes from Through the Looking Glass. Like: Me: “We seem to be going around in circles.” Adrian: “That’s just the point.” OR: Me: “Will you carry my briefcase?” Adrian: “As long as you agree not to carry anything for me just yet.” OR: Me: “I divorced my first husband principally because he was crazy.” Adrian (furrowing his Laingian brows): “That would seem to me to be a good reason to marry someone, not divorce him.” Me: “But he watched television every night.” Adrian: “Oh, then I see why you divorced him.” — Why had May Pei fucked up Adrian’s life? “She left me in the lurch and went back to Singapore. She had a child there living with its father and the child was in a car crash. She had to go back, but she could have at least written. For months I walked around feeling that the world was made up of mechanical people. I’ve never been so depressed.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  his mother died a long time before, and then his father married a new wife, and had another child, that was now of the full age of twelve years. This stepdame was more excellent in beauty than honesty in her husband’s house; for she loved this young man her son-in-law, either because she was unchaste by nature, or because she was enforced by fate to commit so great a mischief. Gentle reader, thou shalt not read of a fable, but rather a tragedy, and must here change from sock to buskin.! This woman, when little Cupid first began to do his work in her heart, could easily resist his weak strength, and pressed down in silence her desire and inordinate appetite, by reason of shame and fear; butafter that Love compassed and burned with his mad fire every part of her breast, she was compelled to yield unto this raging Cupid, and under colour of disease and infirmity of her body to conceal the wound of her restless mind. Every man knoweth well the signs and tokens of love, and how that sickness is con- venient to the same, working upon health and countenance; her countenance was pale, her eyes sorrowful, her knees weak, her rest disturbed, and she would sigh deeply by reason of her slow torment ; there was no comfort in her, but continual weeping and sobbing, in so much you would have thought that she had some spice of an ague, saving that she wept unreasonably. The physicians knew not her disease ? when they felt the beating of her veins, the intemperance of her heat, the sobbing sighs, and her often tossing on every side; no, no, the cunning physicians knew it not, but a scholar of Venus’ court 1 The soccus was the low shoe of the comic actor; the cothurnus, the high boot of the tragedian. 2 Op. Aen. Iv. 65; * Heu vatum ignarae mentes | 475

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Upon hearing her first morning yawn, I feigned handsome profiled sleep. I just did not know what to do. Would she be shocked at finding me by her side, and not in some spare bed? Would she collect her clothes and lock herself up in the bathroom? Would she demand to be taken at once to Ramsdale—to her mother’s bedside—back to camp? But my Lo was a sportive lassie. I felt her eyes on me, and when she uttered at last that beloved chortling note of hers, I knew her eyes had been laughing. She rolled over to my side, and her warm brown hair came against my collarbone. I gave a mediocre imitation of waking up. We lay quietly. I gently caressed her hair, and we gently kissed. Her kiss, to my delirious embarrassment, had some rather comical refinements of flutter and probe which made me conclude she had been coached at an early age by a little Lesbian. No Charlie boy could have taught her that. As if to see whether I had my fill and learned the lesson, she drew away and surveyed me. Her cheekbones were flushed, her full underlip glistened, my dissolution was near. All at once, with a burst of rough glee (the sign of the nymphet!), she put her mouth to my ear—but for quite a while my mind could not separate into words the hot thunder of her whisper, and she laughed, and brushed the hair off her face, and tried again, and gradually the odd sense of living in a brand new, mad new dream world, where everything was permissible, came over me as I realized what she was suggesting. I answered I did not know what game she and Charlie had played. “You mean you have never—?”—her features twisted into a stare of disgusted incredulity. “You have never—” she started again. I took time out by nuzzling her a little. “Lay off, will you,” she said with a twangy whine, hastily removing her brown shoulder from my lips. (It was very curious the way she considered—and kept doing so for a long time—all caresses except kisses on the mouth or the stark act of love either “romantic slosh” or “abnormal”.) “You mean,” she persisted, now kneeling above me, “you never did it when you were a kid?” “Never,” I answered quite truthfully. “Okay,” said Lolita, “here is where we start.”

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  When noon was just now come Byrrhaena sent unto me a present of a fat pig, five hens, and a flagon of old wine and rare. Then I called Fotis and said : ** Behold how Bacchus, the aider and abettor of Venus, doth offer himself of his own accord ; let us therefore drink up this wine, that we may do utterly away with the cowardice of shame and get us the courage of E 65 12 LUCIUS APULEIUS enim sitarchia navigium Veneris indiget sola, ut in nocte pervigili et oleo Jucerna et vino calix abundet." Diem ceterum lavacro ac dein cenae dedimus: nam Milonis boni concinnaticiam mensulam rogatus accu- bueram quam pote tutus ab uxoris eius aspectu, Byrrhaenae monitorum memor, et perinde in eius faciem oculos meos ac si in Avernum lacum formi- dans deieceram, sed assidue respiciens praeminis- trantem Fotidem inibi recreabar animi; cum ecce iam vespera lucernam intuens Pamphile, * Quam largus" inquit * Imber aderit crastino," et per- contanti marito qui comperisset istud, respondit sibi lucernam praedicere. Quod dictum ipsius Milo risu secutus, * Grandem"" inquit * Istam lucernam Sibyllam paseimus, quae cuncta caeli negotia et solem ipsum de specula candelabri contuetur." Ad haec ego subiciens, “Sunt” aio “Prima huiusce divinationis experimenta, nec mirum licet modicum istum ignieulum et manibus humanis laboratum, memorem tamen illius maioris et caelestis ignis velut sui parentis, quid is esset editurus in aetheris vertice divino praesagio et ipsum scire et nobis enuntiare. Nam et Corinthi nunc apud nos passim Chaldaeus quidam hospes miris totam civitatem responsis turbulentat, et arcana fatorum stipibus 66 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK II pleasure, for the voyage of Venus wanteth no other provision than this, that the lamp may be all the night replenished with oil, and the cups filled with wine.” The residue of the day I passed away at the baths, and then to supper, for 1 was bid by the worthy Milo, and so I sat down at his little table, so neatly furnished, out of Pamphile’s sight as much as I could, being mindful of the commandment of Byrrhaena, and only sometimes I would cast mine eyes upon her, as if I should look upon the lakes of hell; but then I (eftsoons turning my face behind me, and beholding my Fotis ministering at the table) was again refreshed and made merry. And behold, when it was now evening and Pamphile did see the lamp standing on the table, she said: “ Verily we shall have much rain to-morrow,” which when her husband did hear, he demanded of her, by what reason she knew it. * Marry,” quoth she, * The light on the table doth shew the same": then Milo laughed and said: “ Verily we nourish and bring up a Sibyl prophesier in this lamp, which doth divine from its socket of celestial things, and of the sun itself, as from a watch-tower.”’

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I cannot tell my learned reader (whose eyebrows, I suspect, have by now traveled all the way to the back of his bald head), I cannot tell him how the knowledge came to me; perhaps my ape-ear had unconsciously caught some slight change in the rhythm of her respiration—for now she was not really looking at my scribble, but waiting with curiosity and composure—oh, my limpid nymphet!—for the glamorous lodger to do what he was dying to do. A modern child, an avid reader of movie magazines, an expert in dream-slow close-ups, might not think it too strange, I guessed, if a handsome, intensely virile grown-up friend—too late. The house was suddenly vibrating with voluble Louise’s voice telling Mrs. Haze who had just come home about a dead something she and Leslie Tomson had found in the basement, and little Lolita was not one to miss such a tale. Sunday. Changeful, bad-tempered, cheerful, awkward, graceful with the tart grace of her coltish subteens, excruciatingly desirable from head to foot (all New England for a lady-writer’s pen!), from the black ready-made bow and bobby pins holding her hair in place to the little scar on the lower part of her neat calf (where a roller-skater kicked her in Pisky), a couple of inches above her rough white sock. Gone with her mother to the Hamiltons—a birthday party or something. Full-skirted gingham frock. Her little doves seem well formed already. Precocious pet! Monday. Rainy morning. “Ces matins gris si doux ...” My white pajamas have a lilac design on the back. I am like one of those inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting in the middle of a luminous web and giving little jerks to this or that strand. My web is spread all over the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like a wily wizard. Is Lo in her room? Gently I tug on the silk. She is not. Just heard the toilet paper cylinder make its staccato sound as it is turned; and no footfalls has my outflung filament traced from the bathroom back to her room. Is she still brushing her teeth (the only sanitary act Lo performs with real zest)? No. The bathroom door has just slammed, so one has to feel elsewhere about the house for the beautiful warm-colored prey. Let us have a strand of silk descend the stairs. I satisfy myself by this means that she is not in the kitchen—not banging the refrigerator door or screeching at her detested mamma (who, I suppose, is enjoying her third, cooing and subduedly mirthful, telephone conversation of the morning). Well, let us grope and hope. Ray-like, I glide in thought to the parlor and find the radio silent (and mamma still talking to Mrs. Chatfield or Mrs.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Heart, head —everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer. 27 Still in Parkington. Finally, I did achieve an hour’s slumber—from which I was aroused by gratuitous and horribly exhausting congress with a small hairy hermaphrodite, a total stranger. By then it was six in the morning, and it suddenly occurred to me it might be a good thing to arrive at the camp earlier than I had said. From Parkington I had still a hundred miles to go, and there would be more than that to the Hazy Hills and Brice-land. If I had said I would come for Dolly in the afternoon, it was only because my fancy insisted on merciful night falling as soon as possible upon my impatience. But now I foresaw all kinds of misunderstandings and was all a-jitter lest delay might give her the opportunity of some idle telephone call to Ramsdale. However, when at 9.30 A.M. I attempted to start, I was confronted by a dead battery, and noon was nigh when at last I left Parkington. I reached my destination around half past two; parked my car in a pine grove where a green-shirted, redheaded impish lad stood throwing horseshoes in sullen solitude; was laconically directed by him to an office in a stucco cottage; in a dying state, had to endure for several minutes the inquisitive commiseration of the camp mistress, a sluttish worn out female with rusty hair. Dolly she said was all packed and ready to go. She knew her mother was sick but not critically. Would Mr. Haze, I mean, Mr. Humbert, care to meet the camp counsellors? Or look at the cabins where the girls live? Each dedicated to a Disney creature? Or visit the Lodge? Or should Charlie be sent over to fetch her? The girls were just finishing fixing the Dining Room for a dance. (And perhaps afterwards she would say to somebody or other: “The poor guy looked like his own ghost.”) Let me retain for a moment that scene in all its trivial and fateful detail: hag Holmes writing out a receipt, scratching her head, pulling a drawer out of her desk, pouring change into my impatient palm, then neatly spreading a banknote over it with a bright “... and five!”; photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall (“nature study”); the framed diploma of the camp’s dietitian; my trembling hands; a card produced by efficient Holmes with a report of Dolly Haze’s behavior for July (“fair to good; keen on swimming and boating”); a sound of trees and birds, and my pounding heart ... I was standing with my back to the open door, and then I felt the blood rush to my head as I heard her respiration and voice behind me.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  shadowed valley adjoining toa wood, where, amongst divers other herbs and pleasant verdures, I thought I saw many flourishing roses of bright damask colour. So that I said within my mind, which was not wholly bestial : “Verily the place is the grove of Venus and the Graces, where secretly glittereth the royal hue of so lively and delectable a flower.” Then I, desiring the help of the god of good fortune, ran lustily towards the wood, in so much that I felt myself no more an ass but a swift-coursing horse, but my agility and quickness could not prevent the cruelty of my fortune; for when I came to the place, I perceived that they were no roses neither tender nor pleasant, neither moistened with the heavenly drops of dew nor celestial liquor, which grow out of the rich thicket and thorns. Neither did I perceive that there was any valley at all, but only the bank of the river environed with great thick trees, which had long branches. like unto laurel, and bear a flower without any manner of scent but somewhat red of hue, and the common people call them by the name of laurel-roses, which are very poisonous to all manner of beasts. Then was I so entangled with unhappy fortune, that I little esteemed mine own life, and went willingly to eat of those roses, though I knew them to be present poison. But as I drew near very slowly, I saw a young man that seemed to be the gardener come upon me, the same that I had devoured up all his herbs in the garden, arid he, knowing now full well his great loss, came swearing with a great staff in his hand, and laid upon me in such sort that I was well nigh dead; but I speedily devised some remedy for myself, for I lifted up my legs and kicked him with my hinder heels, so that I left him lying at the hill foot well nigh slain, and so 147 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Saturday. For some days already I had been leaving the door ajar, while I wrote in my room; but only today did the trap work. With a good deal of additional fidgeting, shuffling, scraping—to disguise her embarrassment at visiting me without having been called—Lo came in and after pottering around, became interested in the nightmare curlicues I had penned on a sheet of paper. Oh no: they were not the outcome of a bellelettrist’s inspired pause between two paragraphs; they were the hideous hieroglyphics (which she could not decipher) of my fatal lust. As she bent her brown curls over the desk at which I was sitting, Humbert the Hoarse put his arm around her in a miserable imitation of blood-relationship; and still studying, somewhat shortsightedly, the piece of paper she held, my innocent little visitor slowly sank to a half-sitting position upon my knee. Her adorable profile, parted lips, warm hair were some three inches from my bared eyetooth; and I felt the heat of her limbs through her rough tomboy clothes. All at once I knew I could kiss her throat or the wick of her mouth with perfect impunity. I knew she would let me do so, and even close her eyes as Hollywood teaches. A double vanilla with hot fudge—hardly more unusual than that. I cannot tell my learned reader (whose eyebrows, I suspect, have by now traveled all the way to the back of his bald head), I cannot tell him how the knowledge came to me; perhaps my ape-ear had unconsciously caught some slight change in the rhythm of her respiration—for now she was not really looking at my scribble, but waiting with curiosity and composure—oh, my limpid nymphet!—for the glamorous lodger to do what he was dying to do. A modern child, an avid reader of movie magazines, an expert in dream-slow close-ups, might not think it too strange, I guessed, if a handsome, intensely virile grown-up friend—too late. The house was suddenly vibrating with voluble Louise’s voice telling Mrs. Haze who had just come home about a dead something she and Leslie Tomson had found in the basement, and little Lolita was not one to miss such a tale. Sunday. Changeful, bad-tempered, cheerful, awkward, graceful with the tart grace of her coltish subteens, excruciatingly desirable from head to foot (all New England for a lady-writer’s pen!), from the black ready-made bow and bobby pins holding her hair in place to the little scar on the lower part of her neat calf (where a roller-skater kicked her in Pisky), a couple of inches above her rough white sock. Gone with her mother to the Hamiltons—a birthday party or something. Full-skirted gingham frock. Her little doves seem well formed already. Precocious pet!

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  There is nothing louder than an American hotel; and, mind you, this was supposed to be a quiet, cozy, old-fashioned, homey place—“gracious living” and all that stuff. The clatter of the elevator’s gate—some twenty yards northeast of my head but as clearly perceived as if it were inside my left temple—alternated with the banging and booming of the machine’s various evolutions and lasted well beyond midnight. Every now and then, immediately east of my left ear (always assuming I lay on my back, not daring to direct my viler side toward the nebulous haunch of my bed-mate), the corridor would brim with cheerful, resonant and inept exclamations ending in a volley of good-nights. When that stopped, a toilet immediately north of my cerebellum took over. It was a manly, energetic, deep-throated toilet, and it was used many times. Its gurgle and gush and long afterflow shook the wall behind me. Then someone in a southern direction was extravagantly sick, almost coughing out his life with his liquor, and his toilet descended like a veritable Niagara, immediately beyond our bathroom. And when finally all the waterfalls had stopped, and the enchanted hunters were sound asleep, the avenue under the window of my insomnia, to the west of my wake—a staid, eminently residential, dignified alley of huge trees—degenerated into the despicable haunt of gigantic trucks roaring through the wet and windy night. And less than six inches from me and my burning life, was nebulous Lolita! After a long stirless vigil, my tentacles moved towards her again, and this time the creak of the mattress did not awake her. I managed to bring my ravenous bulk so close to her that I felt the aura of her bare shoulder like a warm breath upon my cheek. And then, she sat up, gasped, muttered with insane rapidity something about boats, tugged at the sheets and lapsed back into her rich, dark, young unconsciousness. As she tossed, within that abundant flow of sleep, recently auburn, at present lunar, her arm struck me across the face. For a second I held her. She freed herself from the shadow of my embrace—doing this not consciously, not violently, not with any personal distaste, but with the neutral plaintive murmur of a child demanding its natural rest. And again the situation remained the same: Lolita with her curved spine to Humbert, Humbert resting his head on his hand and burning with desire and dyspepsia.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  And then I added another week just for the pleasure of taking on a powerful newcomer, a displaced (and, surely, deranged) celebrity, known for his knack of making patients believe they had witnessed their own conception. 10 Upon signing out, I cast around for some place in the New England countryside or sleepy small town (elms, white church) where I could spend a studious summer subsisting on a compact boxful of notes I had accumulated and bathing in some nearby lake. My work had begun to interest me again—I mean my scholarly exertions; the other thing, my active participation in my uncle’s posthumous perfumes, had by then been cut down to a minimum. One of his former employees, the scion of a distinguished family, suggested I spend a few months in the residence of his impoverished cousins, a Mr. McCoo, retired, and his wife, who wanted to let their upper story where a late aunt had delicately dwelt. He said they had two little daughters, one a baby, the other a girl of twelve, and a beautiful garden, not far from a beautiful lake, and I said it sounded perfectly perfect. I exchanged letters with these people, satisfying them I was housebroken, and spent a fantastic night on the train, imagining in all possible detail the enigmatic nymphet I would coach in French and fondle in Humbertish. Nobody met me at the toy station where I alighted with my new expensive bag, and nobody answered the telephone; eventually, however, a distraught McCoo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of green-and-pink Ramsdale with the news that his house had just burned down—possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins. His family, he said, had fled to a farm he owned, and had taken the car, but a friend of his wife’s, a grand person, Mrs. Haze of 342 Lawn Street, offered to accommodate me. A lady who lived opposite Mrs. Haze’s had lent McCoo her limousine, a marvelously old-fashioned, square-topped affair, manned by a cheerful Negro. Now, since the only reason for my coming at all had vanished, the aforesaid arrangement seemed preposterous. All right, his house would have to be completely rebuilt, so what? Had he not insured it sufficiently? I was angry, disappointed and bored, but being a polite European, could not refuse to be sent off to Lawn Street in that funeral car, feeling that otherwise McCoo would devise an even more elaborate means of getting rid of me.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Look,’ she said, marching back down three steps, ‘if you cancel now it’s actually going to look even more suspicious. It’s booked – I’m head of my table, I have to go. I’ve had three  On Beauty weeks of sympathy cards and bollocks – I just wanted to do something normal .’ ‘I understand,’ said Howard, and looked away. He considered saying something else here about her bizarre choice of the word ‘normal’, but, for all Victoria’s glamour and chutzpah, the quality that she truly exuded right now was breakability. She was wholly breakable, and there was a threat there, in her shaky bottom lip; there was a warning. If he broke her, where would the pieces fly? ‘So just meet me at eight in front of Emerson, OK? Are you going to wear that suit? It’s meant to be black tie but – ’ The fire door opened. ‘And I’ll need that essay by Monday,’ said Howard loudly, his face cringing. Victoria mimed exasperation, turned and left. Howard smiled and waved at Liddy Cantalino, coming to get her photocopies. That evening, when Howard returned home at dinner-time, there was no dinner – it was one of those nights when everybody was heading out. The search was on for keys, hairpins, coats, bath towels, cocoa butter, bottles of perfume, wallets, those five dollars that were on the sideboard earlier, a birthday card, an envelope. Howard, who intended to head back out in the suit he had on, sat on the kitchen stool like a dying sun his family were orbiting. Even though Jerome had returned to Brown two days earlier, the noisy clamour had not lessened, nor had the populated feel of the hallways and stairs. Here was his family and they were legion. ‘ Five dollars ,’ said Levi, suddenly addressing his father. ‘It was on the sideboard .’ ‘I’m sorry – I haven’t seen it.’ ‘So what am I meant to do ?’ demanded Levi. Kiki swept into the kitchen. She looked lovely in a green silk suit with a Nehru collar. The bottom half of her long plait had been unwound and oiled so the free curls fell separately. In each ear she  on beauty and being wrong wore the only gems Howard had ever been able to give her: two simple emerald drops that had belonged to his mother. ‘You look great,’ said Howard genuinely. ‘ What? ’ ‘Nothing. You look great.’ Kiki frowned and shook her head, dismissing this unexpected break in her chain of thought. ‘Look, I need you to sign this card. It’s for Theresa from the hospital. It’s her birthday – I don’t know which birthday but Carlos is leaving her and she’s feeling awful. Me and some of the girls are taking her out for drinks. You know Theresa, Howard – she’s one of the people who exist on this planet who isn’t you. Thank you. Levi, you too. Just sign, you don’t have to write anything.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  There is a touch of the mythological and the enchanted in those large stores where according to ads a career girl can get a complete desk-to-date wardrobe, and where little sister can dream of the day when her wool jersey will make the boys in the back row of the classroom drool. Lifesize plastic figures of snubbed-nosed children with dun-colored, greenish, brown-dotted, faunish faces floated around me. I realized I was the only shopper in that rather eerie place where I moved about fish-like, in a glaucous aquarium. I sensed strange thoughts form in the minds of the languid ladies that escorted me from counter to counter, from rock ledge to seaweed, and the belts and the bracelets I chose seemed to fall from siren hands into transparent water. I bought an elegant valise, had my purchases put into it, and repaired to the nearest hotel, well pleased with my day. Somehow, in connection with that quiet poetical afternoon of fastidious shopping, I recalled the hotel or inn with the seductive name of The Enchanted Hunters which Charlotte had happened to mention shortly before my liberation. With the help of a guidebook I located it in the secluded town of Briceland, a four-hour drive from Lo’s camp. I could have telephoned but fearing my voice might go out of control and lapse into coy croaks of broken English, I decided to send a wire ordering a room with twin beds for the next night. What a comic, clumsy, wavering Prince Charming I was! How some of my readers will laugh at me when I tell them the trouble I had with the wording of my telegram! What should I put: Humbert and daughter? Humberg and small daughter? Homberg and immature girl? Homburg and child? The droll mistake—the “g” at the end—which eventually came through may have been a telepathic echo of these hesitations of mine. And then, in the velvet of a summer night, my broodings over the philter I had with me! Oh miserly Hamburg! Was he not a very Enchanted Hunter as he deliberated with himself over his boxful of magic ammunition? To rout the monster of insomnia should he try himself one of those amethyst capsules? There were forty of them, all told—forty nights with a frail little sleeper at my throbbing side; could I rob myself of one such night in order to sleep? Certainly not: much too precious was each tiny plum, each microscopic planetarium with its live stardust. Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical. 26This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My calendar is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don’t think I can go on. Heart, head—everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The sun made its usual round of the house as the afternoon ripened into evening. I had a drink. And another. And yet another. Gin and pineapple juice, my favorite mixture, always double my energy. I decided to busy myself with our unkempt lawn. Une petite attention. It was crowded with dandelions, and a cursed dog—I loathe dogs—had defiled the flat stones where a sundial had once stood. Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons. The gin and Lolita were dancing in me, and I almost fell over the folding chairs that I attempted to dislodge. Incarnadine zebras! There are some eructations that sound like cheers—at least, mine did. An old fence at the back of the garden separated us from the neighbor’s garbage receptacles and lilacs; but there was nothing between the front end of our lawn (where it sloped along one side of the house) and the street. Therefore I was able to watch (with the smirk of one about to perform a good action) for the return of Charlotte: that tooth should be extracted at once. As I lurched and lunged with the hand mower, bits of grass optically twittering in the low sun, I kept an eye on that section of suburban street. It curved in from under an archway of huge shade trees, then sped towards us down, down, quite sharply, past old Miss Opposite’s ivied brick house and high-sloping lawn (much trimmer than ours) and disappeared behind our own front porch which I could not see from where I happily belched and labored. The dandelions perished. A reek of sap mingled with the pineapple. Two little girls, Marion and Mabel, whose comings and goings I had mechanically followed of late (but who could replace my Lolita?) went toward the avenue (from which our Lawn Street cascaded), one pushing a bicycle, the other feeding from a paper bag, both talking at the top of their sunny voices. Leslie, old Miss Opposite’s gardener and chauffeur, a very amiable and athletic Negro, grinned at me from afar and shouted, re-shouted, commented by gesture, that I was mighty energetic to-day. The fool dog of the prosperous junk dealer next door ran after a blue car—not Charlotte’s. The prettier of the two little girls (Mabel, I think), shorts, halter with little to halt, bright hair—a nymphet, by Pan!—ran back down the street crumpling her paper bag and was hidden from this Green Goat by the frontage of Mr. and Mrs. Humbert’s residence. A station wagon popped out of the leafy shade of the avenue, dragging some of it on its roof before the shadows snapped, and swung by at an idiotic pace, the sweatshirted driver roof-holding with his left hand and the junkman’s dog tearing alongside. There was a smiling pause—and then, with a flutter in my breast, I witnessed the return of the Blue Sedan. I saw it glide downhill and disappear behind the corner of the house. I had a glimpse of her calm pale profile. It occurred to me that until she went upstairs she would not know whether I had gone or not. A minute later, with an expression of great anguish on her face, she looked down at me from the window of Lo’s room. By sprinting upstairs, I managed to reach that room before she left it.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  And then if any accord not to her filthy desire, or if they seeme loathsome in her eye, by and by in the moment of an houre she turneth them into stones, sheep or some other beast, as her selfe pleaseth, and some she presently slayeth and murthereth, of whom I would you should earnestly beware. For she burneth continually, and you by reason of your tender age and comely beauty are capable of her fire and love. Thus with great care Byrrhena gave me in charge, but I (that always coveted and desired, after that I had heard talk of such Sorceries and Witchcrafts, to be experienced in the same) little esteemed to beware of Pamphiles, but willingly determined to bestow my money in learning of that art, and now wholly to become a Witch. And so I waxed joyful, and wringing my selfe out of her company, as out of linkes or chaines, I bade her farewell, and departed toward the house of myne host Milo, by the way reasoning thus with my selfe: O Lucius now take heed, be vigilant, have a good care, for now thou hast time and place to satisfie thy desire, now shake off thy childishnesse and shew thy selfe a man, but especially temper thy selfe from the love of thyne hostesse, and abstain from violation of the bed of Milo, but hardly attempt to winne the maiden Fotis, for she is beautifull, wanton and pleasant in talke. And soone when thou goest to sleepe, and when shee bringeth you gently into thy chamber, and tenderly layeth thee downe in thy bed, and lovingly covereth thee, and kisseth thee sweetly, and departeth unwillingly, and casteth her eyes oftentimes backe, and stands still, then hast thou a good occasion ministred to thee to prove and try the mind of Fotis. Thus while I reasoned to myselfe I came to Milos doore, persevering still in my purpose, but I found neither Milo nor his wife at home. THE NINTH CHAPTER How Apuleius fell in love with Fotis. When I was within the house I found my deare and sweet love Fotis mincing of meat and making pottage for her master and mistresse, the Cupboord was all set with wines, and I thought I smelled the savor of some dainty meats: she had about her middle a white and clean apron, and shee was girded about her body under the paps with a swathell of red silke, and she stirred the pot and turned the meat with her fair and white hands, in such sort that with stirring and turning the same, her loynes and hips did likewise move and shake, which was in my mind a comely sight to see.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Anytime you have a gut feeling that you know something to be true, that’s affective realism. When you hear some news or read a story that you immediately believe, that’s affective realism too. Or if you are immediately dismissive of a message, or even dislike the messenger, that is also affective realism. We all like things that support our beliefs, and usually dislike things that violate those beliefs. Affective realism keeps you believing something even when the evidence puts it highly in doubt. It’s not because of ignorance or malevolence—it is simply a matter of how the brain is wired and operates. Everything you believe, and everything you see, is colored by your brain’s budget-balancing act. Affective realism, when left unchecked, leads people to be dead certain and inflexible. When two opposing groups believe deeply that they are right, they engage in political skirmishes, ideological battles, even wars. The two views of human nature you’ve seen in this book, from the classical view and construction, have been duking it out for several thousand years. 1 2 In this ongoing battle, affective realism has led each side to stereotype the other’s point of view. The classical view is caricatured as biological determinism, that culture is completely irrelevant and genes are absolute destiny, justifying the present social order of who is wealthy and who struggles. That caricature depicts an extreme version of favoring “getting ahead” over “getting along.” Construction, on the other hand, is criticized as absolute collectivism at the expense of the individual, or as the mistaken view that humans are one big superorganism like the Borg from Star Trek, and that the brain is “a uniform meatloaf” in which every neuron has exactly the same function. It’s an exaggerated version of “getting along” trumping “getting ahead.” Each side in this battle ignores the subtleties and variations that necessarily arise in scientific communities. If you’ve read this far, you’ve seen that the evidence points to a more nuanced conclusion: the dividing line between biology and culture is porous. Culture arose from natural selection, and as culture gets under the skin and into the brain, it helps to shape the next generation of humans. 1 3 Affective realism is an inevitability, and yet you are not helpless against it. The best defense against affective realism is curiosity. I tell my students to be particularly mindful when you love or hate something you read. These feelings probably mean that the ideas you’ve read are firmly in your affective niche, so keep an open mind about them. Your affect is not evidence that the science is good or bad. The biologist Stuart Firestein in his lovely book Ignorance encourages curiosity as a way to learn about the world.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I left the porch. At least half an hour in all had elapsed. I ought to have asked for a sip. The strain was beginning to tell. If a violin string can ache, then I was that string. But it would have been unseemly to display any hurry. As I made my way through a constellation of fixed people in one corner of the lobby, there came a blinding flash—and beaming Dr. Braddock, two orchid-ornamentalized matrons, the small girl in white, and presumably the bared teeth of Humbert Humbert sidling between the bridelike lassie and the enchanted cleric, were immortalized—insofar as the texture and print of small-town newspapers can be deemed immortal. A twittering group had gathered near the elevator. I again chose the stairs. 342 was near the fire escape. One could still—but the key was already in the lock, and then I was in the room. 29The door of the lighted bathroom stood ajar; in addition to that, a skeleton glow came through the Venetian blind from the outside arclights; these intercrossed rays penetrated the darkness of the bedroom and revealed the following situation. Clothed in one of her old nightgowns, my Lolita lay on her side with her back to me, in the middle of the bed. Her lightly veiled body and bare limbs formed a Z. She had put both pillows under her dark tousled head; a band of pale light crossed her top vertebrae. I seemed to have shed my clothes and slipped into pajamas with the kind of fantastic instantaneousness which is implied when in a cinematographic scene the process of changing is cut; and I had already placed my knee on the edge of the bed when Lolita turned her head and stared at me through the striped shadows. Now this was something the intruder had not expected. The whole pill-spiel (a rather sordid affair, entre nous soit dit) had had for object a fastness of sleep that a whole regiment would not have disturbed, and here she was staring at me, and thickly calling me “Barbara.” Barbara, wearing my pajamas which were much too tight for her, remained poised motionless over the little sleep-talker. Softly, with a hopeless sigh, Dolly turned away, resuming her initial position. For at least two minutes I waited and strained on the brink, like that tailor with his homemade parachute forty years ago when about to jump from the Eiffel Tower. Her faint breathing had the rhythm of sleep. Finally I heaved myself onto my narrow margin of bed, stealthily pulled at the odds and ends of sheets piled up to the south of my stone-cold heels—and Lolita lifted her head and gaped at me.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  None of the ploys I had used on myself in the past seemed to work anymore. I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like “fidelity” and “adultery,” by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that if I had him I’d be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner. — After lunch on that first day of the Congress, I told Bennett I was taking off to go swimming and I cut out with Adrian. We drove to my hotel where I got my bathing suit, put on my diaphragm, took my other gear, and then left with Adrian for his pension. In his room, I stripped naked in one minute flat and lay on the bed. “Pretty desperate, aren’t you?” he asked. “Yes.” “For God’s sake, why? We have plenty of time.” “How long?” “As long as you want it,” he said, ambiguously. If he left me, in short, it would be my fault. Psychoanalysts are like that. Never fuck a psychoanalyst is my advice to all you young things out there. Anyway, it was no good. Or not much. He was only at half-mast and he thrashed around wildly inside me hoping I wouldn’t notice. I wound up with a tiny ripple of an orgasm and a very sore cunt. But somehow I was pleased. I’ll be able to get free of him now, I thought; he isn’t a good lay. I’ll be able to forget him. “What are you thinking?” he asked. “That I’ve been well and truly fucked.” I remembered having used the same phrase with Bennett once, when it was much more true. “You’re a liar and a hypocrite. What do you want to lie for? I know I haven’t fucked you properly. I can do much better than that.” I was caught up short by his candor. “OK,” I confessed glumly, “you haven’t fucked me properly. I admit it.” “That’s better. Why are you always trying to be such a goddamned social worker? To salve my ego?” He pronounced it “egg-oh.” I thought for a while. What was I doing? I just assumed that you had to act that way with men. If you didn’t they’d fall apart, or go crazy. I didn’t want to drive another man crazy. “I guess I always just assumed that the male ego was so fragile you had to coddle it—” “Well mine isn’t so fragile. I can take being told I haven’t fucked you properly—especially when it’s bloody true.” “I guess I’ve just never met anyone like you.” He smiled delightedly. “No, you haven’t, ducks, and I daresay you never will again.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  "That alone shows you how strong we arc," he said. Rut, I persisted, cautio usly, and in somewhat different terms, this twenty billion dollars, or whatever it is, depends on the total economy of the United States. What happens when the Negro is no longer a part of this economy? Leaving aside the fact that in order for this to happen the economy of the United States will itself have had to under go radical and certainly disastrous changes, the American Negro's spending power will obviously no longer be the same. On what, then, will the economy of this separate nation be based? The boy gave me a rather strange look. I said hur riedly, "I'm not saying it can 1t be donc-1 just want to know how it's to be done." I was thinking, In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be t(>rccd to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have. I didn't feel that the things I had in mind, such as the pseudo-elegant heap of tin in which we were riding, had any very great value. But life would be very different without them, and I wondered if he had thought of this. How can one, however, dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power? The boy could sec that freedom depended on the possession of land; he was persuaded that, in one way or another, Negroes must achieve this possession. In the meantime, he could walk the streets and fear nothing, because there were millions like him, coming soon, now, to DOWN AT THE CROSS 333 power. He was held together, in short, by a dream-though it is just as well to remember that some dreams come true and was united with his "brother s" on the basis of their color. Perhaps one cannot ask for more. People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal re sponsibility.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was fun, too, & we drank champagne and smoked Turkish cigarettes & sprawled on the benches. Eddy St Lyon was there with an actorish young man & winked at us hugely across the room; he has aged extraordinarily & looks ripe with corruption & self-abuse. At the next table some roughish characters were playing dominoes, a thick-set older man, a kind of foreman with his gang. S. was clearly somewhat preoccupied with one of them, eighteen or so, with grubby, sun-bleached hair & broad features: there was something both delicate & brutal about him, with dark stains spreading from the armpits of his shirt & preternaturally powerful, dirty hands that showed a surprising refinement when he pushed the dominoes out, or raised his beer-glass to his lips. When the glass was empty, S. reached over and half-filled it with champagne. The boy smiled candidly, revealing a broad gap in his front upper teeth which made me swallow & tingle with lust, & the ‘foreman’ looked across with pride and gratitude, as if we had somehow helped the boy with his education. When their game was over, S. told the youth that he wanted to draw him, & they arranged a time & shook hands on a price; I began to see how the mixed nature of the clientele worked to everyone’s advantage. After this Sandy rather basked in his own savoir-faire, & we ordered another bottle of champagne. I had noticed a solitary figure sitting across the room, also drinking freely, even heavily. He was slender, & beautifully dressed, of indeterminate age but clearly older than he wanted to be. He must in fact have been about 40, but his flushed appearance & what may well have been a discreet maquillage gave him an air of artifice & sadly made one feel that he must be older, not younger. He was not only by himself but in some heightened, almost dramatic way, alone. He squirmed & twitched as if a thousand eyes were on him, & then composed himself into a kind of harlequin melancholy, holding out his long ivory hands & admiring his polished nails. His gaze wd wander off & fix on some working-boy or freak until an appalling rasping cough, which seemed too vehement to come from within so frail & flowerlike a body, convulsed him, doubling him up into a hacking, flailing caricature. After these attacks he sat back exhausted & quelled the tears in the corners of his eyes with the back of his trembling hands. Otto took notice of this & said in his know-all familiar way: ‘Old Firbank seems to be in a bad condition.’ I asked him more, & he told me that the man was a writer. ‘He writes the most wonderful novels,’ said Otto, ‘all about clergymen, & strange old ladies, &—& darkies: you really ought to read him.’

• From Best Erotic Romance

  The pause was just long enough, and then we tossed pillows aside and tumbled together, kissing and caressing with abandon. Hands were everywhere, and when, unspoken, we reached the point of removing clothes, Tim threw a couple more logs into the woodstove to help keep us warm. I pulled my sweater over my head and felt lips, his, kiss a nipple while her hand gave my other nipple a slight pinch. Gasping, I threw my sweater over toward the sofa and reached to pull off Tim’s shirt. Then I took Teresa’s hand and placed it on Tim’s crotch. I wanted her to unzip his jeans, free his cock, and I wanted to kiss her as she wrapped her hand around his stiffness. I watched as Tim undressed her, watched his cock twitch at the sight of her shaved pussy. I’ve kept all my hair, and soon he is comparing, fingering each of us. A brief question of “Does he prefer her bareness to my bush?” floated through my head, but as I felt him tangle his fingers and give a tug as he lowered his mouth to my cunt, any worries evaporated. Teresa watched him and ran her own fingers through her folds, slick and shiny wet even in the soft, flickering glow. I reached out and placed a hand on her thigh, pulled her toward me so I could rest my head in her lap. My fingers gently explored her, female but other. Her smell was different from mine, though I couldn’t describe it. Slowly, I pushed my tongue into the incredible softness that was her. Was that what it was like to taste me? Tim stopped to watch me lick Teresa’s delicious vulva. I played with her labia, folding the lips back on themselves, then pinching them together gently. She moaned and began to grind against my hand. I slipped a finger inside her, thinking it would feel like when I slip a finger inside me, but it didn’t. I was surprised and pleased, and even more aroused. I added more fingers and stroked her, pressed against that fleshy spot that makes me gasp. Tim moved closer and soon his hand joined mine. Together we were finger-fucking her, and she was bucking against us. I hadn’t felt this close to him in a long time. “Fuck her,” I said to him, almost breathless. “I want to see your cock slide inside her. I want to watch, and I want my fingers in her too when she comes.” Where was all this coming from? I only wondered for a split-second before his cock disappeared inside her juicy cunt and she was moaning in a voice too real to be a pretend porn voice. My cunt needed something, and I shoved fingers inside myself and humped my hand while I watched my husband madly fuck my friend. My brain fast-forwarded through all I wanted to do, and soon I was coming, crying out and slumping over.