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 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time. To gaze at what pleases—a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy, the mole on his jaw—is, in itself, replication—the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last. Staring into the mirror, I replicate myself into a future where I might not exist. And yes, it was not pizza bagels, all those years ago, that I wanted from Gramoz, but replication. Because his offering extended me into something worthy of generosity, and therefore seen. It was that very moreness that I wanted to prolong, to return to. It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus—that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying, with our entire curved and silent selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it? “I have to throw up,” you said. “What?” “I have to throw up.” You rush to your feet and head to the bathroom. “Oh my god you’re serious,” I said, following you. In the bathroom, you knelt at the single toilet and immediately hurled. Though your hair was tied in a bun, I knelt and, with two fingers, held your three or four strands of loose hair back in a mostly obligatory gesture. “You okay, Ma?” I spoke to the back of your head. You hurled again, your back convulsing under my palm. Only when I saw the urinal beside your head flecked with pubic hair did I realize we were in the men’s bathroom. “I’ll buy some water.” I patted your back and got up. “No,” you called back, your face red, “lemonade. I need a lemonade.”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  She even invited wealthy women to bring along their seamstresses, who would make sketches of the designs and then create replicas of them. More than making money, what she wanted most of all was to spread her fashions everywhere, to feel herself and her work to be objects of desire by women of all classes and nations. It would be the ultimate revenge for the girl who had grown up ignored, unloved, and shunned. She would clothe millions of women; her look, her imprint would be seen everywhere—as indeed it was a few years after her comeback. • • • Interpretation: The moment Chanel tried on Etienne Balsan’s clothes and elicited a new kind of attention, something clicked in her brain that would forever change the course of her life. Prior to this she was always coveting something transgressive that stimulated her fantasies. It was not socially acceptable for a lowly orphan girl to aspire to mingle with the upper classes. Actress and courtesan were not suitable roles to pursue, especially for someone raised in a convent. Now, as she rode around the château in her jodhpurs and boater hat, she was suddenly the object that other people coveted. And they were drawn to the transgressive aspect of her clothing, the deliberate flouting of gender roles. Instead of being locked in her imaginary world full of dreams and fantasies, she could be the one stimulating such fantasies in other people. All that was required was to reverse her perspective—to think of the audience first and to strategize how to play on their imagination. The objects she had desired since childhood were all somewhat vague, elusive, and taboo. That was their allure. That is the nature of human desire. She simply had to turn this around and incorporate such elements into the objects she created. This is how she performed such magic: First, she surrounded herself and what she made with an aura of mystery. She never talked about her impoverished childhood. She made up countless contradictory stories about her past. Nobody really knew anything concrete about her. She carefully controlled the number of her public appearances, and she knew the value of disappearing for a while. She never revealed the recipe for her perfume or her creative process in general. Her oddly compelling logo was designed to stimulate interpretations. All of this gave endless space for the public to imagine and speculate about the Coco myth. Second, she always associated her designs with something vaguely transgressive. The clothes had a distinct masculine edge but remained decidedly feminine. They gave women the sense that they were crossing some gender boundaries—physically and psychologically loosening constrictions. The clothes also conformed more to the body, combining freedom of movement with sex. These were not your mother’s clothes.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Most commonly people will try to satisfy the need by gaining social prestige. People may claim they are interested in the work itself or in contributing to humanity, but often deep down what is really motivating them is the desire to have attention, to have their high self-opinion confirmed by others who admire them, to feel powerful and inflated. If they are talented, such types can get the attention they need for several years or longer, but inevitably, as in the story of Eisner, their need for accolades will lure them into overreaching. If people are disappointed in their careers yet still believe they are great and unrecognized, they may turn to various compensations— drugs, alcohol, sex with as many partners as possible, shopping, a superior, mocking attitude, et cetera. Those with unsatisfied grandiosity will often become filled with manic energy—one moment telling everyone about the great screenplays they will write or the many women they will seduce, and the next moment falling into depression as reality intrudes. People still tend to idealize leaders and worship them, and you must see this as a form of grandiosity. By believing someone else will make everything great, followers can feel something of this greatness. Their minds can soar along with the rhetoric of the leader. They can feel superior to those who are not believers. On a more personal level, people will often idealize those they love, elevating them to god or goddess status and by extension feeling some of this power reflected back on them. In the world today, you will also notice the prevalence of negative forms of grandiosity. Many people feel the need to disguise their grandiose urges not only from others but also from themselves. They will frequently make a show of their humility—they are not interested in power or feeling important, or so they say. They are happy with their small lot in life. They do not want a lot of possessions, do not own a car, and disdain status. But you will notice they have a need to display this humility in a public manner. It is grandiose humility—their way to get attention and to feel morally superior. A variation on this is the grandiose victim —they have suffered a lot and been the victim numerous times. Although they may like to frame it as being simply unlucky and unfortunate, you will notice that they often have a tendency to fall for the worst types in intimate relationships, or put themselves in circumstances in which they are certain to fail and suffer. In essence, they are compelled to create the drama that will turn them into a victim.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  These pressures may be subtler in our day and age, but they still exert a powerful influence. The more exploratory, aggressive, and darker sides of her character—both naturally occurring and absorbed from the father—will tend to become repressed and sink into the unconscious, if she adopts a more traditionally feminine role. The unconscious feminine part of the boy and the man is what Jung calls the anima . The unconscious masculine part of the girl and woman are the animus . Because they are parts of ourselves that are deeply buried, we are never really aware of them in our daily life. But once we become fascinated with a person of the opposite sex, the anima and animus stir to life. The attraction we feel toward another might be purely physical, but more often the person who draws our attention unconsciously bears some resemblance— physical or psychological—to our mother or father. Remember that this primal relationship is full of charged energy, excitement, and obsessions that are repressed but yearning to come out. A person who triggers these associations in us will be a magnet for our attention, even though we are not aware of the source of our attraction. If the relationship to the mother or father was mostly positive, we will tend to project onto the other person the desirable qualities that our parent had, in the hope of reexperiencing that early paradise. Take, for instance, a young man whose mother nurtured and adored him. He may have been a sweet, loving little boy, devoted to his mother and reflecting her nurturing energy, but he repressed these traits in himself as he grew into an independent man with a masculine image to uphold. In the woman who triggers an association with his mother he will see the capacity to adore him that he secretly craves. This feeling of getting what he wants will intensify his excitement and physical attraction. She will supply him the qualities he never developed in himself. He is falling in love with his own anima, in the form of the desired woman. If the feelings toward the mother or father were mostly ambivalent (their attention inconsistent), we will often try to fix the original relationship by falling in love with someone who reminds us of our imperfect parent figure, in the hope that we can subtract their negative qualities and get what we never quite got in our earliest years. If the relationship was mostly negative, we may go in search of someone with the opposite qualities to that parent, often of a dark, shadowy nature. For instance, a girl who had a father who was too strict, distant, and critical perhaps had the secret desire to rebel but didn’t dare to. As a young woman she might be drawn to a rebellious, unconventional young man who represents the wild side she was never able to express, and is the polar opposite of her father.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  inevitably spark some kind of viral pull. You can speed up this process by feeding rumors or stories about the object through various media. People will begin to talk and the word of mouth will spread the effect. Even negative comments or controversy will do the trick, sometimes even better than praise. It will give your object a provocative and transgressive edge. Anyway, people are drawn toward the negative. Your silence or lack of overt direction of the message will allow people to run wild with their own stories and interpretations. You can also get important people or tastemakers to talk about it and fan the flames. What you are offering, they say, is new, revolutionary, something not seen or heard of before. You are trafficking in the future, in trends. At a certain point, enough people will feel the pull and will not want to be left out, which will pull in others. The only problem in this game is that in the world today you have much competition for these viral effects and the public is incredibly fickle. You must be a master not only at setting off these chain reactions but at renewing them or creating new ones. As an individual you must make it clear that people desire you, that you have a past—not too much of a past to inspire mistrust but enough to signal that others have found you desirable. You want to be indirect in this. You want them to hear stories of your past. You want them to literally see the attention you receive from men or women, all of this without your saying a word. Any bragging or explicit signaling of this will neutralize the effect. In any negotiating situation you must always strive to bring in a third or fourth party to vie for your services, creating a rivalry of desire. This will immediately enhance your value, not just in terms of a bidding war but also in the fact that people will see that others covet you. Use induction. We may think we live in a time of great freedom compared with the past, but in fact we live in a world that is more regulated than ever before. Our every move is followed digitally. There are more laws than ever governing all aspects of human behavior. Political correctness, which has always existed, can be more intense because of how visible we have become on social media. Secretly most of us feel bothered or crushed by all of these constraints on our physical and mental movement. We yearn for what is transgressive and beyond the limits that are set for us. We can easily be pulled toward that repressed no or yes. You want to associate your object with something ever so slightly illicit, unconventional, or politically advanced. Chanel did this with her overt androgynous appeal and flouting of gender roles. The fight between generations is always ripe material for this. What you offer

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  There is a theory about time travel called the Novikov self-consistency principle, wherein Novikov asserts that if time travel were possible, it would still be impossible to travel back in time and alter events that have already taken place. If present-day you could return to the past, you could certainly make observations that felt new—observations that had the benefit of real-time hindsight—but you’d be unable to, say, prevent your parents from meeting, since that, by definition, had already happened. To do so, Novikov says, would be as impossible as jumping through a brick wall. Time—the plot of it—is fixed. No, Novikov’s time traveler is the tragic dupe who realizes too late her trip to the past is what sealed the very fate she’d meant to prevent. Maybe you mistook your future voice shouting through the walls for something else: a heartbeat pacing and then rapid with want, a purr. Dream House as a Stranger Comes to TownOne day, she texts you to ask if you can give her a ride to the Cedar Rapids airport. She needs to pick up her girlfriend, Val, who is visiting from out of town. You agree because, of course. Historically you’ve done just about anything for a beautiful woman. (Years ago, when you lived in California, your stunningly gorgeous coworker called you at seven in the morning because she needed help jump-starting her car. You were out of bed and on your way in ten minutes, and when you opened the hood of her car you made a point of contemplating the machinery below you, as if you had any idea what it meant.) In the car, you are so busy talking you miss the exit—blowing past a strip club, Woody’s, and the sign for the airport. When you finally arrive and park your car, you walk to the baggage claim and watch these two beautiful, tiny women run at each other. One brunette, one blonde; like Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe. The blonde sits and the brunette crawls in her lap; they laugh and kiss. (You would love that version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.) You turn away and examine a poster for the University of Iowa very closely. In the car, the brunette laughs easily and openly at all of your jokes. You watch her surreptitiously in the rearview mirror. You drop them off back in town. A few days later, you’re talking to your mutual friend. “I think she likes you,” she says. “She’s really hot,” you say. “But she’s seeing someone. I just, like, literally picked up her girlfriend from the airport.” “Oh yeah,” your friend says. “They’re in an open relationship, though. That’s what she told me. I’m just saying.” She throws up her hands with mock innocence. “She’s mentioned you a bunch.” Your heart launches itself against your rib cage like an animal.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  When I was sixteen, a new associate pastor, Joel Jones, was rotated into our United Methodist parish. When he introduced himself to the church youth, I felt a kick deep in my pelvis. He was handsome, with a goatee and straight, sandy hair that jutted out over his forehead. He was a little pudgy, but only just. He had a wedding ring. And when he shook my hand, he looked directly into my eyes. Joel was around a lot. He participated in youth group events alongside his normal church duties. He gave smart, politically progressive sermons that sowed chaos and indignation among the older congregants, which delighted me no end. Sometimes I would linger after the service was over. He always talked to me like I was an adult; he always remembered my name. [image file=image_rsrc2K1.jpg] In my senior year of high school, our church connected with a Methodist congregation in Lichtenburg, South Africa, that was looking to start a youth camp for its children and teens. A group of adults—including Joel—decided to do a trial run, and they invited me to go with them. We departed a frigid Northeast midwinter and arrived in the middle of a Southern Hemisphere summer. The camp was held on a sprawling farm outside town, a palatial property with a pool and a large white fountain and a gate running along the road. The campers, ranging from my age—seventeen—down to nine, stayed in a converted barn. I ran an arts-and-crafts elective. We built bonfires around which we sang and played guitar and made spontaneous confessions. Boerboels—a South African breed of giant dogs that resemble mastiffs—roamed the grounds. There was a new mother with distended nipples and a loping gait, and her massive puppies, who scrambled over each other to get to our outstretched hands. The owner of the farm grew sunflowers, and in the fields their luminous heads were always turned toward the light—one morning he drove us into their midst to show us how they followed the sun’s path across the sky. The land around us was so flat you could see black thunderclouds slit through with lightning in every direction; storms so distant they never arrived. I had never been so far from home. Every night, after the campers went to bed, I would sit and talk with Joel. He spoke openly, honestly of his faith; how he struggled with his own imperfections: pride and jealousy and—his voice dropping low—lust.

• From Dirty Pretty Things (2014)

  Snow Storm Outside, the snow continued to fall, whipped up by a swirling vicious wind that knocked on the frosty windows and rattled the old wooden door. Inside the tiny stone cottage, it was a different story. Flickering flames from a glowing fire cast leaping shadows, which danced like drunk ballerinas across the cobwebbed walls. Her hand reached for the vodka bottle. Mine stroked a thigh which begged to be touched, caressed, and kissed. “I’m feeling tipsy,” she laughed, filling her glass to the brim, the contents overflowing, forming a small puddle that quickly soaked into the wine-stained rug. “Would you like to hear a story?” “Of course,” she replied, pushing my hand under her skirt. “Well, once upon a time, when I was living in Berlin . . .” “Stop right there,” she said. “I’ve heard this one. Remember? The gypsy girl who stole your heart and keeps it in a golden cage. You always repeat yourself when you’re drunk. ” She was right. I had told her the story, as I had the many others who had drifted into my life and melted away, like delicate snowflakes captured by a winter sun. “Here, drink this and forget about it. I don’t care if you can’t love me. I honestly don’t.” I took the bottle from her outstretched hand and swallowed two generous swigs, a warm river running down my throat. Emily smiled and stood up, her gorgeous green eyes twinkling in the darkness. “You know what I want? More than anything right now?” she said, hitching up her skirt to reveal the black lace panties with a pretty red bow. “I want you to fuck me like you fucked that gypsy girl.” I put the bottle down and pointed to the bed that sat waiting in the corner of the room. “Why do we need a bed when there’s a perfectly good table right here?” I watched as she climbed onto it, kicking a chair over with a bare foot as she turned over, pressing her back down on the hard wood, legs slowly spreading wider. “It’s time you wrote a new story, one I haven’t heard,” she whispered. Strawberries She was a curious girl, a wanderer, who spent her summers chasing fluttering pieces of prose and eating strawberries. True Love When you’re in love, truly in love, you never have to question it. Bitter Sweet Love To slap you, is to touch you. Scream for mercy. Beg for more. To bite you, is to kiss you. Tied and tethered, on the floor. To loathe you, is to love you. Pretty princess. Dirty whore. Virgin Snow Your scream startled birds, rising up from naked trees, laid bare by winter’s breath. Little clouds of spoken mist, from the lips of lovers lost, fade to nothing. Pretty knees turn to icy blue, on frozen sheets of brilliant white, in a bed of falling snow, stained red.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Every time she speaks, you feel something inside you drop. You will remember so little about the dinner except that, at the end of it, you want to prolong the evening and so you order tea of all things. You drink it—a mouthful of heat and herb, scorching the roof of your mouth—while trying not to stare at her, trying to be charming and nonchalant while desire gathers in your limbs. Your female crushes were always floating past you, out of reach, but she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the first time. Dream House as Memory PalaceFrom the street, here is the house. There is a front door, but you never go in the front door.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Know how and when to withdraw. This is the essence of the art. You have a presence that people see and interpret. If you are too obvious with this, if people can read you too easily and figure you out, if you show your needs too visibly, then they will unconsciously begin to have a degree of disrespect; over time they will lose interest. Your presence must have a touch of coldness to it, as if you feel like you could do without others. This signals to people that you consider yourself worthy of respect, which unconsciously heightens your value in their eyes. It makes people want to chase after you. This touch of coldness is the first form of withdrawal that you must practice. Add to this a bit of blankness and ambiguity as to who you are. Your opinions, values, and tastes are never too obvious to people. This gives them room to read into you what they want. Movie stars are masters of this. They turn their faces and their presence into screens upon which people can project their own fantasies. What you want in general is to create an air of mystery and to attract interpretations. Once you sense that you have engaged people’s imagination, that you have your hooks in them, then you must use physical absence and withdrawal. You are not so available. A day or week can go by without your presence. You create a feeling of emptiness inside them, a touch of pain. You occupy increasing amounts of their mental space in these absences. They come to want more of you, not less. The musician Michael Jackson played this game to perfection on the social level. He was deeply aware of the dangers of saturating the market with his music and public appearances. He spread out the releases of his albums, making the public hungry for more. He carefully managed the frequency of his interviews and performances and never talked about the meaning of his lyrics or propagated any overt message. He occasionally had his publicists leak to the press some new story surrounding him, such as his use of hyperbaric chambers as a way to maintain eternal youthfulness. He would neither confirm nor deny these stories and the press would run wild. He was someone who sparked stories and rumors, but nothing concrete. Through this strategic elusiveness he made himself an object of continual desire—both to know him better and to possess his music. With the work you produce you can create similar covetous effects. Always leave the presentation and the message relatively open-ended. People can read into your work several interpretations. Never define exactly how they should take or use it. This is why the work of great dramatists such as Shakespeare and Chekhov has lasted for so many centuries and always seem so fresh and exciting; each generation can read into their plays what they want to. These writers described timeless elements of human nature, but without

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  And what do you do to a boy like that but turn yourself into a doorway, a place he can go through again and again, each time entering the same room? Yes, I wanted it all. I drove my face into him as if into a climate, the autobiography of a season. Until I was numb. “Close your eyes,” he said, shaking. “Don’t want you seeing me like this.” But I opened them anyway, knowing that in the dim, everything looked the same. Like you’re still sleeping. But in our hurry, our teeth collided. He made a hurt sound, then turned away, suddenly embarrassed. Before I could ask if he was okay, he resumed, his eyes half-open as we locked, slick and smooth now, deeper. Then lower, toward the waistband’s elastic resistance, the snap never coming, the fabric’s rustle at my ankles, my cock, the bead of moisture at its tip the coldest thing between us. Surfacing from the sheets, his face shone through the wet mask we made of our scavenge. He was white, I never forgot this. He was always white. And I knew this was why there was a space for us: a farm, a field, a barn, a house, an hour, two. A space I never found in the city, where the tenement apartments we lived in were so cramped one could tell when a neighbor had a stomach flu in the middle of the night. To hide here, in a room in a broken-down mobile home, was, somehow, a privilege, a chance. He was white. I was yellow. In the dark, our facts lit us up and our acts pinned us down. — But how do I tell you about that boy without telling you about the drugs that soon blew it apart, the Oxy and coke, the way they made the world smolder at its tips? And then the rust-red Chevy? The one Buford gave his son, Trev’s old man, when he was twenty-four, the one the old man cherished, having repaired and replaced enough parts to make four trucks over through the years. How its windows were already blue-streaked and its tires smooth as human skin by the time we blasted through the corn, going fifty-five as Trevor shouted crazy, a patch of fentanyl hot on his arm, the liquid melted through its edges and dripping down his bicep like sick sap. Cocaine in our noses, our lungs, we laughed, in a way. And then the swerve, a smithereen of yellow, the slam, glass skittering, the crushed hood smoking under the dead oak. A red line running down Trevor’s cheek, then widening at his jaw. Then his daddy calling from the house, the rage in his scream jolting us from the seats.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  manners were so coarse, and he was always avid for more money. Despite his advanced age he was constantly chasing after women other than his wife, none of whom were particularly attractive. In the first years of his reign there were several coup attempts, and the public might have welcomed the change if they had succeeded. George desperately wanted to prove to his new subjects that he could be a great king, in his own way. What he hated most of all was the crushing debts the government had incurred before he ascended the throne. George had an almost allergic reaction to any kind of debt, as if his own blood were being leeched. Now here was Blunt offering him the chance to cancel the debt and bring prosperity to England, strengthening the monarchy in the process. It was almost too good to be true, and he threw his full weight behind the proposal. He assigned the chancellor of the exchequer, John Aislabie, the task of presenting the proposal to Parliament in January 1720. Parliament would have to approve it in the form of a bill. Almost immediately Blunt’s proposal stirred up fierce opposition among several MPs, some of whom found it ludicrous. But in the weeks after Aislabie’s speech, opponents of the bill watched in dismay as support for their side slowly withered away. Advance shares in the venture had been virtually gifted to the wealthiest and most powerful Englishmen, including prominent members of Parliament, who, sensing the sure profits they personally would gain, now gave their approval to the bill. When the bill passed in April of that year, King George himself showed up at the South Sea House and deposited £100,000 for shares in the new venture. He wanted to display his confidence in it, but such a step was hardly necessary, as the buildup to the bill’s passage had captured the public and interest in South Sea Company shares had already reached a fever pitch. The center of activity was an area of London known as Exchange Alley, where almost all stocks were sold. Now the narrow streets in and around the alley were clogged with traffic growing thicker by the day. At first it was mostly the wealthy and influential who came in their fancy coaches to buy up shares. Among the buyers were also artists and intellectuals—including John Gay, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. Soon Sir Isaac Newton felt the pull and invested a good chunk of his savings, £7,000. A few weeks later, however, he felt doubt. The price was rising, but what rises can surely fall, and so he cashed out, doubling his initial investment. Soon rumors began to circulate that the company was about to initiate trade in South America, where all kinds of riches lay buried in the mountains. This only added fuel to the fire, and people from all classes began to converge on London to buy up shares in the South

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  His charm, less tattered than it would later become, before several liquid tons of alcohol crush it out of him, appeals to Jody on some level. Rebellious and adrift, bounced from one boarding school to another (now between Dana Hall and House in the Pines), she comes from money. Her father was running his father’s wool business, and during the war—uniforms, blankets, felt—wool had made money. Jonathan tells Jody he’s back in town for the summer, doing construction, though in fact he’s a laborer, digging ditches. In Palm Beach he’s known as “Barracuda Buck, Native Guide.” Native to what ? Jody asks. He tells her about the novel he has yet to write, his faith in it. Barracuda. Half hot air, but Scituate’s a small town—she tells him what time she gets off. After her shift he’s waiting. They drive to Peggotty Beach, park facing the water as the sun sets behind their heads. He knows her family, knows their summer house on First Cliff, the biggest house in town. He’d seen her at the beach before, but she’d been just a child then. He uncorks a pint of whiskey, offers her some. They talk about their families, he tells her how he had to get away from his father (that bald-headed fuck, playing his violin) , away from this small town, in order to become his own man. If I’d’ve stayed here I’d be dead . She struggles with her father also, feels he doesn’t know her, has never tried. For the past year he’s been sleeping with his secretary, Jody found a letter (“Not long now, dearest, before we’re in Reno and all this is behind us”). They’re both reading Salinger— Catcher in the Rye in her bag. She reads aloud her favorite passage so far: “When I was really drunk, I started that stupid business with the bullet in my guts again. I was the only guy at the bar with a bullet in their guts. I kept putting my hand under my jacket, on my stomach and all, to keep the blood from dripping all over the place. I didn’t want anybody to know I was even wounded. I was con ceal ing the fact that I was a wounded sonuvabitch….” Jonathan puts his hand under his jacket and doubles over in pain. No , she says, he’s con ceal ing it. His face goes stoic. They laugh. Jonathan sees his novel like that, breaking the world open, and Jody’s willing to believe him, at least this night, and for many nights to follow. For the rest of the summer they’ll meet on the beach that connects the two cliffs, lean against the seawall, out of the wind, out of sight, compare the size of their feet, press their palms together. He’ll tell her more about his book, about Florida, about life on the docks. To be a poet digging ditches is very different from being a mere ditch digger .

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

  ORIGEN. Or perhaps these precepts are enough to introduce one, if I may say so, to the entrance of life; but neither these, nor any like them, are enough to conduct one to the more inward parts of life. But whoso transgresses one of these commandments, shall not even come to the entrance in unto life. CHRYSOSTOM. But because all the commandments that the Lord had recounted were contained in the Law, The young man saith unto him. All these have I kept from my youth up. And did not even rest there, but asked further, What lack I yet? which alone is a mark of his intense desire. REMIGIUS. But to those who would be perfect in grace, He shews how they may come to perfection, Jesus saith unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go, and sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor. Mark the words; He said not, Go, and consume all thou hast; but Go, and sell; and not some, as did Ananias and Sapphira, but All. And well He added, that thou hast, for what we have are our lawful possessions. Those therefore that he justly possessed were to be sold; what had been gained unjustly were to be restored to those from whom they had been taken. And He said not, Give to thy neighbours, nor to the rich, but to the poor. AUGUSTINE. (de. Op. Monach. 25.) Nor need it be made a scruple in what monasteries, or to the indigent brethren of what place, any one gives those things that he has, for there is but one commonwealth of all Christians. Therefore wheresoever any Christian has laid out his goods, in all places alike he shall receive what is necessary for himself, shall receive it of that which is Christ’s. RABANUS. See two kinds of life which we have heard set before men; the Active, to which pertains, Thou shalt not kill, and the rest of the Law; and the Contemplative, to which pertains this, If thou wilt be perfect. The active pertains to the Law, the contemplative to the Gospel; for as the Old Testament went before the New, so good action goes before contemplation. AUGUSTINE. (cont. Faust. v. 9.) Nor are such only partakers in the kingdom of heaven, who, to the end they may be perfect, sell or part with all that they have; but in these Christian ranks are numbered by reason of a certain communication of their charity a multitude of hired troops; those to whom it shall be said in the end, I was hungry, and ye gave me to eat; (Mat. 25:35.) whom be it far from us to consider excluded from life eternal, as they who obey not the commands of the Gospel.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I grabbed the two dime bags, one half-filled with weed, the other with coke, and handed them to him. He opened the bag, placed the weed, already broken, into the gutted cigarillo till it filled. He threw the bag out the window, then opened the second bag, tipped the white grains over the row of weed. “Like snow-capped mountains!” he said, grinning. In his excitement, he let the second bag fall through his legs, to the floorboard. He licked the Black & Mild’s hem, sealing the slit until it stuck into a tight joint, then blew on the hem, waved the joint in front of him to dry. He marveled at it between his fingers before placing it between his lips and lighting. We sat there, passing it back and forth until my head felt thin and skull-less. After what seemed like hours, we ended up in the barn, somehow lying on the dusty floor. It must have been late—or at least dark enough to make the barn’s interior feel immense, like the hull of a beached ship. “Don’t be weird,” Trevor said, sitting up. He grabbed the WWII army helmet off the floor and put it back on, the one he was wearing the day I met him. I keep seeing that helmet—but this can’t be right. This boy, impossibly American and alive in the image of a dead soldier. It’s too neat, so clean a symbol I must have made it up. And even now, in all the pictures I looked through, I can’t find him wearing it. Yet here it is, tilted to hide Trevor’s eyes, making him seem anonymous and easy to look at. I studied him like a new word. His reddish lips stuck out from the helmet’s visor. The Adam’s apple, oddly small, a blip in a line drawn by a tired artist. It was dark enough for my eyes to swallow all of him without ever seeing him clearly. Like eating with the lights off—it still nourished even if you didn’t know where your body ends. “Don’t be weird.” “I wasn’t looking at you,” I said, diverting my gaze. “I was just thinking.” “Look. The radio’s working again.” He played with the knob on the handheld radio in his lap and the static intensified, then a robust and urgent voice poured into the space between us: Fourth down-and-goal with twenty-seven seconds to go and the Patriots line up for the snap . . . “Nice! We’re back in this.” He struck his palm with his fist, teeth clenched: a greyish flash under the helmet.

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

  HILARY. This treasure is indeed found without cost; for the Gospel preaching is open to all, but to use and possess the treasure with its field we may not without price, for heavenly riches are not obtained without the loss of this world. JEROME. That he hides it, does not proceed of envy towards others, but as one that treasures up what he would not lose, he hides in his heart that which he prizes above his former possessions. GREGORY. (Hom. in Ev. xi. 1.) Otherwise; The treasure hidden in the field is the desire of heaven; the field in which the treasure is hidden is the discipline of heavenly learning; this, when a man finds, he hides, in order that he may preserve it; for zeal and affections heavenward it is not enough that we protect from evil spirits, if we do not protect from human praises. For in this present life we are in the way which leads to our country, and evil spirits as robbers beset us in our journey. Those therefore who carry their treasure openly, they seek to plunder in the way. When I say this, I do not mean that our neighbours should not see our works, but that in what we do, we should not seek praise from without. The kingdom of heaven is therefore compared to things of earth, that the mind may rise from things familiar to things unknown, and may learn to love the unknown by that which it knows is loved when known. It follows, And for joy thereof he goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field. He it is that selleth all he hath and buyeth the field, who, renouncing fleshly delights, tramples upon all his worldly desires in his anxiety for the heavenly discipline. JEROME. Or, That treasure in which are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Col. 2:3.), is either God the Word, who seems hid in Christ’s flesh, or the Holy Scriptures, in which are laid up the knowledge of the Saviour. AUGUSTINE. (Quæst. in Ev. i. 13.) Or, He speaks of the two testaments in the Church, which, when any hath attained to a partial understanding of, he perceives how great things lie hid there, and goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that; that is, by despising temporal things he purchases to himself peace, that he may be rich in the knowledge of God. 13:45–4645. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: 46. Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Man vs. NatureIn New York City you visit a store that sells natural and scientific ephemera. Deer skulls in cases, petrified wood, articulated bat skeletons in bell jars, amethyst geodes as tall as a child, taxidermied mice, trilobite fossils, leather-bound birding books. There is something hypnotic about this store. You wish you could spend all day there; you wish you could spend thousands of dollars there. It reminds you of a store you used to go to as a kid—Natural Wonders, RIP—and how it always made you feel like equal parts Ellie Sattler and Lara Croft. That night, lying next to her on a futon, you tell her about a fantasy you have: “We have a beautiful home; the sort of home that has its own library, filled with books and the sort of things an amateur gentleman scientist would have had in his library in the nineteen-tens. And we throw a huge, lavish party, and everyone comes, and there is laughter and drinking and delicious food. I’m in a beautiful, clingy fifties swing dress, and you are in a suit and tie. At some point in the evening, when everyone is a few drinks in, you pull me into a private corner of a small room and slip your hand up my dress, murmuring into my ear what will happen when the guests have gone home. And then later, when you have kissed the last person on the cheek and locked the front door, we fumble and tumble our way toward the library, where you push me down on a lush, red divan and I unknot your tie and unbutton your shirt, and there among the bones and the books and the paintings you slide your hand up me and bite my neck and after I come I jerk you off while dead things look over us.” This fantasy springs up so fully formed it feels like it’s already happened in some past era, as if instead of creating it you’ve just plucked it out of a soup of history and consciousness. “Yes,” she says. “Yes.” Dream House as Stoner ComedyIt is summer in New York, and the heat is an animal that won’t climb off. You’re staying in her friend’s apartment in Crown Heights, and you and she and Val smoke a lot of weed. You have never been a pot person—you have, in fact, been a bit of a ninny when it comes to drugs; when you even say the word drugs you feel ridiculous—but you smoke because she does and she’ll be annoyed if you don’t. (“What, you think you’re better than all this?” she says once when you decline; after that, you don’t decline.) You cough and cough because you’ve never gotten used to smoke.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  It was Hartford. It was a cluster of light that pulsed with a force I never realized it possessed. Maybe it was because his breaths were so clear to me then, how I imagined the oxygen in his throat, his lungs, the bronchi and blood vessels expanding, how it moved through all the places I’ll never see, that I keep returning to this most basic measurement of life, even long after he’s gone. But for now, the city brims before us with a strange, rare brilliance—as if it was not a city at all, but the sparks made by some god sharpening his weapons above us. “Fuck,” Trevor whispered. He put his hands in his pockets and spat on the ground. “Fuck.” The city throbbed, shimmered. Then, trying to snap himself out of it, he said, “Fuck Coca-Cola.” “Yeah, Sprite for life, fuckers,” I added, not knowing then what I know now: that Coca-Cola and Sprite were made by the same damn company. That no matter who you are or what you love or where you stand, it was always Coca-Cola in the end. Trevor rusted pickup and no license. Trevor sixteen; blue jeans streaked with deer blood. Trevor too fast and not enough. Trevor waving his John Deere cap from the driveway as you ride by on your squeaky Schwinn. Trevor who fingered a freshman girl then tossed her underwear in the lake for fun. For summer. For your hands were wet and Trevor’s a name like an engine starting up in the night. Who snuck out to meet a boy like you. Yellow and barely there. Trevor going fifty through his daddy’s wheat field. Who jams all his fries into a Whopper and chews with both feet on the gas. Your eyes closed, riding shotgun, the wheat a yellow confetti. Three freckles on his nose. Three periods to a boy-sentence. Trevor Burger King over McDonald’s ’cause the smell of smoke on the beef makes it real. Trevor bucktooth clicking on his inhaler as he sucked, eyes shut. Trevor I like sunflowers best. They go so high. Trevor with the scar like a comma on his neck, syntax of what next what next what next. Imagine going so high and still opening that big. Trevor loading the shotgun two red shells at a time. It’s kind of like being brave, I think. Like you got this big ole head full of seeds and no arms to defend yourself. His hard lean arms aimed in the rain. He touches the trigger’s black tongue and you swear you taste his finger in your mouth as it pulls. Trevor pointing at the one-winged sparrow thrashing in black dirt and takes it for something new. Something smoldering like a word. Like a Trevor

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  When he pushed I felt myself scream—but didn’t. Instead, my mouth was full of salted skin, then the bone underneath as I bit down on my arm. Trevor stopped, not yet all the way in, sat up, and asked if I was okay. “I dunno,” I said into the floor, panting. “Don’t cry on me again. Don’t you cry on me now.” He spat another wad, let it fall on his length. “Let’s try again. If it’s bad we’ll stop for good.” “Okay.” He pushed, deeper this time, pushed his weight down hard—and slid inside me. The pain sparked white in the back of my head. I bit down, my wrist bone touched the contours of my teeth. “I’m in. I’m in, little man.” His voice cracked into the whisper-shout terror of a boy who got exactly what he wanted. “I’m in,” he said, astonished. “I can feel it. Fuck. Oh fuck.” I told him to hold still as I braced against the dirt floor and gathered myself. The pain shot out from between my legs. “Let’s keep going,” he said. “I gotta keep going. I don’t wanna stop.” Before I could respond he was pumping again, his arms planted on each side of my head, the heat pulsing from them as he worked. He was wearing his gold cross, the one he never takes off, and it kept poking at my cheek. So I took it in my mouth to keep it steady. It tasted like rust, salt, and Trevor. The sparks in my head bloomed with each thrust. After a while, the pain melted into a strange ache, a weightless numbness that swept through me like a new, even warmer season. The feeling brought on, not by tenderness, as from caress, but by the body having no choice but to accommodate pain by dulling it into an impossible, radiating pleasure. Getting fucked in the ass felt good, I learned, when you outlast your own hurt. What Simone Weil said: Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object, no corner is left for saying “I.” As he heaved above me I unconsciously reached back to touch myself, to make sure I was still there, still me, but my hand found Trevor instead—as if by being inside me, he was this new extension of myself. The Greeks thought sex was the attempt of two bodies, separated long ago, to return to one life. I don’t know if I believe this but that’s what it felt like: as if we were two people mining one body, and in doing so, merged, until no corner was left saying I.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Such types feel as if it is them against the world. They must assert their will at all costs and resist any kind of change. They will do the opposite of what people suggest. They will seek advice for a particular problem or symptom, only to find dozens of reasons of why the advice given won’t work for them. The best thing to do is to play a game of mental judo with them. In judo you do not counter people’s moves with a thrust of your own but rather encourage their aggressive energy (resistance) in order to make them fall on their own. Here are some ways to put this into practice in everyday life. Use their emotions: In the book Change , the therapist authors (Paul Watzlawick, John H. Weakland, and Richard Fisch) discuss the case of a rebellious teenager, suspended from school by the principal because he was caught dealing drugs. He was still to do his homework at home but was forbidden to be on campus. This would put a big dent in his drug-dealing business. The boy burned with the desire to get vengeance. The mother consulted a therapist, who told her to do the following: explain to the son that the principal believed only students who attended class in person could do well. In the principal’s mind, by keeping the boy away from school he was ensuring he would fail. If he did better by working at home than in class, this would embarrass the principal. Better to not try too hard this semester and get on the good side of the principal by proving him right. Of course, such advice was designed to play into his emotions. Now he desired nothing more than to embarrass the principal and so threw himself into his homework with great energy, the goal of the therapist all along. In essence, the idea is not to counter people’s strong emotions but to move with them and find a way to channel them in a productive direction. Use their language: The therapist Milton Erickson (see chapter 3) described the following case that he had treated: A husband came to him for advice, although he seemed quite set on doing what he wanted anyway. He and his wife came from very religious families and had married mostly to please their parents. The husband and wife were very religious as well. Their honeymoon, however, had been a disaster. They found sex very awkward and did not feel like they were in love. The husband decided it was not anyone’s fault but that they should get “a friendly divorce.” Erickson readily agreed with him and suggested exactly how to bring about this “friendly divorce.” He instructed him to reserve a room at a hotel. They were to have one final “friendly” night together before the divorce.