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 Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It was dubious at times whether I was in her or she in me. It was open warfare, the newfangled Pancrace, with each one biting his own ass. Love among the newts and the cutout wide open. Love without gender and without lysol. Incubational love, such as the wolverines practice above the tree line. On the one side the Arctic Ocean, on the other the Gulf of Mexico. And though we never referred to it openly there was always with us King Kong, King Kong asleep in the wrecked hull of the Titanic among the phosphorescent bones of millionaires and lampreys. No logic could drive King Kong away. He was the giant truss that supports the soul’s fleeting anguish. He was the wedding cake with hairy legs and arms a mile long. He was the revolving screen on which the news passes away. He was the muzzle of the revolver that never went off, the leper armed with sawed-off gonococci. It was here in the void of hernia that I did all my quiet thinking via the penis. There was first of all the binomial theorem, a phrase which had always puzzled me: I put it under the magnifying glass and studied it from X to Z. There was Logos, which somehow I had always identified with breath: I found that on the contrary it was a sort of obsessional stasis, a machine which went on grinding corn long after the granaries had been filled and the Jews driven out of Egypt. There was Bucephalus, more fascinating to me perhaps than any word in my whole vocabulary: I would trot it out whenever I was in a quandary, and with it of course Alexander and his entire purple retinue. What a horse! Sired in the Indian Ocean, the last of the line, and never once mated, except to the Queen of the Amazons during the Mesopotamian adventure. There was the Scotch Gambit! An amazing expression which had nothing to do with chess. It came to me always in the shape of a man on stilts, page 2,498 of Funk and Wagnall’s Unabridged Dictionary. A gambit was a sort of leap in the dark with mechanical legs. A leap for no purpose—hence gambit! Clear as a bell and perfectly simple, once you grasped it. Then there was Andromeda, and the Gorgon Medusa, and Castor and Pollux of heavenly origin, mythological twins, eternally fixed in the ephemeral stardust. There was lucubration, a word distinctly sexual and yet suggesting such cerebral connotations as to make me uneasy. Always “midnight lucubrations,” the midnight being ominously significant. And then arras. Somebody some time or other had been stabbed “behind the arras.” I saw an altar cloth made of asbestos and in it was a grievous rent such as Caesar himself might have made. It was very quiet thinking, as I say, the kind that the men of the Old Stone Age must have indulged in. Things were neither absurd nor explicable.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “All right, I’m not a slave. With me it’s more a matter of love.” She was just barely aware that she was pitching her voice higher and softer than it was naturally, so that she sounded like a cartoon girl. “It’s like the highest form of love.” He thought this was really cute. Sure it was nauseating, but it was feminine in a radio-song kind of way. “You don’t seem interested in love. It’s not about that for you.” “That’s not true. That’s not true at all. Why do you think I was so rough back there? Deep down, I’m afraid I’ll fall in love with you, that I’ll need to be with you and fuck you…forever.” He was enjoying himself now. He was beginning to see her as a locked garden that he could sneak into and sit in for days, tearing the heads off the flowers. On one hand, she was beside herself with bliss. On the other, she was scrutinizing him carefully from behind an opaque facade as he entered her pasteboard scene of flora and fauna. Could he function as a character in this landscape? She imagined sitting across from him in a Japanese restaurant, talking about anything. He would look intently into her eyes…. He saw her apartment and then his. He saw them existing a nice distance apart, each of them blocked off by cleanly cut boundaries. Her apartment bloomed with scenes that spiraled toward him in colorful circular motions and then froze suddenly and clearly in place. She was crawling blindfolded across the floor. She was bound and naked in an S&M bar. She was sitting next to him in a taxi, her skirt pulled up, his fingers in her vagina. …and then they would go back to her apartment. He would beat her and fuck her mouth. Then he would go home to his wife, and she would make dinner for him. It was so well balanced, the mere contemplation of it gave him pleasure. The next day he would send her flowers. He let go of the wheel with one hand and patted her head. She gripped his shirt frantically. He thought: This could work out fine. Something Nice“What’s your name, sir?” The freckled woman wore green stretch pants, and had her red hair tucked under a neat pink scarf. “Fred?” She was making her naturally coarse voice go soft and moist as warm mayonnaise. “I’d like you to meet my girlfriends, Fred.” The four girls stared at him. Two sat up and smiled, holding their purses with tight fingers, their legs pinched together at the knees. A beautiful black-haired girl, with jutting cheekbones and a lush, full mouth, lolled in an orange beanbag chair, her long legs sprawled rudely on the floor, half open and tenting her tight silk dress so you could almost see between her legs. She gawked at him with open disgust.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Cousin Abercrombie was so bewildered by it all that she let a tremendous fart and out tumbled the carrot. At least, that’s how Curley related it to me. He was an outrageous liar, to be sure, and there may not be a grain of truth in the yarn, but there’s no denying that he had a flair for such tricks. As for Miss Abercrombie and her high-tone Narragansett ways, well, with a cunt like that one can always imagine the worst. By comparison Hymie was a purist. Somehow Hymie and his fat circumcised dick were two different things. When he got a personal hard on, as he said, he really meant that he was irresponsible. He meant that Nature was asserting itself—through his, Hymie Laubscher’s, fat circumcised dick. It was the same with his wife’s cunt. It was something she wore between her legs, like an ornament. It was a part of Mrs. Laubscher but it wasn’t Mrs. Laubscher personally, if you get what I mean. Well, all this is simply by way of leading up to the general sexual confusion which prevailed at this time. It was like taking a flat in the Land of Fuck. The girl upstairs, for instance . . . she used to come down now and then, when the wife was giving a recital, to look after the kid. She was so obviously a simpleton that I didn’t give her any notice at first. But like all the others she had a cunt too, a sort of impersonal personal cunt which she was unconsciously conscious of. The oftener she came down the more conscious she got, in her unconscious way. One night, when she was in the bathroom, after she had been in there a suspiciously long while, she got me to thinking of things. I decided to take a peep through the keyhole and see for myself what was what. Lo and behold, if she isn’t standing in front of the mirror stroking and petting her little pussy. Almost talking to it, she was. I was so excited I didn’t know what to do first. I went back into the big room, turned out the lights, and lay there on the couch waiting for her to come out. As I lay there I could still see that bushy cunt of hers and the fingers strumming it like. I opened my fly to let my pecker twitch about in the cool of the dark. I tried to mesmerize her from the couch, or at least I tried letting my pecker mesmerize her. “Come here, you bitch,” I kept saying to myself, “come in here and spread that cunt over me.” She must have caught the message immediately, for in a jiffy she had opened the door and was groping about in the dark to find the couch. I didn’t say a word, I didn’t make a move. I just kept my mind riveted on her cunt moving quietly in the dark like a crab.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He has let me overwhelm him. He has constantly feared to disappoint me. He has exaggerated my expectations. He has worried about how long and how much I would love him. He has let thinking interfere with our happiness. Henry, you love your little whores because you are superior to them. You really have refused to meet a woman on your own level. You were surprised how much I could love without judging, adoring you as no whore ever adored. Well, then, are you no happier to be adored by me, and doesn’t it make you infinitely superior? Do all men shrink before the more difficult love? For Henry, everything is flowing as before. He did not observe my hesitation when he suggested we go to the Hotel Cronstadt. Our hour seemed just as rich as ever, and he was so adoring. Yet I had the feeling of making an effort to love him. Perhaps he has just frightened me. I expected him to be impotent again. I didn’t have the same wild confidence. Tenderness, yes. The cursed tenderness. I recaptured my happiness, but it was a cold happiness. I felt detached. We got drunk, and then we were very happy. But I was thinking of June. Driving home after much white wine: Fourth of July fireworks bursting from the tops of street lamps. I am swallowing the asphalt road with a jungle roar, swallowing the houses with closed eyes and geranium eyelashes, swallowing telegraph poles and messages téléphoniques , stray cats, trees, hills, bridges. . . . I mailed my surrealistic piece to Henry, adding, “Things I forgot to tell you: That I love you, and that when I awake in the morning I use my intelligence to discover more ways of appreciating you. That when June comes back she will love you more because I have loved you. There are new leaves on the tip of your already overrich head.” I feel the need of telling him I love him because I do not believe it. Why has Henry become to me little Henry, almost a child? I understand June’s leaving him and saying, “I love Henry like my own child.” Henry, who, before, was a gigantic menace, a terrorizer. It cannot be! Cabaret Rumba. Hugo and I are dancing together. He is so much taller than I that my face nestles under his chin, against his chest. An inordinately handsome Spaniard (a professional dancer) has been looking at me like a hypnotist. He smiles at me over the head of his partner. I answer his smile, I stare into his eyes. I drink in their message. I answer with the same mixture of sensual enjoyment and amusement. His smile is lightly sketched on his face. I experience such acute pleasure to be communicating with this man while nestled in Hugo’s arms. I am planning, as I smile at him, to return to the place and to dance with him.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I gave myself to that moment with frenzy. I think I am losing my mind, for the feelings it aroused in me haunt me, possess me every moment, and I crave more and more of Henry. I come home. Hugo reads the paper. The tenderness, the smallness, the colorlessness of it all. But I have Henry, and I think of what he said, wildly, while he was coming. I think how I have never been as natural as I am now, have never lived out my true instincts. I didn’t care today that Fred saw my madness. I wanted to face the world, shout to the world: “I love Henry.” I don’t know why I trust him so much, why I want to give him everything tonight—truth, my journal, my life. I even wished that June might suddenly announce her arrival so as to feel the pain the loss of Henry would give me. I went to have a massage. The masseuse was small and pretty. She wore a bathing suit. I saw her breasts when she leaned over me, small but full. I felt her hands over my body, her mouth near mine. One moment my head was near her legs. I could easily have kissed them. I was stirred madly. Immediately I was aware of the frustration of my desire. What I could do did not seem satisfying enough. Would I kiss her? I felt she was not a lesbian. I sensed that she would humiliate me. The moment passed. But what a half hour of exquisite torture! What torture to want to be man! I was amazed at myself, aware of the nature of my feelings for June. And only yesterday I was criticizing the vice of what Hugo and I call collective sexuality, depersonalized, unselective, which I now understand. To Henry: “Persecutions have begun—they are all pained, injured, that I should defend [D. H.] Lawrence. They look sadly at me. I look forward with impatience to the day when I can defend your writing, as you defended Bunuel. “I am glad I didn’t blush before Fred. That day was the high peak of my love, Henry. I wanted to shout: ‘Today I love Henry.’ Perhaps you wish I had pretended casualness, I don’t know. Write to me. I need your letters, as a human assertion of reality. One man I know wants to frighten me. When I talk about you he says, ‘He cannot appreciate you.’ He is wrong.” To Henry: “This is strange, Henry. Before, as soon as I came home from all kinds of places, I would sit down and write in my journal. Now I want to write to you, talk with you.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  He was so full of knowledge, the old buzzard, that one day—I suppose purely to amuse himself—he built a bridge which no living mortal could ever cross. He called it the Pons Asinorum because he was the owner of a pair of beautiful white donkeys, and so attached was he to these donkeys that he would let nobody take possession of them. And so he conjured a dream in which he, the blind man, would one day lead the donkeys over the bridge and into the happy hunting grounds for donkeys. Well, Veronica was very much in the same boat. She thought so much of her beautiful white ass that she wouldn’t part with it for anything. She wanted to take it with her to Paradise when the time came. As for her cunt—which by the way she never referred to at all—as for her cunt, I say, well that was just an accessory to be brought along. In the dim light of the vestibule, without ever referring overtly to her two problems, she somehow made you uncomfortably aware of them. That is, she made you aware in the manner of a prestidigitator. You were to take a look or a feel only to be finally deceived, only to be shown that you had not seen and had not felt. It was a very subtle sexual algebra, the midnight lucubration which would earn you an A or a B next day, but nothing more. You passed your examinations, you got your diploma, and then you were turned loose. In the meantime you used your ass to sit down and your cunt to make water with. Between the textbook and the lavatory there was an intermediate zone which you were never to enter because it was labeled fuck. You might diddle and piddle, but you might not fuck. The light was never completely shut off, the sun never streamed in. Always just light or dark enough to distinguish a bat. And just that little eerie flicker of light was what kept the mind alert, on the lookout, as it were, for bags, pencils, buttons, keys, et cetera. You couldn’t really think because your mind was already engaged. The mind was kept in readiness, like a vacant seat at the theater on which the owner has left his opera hat. Veronica, as I say, had a talking cunt, which was bad because its sole function seemed to be to talk one out of a fuck. Evelyn, on the other hand, had a laughing cunt. She lived upstairs too, only in another house. She was always trotting in at mealtimes to tell us a new joke. A comedienne of the first water, the only really funny woman I ever met in my life. Everything was a joke, fuck included. She could even make a stiff prick laugh, which is saying a good deal. They say a stiff prick has no conscience, but a stiff prick that laughs too is phenomenal.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  My mom threw herself into that scene. She was always out at some club, some party, dancing, meeting people. She was a regular at the Hillbrow Tower, one of the tallest buildings in Africa at that time. It had a nightclub with a rotating dance floor on the top floor. It was an exhilarating time but still dangerous. Sometimes the restaurants and clubs would get shut down, sometimes not. Sometimes the performers and patrons would get arrested, sometimes not. It was a roll of the dice. My mother never knew whom to trust, who might turn her in to the police. Neighbors would report on one another. The girlfriends of the white men in my mom’s block of flats had every reason to report a black woman—a prostitute, no doubt—living among them. And you must remember that black people worked for the government as well. As far as her white neighbors knew, my mom could have been a spy posing as a prostitute posing as a maid, sent into Hillbrow to inform on whites who were breaking the law. That’s how a police state works—everyone thinks everyone else is the police. Living alone in the city, not being trusted and not being able to trust, my mother started spending more and more time in the company of someone with whom she felt safe: the tall Swiss man down the corridor in 206. He was forty-six. She was twenty-four. He was quiet and reserved; she was wild and free. She would stop by his flat to chat; they’d go to underground get-togethers, go dancing at the nightclub with the rotating dance floor. Something clicked. I know that there was a genuine bond and a love between my parents. I saw it. But how romantic their relationship was, to what extent they were just friends, I can’t say. These are things a child doesn’t ask. All I do know is that one day she made her proposal. “I want to have a kid,” she told him. “I don’t want kids,” he said. “I didn’t ask you to have a kid. I asked you to help me to have my kid. I just want the sperm from you.” “I’m Catholic,” he said. “We don’t do such things.” “You do know,” she replied, “that I could sleep with you and go away and you would never know if you had a child or not. But I don’t want that. Honor me with your yes so that I can live peacefully. I want a child of my own, and I want it from you. You will be able to see it as much as you like, but you will have no obligations. You don’t have to talk to it. You don’t have to pay for it. Just make this child for me.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “No, it’s okay, that’s good enough.” She sat on the bed and stared at him, her small face gone suddenly grave. Her eyes were round and dark. Her muddy black makeup looked as if it had been finger-painted on. He sat down next to her and put his hand on her thigh. She ignored it. He felt as though he was bothering a girl sitting next to him on a bus. His hand sweated on her leg and he took it away. What was wrong? Why wasn’t she pulling her dress off over her head, the way they usually did? “Do you come to places like this often?” she asked. “Not too much. Every month or so. I’m married, so it’s hard to get away.” She looked worried. She reached out with nervous quickness and picked up his hand. “What do people do now, mostly?” she asked. “What do you mean?” “I mean I’m new here. You’re only my second customer and I don’t know what I should do. Well, I know what to do, basically, but there’s all these little things, like when to take off the dress.” He felt a foolish smile running over his face. Her second customer! “But you’ve worked before.” “You mean done this before? No, I haven’t.” He looked at her, beaming greedily. “What do you do for a living?” she asked. “I’m an attorney,” he said. “Corporate law.” He was lying. He felt cut loose from himself, unmarried, un-old, because of the lie. “How old are you?” “How old do you think I am?” She smiled, and her black eye paint coiled like a snake in the corners of her eyes. “Fifty?” “You’re exactly right.” He was fifty-nine. “How about you?” “Twenty-two.” She looked as though she could be that age, but he had a strong feeling that she was lying too. “Why do you come to places like this?” She lay across the bed, her head on her hand, her legs folded restfully. “Do you not get along with your wife?” He leaned against the headboard, his naked legs open. “Oh, I love my wife. It’s a very successful marriage. And we have sex, good sex. But it’s not everything I want. She’s willing to experiment, a little, but she’s really not all that interested. It can make you feel foolish to be doing something when you know your partner isn’t an equal participant. Besides, this is an adventure for me. Something nice.” “Is it something nice?” “With you it’s going to be very nice.” “How do you know?” “What a strange question.” She crossed the bed to adjust her body against his, to put her head on his shoulder. She stroked his chest hair. “It’s not so strange.” “Well, I just know, that’s all.” They kissed. She had a harsh, stubborn kiss.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  She had the gift for transformation; almost as quick and subtle she was as the devil himself. Next to the panther and the jaguar she did the bird stuff best: the wild heron, the ibis, the flamingo, the swan in rut. She had a way of swooping suddenly, as if she had spotted a ripe carcass, diving right into the bowels, pouncing immediately on the tidbits—the heart, the liver, or the ovaries—and making off again in the twinkling of an eye. Did someone spot her, she would lie stone quiet at the base of a tree, her eyes not quite closed but immovable in that fixed stare of the basilisk. Prod her a bit and she would become a rose, a deep black rose with the most velvety petals and of a fragrance that was overpowering. It was amazing how marvelously I learned to take my cue; no matter how swift the metamorphosis I was always there in her lap, bird lap, beast lap, snake lap, rose lap, what matter: the lap of laps, the lip of lips, tip to tip, feather to feather, the yoke in the egg, the pearl in the oyster, a cancer clutch, a tincture of sperm and cantharides. Life was Scorpio conjunction Mars, conjunction Venus, Saturn, Uranus, et cetera; love was conjunctivitis of the mandibles, clutch this, clutch that, clutch, clutch, the mandibular clutch-clutch of the mandala wheel of lust. Come food time I could already hear her peeling the eggs, and inside the egg cheep-cheep, blessed omen of the next meal to come. I ate like a monomaniac: the prolonged dreamlit voracity of the man who is thrice breaking his fast. And as I ate she purred, the rhythmic predatory wheeze of the succubus devouring her young. What a blissful night of love! Saliva, sperm, succubation, sphincteritis all in one: the conjugal orgy in the Black Hole of Calcutta. Out there where the black star hung, a Pan-Islamic silence, as in the cavern world where even the wind is stilled. Out there, did I dare to brood on it, the spectral quietude of insanity, the world of men lulled, exhausted by centuries of incessant slaughter. Out there one gory encompassing membrane within which all activity took place, the hero-world of lunatics and maniacs who had quenched the light of the heavens with blood. How peaceful our little dove-and-vulture life in the dark! Flesh to bury in with teeth or penis, abundant odorous flesh with no mark of knife or scissors, no scar of exploded shrapnel, no mustard burns, no scalded lungs. Save for the hallucinating hole in the ceiling, an almost perfect womb life. But the hole was there—like a fissure in the bladder—and no wadding could plug it permanently, no urination could pass off with a smile. Piss large and freely, aye, but how forget the rent in the belfry, the silence unnatural, the imminence, the terror, the doom of the “other” world?

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I believe everything you tell me, but I know also that it will all turn out differently. I take you as a star and a trap, as a stone to tip the scales, as a judge that is blindfolded, as a hole to fall into, as a path to walk, as a cross and an arrow. Up to the present I traveled the opposite way of the sun; henceforth I travel two ways, as sun and as moon. Henceforth I take on two sexes, two hemispheres, two skies, two sets of everything. Henceforth I shall be double-jointed and double-sexed. Everything that happens will happen twice. I shall be as a visitor to this earth, partaking of its blessings and carrying off its gifts. I shall neither serve nor be served. I shall seek the end in myself. I look out again at the sun—my first full gaze. It is blood-red and men are walking about on the rooftops. Everything above the horizon is clear to me. It is like Easter Sunday. Death is behind me and birth too. I am going to live now among the life maladies. I am going to live the spiritual life of the pygmy, the secret life of the little man in the wilderness of the bush. Inner and outer have changed places. Equilibrium is no longer the goal—the scales must be destroyed. Let me hear you promise again all those sunny things you carry inside you. Let me try to believe for one day, while I rest in the open, that the sun brings good tidings. Let me rot in splendor while the sun bursts in your womb. I believe all your lies implicitly. I take you as the personification of evil, as the destroyer of the soul, as the maharanee of the night. Tack your womb up on my wall, so that I may remember you. We must get going. Tomorrow, tomorrow. . . . September, 1938 Villa Seurat, Paris

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I knew her quite well because I was giving her lessons for a time, and I used to do my damnedest to make her admit that she had a normal cunt and that she’d enjoy a good fuck if she could get it now and then. I used to tell her wild stories, which were really thinly disguised accounts of her own doings, and yet she remained adamant. I had even gotten her to the point one day—and this beats everything—where she let me put my finger inside her. I thought sure it was settled. It’s true she was dry and a bit tight, but I put that down to her hysteria. But imagine getting that far with a cunt and then having her say to your face, as she yanks her dress down violently—“you see, I told you I wasn’t built right!” “I don’t see anything of the kind,” I said angrily. “What do you expect me to do— use a microscope on you?” “I like that,” she said, pretending to get on her high horse. “What a way of talking to me!” “You know damned well you’re lying,” I continued. “Why do you lie like that? Don’t you think it’s human to have a cunt and to use it once in a while? Do you want it to dry up on you?” “Such language!” she said, biting her underlip and reddening like a beet. “I always thought you were a gentleman.” “Well, you’re no lady,” I retorted, “because even a lady admits to a fuck now and then, and besides ladies don’t ask gentlemen to stick their fingers up inside them and see how small they’re built.” “I never asked you to touch me,” she said. “I wouldn’t think of asking you to put your hand on me, on my private parts anyway.” “Maybe you thought I was going to swab your ear for you, is that it?’ “I thought of you like a doctor at that moment, that’s all I can say,” she said stiffly, trying to freeze me out. “Listen,” I said, taking a wild chance, “let’s pretend that it was all a mistake, that nothing happened, nothing at all. I know you too well to think of insulting you like that. I wouldn’t think of doing a thing like that to you—no, damned if I would. I was just wondering if maybe you weren’t right in what you said, if maybe you aren’t built rather small. You know, it all went so quick I couldn’t tell what I felt . . . I don’t think I even put my finger inside you. I must have just touched the outside—that’s about all. Listen, sit down here on the couch . . . let’s be friends again.” I pulled her down beside me—she was melting visibly—and I put my arm around her waist, as though to console her more tenderly. “Has it always been like that?”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Eat a bellyful, aye, and tomorrow another bellyful, and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow—but finally, what then? Finally! What was finally? A change of ventriloquist, a change of lap, a shift in the axis, another rift in the vault . . . what? what? I’ll tell you—sitting in her lap, petrified by the still, pronged beams of the black star, horned, snaffled, hitched and trepanned by the telepathic acuity of our interacting agitation, I thought of nothing at all, nothing that was outside the cell we inhabited, not even the thought of a crumb on a white tablecloth. I thought purely within the walls of our amoebic life, the pure thought such as Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant gave us and which only a ventriloquist’s dummy could reproduce. I thought out every theory of science, every theory of art, every grain of truth in every cockeyed system of salvation. I calculated everything out to a pinpoint with gnostic decimals to boot, like primes which a drunk hands out at the finish of a six-day race. But everything was calculated for another life which somebody else would live some day—perhaps. We were at the very neck of the bottle, her and I, as they say, but the neck of the bottle had been broken off and the bottle was only a fiction. I remember how the second time I met her she told me that she had never expected to see me again, and the next time I saw her she said she thought I was a dope fiend, and the next time she called me a god, and after that she tried to commit suicide and then I tried and then she tried again, and nothing worked except to bring us closer together, so close indeed that we interpenetrated, exchanged personalities, name, identity, religion, father, mother, brother. Even her body went through a radical change, not once but several times. At first she was big and velvety, like the jaguar, with that silky, deceptive strength of the feline species, the crouch, the spring, the pounce; then she grew emaciated, fragile, delicate, almost like a cornflower, and with each change thereafter she went through the subtlest modulations—of skin, muscle, color, posture, odor, gait, gesture, et cetera. She changed like a chameleon. Nobody could say what she really was like because with each one she was an entirely different person. After a time she didn’t even know herself what she was like. She had begun this process of metamorphosis before I met her, as I later discovered. Like so many women who think themselves ugly she had willed to make herself beautiful, dazzlingly beautiful. To do this she first of all renounced her name, then her family, her friends, everything which might attach her to the past. With all her wits and faculties she devoted herself to the cultivation of her beauty, of her charm, which she already possessed to a high degree but which she had been made to believe were nonexistent.

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

  Reply to Objection 5: Parish priests and archdeacons are more like bishops than religious are, in a certain respect, namely as regards the cure of souls which they have subordinately; but as regards the obligation in perpetuity, religious are more like a bishop, as appears from what we have said above ([3769]AA[5],6). Reply to Objection 6: The difficulty that arises from the arduousness of the deed adds to the perfection of virtue; but the difficulty that results from outward obstacles sometimes lessens the perfection of virtue—for instance, when a man loves not virtue so much as to wish to avoid the obstacles to virtue, according to the saying of the Apostle (1 Cor. 9:25), “Everyone that striveth for the mastery refraineth himself from all things”: and sometimes it is a sign of perfect virtue—for instance, when a man forsakes not virtue, although he is hindered in the practice of virtue unawares or by some unavoidable cause. In the religious state there is greater difficulty arising from the arduousness of deeds; whereas for those who in any way at all live in the world, there is greater difficulty resulting from obstacles to virtue, which obstacles the religious has had the foresight to avoid. OF THINGS PERTAINING TO THE EPISCOPAL STATE (EIGHT ARTICLES)We must now consider things pertaining to the episcopal state. Under this head there are eight points of inquiry: (1) Whether it is lawful to desire the office of a bishop? (2) Whether it is lawful to refuse the office of bishop definitively? (3) Whether the better man should be chosen for the episcopal office? (4) Whether a bishop may pass over to the religious state? (5) Whether he may lawfully abandon his subjects in a bodily manner? (6) Whether he can have anything of his own? (7) Whether he sins mortally by not distributing ecclesiastical goods to the poor? (8) Whether religious who are appointed to the episcopal office are bound to religious observances? Whether it is lawful to desire the office of a bishop?Objection 1: It would seem that it is lawful to desire the office of a bishop. For the Apostle says (1 Tim. 3:1): “He that desires [Vulg.: ‘If a man desire’] the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work.” Now it is lawful and praiseworthy to desire a good work. Therefore it is even praiseworthy to desire the office of a bishop. Objection 2: Further, the episcopal state is more perfect than the religious, as we have said above ([3770]Q[184], A[7]). But it is praiseworthy to desire to enter the religious state. Therefore it is also praiseworthy to desire promotion to the episcopal state.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Finally she was standing beside the couch. She didn’t say a word either. She just stood there quietly and as I slid my hand up her legs she moved one foot a little to open her crotch a bit more. I don’t think I ever put my hand into such a juicy crotch in all my life. It was like paste running down her legs, and if there had been any billboards handy I could have plastered up a dozen or more. After a few moments, just as naturally as a cow lowering its head to graze, she bent over and put it in her mouth. I had my whole four fingers inside her, whipping it up to a froth. Her mouth was stuffed full and the juice pouring down her legs. Not a word out of us, as I say. Just a couple of quiet maniacs working away in the dark like gravediggers. It was a fucking Paradise and I knew it, and I was ready and willing to fuck my brains away if necessary. She was probably the best fuck I ever had. She never once opened her trap—not that night, nor the next night, nor any night. She’d steal down like that in the dark, soon as she smelled me there alone, and plaster her cunt all over me. It was an enormous cunt, too, when I think back on it. A dark, subterranean labyrinth fitted up with divans and cosy corners and rubber teeth and syringas and soft nestles and eiderdown and mulberry leaves. I used to nose in like the solitary worm and bury myself in a little cranny where it was absolutely silent, and so soft and restful that I lay like a dolphin on the oyster banks. A slight twitch and I’d be in the Pullman reading a newspaper or else up an impasse where there were mossy round cobblestones and little wicker gates which opened and shut automatically. Sometimes it was like riding the shoot-the-shoots, a steep plunge and then a spray of tingling sea crabs, the bulrushes swaying feverishly and the gills of tiny fishes lapping against me like harmonica stops. In the immense black grotto there was a silk-and-soap organ playing a predaceous black music. When she pitched herself high, when she turned the juice on full, it made a violaceous purple, a deep mulberry stain like twilight, a ventriloqual twilight such as dwarfs and cretins enjoy when they menstruate. It made me think of cannibals chewing flowers, of Bantus running amuck, of wild unicorns rutting in rhododendron beds. Everything was anonymous and unformulated, John Doe and his wife Emmy Doe; above us the gas tanks and below the marine life. Above the belt, as I say, she was batty. Yes, absolutely cuckoo, though still abroad and afloat. Perhaps that was what made her cunt so marvelously impersonal.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  And when the stairs stop squeaking I gently open the door and sally out, and then by God I have a real fright because if that black buck ever finds out I’ll have my throat slit and no mistake about it. And so I stop giving lessons at that joint, but soon the daughter is after me—just turning sixteen—and won’t I come and give her lessons at a friend’s house? We begin the Czerny exercises all over again, sparks and everything. It’s the first smell of fresh cunt I’ve had, and it’s wonderful, like newmown hay. We fuck our way through one lesson after another and in between lessons we do a little extra fucking. And then one day it’s the sad story—she’s knocked up and what to do about it? I have to get a Jewboy to help me out, and he wants twenty-five bucks for the job and I’ve never seen twenty-five bucks in my life. Besides, she’s under age. Besides, she might have blood poisoning. I give him five bucks on account and beat it to the Adirondacks for a couple of weeks. In the Adirondacks I meet a schoolteacher who’s dying to take lessons. More velocity exercises, more condoms and conundrums. Every time I touched the piano I seemed to shake a cunt loose. If there was a party I had to bring the fucking music roll along; to me it was just like wrapping my penis in a handkerchief and slinging it under my arm. In vacation time, at a farmhouse or an inn, where there was always a surplus of cunt, the music had an extraordinary effect. Vacation time was a period I looked forward to the whole year, not because of the cunts so much as because it meant no work. Once out of harness I became a clown. I was so chock-full of energy that I wanted to jump out of my skin. I remember one summer in the Catskills meeting a girl named Francie. She was beautiful and lascivious, with strong Scotch teats and a row of white even teeth that was dazzling. It began in the river where we were swimming. We were holding on to the boat and one of her boobies had slipped out of bounds. I slipped the other one out for her and then I undid the shoulder straps. She ducked under the boat coyly and I followed and as she was coming up for air I wiggled the bloody bathing suit off her and there she was floating like a mermaid with her big strong teats bobbing up and down like bloated corks. I wriggled out of my tights and we began playing like dolphins under the side of the boat. In a little while her girl friend came along in a canoe. She was a rather hefty girl, a sort of strawberry blonde with agate-colored eyes and full of freckles.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Or as God would look to man if the devil had given him wings. And with it all, in the fixed, close intimacy of a night without end she was radiant, jubilant, an ultra-black jubilation streaming from her like a steady flow of sperm from the Mithraic Bull. She was double barreled, like a shotgun, a female bull with an acetylene torch in her womb. In heat she focused on the grand cosmocrator, her eyes rolled back to the whites, her lips a-slaver. In the blind hole of sex she waltzed like a trained mouse, her jaws unhinged like a snake’s, her skin horripilating in barbed plumes. She had the insatiable lust of a unicorn, the itch that laid the Egyptians low. Even the hole in the sky through which the lackluster star shone down was swallowed up in her fury. We lived glued to the ceiling, the hot rancid fumes of the everyday life steaming up and suffocating us. We lived at marble heat, the ascending glow of human flesh warming the snakelike coils in which we were locked. We lived riveted to the nethermost depths, our skins smoked to the color of a gray cigar by the fumes of worldly passion. Like two heads carried on the pikes of our executioners we circled slowly and fixedly over the heads and shoulders of the world below. What was life on the solid earth to us who were decapitated and forever joined at the genitals? We were the twin snakes of Paradise, lucid in heat and cool as chaos itself. Life was a perpetual black fuck about a fixed pole of insomnia. Life was Scorpio conjunction Mars, conjunction Mercury, conjunction Venus, conjunction Saturn, conjunction Pluto, conjunction Uranus, conjunction quicksilver, laudanum, radium, bismuth. The grand conjunction was every Saturday night, Leo fornicating with Draco in the house of brother and sister. The great malheur was a ray of sunlight stealing through the curtains. The great curse was Jupiter, king of the fishes, that he might flash a benevolent eye. The reason why it is difficult to tell it is because I remember too much. I remember everything, but like a dummy sitting on the lap of a ventriloquist. It seems to me that throughout the long, uninterrupted connubial solstice I sat on her lap (even when she was standing) and spoke the lines she had taught me. It seems to me that she must have commanded God’s chief plumber to keep the black star shining through the hole in the ceiling, must have bid him to rain down perpetual night and with it all the crawling torments that move noiselessly about in the dark so that the mind becomes a twirling awl burrowing frantically into black nothingness. Did I only imagine that she talked incessantly, or had I become such a marvelously trained dummy that I intercepted the thought before it reached the lips?

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The lips were finely parted, smoothed down with a thick paste of dark blood; I watched them open and close with the utmost fascination, whether they hissed a viper’s hate or cooed like a turtle dove. They were always close up, as in the movie stills, so that I knew every crevice, every pore, and when the hysterical slavering began I watched the spittle fume and foam as though I were sitting in a rocking chair under Niagara Falls. I learned what to do just as though I were a part of her organism; I was better than a ventriloquist’s dummy because I could act without being violently jerked by strings. Now and then I did things impromptu like, which sometimes pleased her enormously; she would pretend, of course, not to notice these irruptions, but I could always tell when she was pleased by the way she preened herself. She had the gift for transformation; almost as quick and subtle she was as the devil himself. Next to the panther and the jaguar she did the bird stuff best: the wild heron, the ibis, the flamingo, the swan in rut. She had a way of swooping suddenly, as if she had spotted a ripe carcass, diving right into the bowels, pouncing immediately on the tidbits—the heart, the liver, or the ovaries—and making off again in the twinkling of an eye. Did someone spot her, she would lie stone quiet at the base of a tree, her eyes not quite closed but immovable in that fixed stare of the basilisk. Prod her a bit and she would become a rose, a deep black rose with the most velvety petals and of a fragrance that was overpowering. It was amazing how marvelously I learned to take my cue; no matter how swift the metamorphosis I was always there in her lap, bird lap, beast lap, snake lap, rose lap, what matter: the lap of laps, the lip of lips, tip to tip, feather to feather, the yoke in the egg, the pearl in the oyster, a cancer clutch, a tincture of sperm and cantharides. Life was Scorpio conjunction Mars, conjunction Venus, Saturn, Uranus, et cetera; love was conjunctivitis of the mandibles, clutch this, clutch that, clutch, clutch, the mandibular clutch-clutch of the mandala wheel of lust. Come food time I could already hear her peeling the eggs, and inside the egg cheep-cheep , blessed omen of the next meal to come. I ate like a monomaniac: the prolonged dreamlit voracity of the man who is thrice breaking his fast. And as I ate she purred, the rhythmic predatory wheeze of the succubus devouring her young. What a blissful night of love! Saliva, sperm, succubation, sphincteritis all in one: the conjugal orgy in the Black Hole of Calcutta. Out there where the black star hung, a Pan-Islamic silence, as in the cavern world where even the wind is stilled.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  There are cunts which laugh and cunts which talk; there are crazy, hysterical cunts shaped like ocarinas and there are planturous, seismographic cunts which register the rise and fall of sap; there are cannibalistic cunts which open wide like the jaws of the whale and swallow alive; there are also masochistic cunts which close up like the oyster and have hard shells and perhaps a pearl or two inside; there are dithyrambic cunts which dance at the very approach of the penis and go wet all over in ecstasy; there are the porcupine cunts which unleash their quills and wave little flags at Christmas time; there are telegraphic cunts which practice the Morse code and leave the mind full of dots and dashes; there are the political cunts which are saturated with ideology and which deny even the menopause; there are vegetative cunts which make no response unless you pull them up by the roots; there are the religious cunts which smell like Seventh Day Adventists and are full of beads, worms, clamshells, sheep droppings and now and then dried bread crumbs; there are the mammalian cunts which are lined with otter skin and hibernate during the long winter; there are cruising cunts fitted out like yachts, which are good for solitaries and epileptics; there are glacial cunts in which you can drop shooting stars without causing a flicker; there are miscellaneous cunts which defy category or description, which you stumble on once in a lifetime and which leave you seared and branded; there are cunts made of pure joy which have neither name nor antecedent and these are the best of all, but whither have they flown? And then there is the one cunt which is all, and this we shall call the super-cunt, since it is not of this land at all but of that bright country to which we were long ago invited to fly. Here the dew is ever sparkling and the tall reeds bend with the wind. It is here that the great father of fornication dwells, Father Apis, the mantic bull who gored his way to heaven and dethroned the gelded deities of right and wrong. From Apis sprang the race of unicorns, that ridiculous beast of ancient writ whose learned brow lengthened into a gleaming phallus, and from the unicorn by gradual stages was derived the late-city man of which Oswald Spengler speaks. And from the dead cock of this sad specimen arose the giant skyscraper with its express elevators and observation towers. We are the last decimal point of sexual calculation; the world turns like a rotten egg in its crate of straw. Now for the aluminum wings with which to fly to that far-off place, the bright country where Apis, the father of fornication, dwells. Everything goes forward like oiled clocks; for each minute of the dial there are a million noiseless clocks which tick off the rinds of time.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Maybe we wouldn’t even have to buy her a drink, just haul up somewhere on a side road and go at it, one after the other, in the car. And if she was an emptyheaded bimbo, as they usually were, he wouldn’t even bother to drive her home. “We’re not going that way,” he’d say, the bastard that he was. “You’d better jump out here,” and with that he’d open the door and out with her. His next thought was, of course, was she clean? That would occupy his mind all the way back. “Jesus, we ought to be more careful,” he’d say. “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into picking them up like that. Ever since that last one—you remember, the one we picked up on the Drive—I’ve been itchy as hell. Maybe it’s just nervousness . . . I think about it too much. Why can’t a guy stick to one cunt, tell me that, Henry. You take Trix, now, she’s a good kid, you know that. And I like her too, in a way, but. . . shit, what’s the use of talking about it? You know me—I’m a glutton. You know, I’m getting so bad that sometimes when I’m on my way to a date—mind you, with a girl I want to fuck, and everything fixed too—as I say, sometimes I’m rolling along and maybe out of the corner of my eye I catch a flash of a leg crossing the street and before I know it I’ve got her in the car and the hell with the other girl. I must be cuntstruck, I guess . . . what do you think? Don’t tell me,” he would add quickly. “I know you, you bugger . . . you’ll be sure to tell me the worst.” And then, after a pause—“you’re a funny guy, do you know that? I never notice you refusing anything, but somehow you don’t seem to be worrying about it all the time. Sometimes you strike me as though you didn’t give a damn one way or the other. And you’re a steady bastard too—almost a monogamist, I’d say. How you can keep it up so long with one woman beats me. Don’t you get bored with them? Jesus, I know so well what they’re going to say. Sometimes I feel like saying . . . you know, just breeze in on ’em and say: ‘Listen, kid, don’t say a word . . . just fish it out and open your legs wide.’ ” He laughed heartily. “Can you imagine the expression on Trix’s face if I pulled a line like that on her? I’ll tell you, once I came pretty near doing it. I kept my hat and coat on. Was she sore! She didn’t mind my keeping my coat on so much, but the hat! I told her I was afraid of a draught . . . of course there wasn’t any draught.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Had she checked it or had she left it on a siding? No doubt she was cursing me out roundly. I wondered what she would really think if she could have imagined me sitting there at the dock with my legs dangling over the stringpiece. It was warm and sultry despite the breeze that was blowing off the river. I began to snooze. As I dozed off Pauline came to my mind. I imagined her walking along the highway with her hand up. She was a brave kid, no doubt about it. Funny that she didn’t seem to worry about getting knocked up. Maybe she was so desperate she didn’t care. And Balzac! That too was highly incongruous. Why Balzac? Well, that was her affair. Anyway she’d have enough to eat with, until she met another guy. But a kid like that thinking about becoming a writer! Well, why not? Everybody had illusions of one sort or another. Monica too wanted to be a writer. Everybody was becoming a writer. A writer! Jesus, how futile it seemed! I dozed off . . . When I woke up I had an erection. The sun seemed to be burning right into my fly. I got up and I washed my face at the drinking fountain. It was still as hot and sultry as ever. The asphalt was soft as mush, the flies were biting, the garbage was rotting in the gutter. I walked about between the pushcarts and looked at things with an empty eye. I had a sort of lingering hard on all the while, but no definite object in mind. It was only when I got back to Second Avenue that I suddenly remembered the Egyptian Jewess from lunch time. I remembered her saying that she lived over the Russian restaurant near Twelfth Street. Still I hadn’t any definite idea of what I was going to do. Just browsing about, killing time. My feet nevertheless were dragging me northward, toward Fourteenth Street. When I got abreast of the Russian restaurant I paused a moment and then I ran up the stairs three at a time. The hall door was open. I climbed up a couple of flights scanning the names on the doors. She was on the top floor and there was a man’s name under hers. I knocked softly. No answer. I knocked again, a little harder. This time I heard some one moving about. Then a voice close to the door, asking who is it and at the same time the knob turning. I pushed the door open and stumbled into the darkened room. Stumbled right into her arms and felt her naked under the half-opened kimono. She must have come out of a sound sleep and only half realized who was holding her in his arms.