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 The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  He led me onto a staircase and we climbed right to the top, perhaps eight floors up. We took the stairs two at a time, and all the while I had this wonderful ass in my face; I had a hard-on by the time we reached the first floor. The attic corridor was hot and low-ceilinged, with dormer windows wide open and the traffic noise from far below nostalgically audible. Phil persuaded a key from the tight front pocket of his cords, and let us into a small bedroom. ‘This is it,’ he said. The room was furnished with a single bed, a bedside cupboard with a lamp, and a low cheap dressing-table with a mirror in which, standing, one could see only the region of one’s crotch; there was also a chair and a curtained-off hanging cupboard. I closed the door behind me and we both put our bags on the floor, side by side. The tension was terrific, and I could hear the rapid shushing of my pulse in my ear. I knew everything was up to me. ‘Well …’ I began, but at the same moment he turned away towards the window; his face was stiff with embarrassment and fear. He stood there, looking out. The mood of delay snagged me temporarily. ‘Do you often entertain people here?’ I asked, the words coming out with a quite sarcastic edge. ‘Oh—er, no,’ he replied, half turning his head but still shyly concealing his face. I took the three or four steps it required to cross the room and stand beside and slightly behind him. Outside, beyond where the light from our window fell, there was a deep inner well. The roof in which these rooms were built dropped steeply away, and facing us across the void were other similar dormers, unlit, their windows open into shadowy stillness. Above the roofline the sky was amorously transformed by the pink glare of the London dusk. I put my arm around Phil’s shoulder. He immediately began talking. ‘We can go on the roof,’ he said. ‘During the day the staff sunbathe up there. There’s a really good view.’ Nothing was going to get done unless I took command. Lifting my other hand I gripped his jaw, turned his head towards me and kissed him. Slowly, clumsily, as if being brought back to life, he swivelled round, put his arms around me and then held me extremely tight. I had wanted to kiss him for such a long time that I clung on, forcing my long, pointed tongue to the back of his throat; pulling out and biting his lips till I tasted the blood on my tongue. He was powerless and amazed. When I drew my head back a string of saliva swung between our mouths and I wiped it brutally from his chin.

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

  Hence the intellect which has more of the light of glory will see God the more perfectly; and he will have a fuller participation of the light of glory who has more charity; because where there is the greater charity, there is the more desire; and desire in a certain degree makes the one desiring apt and prepared to receive the object desired. Hence he who possesses the more charity, will see God the more perfectly, and will be the more beatified. Reply to Objection 1: In the words,”We shall see Him as He is,” the conjunction “as” determines the mode of vision on the part of the object seen, so that the meaning is, we shall see Him to be as He is, because we shall see His existence, which is His essence. But it does not determine the mode of vision on the part of the one seeing; as if the meaning was that the mode of seeing God will be as perfect as is the perfect mode of God’s existence. Thus appears the answer to the Second Objection. For when it is said that one intellect does not understand one and the same thing better than another, this would be true if referred to the mode of the thing understood, for whoever understands it otherwise than it really is, does not truly understand it, but not if referred to the mode of understanding, for the understanding of one is more perfect than the understanding of another. Reply to Objection 3: The diversity of seeing will not arise on the part of the object seen, for the same object will be presented to all—viz. the essence of God; nor will it arise from the diverse participation of the object seen by different similitudes; but it will arise on the part of the diverse faculty of the intellect, not, indeed, the natural faculty, but the glorified faculty. Whether those who see the essence of God comprehend Him?Objection 1: It seems that those who see the divine essence, comprehend God. For the Apostle says (Phil. 3:12): “But I follow after, if I may by any means comprehend [Douay: ‘apprehend’].” But the Apostle did not follow in vain; for he said (1 Cor. 9:26): “I . . . so run, not as at an uncertainty.” Therefore he comprehended; and in the same way, others also, whom he invites to do the same, saying: “So run that you may comprehend.” Objection 2: Further, Augustine says (De Vid. Deum, Ep. cxlvii): “That is comprehended which is so seen as a whole, that nothing of it is hidden from the seer.” But if God is seen in His essence, He is seen whole, and nothing of Him is hidden from the seer, since God is simple. Therefore whoever sees His essence, comprehends Him.

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

  GREGORY. (in Ezech. lib. i. Hom. 2.) Or else, fire is sent upon the earth, when by the fiery breath of the Holy Spirit, the earthly mind has all its carnal desires burnt up, but inflamed with spiritual love, bewails the evil it has done; and so the earth is burnt, when the conscience accusing itself, the heart of the sinner is consumed in the sorrow of repentance. BEDE. But He adds, I have a baptism to be baptized with, that is, I have first to be sprinkled with the drops of My own Blood, and then to inflame the hearts of believers by the fire of the Spirit. AMBROSE. But so great was our Lord’s condescension, that He tells us He has a desire of inspiring us with devotion, of accomplishing perfection in us, and of hastening His passion for us; as it follows, And how am I straitened till it be accomplished? BEDE. Some manuscripts have, “And how am I anguished,” (coangor) that is, grieved. For though He had in Himself nothing to grieve Him, yet was He afflicted by our woes, and at the time of death He betrayed the anguish which He underwent not from the fear of His death, but from the delay of our redemption. For he who is troubled until he reaches perfection, is secure of perfection, for the condition of bodily affections not the dread of death offends him. For ho who has put on the body must suffer all things which are of the body, hunger, thirst, vexation, sorrow; but the Divine nature knows no change from such feelings. At the same time He also shews, that in the conflict of suffering consists the death of the body, peace of mind has no struggle with grief. BEDE. But the manner in which after the baptism of His passion and the coming of the spiritual fire the earth will be burnt, He declares as follows, Suppose ye that I am to give peace, &c. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. What sayest thou, O Lord? Didst thou not come to give peace, Who art made peace for us? (Eph. 2:14.) making peace by Thy cross with things in earth and things in heaven; (Col. 1:20.) Who saidst, My peace I give unto you. (John 14:27.) But it is plain that peace is indeed a good, but sometimes hurtful, and separating us from the love of God, that is, when by it we unite with those who keep away from God. And for this reason we teach the faithful to avoid earthly bonds. Hence it follows, For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, &c.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  And then I saw a wonderful young man, perhaps about my age, and with just that air of bland international luxury about him, come from the lift and saunter towards the cocktail bar. He was tall and graceful but gave the impression of weighing a great deal; as he approached I was startled by his deep-set brown eyes, long nose and curling lips and his trotting, swept-back hair; as he walked away I took in his maroon mocassins, his immaculate pale cotton trousers, through which the shadow of his briefs could be seen, the cashmere slip cast around his shoulders. I felt he must belong to some notable Latin American family. It hardly required thought to follow him, though I gave him a second or two to get settled. I feared he might have gone to sit at a table or have joined his diplomat father and ragging, adoring younger brothers and sisters. But no, he was perched at the marble curve of the bar, and I was able to greet Simon—all in braid and tumbling his cocktail-shaker—as I took up a convenient high stool. ‘What are you having?’ Simon wanted to know. He was a skinny Lancashire boy who loved fucking girls and should ideally have been following a career as a pianist. He played extremely well, and had a long, long tongue with which he could easily lick the tip of his nose. He knew all about my little ways. ‘What’s he having?’ I said, as I watched the wild pink liquid rattle from the shaker into the inverted cone of the glass. He raised an eyebrow and murmured disgustingly, ‘Cunnilingus Surprise.’ ‘Mm. Not quite my kind of thing perhaps.’ Here the notable Latin American said: ‘It’s really good. You should try one.’ And then smiled immensely so that I went funny inside. His lips curled back in a friendly primitive way, and gave an unexpected animation to his dully beautiful face. I realised he reminded me of one of the sketches of Akhnaten on Charles’s stele—not the final inscrutable profile, but one of the intermediate stages, half human, half work of art. I watched incredulously as the various ingredients, some exotic, some European, were measured into the shaker. Simon gave me a smirk of lewd surmise as he agitated it.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Sometimes in the showers, which only epitomised and confirmed a general feeling held elsewhere, I was amazed and enlightened by the variety of the male organ. In the rank and file of men showering the cocks and balls took on the air almost of an independent species, exhibited in instructive contrasts. Here was the long, listless penis, there the curt, athletic knob or innocent rosebud of someone scarcely out of school. Carlos’s Amerindian giant swung alongside the compact form of a Chinese youth whose tiny brown willy was almost concealed in his wet pubic hair, like an exotic mushroom in a dish of seaweed. On the other side of me a young businessman displayed one of those long, dispiriting foreskins, which gather very tight about the glans and then bunch and dribble on childishly for an inch or so more. Beyond him the cock of one of the weightlifters, radically circumcised, was in its usual ambiguous form, not quite at ease, not quite at attention. I looked obviously and lovingly at him as he turned slowly from side to side, unaware of me and lost in his serene, numerical weightlifter’s world. I couldn’t wait any longer, and at the merest word to Carlos took him dripping and giggling to the lav, where we brought each other off swiftly and greedily. How hopelessly different life must appear to Charles, I thought, as I took the train to St Paul’s. When one is beyond love, where does pleasure lie? What does one do, seeing the lustful, disrespectful world going about its business, the young up one another’s arse? Was there ever an end to it, this irresistible, normal, subnormal craving for sex? Or did it go tauntingly on? At Skinner’s Lane the door was opened by the new man. He was not unlike Lewis, a plausible ex-con, with regular good looks enlivened by a pale scar running up his left cheek almost to his eye. It touched me as a strange coincidence, today of all days. ‘Mr Beckwith?’ he said, with the complacency of one who knows just what’s going on. ‘His Lordship is expecting you.’

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  The myth of Tiresias reminds us that woman’s sexual pleasure is possibly the most central and enduring mystery about sex. What is its purpose, and why does it exist? Yet even while attempting to deal with the evolution of female pleasure—including the female orgasm—the contemporary science of mate choice has been mute about the subjective experience of sexual pleasure. The theory of aesthetic evolution, however, has plenty to say about it, as do I, in this chapter. Viewing pleasure as the central, organizing force in mate choice, and mate choice as a major dynamic in evolutionary change, the aesthetic theory holds that women’s pursuit of pleasure is at the very heart of the evolution of human beauty and sexuality. — The theory of aesthetic coevolution predicts that behind every elaborate sexual ornament, there is an equally elaborate, coevolved sexual preference. If the size and shape of the human penis evolved to fulfill an ornamental function, for example, then there must be a set of female preferences that coevolved with the evolutionary changes that occurred to the penis. As I proposed in the preceding chapter, those preferences had to do with the sensory experiences of enhanced sexual pleasure. And that leads us directly to the question of the female orgasm—its origins, its purpose—and finally to elaborate on the answer Tiresias supplied to Zeus and Hera, why it may be a more powerful and profound experience than the male orgasm. Perhaps no topic in human sexual evolution has stimulated more scientific excitement and heated debate in recent decades than the origin of the female orgasm. The evolutionary explanation of the male orgasm has always seemed obvious; because the male orgasm is directly connected to the ejaculation of sperm, male sexual pleasure must have evolved, through natural selection, to motivate males to pursue reproductive opportunities. All in all, the male orgasm is a very tidy solution to the problem of how to keep the species going and in perfect keeping with the adaptationist point of view. In contrast, the origin and function of the female orgasm have been highly contested, with an abundance of theorists eager to supply possible explanations. What is surprising about these explanations of sexual pleasure, however, is how anhedonic they are. In the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud proposed a scientifically influential account of the female orgasm. He identified the clitoris as the location of infantile female sexual pleasure and the vagina as the appropriate location of mature female sexual pleasure. According to Freud, “normal” female sexual development required transitioning from the clitoral, masturbatory orgasm to vaginal orgasm achieved through heterosexual intercourse without clitoral stimulation. Women who failed to achieve the mythological transition were labeled as “frigid”—that is, sexually deficient, emotionally immature, not fully realized as “feminine.”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  In what seemed to be very slightly slow motion the shirtless boy ambled across to the other. They stood close together, both extremely beautiful, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years of age. Their lips moved, they spoke and smiled, but as the film had no sound-track, and we heard only the cinema’s throbbing, washing music, they communicated in a dreamlike silence, or as if watched from out of earshot through binoculars. The picture was irradiated with sunlight and, being fractionally out of focus, blurred the boys’ smooth outlines into a blond nimbus. The one in the vest appeared to put a question to the other, they turned aside and were swallowed up into the darkness of the barn. Where did they get them from, I wondered, these boys more wonderful than almost everything one came across in real life? And I remembered reading somewhere that a Californian talentspotter had photographic records of three thousand or more of them ranging back over twenty or thirty years and that a youngster, after a session in the studio, mooching through the files, had found pictures of his own father, posed long before. In the meantime there were other arrivals at the cinema, though it was difficult to make them out; while the sunlit introduction had brightened up the room and cast its aura over the scattered audience in the forward rows, the sex scenes within the barn were enacted in comparative gloom, allowing the viewers a secretive darkness. I tugged my half-hard cock out through my fly and stroked it casually. One new entrant tottered to the deserted front row, which in this tiny space was only a few feet from the screen. There was a rustle of papers, and I could see him in silhouette remove his coat, fold it neatly and place it on the seat next to that in which he then sat down. The rustling recurred intermittently, and I guessed he must be a man I’d seen at the Brutus the very first time I went there, a spry little chap of sixty-five or so who, like a schoolgirl taken to a romantic U picture, sat entranced by the movies and worked his way through a bag of boiled sweets as the action unfolded. A fiver from his pension, perhaps, and 30p for the humbugs, might be set aside weekly for this little outing. How he must look forward to it! His was a complete and innocent absorption in the fantasy world on screen. Could he look back to a time when he had behaved like these glowing, thoughtless teenagers, who were now locked together sucking on each other’s cocks in the hay?

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I rested a hand on the side of his neck, whose shaft, thicker than his head, was buttressed by the gathered, sloping muscles of his shoulders. ‘You’re looking very big, Stan,’ I said, smiling at him teasingly. He was a hard man to clothe and at night often went out as he was now, his torso draped in the tatters of some sweat-scorched singlet, a broad leather belt (which he assured me came in handy ) needlessly supporting pale old jeans rubbed thin under his bum and along the thick bolt of his cock. He once showed me a picture of how he looked at fifteen—tall and uncertain, and indifferently built. I think some sort of crisis about being gay had got him to the gym, which gave him both lovers and a new body. An element of defiance had made him a now almost unconscious exhibitionist. A lot of sex went on in the lock-ups of the Shaft, but one evening I had stumbled in for a piss to find Stan fucking a boy just inside the door. He had him with one leg cocked up on a washbasin and as he laid into his ass the bracket of the basin was breaking free of the wall, and the kid, who looked the younger and slighter in his giant grasp, rode up and down against his own breath-smeared reflection in the mirror. An ever-growing group of admirers deserted the dance floor and stood around feeling themselves and muttering encouragement. Phil was back with the much-jogged pints of beer. I craved liquid, and as I drank my dry palate seemed to admit the alcohol straight to my brain. ‘See you, sweetheart,’ said Stan, realising we would be no good to him—the endearment, as always when spoken by a real man, a virtual stranger, moving me for a few seconds intensely. Phil watched him amble off. ‘Some bloke grabbed my cock, at the bar,’ he said, in a tone which strove to combine pleasure and resentment and came out, neutrally, as a statement of fact. I drank and then kissed him, squirting cold lager into his mouth, though much of it, in his surprise, ran back down his chin. As I held him I could squeeze the sweat from his shirt where it clung down the channel of his back—so I took his drink from him, and helped him tug the wet garment off. The atmosphere was more and more liquid. Everyone was stripping off, and those who touched each other could cream off the sweat with a finger. I took his hand and led him away.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I watched him live: my opinion of him was constantly changing, a thing which rarely happens except for those persons to whom we are closely attached; we are satisfied to judge others more in general, and once for all. Sometimes a studied insolence and hardness, or a coldly frivolous remark would disturb me; more often, however, I let myself be carried along by his swift and nimble intelligence; an astute comment seemed suddenly to reveal the future statesman. I spoke of all this to Marcius Turbo, who after his tiring day as Praetorian prefect came every evening to talk over current business and play his game of dice with me; together we re-examined in utmost detail Lucius' possibilities for suitably fulfilling the career of emperor. My friends were amazed at my scruples; some of them counseled me, with a shrug of the shoulders, to take whatever decision I liked; such people imagine that one bequeaths half the world to someone as one would leave a country house to a friend. I reflected further about it by night: Lucius had hardly reached thirty; what was Caesar at thirty years but a young patrician submerged in debts and sullied by scandal? As in the bad days of Antioch, before my adoption by Trajan, I thought with a pang that nothing is slower than the true birth of a man: I had myself passed my thirtieth year before the Pannonian campaign had opened my eyes to the responsibilities of power; Lucius seemed to me at times more accomplished than I was at that age. I made up my mind abruptly, after a crisis of suffocation graver than the others, which warned me that I had no more time to lose. I adopted Lucius, who took the name of Aelius Caesar. He was carefree even in his ambition, and though demanding was not grasping, having always been accustomed to obtain everything; he took my decision with casual ease. I had the imprudence to mention that this fair-haired prince would be admirably handsome clad in the purple; the maliciously inclined hastened to assert that I was giving an empire in return for a voluptuous intimacy of earlier days. Such a charge shows no understanding of the way that the mind of a ruler functions (provided that in some degree he merits his post and his title). If like considerations had figured, then Lucius would not have been the only one on whom I could have fixed my choice.

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

  “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 Untrue (2018)

  If things did start to get serious, or even if the feeling of exhilaration about being in a new sexual partnership faded, the women ended the affair with no apparent regret and found another outside partner. And if a guy misrepresented himself? Walker chuckled and told me, “Oh, they felt no compunction about moving quickly on when someone was not what he had promised!” Having chosen a husband or life partner who did not satisfy them sexually, they were not going to make the same mistake in their affairs. Why not simply end their marriages? Mostly because doing so would be far from simple. The women told Walker they didn’t want to divorce for various reasons. Many said they loved their husbands and did not want to hurt them. Except for the lack of sex or the unsatisfying sex, they enjoyed their lives together. Others said they did not want to unsettle their children’s lives and routines. Still others said divorce would be too costly or complicated. Their concurrent relationships were pragmatic and rather ingenious strategies to remain, on the surface, good wives and partners while getting the sex they felt they needed, not to mention a heady dose of novelty, variety, and excitement. As Darcy, forty-eight, explained, after years of being sexually deprived, “some of the fun…[is] sampling from the parts of the menu I wouldn’t normally order.” Jordan, thirty-four, said, “I’m looking for that feeling when you first meet someone and…your stomach is all wobbly and every time they touch you, you about jump out of your skin.” The majority of the women expressed guilt, Walker told me, but none were so remorseful that they stopped having affairs. Indeed, many “found they enjoyed the boost in self-esteem, empowerment, and sexual fulfillment an outside partnership brings.” And not a few had several partners simultaneously, so they would not be subjected to any one outside partner’s whims or schedule. These women, like the calculating and unsentimental dames of film noir, were thinking through all the angles; Walker describes the women’s outside partnerships as “relationships of sexual utility.” Their sole focus was their own pleasure. “That’s very different from all the other relationships in their lives,” Walker observed, adding, “The amount of power and freedom the women exercise in their outside partnerships is much more than we see them employ in their marriages.”

• From Untrue (2018)

  So we know something about who the women who have affairs are. They’re you and me. They’re bored in their marriages, or sexless and orgasmless in their marriages, or happy in their marriages but eager for sex with someone other than their spouses, or they have money and power so they can do what they want, or they live in a culture that dictates that monogamy is stingy, or where monogamy isn’t an option. Or they have a particular sexual “personality.” Not unlike men, they often do it simply because they feel like it. For fun or for payback or because they are out of town or they had one drink too many and succumbed to their feelings for that woman at work. Whatever the reason, for that window in time, whether the encounter is under an hour or an affair that extends for years, when they are doing it they are not mothers or wives or employees. They are not honest and they are not self-sacrificing. They are not good; they are not admirable. But make no mistake, they are being themselves. Part of female sexuality, part of its legacy and its present and its future is that it is assertive, pleasure centered, and selfish. No amount of pathologizing can change the deep lessons we glean from the Wyandot and the Himba, from Amy Parish’s bonobos and Sarah Hrdy’s langurs, from the laboratories of Meredith Chivers and Marta Meana and Lisa Diamond’s twenty years of interviews: that when ecological circumstances are right, women are just as likely to step out as men are. Our dearest held binary cannot hold. The world is being rewritten. But certain rules and formulas adhere, and the lesson from cultures across the world and the women you know is clear: there can be no autonomy without the autonomy to choose, without coercion or constraint, or in spite of it, who our lovers will be. Afterword

• From Untrue (2018)

  I revisited my conversations and emails with Parish in my mind for many, many weeks. Her insights and perspective seemed relevant to every interview I had done, every question I had about my own marriage and libido, every conversation I had with women who confessed that they were “unfaithful,” or told me they were sexually bored in their marriages or partnerships, or that they stepped out not in search of companionship but for sex. Unexpectedly, Parish’s point of view also left me better prepared for an event I attended after my trip to San Diego, giving me a unique lens through which to view the behavior of a group of female Homo sapiens who use “promiscuous sex” to build bonds with one another. They do so for pleasure, and without apparent guilt or regret. They do not live in Namibia or Botswana, where women have also used non-dyadic sex to their benefit. This tribe gathered in a soaring townhouse in the modern metropole of Manhattan, and in a luxurious loft in downtown Los Angeles. I had first heard about Skirt Club in a 2016 New York Post article by Mackenzie Dawson. The headline was “This Sex Club Gives Men Major FOMO.” The article chronicled the adventures of the founder of a roving, underground women’s “play party.” She went by the pseudonym Geneviève LeJeune and told Dawson that she was married to a man. She had founded Skirt Club after being groped at grotty sex parties in London that left her thinking, I could do this better. It could be more luxurious. And for women only. LeJeune explained that far too often she found herself in contexts where her attraction to and yearning for adventures with other women was “leveraged” or interfered with by men who wanted in on it for their own gratification. What might a women-only gratification gathering for women like LeJeune—women who identify as “bi but in a committed straight relationship” or simply “curious”—look like? She set about creating it. Today there are Skirt Club parties in Shanghai, Vienna, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Ibiza, Miami, London, Berlin, Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Washington, DC, with themes like “All Tied Up” (with a bondage tutorial), “Retro Pin-Up Girls” (with a burlesque performance by a comely Dita Von Teese type), and “Strict” (a BDSM-themed event). They are billed as exclusive, high-end, femme-y affairs, free of the yucky plastic mattresses and grabby guys that LeJeune sought to replace with well-dressed, well-groomed, successful women in chic, sexy lingerie and heels and little else.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I must admit that certain indiscreet stories whispered in my ear by my mistresses served to awaken in me some sympathy for these much mocked and little understood spouses. Such liaisons, agreeable enough when the women were expert in love, became truly moving when these women were beautiful. It was a study of the arts for me; I came to know statues, and to appreciate at close range a Cnidian Venus or a Leda trembling under the weight of the swan. It was the world of Tibullus and Propertius: a melancholy, an ardor somewhat feigned but intoxicating as a melody in the Phrygian mode, kisses on back stairways, scarves floating across a breast, departures at dawn, and wreaths of flowers left on doorsteps. I knew almost nothing of these women; the part of their lives which they conceded to me was narrowly confined between two half-opened doors; their love, of which they never ceased talking, seemed to me sometimes as light as one of their garlands; it was like a fashionable jewel, or a fragile and costly fillet, and I suspected them of putting on their passion with their necklaces and their rouge. My own life was not less mysterious to them; they hardly desired to know it, preferring to dream vaguely, and mistakenly, about it; I came to understand that the spirit of the game demanded these perpetual disguises, these exaggerated avowals and complaints, this pleasure sometimes simulated and sometimes concealed, these meetings contrived like the figures of a dance. Even in our quarrels they expected a conventional response from me, and the weeping beauty would wring her hands as if on the stage. I have often thought that men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself: they delight in fingers reddened with henna, in perfumes rubbed on the skin, and in the thousand devices which enhance that beauty and sometimes fabricate it entirely. These tender idols differed in every respect from the tall females of the barbarians, or from our grave and heavy peasant women; they were born from the golden volutes of great cities, from the vats of the dyers or the baths' damp vapor, like Venus from the foam of Greek seas. They seemed hardly separable from the feverish sweetness of certain evenings in Antioch, from the excited stir of mornings in Rome, from the famous names which they bore, or from that luxury amid which their last secret was to show themselves nude, but never without ornament. I should have desired more: to see the human creature unadorned, alone with herself as she indeed must have been at least sometimes, in illness or after the death of a first-born child, or when a wrinkle began to show in her mirror. A man who reads, reflects, or plans belongs to his species rather than to his sex; in his best moments he rises even above the human.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The concert hall gave on an inner court where some water lilies were growing in the fountain's basin; they lay wide open in the almost furious heat of a late August afternoon. During an interlude, Pancrates urged us to inspect more closely these flowers of rare type, red as blood, which bloomed only at the end of summer. At once we recognized our scarlet lilies of the oasis of Ammon; Pancrates was suddenly fired by the thought of the wounded beast expiring among the flowers. He proposed to me that he versify this episode of our hunt; the lion's blood would be represented as tinting the lilies. The formula is not new: I nevertheless gave him the commission. This Pancrates, who was completely the court poet, improvised on the spot a few pleasant verses in Antinous' honor: the rose, the hyacinth, and the celandine were valued less in his hexameters than those scarlet cups which would hereafter bear the name of the chosen one. A slave was ordered to wade into the water to gather an armful of the blossoms. The youth accustomed to homage gravely accepted the wax-like flowers with the limp, snaky stems; the petals closed like eyelids when night fell. In the midst of these pleasures the empress arrived. The long crossing had told on her: she was growing frail without ceasing to be hard. Her political associations no longer caused me annoyance, as in the period when she had foolishly encouraged Suetonius; she now had only inoffensive women writers about her. The confidante of the moment was a certain Julia Balbilla, whose Greek verse was fairly good. The empress and her suite established themselves in the Lyceum, from which they rarely went out. Lucius, on the contrary, was as always avid for all delights, including alike those of the mind and of the eye. At twenty-six he had lost almost nothing of that arresting beauty which aroused acclamations from the youth in the streets of Rome. He was still absurd, ironic, and gay. His caprices of other days had now turned to manias: he made no move without his head cook; his gardeners composed astonishing flower plantings for him even aboard ship; he took his bed with him wherever he went, modeled on his own design of four mattresses stuffed with four special kinds of aromatics, on top of which he lay surrounded by his young mistresses like so many cushions. His pages, painted, powdered, and attired like Zephyrs and Eros, complied as well as they could with mad whims which were sometimes cruel: I had to intervene to keep the young Boreas, whose slenderness Lucius admired, from letting himself die of hunger. All that was more exasperating than charming. We visited together everything to be visited in Alexandria: the Lighthouse, the Mausoleum of Alexander and that of Mark Antony, where Cleopatra triumphs eternally over Octavia, the temples, the workshops and factories, and even the quarter of the embalmers.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I closed the door behind me and we both put our bags on the floor, side by side. The tension was terrific, and I could hear the rapid shushing of my pulse in my ear. I knew everything was up to me. ‘Well …’ I began, but at the same moment he turned away towards the window; his face was stiff with embarrassment and fear. He stood there, looking out. The mood of delay snagged me temporarily. ‘Do you often entertain people here?’ I asked, the words coming out with a quite sarcastic edge. ‘Oh—er, no,’ he replied, half turning his head but still shyly concealing his face. I took the three or four steps it required to cross the room and stand beside and slightly behind him. Outside, beyond where the light from our window fell, there was a deep inner well. The roof in which these rooms were built dropped steeply away, and facing us across the void were other similar dormers, unlit, their windows open into shadowy stillness. Above the roofline the sky was amorously transformed by the pink glare of the London dusk. I put my arm around Phil’s shoulder. He immediately began talking. ‘We can go on the roof,’ he said. ‘During the day the staff sunbathe up there. There’s a really good view.’ Nothing was going to get done unless I took command. Lifting my other hand I gripped his jaw, turned his head towards me and kissed him. Slowly, clumsily, as if being brought back to life, he swivelled round, put his arms around me and then held me extremely tight. I had wanted to kiss him for such a long time that I clung on, forcing my long, pointed tongue to the back of his throat; pulling out and biting his lips till I tasted the blood on my tongue. He was powerless and amazed. When I drew my head back a string of saliva swung between our mouths and I wiped it brutally from his chin. He had gone a deep, searching red. I tugged out the bottom of his T-shirt and slid it up over his rhythmic stomach. The T-shirt was very tight, so I only pushed it into a roll under his armpits and stretched across his hard, jutting tits; I twisted his nipples between my thumb and forefinger and then, holding his eyes with a passionate stare that at once felt almost cruel, I grabbed at his crotch, fumbled and tore open his fly, and pulled down his trousers and underpants to his knees. Through all this he stood, arms away from his sides, impassive, like a child in a doctor’s surgery, or someone being measured for a suit. He made no gesture towards me, except by a curious, serious facial expression: this was what he’d heard about, this was what he wanted us to do.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Afterwards I wandered through Soho & then in Charing Cross Road saw three black GIs loitering along rather idyllically, smoking cigarettes & looking at girls. They had that touching quality which off-duty soldiers so often do have, as if they knew they ought to be up to something but didn’t quite know what it was. There was a fat one, a thin one & an inbetween one with a lost, ingenuous expression which was decidedly heart-stopping. He was clearly the butt of his two smart friends’ humour & had an infinitely tolerant, good-hearted glow about him. I walked beside them to pick up their talk, & then went on & took up an insouciant pose on the other side of Oxford Street, by the Lyon’s Corner House. By some sublime, birthday miracle they split up on the corner opposite, Fat & Thin turning back down Charing Cross Rd as if to have a second, more determined go at something they had funked or got wrong the first time, while my friend crossed over & then crossed again, to the far side of Tottenham Court Road. When I strolled over myself he was looking at the posters at the little cinema there. He appeared uncertain about the prospect of an afternoon of This Happy Breed and something else with Jack Hulbert in. He asked me if I’d seen these films, & I said I had (which I hadn’t) and that they were unutterably tedious. It seemed to me that if he cd be kept out of the cinema then there were possibilities: I wasn’t going to go in with him & sit it out expectantly in the dark for hours on end, smoking American cigarettes. I said why didn’t he come & have a swim at the Corinthian Club, that’s what I was going to do. Like a child who had been hoping for guidance, & with only the faintest hint of adult irony or doubt, he came along, & when he saw the bombed-out far end of the building under all its tarpaulins & scaffolding reacted to it as though it were a cause for personal sympathy and congratulation. I cd hardly wait to get him in the showers, but I hired him some drawers & a towel & drew out our time in the pool as if I were only there for the exercise. Roy (his name, Roy Bartholomew) was a clumsy swimmer, but jolly fast, soldier-fit & divinely constructed. I tested him gently by saying how muscly he was, & he flexed his arms & had me punch him in the stomach—at the same time saying how I shd see so-and-so in his regiment, who evidently has the biggest muscles imaginable. I discovered he likes to box, & wished for a moment I was twenty years younger & cd have taken him on.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I realised why it was, when, after tucking his long-skinned dick into cheap red knickers, and pulling on a grey jersey and those baggy, splotch-bleached jeans which look as though a circle of kids have jacked off all over them, he said to Bill: ‘I got to go and see my girlfriend.’ Bill grinned at him wretchedly. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ he said. 5 The first instalment of Charles’s papers was crammed into an old briefcase. Carrying it on the Underground, I felt like a young schoolmaster, taking home a bag bulging with books and essays. It was heavy, as I lolled in the crowded train, holding it by its charred leather handle, which had been strengthened with black insulating tape and was slightly sticky to the touch. At Tottenham Court Road a young man got on whom I recognised and placed within a second or two as the wiry person that James had fancied a while ago in the showers. He was even more deeply tanned than before, and there was something unsettling about this, as there was about his big, protuberant cock, very emphatic in his light cotton trousers, and the contrast of its fatness with his thin, taut body. He had a sports bag over his shoulder, and the clean gleam of his forehead confirmed that he had come from the Corry and a shower. He stood opposite me in the doorway, and we held each other’s gaze for a long moment before each modestly looked away, though with the evident intention of looking back again after a few seconds. And so the sudden precipitation of sex had begun. At Oxford Circus many people got off, and I dropped into the seat next to the door. Many people also got on, so my view of the boy was blocked. He remained standing where he had been; when I looked across through the glass screen that shelters the seats from the door I saw only the bums and palms of standing passengers flattened witlessly against its other side. I was heightening the drama of the pick-up by making him follow me. This was impossible at Bond Street, where even more people got on. The seat I had taken was marked for the use of the elderly and handicapped, but had another claimant come, a figure like Charles, for instance, I would have been prepared to leave the train, when my stop came, with a lurching gait or limb held awry to designate my previously unguessed incapacity.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I was turning to leave when I spotted a lone Arab boy wandering along, hands in the pockets of his anorak, fairly unremarkable, yet with something about him which made me feel I must have him. I was convinced that he had noticed me, and I felt a delicious surplus of lust and satisfaction at the idea of fucking him while another boy waited for me at home. To test him out I dawdled off behind the pavilion to where some public lavatories, over-frequented by lonely middle-aged men, are tucked into the ivy-covered, pine-darkened bank of the main road. I went down the tiled steps between the tiled walls, and a hygienic, surprisingly sweet smell surrounded me. It was all very clean, and at several of the stalls under the burnished copper pipes (to which someone must attach all their pride), men were standing, raincoats shrouding from the innocent visitor or the suspicious policeman their hour-long footlings. I felt a faint revulsion—not disapproval, but a fear of one day being like that. Their heads seemed grey and loveless to me as they turned in automatic anticipation. What long investment they made for what paltry returns … Did they nod to one another, the old hands, as they took up their positions, day by day, alongside each other in whatever station in their underground cycle of conveniences they had reached? Did anything ever happen, did they, despairing of whatever it was they sought, which could surely never be sex, but at most a glimpse of something memorable, ever make do with each other? I felt certain they didn’t; they were engaged, in a silently agreed silence, in looking out endlessly for something they couldn’t have. I was not shy but too proud and priggish to take up my place among them, and it was with only a moment’s hesitation that I resolved not to do so.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  There was now a fairly complicated set-up on screen, with all six boys doing something interesting, and one of them I realised was Kip Parker, a famous tousle-headed blond teen star. I ran my hand between my new friend’s legs and felt his cock kicking against the tightish cotton of his slacks. He helped me take it out, a short, punchy little number, which I went down on and polished off almost at once. God, he must have been ready. After a shocked recuperation he felt for his bag and went out without a word. I’d had a growing suspicion throughout this sordid but charming little episode, which rose to a near certainty as he opened the door and was caught in a slightly brighter light, that the boy was Phil from the Corry. He had smelt of sweat rather than talcum powder and there was a light stubble on his jaw, so I concluded that if it were Phil he was on his way to rather than from the Club, as I knew he was fastidiously clean, and that he always shaved in the evening before having his shower. I was tempted to follow him at once, to make sure, but I realised it would be easy enough to tell from seeing him later; and besides, a very well-hung kid, who’d already been showing an interest in our activities, moved in to occupy the boy’s former seat, and brought me off epically during the next film, an unthinkably tawdry picture which all took place in a kitchen. On the train home I carried on reading Valmouth. It was an old grey and white Penguin Classic that James had lent me, the pages stiff and foxed, with a faint smell of lost time. Wet-bottomed wine glasses had left mauve rings over the sketch of the author by Augustus John and the price, 3/6, which appeared in a red square on the cover. Nonetheless, I was enjoined to take especial care of the book, which also contained Prancing Nigger and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli. James had a mania for Firbank, and it was only out of his love for me that he had let me take away this apparently undistinguished old paperback, which bore on its flyleaf the absurd signature ‘O. de V. Green’. James held the average Firbank-lover in contempt, and professed a very serious attitude towards his favourite writer. I had long deferred reading him in the childishly stubborn way that one resists all keen and repeated recommendations, and had imagined him until now to be a supremely frivolous and silly author.