Despair

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 Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  “ Hundreds of days — a lifetime — life itself. Life as it was in the old days, life with my ‘ worst enemy % as she used to call herself. My worst enemy! who forgave me all, and never let me off a single thing.” He seized hold of his past, to squeeze out every remaining drop upon his empty, arid present; bringing back to life, and inventing where necessary, the princely days of his youth, his adolescence shaped and guided by a woman’s strong capable hands — loving hands, ever ready to chastise. A prolonged, sheltered, oriental adolescence, in which the pleasures of the flesh had their passing place, like silent pauses in a song. A life of luxury/passing whims, childish cruelty, with fidelity a yet unspoken word. He threw back his head to look up at the nacreous halo which irradiated the whole sky, and he gave a low cry, “It’s all gone to hell! Pm thirty years old!” He hurried on his way back home, heaping curses on himself to the rhythm of his quickened steps. “Fool! The tragedy is not her age, but mine. Everything may be over for her, but, for me ...” He let himself in without making a sound, to find the house in silence at last; to be nauseated by the lingering stale smell of those who had dined, wined, and danced there. In the looking-glass fitted to the door in the hall he met face to face the young man who had grown so thin, whose cheeks had hardened, whose sad beautifully moulded upper lip was unshaven and blue, whose large eyes were reticent and tragic. The young man, in effect, who had ceased, inexplicably, to be twenty-four years old. “For me,” Cheri completed his thought, “I really do believe that the last word has been said.” What I need is somewhere quiet, you understand. ... Any little place would do. ... A bachelor flat, a room, a comer. ...* *1 wasn’t bom yesterday,’ said the Pal reproachfully. She raised disconsolate eyes towards the festoons on the ceiling: ‘A little love, of course, of course, a little kiss - something to warm a poor lonely heart You bet I understand! Any special fancy?* Cheri frowned. ‘Fancy? For whom?* ‘You don’t understand, my pretty. ... Fancy for any particular district? * ‘Ah! ... No, nothing special. Just a quiet corner.* The Pal nodded Ker large head in collusion. T see, I see. Something after my style — like my flat. You know where I rest my bones?’ ‘Yes.* ‘No, you don’t know at all. I was certain you wouldn’t write it down. Two hundred and fourteen Rue de Villiers. It’s not big, and it’s not beautiful. But you don’t want the sort of place where the whole street knows your business.’ ‘No.*

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Today while we worked in the garden I felt as if I were in Richmond Hill again, wrapped up in books and in trances, with Hugo passing by, hoping for a glimpse of me. Mon Dieu , for a moment today, I was in love with him, with the soul and the virgin body of those earlier days. A part of me has grown immeasurably, while I have clung to my young love, to a memory. And now the woman lying naked in the vast bed watches her young love bending over her and does not want him. Since that talk with Henry, when I admitted more than I had ever admitted to myself, my life has altered and become deformed. The restlessness which was vague and nameless has become intolerably clear. Here is where it stabs me, at the center of the most perfect, the most steadfast structure, marriage. When this shakes, then my whole life crumbles. My love for Hugo has become fraternal. I look almost with horror on this change, which is not sudden, but slow in appearing on the surface. I had closed my eyes to all the signs. Above all, I dreaded admitting that I didn’t want Hugo’s passion. I had counted on the ease with which I would distribute my body. But it is not true. It was never true. When I rushed towards Henry, it was all Henry. I am frightened because I have realized the full extent of my imprisonment. Hugo has sequestered me, fostered my love of solitude. I regret now all those years when he gave me nothing but his love and I turned into myself for the rest. Starved, dangerous years. I should break up my whole life, and I cannot do it. My life is not as important as Hugo’s, and Henry doesn’t need me because he has June. But whatever in me has grown outside and beyond Hugo will go on. May I never have seen as clearly as tonight that my journal writing is a vice, a disease. I came home at seven-thirty worn out by a magnificent night with Henry and three hours with Eduardo. I didn’t have the strength to go to Henry again. I had dinner, smoked dreamily. I glided into my bedroom, felt a sense of being enclosed, of falling into myself. I got my journal from its last hiding place under my dressing table and threw it on the bed. And I had the feeling that this is the way an opium smoker prepared his pipe. The journal, like a fragment of myself, shares my duplicities. Where has my tremendous fatigue gone? Occasionally I stop writing and feel a profound lethargy. And then some demoniac feeling urges me on. I confide in Allendy. I talk profusely about my childhood, quote from my early journals obvious phrases about Father—so intelligible now, my passion for him. Also my sense of guilt; I felt I did not deserve anything.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  He went forward cautiously, lord of this empire of a few square feet, which he now owned but did not know. The useless daily arrangement of the armoury had been laid out on the table by the well-trained charwoman, and an earthenware coffee-pot stood in the midst of charcoal embers already dying under the velvet of warm ashes. Methodically, Cheri emptied his pockets and set out one by one his cigarette-case, the huge key, his own small key, the flat revolver, his note-case, handkerchief, and watch; but when he had put on his Japanese robe, he did not lie down on the divan. With the silent curiosity of a cat he opened doors and peered into cupboards. His peculiar prudishness shrank back before a primitive but distinctively feminine lavatory. The bedroom, all bed and little else, also was decorated in the mournful shade of red that seems to settle in on those of declining years; it smelt of old bachelors and eau-de Cologne. Cheri returned to the drawing-room. He switched on the two wall lamps and the beribboned chandelier. He listened to faint far-away sounds and, now that he was alone for the first time in this poor lodging, began trying out on himself the influence of its previous inmates — birds of passage or else dead. He thought he heard and recognized a familiar footstep, a slipshod, shambling old animal pad-pad, then shook his head: “It can’t be hers. She won’t be back for a week, and when she does come back, what will there be left for me in this world? I’ll have ...” Inwardly he listened to the Pal’s voice, the worn-out voice of a tramp. * But wait till I finish the story of the famous slanging-match between Lea and old Mortier at the Races. Old Mortier thought that with the aid of a little publicity in Gil Bias he would get all he wanted out of Lea. Oh! la la, my pretties, what a donkey he made of himself! She drove out to Longchamp — a dream of blue — as statuesque as a goddess, in her victoria drawn by a pair of piebalds. ...’ He raised his hand towards the wall in front of him, where so many blue eyes were smiling, where so many swan-necks were preening themselves above imperturbable bosoms. “ ... I’ll have all this. All this, and nothing more. It’s true, perhaps, that this is a good deal. I’ve found her again, by a happy chance, found her here on this wall. But I’ve found her, only to lose her again for ever. I am still held up, like her, by these few rusty nails, by these pins stuck in slantwise. How much longer can this go on? Not very long. And then, knowing myself as I do, I’m afraid I shall demand more than this. I may suddenly cry out: "I want her! I must have her! Now! at this very moment!’ Then what will become of me?”

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  She never took her eyes off her husband, lying full-length in a low armchair, and she murmured distinctly enough for him to hear, ‘A child ... who’d be sure to take after you. You twice over, you twice over in the single lifetime of one woman? No. ... Oh, no/ He began a gesture which she misinterpreted. ‘No, I beg of you. ... There’s nothing more to be said. I won’t even discuss it. Let’s leave things as they are. We’ve only to be a little cautious, and go on ... I ask nothing of you ...’ ‘That suits you?’ Her only answer was to put on a look, insulting in its misery and plaintive helplessness, a seraglio look that well suited her nakedness. Her freshly powdered cheeks, the touch of colour on her youthful lips, the light brown halo round her hazel eyes, the care bestowed on every feature of her face, were in striking contrast to the confusion of her body, bare except for the crumpled silk shift she was clasping to her breasts. “I can no longer make her happy,” thought Cheri, “but I can still make her suffer. She is not altogether unfaithful to me. Whereas I am not untrue to her ... I have deserted her.” Turning away from him, she began to dress. She had regained her freedom of movement and her disingenuous tolerance. The palest of pink frocks now hid from view the woman who, a moment since, had pressed her last stitch of clothing to her bosom, as though to a wound. She had recovered, too, her buoyant determination, her desire to live and hold sway, her prodigious and feminine aptitude for happiness. Cheri despised her afresh; but a moment came when the rays of the evening sun, shining through her transparent pink dress, outlined the shape of a young woman who no longer bore any semblance to the wounded Circassian: a heaven-aspiring form, as supple and vigorous as a serpent about to strike. “I can still hurt her, but how quickly she recovers! In this house, too, I am no longer needed, no longer expected. She has gone far beyond me, and is going further: I am, the old creature would say, her * first turn \ It’s now for me to follow her example, if only I could. But I can't. And then would I, if I could? Unlike some of us, Edmde has never come up against what one meets only once in a lifetime and is floored by completely. Speleieff was fond of saying that, after a really bad crash - which, however, involved no broken bones some horses would let themselves be killed rather than take the fence again. I am just the same.”

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  The names kept changing. Manic depression for example became OCD and OCD was short for obsessive-compulsive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder became something else, I could never remember just what but in any case it made no difference because by the time I did remember there would be a new name, a new “diagnosis.” I put the word “diagnosis” in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a “diagnosis” led to a “cure,” or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility. Yet another demonstration of medicine as an imperfect art. She was depressed. She was anxious. Because she was depressed and because she was anxious she drank too much. This was called medicating herself. Alcohol has its own well-known defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested—ask any doctor— that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known. This would seem a fairly straight-forward dynamic, yet, once medicalized— once the depths and shallows and quicksilver changes had been assigned names—it appeared not to be. We went through many diagnoses, many conditions that got called by many names, before the least programmatic among her doctors settled on one that seemed to apply. The name of the condition that seemed to apply was this: “borderline personality disorder.” “Patients with this diagnosis are a complex mixture of strengths and weaknesses that confuse the diagnostician and frustrate the psychotherapist.” So notes a 2001 New England Journal of Medicine review of John G. Gunderson’s Borderline Personality Disorder: A Clinical Guide. “Such patients may seem charming, composed, and psychologically intact one day and collapse into suicidal despair the next.” The review continues: “Impulsivity, affective lability, frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, and identity diffusion are all hallmarks.” I had seen most of these hallmarks. I had seen the charm, I had seen the composure, I had seen the suicidal despair. I had seen her wishing for death as she lay on the floor of her sitting room in Brentwood Park, the sitting room from which she had been able to look into the pink magnolia. Let me just be in the ground, she had kept sobbing. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep. I had seen the impulsivity. I had seen the “affective lability,” the “identity diffusion.” What I had not seen, or what I had in fact seen but had failed to recognize, were the “frantic efforts to avoid abandonment.” How could she have ever imagined that we could abandon her?

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Our missionaries in China are in a privileged position, yet they have to let official corruption alone or their consuls are likely to hear from the mandarins. Postponement to the Lord’s coming Paul was not an anti-slavery man. He doubtless realized the oppressive conditions of many slaves, just as we recognize the hard lot of miners or oyster-dredgers. But to his lofty idealism outward conditions were almost indifferent. He himself bore poverty and homelessness almost with equanimity for Christ’s sake. Let the slave realize that he is Christ’s freeman, and he can hold his head as erect as any. This is sublime, but it is too rare an atmosphere for the mass of men, and even the few can maintain such victorious elevation of soul only under the tension of unusual feelings and only for a limited time. Paul and the entire primitive Church were under such tension. They expected the very speedy coming of the Lord. Paul expected that this event would signalize the transformation and spiritualization of all the material world, and what did our transient earthly troubles matter in the face of so tremendous a change? Others, as we have seen, expected the coming of the Lord to usher in an earthly millennium of justice and happiness, which would solve all social questions in one blessed catastrophe. They were then in the same position as those revolutionary socialists who refuse to dabble with social palliatives because the people are almost on the point of seizing control of all. We know now that the Christians of the first century were at the beginning of Christian history; they thought they were at the end. This expectation, to any one who took it seriously, affected all relations and outlooks on life. Paul even advised against marriage on account of the nearness of the end and the upheavals sure to precede it. He counselled an attitude of inner detachment. Let those who had wives be as if they had none, and those who purchased property as if they did not own it; let those who had dealings with the world make them as slight as possible; for the time was short, and the present make-up of the world was soon to pass away. Given that conviction of the coming end, and this was the language of an heroic soul. Any one with that faith would be morally absolved from entering on any moral crusade that would take time. But without that honest faith the same attitude would be a shirking of responsibility. If a man spends only a single night in a shack in the woods, he does not mind if the stars shine through the roof or the rain leaks in, for in the morning he will strike camp.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Education became common, and yet culture declined. There were plenty of universities, great libraries, well-paid professors, and yet a growing coarseness of taste and a decline in creative artistic and literary ability. If the yellow newspaper could have been printed, it would have “filled a long-felt want.” The social conditions involved a readjustment of political power. A strong centralized government was necessary to keep the provinces quiet while Rome taxed them and the bureaucracy grew rich on them. Government was not based broadly on the just consent of the governed, but on the swords of the legions, and especially of the prætorian guard. The old republican forms were long maintained, but Rome verged more and more toward despotic autocracy. In a hundred ways the second century of our era seemed to be the splendid culmination of all the past. The Empire seemed imperishable in the glory of almost a thousand years of power. To prophesy its fall would have seemed like predicting the failure of civilization and humanity. The reverses which began with the death of Marcus Aurelius in a.d. 180 seemed mere temporary misfortunes. Yet they were the beginning of the end. The German and Celtic tribes had long swirled and eddied about the northern boundary of the Empire, like the ocean about the dikes of Holland. The little Rome of Marius a hundred years before Christ had successfully beaten back the Cimbrians and Teutons. For two centuries the strong arm of the legions had dammed the flood behind the Rhine and Danube. Rome was so much superior in numbers, in wealth, in the science of war and all the resources of civilization, that it might have continued to hold them in check and to turn their forward movements in other directions. But the decay at the centre now weakened the capacity for resistance at the borders. The farmers who had made the legions of the Republic invincible had been ruined by the competition of slave labor, crowded out by land monopoly, and sucked into the ragged proletariat of the cities. The armies had to be recruited from the conquered provinces and finally from barbarian mercenaries. The moral enthusiasm of a citizen soldiery fighting for their homes was gone. The impoverished and overtaxed provinces were unable to respond to additional financial needs. Slowly the barbarians filtered into the Northern provinces by mass immigration. The civilized population did not have vitality enough to assimilate the foreign immigrants. Slowly, by gradual stages, hardly fast enough for men to realize what was going on, the ancient civilization retreated, and the flood of barbarism covered the provinces, with only some islands of culture rising above the yellow flood. And how will it be with us? Will that vaster civilization which began in Europe and is now spreading along the shores of all the oceans, as Rome grew from Italy outward around the great inland sea, run through the same stages?

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  They are a heavy financial drag. The more humane our feeling is, the better we shall have to house our dependents and delinquents. But those who have had personal contact with the work, feel that they are beating back a swelling tide with feeble hands. With their best intentions they may be harming men more than helping them. And the misery grows. The incapables increase faster than the population. Moreover, beyond the charity cases lies the mass of wretchedness that spawns them. For every half witted pauper in the almshouse there may be ten misbegotten and muddle-headed individuals bungling their work and their life outside. For every person who is officially declared insane, there are a dozen whose nervous organization is impaired and who are centres of further trouble. For every thief in prison there are others outside, pilfering and defrauding, and rendering social life insecure and anxious. Mr. Hunter estimates that about four million persons are dependent on public relief in the United States; that an equal number are destitute, but bear their misery in silence; and that ten million have an income insufficient to maintain them even in a state of physical efficiency to do their work. The methods by which he arrives at these results seem careful and fair. But suppose that he were a million or two out of the way, does that affect the moral challenge of the figures much? Sir Wilfred Lawson told of a test applied by the head of an insane asylum to distinguish the sane from the insane. He took them to a basin of water under a running faucet and asked them to dip out the water. The insane merely dipped and dipped. The sane turned off the faucet and dipped out the rest. Is our social order sane? The wedge of inequality Approximate equality is the only enduring foundation of political democracy. The sense of equality is the only basis for Christian morality. Healthful human relations seem to run only on horizontal lines. Consequently true love always seeks to create a level. If a rich man loves a poor girl, he lifts her to financial and social equality with himself. If his love has not that equalizing power, it is flawed and becomes prostitution. Wherever husbands by social custom regard their wives as inferior, there is a deep-seated defect in married life. If a teacher talks down at his pupils, not as a maturer friend, but with an “I say so,” he confines their minds in a spiritual straight-jacket instead of liberating them. Equality is the only basis for true educational influences. Even our instinct of pity, which is love going out to the weak, works with spontaneous strength only toward those of our own class and circle who have dropped into misfortune. Business men feel very differently toward the widow of a business man left in poverty than they do toward a widow of the poorer classes.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  He was walking to and fro, from the door to the wall with the photographs and back to the door again, and in doing so he knocked against a squashed old travelling-bag. The coffee-pot and cups were steaming on the table. ‘I made you your coffee, come what might. ...’ ‘Thanks.* They drank standing up, as at a station, and the chill of departure gripped Cheri by the throat and made his teeth chatter secretly. ‘Goodbye, then, dear boy,’ said the Pal. ‘You may be sure that I’ll hurry things as much as I can.* ‘Goodbye — pleasant journey.’ They shook hands, and she did not dare to kiss him. ‘Won’t you stay here for a little while?* He looked all round in great agitation. ‘No. No.’ ‘Take the key, then?’ ‘Why should I?’ ‘You’re at home here. You’ve fallen into the habit of it. I’ve told Maria to come every day at five and light a good fire and get the coffee ready. ... So take my key, won’t you? ...’ With a limp hand he took the key, and it struck him as enormous. Once outside, he longed to throw it away or take it back to the concierge. The old woman took courage on her way between her own door and the street, loading him with instructions as she might a child of twelve. ‘ The electric-light switch is on your left as you gb in. The kettle is always on the gas-stove in the kitchen, and all you have to do is to put a match to it. And your Japanese robe - Maria has her instructions to leave it folded at the head of the divan and the cigarettes in their usual place.’ Cheri nodded affirmation once or twice, with the look of courageous unconcern of a schoolboy on the last morning of the holidays. And, when Jhe was alone, it did not occur to him to make fun of his old retainer with the dyed hair, who had placed the proper value both on the last prerogatives of the dead and on the little pleasures of one whom all had now deserted.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  ‘Yes, I know a little restaurant... Let me speak! Only, you must be quick, before the smart set and the newspapers take it into their heads to make it fashionable, and the good woman herself is replaced by a chef. She does all the cooking at present, and, my dear ...’ She brought thumb and forefinger together on the tip of her lips, and blew an imitation kiss. Cheri turned away to look out of the window, where the shadow thrown by a branch flicked at the steady shaft of sunlight, impatiently but at regular intervals, much as a bent reed or river-plant appears to strike at the ripples of a regularly flowing current. ‘What an odd sort of conversation ...’ he ventured in strained tones. ‘No more odd than your presence in my house,9 Lea snapped back at him. With a wave of the hand he made it clear that he wanted peace, only peace, with as few words spoken as possible, and preferably none at all. He felt defeated in face of this elderly woman's boundless reserves of energy and appetite. Lda’s quick blood was now rising and turning her bulging neck and her ears to purple. “ She’s got a crop like an old hen,” he thought, with something of his old enjoyment of cruelty. ‘And that’s the truth!9 she hurled at him excitedly. ‘You drag yourself round here, for all the world like an apparition, and when I do my best to find some way of putting things to rights, I who, when all’s said and done, do happen to know you rather well ...’ He smiled at her despondently, “And how in the world should she know me? When far shrewder people than she, and even than I myself...” ‘A certain kind of sickness of the soul, my child, of disillusion, is just a question of stomach. Yes, yes, you may laugh!’ He was not laughing, but she might well think he was. ‘ Romanticism, nerves, distaste for life: stomach. The whole lot, simply stomach. Love itself! If one wished to be perfectly sincere, one would have to admit there are two kinds of love — well-fed and ill-fed. The rest is pure fiction. If only I knew how to write, or to make speeches, my child, what things I could say about that! Oh, of course, it wouldn’t be anything new, but I should know what I was talking about, and that would be a change from our present-day writers.’ Something worse than this obsession with the kitchen was upsetting Cheri: the affectation, the false tone of voice, the almost studied joviality. He suspected Lea of putting on an act of hearty and sybaritic geniality, just as a fat actor, on die stage, plays ‘jovial’ characters because he has developed a paunch.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  In the hotel last night a baby’s feverish crying kept me awake, and my thinking was like a high-powered machine. It wore me out. In the morning a monstrously ugly femme de chambre came in to open the shutters. A man who had red hair standing in a bush around his face was sweeping the hall carpets. I telephoned Hugo, begging him to come sooner than he had promised. His letters had been soft and sad. But over the telephone he was reasonable. “I’ll come immediately if you are ill.” I said, “Never mind. I’ll come home Thursday. I can’t stay any longer.” Fifteen minutes later he called, now fully aware of my distress, to say he would be here Friday instead of Saturday morning. I was in despair over the sudden and terrifying need of Hugo. It would have led me to commit any act. I sat in bed, shaking. I am definitely ill, I thought. My mind is not altogether in power. I made a tremendous effort to write Hugo a steady, clear letter, to reassure him. I had made the same effort to steady myself when I came here to Switzerland. Hugo understood. He had written to me: “. . . how well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me—full rich lives from birth to death, and you will just have to have these rest periods in between. “Do you realize what a live force you are, just to speak of you in the abstract? I feel like a machine that has lost its motor. You represent everything that is vital, live, moving, rising, flying, soaring. . . . ” June objects strongly to Henry’s frank sensualism. Hers is so much more intricate. Besides, he represents goodness to her. She clings desperately to it. She is afraid he will be spoiled. All Henry’s instincts are good, not in the nauseating Christian sense but in the simple human sense. Even the ferocity of his writing is not monstrous or intellectual but human. But June is nonhuman. She has only two strong human feelings: her love of Henry and her tremendous selfless generosity. The rest is fantastic, perverse, pitiless. What demoniac accounts she manages to keep, so that Henry and I look with awe on her monstrosity, which enriches us more than the pity of others, the measured love of others, the selflessness of others. I will not tear her to pieces as Henry has done. I will love her. I will enrich her. I will immortalize her. Henry sends a desperate letter from Dijon. Dostoevsky in Siberia, only Siberia was far more interesting, from what poor Henry says. I send him a telegram: “Resign and come home to Versailles.”

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  In all of those intensive care units there were the same blue-and-white printed curtains. In all of those intensive care units there were the same sounds, the same gurgling through plastic tubing, the same dripping from the IV line, the same rales, the same alarms. In all of those intensive care units there were the same requirements to guard against further infections, the donning of the double gowns, the paper slippers, the surgical cap, the mask, the gloves that pulled on only with difficulty and left a rash that reddened and bled. In all of those intensive care units there was the same racing through the unit when a code was called, the feet hitting the floor, the rattle of the crash cart. This was never supposed to happen to her, I remember thinking—outraged, as if she and I had been promised a special exemption—in the third of those intensive care units. By the time she reached the fourth I was no longer invoking this special exemption. When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children. I just said that, but what does it mean? All right, of course I can track it, of course you can track it, another way of acknowledging that our children are hostages to fortune, but when we talk about our children what are we saying? Are we saying what it meant to us to have them? What it meant to us not to have them? What it meant to let them go? Are we talking about the enigma of pledging ourselves to protect the unprotectable? About the whole puzzle of being a parent? Time passes. Yes, agreed, a banality, of course time passes. Then why do I say it, why have I already said it more than once? Have I been saying it the same way I say I have lived most of my life in California? Have I been saying it without hearing what I say? Could it be that I heard it more this way: Time passes, but not so aggressively that anyone notices? Or even: Time passes, but not for me? Could it be that I did not figure in either the general nature or the permanence of the slowing, the irreversible changes in mind and body, the way in which you wake one summer morning less resilient than you were and by Christmas find your ability to mobilize gone, atrophied, no longer extant? The way in which you live most of your life in California, and then you don’t? The way in which your awareness of this passing time—this permanent slowing, this vanishing resilience—multiplies, metastasizes, becomes your very life? Time passes. Could it be that I never believed it? Did I believe the blue nights could last forever? 3Last spring, 2009, I had some warnings, flags on the track, definite notices of darkening even before the blue nights came. L’heure bleue. The gloaming. Not even yet evident when that year’s darkening gave its first notices.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  In vain they dash their fair ideas against the solid granite of human selfishness. The possessing classes are strong by mere possession long-continued. They control nearly all property. The law is on their side, for they have made it. They control the machinery of government and can use force under the form of law. Their self-interest makes them almost impervious to moral truth if it calls in question the sources from which they draw their income. In the past they have laughed at the idealists if they seemed harmless, or have suppressed them if they became troublesome. We Americans have a splendid moral optimism. We belive that “truth is mighty and must prevail.” “Truth crushed to earth shall rise again.” “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” In the words of the great Anabaptist Balthasar Hubmaier, who attested his faith by martyrdom, “Truth is immortal; and though for a long time she be imprisoned, scourged, crowned with thorns, crucified and buried, she will yet rise victorious on the third day and will reign and triumph.” That is a glorious faith. But the three days may be three centuries, and the murdered truth may never rise again in the nation that crucified it, but may come to victory in some other race and on another continent. The Peasants’ Rising in 1525 in Germany embodied the social ideals of the common people; the Anabaptist movement, which began simultaneously, expressed their religious aspirations; both were essentially noble and just; both have been most amply justified by the later course of history; yet both were quenched in streams of blood and have had to wait till our own day for their resurrection in new form. Truth is mighty. But for a definite historical victory a given truth must depend on the class which makes that truth its own and fights for it. If that class is sufficiently numerous, compact, intelligent, organized, and conscious of what it wants, it may drive a breach through the intrenchments of those opposed to it and carry the cause to victory. If there is no such army to fight its cause, the truth will drive individuals to a compratively fruitless martyrdom and will continue to hover over humanity as a disembodied ideal. There were a number of reformatory movements before 1500 which looked fully as promising and powerful as did the movement led by Luther in its early years; but the fortified authority of the papacy and clergy succeeded in frustrating them, and they ebbed away again. The Lutheran and Calvinistic Reformation succeeded because they enlisted classes which were sufficiently strong politically and economically to defend the cause of Reformed Religion. It was only when concrete material interests entered into a working alliance with Truth that enough force was rallied to break down the frowning walls of error.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  fluttering your wings too much, as we used to say in the old days. Eh?’ He detested this new ‘ Eh?’ with which she peppered her sentences so freely. But he stiffened at each interrogation, and each time mastered his rising excitement, preferring to remain in ignorance of both its reason and its aim. * I don’t ask whether you have any troubles at home. In the first place, it’s none of my business; and besides, I know your wife as if I were her mother.’ He listened to the sound of her voice without paying much attention. He noticed, above all, that when she stopped smiling or laughing, she ceased to belong to any assignable sex. Despite her enormous breasts and crushing backside, she seemed by virtue of age altogether virile and happy in that state. * And I know your wife to be thoroughly capable of making a man happy.’ He was powerless to hide his inward laughter, and Lea quickly went on to say: ‘WhatI said was “a man”, and not “any man”. Here you are in my house, without a word of warning. You’ve not come, I take it, iust to gaze into my beautiful eyes, eh? * She turned on Cheri those once ‘beautiful blue eyes’, now so diminished, marbled with tiny red veins, quizzical, neither kind nor unkind, alert and bright certainly, but ... but where was now the limpid freshness that had laved their whites with palest blue? Where the contour of their orbs, with the roundness of fruit, breast, or hemisphere, and blue as a land watered by many a river? Jestingly, he said, ‘Pooh! aren’t you sharp! A real detective!’ And it amazed him to find that he had fallen into such a carefree posture, with his legs crossed, like a handsome young man with bad manners. For inwardly he was watching his other self, hopelessly distracted and on his knees, waving his arms, baring his breast, and shrieking incoherently. ‘ I’m not a particularly stupid woman. But you must admit that you don’t present me to-day with a very difficult problem! ’ She drew in her chin and its lower folds spread over her neck: the kneeling ghost of his other self bowed its head like a man who has received a death-blow. ‘You show every known sign of suffering from the disease of your generation. No, no, let me go on. Like all your soldier friends, you’re looking everywhere for your paradise, eh! the paradise they owe you as a war hero: your own special Victory Parade, your youth, your lovely women.... They owe you all that and more, for they promised you everything, and, dear God, you deserved it. And what do you find? A decent ordinary life. So you go in for nostalgia, listlessness, disillusion, and neurasthenia. Am I wrong? ’ ‘No,’ said Cheri, for he was thinking that he would give his little finger to stop her talking.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  I’ve got to talk fast before he gets back, but I got to tell you, I decided I’m calling Children’s Services, so whatever you were thinking, it’s all over now, Baby Blue. You’re history.” I stared at her, her furry lashes. She couldn’t be that mean, could she? I hadn’t done anything. Sure, I loved him, but I couldn’t help that. I loved her too, and Davey, all of them. It was unfair. She couldn’t be serious. I started to protest, but she held up her hand, the butt smoldering between her fingers. “Don’t try to argue me out of it. I got a nice thing going here now. Ray’s the best man I ever had, treats me nice. Maybe you haven’t been trying, but I smell S-E-X, missy, and I’m not taking any chances. I lived too long and come too far to blow it now.” I sat like a fish in that airless room, flopping, as the rain battered the metal roof and walls. She was kicking me out, for nothing. I felt the ocean tugging me from my tiny little place on the rock. I could hear the river, carrying its tons of debris. I tried to think of an explanation, a reason that might satisfy her. “I never had a father,” I said. “Don’t.” She crushed the twice-smoked butt out in the ashtray, watched her fingers. “I’ve got myself and my own kids to worry about. You and me, we hardly know each other. I don’t owe you a thing.” She looked down at the front of her fuzzy sweater and brushed at some ash that had fallen on her full breast. I was slipping, falling. I had trusted Starr and I’d never given her a reason to doubt me. It wasn’t fair. She was a Christian, but she wasn’t acting on faith, on goodness. “What about charity?” I said, like a falling man reaching for a branch. “Jesus would give me a chance.” She stood up. “I’m not Jesus,” she said. “Not even close.” I sat on the bed, praying to the voice in the rain. Please, Jesus, don’t let her do this to me. Jesus, if you can see this, open up her heart. Please Jesus, don’t let it be like this. “I’m sorry, you were a good kid,” she said. “But that’s life.” The only answer was rain. Silence and tears. Nothing. I thought of my mother. What she would do if she were me. She would not hesitate. She would spare nothing to have what she wanted. And thinking of her, I felt something flow into my emptiness like a flexible rod of rebar climbing up my spine. I knew it was evil, what I was feeling, self-will, but if it was, then it was. I suddenly saw us on a giant chessboard, and saw my move. “He might be mad,” I said. “You thought of that?

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  Edmee gave a mischievous shake of the head: ‘Your power of attorney still stands, my love. “ The right to sell, purchase, draw up, or sign an agreement made out in my name ... etcetera” — which reminds me, I must send the Baroness something as a souvenir.’ ‘A briar pipe,’ said Cheri, after pretending to have given the matter his attention. ‘No, don’t laugh. The good soul is so valuable to us.’ ‘And who are “us”?’ ‘Your mother and me. The Baroness knows how to talk to the men in a way they understand. She speaks their language. She tells them rather risky stories, but in such a way ... They dote on her.’ The strangest of laughs trembled on Chari’s lips. He let go his hold on the dark curtain, and it fell back into place behind him, thus obliterating him completely, as sleep obliterates the figment of a dream. He walked along a passage dimly lit by a blue globe, without making a sound, like a figure floating on air; for he had insisted upon having thick carpets laid on every floor, from top to bottom of the house. He loved silence, and furtiveness, and never knocked at the door of the boudoir, which his wife, since the war, called her study. She showed no annoyance, and sensing Cheri’s presence, never jumped when he came into the room. He took a shower bath without lingering under the cool water, sprayed himself with scent absent-mindedly, and returned to the boudoir. He could hear the sound of someone rumpling the sheets in the bedroom next door, and the tap of a paper-knife against a cup on the bedside table. He sat down and rested his chin in his hand. On the little table beside him, he caught sight of the morrow’s menu, duly made out for the butler, according to daily routine. On it he read: ‘ Homard Thermidor, Cotelettes Fulbert-Dumonteil, Chaudfroid de canard, Salade Charlotte, Souffle au Curasao, Allumettes au Chester.’ ... “No alteration required,” he murmured to himself. *Sixplaces}’ — “Ah, yes, that I must alter.” He corrected the number, and once more cupped his chin in his hand. ‘Fred, do you know what time it is?’ He did not answer the soft voice, but went into their room and sat down facing the bed. With one shoulder bare and the other half hidden by a wisp of white nightgown, Edmee was smiling, despite her tired state, aware that she looked prettier in bed than out. But Cheri remained seated, and once again cupped his chin in his hand. ‘ Rodin’s Penseur ,’ said Edmee, to encourage him to smile or to move. * There’s many a true word spoken in iest,’ he answered sententiously. He pulled the folds of his Chinese dressing-gown closer over his knees and savagely crossed his arms. ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ She did not understand, or had no wish to do so.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  ‘I don’t think so, Monsieur.’ ‘Where is Madame?* ‘It wouldn’t be easy for me to tell you, Monsieur. We forward all letters addressed to Madame - and there’s none to speak of — to Madame’s solicitor.’ Cheri pulled out his note-case, and cocked an eye at Ernest. ‘ Oh, Monsieur Peloux, money between you and me? Don’t think of it. A thousand francs won’t make a man tell what he doesn’t know. But if Monsieur would like the address of Madame’s solicitor?’ ‘No thanks, there’s no point. And when does she return?’ Ernest threw up his hands: ‘ That’s another question that’s beyond me. Maybe to-morrow, maybe in a month’s time. ... I keep everything in readiness, just the same. You have to watch out where Madame is concerned. If you said to me now, “There she comes round the comer of the Avenue,” I shouldn’t be surprised.’ Cheri turned round and looked towards the comer of the Avenue. ‘ That’s all Monsieur Peloux wants? Monsieur just happened to be walking by? It’s a lovely day. ...’ ‘Nothing else, thank you, Ernest. Goodbye, Ernest.’ ‘Always at Monsieur’s service.’ Cheri walked up as far as the Place Victor-Hugo, swinging his cane as he went. Twice he stumbled and almost fell, like people who imagine their progress is being followed by hostile eyes. On reaching the balustraded entrance to the Metro, he leaned over the ramp to peer down into the pink-and-black recesses of the Underground, and felt utterly exhausted. When he straightened his back, he saw that the lamps had been lighted in the square and that the blue of dusk coloured everything around him. “No, it can’t be true. Pm ill.” He had plumbed the depths of cavernous memories and his return to the living world was painful. The right words came to him at last. “Pull yourself together, Peloux, for God’s sake! Are you losing your head, my boy? Don’t you know it’s time to go back home?” This last word recalled a sight that one hour had sufficed to banish from his mind: a large square room — his own nursery; an anxious young woman standing by the window; and Charlotte Peloux, subdued by a Martini. ‘Oh, no,’ he said aloud. ‘Not that! That’s all over.’ He signalled to a taxi with his raised stick. ‘To the ... er ... to the Restaurant du Dragon Bleu.’ Cheri crossed the grill-room to the sound of violins in the glare of the atrocious electric light, and this had a tonic effect. He shook the hand of a maitre d’hotel who recognized him. Before him rose the stooping figure of a tall young man. Cheri gave an affectionate gasp. ‘ Desmond, the very man I wanted to see! Howdydo? ’ They were shown to a table decorated with pink carnations. A small hand and a towering aigrette beckoned towards Cheri from a neighbouring table. ‘It’s La Loupiote,’ Vicomte Desmond warned him.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  It will work us over in whatever way it wants, and on its own damn schedule. We can’t just snap our fingers and be done with the devastation. We also can’t amputate any of our emotions and expect to be whole. Believe me, I’ve tried. For most of my life, I’ve done everything in my power to run from the big, scary feelings explored in this book—the socially unacceptable emotions that we’re not “supposed” to feel, like rage, powerlessness, and utter despair. But a few years ago, when my father was dying, my world was falling apart, and I was on the verge of reaching my 20-year milestone of living with my own shit pickle—a stage IV cancer diagnosis (yup, it’s not gone, neat, or tidy)—I suddenly lost the energy to run. So I decided to try something different: I stopped and faced my feelings. Eager to find a framework that resonated, I began researching how grief and other difficult emotions affect our brains, bodies, and lives—even when we’re unaware of it. Could understanding these big kahunas help me understand myself and others better? Could accepting grief as a part of me that needed to be cared for—just like my skin or heart or the dozens of tumors that I’ve learned to coexist with—help me feel even the slightest bit whole again? I didn’t know, but I needed to try. So, I slowly and gently started applying the practices, insights, and therapies I was discovering to my own pain, and over time, I eventually began to feel better—not cured, but better. Which is exactly what can happen for you. Let’s be honest: feelings are slippery little suckers. When we deny them, they get pissed off and come out in other, more destructive ways. Uncared for pain can morph into anger, violence, addiction, anxiety, hypervigilance, hyperdrive, guilt, procrastination, hopelessness, and, of course, the consuming of copious amounts of wine. It shrinks our worlds and makes us feel stuck—at home, at work, in our bodies, in our relationships, and in our hearts. Burying pain can also make us sick or, at the very least, constipated. But here’s what can happen when we’re brave enough to take care of our hearts: our messy emotions can teach us how to be free—not free from pain but free from the fear of pain and the barrier it creates to fully living. As trauma specialist Robert Stolorow points out, our feelings, no matter what they are, long for a home. Creating that home, a place where all parts of us are welcome, is how we heal. Grief, loss, and pain beg for a safe place to be seen and heard. They ask us to be vulnerable, which is the last thing we want to do when we’re in agony. But if we’re brave enough to let our various griefs do their therapeutic work, they will grow and mend us in ways we can’t begin to imagine (yet).

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  Consider, ladies, I beseech you, what disorders a wicked woman occasions, and how many evils ensue from the sin of the one you have just heard of. Since Eve made Adam sin, it has been the business of women to torment, kill, and damn men. For my part, I have had so much experience of their cruelty, that I shall lay my death to nothing but the despair into which one of * The events related in this novel, and the names of the per- sons, are all real. The last editors of the Heptameron (la Socidt^ des Bibliophiles Frangais, 1853) have published the writ of pardon granted by Francis I. to St. Aignan, the original of which is pre- served in the Archives Nationales. The writ, as usual, recites the statement of the case made by the petitioner for pardon, and this agrees closely with the Queen of Navarre's narrative, allowance, of course, being made for the peculiar colouring which it was the murderer's interest to give to the facts. 22 THE HRPrAMERON OF THE • INavel z them has plunged me. And yet I am crazed enough to confess this hell is more agreeable to me, coming from her hand, than the paradise which another might be- stow upon me. Parlamente, affecting not to understand that it was of herself he spoke, replied, " If hell is as agreeable as you say, you can't be afraid of the devil who put you into it." " If my devil," replied Simontault in a pet, " were to become as black as it has been cruel to me, it would cause this company as much fright as I feel pleasure in looking upon it. But the fire of love makes me forget the fire of that hell. So I will say no more about it, but call upon Madame Oisille, being assured that if she would speak of women as she knows them, she would corroborate my opinion." The whole company turned to the old lady and begged her to begin, which she did with a smile, and with this little preamble : " It seems to me, ladies, that the last speaker has cast such a slur upon our sex by the true story he has narrated of a wretched woman, that I must run back through all the past years of my life in order to call to my mind one woman whose virtue was such as to belie the bad opinion he has of our sex. Happily I recollect one such woman, who deserves not to be forgotten, and will now relate her story to you." NOVEL II. Chaste and lamentable death of the wife of one of the Queen oj Navarre's muleteers. At Amboise there once lived a muleteer, who was in the service of the Queen of Navarre, sister of Francis Ftrst dny.\ QUEEN OF NA VARRE. 23

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  The duchess would not suffer him to proceed, but seeing she was in danger of receiving a shameful refusal, she broke in upon him suddenly, " Wicked and arrogant fool ! who requires any such thing of you .'' Because you are good-looking you imagine that the very flies are enamoured of you; but if you were presumptuous enough to address yourself to me, I would soon let you know that I love, and will love, none but my husband I have spoken to you as I have done only for my diver- sion, to sift you, and make you my laughing-stock, as I do all amorous coxcombs."' C24 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE INavel ya " I have all along been assured that it was just as you say, madam," replied the gentleman. She would hear no more, but turned abruptly from him, and to avoid her ladies who followed her into her chamber, she shut herself up in her closet, where she gave way to an indescribable burst of bitter feeling. On the one hand, the love in which she had failed caused her mortal sadness ; and on the other, her despite against herself for entering upon so injudicious a dialogue, and against the gentleman for having answered so prudently, put her into such a fury that at one moment she wished to kill herself, at the next she would live to be revenged on him she regarded as her deadliest enemy. After a long fit of tears she feigned indisposition, to avoid ap- pearing at the duke's supper, at which the gentleman was usually in attendance. The duke, who loved his wife more than himself, failed not to go and see her ; when, in order to arrive the more easily at her ends, she told him she believed she was pregnant, and that her pregnancy had caused a rheum to fall upon her eyes, which gave her great pain. The duchess kept her bed for tv/o or three hours in so sad and melancholy a mood that the duke suspected there was something else the matter besides pregnancy. He went to sleep with her that flight ; but seeing that, in spite of all the caresses he could bestow upon her, she continued to sigh incessantly, he said, "You know, my dear, that I love you as my own life, and that if you die I cannot possibly survive you. If, then, you value my health and life, tell me, I entieat, what makes you sigh thus ; for T cannot believe that pregnancy alone can produce that effect." The duchess, seeing her husband in the very mood she wished, hastened to turn it to her vengeful purpose. " Alas ! monsieur," she said, embracing him with tears, Seventh day. \ Q UEEN OF NA VARRE. 525