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.

Page 185 of 267 · 20 per page

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Good-bye, Martin.’ She watched him hurrying down the street, and when he was finally lost in its shadows, she turned slowly and made her own way up the hill, past the garish lights of the Moulin de la Galette. Its pitiful sails revolved in the wind, eternally grinding out petty sins—dry chaff blown in from the gutters of Paris. And after a while, having breasted the hill, she must climb a dusty flight of stone steps, and push open a heavy, slow- moving door; the door of the mighty temple of faith that keeps its anxious but tireless vigil. She had no idea why she was doing this thing, or what she would say to the silver Christ with one hand on His heart and the other held out in a patient gesture of supplication. The sound of praying, monotonous, low, insistent, rose up from those who prayed with extended arms, with crucified arms—like the tides of an ocean it swelled and receded and swelled again, bathing the shores of heaven. They were calling upon the Mother of God: ‘Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu, priez pour nous, pauvres pêcheurs, maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort.’ ‘Et à l’heure de notre mort,’ Stephen heard herself repeating. He looked terribly weary, the silver Christ: ‘But then He always looks tired,’ she thought vaguely; and she stood there without finding anything to say, embarrassed as one so frequently is in the presence of somebody else’s sorrow. For herself she felt nothing, neither pity nor regret; she was curiously empty of all sensation, and after a little she left the church, to walk on through the wind-swept streets of Montmartre. CHAPTER 56 1 V alérie stared at Stephen in amazement: ‘But . . . it’s such an extraordinary thing you’re asking! Are you sure you’re right to take such a step? For myself I care nothing; why should I care? If you want to pretend that you’re my lover, well, my dear, to be quite frank, I wish it were true— I feel certain you’d make a most charming lover. All the same,’ and now her voice sounded anxious, ‘this is not a thing to be done lightly, Stephen. Aren’t you being absurdly self-sacrificing? You can give the girl a very great deal.’ Stephen shook her head: ‘I can’t give her protection or happiness, and yet she won’t leave me. There’s only one way . . .’ Then Valérie Seymour, who had always shunned tragedy like the plague, flared out in something very like temper: ‘Protection! Protection! I’m sick of the word. Let her do without it; aren’t you enough for her? Good heavens, you’re worth twenty Mary Llewellyns! Stephen, think it over before you decide—it seems mad to me.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  He seemed to understand that I was hurting. He whined a little. I whined back at him and we whined together. I wanted to pretend it was just irritation, maybe the dawning of a mild yeast infection, which could be snuffed out with a bit of Monistat. But this was no yeast infection. It was a goddamn urinary tract infection. I hadn’t had one in years, but the feeling was not one you forget. The dull ache in the pelvis, the urgent need to pee, the burning. After my first three UTIs I had learned the secret at my college infirmary: always pee after sex. Pee immediately, within ten minutes, if possible. But I wasn’t about to pee in front of Garrett. I thought about how I was taught to wipe, as a little girl, after I’d gotten my first UTI. “From now on you’re going to wipe from front to back,” said the pediatrician. “Do you understand?” When Garrett tried to stick his dick into my asshole, and then abandoned the mission for my vagina, I did, for a split second, think, This can’t be good. Back to front. I tried to sleep but it was no use. I knew exactly what I needed: Pyridium to take the pain away and Cipro to kill the bug. I started moaning little things out loud in a deeply self-pitying way, like “Noooooo” and “Why meeeeeeee?” Part of me was reacting to the pain. But another part of me liked being melodramatic, babying myself. I managed to walk Dominic and then summon a car. The closest hospital was in Marina del Rey, not far. “Be good,” I said. “Mommy is very, very sick.” I heard myself talking to the dog, and it reminded me that I existed. Existence always looked like something other than I thought it would. 4. Then came the obsession. I started reading my weekly horoscopes and his (Sagittarius), parsing every word for a sign that the universe was going to bring us back together. If there was nothing about love I would read a different horoscope. I would read them until I found one that suited me—until it said this was my lucky day or week or month. I consulted a psychic, an old woman in Tempe who worked in the back of a Mediterranean restaurant. She said that I needed to focus on me, do work on myself and my “blocks” and more would be revealed. She suggested a powder made of quartz crystal to put in my bath. She said it would serve as a clearing of negativity. I bought it for $250 and soaked in it. Nothing happened. So I called more psychics. I realized how much time I had spent with Jamie.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Things were so bad for me by the end—the end of my last run. It could have killed me, easily. If I ever end up in that emotional space again? In a way, I think I’d be lucky to be dead. It would be worse to roam the planet, a tormented soul, for the rest of my life.” Maybe this was why I was in group, to remind people like her of the hell that awaited them just on the other side. I was here to be a cautionary tale. “How did you get through your withdrawal without dying?” I asked. “I just kept going. One minute at a time. And gradually I saw that the feelings didn’t destroy me.” “But you were forced to give him up, right? You didn’t choose to do it. I mean, he got a restraining order?” “What does a restraining order mean to people like us? In the face of our kind of obsession? But I guess, technically, yes, I was forbidden from being with him. I didn’t make the choice.” So there it was. She hadn’t so much recovered as she was stopped by the law. I pictured her like a marionette, a marionette of obsessive love, with a judge pulling the strings. She was running in place, like a boxer, but could not move toward what she thought she loved. “But what if you could be with him? If you could be with him again, wouldn’t you do it in a heartbeat?” “No, I wouldn’t,” she said quickly. “Come on. What if he was standing right here on the sidewalk?” She thought about it for a second and the corners of her mouth twitched downward. “Do I still miss him? Yes, I do. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. But I don’t miss what being with him took away from me.” “Like what?” “Everything,” she said. “Dignity, sanity. My life.” “What was the restraining order for anyway?” I said. “It’s embarrassing.” “Come on. I’m in child’s pose on the sidewalk.” She laughed. I’d never seen her laugh before. “Fine,” she said. “One day I saw his wife out walking. I’d never met her, only stalked her on the Internet. But there she was, power walking down Montana right in front of me. And I thought about how unfair it was that I knew so much about her, from the stalking, and she didn’t even know I existed. I just felt livid about it. And I sort of chased her down…with my Prius.” “No!” “It’s true.” “You chased her down! Like tried to run her over?” “I wouldn’t have said that at the time. But yes, that’s what I was doing.” “My God, that’s amazing.” I laughed. “It’s not,” she said. “It’s pretty disgusting.” “I suddenly like you so much more,” I said. “You shouldn’t. None of it was her fault. It was her husband’s fault.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Every road for miles around Upton was familiar, yet she had not the least idea where she was going. Nor did she know how long she drove, nor when she stopped to procure fresh petrol. The sun rose high and hot in the heavens; it beat down on her without warming her coldness, for always she had the sense of a dead thing that lay close against her heart and oppressed it. A corpse—she was carrying a corpse about with her. Was it the corpse of her love for Angela? If so that love was more terrible dead—oh, far more terrible dead than living. The first stars were shining, but as yet very faintly, when she found herself driving through the gates of Morton. Heard Puddle’s voice calling: ‘Wait a minute. Stop, Stephen!’ Saw Puddle barring her way in the drive, a tiny yet dauntless figure. She pulled up with a jerk: ‘What’s the matter? What is it?’ ‘Where have you been?’ ‘I—don’t know, Puddle.’ But Puddle had clambered in beside her: ‘Listen, Stephen,’ and now she was talking very fast, ‘listen, Stephen—is it—is it Angela Crossby? It is. I can see the thing in your face. My God, what’s that woman done to you, Stephen?’ Then Stephen, in spite of the corpse against her heart, or perhaps because of it, defended the woman: ‘She’s done nothing at all—it was all my fault, but you wouldn’t understand—I got very angry and then I laughed and couldn’t stop laughing—’ Steady—go steady! She was telling too much: ‘No—it wasn’t that exactly. Oh, you know my vile temper, it always goes off at half cock for nothing. Well, then I just drove round and round the country until I cooled down. I’m sorry, Puddle, I ought to have rung up, of course you’ve been anxious.’ Puddle gripped her arm: ‘Stephen, listen, it’s your mother—she thinks that you started quite early for Worcester, I lied—I’ve been nearly distracted, child. If you hadn’t come soon, I’d have had to tell her that I didn’t know where you were. You must never, never go off without a word like this again—But I do understand, oh, I do indeed, Stephen.’ But Stephen shook her head: ‘No, my dear, you couldn’t—and I’d rather not tell you, Puddle.’ ‘Some day you must tell me,’ said Puddle, ‘because—well, because I do understand, Stephen.’ 4 That night the weight against Stephen’s heart, with its icy coldness, melted; and it flowed out in such a torrent of grief that she could not stand up against that torrent, so that drowning though she was she found pen and paper, and she wrote to Angela Crossby. What a letter! All the pent-up passion of months, all the terrible, rending, destructive frustrations must burst from her heart: ‘Love me, only love me the way I love you.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And then she would stand up before her tall easel, swaying a little but with hand always steady. The brandy went into her legs, not her hands; her hands would remain disconcertingly steady. She would start some gigantic and heart-broken daub, struggling to lose herself in her picture, struggling to ease the ache of her passion by smearing the placid white face of the canvas with ungainly yet strangely arresting forms—according to Dupont, Wanda had genius. Neither eating nor sleeping she would grow very thin, so that everybody would know what had happened. They had seen it before, oh, but many times, and therefore for them the tragedy was lessened. ‘Wanda’s off again!’ some one might say with a grin. ‘She was tight this morning; who is it this time?’ But Valérie, who hated drink like the plague, would grow angry; outraged she would feel by this Wanda. There was Hortense, Comtesse de Kerguelen; dignified and reserved, a very great lady, of a calm and rather old-fashioned beauty. When Valérie introduced her to Stephen, Stephen quite suddenly thought of Morton. And yet she had left all for Valérie Seymour; husband, children and home had she left; facing scandal, opprobrium, persecution. Greater than all these most vital things had been this woman’s love for Valérie Seymour. An enigma she seemed, much in need of explaining. And now in the place of that outlawed love had come friendship; they were close friends, these one-time lovers. There was Margaret Roland, the poetess, a woman whose work was alive with talent. The staunchest of allies, the most fickle of lovers, she seemed likely enough to end up in the work-house, with her generous financial apologies which at moments made pretty large holes in her savings. It was almost impossible not to like her, since her only fault lay in being too earnest; every fresh love affair was the last while it lasted, though of course this was apt to be rather misleading. A costly business in money and tears; she genuinely suffered in heart as in pocket. There was nothing arresting in Margaret’s appearance, sometimes she dressed well, sometimes she dressed badly, according to the influence of the moment. But she always wore ultra feminine shoes, and frequently bought model gowns when in Paris. One might have said quite a womanly woman, unless the trained ear had been rendered suspicious by her voice which had something peculiar about it. It was like a boy’s voice on the verge of breaking. And then there was Brockett with his soft, white hands; and several others there were, very like him. There was also Adolphe Blanc, the designer—a master of colour whose primitive tints had practically revolutionized taste, bringing back to the eye the joy of the simple. Blanc stood in a little niche by himself, which at times must surely have been very lonely. A quiet, tawny man with the eyes of the Hebrew, in his youth he had been very deeply afflicted.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And I ask for so little, just to have you with me for a few days and nights—just to sleep with you in my arms; just to feel you beside me when I wake up in the morning—I want to open my eyes and see your face, as though we belonged to each other. Angela, I swear I wouldn’t torment you —we’d be just as we are now, if that’s what you’re afraid of. You must know, after all these months, that you can trust me—’ But Angela set her lips and refused: ‘No, Stephen, I’m sorry, but I’d rather not come.’ Then Stephen would feel that life was past bearing, and sometimes she must ride rather wildly for miles—now on Raftery, now on Sir Philip’s young chestnut. All alone she would ride in the early mornings, getting up from a sleepless night unrefreshed, yet terribly alive because of those nerves that tortured her luckless body. She would get back to Morton still unable to rest, and a little later would order the motor and drive herself across to The Grange, where Angela would usually be dreading her coming. Her reception would be cold: ‘I’m fairly busy, Stephen—I must pay off all these bills before Ralph gets home;’ or: ‘I’ve got a foul headache, so don’t scold me this morning; I think if you did that I just couldn’t bear it!’ Stephen would flinch as though struck in the face; she might even turn round and go back to Morton. Came the last precious day before Ralph’s return, and that day they did spend quite peaceably together, for Angela seemed bent upon soothing. She went out of her way to be gentle to Stephen, and Stephen, quick as always to respond, was very gentle in her turn. But after they had dined in the little herb garden—taking advantage of the hot, still weather—Angela developed one of her headaches. ‘Oh, my Stephen—oh, darling, my head’s too awful. It must be the thunder—it’s been coming on all day. What a perfectly damnable thing to happen, on our last evening too—but I know this kind well; I’ll just have to give in and go to my bed. I’ll take a cachet and then try to sleep, so don’t ring me up when you get back to Morton. Come to-morrow—come early. I’m so miserable, darling, when I think that this is our last peaceful evening—’ ‘I know. But are you all right to be left?’ ‘Yes, of course. All I need is to get some sleep. You won’t worry, will you? Promise, my Stephen!’

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  I vacuumed our apartment, polished the dining and wooden end tables, scrubbed the ten linoleum squares that made up our kitchen and bathroom, and left the tiny apartment in its gleaming glory to walk around the corner to the bakery. Once I reached it though, I stopped outside the door leading inside, immobilized as I watched other customers stroll in and out. I could see the glass case of cookies through the window and I felt nothing so much as bafflement: this once made me happy? These crumbling, garishly colored cookies? Jockeying for a spot in line with all the couples pushing overloaded baby strollers? I desperately wanted to be a mother, I wanted to coo over a baby with Michael, saying she has my eyes but your smile, I wanted to know what it meant to feel a life growing inside of me – and these cookies were supposed to bring me some modicum of joy? I didn’t want the crumbs, I wanted the whole bakery. I was disgusted with myself, a simpleton who had been fooled by such a mundane pleasure in the past. Now, standing here on the sidewalk, I have that same feeling of bewilderment. I had thought happiness was still within my grasp and an emotion that I understood – men were mine for the taking just like those cookies had been, lined up on their trays, waiting to be chosen and packed up for home. But I don’t have the fire in me to compete with these strutting women who dominate the streets of my hometown. I suddenly feel used up and spit out, my eyes swollen from my meltdown in the car, my curly hair puffing up in the humidity, my skin coated in a toxic layer of acridness that I am certain will repel anyone who comes near me. I feel, finally, defeated. Slowly, I walk back home, letting Daisy know I can help her finish her errands if she wants and texting Hudson a long note that has been purged of the rage I felt just an hour ago. I tell him I love him unconditionally, am sorry I lost my temper and know we will get through this together. If I can only retrieve one part of my former self, it’ll be to mother the hell out of my kids – that’s the one job at which I absolutely will not allow myself to fail. To their credit, the kids get their emotions under control and our reunification spurs me along. Back upstate, every night leading up to her departure, I cook one of Daisy’s favorite meals and then excuse myself to wipe away a sudden onslaught of tears while the kids murmur to each other, “Is she seriously crying again?” Daisy and I have always been deeply connected to each other, and she is the child of mine who bursts through the door at the end of the day spilling out an endless series of stories.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  Why had I so wholeheartedly embraced the fairy-tale notion of a happily ever after when I had so little evidence aside from schmaltzy television shows that such a thing existed? Why had it never occurred to me that my marriage could come to a screeching halt if I didn’t consistently keep my foot on the pedal? I had believed myself to be impervious to becoming a divorce statistic, above something as cliché as an affair. What did I know of this life if my most basic understanding of its essential elements had been wrong all along? I pictured a Jenga tower with my relationship with Michael at the very bottom, every other wood piece balancing on that base – my family, my past, my future, my sense of self. How was I to stay in one piece now? Watching my husband kiss our kids goodbye and then hearing the front door slam shut, I fought hard to control my reaction so the kids would not suspect anything awry. Soon I would have to come up with an explanation, but for now I had to get through my first night alone. I moved through the next days in a stupor, getting the kids off to school and then collapsing in tears. I cried to friends, I cried alone, I cried in the bathroom with the shower running when the kids got home from school, I cried in the pantry as I attempted to throw together meals for the kids. Twice a day I dropped CBD oil on my tongue that Erika had sent to help calm me. Jessica made an emergency appointment with a therapist she found for me, whose face looked so pained as I choked out my story that I cried even harder; after two sessions, when I realized she didn’t seem able to help me make a plan for how to move forward, I stopped seeing her. I was so lost that I felt I needed a cartographer, not a therapist. By Tuesday night, the kids were onto me. After I put Georgia to sleep, Daisy and Hudson approached me as a unified force, startling me with their intensity on getting to the truth. “Mom, where’s Dad?” Hudson asked, fixing his gray eyes on mine. “Upstate. Meetings,” I responded. “That doesn’t make sense,” Hudson said. “What’s really going on?” I took a deep breath and sat on the sofa. I had not planned this conversation, assuming I had at least a few days before I had to tackle it. “OK, guys, I’m sorry. I wanted to gather myself before talking to you. You know how Dad and I have been fighting a lot lately?” I asked. “No,” said Daisy, resolutely. “OK, well you know how we’ve been having a hard time with each other lately?” She shook her head again.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  Though reluctant to disrupt our newly established summer routine, I pull Georgia out of day camp so that we can spend a few days with my friend Tina and her family at their house in Nantucket. Tina has been insistent that a few days away will do me good and I don’t have the stamina to come up with more excuses. I want to burrow in my grief and hibernate, but my friends keep digging me out. I love them for their tenacity, but wish they would let me be. Countless mornings I walked through my apartment from bedroom to bedroom, attempting to rouse my kids for school with a chipper “Good morning, sunshine!” and watching them instead pull blankets over their heads without so much as opening an eye. I would disentangle and then pull off twisted blankets from their slumbering bodies as they reached out to hold on for a few more minutes, seconds even. That’s how I feel now – friends keep throwing my blankets off to wake me up, but I want to be left alone to sleep through the pain. Of course, Tina had been right. A change of scenery, her bracingly strong cocktails and the sight of Georgia frolicking on the wide expanse of beach are a welcome respite from my misery. If I can’t feel joy right now, I can at least find occasional moments of peace. It has been months since I have been able to get through more than a few hours of the day without weeping and these small bits of calm give me a glimmer of hope, reminding me of the person I was before. My current life is framed in the before and the after: before, I was happily married, comfortable, my path laid out in a neat, unbroken line. After is the dystopian alternative of that narrative, the pitiful remains left after the version I wanted was taken away from me. I need to get back to the before version of myself – the one who smiled easily and often, who embraced her life with purposefulness, a can-do attitude and joie de vivre – but without marriage, stability and a clear footpath I cannot figure out how to begin the journey to find her, if she in fact still exists. We arrive sandy and sunburnt back at our house in rural Upstate New York after a choppy ferry ride and a long drive home. Michael is there, ready to take over for a couple of days. I turn Georgia over to him and close myself in my – formerly our – bedroom. We are sharing our country home so that the kids don’t have to come and go; it’s awkward on a good day, a slap in the face on a bad one. Now it’s 6 p.m. on Saturday and I’m facing a long evening shut in my room so that I can avoid interacting with him.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  So far, this had not made me hustle any faster. It wasn’t that I no longer felt impassioned by Sappho. I did, or sort of did, as much as you can feel impassioned by anyone you have lived with for nine years. But it had dawned on me around year six that the thesis of my thesis, its whole raison d’être, was faulty. In fact, it was not just faulty. It was total bullshit. But I didn’t know how to fix it. So I’d just been riding it out. The book operated under the notion that scholars always assumed a first-person speaker when reading Sappho’s poetry. Scholars were kind of assholes and they actually hated mystery—they detested any inability to fill in the blanks. They were victims, like the rest of us, of the way their brains worked: trying to compartmentalize every fragment of information into a pattern. They wanted the world to make sense. Who didn’t? So when reading Sappho’s work, they took details that they already knew, or thought they knew, of Sappho’s life, and used them to fill in the blanks. But they did so erroneously, like a psychologist who, after learning three extraneous things about a person’s childhood, believes they know the whole person. My book presented the argument that one should read the vast number of erasures in Sappho’s work as intentional. True, Sappho had not included these herself. They were created by the passage of time and dirt since 600 BCE. Most of her work was actually missing, with only 650 lines of 10,000 surviving. But I argued that to reimagine these blanks as created by Sappho herself was far less of a co-option than filling in the gaps with what little we know of her life, creating our own meanings for them out of a desire to make history our own, and above all, projecting a first-person speaker upon them. I felt that the only way we would cease projecting was if the blanks were read as intentional text themselves. Forget whether she was a lesbian, preferred younger men, was hypersexual, bisexual, or had multiple male lovers. If we were going to ascribe meaning, let’s do it with what was there rather than what was not there. Unfortunately this was a total garbage proposition. I, myself, had a very complicated relationship with emptiness, blankness, nothingness. Sometimes I wanted only to fill it, frightened that if I didn’t it would eat me alive or kill me. But sometimes I longed for total annihilation in it—a beautiful, silent erasure. A desire to be vanished. And so I was most guilty of all in projecting an agenda. I knew it, which was why I had not really pressed ahead. I wasn’t sure if my advisory committee knew it. But I was about to be cut off and I figured that a shitty book was probably better than no book at all.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  She said she liked that, as she liked military men, and he seemed handsome. For two weeks he had sent her messages every day: never saying anything uncouth or sending a picture of his penis. Then, one day, she asked if he might like to meet in person. He deleted his account. “But if it’s meant for me, it’s meant for me. And if it’s not, it’s not,” she said quietly, adjusting the strap on her babydoll dress. She was wearing knee socks and Mary Janes too. “I have a very full life. Very full. I don’t even know if I really want anyone else in it.” Then she sighed. The only person I liked was a woman named Claire. She was British, crass, and irate, with long fiery-red curls. Claire kept saying “Fuck this bullshit” over and over. She had left her husband two years ago when she met a younger man at a juice bar and realized, as she put it, that she hadn’t had a proper dick inside of her in twelve years. The younger man was happy to fuck her, but he never encouraged her to leave her husband. It was she who assumed they would have a life together. For six months they were off and on, until finally, she threw a plate of pesto kelp noodles at him at Café Gratitude and broke it off for good. Clean and sober for nine years, she was afraid the drama would make her drink. Most recently, though, she was hurt and enraged again by a man named Brad. He sounded pretty bad—bald, baseball capped, and litigation lawyery—but she really liked him. She said that they had begun to get really intimate around his mother’s death, then he just disappeared. She wasn’t drinking, but she was taking up a lot of bad behaviors again to cope with her depression. “I left my children with a friend and rented a hotel room, where I could go self-harm in peace,” she said. “But then I got scared I would off myself. I didn’t know what else to do. So I’ve come back to this bloody hellhole.” Unlike Brianne and Chickenhorse, Claire was firmly instructed that she should not be dating until she’d done some work on herself. She called this “a load of shite.” “Lucy, I’d like to suggest the same for you,” said Dr. Jude. “No dating, no sex, no contact with Jamie for the next ninety days. You’ll likely experience a period of withdrawal, if you haven’t begun to already. But it will be worth it in the end.” “Withdrawal?” “Yes, you’re detoxing from him…from a whole way of life really.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She bought twelve pairs of gloves, some heavy silk stockings, a square sapphire scarf pin and a new umbrella. Nor could she resist the lure of pyjamas made of white crêpe de Chine which she spotted in Bond Street. The pyjamas led to a man’s dressing-gown of brocade—an amazingly ornate garment. Then she had her nails manicured but not polished, and from that shop she carried away toilet water and a box of soap that smelt of carnations and some cuticle cream for the care of her nails. And last but not least, she bought a gold bag with a clasp set in diamonds for Angela. All told she had spent a considerable sum, and this gave her a fleeting satisfaction. But on her way back in the train to Malvern, she gazed out of the window with renewed desolation. Money could not buy the one thing that she needed in life; it could not buy Angela’s love. 6 That night she stared at herself in the glass; and even as she did so she hated her body with its muscular shoulders, its small compact breasts, and its slender flanks of an athlete. All her life she must drag this body of hers like a monstrous fetter imposed on her spirit. This strangely ardent yet sterile body that must worship yet never be worshipped in return by the creature of its adoration. She longed to maim it, for it made her feel cruel; it was so white, so strong and so self-sufficient; yet withal so poor and unhappy a thing that her eyes filled with tears and her hate turned to pity. She began to grieve over it, touching her breasts with pitiful fingers, stroking her shoulders, letting her hands slip along her straight thighs—Oh, poor and most desolate body! Then she, for whom Puddle was actually praying at that moment, must now pray also, but blindly; finding few words that seemed worthy of prayer, few words that seemed to encompass her meaning—for she did not know the meaning of herself. But she loved, and loving groped for the God who had fashioned her, even unto this bitter loving. CHAPTER 25 1 S tephen’s troubles had begun to be aggravated by Violet, who was always driving over to Morton, ostensibly to talk about Alec, in reality to collect information as to what might be happening at The Grange. She would stay for hours, very skilfully pumping while she dropped unwelcome hints anent Roger. ‘Father’s going to cut down his allowance,’ she declared, ‘if he doesn’t stop hanging about that woman. Oh, I’m sorry! I always forget she’s your friend—’ Then looking at Stephen with inquisitive eyes: ‘But I can’t understand that friendship of yours; for one thing, how can you put up with Crossby?’ And Stephen knew that yet once again, county gossip was rife about her.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  What else would I do? I could not go back to Phoenix, languish in my apartment. There was nothing there for me. And every day I would have to face consciousness, cursing myself for not dissolving in the most beautiful of ways when I could have. Suddenly, though, this dissolve no longer seemed beautiful. It seemed all wrong. If I were to die for him, if I were to be dead—and I knew within myself that I was to be dead—I could not just be a dead girl among many. The dead girl among many is not worshipped. I wanted to be the lone dead girl or nothing at all. “I fucking hate you,” I said coolly. I was shocked that these words came out of me. Immediately I thought to correct them, but I didn’t. “Lucy.” I looked at him carefully. Did he really love me, or had it been just a game? In a way it was both. It was a game he was playing with himself, a very serious game, in which I had occupied a crucial role. Theo had hoped that I could fill his emptiness, at least for a little while. Then, once he had me under the water—once my want for him was proven—he would have no need for me anymore. I would begin to dissolve in that emptiness and he would need someone else to fill it. This was a game I knew well. Like Claire, I too wanted a thousand cocks. Didn’t we all just want a thousand hard cocks attached to the bodies of boys who have died for us, still warm, to plug our infinite holes? It was a whole way of life, really, the pursuit of that satiety. And it felt like life or death for him too. I wondered if I was looking at myself. Was I that beautiful and cold? What had always felt to me like an overabundance of want, too much desire, had not been the problem. It was my fear of having to feel it that hurt me. Theo was afraid too. That innate desire was something warm, lovely even, but his fear had turned it into something cold. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to need, even if you risked rejection. Annika needed me now. When she put it out there on the line it moved me. In her it didn’t seem weak or disgusting, but like a beautiful quality. Her need brought something out in me that I didn’t know that I could be. It was transformational. I could go back to the beach house. I could go back to the house and I could stay, she told me so. In fact, she not only wanted me to do that—she needed me to do it. Maybe I could even finish the book on my own terms. Fuck the university.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I said, “Gods, please help me to be happy. Let me do the will of the universe and be willing to do the will of the universe, whatever that even is. Clearly I know very little. Clearly what I think I know leads me only to a place of suicidal longing. I never asked to be born on the planet. I never asked to exist. But I am here now so could you maybe at least try and help me enjoy my life?” I felt silly asking to enjoy my life. I wondered if this was more than any human being should ask. Did anyone ever say that life was to be enjoyed and not suffered? What if the suffering was the point? But I didn’t want to suffer anymore. I couldn’t take it. That was clear. So I was going to try to be happy, even if it brought me more suffering. The candle burning, amethyst in hand, sitting on the deck of the beach house, I felt closer to myself than I had since before Jamie. I began to cry. Dominic made a noise, then got up into my lap and licked the tears off my face. He was licking them because they tasted good. He did the same thing when I was sweaty too. But I pretended that they were licks of love, and that’s what it felt like. Maybe this group therapy shit was working. Maybe this was self-love. I didn’t know and I didn’t really care. Where there had been a vile, depressive ooze was now quiet. The quiet itself was a thing: a sweet-filled quiet, as though the depression had been alchemized into something delicious. I looked out at the ocean. It was as though I hadn’t noticed it before, or hadn’t wanted to see it. I was scared of its wild ambivalence, so powerful and amorphous, like the depression itself. It didn’t give a fuck about me. It could eat me without even knowing. But now I saw each of the waves individually, one after the other, and felt them to be in rhythm with my heartbeat. They glimmered and splashed in the moonlight. Maybe the ocean was cheering for me after all? Maybe we were on the same side, comprised of the same things, water mostly, also mystery. The ocean swallowed things up—boats, people—but it didn’t look outside itself for fulfillment. It could take whatever skimmed its surface or it could leave it. In its depths already lived a whole world of who-knows-what. It was self-sustaining. I should be like that. It made me wonder what was inside of me. 10. But in the morning the beach was filled with tourists and the amethyst was just a rock. The quiet was gone again and replaced with nothingness.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  When it manifested as a feeling of emptiness, you could inject something into it: a 3 Musketeers, a walk, something to kind of give it a new form. You could penetrate it and give it more of a shape you felt better about. Or at least you could make a shape inside it or around it. But this was something new, like a thicker, gooey sludge. It had its own shape. It could not be contained. It was a terror. Of what I was terrified I couldn’t exactly say, but it was sitting on me. Every other shape was being absorbed into it. I no longer slept. Was this all because of Jamie? How could someone who got on my nerves so much have this much power over me? I asked my doctor for Ambien. The Ambien helped me sleep. But in the mornings the goo was right there, waiting for me. I was already in it. It was becoming more dense. One night I took nine Ambien. I was not trying to kill myself so much as vanish. I just wanted to go to sleep and be transported into the ether, another world. I guess that vanishing would have meant death, so perhaps it was an attempt at suicide? But I felt afraid of death, or at least, afraid of dying. Was there something that wasn’t death but wasn’t here either? I woke up fourteen hours later, ravenous. Doughnuts! I had to have doughnuts. Stoned from the Ambien, I got in my car and the rest was a blur. I must have blacked out. I only remember waking up on the road, parked, wearing my nightie, with doughnuts strewn around the car seats: powdered, cream-filled, a jelly. I didn’t even like jelly. Cars were honking behind me but I couldn’t figure out what to do. So I just stayed parked like that in the middle of the road and went back to sleep on the steering wheel. Then I woke up again. Now a police officer was leaning into my car on the passenger’s side. He asked if I could get out of the car. I climbed out hazily. I remember thinking a dumb joke about cops and doughnuts. Then I realized: it was the same cop who had come to my house about Jamie’s nose. “Hi,” I said. He gave me a Breathalyzer to test my blood alcohol levels. Those were normal. Then he searched the car for drugs but couldn’t find any. “I’m really feeling sick,” I said. “First the breakup, now some kind of flu. I was going to get the doughnuts for the sugar. I must have fainted. Anyway, if you just let me go home I’ll be okay.” “Ma’am, I can’t let you drive in this condition. Is there anyone I can call to come get you?” I thought of Jamie. He was usually my emergency contact. But I didn’t want him to know I needed anything from him.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Morton—so quietly perfect a thing, yet the thing of all others that she must fly from, that she must forget; but she could not forget it in these surroundings; they reminded by contrast. Curious what Brockett had said that evening about putting the sea between herself and England. . . . In view of her own half-formed plan to do so, his words had come as a kind of echo of her thoughts; it was almost as though he had peeped through a secret keyhole into her mind, had been spying upon her trouble. By what right did this curious man spy upon her—this man with the soft, white hands of a woman, with the movements befitting those soft, white hands, yet so ill-befitting the rest of his body? By no right; and how much had the creature found out when his eye had been pressed to that secret keyhole? Clever—Brockett was fiendishly clever—all his whims and his foibles could not disguise it. His face gave him away, a hard, clever face with sharp eyes that were glued to other people’s keyholes. That was why Brockett wrote such fine plays, such cruel plays; he fed his genius on live flesh and blood. Carnivorous genius. Moloch, fed upon live flesh and blood! But she, Stephen, had tried to feed her inspiration upon herbage, the kind, green herbage of Morton. For a little while such food had sufficed, but now her talent had sickened, was dying perhaps—or had she too fed it on blood, her heart’s blood when she had written The Furrow? If so, her heart would not bleed any more—perhaps it could not—perhaps it was dry. A dry, withered thing; for she did not feel love these days when she thought of Angela Crossby—that must mean that her heart had died within her. A gruesome companion to have, a dead heart. Angela Crossby—and yet there were times when she longed intensely to see this woman, to hear her speak, to stretch out her arms and clasp them around the woman’s body—not gently, not patiently as in the past, but roughly, brutally even. Beastly—it was beastly! She felt degraded. She had no love to offer Angela Crossby, not now, only something that lay like a stain on the beauty of what had once been love. Even this memory was marred and defiled, by herself even more than by Angela Crossby.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Something had to be done. Go into the bedroom, Stephen Gordon’s bedroom that faced on the courtyard . . . just a few short steps and then the window. A girl, hatless, with the sun falling full on her hair . . . she was almost running . . . she stumbled a little. But now there were two people down in the courtyard—a man had his hands on the girl’s bowed shoulders. He questioned her, yes, that was it, he questioned; and the girl was telling him why she was there, why she had fled from that thick, awful darkness. He was looking at the house, incredulous, amazed; hesitating as though he were coming in; but the girl went on and the man turned to follow . . . They were side by side, he was gripping her arm . . . They were gone; they had passed out under the archway. Then all in a moment the stillness was shattered: ‘Mary, come back! Come back to me, Mary!’ David crouched and trembled. He had crawled to the bed, and he lay there watching with his eyes of amber; trembling because such an anguish as this struck across him like the lash of a whip, and what could he do, the poor beast, in his dumbness? She turned and saw him, but only for a moment, for now the room seemed to be thronging with people. Who were they, these strangers with the miserable eyes? And yet, were they all strangers? Surely that was Wanda? And some one with a neat little hole in her side—Jamie clasping Barbara by the hand; Barbara with the white flowers of death on her bosom. Oh, but they were many, these unbidden guests, and they called very softly at first and then louder. They were calling her by name, saying: ‘Stephen, Stephen!’ The quick, the dead, and the yet unborn—all calling her, softly at first and then louder. Aye, and those lost and terrible brothers from Alec’s, they were here, and they also were calling: ‘Stephen, Stephen, speak with your God and ask Him why He has left us forsaken!’ She could see their marred and reproachful faces with the haunted, melancholy eyes of the invert—eyes that had looked too long on a world that lacked all pity and all understanding: ‘Stephen, Stephen, speak with your God and ask Him why He has left us forsaken!’ And these terrible ones started pointing at her with their shaking, white-skinned, effeminate fingers: ‘You and your kind have stolen our birthright; you have taken our strength and have given us your weakness!’ They were pointing at her with white, shaking fingers.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The end of Jacques de Molay, the 22d and last grand-master of the order of Templars, was worthy of its proudest days. At the first trial he confessed to the charges of denying Christ and spitting upon the cross, and was condemned, but afterwards recalled his confession. His case was reopened in 1314. With Geoffrey de Charney, grand-preceptor of Normandy, and others, he was led in front of Notre Dame Cathedral, and sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. Molay then stood forth and declared that the charges against the order were false, and that he had confessed to them under the strain of torture and instructions from the king. Charney said the same. The commission promised to reconsider the case the next day. But the king’s vengeance knew no bounds, and that night, March 11, 1314, the prisoners were burned. The story ran that while the flames were doing their grewsome (sic) work, Molay summoned pope and king to meet him at the judgment bar within a year. The former died, in a little more than a month, of a loathsome disease, though penitent, as it was reported, for his treatment of the order, and the king, by accident, while engaged in the chase, six months later. The king was only 46 years old at the time of his death, and 14 years after, the last of his direct descendants was in his grave and the throne passed to the house of Valois. As for the possessions of the order, papal decrees turned them over to the Knights of St. John, but Philip again intervened and laid claim to 260,000 pounds as a reimbursement for alleged losses to the Temple and the expense of guarding the prisoners.105 In Spain, they passed to the orders of San Iago di Compostella and Calatrava. In Aragon, they were in part applied to a new order, Santa Maria de Montesia, and in Portugal to the Military Order of Jesus Christ, ordo militiae Jesu Christi. Repeated demands made by the pope secured the transmission of a large part of their possessions to the Knights of St. John. In England, in 1323, parliament granted their lands to the Hospitallers, but the king appropriated a considerable share to himself. The Temple in London fell to the Earl of Pembroke, 1313.106

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  Paul had originally imagined the unity of Jews and Christians (to use those terms) within the one community of Christian Judaism. God was calling that community “not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles” (9:24), so that “there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him” (10:12). But by the time he wrote this letter he already knew that something had, from his point of view, gone terribly wrong. “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people” (9:2–3; read 9:1–5) By the mid-50s, then, as that anguished confession proclaims, Paul had already decided that the unified community of (many? most? all?) Christian Jews and (many? most? all?) Christian pagans had not happened and was not going to do so within the normal parameters of Christian missionary activity. So, in Romans 9–11, he ponders this “mystery” from the double viewpoint of both divine and human causality. He considers divine causality in 9:1–29 and 11:1–36, thereby framing human causality in 9:30–10:21. A mystery, by the way, is something hidden in the heart of God and not just a puzzle, difficulty, or problem to be solved by human ingenuity. Divine Causality As always, in biblical tradition, whatever humans do, whether for good or evil, is understood within the control, plan, and intention of God. And to apply that principle to the present situation, Paul laces his argument with citations from the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. ROMANS 9:1–29. First, Abraham had children of flesh, but the children of promise were chosen (9:6–9). Rebecca had Esau the elder and Jacob the younger, but Jacob was chosen (9:10–13). Even the disobedience of a Pharaoh is within divine permission (9:17–18). It is all simply part, says Paul, of the inscrutable mercy of God who, as the divine Potter, can “make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use” (9:19–21). That is certainly quite clear, but not exactly consoling. Furthermore, biblical prophets are cited announcing that God would choose a “people” from among the pagans (9:24–26), but only a “remnant” from among the Jews (9:27–29).

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  He had spent his days going from doctor to doctor: ‘What am I?’ They had told him, pocketing their fees; not a few had unctuously set out to cure him. Cure him, good God! There was no cure for Blanc, he was, of all men, the most normal abnormal. He had known revolt, renouncing his God; he had known despair, the despair of the godless; he had known wild moments of dissipation; he had known long months of acute self-abasement. And then he had suddenly found his soul, and that finding had brought with it resignation, so that now he could stand in a niche by himself, a pitiful spectator of what, to him, often seemed a bewildering scheme of creation. For a living he designed many beautiful things—furniture, costumes and scenery for ballets, even women’s gowns if the mood was upon him, but this he did for a physical living. To keep life in his desolate, long-suffering soul, he had stored his mind with much profound learning. So now many poor devils went to him for advice, which he never refused though he gave it sadly. It was always the same: ‘Do the best you can, no man can do more—but never stop fighting. For us there is no sin so great as despair, and perhaps no virtue so vital as courage.’ Yes, indeed, to this gentle and learned Jew went many a poor baptized Christian devil. And such people frequented Valérie Seymour’s, men and women who must carry God’s mark on their foreheads. For Valérie, placid and self- assured, created an atmosphere of courage; every one felt very normal and brave when they gathered together at Valérie Seymour’s. There she was, this charming and cultured woman, a kind of lighthouse in a storm-swept ocean. The waves had lashed round her feet in vain; winds had howled; clouds had spued forth their hail and their lightning; torrents had deluged but had not destroyed her. The storms, gathering force, broke and drifted away, leaving behind them the shipwrecked, the drowning. But when they looked up, the poor spluttering victims, why what should they see but Valérie Seymour! Then a few would strike boldly out for the shore, at the sight of this indestructible creature. She did nothing, and at all times said very little, feeling no urge towards philanthropy. But this much she gave to her brethren, the freedom of her salon, the protection of her friendship; if it eased them to come to her monthly gatherings they were always welcome provided they were sober. Drink and drugs she abhorred because they were ugly—one drank tea, iced coffee, sirops and orangeade in that celebrated flat on the Quai Voltaire. Oh, yes, a very strange company indeed if one analysed it for this or that stigma. Why, the grades were so numerous and so fine that they often defied the most careful observation.