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

  originators of Gnosticism. 3. Thus was the way for Christianity prepared on every side, positively and negatively, directly and indirectly, in theory and in practice, by truth and by error, by false belief and by unbelief—those hostile brothers, which yet cannot live apart—by Jewish religion, by Grecian culture, and by Roman conquest; by the vainly attempted amalgamation of Jewish and heathen thought, by the exposed impotence of natural civilization, philosophy, art, and political power, by the decay of the old religions, by the universal distraction and hopeless misery of the age, and by the yearnings of all earnest and noble souls for the religion of salvation. "In the fulness of the time," when the fairest flowers of science and art had withered, and the world was on the verge of despair, the Virgin’s Son was born to heal the infirmities of mankind. Christ entered a dying world as the author of a new and imperishable life.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] But while I was writing, Brandon taught himself about building codes and wood-fired ovens, restaurant licensing and leases, how to mix concrete and tile a wall. When I finally came to, when my book was at the printer, I saw that the lease was signed and our basement was impassable for all the scavenged pots and table bases, chairs, and professional kitchen equipment. I understood that I had been terribly wrong. He was going to open a restaurant. In the linoleum-floored kitchen of our duplex apartment, I sobbed and pleaded. I didn’t want a restaurant. I knew what that life looked like—debt, tight margins, long and irregular hours—and I didn’t want it. The friend with the successful Italian restaurant had recently filed for divorce. Our relationship stood on a foundation of long dinners and meandering conversations while cooking; now, when I finished my work each day, Brandon would be at the restaurant, beginning his. He would be a chef, working noon to midnight, seven days a week. Opening a restaurant is not a job for newlyweds. I didn’t want any of it. Brandon stared at me blank-faced. His mouth curled, a rictus of disbelief. The lease is already signed, he cried. I’ve been working on this for months! His voice had gone high and raspy. I did this for us, he said. I thought you would be happy. Now we can both do what we love to do. That’s what I meant this to be. The restaurant will bring together everything we love. But I don’t want it, I said, my pitch rising to match his. It can’t be that easy! That’s not what this industry is. I tried to slow down, catch my breath. I just never thought you’d get this far, I said. I thought you’d move on. I thought you’d give up. This would humiliate him, though that wasn’t what I wanted. I hadn’t believed in him, and now we both knew it. But I knew whose fault it was. I’d made the huge mistake. I’d been eyeballs-deep in my own work, distracted as I encouraged him in his. I hadn’t been clear about what I wanted, or didn’t want, because I didn’t think I had to be; the restaurant was never, not actually, going to open. Now it was. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] A friend of mine used to have a phrase taped to the wall of her office: Accept it as if you’d chosen it. The first time I read it, it seemed sad. I read it like an admission of defeat, the image of the toddler in the grocery store who, having wailed herself dry on the floor of the cereal aisle, stands and follows her mother in silence to the checkout line. When we opened Delancey, I saw that I’d missed the point. Accepting it, this thing I had not chosen—this was not defeat but evolution. This was what I’d heard called “resilience.” This was sanity.

• From The Art of Memoir

  In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right. Sure, there’s the pleasure of doing work guaranteed to engage you emotionally—who’s indifferent to their own history? The form always has profound psychological consequence on its author. It can’t not. What project can match it for that? Plus you get to hang out with folks no longer on this side of the grass. Places and times you may have for decades ached after wind up erecting themselves around you as you work. But nobody I know who’s written a great one described it as anything less than a major-league shit-eating contest. Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there’s suffering involved. When I’m trying to edit or coach somebody through one, I usually wind up feeling like the mean sergeant played by Tom Berenger in Platoon. He’s leaning over a screaming soldier whose guts are extruding, and in a husky whisper, Berenger says through gritted teeth, “Take the pain,” till the guy shuts up and mechanically starts stuffing his guts back in. No matter how self-aware you are, memoir wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self— your neat analyses and tidy excuses. One not-really-a-joke saying in my family is, “The trouble started when you hit me back.” Your small pieties and impenetrable, mostly unconscious poses invariably trip you up. In terms of cathartic affect, memoir is like therapy, the difference being that in therapy, you pay them. The therapist is the mommy, and you’re the baby. In memoir, you’re the mommy, and the reader’s the baby. And—hopefully—they pay you. (“No man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money,” Samuel Johnson said.) So forget about holes in your memory or lawsuits or how those crazy suckers you share DNA with are going to spaz out once you tell about what Uncle Bubba did during naptime. (I’ll talk later about how you can deal with all those worries.) You can do “research,” i.e. postponing writing, till Jesus dons a nightie. But your memoir’s real enemy is blinking back at you from the shaving glass when you floss at night—your ignorant ego and its myriad masks.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  He tried not to see the guards scrambling for cover. Lying dead on bloody concrete. One sat blinking at the crossfire’s edge, her guts spilling out into her lap, her hands idly stroking a length of perforated intestine. Another crawled toward the van, legs dragging, a wide snail’s trail of blood behind her as though someone had swept an enormous paintbrush over the floor of the motor pool. Robbie shoved Mercer toward the airlock door that led to the Screw proper. She was sobbing, unsteady on her feet. He kept his knife at the small of her back. The suddenness of their transition from silence to carnage sang through his nerves. He felt both numb and completely exposed, as though his skin had been peeled back to reveal the twitching flesh beneath. The gunshots slackened. Stopped. His bad ear started to ring as he pushed Mercer against the wall beside the door’s scuffed keypad. “Open it.” Her trembling fingers tapped against the keys. The lock clicked. The door hissed open with a whump of pressurized air escaping. “Led be go,” Mercer blubbered, looking back at him over her shoulder. “Blease. I did whad you—” He stabbed her in the neck just below the curve of her jaw, ignoring the blood spatter that misted his cheek and the side of his throat, and jerked the knife out, wiping it on his sleeve as she fell to her knees and slumped against the wall. She pressed a hand to the gash, pulling at its livid lips as though to close it up again. Blood pumped between her fingers. Her lips were white, her face as pale as milk. She mouthed something unintelligible. Red spittle dripped from her split lower lip. He went back to the van and got his rifle. It was so much easier to drink than it was to think about tomorrow. And why shouldn’t she enjoy herself? What did she have to feel bad about? Someone had cut a tumor (her heart) out of her chest and now all her worries were over. Ramona was free. Teach’s golden girl, forgiven for getting her dick wet—well, for getting someone else’s wet, anyway, and here to act as the chief’s eyes and ears in the city formerly known as Seabrook. She was made. Set. Minted. She wanted to die. No. Not really, she didn’t. That was just the beer and gin and crème de menthe talking, their liquid voices sloshing up from the depths of her uneasy stomach. What she really wanted was to already be dead.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  When he began to compose his last novel, Lawrence was suffering in the final stages of tuberculosis. After The Plumed Serpent he admitted to being weary of the ‘1eader cum follower” bit and had despaired of political success.27 All other avenues of grandeur appeared to be closed. Public power was a delusion, only sexual power remained. If the last Lawrentian hero is to have but one apostle to glorify him, let it be a woman. Sexual politics is a surer thing than the public variety between males. For all the excursions into conventional political fascism that occupy the middle and late period of his work, it was the politics of sex which had always commanded Lawrence’s attention most, both as the foundation and as a stairway to other types of self-aggrandizement. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is as close as Lawrence could get to a love story. It is also something of a cry of defeat, perhaps even of remorse, in a man who had aspired rather higher, but had to settle for what he could get. As a handbook of sexual technique to accompany a mood of reaction in sexual politics, it was not altogether a failure. II OEDIPAL In a letter to Edward Garnett written in 1912, Lawrence provided his own description of Sons and Lovers: A woman of character and refinement goes into the lower class, and has no satisfactions in her own life. She has had a passion for her husband, so the children are born of passion, and have heaps of vitality. But as her sons grow up, she selects them as lovers-first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother-urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can’t love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives, and holds them…As soon as the young men come into contact with women there is a split. William gives his sex to a fribble, and his mother holds his soul. But the split kills him, because he doesn’t know where he is. The next son gets a woman who fights for his soul-fights his mother. The son loves the mother—all the sons hate and are jealous of the father. The battle goes on between the mother and the girl, with the son as object. The mother gradually proves the stronger, because of the tie of blood. The son decides to leave his soul in his mother’s hands, and like his elder brother, go for passion. He gets passion. Then the split begins to tell again. But, almost unconsciously, the mother realizes what is the matter and begins to die. The son casts off his mistress, attends to his mother dying. He is left in the end naked of everything, with the drift toward death.28

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure gives an account of the trials of two rebels: Jude is battling the class system in trying to obtain the Oxford education reserved for the elite; Sue Bridehead has set herself against a number of patriarchal institutions, principally marriage and the church. Both are beaten. Jude dies solitary and desolate with the merry echoes of Oxford’s Eights Week boat races mocking his agony. Sue returns to the “fanatic prostitution” of living with her first husband, Richard Phillotson, a man she despised. Hardy’s Jude is a complete human being composed of both sense and spirit, mind and body. In a classic instance of the Victorian triangle he is tom between two women who are incomplete beings. Arabella is at one pole, utter carnality, “a complete and substantial female animal—no more, no less.”157 In Hardy’s grotesque parody of Cupid’s shaft, they first meet when Arabella pitches the scrotum of a butchered barrow-pig at Jude’s head. At the other pole stands Sue—pure spirit. They are the familiar Lily and Rose, but Sue is a lily with a difference—she has a brain. Yet she is repelled by sense, for Sue is not only the New Woman, but by a complex set of frequently unsympathetic defenses, at times convincing, and at times only a rather labored ambivalence of Hardy’s own—she is the Frigid Woman as well. Hardy is disgusted by Arabella, appalled, if intrigued, by her crude and terrible vitality. He champions Sue through a series of uningratiating maneuvers, but he is always slightly nervous about her. In a defensive postscript written seventeen years after his first preface, he appears to have been rather embarrassed and even annoyed at what the public took her to be: After the issue of Jude the Obscure as a serial story in Gennany, an experienced reviewer of that country informed the writer that Sue Bridehead, the heroine, was the first delineation in fiction of the woman who was coming into notice in her thousands every year—the woman of the feminist movement—that slight, pale, “bachelor” girl—the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves, that modern conditions were producing, mainly in cities as yet; who does not recognize the necessity for most of her sex to follow marriage as a profession, and boast themselves as superior people because they are licensed to be loved on the premises. The regret of this critic was that the portrait of the newcomer had been left to be drawn by a man, and was not done by one of her own sex, who would never have allowed her to break down at the end.158

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The perfidious machine penetrates to the two-thirds mark and the tearing it causes combined with its extreme heat are about to deprive me of the use of my senses; meanwhile, the superior, showering an uninterrupted stream of invectives upon the parts he is molesting, has himself excited by his follower; after fifteen minutes of rubbing which lacerates me, he releases the spring, a quart of nearly boiling water is fired into the last depths of my womb... I fall into a faint. Severino was in an ecstasy... he was in a delirium at least the equal of my agony. "Why," said the traitor, "that's nothing at all. When I recover my wits, we'll treat those charms much more harshly... a salad of thorns, by Jesus! well peppered, a copious admixture of vinegar, all that tamped in with the point of a knife, that's what they need to buck them up; the next mistake you make, I condemn you to the treatment," said the villain while he continued to handle the object of his worship; but two or three homages after the preceeding night's debauches had near worked him to death, and I was sent packing. Upon returning to my chamber I found my new companion in tears; I did what I could to soothe her, but it is not easy to adjust to so frightful a change of situation; this girl had, furthermore, a great fund of religious feeling, of virtue, and of sensitivity; owing to it, her state only appeared to her the more terrible. Omphale had been right when she told me seniority in no way influenced retirement; that, simply by the monks' caprice, or by their fear of ulterior inquiries, one could undergo dismissal at the end of a week as easily as at the end of twenty years. Octavie had not been with us four months when Jerome came to announce her departure; although 'twas he who had most enjoyed her during her sojourn at the monastery, he who had seemed to cherish her and seek her more than any other, the poor child left, making us the same promises Omphale had given; she kept them just as poorly. From that moment on, my every thought was bent upon the plan I had been devising since Omphale's departure; determined to do everything possible to escape from this den of savages, nothing that might help me succeed held any terrors for me. What was there to dread by putting my scheme into execution? Death. And were I to remain, of what could I be certain? Of death.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  The taller woman took a double fistful of her shirt and hung on grimly, jaw set and eyes bulging, as blood sheeted down her throat. Ramona twisted the knife. Viv’s grip went slack. She folded up and fell. “Hold me closer, Tony Danza,” Ramona muttered, half-numb. She knelt and wiped her knife on Viv’s jacket, leaving a dark streak of blood. “What?” Fran stared at her like she’d grown a second head. The trans girl’s voice was reedy with terror. “What? Why?” “Go,” said Ramona. “Get out of here. Now.” The other girl scrambled down off the table and skipped over Viv’s outflung arm with a whimper of fear, never taking her eyes off Ramona until she was well clear of the patio. Then she put her head down and took off up the beach at a flat sprint. Ramona watched her go, breathing hard in spite of the clean air and the soft, soothing sound of the waves. What the fuck did I just do? Part Three. Terf War PART THREE TERF WAR Internally, I’m thinking, of course trans girls all love and fuck each other. Who else will? When I first learned the term brick for those square never-will-be-passable trans women, it was auxiliary to an explanation for another term, masonry : as in brick-on-brick love—only bricks get stuck to other bricks. Except what do you do with the meanness of the word masonry itself—it was other trans women, the only ones that bricks could supposedly trust, who came up with that hilariously cruel slang. Brick-on-brick betrayal. But we have to understand each other well to be so cruel. —Torrey Peters, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones I. Lighthouse I LIGHTHOUSE When Fran reached the Screw, it was already burning. A few women stood outside it in the smoldering wreckage of the camp. She joined them, staggering uphill, feet blistered in her evening flats after a long night of creeping through the woods and side roads, too afraid of TERF kill squads to risk a direct route. Smoke guttered out of the half-open blast doors. The dull orange glow of flames flickered within. She smelled gasoline and cooking flesh, a stink like pork left too long on the grill. I’m never going to have a cunt. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she watched flames lick at the opening. A fiery red slit. Her cock still burned with the memory of Viv’s fingers finding it, worming through her unzipped jeans to caress its stiffening length in the half-second before disgust curdled the other woman’s hungry expression, in the split second before Ramona staggered drunk out of the dark and stabbed Viv in the throat. That gaping wound, slick and pinkish red where the starlight touched its ragged lips. She imagined setting her lips to that fragile gash, tonguing its depths, kissing beads of sweat and blood off the wet landscape of its interior. “Fran!”

• From Manhunt (2022)

  We’ve been dicking around like a bunch of neo-Nazis with our walkie-talkies and our hand signals. This is real war. This isn’t fucking around anymore. She’s actually going to kill every last one of them. “Once the horde has them penned in,” said Teach, her eyes fixed and unblinking, her smile so strained that deep lines cut the corners of her mouth, “we’ll come down the coast and open up with the big guns. They won’t last long.” She’s going to kill Fran. They met the ship at the pier’s end, spray misting their coats as the destroyer, which up close rose towering above them like a wall of slate and rivets, let down its boarding ramp and Kilroy came to greet them with a crisp salute. “Welcome aboard, ma’am,” she said to Teach. “Captain Roach is ready to depart.” “Perfect,” said Teach, flashing her teeth. “Get Pierce’s things, won’t you? She’ll be in the cabin next to my stateroom.” Kilroy took Ramona’s bag, swinging it up over one shoulder, and followed close behind as they climbed up toward the deck, toward the massive guns and milling Legion women, the armed Maenads and the mismatched launches hanging over the ship’s sides. This is a nightmare, thought Ramona. I’m going to wake up any second and I’ll be back in Feather’s bed, and I’ll do it right this time, I’ll desert and take them to New York and find somewhere for us, be a manhunter or a guard or something, anything but this, I don’t want to go to war, I don’t want to see more people die, I don’t want to see Fran die, so please let me wake up. Her boots struck the deck. Teach and Kilroy went on ahead of her as a few women hurried to bring up the ramp, collapse it, and fit it back into its slot in the hull. She looked back at the pier and the Maine forest beyond it, wild and trackless and cold. Please. The ship’s horn blew an earsplitting blast as the great engines thundered to life somewhere far beneath her feet. Let me wake up. VIII. Moral Mandate VIII MORAL MANDATE The men came out of the woods just before dawn a few days after Tandeka arrived to warn them. There were only a few at first, scurrying like roaches across the swath of burnt and blackened earth as Fran scrambled down to where the wall met the fort’s concrete bunk to ring the signal bell. Robbie watched them come from where he knelt draped in a blanket on the creaking walk of the new land wall, his heart fluttering in his chest. He could hear others running in the courtyard behind him. Women on the ladders. He sat up, blinking sleep from his eyes, and settled his rifle on the wooden ramparts.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  He who does not walk along with others has inevitably to perish; everyone he encounters he collides with, and, as he is weak, he has necessarily to be crushed. It is in vain the law wishes to re-establish order and restore men to righteousness; too unjust to undertake the task, too insufficient to succeed in it, those laws will lure you away from the beaten path, but only temporarily; never will they make man abandon it. While the general interest of mankind drives it to corruption, he who does not wish to be corrupted with the rest will therefore be fighting against the general interest; well, what happiness can he expect who is in perpetual conflict with the interest of everyone else? Are you going to tell me it is vice which is at odds with mankind's welfare? I would grant this true in a world composed of equal proportions of good and bad people, because in this instance, the interest of the one category would be in clear contradiction with that of the other; however, that does not hold true in a completely corrupt society; in it, my vices outrage the vicious only and provoke in them other vices which they use to square matters: and thus all of us are happy: the vibration becomes general: we have a multitude of conflicts and mutual injuries whereby everyone, immediately recovering what he has just lost, incessantly discovers himself in a happy position. Vice is dangerous to naught but Virtue which, frail and timorous, dares undertake nothing; but when it shall no longer exist on earth, when its wearisome reign shall reach its end, vice thereafter outraging no one but the vicious, will cause other vices to burgeon but will cause no further damage to the virtuous. How could you help but have foundered a thousand times over in the course of your life, Therese? for have you not continually driven up the one-way street all the world has crowded down? Had you turned and abandoned yourself to the tide you would have made a safe port as well as I. Will he who wishes to climb upstream cover as much distance in a day as he who moves with the current? You constantly talk about Providence; ha! what proves to you this Providence is a friend of order and consequently enamored of Virtue? Does It not give you uninterrupted examples of Its injustices and Its irregularities? Is it by sending mankind war, plagues, and famine, is it by having formed a universe vicious in every one of its particulars It manifests to your view Its extreme fondness of good?

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “These new theories of hypnotism, of mental maladies, of hysteria are not simple stupidities, but dangerous or evil stupidities. Charcot, I am sure, would have said that my wife was hysterical, and of me he would have said that I was an abnormal being, and he would have wanted to treat me. But in us there was nothing requiring treatment. All this mental malady was the simple result of the fact that we were living immorally. Thanks to this immoral life, we suffered, and, to stifle our sufferings, we tried abnormal means, which the doctors call the ‘symptoms’ of a mental malady,—hysteria. “There was no occasion in all this to apply for treatment to Charcot or to anybody else. Neither suggestion nor bromide would have been effective in working our cure. The needful thing was an examination of the origin of the evil. It is as when one is sitting on a nail; if you see the nail, you see that which is irregular in your life, and you avoid it. Then the pain stops, without any necessity of stifling it. Our pain arose from the irregularity of our life, and also my jealousy, my irritability, and the necessity of keeping myself in a state of perpetual semi-intoxication by hunting, card-playing, and, above all, the use of wine and tobacco. It was because of this irregularity that my wife so passionately pursued her occupations. The sudden changes of her disposition, from extreme sadness to extreme gayety, and her babble, arose from the need of forgetting herself, of forgetting her life, in the continual intoxication of varied and very brief occupations. “Thus we lived in a perpetual fog, in which we did not distinguish our condition. We were like two galley-slaves fastened to the same ball, cursing each other, poisoning each other’s existence, and trying to shake each other off. I was still unaware that ninety-nine families out of every hundred live in the same hell, and that it cannot be otherwise. I had not learned this fact from others or from myself. The coincidences that are met in regular, and even in irregular life, are surprising. At the very period when the life of parents becomes impossible, it becomes indispensable that they go to the city to live, in order to educate their children. That is what we did.” Posdnicheff became silent, and twice there escaped him, in the half-darkness, sighs, which at that moment seemed to me like suppressed sobs. Then he continued. CHAPTER XVIII.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The sight, however, moved him, as he afterwards told me, irresistibly, and by way of giving me some reason to be less powerfully afflicted, he drew out his purse, and calling for pen and ink, which the landlady was prepared for, paid her every farthing of her demand, independent of a liberal gratification which was to follow unknown to me, and taking a receipt in full, very tenderly forced me to secure it, by guiding my hand, which he had thrust it into, so as to make me passively put it into my pocket. Still I continued in a state of stupidity, or melancholic despair, as my spirits could not yet recover from the violent shocks that they had received; and the accommodating landlady had actually left the room, and me alone with this strange gentleman, before I had observed it, and then I observed it without alarm, for I was now lifeless, and indifferent to every thing. The gentleman, however, no novice in affairs of this sort, drew near me; and, under the pretence of comforting me, first with his handkerchief dried my tears as they ran down my cheeks: presently he ventured to kiss me on my part, neither resistance nor compliance. I sat stock still; and now looking on myself as bought by the payment that had been transacted before me.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I shuddered, but what my glances fell upon soon astonished me more: Omphale had either not known everything, or had not told all she knew; I spied four naked girls in the basement, and they certainly did not belong to our group; and so there were other victims of these monsters' lechery in this horrible asylum... other wretches unknown to us.... I fled away and continued my circuit until I was on the side opposite the basement window; not yet having found a breach, I resolved to make one; all unobserved, I had furnished myself with a long knife; I set to work; despite my gloves, my hands were soon scratched and torn; but nothing daunted me; the hedge was two feet thick, I opened a passage, went through, and entered the second ring; there, I was surprised to find nothing but soft earth underfoot; with each step I sank in ankle-deep: the further I advanced into these copses, the more profound the darkness became. Curious to know whence came the change of terrain, I felt about with my hands... O Just Heaven! my fingers seized the head of a cadaver! Great God! I thought, whelmed with horror, this must then be the cemetery, as indeed I was told, into which those murderers fling their victims; they have scarcely gone to the bother of covering them with earth!... this skull perhaps belongs to my dear Omphale, perhaps it is that of the unhappy Octavie, so lovely, so sweet, so good, and who while she lived was like unto the rose of which her charms were the image. And I, alas! might that this have been my resting place! Wouldst that I had submitted to my fate! What had I to gain by going on in pursuit of new pitfalls? Had I not committed evil enough? Had I not been the occasion of a number of crimes sufficiently vast? Ah! fulfill my destiny! O Earth, gape wide and swallow me up I Ah, 'tis madness, when one is so forsaken, so poor, so utterly abandoned, madness to go to such pains in order to vegetate yet a few more instants amongst monsters!... But no! I must avenge Virtue in irons.... She expects it of my courage.... Let her not be struck down... let us advance: it is essential that the universe be ridded of villains as dangerous as these.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Yet the real interest in the story is in the crushing of the woman’s will, of which the murder is merely a consummation. As with the Story of O, or much of “exotic” pornography (e.g. that set in Near and Far Eastern or in primitive cultures, where a real or assumed contempt for women rationalizes the large dose of sexual sadism which caused the author to choose such a locale to begin with), the interest is not in the physical pain inflicted but in the damage done to will and spirit, the humiliation of the human claim or dignity of the victim. Progress is measured in hundreds of phrases like this: “…she was very tired. She lay down on a couch of skins…and she slept, giving up everything”179…“she was utterly strange and beyond herself, as if her body were not her own.”180 Imprisoned in a little hut, drugged day after day as the torture drags on, vomiting continuously, she is reduced to a phenomenal despair and passivity “as if she had no control over herself,”181 Lawrence lingers over her gradual relinquishment of selfhood: “She was not in her own power, she was under the spell of some other control. And at times she had moments of terror and horror…the Indians would come and sit with her, casting their insidious spell over her by their very silent presence…As they sat they seemed to take her will away, leaving her will-less and victim to her own indifference.”182 The message—for this story has a message—is revealed at last in a central passage, when the author delivers a formal lecture to the modern woman: In the strange towering symbols on the heads of the changeless, absorbed women, she seemed to read once more the Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin. Her kind of womanhood, intensely personal and individual, was to be obliterated again, and the great primeval symbols were to tower once more over the fallen individual independence of women. The sharpness and the quivering nervous consciousness of the highly-bred white woman was to be destroyed again, womanhood was to be cast once more into the great stream of impersonal sex and impersonal passion. Strangely, as if clairvoyant, she saw the immense sacrifice prepared, and she went back to her little house in a trance of agony.183 Well she might. With bemused pity one contemplates those women of Africa, Asia, and South America, lobbying in the United Nations for civil rights. Sadly misled, they have failed to grasp Lawrence’s wise understanding of the impropriety in their hope of sexual revolution—and their own importance as models to the rest of their sex.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Madame herself is kind, with the kindness of the comfortable middle class who can afford good manners. (To a lady who congratulated herself on giving her maid her discarded dresses, Genet quietly replied, “How nice, and does she give you hers?’)61 But the maids, playing at being mistress to each other, are not nice. Outcasts in an emotional complicity with the ruling order, they invent insults (“Servants ooze.” “They are not of the human race”)62 exposing the poisonous effect their declared inferiority (agreed upon by others and agreed to by themselves) has had upon them. So much do they believe in their superiors’ edition of their lives, they cannot escape servitude save in self-laceration, and their revolt is only the criminal’s folly which inevitably rebounds back upon itself. But here, in contrast to the novels, it is presented for the first time with explicitness devoid of romantic sentimentality. The maids’ suffering is exquisite, but their oppression is too effective; out of their predicament as selves defined by another, there is as yet no exit. The Balcony, which concentrates on the political connotations of sex role as power, is another case of failed rebellion, but a great advance over the maids’ claustral dilemma in that an actual revolution might have occurred if it had any alternate values to set up in place of the ancien régime it has temporarily destroyed. Armand names the problem: “I personally don’t believe in their masquerade, not one bit. But is there any stronger force to replace them?”63 A history of belief and co-operation paralyzes one. In Carmen the prostitute, participation in masculine fantasy has created such identification with the role that it becomes her reality; excused from the charade, she craves those heady moments when she was The Immaculate Conception of Lourdes to a bank clerk. In the same way, the participation of a whole populace in the ancient myths of the church, the law, and the army, bring about instantaneous capitulation when imposters standing in for these members of the “Nomenclature” are paraded through the city in state. Humanity is a bit infantilized, like the masochist in studio four who wishes only to be tied and spanked, so schooled in the old rites it loves them.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "What is the trouble, Therese?" he demanded, urging me on toward his fortress; "you are not out of France; we are on the Dauphine border and within the bishopric of Grenoble." "Very well, Monsieur," I answered; "but why did it ever occur to you to take up your abode in a place befitting brigands and robbers ?" "Because they who inhabit it are not very honest people," said Roland; "it might be altogether possible you will not be edified by their conduct." "Ah, Monsieur I" said I with a shudder, "you make me tremble; where then are you leading me ?" "I am leading you into the service of the counterfeiters of whom I am the chief," said Roland, grasping my arm and driving me over a little drawbridge that was lowered at our immediately we had traversed it; "do you see that well?" he continued when we had entered; he was pointing to a large and deep grotto situated toward the back of the courtyard, where four women, nude and manacled, were turning a wheel; "there are your companions and there your task, which involves the rotation of that wheel for ten hours each day, and which also involves the satisfaction of all the caprices I am pleased to submit you and the other ladies to; for which you will be granted six ounces of black bread and a plate of kidney beans without fail each day; as for your freedom, forget it; you will never recover it. When you are dead from overwork, you will be flung into that hole you notice beside the well, where the remains of between sixty and eighty other rascals of your breed await yours, and your place will be taken by somebody else." "Oh, Great God!" I exclaimed, casting myself at Roland's feet, "deign to remember, Monsieur, that I saved you gratitude for an instant, you seemed to offer me happiness and that it is by precipitating me into an eternal abyss of evils you reward my services. Is what you are doing just? and has not remorse already begun to avenge me in the depths of your heart?" "What, pray tell, do you mean by this feeling of gratitude with which you fancy you have captivated me?" Roland inquired. "Be more reasonable, wretched creature; what were you doing when you came to my rescue? Between the two possibilities, of continuing on your way and of coming up to me, did you not choose the latter as an impulse dictated by your heart? You therefore gave yourself up to a pleasure? How in the devil's name can you maintain I am obliged to recompense you for the joys in which you indulge yourself?

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Indi pretending that she didn’t want just that, that it was irrelevant to her that someone would approach her on their hands and knees, would beg without shame to touch the quivering hillsides of her body. Beth rolled toward her as best she could, clutching tighter at her thigh. “ Please .” She knew how disgusting she sounded, but she couldn’t stop. It poured out of her in a dirty flood of begging even as Indi pushed her hand away, even as the other woman wordlessly held out another glass of sepia-colored diluted penicillin until Beth took it, slumping back onto the table. “Drink this, then try to sleep.” The door swung open, then shut hard enough to shake the framed diplomas on the wall. Beth stared up at the water spot, the glass forgotten in her hands. She began to cry again in thick, snotty gasps that quickly sealed her nose and reduced each breath to a whining gurgle. Fuck me, so I can pretend I’m a girl. Later, while Beth slept in her room upstairs, they sat together by candlelight at the hastily cleared kitchen table, eating cold pork and onions wrapped in thick brown flatbread. Fran had never tasted anything better in her life. Indi only picked at hers; she couldn’t stand to be seen eating. Robbie, by contrast, wolfed his down without pausing for air. He was a loud chewer, which Fran decided to find endearing, but he still wouldn’t say more than a few words at a time. “They’re all over town,” said Indi as Robbie mopped tzatziki from his plate with the last of his bread. “They got here the day before yesterday. They’re in Boston, too, and Manchester. Nashua. Nobody’s heard anything from Nashua on the ham since Wednesday.” Fran sighed, looking out the dining room window at the overgrown hedge and the street beyond it. Farm workers were trickling back into town as the last of the daylight faded. A pair of weathered middle-aged women in faded Levis, sun shirts, and work boots, one with a little girl clinging to her from behind, rode past on horseback, laughing about something as they went. Bees wandered through the lilac bushes in Indi’s front yard. It all looked like it always did. “We ran into them out by the coast, just across the Mass border. Beth took a shot at Teach, the one who’s supposed to be their den mother or whatever.” She felt a phantom twinge of her desire for that woman, for the cold, bitter mommy-ness of her, and tongued absently at the socket of her missing tooth. “We barely got out alive.” Indi looked troubled.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  CHAPTER 14 Seventeen years later, Daddy had a stroke while sitting on a stool bellied up to the American Legion bar. It was ten on a summer morning. He’d been pounding shooters of whiskey he washed back with glasses of tap beer, which trick he’d performed daily for the seven years since he’d retired from Gulf Oil at the age of sixty-three. I say retired. Technically, he had a part-time job running errands for Lecia’s husband, David. The Rice Baron, I called him, for he owned working rice farms that nudged his income up towards the fifty percent tax bracket. David bought Daddy a little white pickup for mail-runs or for getting tacos come lunchtime, whatever needed doing. When Daddy, who supplemented his Legion alcohol-intake by sucking from a whiskey bottle he kept ratholed under his truck seat, got too weaving drunk to operate the pickup at all, somebody rang my brother-in-law, who dispatched one of the field hands to ferry Daddy around on some fabricated job till his head cleared and his hands started back trembling, a sign that his blood-alcohol level was edging down toward normal. Then he got re-deposited at the white truck. During all this, Mother was usually laid up in bed wearing something filmy. She’d quit teaching art in public school, allegedly to spend more time with her rickety and rheumy-eyed husband. Instead, depression had walloped her. She stayed in that giant bed she’d built decades before, with a bearing I still think of as imperial. She’d stopped drinking under threat from Lecia and me, but stayed drugged to the gills on Valium and related pharmaceuticals and whatever book she’d drawn from the literal tower of them stacked on the floor by her nighttable. Her reading tended toward religion and philosophy, the books ranging from the profound—Sartre was still a favorite; so was Gandhi—to the crackpot. She’d studied hatha yoga and macrobiotics, macramé and est. Her basic trouble at the time of Daddy’s stroke was that she saw no good reason to get up and put on clothes. Back then, I talked to her long distance from Boston most every night. After prime time, she lay in a torment that barbiturates only blurred the edges of: Football, fishing, and fucking —she’d say— that’s all anybody down here thinks about. I swear to God I’m going to blow my brains out. My live-in boyfriend at the time—a recent Harvard grad from an old Long Island family—praised my patience with Mother. He took the long hours I spent on the phone with her for kindness. His family estate had a name, an aged and doddering staff, and a formal library where silver polo trophies shone between rows of leather-bound editions. He spoke to his mother on holidays, from one end of a long glossy dinner table (a formality I envied and, when we later married, failed to master).

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  He was leaving; an unconquerable impulse drew me to his knees yet another time. "Tiger!" I exclaimed through my tears, "open your granite heart, let my appalling misadventures melt it, and do not, in order to conclude them, do not impose conditions more dreadful to me than death itself...." The violence of my movements had disturbed what veiled my breast, it was naked, my disheveled hair fell in cascades upon it, it was wetted thoroughly by my tears; I quicken desires in the dishonest man... desires he wants to satisfy on the spot; he dares discover to me to what point my state arouses them; he dares dream of pleasures lying in the middle of the chains binding me and beneath the sword which is poised to smite me... I was upon my knees... he flings me backward, leaps upon me, there we lie upon the wretched straw I use for a bed; I wish to cry out, he stuffs his handkerchief into my mouth; he ties my arms; master of me, the infamous creature examines me everywhere... everything becomes prey to his gaze, his fingerings, his perfidious caresses; at last, he appeases his desires. "Listen to me," says he, untying me and readjusting his costume, "you do not want me to be helpful, all very well; I am leaving you; I'll neither aid nor harm you, but if it enters your head to breathe a word of what has just happened, I will, by charging you with yet more enormous crimes, instantly deprive you of all means of defending yourself; reflect carefully before jabbering... I am taken for your confessor... now hark: we are permitted to reveal anything and all when 'tis a question of a criminal; fully approve what I am going to say to your warden, or else I'll crush you like a fly." He knocks, the jailer appears. "Monsieur," says the traitor, "the nice young lady is in error; she wished to speak to a Father Antonin who is now in Bordeaux; I have no acquaintance of her, never have I even set eyes upon her: she besought me to hear her confession, I did so, I salute you and her and shall always be ready to present myself when my ministry is esteemed important."

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Is it not clear that leaving us the power to create, not to create, or to destroy, we will not delight her at all or disappoint her any more by adopting toward the one or the other the attitude which suits us best; and what could be more self-evident than that the course we choose, being but the result of her power over us and the influence upon us of her actions, will far more surely please than it will risk offending her. Ah, Therese ! believe me, Nature frets very little over those mysteries we are great enough fools to turn into worship of her. Whatever be the temple at which one sacrifices, immediately she allows incense to be burned there, one can be sure the homage offends her in no wise; refusals to produce, waste of the semen employed in production, the obliteration of that seed when it has germinated, the annihilation of that germ even long after its formation, all those, Therese, are imaginary crimes which are of no interest to Nature and at which she scoffs as she does at all the rest of our institutions which offend more often than they serve her." Coeur-de-fer waxed warm while expounding his perfidious maxims, and I soon beheld him again in the state which had so terrified me the night before; in order to give his lesson additional impact, he wished instantly to join practice to precept; and, my resistances notwithstanding, his hands strayed toward the altar into which the traitor wanted to penetrate.... Must I declare, Madame, that, blinded by the wicked man's seductions; content, by yielding a little, to save what seemed the more essential; reflecting neither upon his casuistries' illogicalities nor upon what I was myself about to risk since the dishonest fellow, possessing gigantic proportions, had not even the possibility to see a woman in the most permissible place and since, urged on by his native perversity, he most assuredly had no object but to maim me; my eyes as I say, perfectly blind to all that, I was going to abandon myself and become criminal through virtue; my opposition was weakening; already master of the throne, the insolent conqueror concentrated all his energies in order to establish himself upon it; and then there was heard the sound of a carriage moving along the highway. Upon the instant, Coeur-de-fer forsakes his pleasures for his duties; he assembles his followers and flies to new crimes. Not long afterward, we hear cries, and those bandits, all bloodied over, return triumphant and laden with spoils. "Let's decamp smartly," says Coeur-de-fer, "we've killed three men, the corpses are on the road, we're safe no longer."