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 From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Pluto was right. Wasn’t gonna be no fuckin’ Baltimore for neither one of them. She was ass-fucked. Just out there. She’d already told her super and her landlord that they could go eat each other. She’d run up all kinds of bills in Pluto’s name in stores all over Harlem that she hadn’t planned to pay, and she’d double-crossed folks and burned bridges like a motherfucker too. Skipping out of Harlem hadn’t been just a wish, it was a fuckin’ requirement, and now somehow all of that shit had been canceled. Monique didn’t know what the fuck had gone down, but if G was bodied then the future she had planned for herself was bodied too. Monique hid, pressing herself deep into the shadows of the Dumpster as the Benz backed outta the alley. Moonie, Pluto, and Ace were in the whip and Cooter had gone back inside the Spot. She was dying to know who or what had been in that first package they put in the trunk. G was in that second package. She knew that shit for a fact ’cause she’d seen it with her own eyes. And she knew something else too. Whatever the fuck had gone down that ended up ripping all of her dreams apart, she was willing to bet her sexiest fuckin’ thong that it had something to do with that raggedy bitch who was chained to a bed downstairs in the Dungeon. That bitch Juicy. • • • Monique sat in her car watching the front door and the alley of the G-Spot. She had moved to a better parking space after the Benz rolled out, and she kept her engine running, even though her lights and heat were off. It was cold as shit outside and in the car, but it didn’t bother her at all. In fact, her right ear was now cooling to a dull throb, and the icy air felt damn good on her burnt skin. Every now and then she peered into the overhead mirror and stared at the welp-like blisters that were beginning to rise on her cheek and shuddered inside, even though her face was now the last damn thing she was worried about. Monique sat there running details through her mind, wondering who had merked G and why the fuck Cooter was still inside the Spot instead of rolling out with Pluto and them. Monique waited, and about fifteen minutes passed before Cooter came back out. He walked out the front door of the G-Spot like everything was everything, and put his hands in his pockets and strolled calmly through the snow toward the bright lights up ahead on the avenue. Monique just didn’t understand that shit but before she could figure it out, the front door opened again and a girl ran outside. “No this bitch ain’t butt-ass naked!” Monique screamed out loud when she saw who it was. “No her stank ass ain’t wrapped up in no motherfuckin’ sheet!”

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Poochie held out his hand, and Forty slapped it. An official sign of tag-teaming. Pushing my ankles over my head until my knees pounded my shoulders, he almost cut off my oxygen when he climbed his big ass over me and held me in position from the other side. “I got this, dawg. But you gone have to hold her down for Ray-Ray and them.” Tears threatened to fall, but I refused to cry. Running a train on me or not, I wasn’t gonna give them dirty niggahs too much of my energy. So I sat there—like I had a choice—and took that shit like a pro. Five of them switched up, battle-ramming my pussy like they’d never had ass before. All of them spilled their cum in the cup. A loaded gun to my head was how the gang bang ended. “Had enough?” 12 asked with a big, doofy-ass grin on his face. “Sit up.” I looked into the nozzle of the same Desert Eagle that’d had my back for years. “Why, 12?” “Told ya, Sweets. Ya man sang like a bird.” “You gonna believe that niggah over me? After he was fuckin’ your wifey?” 12 laughed. “Nah. I’m gonna believe the tape that the hidden cameras produced. The same cameras that had night vision.” I’d fallen for many things, but never the okeydoke. He was tryin’ to pull my card—make me tell on myself. I shook my head. “Wasn’t me, 12. We go way back, you can trust me.” 12 held the cup of cum out to me. “You always tryin’ to play a niggah. I know what I saw, Sweets. And it was you. Point blank.” Tears fell now. “No it wasn’t.” He cocked his burner. “You got two options. Drink this cup of cum or join ya boy Whisky.” I pushed the cup away, squeezed my eyelids closed. I’d die tonight. Because the last time I checked, when it came down to the taste of cum, ain’t nuthin’ sweet about it. GRIMIER Euftis Emory Damn! All the women I had on constant rotation had already made other plans. Seven numbers deep on my “to fuck” list and I was horny as hell without a pool for Monster to swim in. I was left with one other option: my alternate call list. Women who were still being evaluated until I could determine whether to push them out the door or bang them on the floor. It was Friday night, and I damn sure wasn’t going to be stuck at home playing with myself. Real playaz don’t get down like that. Don’t have to when there’s a side chick waiting to be slid to the front. For me, that was Rasheeda. When all else failed, whenever I needed a hit at the last minute, I could always depend on her.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  For a minute there, Sam and I were so caught up experimenting with each other’s bodies, that we didn’t realize that Detail was the muthafucka who made all the money. But when the bills became due, it was a quick reminder. Detail was a small, very small, dope pusher, so when Sam called herself going to some of the cats he fucked with to try and get put on or flip a lil’ somethin’ somethin’, all them niggas wanted to do was fuck, and after a minute I could tell Sam was only one more rejection away from actually deciding to trick with one of them hood niggas. I could tell by the look in her eyes, by how worn down she was from trying. It was that same look my moms had had in her eyes after my father left us and she kept getting turned down from jobs. Finally, my moms decided to just start fuckin’ the bastards who weren’t giving her the jobs. That became her job. “You thought Detail beat your ass,” I remember telling Sam as I held her by her wrist. She was older than me, but I was bigger than her. “I swear to God, Sam, if you even think about it—” “Then how the fuck we supposed to live, Sin?” Sam spat as she yanked her wrist away from me, knocking some of the items off of the dresser we were standing by. “I can’t keep this place if I don’t have no money to pay the bills. You thought you were on the streets. We both gon’ be on the streets. Then what we gon’ do, huh?” I thought for a moment. Here I was only sixteen, but feeling like a grown woman. “Samantha, I put it on my life that I’d rather be out there on the goddamn streets homeless with you than under a roof where you got to lay on your back to keep the roof over us.” By then I started to break down just thinking about how my moms went out. “Sin, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Sam cried as she comforted me. “I didn’t mean to . . . I just don’t know what to do. I’m sorry, baby.” Sam began kissing my tears away, and then slowly I tasted the salt of my tears on her tongue. I lifted her up and placed her on the dresser. She was only wearing a T-shirt and some panties. I moved her panties aside with my hand and as I tongue-fucked her, I finger-fucked her at the same time. Her ass scooted back and forth on the dresser as she pleased herself with my three fingers that were inside of her. “Oh, Sin,” she moaned. “This isn’t right. I shouldn’t be—”

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  That problem is encapsulated by a horrible tale told by one of the chief writers in early monasticism, John Cassian, a fourth-century ascetic from the Eastern Empire whose writings brought eastern monastic discipline to the attention of ascetic communities in the western Mediterranean. In his book of community instruction, the Institutes , Cassian reminisces about a wealthy man whom he calls Patermutus, who, when he became a monk, brought his eight- year-old son with him. The abbot now assumed the role of paterfamilias : he deliberately broke them up to sever the biological bond, and sent them to separate communities. Patermutus was then sadistically tested: his little son was ‘purposely neglected’, ‘clothed in rags’ and left filthy, even randomly beaten until he cried, just to emphasize that the natural father should not intervene in this cruelty. The tale shockingly culminates in a ritually enacted parody of the Old Testament patriarch Abraham’s offering his son Isaac for a sacrificial death: the abbot ordered Patermutus to throw his son into the river, and the pair were actually at the water’s edge before a couple of strategically placed monks intervened to tell the father that he had passed the test of loyalty to his new vocation. The boy did not die, any more than Isaac had done, but now Patermutus had lost everything from the past; he was no longer even a parent. [26] * Yet not all Christians submitted as Patermutus did to this twisted version of the ‘silent rebellion’. The growing establishment of the Church brought in many converts who were no less aspiring Christians because they were powerful and wealthy, and who did not choose to reject their existing place in the society of their day. They too could be swept up in the movement to asceticism, but accommodating their power and wealth alongside its flat rejection by other ascetics was not straightforward. One wealthy and spiritually distinguished Christian family set useful patterns providing an answer. With an honourable ancestry among senators and urban magistrates, they lived in rural respectability in Asia Minor. Even before the fourth century, it was not so unusual in Asia Minor to encounter a Christian family among the local landed elite, but one fourth-century generation of the children of Basil and Emmelia made a remarkable joint contribution to Christian life and theology. Basil the son of Basil became Bishop of Caesarea Mazaca (now Kayseri in eastern inland Turkey). Having become a monk, he is known as ‘the Great’ both for his writings about structuring monastic life and general pastoral discipline, and for his strong support of the anti-Arian cause in the Church. Basil’s brother Gregory became Bishop of Nyssa in Asia Minor and was likewise a great Nicene theologian and spiritual writer. They both revered their older sister Macrina (‘the younger’ to distinguish her from a saintly grandmother), who played a major part in educating and bringing up her various brothers.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Tatian’s influence was immense in Syria; his greatest scholarly achievement, his ‘Harmony’ or Diatessaron of the four Gospels, was used liturgically as Gospel text in the Syriac Church from the second down to the fifth century. Not surprisingly, therefore, his views on the literally Satanic nature of sexual intercourse had a considerable following in Christian west Asia. The Christianity that he and his missionary admirers created would necessarily be of a single generation – since his converts could not procreate – but they could sustain their life by drawing others to it. They could and did live in communities together, liberated from the normal expectations of sexuality in the ancient world, taking advantage of the many remote places of their region to practise their faith. In other words, this was the first known example of a pattern that has survived till our own time: the community life of Christian monasticism. The priority of Tatian has rarely been acknowledged in Christian history because of his eventual outcast status. [13] * This is the likely reason for one of the oddest displacements in Christian historical writing: the generally accepted idea that Christian monasticism and the life of hermits originated in Egypt. Not so. There is no chronological evidence for anything in Egypt as early as the undoubted presence of male and female ascetics (so both monks and nuns) in Syria during the second century. Nor did Syrian asceticism consist only of those communities who adhered to Tatian and put themselves beyond the pale of Catholic episcopal Christianity by retreating into solitude. There were also celibate ascetics who gathered in community among other Christians, happy to contribute their service to general community life and liturgy, both men and women: the ‘Sons (or Daughters) of the Covenant’. One of the chief ways in which this movement of the Covenant showed how embedded it was in the general life of the Church was its leading role in Syrian liturgical music. Syria was the first region to foster an increasing elaboration of Christian communal singing after a mainstream Church emerged

• From The Girls (2016)

  But the appeal of the lists wore off quickly or something about them started to depress her, so she stopped. Now Alex was no longer welcome in certain hotel bars, had to avoid certain restaurants. Whatever charm she had was losing its potency. Not fully, not totally, but enough that she began to understand it was a possibility. She’d seen it happen to others, the older girls she’d known since moving here. They defected for their hometowns, making a grab at a normal life, or else disappeared entirely. In April: A manager had, in low tones, threatened to call the police after she’d tried to charge dinner to an old client’s account. Too many of her usuals stopped reaching out, for whatever reason— ultimatums eked out of couples therapy and this new fad of radical honesty, or the first flushes of guilt precipitated by the birth of children, or just plain boredom. Her monthly cash flow fell precipitously. Alex considered breast augmentation. She rewrote her ad copy, paid an exorbitant fee to be featured in the first page of results. Dropped her rates, then dropped them again. Six hundred roses, the ads said. Six hundred kisses. Things only very young girls would want six hundred of. Alex got a series of laser treatments: flashes of blue light soaked her face while she looked out of tinted medical goggles like a somber spaceman. In the meantime, she had her photos redone by a twitchy art student who asked, mildly, whether she might consider a trade for services. He had a pet bunny that lurched around his makeshift studio, its eyes demonic pink. May: One of her roommates wondered why their Klonopin was dwindling so rapidly. A gift card had gone missing, a favorite bracelet. A consensus that Alex had been the one to break the window unit. Had Alex broken the window unit? She had no memory of it, but it was possible. Things she touched started to seem doomed. June: Desperation made her lax with her usual screening policies— she waived references, waived photo IDs, and she’d been ripped off more than once. A guy had Alex take a cab out to the JFK airport hotel, promising to reimburse her in person, and then stopped answering her calls, Alex on the sidewalk dialing again and again, the wind attacking her dress while the taxi drivers slowed to look. And in July, after the roommates demanded that the back rent be paid in the next two weeks or else they would change the locks, Dom came back to town. —DOM HAD BEEN AWAY for almost a year, a self-imposed exile in the wake of some trouble she didn’t want to know too much about. Better, with Dom, to never know too much. He said he’d been arrested— more than once— but never seemed to actually spend any time in jail, alluding vaguely to some variety of diplomatic immunity, some last-minute intervention on his behalf by high-ranking officials.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  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. 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 de- signed 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 learn- ing. 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 fight- ing. 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 drown- THE WELL OF LONELINESS 405 ing. 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.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  And, of course, it would be terrible even to think that one could execute such a man. There had been no execution! No execution! That was the loveliness of this journey up the stairway of the moon. There was as much free time as they needed, and the storm would come only towards evening, and cowardice was undoubtedly one of the most terrible vices. Thus spoke Yeshua Ha-Nozri. No, philosopher, I disagree with you: it is the most terrible vice! He, for example, the present procurator of Judea and former tribune of a legion, had been no coward that time, in the Valley of the Virgins, when the fierce Germani had almost torn Ratslayer the Giant to pieces. But, good heavens, philosopher! How can you, with your intelligence, allow yourself to think that, for the sake of a man who has committed a crime against Caesar, the procurator of Judea would ruin his career? ‘Yes, yes . . .’ Pilate moaned and sobbed in his sleep. Of course he would. In the morning he still would not, but now, at night, after weighing everything, he would agree to ruin it. He would do everything to save the decidedly innocent, mad dreamer and healer from execution! ‘Now we shall always be together,’ 2 said the ragged wandering philosopher in his dream, who for some unknown reason had crossed paths with the equestrian of the golden spear. ‘Where there’s one of us, straight away there will be the other! Whenever I am remembered, you will at once be remembered, too! I, the foundling, the son of unknown parents, and you, the son of an astrologer-king and a miller’s daughter, the beautiful Pila.’ 3 ‘Yes, and don’t you forget to remember me, the astrologer’s son,’ Pilate asked in his dream. And securing in his dream a nod from the En-Sarid 4 beggar who was walking beside him, the cruel procurator of Judea wept and laughed from joy in his dream. This was all very good, but the more terrible was the hegemon’s awakening. Banga growled at the moon, and the pale-blue road, slippery as though smoothed with oil, fell away before the procurator. He opened his eyes, and the first thing he remembered was that the execution had been. The first thing the procurator did was to clutch Banga’s collar with a habitual gesture, then with sick eyes he began searching for the moon and saw that it had moved slightly to the side and turned silvery. Its light was being interfered with by an unpleasant, restless light playing on the balcony right before his eyes. A torch blazed and smoked in the hand of the centurion Ratslayer.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  "What are you thinking?" says the squirming American Tourist.... To which I reply: "Morphine have depressed my hypothalamus, seat of libido and emotion, and since the front brain acts only at second hand with backbrain titillation, being a vicarious type citizen can only get his kicks from behind, I must report virtual absence of cerebral event. I am aware of your presence, but since it has for me no affective connotation, my affect having been disconnect by the junk man for the non-payment, I am not innarested in your doings.... Go or come, shit or fuck yourself with a rasp or an asp -- tis well done and fitting for a queen -- but The Dead and The Junky don't care.... " They are Inscrutable . "Which is the way down the aisle to the water closet?" I asked the blonde usherette. "Right through here, sir.... Room for one more inside." "Have you seen Pantopon Rose?" said the old junky in the black overcoat. The Texas sheriff has killed his complicit Vet., Browbeck The Unsteady, involved in horse heroin racket. . A horse down with the aftosa need a sight of heroin to ease his pain and maybe some of that heroin take off across the lonesome prairie and whinny in Washington Square.... Junkies rush up yelling: "Heigh oOO Silver." "But where is the statuary ?" This arch type bit of pathos screeched out in tea-room cocktail lounge with bamboo decorations, Calle Juarez, Mexico, DF.... Lost back there with a meatball rape rap... a cunt claw your pants down and you up for rape that's statutory, brother.... Chicago calling... come in please... Chicago calling... come in please.... What you think I got the rubber on for goulashes in Puyo? A mighty wet place, reader.... "Take it off! Take it off!" The old queen meets himself coming round the other way in burlesque of adolescence, gets the knee from his phantom of the Old Old Howard... down skid row to Market Street Museum shows all kinds masturbation and self-abuse... young boys need it special.... They was ripe for the plucking forgot way back yonder in the corn hole... lost in little scraps of delight and burning scrolls.... Read the metastasis with blind fingers. Fossil message of arthritis... "Selling is more of a habit than using." -- Lola La Chata, Mexico, DF. Sucking terror from needle scars, underwater scream mouthing numb nerve warnings of the yen to come, throbbing bite site of rabies... "If God made anything better he kept it for himself," the Sailor used to say, his transmission slowed down with twenty goof balls. (Pieces of murder fall slow as opal chips through glycerine. ) Watching you and humming over and over "Johnny's So Long At The Fair." Pushing in a small way to keep up our habit.. "And use that alcohol," I say slamming a spirit lamp down on the table.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  The organism neither contracts from pain nor expands to normal sources of pleasure. It adjusts to a morphine cycle. The addict is immune to boredom. He can look at his shoe for hours or simply stay in bed. He needs no sexual outlet, no social contacts, no work, no diversion, no exercise, nothing but morphine. Morphine may relieve pain by imparting to the organism some of the qualities of a plant. (Pain could have no function for plants which are, for the most part, stationary, incapable of protective reflexes.) Scientists look for a non-habit forming morphine that will kill pain without giving pleasure, addicts want – or think they want – euphoria without addiction. I do not see how the functions of morphine can be separated, I think that any effective pain killer will depress the sexual function, induce euphoria and cause addiction. The perfect pain killer would probably be immediately habit forming. (If anyone is interested to develop such a drug, dehydro-oxy-heroin might be a good place to start.) The addict exists in a painless, sexless, timeless state. Transition back to the rhythms of animal life involves the withdrawal syndrome. I doubt if this transition can ever be made in comfort. Painless wihdrawal can only be approached. Cocaine. – Cocaine it the most exhilarating drug I have ever used. The euphoria centres in the head. Perhaps the drug activates pleasure connections directly in the brain. I suspect that an electric current in the right place would produc the same effect. The full exhilaration of cocaine can only be realized by an intravenous injection. The pleasurable effects do not last more than five or ten minutes. If the drug is injected in the skin, rapid elimination vitiate the effects. This goes double for sniffing. It is standard practice for cocaine users to sit up all night shooting cocaine at one minute intervals, alternating with shots of heroin mixed in the same injection to form a "speed ball." (I have never known an habitual cocaine user who was not a morphine addict.) The desire for cocaine can be intense. I have spent whole days walking from one drug store to another to fill a cocaine prescription. You may want cocaine intensely, but you don’t have any metabolic need for it. If you can’t get cocaine you eat, you go to sleep and forget it. I have talked with people who used cocaine for years, then were suddenly cut off from their supply. None of them experienced any withdrawal symptoms. Indeed it is difficult to see how a front brain stimulant could be addicting. Addiction seems to be a monopoly of sedatives. Continued use of cocaine leads to nervousness, depression, sometimes drug psychosis with paranoid hallucinations. The nervousness and depression resulting from cocaine use are not alleviated by more cocaine.

• From The Girls (2016)

  She was probably projecting all that innocence and sweetness on the almost-adult man who eased off his shorts and patted the bed for her to join him. The blurry leavings of amateur tattoos rippling along his arms. I heard the groan of mattress. I wasn’t surprised that they would fuck. But then there was Sasha’s voice, whining like a porno. High and curdled. Didn’t they know I was right next door? I turned my back to the wall, shutting my eyes. Julian growling. “Are you a cunt?” he said. The headboard jacking against the wall. “Are you?” —I’d think, later, that Julian must have known I could hear everything. 19691It was the end of the sixties, or the summer before the end, and that’s what it seemed like, an endless, formless summer. The Haight populated with white-garbed Process members handing out their oat-colored pamphlets, the jasmine along the roads that year blooming particularly heady and full. Everyone was healthy, tan, and heavy with decoration, and if you weren’t, that was a thing, too—you could be some moon creature, chiffon over the lamp shades, on a kitchari cleanse that stained all your dishes with turmeric. But that was all happening somewhere else, not in Petaluma with its low-hipped ranch houses, the covered wagon perpetually parked in front of the Hi-Ho Restaurant. The sun-scorched crosswalks. I was fourteen but looked much younger. People liked to say this to me. Connie swore I could pass for sixteen, but we told each other a lot of lies. We’d been friends all through junior high, Connie waiting for me outside classrooms as patient as a cow, all our energy subsumed into the theatrics of friendship. She was plump but didn’t dress like it, in cropped cotton shirts with Mexican embroidery, too-tight skirts that left an angry rim on her upper thighs. I’d always liked her in a way I never had to think about, like the fact of my own hands. Come September, I’d be sent off to the same boarding school my mother had gone to. They’d built a well-tended campus around an old convent in Monterey, the lawns smooth and sloped. Shreds of fog in the mornings, brief hits of the nearness of salt water. It was an all-girls school, and I’d have to wear a uniform—low-heeled shoes and no makeup, middy blouses threaded with navy ties. It was a holding place, really, enclosed by a stone wall and populated with bland, moon-faced daughters. Camp Fire Girls and Future Teachers shipped off to learn 160 words a minute, shorthand. To make dreamy, overheated promises to be one another’s bridesmaids at Royal Hawaiian weddings. My impending departure forced a newly critical distance on my friendship with Connie. I’d started to notice certain things, almost against my will. How Connie said, “The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else,” as if we were shopgirls in London instead of inexperienced adolescents in the farm belt of Sonoma County.

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

  The Gregorian party elected Gelasius a cardinal-deacon, far advanced in age. His short reign of a year and four days was a series of pitiable misfortunes. He had scarcely been elected when he was grossly insulted by a mob led by Cencius Frangipani and cast into a dungeon. Freed by the fickle Romans, he was thrown into a panic by the sudden appearance of Henry V. at the gates, and fled the city, attempting to escape by sea. The Normans came to his rescue and he was led back to Rome, where he found St. Peter’s in the hands of the anti-pope. A wild riot again forced him to flee and when he was found he was sitting in a field near St. Paul’s, with no companions but some women as his comforters. He then escaped to Pisa and by way of Genoa to France, where he died at Cluny, 1119. The imperialist party had elected an anti-pope, Gregory VIII., who was consecrated at Rome in the presence of Henry V., and ruled till 1121, but was taken captive by the Normans, mounted on a camel, paraded before Calixtus amid the insults and mockeries of the Roman mob, covered with dust and filth, and consigned to a dungeon. He died in an obscure monastery, in 1125, "still persevering in his rebellion." Such was the state of society in Rome. Calixtus II., the successor of Gelasius, 1119–1124, was elected at Cluny and consecrated at Vienne. He began his rule by renewing the sentence of excommunication against Henry; and in him the emperor found his match. After holding the Synod of Rheims, which ratified the prohibition of lay investiture, he reached Rome, 1120. Both parties, emperor and pope, were weary of the long struggle of fifty years, which had, like the Thirty Years’ War five centuries later, kept Central Europe in a state of turmoil and war. At the Diet of Würzburg, 1121, the men of peace were in the majority and demanded a cessation of the conflict and the calling of a council. Calixtus found it best to comply, however reluctantly, with the resolution of the German Diet, and instructed his legates to convoke a general council of all the bishops of France and Germany at Mainz for the purpose of restoring concord between the holy see and the empire. The assembly adjourned from Mainz to Worms, the city which became afterwards so famous for the protest of Luther. An immense multitude crowded to the place to witness the restoration of peace. The sessions lasted more than a week, and closed with a solemn mass and the Te Deum by the cardinal-bishop of Ostia, who gave the kiss of peace to the emperor.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  More penetrating than the defiant ‘Manuscripts don’t burn’, this word touched the inner experience of generations of Russians. To portray that experience with such candour required another sort of freedom and a love for something more than ‘culture’. Gratitude for such perfect expression of this other, deeper freedom must surely have been part of the enthusiastic response of readers to the novel’s first appearance. And then there was the sheer unlikeliness of its publication. By 1966 the ‘thaw’ that had followed Stalin’s death was over and a new freeze was coming. The hopes awakened by the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , the first public acknowledgement of the existence of the Gulag, had been disappointed. In 1964 came the notorious trial of the poet Joseph Brodsky, and a year later the trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, both sentenced to terms in that same Gulag. Solzhenitsyn saw a new Stalinization approaching, made worse by the terrible sense of repetition, stagnation and helplessness. Such was the monotonously grim atmosphere of the Brezhnev era. And in the midst of it there suddenly burst The Master and Margarita , not only an anomaly but an impossibility, a sort of cosmic error, evidence of some hidden but fatal crack in the system of Soviet power. People kept asking, how could they have let it happen? Bulgakov began work on the first version of the novel early in 1929, or possibly at the end of 1928. It was abandoned, taken up again, burned, resurrected, recast and revised many times. It accompanied Bulgakov through the period of greatest suffering for his people—the period of forced collectivization and the first five-year plan, which decimated Russia’s peasantry and destroyed her agriculture, the period of expansion of the system of ‘corrective labour camps’, of the penetration of the secret police into all areas of life, of the liquidation of the intelligentsia, of vast party purges and the Moscow ‘show trials’. In literature the same struggle went on in miniature, and with the same results. Bulgakov was not arrested, but by 1930 he found himself so far excluded that he could no longer publish or produce his work. In an extraordinarily forthright letter to the central government, he asked for permission to emigrate, since the hostility of the literary powers made it impossible for him to live. If emigration was not permitted, ‘and if I am condemned to keep silent in the Soviet Union for the rest of my days, then I ask the Soviet government to give me a job in my speciality and assign me to a theatre as a titular director.’ Stalin himself answered this letter by telephone on 17 April, and shortly afterwards the Moscow Art Theatre hired Bulgakov as an assistant director and literary consultant. However, during the thirties only his stage adaptations of Gogol’s Dead Souls and Cervantes’ Don Quixote were granted a normal run.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  moved away by torchlight into the dark—no, said Vera, Maximilian told us that a bird’s-eye view showed a city of white tents extending to the horizon, from which as day broke the Germans emerged singly, in couples, or in small groups, forming a silent procession and pressing ever closer together as they all went in the same direction, following, so it seemed, some higher bidding, on their way to the Promised Land at last after long years in the wilderness. It was only a few months after this experience of Maximilian’s in the Munich cinema that the Austrians were to be heard over the wireless, hundreds of thousands of them pouring into the Heldenplatz in Vienna, their shouts breaking over us like a flood tide for hours on end, said Vera. In Maximilian’s opinion, she told me, this collective paroxysm on the part of the Viennese crowds marked the watershed. It was still a sinister echo in our ears when, with summer hardly over, the first refugees arrived here in Prague, expelled from the now so-called Ostmark region after being robbed by their former fellow citizens of everything but a few schillings. In what they probably knew was the false hope of keeping their heads above water in a foreign country, they went from door to door as itinerant pedlars, offering for sale hairpins and slides, pencils and writing paper, ties and other items of haberdashery, just as their ancestors had once walked the countryside of Galicia, Hungary, and the Tyrol with packs on their backs. I remember, said Vera, Austerlitz added, one such hawker, a man called Saly Bleyberg, who had built up his own garage business in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna not far from the Praterstern during the difficult interwar years, and who when Agata invited him in for a cup of coffee told us the most appalling tales of the despicable conduct of the Viennese: the methods used to force him to make over his business to a certain Herr Haselberger, the manner in which he was then cheated of the sale price, which was ridiculously low anyway, how he was robbed of his bank deposits and securities, how all his furniture and his Steyr car were appropriated, and how at last he, Saly Bleyberg and his family, sitting on their suitcases in the hall of the building where they lived, had been obliged to hear the drunken caretaker negotiating with the young couple, obviously just married, who had come to look at the now vacant flat. Although the story we heard from poor Bleyberg, who kept crumpling the handkerchief in his hand with helpless rage, was far worse than anything we had imagined, and although after the Munich Agreement the situation held out no hope at all, said Vera, Maximilian stayed in Prague throughout the winter, whether because of his work for the Party, which was now a matter of particular urgency, or because he refused, for as long as was humanly possible, to give up his belief that the law would protect a man. For her part, Agata was not prepared to go to France ahead of Maximilian, although he had repeatedly advised her to leave, and so it was

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Here something amazed her. She looked at the window through which the moon was shining and said: ‘And here’s something I don’t understand . . . How is it midnight, midnight, when it should have been morning long ago?’ ‘It’s nice to prolong the festive night a little,’ replied Woland. ‘Well, I wish you happiness!’ Margarita prayerfully reached out both hands to Woland, but did not dare approach him and softly exclaimed: ‘Farewell! Farewell!’ ‘Goodbye,’ said Woland. And, Margarita in the black cloak, the master in the hospital robe, they walked out to the corridor of the jeweller’s wife’s apartment, where a candle was burning and Woland’s retinue was waiting for them. When they left the corridor, Hella was carrying the suitcase containing the novel and Margarita Nikolaevna’s few possessions, and the cat was helping Hella. At the door of the apartment, Koroviev made his bows and disappeared, while the rest went to accompany them downstairs. The stairway was empty. As they passed the third-floor landing, something thudded softly, but no one paid any attention to it. Just at the exit from the sixth stairway, Azazello blew upwards, and as soon as they came out to the courtyard, where the moonlight did not reach, they saw a man in a cap and boots asleep, and obviously dead asleep, on the doorstep, as well as a big black car by the entrance with its lights turned off. Through the windshield could be dimly seen the silhouette of a rook. They were just about to get in when Margarita cried softly in despair: ‘Oh, God, I’ve lost the horseshoe!’ ‘Get into the car,’ said Azazello, ‘and wait for me. I’ll be right back, I only have to see what’s happened.’ And he went back in. What had happened was the following: shortly before Margarita and the master left with their escort, a little dried-up woman carrying a can and a bag came out of apartment no. 48, which was located just under the jeweller’s wife’s apartment. This was that same Annushka who on Wednesday, to Berlioz’s misfortune, had spilled sunflower oil by the turnstile. No one knew, and probably no one will ever know, what this woman did in Moscow or how she maintained her existence. The only thing known about her is that she could be seen every day either with the can, or with bag and can together, in the kerosene shop, or in the market, or under the gateway, or on the stairs, but most often in the kitchen of apartment no.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “Did you do that just for me?” She threw herself back on the pillow. “You’ll like this news. Peter’s gone. Like, gone gone. With Pamela, quelle surprise.” She rolled her eyes but articulated Pamela’s name with a perverse happiness. Cutting me a look. “What do you mean, left?” Panic was already dislocating my voice. “He’s so selfish, ” she said. “Dad told us we might have to move to San Diego. The next day, Peter takes off. He took a bunch of his clothes and stuff. I think they went to her sister’s house in Portland. I mean, I’m pretty sure they went there.” She blew at her bangs. “He’s a coward. And Pamela is the kind of girl who’s gonna get fat after she has a baby.” “Pamela’s pregnant?” She gave me a look. “Surprise—you don’t even care I might have to move to San Diego?” I knew I was supposed to start enumerating the ways I loved her, how sad I would be if she left, but I was hypnotized by an image of Pamela next to Peter in his car, falling asleep against his shoulder. Avis maps at their feet gone translucent with hamburger grease, the backseat filled with clothes and his mechanic manuals. How Peter would look down and see the white line of Pamela’s scalp through her part. He might kiss her, moved by a domestic tenderness, even though she was sleeping and would never know. “Maybe he’s just messing around,” I said. “I mean, couldn’t he still show up?” “Screw you,” Connie said. She seemed surprised by these words, too. “What’d I even do to you?” I said. Of course we both knew. “I think I’d rather be alone right now,” Connie announced primly, and stared hard out the window. Peter, fleeing north with the girlfriend who might even have his baby—there was no imagining the biology away, the fact of the multiplying proteins in Pamela’s stomach. But here was Connie, her chubby shape on the bed so familiar that I could map her freckles, point out the blip on her shoulder from chicken pox. There was always Connie, suddenly beloved. “Let’s go to a movie or something,” I said. She sniffed and studied the pale rim of her nails. “Peter’s not even around anymore,” she said. “So you really have no reason to be here. You’re gonna be at boarding school, anyway.” The hum of my desperation was obvious. “Maybe we can go to the Flying A?” She bit her lip. “May says you’re not very nice to me.” May was the dentist’s daughter. She wore plaid pants with matching vests, like a junior accountant. “You said May was boring.” Connie was quiet. We used to feel sorry for May, who was rich but ridiculous, but I understood that now Connie was feeling sorry for me, watching me pant after Peter, who’d probably been planning to go to Portland for weeks. Months. “May’s nice,” Connie said.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The thing was that during her winter sufferings she had never seen the master in her dreams. He released her for the night, and she suffered only in the daylight hours. But now she had dreamed of him. The dream was of a place unknown to Margarita—hopeless, dismal, under the sullen sky of early spring. In the dream there was this ragged, fleeting, grey sky, and under it a noiseless flock of rooks. Some gnarled little bridge, and under it a muddy spring runlet. Joyless, destitute, half-naked trees. A lone aspen, and further on, among the trees, beyond some vegetable patch, a little log structure—a separate kitchen, a bathhouse, devil knows what it was! Everything around somehow lifeless and so dismal that one just longed to hang oneself from that aspen by the bridge. Not a puff of breeze, not a movement of the clouds, and not a living soul. What a hellish place for a living man! And then, imagine, the door of this log structure is thrown open, and he appears. Rather far away, but clearly visible. He is in tatters, it is impossible to make out what he is wearing. Unshaven, hair dishevelled. Sick, anxious eyes. He beckons with his hand, calling her. Gasping in the lifeless air, Margarita ran to him over the tussocks, and at that moment she woke up. ‘This dream means only one of two things,’ Margarita Nikolaevna reasoned with herself. ‘If he’s dead and beckoned to me, it means he has come for me, and I will die soon. And that’s very good—because then my suffering will soon end. Or else he’s alive, and then the dream can only mean one thing, that he’s reminding me of himself! He wants to say that we will see each other again . . . Yes, we will see each other very soon!’ Still in the same agitated state, Margarita got dressed and began impressing it upon herself that, essentially, everything was turning out very luckily, and one must know how to catch such lucky moments and take advantage of them. Her husband had gone on a business trip for a whole three days. During those three days she was at her own disposal, and no one could prevent her from thinking what she liked or dreaming what she liked. All five rooms on the top floor of the house, all of this apartment which in Moscow would be the envy of tens of thousands of people, was entirely at her disposal. However, being granted freedom for a whole three days, Margarita chose from all this luxurious apartment what was far from the best place. After having tea, she went to a dark, windowless room where suitcases and all sorts of old stuff were kept in two large wardrobes.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Enrique snatched her by her red hair and pulled her to her feet. “Show me some fuckin’ respect when I talkin’ to you. I show you some just by lettin’ you live.” He spat in her face and mushed her back down onto the chair. Flame balled up and cried like a baby, hoping Enrique would ease up off of her. Grabbing her temples, she screamed. She was doing the best she could to pay back Power’s debt, selling her ass and soul, and hadn’t a thing to show for it. But tomorrow that would all change. “Mira, that way.” Enrique pointed toward the bedroom door, and Flame dropped her stare at the floor. “Don’t act like you don’t know what the fuck I saying. All morenos know ‘mira’ means ‘look.’ Take ya ass in the back ’til I finish here. Comprende?” Fuckin’ Power. The room was hot and stuffy, with barred and boarded-up windows. Flame sat on the edge of the bed, tears streaking her pressed powder, and wondered what her sister, Mercedes, was doing to survive without her. Flame had been the one to feed, clothe, and make sure Mercedes had had a proper education ever since their momma decided to trade them in for a heroin kick almost seven years ago. She’d given up her dreams of going to college, learning a trade, having a workingman who pulled a 9-to-5, to make sure her sister didn’t have to live the life that she did. No one deserved the shit she was putting herself through for Power. She exhaled and sighed, wiped the tears from her face and assured herself I ain’t doin’ nothin’ for Power that he wouldn’t do for me. He’s gonna come through. Got to. Enrique stood in the doorway eating out of a bowl. “You hungry, mami,” he asked as if he hadn’t just spit on Flame. “There’s arroz con pollo and sweet plantanos in the kitchen.” Flame just shook her head. Her stomach was growling, but she didn’t feel hungry. Stress had fucked up her blood sugar levels. “No thanks,” she answered, remembering Enrique’s talk on respect. Enrique dragged his slippered feet into the room and sat next to her on the bed. Softly, he touched her shoulder, and she flinched and trembled. Setting the bowl down on the white sheets, he rubbed her face with the back of his hand. Instantly, her tears came to life again, running down her face like she wished she could haul ass up out of there.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Pushing Goody’s head back down, Power instructed her to keep licking as he positioned himself between her lower lips, and pushed his hugeness inside her with one single plunge. Goody hollered out in shock, pain, pleasure, then got back down with the get-down as he worked her middle until it spilled over. The cell phone buzzed on his hip just as he was about to bust. “Fuck!” he complained, but didn’t hesitate to answer the call. Pulling out, he decided he could get his rocks off anytime. Pussy waited on him 24/7. But come-ups like the one he’d planned came through only once in a lifetime, if a nigga was lucky. “Gimme what’chu got,” Power answered. “Enrique’s real stash is near 115th and Lexington. My boy’s got a spot on 112th right off Lex, so watchin’ him ain’t a problem. I already know how many men he got workin’ days.” “Cool. Hit me lata—” Whiz laughed. “Ya forgettin’ somethin’.” Power rubbed his stubbled chin. “What’s that?” “Ya girl Flame, nigga! You want me to go get her or what? You know Enrique’s still holding her. He’ll let her go for a brick—from me anyway. But he’s out for ya whole ass!” Whiz laughed. Power looked back, saw his snow bunny’s face buried between Goody’s legs, and grinned. “Let ’im keep her, it’s too risky,” he said, slapping Kirsten on the ass. “If she slipped and got caught once, she’ll do it again. I can’t let no broad bring death to my door. Plus, how ya know that nigga won’t bank you soon as you hand the bird over?” Whiz choked on the other end of the line, then exhaled smoke as he spoke. “You a cold mu’fucka, Power. You just gonna leave Flame to the wolves like dat? After her being down wit’chu for a nickel?” Power shook his head. Whiz had all the connects and could find a grain of red dirt in a sandstorm, but he was slow when it came down to broads. “Letmedo me. Flame knew what kinda nigga I was from the door. Let her charge it to the game!” • • • Flame sat as still as she possibly could and tried to disappear into her chair as Enrique hemmed up one of his workers, slapping him around and pulverizing his face until he was barely recognizable. She winced every time the man cried out and pleaded for his life. She empathized with him because she too was bargaining for hers. “What up, mami,” Carlos, one of Enrique’s soldiers asked. “Que? Did I hear you speak to Flame, cabron?” Enrique turned his rage on his worker. “You don’t fuck wit my money, right? So don’t fuck wit her.” He looked at Flame. “Mami’s got dineros in her cho-cha. Dat’s right, right? There’s money in your pussy? At least thirty-four grand.” Flame froze. She didn’t know if she should answer him.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  For a minute there, Sam and I were so caught up experimenting with each other’s bodies, that we didn’t realize that Detail was the muthafucka who made all the money. But when the bills became due, it was a quick reminder. Detail was a small, very small, dope pusher, so when Sam called herself going to some of the cats he fucked with to try and get put on or flip a lil’ somethin’ somethin’, all them niggas wanted to do was fuck, and after a minute I could tell Sam was only one more rejection away from actually deciding to trick with one of them hood niggas. I could tell by the look in her eyes, by how worn down she was from trying. It was that same look my moms had had in her eyes after my father left us and she kept getting turned down from jobs. Finally, my moms decided to just start fuckin’ the bastards who weren’t giving her the jobs. That became her job. “You thought Detail beat your ass,” I remember telling Sam as I held her by her wrist. She was older than me, but I was bigger than her. “I swear to God, Sam, if you even think about it—” “Then how the fuck we supposed to live, Sin?” Sam spat as she yanked her wrist away from me, knocking some of the items off of the dresser we were standing by. “I can’t keep this place if I don’t have no money to pay the bills. You thought you were on the streets. We both gon’ be on the streets. Then what we gon’ do, huh?” I thought for a moment. Here I was only sixteen, but feeling like a grown woman. “Samantha, I put it on my life that I’d rather be out there on the goddamn streets homeless with you than under a roof where you got to lay on your back to keep the roof over us.” By then I started to break down just thinking about how my moms went out. “Sin, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Sam cried as she comforted me. “I didn’t mean to . . . I just don’t know what to do. I’m sorry, baby.” Sam began kissing my tears away, and then slowly I tasted the salt of my tears on her tongue. I lifted her up and placed her on the dresser. She was only wearing a T-shirt and some panties. I moved her panties aside with my hand and as I tongue-fucked her, I finger-fucked her at the same time. Her ass scooted back and forth on the dresser as she pleased herself with my three fingers that were inside of her. “Oh, Sin,” she moaned. “This isn’t right. I shouldn’t be—”