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 The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  * Perrexit Psyche volenter, non obsequium. qui- dem illa functura, sed requiem malorum praecipitio fluvialis rupis habitura. Sed inde de fluvio musicae suavis nutrieula leni crepitu dulcis aurae divinitus inspirata sic vaticinatur arundo viridis: * Psyche, tantis aerumnis exercita, neque tua miserrima morte meas sanctas aquas polluas nec vero istud horae? contra formidabiles oves feras aditum, quoad de solis flagrantia mutuatae calorem truci rabie solent efferri cornuque acuto et fronte saxea et nonnunquam venenatis morsibus in exitium saevire mortalium Sed dum meridies solis sedaverit vaporem et pecua Spiritus fuvialis serenitate conquieverint, poteris sub illa procerissima platano, quae mecum simul unum fluentum bibit, latenter abscondere. Et cum primum mitigata furia laxaverint oves animum, percussis frondibus attigui nemoris lanosum aurum repperies, quod passim stirpibus convexis obhaerescit.’ Sic arundo simplex et humana Psycher. aegerrimam salutem suam docebat : nec auscultatu impaenitendo 4 ! Cuius must necessarily refer to the grove, and not to the river, so that the MSS’ gurgites cannot stand. Van der Vliet’s frutices is a possible suggestion. 2 This is the correction of the older editors for the un- intelligible awrive cole of the MSS, 266 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK VI in length with the river-banks, the bushes whereof look close down upon the stream hard by? There be great sheep shining like gold, and kept by no manner of person ; I command thee that thou go thither and bring me home some of the wool of their fleeces.’ * Psyche arose willingly, not to do her command- ment, but to throw herself headlong into the water to end her sorrow. But then a green reed, nurse of sweet music, inspired by divine inspiration with a gracious tune and melody, began to say : ‘O Psyche, harried by these great labours, I pray thee not to trouble or pollute my holy water by thy wretched death, and yet beware that thou go not towards the terrible wild sheep of this coast until such time as the heat of the sun be past; for when the sun is in his force, then seem they most dreadful and furious with their sharp horns, their stony foreheads, and their poisonous bites wherewith they arm themselves to the destruction of mankind : but until the midday is past and the heat assuaged, and until the flock doth begin to rest in the gentle breeze of the river, thou mayest hide thyself here by me under this great plane-tree, which drinks of the river as I do also, and as soon as their great fury is past and their passion is stilled, thou mayest go among the thickets and bushes under the wood-side and gather the locks of their golden fleeces which thou shalt find hanging upon the briars. Thus spake the gentle and benign reed, shewing a mean to most wretched Psyche to save her life, which she bare well in eae Duet icti b FADUM MA 3 So Salmasius for the MSS’ Zstéus orae.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  In the past month Howard had stepped up his flirtatious campaign. Touching, holding and now squeezing. Howard seemed to think the next step inevitable, but Kiki had not yet decided whether tonight was to be the beginning of the rest of her marriage. ‘Uh-uh . . .’ she said softly. ‘Sorry. Turns out they’re not coming.’ ‘Why not?’ He pulled her close to him again and rested his head on her shoulder. Kiki let him. Anniversaries will do that. She gripped a  On Beauty clump of her husband’s thick, silky hair in her free hand. The other hand held Christian and Meredith’s present, still waiting to be appreciated. And just like this, with her eyes closed, and with his hair escaping her fingers, they could have been standing in any happy day of any of these thirty years. Kiki was not a fool and recognized the feeling for what it was: a dumb wish to go backwards. Things could not be exactly the same as they had been. ‘The girls hate Christian Von Asshole,’ she said finally, teasingly, but let him rest his head on her bosom. ‘They won’t go to anything he goes to. You know how they are. I can’t do a thing about it.’ The bell rang. Howard sighed lustily. ‘Saved by the bell,’ whispered Kiki. ‘Look, I’m going upstairs. I’m going to try to get the kids down. You answer that – and slow down on the drinks, OK? You gotta hold this whole shebang together.’ ‘Mmm.’ Howard hurried to the door, but then turned just before he opened it. ‘Oh – Keeks – ’ His face was childish, apologetic, completely inadequate. It made Kiki suddenly despair. It was a face that placed them right alongside every other middle-aged couple on the block – the raging wife, the rueful husband. She thought: How did we get to the same place as everybody else? ‘Keeks . . . Sorry, darling, just . . . I need to know if you invited them?’ ‘Who?’ ‘Who d’you think? The Kippses.’ ‘Oh, right . . . Sure. I spoke to her. She was . . .’ But it was impossible either to make a joke of Mrs Kipps or to give her to Howard in a nutshell, the way he liked people to be served to him. ‘I don’t know if they’ll come, but I invited them.’ And again with the bell. Kiki went off towards the stairs, leaving the present upon the little table under the mirror. Howard answered the door.  kipps and belsey  ‘Hey.’ Tall, pleased with himself, pretty, too pretty like a conman, sleeveless, tattooed, languid, muscled, a basketball under his arm, black. Howard kept hold of the half-open door. ‘Can I help you?’ Carl had been smiling, now he stopped.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We were usually drunk from noon on, careening down the Autobahn in a right-hand-drive car, taking wrong turns everywhere, being tailgated by Volkswagens going 80 miles an hour, by Mercedes Benzes blinking their headlights aggressively and doing 110, by BMWs trying to outrun the Mercedes-Benzes. All a German had to see were our English license plates and he was out to run us off the road. Adrian drove like a maniac, too, passing on the wrong side, weaving in and out of the truck lane, allowing himself to get riled by the Germans and trying to outrun them. There was part of me that was terrified by this, but another part of me which thrilled to it. We were living on the edge. It was likely we’d be killed in a horrible wreck which would obliterate every trace of our faces and our sins. At least I knew for sure I wasn’t bored. Like all people who are preoccupied with death, who hate plane rides, who study their tiniest wrinkles in the mirror and are morbidly afraid of birthdays, who worry about dying of cancer or a brain tumor or a sudden aneurysm, I am secretly in love with death. I will suffer morbidly through a shuttle flight from New York to Washington, but behind the wheel of a sports car I’ll start doing 110 without hesitation and love every terrifying minute. The excitement of knowing that you may be the author of your own death is more intense than orgasm. It must have been what the kamikazes felt, creating their own holocaust and being swallowed up by it, instead of waiting for the holocaust to catch up with them some surprising morning in their safe beds in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. There was another reason for our heavy drinking: namely my depressions. I would alternate between elation and despair (self-hatred for what I’d done, dismal despair over being alone with a man who did not love me, anguish about the future I was not supposed to mention). So we got drunk, and in our giggling drunken antics, the despair would get blurred. It would never quite vanish, of course, but it would become easier to bear. Like getting drunk on a plane to ease your fear of flying. You still believe you’re going to die whenever the sound of the engines changes, but you don’t care anymore. You almost like the idea. You imagine yourself gliding down through the flocculent clouds into a blue ocean full of your fondest memories of childhood.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I knew that the women who got most out of life (and out of men) were the ones who demanded most, that if you acted as if you were valuable and desirable, men found you valuable and desirable, that if you refused to be a doormat, nobody could tread on you. I knew that servile women got walked on and women who acted like queens got treated that way. But no sooner had my defiant mood passed than I would be seized with desolation and despair, I would feel terrified of losing both men and being left all alone, I would feel sorry for Bennett, curse myself for my disloyalty, despise myself utterly for everything. Then I wanted to run to Bennett and plead forgiveness, throw myself at his feet, offer to bear him twelve children immediately (mainly to cement my bondage), promise to serve him like a good slave in exchange for any bargain as long as it included security. I would become servile, cloying, saccharinely sweet: the whole package of lies that passes in the world as femininity. The fact was that neither one of these attitudes made any sense and I knew it. Neither dominating nor being dominated. Neither bitchiness nor servility. Both were traps. Both led nowhere except toward the loneliness both were designed to avoid. But what could I do? The more I hated myself, the more I hated myself for hating myself. It was hopeless. I kept scanning the faces in the crowd for Adrian. No face but his contented me. Every other face looked gross and ugly to me. Bennett knew what was going on and was maddeningly understanding. “You’re like something out of Last Year at Marienbad,” he said. “Did it happen or didn’t it? Only her analyst knows for sure.” He was convinced that Adrian “only” represented my father, and in that case it was kosher. Only! I was merely, in short, “acting out” an Oedipal situation as well as an “unresolved transference” toward my German analyst, Dr. Happe, not to mention Dr. Kolner, whom I’d just left. Bennett could understand that. As long as it was Oedipus, not love. As long as it was transference, not love. Adrian was worse, in a way. We met on the side stairs under a Gothic arch. He was full of interpretations too. “You keep running back and forth between the two of us,” he said. “I wonder which of us is Mummy and which Daddy?” I had a sudden mad impulse to pack my bags and get away from both of them. Maybe it wasn’t a question of choosing between them but just of escaping both entirely. Released in my own custody. Stop this nonsense of running from one man to the next. Stand on my own two feet for once. Why was that so terrifying? The other options were worse, weren’t they?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  21“Lo! Lola! Lolita!” I hear myself crying from a doorway into the sun, with the acoustics of time, domed time, endowing my call and its tell-tale hoarseness with such a wealth of anxiety, passion and pain that really it would have been instrumental in wrenching open the zipper of her nylon shroud had she been dead. Lolita! In the middle of a trim turfed terrace I found her at last—she had run out before I was ready. Oh Lolita! There she was playing with a damned dog, not me. The animal, a terrier of sorts, was losing and snapping up again and adjusting between his jaws a wet little red ball; he took rapid chords with his front paws on the resilient turf, and then would bounce away. I had only wanted to see where she was, I could not swim with my heart in that state, but who cared—and there she was, and there was I, in my robe—and so I stopped calling; but suddenly something in the pattern of her motions, as she dashed this way and that in her Aztec Red bathing briefs and bra, struck me … there was an ecstasy, a madness about her frolics that was too much of a glad thing. Even the dog seemed puzzled by the extravagance of her reactions. I put a gentle hand to my chest as I surveyed the situation. The turquoise blue swimming pool some distance behind the lawn was no longer behind that lawn, but within my thorax, and my organs swam in it like excrements in the blue sea water in Nice. One of the bathers had left the pool and, half-concealed by the peacocked shade of trees, stood quite still, holding the ends of the towel around his neck and following Lolita with his amber eyes. There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness, his damp black hair or what was left of it, glued to his round head, his little mustache a humid smear, the wool on his chest spread like a symmetrical trophy, his naval pulsating, his hirsute thighs dripping with bright droplets, his tight wet black bathing trunks bloated and bursting with vigor where his great fat bullybag was pulled up and back like a padded shield over his reversed beasthood. And as I looked at his oval nut-brown face, it dawned upon me that what I had recognized him by was the reflection of my daughter’s countenance—the same beatitude and grimace but made hideous by his maleness. And I also knew that the child, my child, knew he was looking, enjoyed the lechery of his look and was putting on a show of gambol and glee, the vile and beloved slut. As she made for the ball and missed it, she fell on her back, with her obscene young legs madly pedalling in the air; I could sense the musk of her excitement from where I stood, and then I saw (petrified with a kind of sacred disgust) the man close his eyes and bare his small, horribly small and even, teeth as he leaned against a tree in which a multitude of dappled Priaps shivered. Immediately afterwards a marvelous transformation took place. He was no longer the satyr but a very good-natured and foolish Swiss cousin, the Gustave Trapp I have mentioned more than once, who used to counteract his “sprees” (he drank beer with milk, the good swine) by feats of weight-lifting—tottering and grunting on a lake beach with his otherwise very complete bathing suit jauntily stripped from one shoulder. This Trapp noticed me from afar and working the towel on his nape walked back with false insouciance to the pool. And as if the sun had gone out of the game, Lo slackened and slowly got up ignoring the ball that the terrier placed before her. Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp? I started to say something, and then sat down on the grass with a quite monstrous pain in my chest and vomited a torrent of browns and greens that I had never remembered eating.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  And don’t look at me that way….” “What way?” “As if my not being able to read your mind were my greatest sin. I can’t read your mind. I don’t know why you’re so mad. I can’t intuit your every wish. If that’s what you want in a wife you don’t have it in me.” “I certainly don’t.” “Then what is it? Please tell me.” “I shouldn’t have to.” “Good God! Do you mean to tell me I’m expected to be a mind reader? Is that the kind of mothering you want?” “If you had any empathy for me…” “But I do. My God, you just don’t give me a chance.” “You tune out. You don’t listen.” “It was something in the movie, wasn’t it?” “What, in the movie?” “The quiz again. Do you have to quiz me like some kind of criminal. Do you have to cross-examine me?…It was the funeral scene…. The little boy looking at his dead mother. Something got you there. That was when you got depressed.” Silence. “Well, wasn’t it?” Silence. “Oh come on, Bennett, you’re making me furious. Please tell me. Please.” (He gives the words singly like little gifts. Like hard little turds.) “What was it about that scene that got me?” “Don’t quiz me. Tell me!” (She puts her arms around him. He pulls away. She falls to the floor holding onto his pajama leg. It looks less like an embrace than like a rescue scene, she sinking, he reluctantly allowing her to cling to his leg for support.) “Get up!” (Crying) “Only if you tell me.” (He jerks his leg away.) “I’m going to bed.” (She puts her face to the cold floor.) “Bennett, please don’t do this, please talk to me.” “I’m too mad.” “Please.” “I can’t.” “Please.” “The more you plead, the colder I feel.” “Please.” They are lying in bed thinking. The bolster on her side is wet. She is shivering and sobbing. He seems not to hear. Whenever they roll toward the depression in the center of the bed, he is the first to draw back. This happens repeatedly. The bed is hollowed out like a log canoe. She likes the warmth and hardness of his back. She would like to put her arms around him. She would like to forget the whole scene, pretend it never happened. When they make love, they’re together for a while. But he won’t. He snatches her hand from his pajama fly. He pushes her away. She rolls back. He moves to his outer edge. “That’s no solution,” he says. Listen to the rain falling. Out in the street there are occasional shouts from students coming home drunk. Wet cobblestones. Paris can be so wet. After the movie tonight, they went to Notre Dame. They were packed in between wet wool coats and wet fur coats. Midnight Mass.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Our marriage went from bad to worse. Brian stopped fucking me. I would beg and plead and ask what was wrong with me. I began to hate myself, to feel ugly, unloved, bodily odoriferous—all the classic symptoms of the unfucked wife; I began to have fantasies of zipless fucks with doormen, derelicts, countermen at the West End Bar, graduate students—even (God help me!) professors. I would sit in my “Proseminar in Eighteenth-Century English Lit.” listening to some creepy graduate student drone on and on about Nahum Tate’s revisions of Shakespeare’s plays, and meanwhile I would imagine myself sucking off each male member (hah) of the class. Sometimes I would imagine myself actually fucking Professor Harrington Stanton, a fiftyish proper Bostonian with a well-connected New England family behind him—a family renowned for politics, poetry, and psychosis. Professor Stanton had a wild laugh and always called James Boswell Bozzy—as if he drank with him nightly at the West End (which, indeed, I suspected him of doing). Somebody once referred to Stanton as “very brilliant but not quite plugged in.” It was apt. Despite being well-connected socially, he flickered on and off between sanity and insanity, never staying in one state long enough for you to know where you stood. How would Professor Stanton fuck? He was fascinated with eighteenth-century dirty words. Perhaps he would whisper “coun,” “cullion,” “crack” (for “cunt,” “testicles,” “pussy”) in my ear as we screwed? Perhaps he would turn out to have his family crest tattooed on his foreskin? I would be sitting there chuckling to myself at these fantasies and Professor Stanton would beam at me, thinking I was chuckling at one of his own wisecracks. But what was the use of these pathetic fantasies? My husband had stopped fucking me. He thought he was working hard enough as it was. I cried myself to sleep every night, or else went into the bathroom to masturbate after he fell asleep. I was twenty-one and a half years old and desperate. In retrospect, it all seems so simple. Why didn’t I find someone else? Why didn’t I have an affair or leave him or insist on some sort of sexual freedom arrangement? But I was a good girl of the fifties. I had grown up finger-fucking to Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning. I had never slept with any man but my husband. I had petted “above the waist” and “below the waist” according to some mysterious unwritten rules of propriety. But an affair with another man seemed so radical that I couldn’t even consider it. Besides, I was sure that Brian’s failure to fuck me was my fault, not his. Either I was a nymphomaniac (because I wanted to be fucked more than once a month) or else it was just that I was so unattractive. Or maybe it was Brian’s age that was the problem. I had been raised on the various sexual myths of the fifties like:

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Humbert, would have to overcome her habitual sloth and write to Miss Phalen’s sister who taught at St. Algebra. The dazzling lake emerged. I said I had forgotten my sunglasses in the car and would catch up with her. I had always thought that wringing one’s hands was a fictional gesture—the obscure outcome, perhaps, of some medieval ritual; but as I took to the woods, for a spell of despair and desperate meditation, this was the gesture (“look, Lord, at these chains!”) that would have come nearest to the mute expression of my mood. Had Charlotte been Valeria, I would have known how to handle the situation; and “handle” is the word I want. In the good old days, by merely twisting fat Valechka’s brittle wrist (the one she had fallen upon from a bicycle) I could make her change her mind instantly; but anything of the sort in regard to Charlotte was unthinkable. Bland American Charlotte frightened me. My lighthearted dream of controlling her through her passion for me was all wrong. I dared not do anything to spoil the image of me she had set up to adore. I had toadied to her when she was the awesome duenna of my darling, and a groveling something still persisted in my attitude toward her. The only ace I held was her ignorance of my monstrous love for her Lo. She had been annoyed by Lo’s liking me; but my feelings she could not divine. To Valeria I might have said: “Look here, you fat fool, c’est moi qui décide what is good for Dolores Humbert.” To Charlotte, I could not even say (with ingratiating calm): “Excuse me, my dear, I disagree. Let us give the child one more chance. Let me be her private tutor for a year or so. You once told me yourself—” In fact, I could not say anything at all to Charlotte about the child without giving myself away. Oh, you cannot imagine (as I had never imagined) what these women of principle are! Charlotte, who did not notice the falsity of all the everyday conventions and rules of behavior, and foods, and books, and people she doted upon, would distinguish at once a false intonation in anything I might say with a view to keeping Lo near. She was like a musician who may be an odious vulgarian in ordinary life, devoid of tact and taste; but who will hear a false note in music with diabolical accuracy of judgment. To break Charlotte’s will, I would have to break her heart. If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too. If I said: “Either I have my way with Lolita, and you help me to keep the matter quiet, or we part at once,” she would have turned as pale as a woman of clouded glass and slowly replied: “All right, whatever you add or retract, this is the end.”

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  After the same manner I was cruelly handled by the horses, so that I longed for the mill again whereby I went round and round; but behold fortune (insatiable of my torments) had devised a new pain for me. I was appointed to bring home wood every day from a high hill, and who should drive me thither and home again but a boy that was the veriest hangman in all the world: he was not contented with the great travail I took in climbing up the steep hill, neither that my hoofs were torn and worn away by sharp flints, but he beat me cruelly and very often with a great staff, in so much that the marrow of my bones did ache for woe ; for. he would strike me continually in my right hip and still in one place, whereby he tare my skin and made of my wide sore a great hole or trench, or rather a window to look out at, and although it ran down of blood, yet would he not cease beating me in that place. Moreover he laded me with such great trusses and burdens of wood that you would think they had rather been prepared for elephants than for an ass, and when he perceived that my wood hanged more of one side than another (when he should rather take away the heavy sides and so ease me, or else lift them up a little, or at least put them over to make them equal with the other) he laid great stones upon the lighter side to remedy the matter. Yet could he not be contented with this my great misery and immoderate burdens of wood, but when we came to any river by the way, he, to save his boots from water, would leap upon my loins likewise, which was no small load upon load. And if by adventure I had fallen down in any dirty or miry place by the water-side, on the slippery bank, under that load too great for me to bear, when he 327 19 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  What can you do to master your feelings in the moment ? The simplest approach, believe it or not, is to move your body. All animals use motion to regulate their body budgets; if their brain serves up more glucose than their body needs, a quick scamper up a tree will bring their energy level back into balance. Humans are unique in that we can regulate the budget without moving, using purely mental concepts. But when this skill fails you, remember that you too are an animal. Get up and move around, even if you don’t feel like it. Turn on some music and dance around your home. Take a walk in a park. Why does this work? Moving your body can change your predictions and therefore your experience. Your movements may also help your control network to bring other, less bothersome concepts into the foreground. 2 6 Another approach to mastering your emotions in the moment is to change your location or situation, which in turn can change your predictions. During the Vietnam War, for example, 15 percent of U.S. soldiers were addicted to heroin. When they came home as veterans, 95 percent of them stayed off the drug in their first year back—an astounding figure compared to the general population, where only 10 percent of users avoid relapse. The shift in location changed their predictions, which lessened their craving for the drug. (I sometimes wonder if midlife crisis is a drastic attempt to change one’s predictions by changing the context. * ) 2 7 When changes in movement and context fail to help you master your emotions, the next big thing to try is recategorizing how you feel. This will require some explanation. Anytime you feel miserable, it’s because you are experiencing unpleasant affect due to interoceptive sensations. Your brain will dutifully predict causes for those sensations. Perhaps they are a message from your body, like “I have a stomachache.” Or perhaps they’re saying, “Something is seriously wrong with my life.” This is the distinction between discomfort and suffering. Discomfort is purely physical. Suffering is personal. Imagine what your body looks like to an invading virus. You are just a big bag of DNA, proteins, water, and whatever other biological stuff it must steal to replicate itself. An influenza virus doesn’t care about your beliefs, qualities, or values when it infects your cells. It does not make moral judgments on your character, like “Oooh, she’s a snob with a bad haircut . . . let’s infect her!” No, a virus is egalitarian toward its victims. It brings discomfort, but it’s nothing personal. All humans who haven’t slept enough, with a nice wet set of lungs, can apply for the job of host. Affect, on the other hand, transforms interoceptive sensation into something about you, with your particular strengths and faults. Now the sensations are personal—they reside inside your affective niche. When you feel wretched, the world seems like an awful place. People are judging you. Wars are raging.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  At least I knew for sure I wasn’t bored. Like all people who are preoccupied with death, who hate plane rides, who study their tiniest wrinkles in the mirror and are morbidly afraid of birthdays, who worry about dying of cancer or a brain tumor or a sudden aneurysm, I am secretly in love with death. I will suffer morbidly through a shuttle flight from New York to Washington, but behind the wheel of a sports car I’ll start doing 110 without hesitation and love every terrifying minute. The excitement of knowing that you may be the author of your own death is more intense than orgasm. It must have been what the kamikazes felt, creating their own holocaust and being swallowed up by it, instead of waiting for the holocaust to catch up with them some surprising morning in their safe beds in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. There was another reason for our heavy drinking: namely my depressions. I would alternate between elation and despair (self-hatred for what I’d done, dismal despair over being alone with a man who did not love me, anguish about the future I was not supposed to mention). So we got drunk, and in our giggling drunken antics, the despair would get blurred. It would never quite vanish, of course, but it would become easier to bear. Like getting drunk on a plane to ease your fear of flying. You still believe you’re going to die whenever the sound of the engines changes, but you don’t care anymore. You almost like the idea. You imagine yourself gliding down through the flocculent clouds into a blue ocean full of your fondest memories of childhood. We came to know French truck stops with Italian espresso machines serving thick excellent coffee. We came to know the pleasures of Alsatian beer and boxes of peaches bought from farmers by the side of the road. We knew we were in France when the headlights of the cars turned from white to mustard yellow and the bread became delicious.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  My Lolita! There was still a three-year-old bobby pin of hers in the depths of the glove compartment. There was still that stream of pale moths siphoned out of the night by my headlights. Dark barns still propped themselves up here and there by the roadside. People were still going to the movies. While searching for night lodgings, I passed a drive-in. In a selenian glow, truly mystical in its contrast with the moonless and massive night, on a gigantic screen slanting away among dark drowsy fields, a thin phantom raised a gun, both he and his arm reduced to tremulous dish- water by the oblique angle of that receding world,—and the next moment a row of trees shut off the gesticulation. 35 I left Insomnia Lodge next morning around eight and spent some time in Parkington. Visions of bungling the execution kept obsessing me. Thinking that perhaps the cartridges in the automatic had gone stale during a week of inactivity, I removed them and inserted a fresh batch. Such a thorough oil bath did I give Chum that now I could not get rid of the stuff. I bandaged him up with a rag, like a maimed limb, and used another rag to wrap up a handful of spare bullets. A thunderstorm accompanied me most of the way back to Grimm Road, but when I reached Pavor Manor, the sun was visible again, burning like a man, and the birds screamed in the drenched and steaming trees. The elaborate and decrepit house seemed to stand in a kind of daze, reflecting as it were my own state, for I could not help realizing, as my feet touched the springy and insecure ground, that I had overdone the alcoholic stimulation business. A guardedly ironic silence answered my bell. The garage, however, was loaded with his car, a black convertible for the nonce. I tried the knocker. Re-nobody. With a petulant snarl, I pushed the front door—and, how nice, it swung open as in a medieval fairy tale. Having softly closed it behind me, I made my way across a spacious and very ugly hall; peered into an adjacent drawing room; noticed a number of used glasses growing out of the carpet; decided that master was still asleep in the master bedroom. So I trudged upstairs. My right hand clutched muffled Chum in my pocket, my left patted the sticky banisters. Of the three bedrooms I inspected, one had obviously been slept in that night. There was a library full of flowers. There was a rather bare room with ample and deep mirrors and a polar bear skin on the slippery floor. There were still other rooms. A happy thought struck me. If and when master returned from his constitutional in the woods, or emerged from some secret lair, it might be wise for an unsteady gunman with a long job before him to prevent his playmate from locking himself up in a room.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Half Credit When I was a child, my father told me that if I ever was struggling to answer a question on a test, I should, instead, write down everything I knew about the topic. I took this advice seriously. Where I had doubt, I’d fill the space with what I remembered, what I knew to be true, what I could say . I waxed poetic on those scenes in a novel I could visualize clearly, instead of striving to evoke the ones I couldn’t. I recorded everything I knew about a particular lab experiment when I couldn’t correctly balance equations on my exam. When I couldn’t explain how particular historical moments shifted the tide of major world events, I wrote down the little stories I did remember. Let it never be said I didn’t try. Dream House as Exercise in Style It would make sense if, during the time in the Dream House, your work suffered. Why not? You were miserable; you spent what probably added up to weeks or months of your life crying and snotting and howling in agony. But instead, your creativity explodes. You are brimming with ideas, so many that you sign up for six workshops in your last semester of school. You begin to experiment with fragmentation. Maybe “experiment” is a generous word; you’re really just unable to focus enough to string together a proper plot. Every narrative you write is smashed into pieces and shoved into a constraint, an Oulipian’s wet dream—lists and television episode synopses and one with the scenes shattered and strung backward. You feel like you can jump from one idea to the next, searching for a kind of aggregate meaning. You know that if you break them and reposition them and unravel them and remove their gears you will able to access their truths in a way you couldn’t before. There is so much to be gained from inverting the gestalt. Back up, cross your eyes. Something is there. You will spend the next few years of your career coming up with elaborate justifications for the structure of the stories you were writing at the time—telling them to young readers in classrooms and audiences at bookstores; once, to a tenure-track job search committee. You say, “Telling stories in just one way misses the point of stories.” You can’t bring yourself to say what you really think: I broke the stories down because I was breaking down and didn’t know what else to do.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Cosmic Horror Evil is a powerful word. You use it once, and it tastes bad: metallic, false. But what other word can you use for a person who makes you feel so powerless? Lots of people in the world have made you feel powerless. Run-of-the-mill bullies; both of your parents, and most adults, when you were a child; unflinching bureaucrats at the DMV, the post office. A doctor who didn’t believe you were sick, approximately two minutes before you projectile vomited against the wall. A cadre of nurses who pried your arms away from your body to take your blood when they thought you had cancer. (You didn’t have cancer, but they never did figure out why you spent so much of your childhood cramping with agony.) But did any of them seem to enjoy it? Did any of them make you feel complicit in your own suffering? You’ve outgrown parents and bullies. You’ve railed against the everyday tyrants to friends; you chastised the doctor while dropping a long line of sour saliva down to the floor; you fought those nurses as hard as if they were trying to murder you. Sick seems more appropriate, but it too tastes bad. It feels too close to disordered, which is a word your oldest and dearest friend, who had become very religious after childhood, used when you came out to her. It was over email but you flinched anyway, and before the end of the next paragraph—which explained that she was sort of relieved you hadn’t said you had a crush on her—you were already crying.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Shipwreck In New York that winter, when you walk too slowly for her taste, she abandons you at a storage container craft fair in Brooklyn. You stand there with your suitcase and your puffy down coat, and she tells you as she walks away that maybe you should go back to your parents’ house in Allentown if you can’t take the city. (This is, you will recognize later, a pattern: she loves to walk away from you in places where you know no one, where you have no power, where you can’t simply get up and go somewhere. Over the course of your relationship she will walk away from you in New York a total of seven times.) You sit down on a bench and numbly try to buy a bus ticket on your phone, but your phone’s storage is full and your screen does not respond properly to your finger. When you look up she is actually gone, and you panic, because you don’t know New York, and not only do you not know New York, you hate New York, and you have too many bags and no money for a taxi and you don’t even know the difference between uptown and downtown. In every direction walk New Yorkers: so confident, so cosmopolitan. You think, they are not the kind of people who get abandoned by their girlfriends at twee craft fairs. You cry so hard that a tall woman with dreadlocks gets up from her storage container and comes over to you. She sits on the bench and puts her arm around your shoulder, and asks if she can do anything to help. You hiccup and wipe your nose with your hand, and tell her no, no, you’re just having a bad day, and she crosses back to her container to fetch something. When she returns, she hands you a tiny box of cone incense and a carved wooden incense holder. “For your new year,” she says, and you want to believe she’s right—that even though your suffering feels eternal, unrelenting, the new year is full of promise, and it is coming fast.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Erskine paused. ‘What the point is, I’m not sure.’ ‘But Monty Kipps ,’ repeated Howard despairingly. From Erskine he knew he would get what he needed. This was why they were friends. Erskine whistled his sympathy. ‘My God, Howard, you don’t have to tell me. I remember during the Brixton riots – this was ’ – I was on the BBC World Service trying to talk about context, deprivation, etcetera’ – Howard enjoyed the tuneful Nigerian musicality of ‘etcetera’ – ‘and that madman Monty – he was sitting there opposite me in his Trinidad cricket-club tie saying, ‘‘The coloured man must look to his own home, the coloured man must take responsibility.’’ The coloured man! And he still says coloured! Every time it was one step forward, and Monty was taking us all two  kipps and belsey steps back again. The man is sad. I pity him, actually. He’s stayed in England too long. It’s done strange things to him.’ Howard was quiet on the other end of the phone. He was checking his computer bag for his passport. He felt exhausted at the prospect of the journey and of the battle that awaited him at the other end. ‘And his work gets worse every year. In my opinion, the Rembrandt book was very vulgar indeed,’ added Erskine kindly. Howard felt the baseness of pushing Erskine into unfair positions such as this. Monty was a shit, sure, but he wasn’t a fool. Monty’s Rembrandt book was, in Howard’s opinion, retrogressive, perverse, infuriatingly essentialist, but it was neither vulgar nor stupid. It was good. Detailed and thorough. It also had the great advantage of being bound between hard covers and distributed throughout the English-speaking world, whereas Howard’s book on the same topic remained unfinished and strewn across the floor before his printer on pages that seemed to him sometimes to have been spewed from the machine in disgust. ‘Howard?’ ‘Yes – here. Got to go, actually. Got a cab booked.’ ‘You take care, my friend. Jerome is just . . . well, by the time you get there I’m sure it will have proved to be a storm in a teacup.’ Six steps from the ground floor Howard was surprised by Levi. Once again, this head-stocking business. Looking up at him from beneath it, that striking, leonine face with its manly chin, upon which hair had been growing for two years and yet had not confidently established itself. He was topless to the waist and barefoot. His slender chest smelt of cocoa butter and had been recently shaved. Howard stretched his arms out, blocking the way. ‘What’s the deal?’ asked his son. ‘Nothing. Leaving.’ ‘Who you on the phone to?’ ‘Erskine.’ ‘You leaving leaving?’ ‘Yes.’  On Beauty ‘Right now ?’ ‘What’s the deal with this ?’ asked Howard, flipping the interrogation round and touching Levi’s head. ‘Is it a political thing?’ Levi rubbed his eyes.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  It was a black warm night, somewhere in Appalachia. Now and then cars passed me, red tail- lights receding, white headlights advancing, but the town was dead. Nobody strolled and laughed on the sidewalks as relaxing burghers would in sweet, mellow, rotting Europe. I was alone to enjoy the innocent night and my terrible thoughts. A wire receptacle on the curb was very particular about acceptable contents: Sweepings. Paper. No Garbage. Sherry-red letters of light marked a Camera Shop. A large thermometer with the name of a laxative quietly dwelt on the front of a drugstore. Rubinov’s Jewelry Company had a display of artificial diamonds reflected in a red mirror. A lighted green clock swam in the linenish depths of Jiffy Jeff Laundry. On the other side of the street a garage said in its sleep—genuflexion lubricity; and corrected itself to Gulflex Lubrication. An airplane, also gemmed by Rubinov, passed, droning, in the velvet heavens. How many small dead-of-night towns I had seen! This was not yet the last. Let me dally a little, he is as good as destroyed. Some way further across the street, neon lights flickered twice slower than my heart: the outline of a restaurant sign, a large coffee-pot, kept bursting, every full second or so, into emerald life, and every time it went out, pink letters saying Fine Foods relayed it, but the pot could still be made out as a latent shadow teasing the eye before its next emerald resurrection. We made shadow-graphs. This furtive burg was not far from The Enchanted Hunters. I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past. 31 At this solitary stop for refreshments between Coalmont and Ramsdale (between innocent Dolly Schiller and jovial Uncle Ivor), I reviewed my case. With the utmost simplicity and clarity I now saw myself and my love. Previous attempts seemed out of focus in comparison. A couple of years before, under the guidance of an intelligent French-speaking confessor, to whom, in a moment of metaphysical curiosity, I had turned over a Protestant’s drab atheism for an old-fashioned popish cure, I had hoped to deduce from my sense of sin the existence of a Supreme Being.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Not even a yawn. I wasn’t remotely sleepy. I could tell my sense of balance was off—I nearly fell over when I tried to stand up, but I pushed through it and tidied up for a while, sliding the videocassettes into their cases and putting them back on the shelf. I thought some activity might tire me out. I took a Zyprexa and some more Ativan. I ate a handful of melatonin, chewing like a cow on cud. Nothing was working. So I called Trevor. “It’s five in the morning,” he said. He sounded irritated and foggy, but he’d answered. My number must have shown up on his caller ID, and he’d answered. “I’ve been sexually assaulted,” I lied. I hadn’t said anything aloud in days by then. My voice had a sexy rasp. I felt like I might vomit again. “Can you come over? I need you to come look to see if there are any tears in my vagina. You’re the only one I trust,” I said. “Please?” “Who is it?” I heard a woman’s voice murmuring in the distance. “Nobody,” Trevor said to her. Then, “Wrong number,” he said to me and hung up. I took three Solfoton and six Benadryl, put Frantic in to rewind, cracked the window in the living room to circulate the air, found the blizzard was howling outside, and then I remembered that I’d bought cigarettes, so I smoked one out the window, pressed “play” on the VCR, and lay back down on the sofa. I felt my head get heavy. Harrison Ford was my dream man. My heart slowed, but still, I couldn’t sleep. I drank from the jug of gin. It seemed to settle my stomach. At eight A.M., I called Trevor again. This time he didn’t answer. “Just checking in,” I said in my message. “It’s been a while. Curious how you’ve been and what you’ve been up to. Let’s catch up soon.” I called again fifteen minutes later. “Look, I don’t know how to say this. I’m HIV positive. I probably got it from one of the black guys at the gym.” At eight thirty, I called and said, “I’ve been thinking I might get a boob job, just take them clean off. What do you think? Could I pull off the flat-chested look?” At eight forty-five, I called and said, “I need some financial advice. Actually, I’m serious. I’m in a bind.” At nine o’clock, I called again. He answered. “What do you want?” he asked. “I was hoping to hear you say you miss me.” “I miss you,” he said. “Is that it?” I hung up. • • •

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  divitibus, quorum haec fenestra domum prospicit ?’ Quo sermone callido deceptus astu, et vera quae dicta sunt credens Alcimus, verens scilicet ne et ea, quae prius miserat quaeque postea missurus foret, non sociis suis sed in alienos Lares iam certus erroris abiceret, suspendit se fenestra sagaciter perspecturus omnia, praesertim domus attiguae, ut dixerat illa, fortunas arbitraturus. Quod eum strenue quidem sed satis improvide conantem senile illud facinus quamquam. invalido, repentino tamen et inopinato pulsu, nutantem ac pendulum et in prospectu alio- quin attonitum praeceps inegit; qui praeter altitu- dinem nimiam super quendam etiam vastissimum lapidem propter iacentem recidens, perfracta diffis- saque crate costarum rivos sanguinis vomens imitus, narratisque nobis quae. gesta sunt, non diu cruciatus vitam evasit: quem prioris exemplo sepulturae tra- ditum bonum secutorem Lamacho dedimus. 18 Tune orbitatis duplici plaga petiti, iamque The- banis conatibus abnuentes, Plataeas proximam con- scendimus civitatem. Ibi famam celebrem super quodam Demochare munus edituro gladiatorium de- prehendimus: nam vir et genere primarius et opibus plurimus et liberalitate praecipuus digno fortunae suae splendore publicas voluptates instruebat. Quis tantus ingenii, quis facundiae, qui singulas species apparatus multiiugi verbis idoneis posset explicare? Gladiatores isti famosae manus, venatores illi pro- batae. pernicitatis, alibi noxii perdita securitate suis 162 P THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IV for they are rich enough and need no such things.’ Then Alcimus (thinking her words to be true) was brought in belief that such things as he had thrown out already, and such things as he should throw out after, were not fallen down to his fellows, but into other men’s houses; wherefore he went to the window to see, and especially to behold the places round about, as she had told him, thrusting his body out of the window ; but while he strove to do this, strongly indeed but somewhat rashly, the old trot marked him well, and came behind him softly, and although she had but small strength, yet with a sudden force she took him by the heels and thrust him out headlong while his body was balancing and unsure ; and beside that.the height was very great, he fell upon a mar- vellous great stone that lay near and burst his ribs, whereby he vomited and spewed flakes of blood, and when he had told us all, he suffered not long torment, but presently died. Then we gave unto him the same burial and sent him a worthy comrade to Lamachus, as we had done before.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Sometimes I would imagine myself actually fucking Professor Harrington Stanton, a fiftyish proper Bostonian with a well-connected New England family behind him—a family renowned for politics, poetry, and psychosis. Professor Stanton had a wild laugh and always called James Boswell Bozzy—as if he drank with him nightly at the West End (which, indeed, I suspected him of doing). Somebody once referred to Stanton as “very brilliant but not quite plugged in.” It was apt. Despite being well-connected socially, he flickered on and off between sanity and insanity, never staying in one state long enough for you to know where you stood. How would Professor Stanton fuck? He was fascinated with eighteenth- century dirty words. Perhaps he would whisper “coun,” “cullion,” “crack” (for “cunt,” “testicles,” “pussy”) in my ear as we screwed? Perhaps he would turn out to have his family crest tattooed on his foreskin? I would be sitting there chuckling to myself at these fantasies and Professor Stanton would beam at me, thinking I was chuckling at one of his own wisecracks. But what was the use of these pathetic fantasies? My husband had stopped fucking me. He thought he was working hard enough as it was. I cried myself to sleep every night, or else went into the bathroom to masturbate after he fell asleep. I was twenty-one and a half years old and desperate. In retrospect, it all seems so simple. Why didn’t I find someone else? Why didn’t I have an affair or leave him or insist on some sort of sexual freedom arrangement? But I was a good girl of the fifties. I had grown up finger-fucking to Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning. I had never slept with any man but my husband. I had petted “above the waist” and “below the waist” according to some mysterious unwritten rules of propriety. But an affair with another man seemed so radical that I couldn’t even consider it. Besides, I was sure that Brian’s failure to fuck me was my fault, not his. Either I was a nymphomaniac (because I wanted to be fucked more than once a month) or else it was just that I was so unattractive. Or maybe it was Brian’s age that was the problem. I had been raised on the various sexual myths of the fifties like: A. There is no such thing as rape. Nobody can rape a woman unless she consents at the last minute. (The girls in my high school actually used to repeat this piously to each other. God only knows where we got it. It was the received wisdom, and like robots, we passed it on.) B. There are two kinds of orgasm: vaginal and clitoral. One is “mature” (i.e. good). The other is “immature” (i.e. evil). One is “normal” (i.e. good). The other is “neurotic” (i.e. evil). This pseudohip, pseudopsychological moral code was more Calvinistic than Calvinism. C. Men reach their sexual peak at sixteen and decline thereafter....