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 Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  There are frames all over the place now, lined up in front of the blue room for their enemas. It is the Six o’Clock Special. There are maybe twenty guys waiting by now. It looks like a long train, a long assembly line of broken, twisted bodies waiting for deliverance. It is very depressing, all these bodies, half of them asleep, tied down to their frames with their rear ends sticking out. All these bodies bloated, waiting to be released. Every third day I go for my enema and wait with the long line of men shoved against the green hospital wall. I watch the dead bodies being pushed into the enema room, then finally myself. It is a small blue room and they cram us into it like sardines. Tommy runs back and forth placing the bedpans under our rear ends, laughing and joking, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “Okay, okay, let’s go!” he shouts. There is a big can of soapy water above each man’s head and a tube that comes down from it. Tommy is jumping all around and whistling like a little kid, running to each body, sticking the rubber tubes up into them. He is jangling the pans, undoing little clips on the rubber tubes and filling the bellies up with soapy water. Everyone is trying to sleep, refusing to admit that this whole thing is happening to them. A couple of the bodies in the frames have small radios close to their ears. Tommy keeps running from one frame to the other, changing the rubber gloves on his hands and squirting the tube of lubricant onto his fingers, ramming his hands up into the rear ends, checking each of the bodies out, undoing the little clips. The aide keeps grabbing the bedpans and emptying all the shit into the garbage cans, occasionally missing and splattering the stuff on the floor. She places the empty pans in a machine and closes it up. There is a steam sound and the machine opens with all the bedpans as clean as new. Oh God, what is happening to me? What is going on here? I want to get out of this place! All these broken men are very depressing, all these bodies so emaciated and twisted in these bedsheets. This is a nightmare. This isn’t like the poster down by the post office where the guy stood with the shiny shoes; this is a concentration camp. It is like the pictures of all the Jews that I have seen. This is as horrible as that. I want to scream. I want to yell and tell them that I want out of this. All of this, all these people, this place, these sounds, I want out of this forever. I am only twenty-one and there is still so much ahead of me, there is so much ahead of me. I am wiped clean and pushed past the garbage cans. The stench is terrible.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  It is too soon to die even for a man who has died once already. I try to keep telling myself it is good to still be alive, to be back home. I remember thinking on the ambulance ride to the hospital that this was the Bronx, the place where Yankee Stadium was, where Mickey Mantle played. I think I realized then also that my feet would never touch the stadium grass, ever again; I would never play a game in that place. * * * The wards are filthy. The men in my room throw their breadcrumbs under the radiator to keep the rats from chewing on our numb legs during the nights. We tuck our bodies in with the sheets wrapped around us. There are never enough aides to go around on the wards, and constantly there is complaining by the men. The most severely injured are totally dependent on the aides to turn them. They suffer the most and break down with sores. These are the voices that can be heard screaming in the night for help that never comes. Urine bags are constantly overflowing onto the floors while the aides play poker on the toilet bowls in the enema room. The sheets are never changed enough and many of the men stink from not being properly bathed. It never makes any sense to us how the government can keep asking money for weapons and leave us lying in our own filth. Briggs throws his bread over the radiator. “There he goes again,” says Garcia. “That goddamn rat’s been there for the last two months.” Briggs keeps the rats in our room well fed. “It’s a lot better than having the bastards nibble at your toes during the night,” he says with a crazy laugh. The nurse comes in and Garcia is getting real excited. “I think I pissed in my pants again,” he cries. “Mrs. Waters, I think I pissed in my pants.” “Oh Garcia,” the pretty nurse scolds, “don’t say piss , say urine . Urine is much nicer.” Garcia tells her he is sorry and will call it urine from here on out. Willey is clicking his tongue again and the nurse goes over to see. “What do you want?” she says to Willey. He is the most wounded of us all. He has lost everything from the neck down. He has lost even more than me. He is just a head. The war has taken everything. He clicks three times. The nurse knows he wants the stuff sucked out of his lungs, so she does it. Garcia’s radio is playing in the background. She slurps all of the stuff out, then walks out of the room. Now Briggs is getting the whiskey bottle out of his top drawer, taking big gulps and cursing out the rats that are still running under the radiator. Someone please help me understand this thing, this terrible thing that’s happening to me.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I think there will be more of them, too.’ He looked confident of vindication, almost proud. I was still standing in the middle of the room, though by now I was beginning to shake, and had to force my knees back and grip my hands together. ‘Your opinion is of no interest to me,’ I said. He gave a little smirk. ‘You will be allowed to attend the funeral,’ he said, as if I had been wrong to judge him so harshly. And so the light of my life went out. The morning of the funeral was ragged and squally, and I was stunned to find how readily I returned to the Scrubs and hid myself away: even if a car had been waiting to drive me home I would have been incapable of accepting it—and throughout the first few days of choking grief the hermit bleakness of my cell served to contain me in the fullest sense. In my own house I would have fallen apart. The other men, my friends, too, helped me and held me, and showed in their laconic condolences an understanding I could never have received in the world at large. It would be unedifying to describe as it would be needless torture to recall those days when the world first changed, and became a world without my Taha. It was a terrible destitution, and my knowledge is all bound up with my physical experience of the hard coir mattress where I lay, the few properties of my cell, the bladeless razor, the little framed square of looking-glass in which I caught my tear-blotched face, the steady night-time smell of the chamberpot. As the autumn drew on it grew colder in the prison, but if one held one’s hand to the black iron vent through which warm air was supposed to issue into each cell one felt only a slight chill stirring, which seemed to come from far away. It was a time of incessantly recurrent images of my sweet dead friend, and of a thousand memories fanned into the air by this cold draught. I haunted and interrogated the past even as it interrogated me. London, Skinner’s Lane, Brook Street, the Sudan—how had we passed all that time? Why did we not burn up every moment of it, as we would if we could have it all again? The journey back to England surfaced in dreams and occupied my days, the train to Wadi Halfa panting across the desert, reading old newspapers in the white, shuttered carriages while Taha, alas, was obliged to travel with the guard; and the stops, which had no names, but only a number, painted on a little shelter beside the track; and the steamer to the First Cataract and the visionary beauty of Aswan.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “I want my sisters!” I cried and wedged myself against the backseat, refusing to leave. “Norman, help your sister out of the car. Now.” Mrs. Brady said. The real Mrs. Brady would have used humor, or maybe she’d bring brownies or cookies out to the car. This Mrs. Brady was all business. Norm, who was always pragmatic, said, “Ma’am, this looks like a bad place. And if Rosie doesn’t want to go, I think we better not go.” Mrs. Brady lifted her shoulders and huffed. The pink-faced driver got out of his seat, opened the other back door and lunged across the seat. He grabbed my legs and pulled while I kicked and screamed. Norm held on to me, a determined gritty look on his face. Once I’d slipped free of Norm and was left trembling on the ground, my brother scrambled out and picked me up. “We don’t have a choice,” he said. “But don’t worry, we won’t be here too long anyway.” At the front door, on the cement stoop, was a thin woman with stringy brown and gray hair. She wore black leggings and an oversized Popeye sweatshirt. In the same hand in which Popeye held his pipe, she held her cigarette. She looked us up and down, her nose and lips contracted as if we smelled, and then she dropped her cigarette on the stoop and stomped on it with her white canvas sneaker. This was something I’d seen Cookie do many times, although Cookie was fond of high shoes that made a horse’s clop-clop when she walked. “Thought you got lost,” she said. Her voice was like crushed ice. “This one took a little longer than usual,” Mrs. Brady said. “So these are the two, huh?” Her eyes were tiny blue pinpoints that she drilled into me for a second before drilling them into Norm. “This is Norman and Rosanne,” Mrs. Brady said. “Kids, meet Mrs. Callahan, your new foster mother.” “I want Gi,” I whispered. “I got you,” Norm whispered back. “They look too skinny to me,” Mrs. Callahan said. “I don’t want no finicky eaters, you hear? What I serve, they eat. This ain’t no diner and I ain’t no short-order cook.” “I’m sure they’ll appreciate anything you put in front of them. They haven’t had a real meal in weeks.” Mrs. Brady gave a forced smile, and I wondered if she didn’t like Mrs. Callahan. “And the stipend sure don’t give me enough money to buy them separate meals! It barely covers the cost of keeping them here. I do this outta generosity, you hear? You gotta be a giving and generous soul to spend your own money on people like this.” Mrs. Callahan’s nose lifted again. I wondered if she was part dog and that’s why she kept sniffing at us. “I’m sure they’ll appreciate all your good will and all your good meals,” Mrs. Brady said.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I insisted; I made absolute demand; I employed every means to try to draw his pity, or to corrupt him; he will be the last man whom I shall have implored. Finally won over, he promised me to go and seek the dose of poison. I awaited him in vain until evening. Late in the night I learned with horror that he had just been found dead in his laboratory, with a glass phial in his hands. That heart clean of all compromise had found this means of abiding by his oath while denying me nothing. The next day Antoninus was announced; this true friend could barely hold back his tears. The idea that a man whom he had come to love and to venerate as a father suffered enough to seek out death was to him insupportable; it seemed to him that he must have failed in his obligations as a good son. He promised me to add his efforts to those of my entourage in order to nurse me and relieve my pain, to make my life smooth and easy to the last, even to cure me perhaps. He depended upon me to continue the longest time possible in guiding and instructing him; he felt himself responsible towards the whole empire for the remainder of my days. I know what these pathetic protestations and na�ve promises are worth; nevertheless I derive some relief and comfort from them. Antoninus' simple words have convinced me; I am regaining possession of myself before I die. The death of Iollas, faithful to his duty as physician, exhorts me to conform, to the end, to the proprieties of my profession as emperor. Patientia: yesterday I saw Domitius Rogatus, now become procurator of the mint and entrusted with a new issue of coins; I have chosen for it this legend, which will be my last watchword. My death had seemed to me the most personal of my decisions, my supreme redoubt as a free man; I was mistaken. The faith of millions of Mastors must not be shaken, nor other Iollases put to so sore a trial. I have realized that suicide would appear to signify indifference, or ingratitude perhaps, to the little group of devoted friends who surround me; I do not wish to bequeath to them the hideous picture of a man racked by pain who cannot endure one torture more.

• From The Songs of Bilitis (1894)

  Great eyes of Mnasidika, cease not to regard me! or I will stab you with my needle and then you will see only the terrible night. LXXIX FARDS All, all my life, and my world, and the men, all that is not of her, is nothing. All that is not of her, I give to thee, passer-by. Does she know the labor I have accomplished to be fair to her eyes, with my hair and with my fards, with my robes and my perfumes? As long a time I would turn a millstone, I would wield the oar or labor in the earth, if it were a necessary price to retain her here. But perhaps she will never know, Goddesses who watch over us. The day she learns that I love her, she will seek another woman. LXXX THE SILENCE OF MNASIDIKA She had laughed all the day, and she even had mocked me a little. She had refused to obey me before many strange women. When we returned, I affected not to speak to her, and, as she cast herself upon my neck, saying: “Thou art offended?” I said to her: “Ah! thou art not as formerly, thou art not as on the first day. I no longer recognize thee, Mnasidika.” She did not respond to me. But she put on all the jewels which she had not worn for a long time, and the same yellow robe, broidered with blue, as on the day of our meeting. LXXXI SCENE “Where wast thou?--At the flower merchant’s. I have bought some very beautiful irises. Here they are, I have brought them to thee.--In so long a time thou hast bought four flowers?--The flower-woman detained me. “Thy cheeks are pale and thine eyes brilliant.--It is fatigue from the walk.--Thy hair is moist and tangled.--It is the heat and the wind which almost blew down my hair. “Someone has untied thy girdle. I made the knot myself, looser than this one.--So loose that it became undone; a slave who passed retied it for me. “There is a spot upon thy robe.--It is water which has fallen from the flowers.--Mnasidika, my little soul, thine irises are fairer than any in all Mytilene.--That I know well, that I know well.” LXXXII WAITING The sun has passed all the night among the dead while I have waited, seated upon my bed, weary from watching. The wick of the exhausted lamp has burned to the end. She will never return: there is the last star. I know well that she will never return. I know even the name that I hate. Nevertheless, I still wait. That she would come now! yes, that she would come, her hair disordered and without roses, her robe soiled, spotted, rumpled, her tongue dry and her eyelids black!

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “What in the world is she doing?” “Just watch her,” Cherie says, and before long we begin to see the point. We troop into every grocery, deli, and liquor store in town, watch Cookie snow the workers with her harebrained story, and retreat to the aisles when they set us loose, telling us with pity to get what we need. Soon we have enough cigarettes, vodka, deli salads, beer, soda, bread, and toilet paper to last us days. At each stop, as the bell jingles to mark our exit, Cookie tells the clerk: “Just put it on Mike and Rose’s tab.” ON NOVEMBER 9, I imagine that one day, when I’m an adult, a friend or my husband will ask me, “So, Regina, tell me: How’d you celebrate your eleventh birthday?” “Oh, you know, like any kid,” I’ll answer. “Living as a parking lot gypsy and bathing in a gas station sink.” We’ve spent the past two months sleeping in Cookie’s car, while she’s been cruising all over Suffolk County to stay under the cops’ radar since she never registered us for school this year. But just as the stores and houses we pass are putting up Christmas decorations, Cookie finds a landlord who will rent to us with a welfare housing voucher. The problem is that his property is close to our grandparents’ house, and by now, our food supply in their neighborhood has already been cut off—except for the butcher, who feels sorry for my mother. He tells her to come in either first thing in the morning or at night, when there’s no rush of customers. Then, with clean white paper, he wraps up pigs’ knuckles, liver, and tripe. “What’s tripe?” Norman asks. “It’s cow intestines,” Cherie says. “At least we’re eating healthy,” I joke with my sisters. Norman looks like he’ll vomit. But when we set the food on the table, we’re so hungry that we inhale tripe in its broth, and liver smothered in ketchup and mustard. This helps get it down without gagging. The most thrilling feature in the new house is its portable washing machine. Cherie and Camille wheel it up to the kitchen sink and attach a hose to the spigot while Norman and I search the house for every piece of clothing we’ve worn since September. The excitement fades, of course, when we see how many times we have to run each load before our clothes actually look clean; and it takes no time to learn the washer’s other issue: The water inside never gets hot enough to kill the lice we picked up from one of the gas station restrooms. Thanks to the lice, none of us pass the health exam that’s required to register for school in West Babylon. We spend our days at home with our heads under the sink, sudsing up with the lice killer we lifted from the pharmacy, then combing the eggs out of each other’s hair.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The motionless survival of statues which, like the head of the Mondragone Antinous in the Louvre, are still living in a past time, a time that has died. The problem of time foreshortened in terms of human generations: some five and twenty aged men, their withered hands interlinked to form a chain, would be enough to establish an unbroken contact between Hadrian and ourselves. In 1937, during a first stay in the United States, I did some reading for this book in the libraries at Yale; I wrote the visit to the physician, and the passage on renunciation of bodily exercise. These fragments, re-worked, are still part of the present version. In any case, I was too young. There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty. Earlier than that one may well fail to recognize those great natural boundaries which from person to person, and from century to century, separate the infinite variety of mankind; or, on the contrary, one may attach too much importance to mere administrative barriers, to the customs houses or the sentry boxes erected between man and man. It took me years to learn how to calculate exactly the distances between the emperor and myself. I ceased to work on the book (except for a few days, in Paris) between 1937 and 1939. Some mention of T. E. Lawrence reminded me that his tracks in Asia Minor cross and recross those of Hadrian. But the background for Hadrian is not the desert; it is Athens and her hills. The more I thought of these two men, the more the adventure of one who rejects life (and first of all rejects himself) made me desirous of presenting, through Hadrian, the point of view of the man who accepts all experience, or at least who refuses on one score only to accept elsewhere. It goes without saying, of course, that the asceticism of the one and the hedonism of the other are at many points interchangeable. In October of 1939 the manuscript was left behind in Europe, together with the greater part of the notes; I nevertheless took with me to the United States the several resumes of my former readings at Yale and a map of the Roman Empire at the time of Trajan's death which I had carried about with me for years; also the profile photograph of the Antinous of the Archaeological Museum in Florence, purchased there in 1926, the young face gravely sweet. From 1939 to 1948 the project was wholly abandoned. I thought of it at times, but with discouragement, and almost with indifference, as one thinks of the impossible. And with something like shame for ever having ventured upon such an undertaking. The lapse into despair of a writer who does not write.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Influential criminologists predicted a coming wave of “super-predators” with whom the juvenile justice system would be unable to cope. Sometimes expressly focusing on black and brown children, theorists suggested that America would soon be overcome by “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and who “have absolutely no respect for human life.” Panic over the impending crime wave expected from these “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless” children led nearly every state to enact legislation that increased the exposure of children to adult prosecution. Many states lowered or eliminated the minimum age for trying children as adults, leaving children as young as eight vulnerable to adult prosecution and imprisonment. Some states also initiated mandatory transfer rules, which took away any discretion from prosecutors and judges over whether a child should be kept in the juvenile system. Tens of thousands of children who had previously been managed by the juvenile justice system, with its well-developed protections and requirements for children, were now thrown into an increasingly overcrowded, violent, and desperate adult prison system. The predictions of “super-predators” proved wildly inaccurate. The juvenile population in America increased from 1994 to 2000, but the juvenile crime rate declined, leading academics who had originally supported the “super-predator” theory to disclaim it. In 2001, the surgeon general of the United States released a report labeling the “super-predator” theory a myth and stated that “[t]here is no evidence that young people involved in violence during the peak years of the early 1990s were more frequent or more vicious offenders than youths in earlier years.” This admission came too late for kids like Trina, Ian, and Antonio. Their death-in-prison sentences were insulated from legal challenges or appeals by a maze of procedural rules, statutes of limitations, and legal barricades designed to make successful postconviction challenges almost impossible. — When I met Trina, Ian, and Antonio years later, they had each been broken by years of hopeless confinement. They were legally condemned children hidden away in adult prisons, largely unknown and forgotten, preoccupied with surviving in dangerous, terrifying environments with little family support or outside help. They weren’t exceptional. There were thousands of children like them scattered throughout prisons in the United States—children who had been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole or other extreme sentences. The relative anonymity of these kids seemed to aggravate their plight and their despair. I agreed to represent Trina, Ian, and Antonio, and our office would eventually make challenging death-in-prison sentences imposed on children a major focus of our work. But it became immediately clear that their extreme, unjust sentences were just one of the problems that had to be overcome. They were all damaged and traumatized by our system of justice.

• From The Songs of Bilitis (1894)

  What would I not have done to obtain that which I have refused this night! Today, my breasts are pliant and in my worn heart, Eros slumbers from lassitude. CXXXIX THE CHEAT I awaken.... Is he then gone! He has left something! No: two empty amphoras and some soiled flowers. All the rug is red with wine. I have slept, but I am still drunk.... With whom, then, did I return?... At least, we lay down together. The bed is still steeped with sweat. Perhaps there were several; the bed is so disordered. I know no more.... But someone saw them! There is my Phrygian. She still sleeps across the door. I give her a kick in the breast and I cry: “Bitch, thou couldst not....” I am so hoarse that I can say no more. CXL THE LAST LOVER Child, do not pass without loving me, I am still beautiful in the night; thou shalt see how much warmer my autumn is than the springtime of another. Seek not for love from virgins. Love is a difficult art in which young girls are little versed. I have prepared it all my life to give it to my last lover. My last lover shall be thou; I know it. Behold my mouth, for which a nation has paled with desire. Behold my hair, the same hair that Psappha the Great has sung. I will gather for thee all that remains of my lost youth. I will burn even the memories. I will give thee the flute of Lykas, the girdle of Mnasidika. CXLI THE DOVE For a long time I have been beautiful; the day comes when I shall no longer be a woman. And then I will know heart-rendering memories, burning solitary envy and tears in my hands. If life is a long dream, of what good to resist? Now, four and five times a night, I demand amorous enjoyment, and when my loins are exhausted, I sink asleep wherever my body falls. In the morning, I open my eyelids and I shiver in my hair. A dove is upon my window; I ask of her, in what month we are. She says to me: “It is the month when women are in love.” Ah! whatever be the month, the dove speaks truly, Cypris. And I throw my two arms about my lover, and with great tremblings, I stretch my still benumbed legs to the foot of the bed. CXLII THE RAIN OF THE MORNING The night has worn away. The stars are far away. See, the last courtesans have returned with their lovers. And I, in the rain of morning, I write this verse upon the sand. The leaves are laden with brilliant water. The rivulets across the paths drag along the earth and the dead leaves. The rain, drop by drop, makes holes in my song.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I am the living death the memorial day on wheels I am your yankee doodle dandy your john wayne come home your fourth of july firecracker exploding in the grave

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I could see that this thing—this body I had trained so hard to be strong and quick, this body I now dragged around with me like an empty corpse—was to mean much more than I had ever realized. Much more than I’d known the night I cried into my pillow in Massapequa because my youth had been desecrated, my physical humanity defiled. I think I honestly believed that if only I could speak out to enough people I could stop the war myself. I honestly believed people would listen to me because of who I was, a wounded American veteran. They would have to listen. Every chance I had to get my broken body on the tube or in front of an audience I went hog wild. Yes, let them get a look at me. Let them be reminded of what they’d done when they’d sent my generation off to war. One look would be enough—worth more than a thousand speeches. But if they wanted speeches I could give them speeches too. There was no end to what I had to tell them. “I’m the example of the war,” I would say. “Look at me. Do you want your sons to look like this? Do you want to put on the uniform and come home like me?” Some people could not believe the conditions I told them about in the hospitals. Others could not believe anything at all. After one of the TV shows a cameraman called me a commie traitor to my face. He was pushing me down the studio steps in my chair and I wondered if he was going to drop me. I kept receiving letters from people calling me names and telling me what they would do if I didn’t stop aiding the enemy. The speaking went on and on, and so did the war, and after a while it all began to seem endless. My friends told me I was starting to sound like a broken record. Even Kenny got disgusted with my new role of activist and antiwar veteran and left for New York. I went a little crazy staying alone in the apartment, answering the phone that never stopped ringing and scrawling more names all over the walls. One night I tore the place apart. I thought of stopping but I was afraid of the loneliness. The speaking had brought back everything—the hospital, Vietnam. Each time I spoke about an experience it was just like reliving it. And there were some things I never talked about—like the corporal from Georgia and the ambush in the village and the dead children lying on the ground. I can’t remember one time when I even came close to telling anyone exactly what had happened over there. Back then it was still deep inside of me and I shared it with no one—not even the men I had come to know as my brothers.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  I walk the streets studying the tops of trees to measure the wind; I know the tides without looking; I dive on my anchors every other day and reset them in the sand; I see the cabins need paint and try to make more time. All of it fills me so I don’t have to dwell on what’s really in my brain—a palmfull of pills, a gunshot wound, a splintered chair. A nightgown left heavy with blood. Summer becomes fall. That time still passes, ignoring my mother’s absence, somehow overwhelms me. Going into my second year at the shelter I’m discovering unknown reserves of bad energy inside me that need to be tapped. Provincetown’s good for that—the so-called last resort, the end of the world, jumping-off point to oblivion. Provincetown can absorb nearly anything, nearly anyone who can’t fit in elsewhere, no such thing as too freaky, too lost, not here. By late October the police make their annual post-summer sweep through town, rounding up the most obvious drug peddlers, the walking wreckage, the ones who’d been flush all summer on tourist hungers and now find themselves eating the profits, the product, spending all they’d accumulated. Summer’s over, the police murmur, buy a bus ticket or check into jail. By November I’m caught unawares. As the town emptied I’d stayed on, unsure what to do next. I’d never hauled the boat out of the water, I didn’t have a plan. Late in the season and still a quarter mile offshore—no telephone, no electricity, a propane stove, a radio powered by AA batteries, somehow reluctant to move back onto land, feeling that land itself is a temporary state, a transition. Living on the water quiets my mind. What can I pass through now on my way to more water? Another Christmas at the shelter? I gaze at the shoreline—all those houses, each window lit, families inside, whole lives unfolding—convince myself that I’m not a part of it, that the lives behind each window have nothing to do with my life. The boat has become supreme isolation, chosen isolation, holding myself apart from the world, which I only dimly understand anyway. I can sit on the aft deck and never be surprised by anything again—no phone will ever ring, no one will knock that I haven’t seen coming for a quarter mile. That I can go to sleep any night and wake up having broken loose—a failed knot, a line frayed, the anchor dragged—that I can drift out of sight of land makes a twisted sense, in line with my internal weather. When everything has proven tenuous one can either move toward permanence or move toward impermanence. The boat’s sublimely impermanent. Some mornings the fog’s so thick that I exist only in a tight globe of clearing, beyond which is all foghorn and unknown. Though the boat weighs in at sixteen tons I’ve underestimated how difficult it will be to haul her for the winter.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  Each time I come across a bloated fish or a squashed something, I say, “That’s not dead.” When I feel like my legs are going to drop off I turn around and head back. By this time the sun is hanging about a quarter-inch above the part in my hair. My shoulders feel scorched and I’m sort of hungry. Back at the house I eat a rice cake with a glass of water. It tastes like Styrofoam, which is somehow better than having it taste like food. I drink as much of the Nyquil as I can stand, stretch out on the couch, and count sheep with my eyes open. Five hours later the phone rings off in the distance and I come to. I feel swampy and disoriented, stand up quickly, and then sit back down on the couch. It’s hard to tell where the phone is located. Staggering through the house, I follow the noise into the bathroom. “Guess who,” she says cheerfully. I report to her on what I’ve accomplished — the walk, the rice cake, the Nyquil nap. “Whew,” she says. “For a minute there I thought I was gonna have to come rescue you; I even called the airline.” I feel deeply touched by this, and begin weeping. I’m not completely out of the woods. “Oh honey,” she says quietly. “He’s dumping me,” I wail. “For some pliant, rat-faced little nurse practitioner who doesn’t have an unusual bone in her body.” “What’s her husband think about all this?” she asks. “Who knows. He’s probably relieved , wouldn’t you say?” We ponder this for a while. “I called him a couple of days ago and asked him if he missed me,” I say. “Uh-oh,” Elizabeth says. “He had one of his honesty attacks.” “Why, that little fuck,” she starts. “I’d like to get my hands around his skinny neck.” “He’s already left me,” I say, “he’s just too chicken to take his body with him.” “I know you don’t want to hear this,” she says carefully. “But it seems to me that you wouldn’t be this upset about him wanting to leave you. I think you’re this upset because you want to leave him .” This makes my stomach lurch in a very sickening, grain-of-truth-to-it way. “But I love him,” I tell her. “He’s the only man I’ve ever loved.” Even I know how trite that sounds. I feel like a character in a Gothic novel. “Keep in mind who you’re talking to here,” she says dryly. “I can’t believe I said ‘He’s the only man I’ve ever loved.’ I’m supposed to be a writer ,for God’s sake.” I might be starting to snap out of it. “It’s time for the other banana,” she suggests. “And I’m gonna talk to you while you eat it.” Seventeenth summer, a farmhouse full of boys on the edge of town, a car full of girls heading toward it.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I’m tiny Eva, watching Little Joe Cartwright through the bars of my crib, I’m a monkey, strapped into a space capsule and flung far out into the galaxy, weightless, hurtling along upside down through the Milky Way. Alone, alone, and alone. Against my will, I sob out loud. I turn over and weep into the Arkansas pillow, wrecking the velveteen. Suddenly my grandma’s hand is on my hair, the knitting needles have been set down. There is telephone talk, and muffled comments from Grandma to Ralph, from Ralph to the person on the other end of the phone. My nose is pressed against the pillow and I’m still crying, or trying to. I suddenly want to hear what’s going on but I don’t have the nerve to sit up. My clothes are gathered, the television is shut off, I am walked outside and put in the back seat of their great big yellow car. In the back window, there’s a dog with a bobbing head that I usually like to mess around with when I’m riding in the car. I don’t even bother to look at it; I just stare out the back window at the night sky. After about a half hour of driving we pull over and sit at the side of the road. I’m no longer weightless, but unbearably heavy, and tired. My dad pulls up with a crunch of gravel, words are exchanged through open windows, quiet chuckles, I am placed in the front seat between my parents. We pull away, and as we head toward home, the galaxy recedes, the stars move back into position, and the sky stretches out overhead, black and familiar. They’ve decided not to hassle me about this. “What happened, honey?” my mom asks once, gently. “Bonanza made me sad,” I reply. Cousins [image "art" file=Image00000.jpg] H ere is a scene. Two sisters are fishing together in a flat-bottomed boat on an olive green lake. They sit slumped like men, facing in opposite directions, drinking coffee out of a metal-sided thermos, smoking intently. Without their lipstick they look strangely weary, and passive, like pale replicas of their real selves. They both have a touch of morning sickness but neither is admitting it. Instead, they watch their bobbers and argue about worms versus minnows. My cousin and I are floating in separate, saline oceans. I’m the size of a cocktail shrimp and she’s the size of a man’s thumb. My mother is the one on the left, wearing baggy gabardine trousers and a man’s shirt. My cousin’s mother is wearing blue jeans, cuffed at the bottom, and a cotton blouse printed with wild cowboys roping steers. Their voices carry, as usual, but at this point we can’t hear them. It is five A.M. A duck stands up, shakes out its feathers, and peers above the still grass at the edge of the water.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  In the imperial period, this norm, which was always one element among others in the Greek cultural atmosphere, if not always the dominant one, drove out the competing alternatives. Of course, such an attitude rests on a bedrock of slavery. To read closely the famous “contests of loves” in the imperial period is to see how deeply insinuated slavery had become in the nexus of erotic THE MORALITIES OF SEX IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE  practice. Yet despite the vitality of various forms of same- sex erotics in the high empire, it would be a grave mistake to say that the Romans had any- thing resembling tolerance for homosexuality. Th e code of manliness that governed the access to pleasures in the classical world was severe and unfor- giving, and deviance from it was socially mortal. Th e viciousness of main- stream attitudes toward passivity is startling for anyone who approaches the ancient sources with the false anticipation that pre- Christian cultures were somehow reliably civilized toward sexual minorities. CHASTITY: THE SEXUAL LIFE COURSE FOR WOMEN In a scene worthy of a modern action fi lm, Achilles Tatius described a boat chase in which Clitophon and his comrades race after a band of pirates who have abducted Leucippe. As the pursuers bear down on the pirates, the vil- lains expose Leucippe on deck and ostentatiously decapitate her, casting the headless body into the sea. Clitophon is despondent. He was so convinced of her death that he would reluctantly agree to marry the young widow Melite. Only at the very end of the novel, after Leucippe has passed a fright- ening test confi rming her virginity, is “the enigma of the severed head” ex- plained. In Leucippe’s words, the pirates had also taken on board an “ill- starred woman who earned her living from selling the acts of Aphrodite,” and they “sacrifi ced her in my stead.” Although the drama of this revelation is deliberately heightened by the long delay, Achilles is not simply relishing the art of his own special eff ects. Apparent deaths and failed identifi cations are essential to the Greek romances. Th e decapitated prostitute was Leucippe’s doppelgänger. Leucippe called her an “ill- starred” woman, just as Th er- sander called Leucippe an “ill- starred slave” during his crucial misrecogni- tion scene.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Between the passage of Alabama’s new death penalty statute in 1975 and the end of 1988, there had been only three executions in Alabama. But in 1989, driven by a change in the Supreme Court’s treatment of death penalty appeals and shifts in the political winds, the attorney general’s office began vigorously seeking executions of condemned prisoners. By the end of 1989, the number of people executed by the State of Alabama would double. Months before our center opened, I started visiting Alabama’s death row every month, traveling from Atlanta to see a handful of new clients, including Walter McMillian. They were all grateful for the help, but as the spring of 1989 approached they all made the same request at the end of our meetings: Help Michael Lindsey. Lindsey’s execution was scheduled for May 1989. Later, they would ask me to help Horace Dunkins, whose execution date was scheduled for July 1989. I painfully explained the constraints on resources and time, telling them how frantic we were just trying to get the new office up and running. Although they said they understood, they were clearly anguished about getting legal assistance while other men faced looming executions. Both Lindsey and Dunkins had volunteer lawyers who had reached out to me for help because they were overwhelmed. Lindsey’s lawyer, David Bagwell, was a respected civil attorney from Mobile; he had worked on the case of Wayne Ritter, who’d been executed a year earlier. That experience left Bagwell disillusioned and angry. He wrote a scathing letter published in the state bar association’s journal in which he vowed “never to take another death penalty case, even if they disbar me for my refusal” and urged other civil lawyers not to take death penalty cases. Bagwell’s public complaints made it hard for courts to appoint other civil lawyers for last-stage appeals in a death penalty case, not that they were particularly inclined to do so. But it had another effect as well. Prisoners got word of the letter and talked about it among themselves, especially about a chilling comment buried in Bagwell’s jeremiad: “I generally favor the death penalty because mad dogs ought to die.” The prisoners became even more distrustful of lawyers, even the ones who claimed they would help. After further pleading by our other clients, we decided to do what we could for Michael Lindsey, whose execution date was fast approaching. We tried to make arguments about an interesting twist in that case: His jury had never decided that Michael Lindsey should be executed at all. Lindsey received a sentence of life imprisonment without parole from his jury, but the judge had “overridden” it and imposed a death sentence on his own.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  In this story, the recalibration of romance for Christian ends is so transparent that it affords an opportunity to peer directly inside the artifice of fiction. The social grammar is directly taken over from romance: the girl’s high birth and good looks are in the exaggerated style of the romantic heroine. If the Christian maiden’s “device of chastity” is slightly less appealing than the equally desperate contrivances of Anthia or Tarsia, it is nevertheless structurally identical. The providential rescue of the girl’s chastity is familiar, as is the high-pitched self-awareness of the episode as a “drama.” The atmospherics of the story deliberately arouse the expectations of a romance, so the departures from the traditional script are all the more resonant. In the Christian version, the story is not set against a timeless Mediterranean but a distinctly recognizable Roman Empire. The heroine relies not on the implicit order of the fictional cosmos to rescue her but on the Christian God. Her chastity is saved, but not as a precondition for marriage. Instead, it is an end in itself. And her rescuer suffers the ultimate penalty for securing her salvation. The Christian story ends not with marriage and regeneration but with the double martyrdom of virginity and death. The spirit of eros has been evicted, replaced by a grim sexual austerity that dictates the shape of the narrative quite as much as the fervent sensuality of the classical romance ever did.30

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Sandy Labouchère did it soon after we got back from Africa—you can see he had a rather brilliant line when he wanted to. But he hasn’t brought out the child’s gaiety, a kind of radiance … He was the most beautiful thing on earth. You just wanted to look at him and look at him.’ ‘Is he still alive?’ I asked, unable to imagine him going the way of the grocer’s boy into banal middle age; but Charles muttered ‘No, no,’ unanswerably, and then bashed on: ‘So you’ve read all the books I gave you.’ ‘Yes, I have. Well, I haven’t read every word, but I’ve taken a pretty fair sample.’ He nodded reasonably. ‘I would read them really thoroughly, of course, if I decided to take on this … job.’ Charles was quite quick and tactical. ‘Quite so, quite so,’ he said. ‘But tell me, I don’t know what sort of impression those books give. Do they appeal at all to, to a younger person?’ ‘Oh, I think they’re very interesting indeed. And you’ve done so much,’ I obviously went on, ‘and known such extraordinary people.’ He sighed heavily at this. ‘I ought to have been able to make something of it myself; but it’s too late now. As you get near the end of your life you realise you’ve wasted nearly all of it.’ ‘But that’s not the impression I have at all. I’m sure you don’t really think that,’ I said, in the way that one blandly comforts those whose torments one cannot imagine. ‘I mean, I really am wasting my life, and it’s not like what you were doing.’ Charles took this up directly. ‘I’ve no time for idleness,’ he said. ‘I want you to have a job.’ ‘I just don’t want the wrong one,’ I said, sounding spoilt even to myself. ‘I’d like it if I could simply disappear, like you did. It was wonderful how you could disappear into Africa.’ ‘One disappeared,’ Charles admitted. ‘But one also remained in view.’ I came back to it carefully, weighing the weightless teacup and saucer in my hands. ‘What I rather got the impression of is that you were lost in a dream. It’s very beautiful that feeling the diaries give of a constant kind of transport when you were in the Sudan. It’s like a life set to music,’ I said, in a fantastic impromptu, which Charles ignored. ‘We were doing a job, of course. It was exceedingly hard work: relentless and exhausting.’ ‘Oh, I know.’ ‘But you’re right in a way—of me, at any rate. It was a vocation. Not all of them in the Service saw it in quite the same light as I did, perhaps. Many of them hardened. Many of them were dryish sticks long before they reached the desert. They write books about it, even now—fantastically boring.’ Charles shot out his foot and sent a book across the hearth-rug to me.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  His mother went racing in and out of the room. “He’s drunk, he’s drunk,” she repeated to the old man. “We’ve got a drunk for a son.” The old man didn’t seem to hear her. He grabbed a warm washcloth and began scrubbing his son. The last thing he did was to connect the rubber tube that went into the boy’s penis to the long plastic tube that went into the bag on the side of the bed. That was what the nurses in the hospital had taught them to do. It was very important to connect the rubber tube in the boy’s penis to the plastic tube when he went to bed at night. So that everything would run okay. So that everything would be all right. So he did it just the way they had told them and after pulling the sheets and covers up over the body and just below the shoulders of his son, the old man walked out of the room. The lights went out in the house. The boy turned slowly over until he had propped himself up on both elbows with his head pushed down into his pillow. He wanted to forget the terrible night. He wanted to forget it and everything else, the numb legs, the unfeeling numbness. He was lost, more lost than he had ever been in his life. Lost in some kind of limbo land of the dead. He wanted to explode, to get out of this crazy numb body and be a man again. He wanted to be free again, to walk in his back yard on the grass. He wanted to run down to Sparky’s and get a haircut, he wanted to play stickball with Richie, to swing the bat, to feel the gravel on Hamilton Avenue beneath his feet again. He wanted to stand up in the shower every morning with the hot water streaming down his back and off his legs. It was now very clear that this thing was final like death. No one, he thought, ever wanted to think about final things, dead things, things that ended abruptly or could not be explained. Once someone died, he thought, people just put them in the ground, they put them in the ground and stood above the grave saying words that helped explain why there was an end to the person, words that were beautiful like the flowers and the big stone, words that helped others realize that it wasn’t the end, but only the beginning of a wonderful thing. It was so easy for them to say the words, to deny the finality. Why weren’t they saying the words over his bed? Why weren’t they telling him that this whole thing, this whole crazy numb thing, wasn’t final? But for him there were no words and no people, nothing to tell him things would be beautiful again. This end was no beginning.