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 Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  I thought then that it was the worst night of my life, but I soon found out that worse were coming. I slept on a friend’s couch for a couple of months, until his parents claimed that they could not support me further. I tried calling home, but my mother hung up when she heard my voice. That night I slept on a bench in the Park Blocks, which turned out to be some wine guzzler’s favorite bench. His psycho friends roughed me up and would have robbed me if I’d had anything to steal. Two months away from graduating high school, I stopped going altogether. Surviving the streets was too hard to include academics. My education was different from that of my classmates. I learned how to eat garbage, sleep in doorways, beg for money and run con games on tourists. Edible food can be found in Dumpsters and people toss out all kinds of cool stuff. I learned how to panhandle too, though I was never as good as others. I’d been living on the street for almost a year when I met Pop Tingle. I was squatting in the stairwell of an unkempt parking garage with about fifty other kids ranging in age from twelve to twenty-nine. We’d fixed up the stairwell, even hauling in castoff furniture so the landings were homey. I’d spent a hard evening panhandling. After raking in four bucks, I was dragging my hungry ass back to the parking garage when an older dude sitting at a sidewalk café beckoned me. “I’m not doing anything,” I yelped before he could accuse me of stealing his shit. Smiling, he gestured toward an untouched piece of cheesecake covered with a chocolate sauce. “What would you do for this?” he taunted. “What do you want?” I asked. I lusted after that cheesecake, but the streets had taught me the ways of older dudes. Their malevolent tactics entailed barebacking a boy’s ass, shooting him full of diseased cum and kicking him out before the wife got home. Many of the kids sold their asses and got infected for their trouble, but I’d kept mine intact. This guy acted as if my natural caution was a malady. “You’re a suspicious bugger, aren’t you?” “I got good reason,” I said. Lots of men had wanted to use me—plenty of women too. “Let me take a few pictures,” they’d say, offering pizza in trade, sometimes dope or booze. I kept refusing. The payment could not be worth what I would endure. I’d seen too many young kids die, their eyes wild with terror. I started to walk away, but the man called me again. “What’s your name?” he asked, holding out the plate. I drooled onto my decrepit sneakers. “Eric,” I said. “No,” he said, withdrawing the plate. “Shit.” I didn’t want to waste more time on this asshole. His eyes glinted with weird amusement, a kitty toying with a mouse. “No, Eric isn’t your name.”

• From Escape (2007)

  “I’m going to ask Warren for help. I do have sins.” And she proceeded to tell me about a wrong that she had committed. I begged her not to confess that wrong to Warren Jeffs. “Cathleen, don’t do it. He will eat you for lunch. If you really want to confess, confess to things like not picking up paper from the floor. Don’t give him anything to use against you.” But Cathleen was still a true believer. “If I want his help, I need to be honest.” I knew she was doomed. There was no way she would get any help from Warren Jeffs. Confessing to a sin like that would give him power to condemn her to hell. Cathleen made an appointment to see Warren. He heard another of Merril Jessop’s wives talk about his abusive behavior toward her. Cathleen didn’t say much when she came back. She looked spent. She became more obedient to Barbara. Merril told her there would be no forgiveness for her rebellion and instructed her to turn over her small yellow truck to him. She would not be allowed to have her own transportation again. (Some of us had our own cars and vans, but most of us were not allowed to register them and they had no license plates. So if we left the community, we could not travel far without being stopped by the police. Cathleen needed her truck to go back and forth to Page, so hers was one of the few vehicles that was registered.) Merril also ordered Cathleen to turn over all her paychecks to him. But she told me later she had no intention of doing that. “There is no way I’ll put myself at his mercy financially,” she said. But I knew Barbara would insist that she did. Cathleen told me that she was going to make amends to Barbara by working on a project with her: cleaning Merril’s office. This was the way they were to learn to love each other again as sister wives. I told her I thought this was ridiculous. “You have to act like Barbara’a slave to make up to her because she beat your baby?” Cathleen turned and walked away without responding. The next day I saw Cathleen cleaning Merril’s office. Barbara was sitting in a chair barking orders at her. “Cathleen, I want you to clean the window next, and Father likes his windows cleaned a certain way. Don’t do them the way you usually do.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  And then I began to think about one after the other—all those whom I had passed up for one reason or another—until finally I fell sound asleep and in the midst of it I had a wet dream. At seven-thirty the alarm went off as usual and as usual I looked at my torn shirt hanging over the chair and I said to myself what’s the use and I turned over. At eight o’clock the telephone rang and it was Hymie. Better get over quickly, he said, because there’s a strike on. And that’s how it went, day after day, and there was no reason for it, except that the whole country was cockeyed and what I relate was going on everywhere, either on a smaller scale or a larger scale, but the same thing everywhere, because it was all chaos and all meaningless. It went on and on that way, day in and day out for almost five solid years. The continent itself perpetually wracked by cyclones, tornadoes, tidal waves, floods, droughts, blizzards, heat waves, pests, strikes, hold-ups, assassinations, suicides . . . a continuous fever and torment, an eruption, a whirlpool. I was like a man sitting in a lighthouse: below me the wild waves, the rocks, the reefs, the debris of shipwrecked fleets. I could give the danger signal but I was powerless to avert catastrophe. I breathed danger and catastrophe. At times the sensation of it was so strong that it belched like fire from my nostrils. I longed to be free of it all and yet I was irresistibly attracted. I was violent and phlegmatic at the same time. I was like the lighthouse itself—secure in the midst of the most turbulent sea. Beneath me was solid rock, the same shelf of rock on which the towering skyscrapers were reared. My foundations went deep into the earth and the armature of my body was made of steel riveted with hot bolts. Above all I was an eye, a huge searchlight which scoured far and wide, which revolved ceaselessly, pitilessly. This eye so wide-awake seemed to have made all my other faculties dormant; all my powers were used up in the effort to see, to take in the drama of the world. If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  My mother had met a handsome man much younger than she who wanted her to buy him a fishing camp in Kentucky; luckily his greed finally caused her to drop him. On the way down to join him one time in Kentucky, Mother kept the radio tuned to a hillbilly station, but my sister and I mocked the corn-pone accents and sad lyrics. Once we were in Kentucky the handsome man, mustached and cologned, took us out fishing in a rented boat. It rained. No one caught anything. A strict silence had to be maintained when the man cast his rod as though blessing the waters. At night my sister and I slept in bunk beds in the man’s sister’s house. My mother wore a new, dazed expression and treated us with great politeness, as though my sister and I were guests she didn’t know very well. She spoke of our accomplishments and of her own trials and powers of recuperation. The man laid a strong hand on my shoulders, but withdrew it when my mother left the room. At night his family and ours sat together; everyone visited as a bowl of pecans and a nutcracker were passed around the room from one grown-up to another on down to silent children in pajamas stained with orange juice. Our mother was betraying us into this dingy house permeated by the smell of hot grease. Mother was losing interest in me; she’d willingly hand me over to this good-looking fool. During the night they fought. The engagement was broken off and the next morning we were in the car again, blinking and exhausted, the radio blaring, the temperature noticeably warmer, familiar plants unseasonably in bloom. Mother started reciting the litany of our lives. She questioned us once more about our father and how he behaved toward his new wife. Each twisted or colored fact we gave her she plaited into a heavy weave. Then she tore that up and started again. He would soon leave his wife or he would never leave her, he was being blackmailed by that woman, no he loved her, he was a man of honor, no he was a man without principle, he had failed us, no he stayed true, he’d tire of her, no she was a born fascinator, this was just an adventure, it was a life, she made him feel superior, she made him feel cheap, he’d soon be back or he’d never return—oh, my mother was a tedious Penelope weaving her tales and tearing them up. I listened to everything, smiling and in possession of my secret power.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  He can see his house from here. His stomach turns. He retches. His throat is hot with vomit. His eyes water. In the distance, he can hear branches breaking. The woods shift with soft, hushed voices of motion. He leaves the woods entirely and steps back onto the street. Milton thinks again of all the homes and their interchangeable lives and wishes that it were as easy as stopping at someone else’s door, knocking, and switching places with the version of himself who lived there. If only he could enter into another version of his life, one in which things have not gone quite as horribly awry—if only he could pass from this world into the next or into the next, some other place without Abe or Tate, some place where he and Nolan might be as they were, though perhaps they have always been this way, full of violence and calamity. Maybe he’s had it wrong this whole time—it’s not that Abe and Tate bring it out of Nolan, and it’s not that Nolan brings it out of them. They’re always in the thick of violence. It moves through them like the Holy Ghost might—except the Holy Ghost never moved anybody to rape a girl or ruin her life. The Holy Ghost never moved anybody to bash a boy’s head in. There was some other god, then, a god for whom the spilling of blood was a prayer, an act of devotion. And they’ve been praying to that god their whole lives. The streetlights glow, and bits of grass stick up coarsely from the pools of shadow below them. Milton puts the butt of his hand to his eye, which is throbbing, low and deep. The pressure in his chest intensifies, and he thinks, in that moment, of cutting himself open to let it out. Toward home, then , he says to himself. Toward home. His steps are stiff, ragged, hard, but he keeps going. One foot in front of the other until he’s at his door. The lights are off. He unlocks the door and pushes it open with his hip. Then it’s down the stairs, into the warm cave of the basement. He tugs on the cord and the basement is once again bathed in dim, yellow light. His mouth is sour and skunky from vomit and spit. His hand feels filmy and gritty, from Abe’s come and blood and the dirt and the grass. He glances down and sees smudges on his palm, white mucosal remnants, like he’s squeezed snails or slugs. There was a time when he and Nolan were boys and playing out by the creek, when they’d catch frogs and other small animals and bash them with rocks until they resembled nothing like themselves or anything else. And when they got older, they shot deer and pulled fish from the river and held them up, grinning into cameras, smiling like Look what I’ve done .

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Sophie put her face behind her hand and shook her head. She groaned. “It was nice, actually.” “Are you with someone?” “No,” Lionel said. “God no.” “Why not?” Lionel considered the question. Then he unbuttoned his left sleeve and rolled it up to his elbow. His forearm was covered in a network of scars, culminating in a series of deep gouges near his wrist. His forearms were paler than the rest of him, except for this cluster of keloids with their tannish, reddish undertones. And sometimes, in the winter months, they grew dry and rubbery. Sophie took in the view and Lionel watched her for the usual choreography of sympathy and disgust. She reached out and brushed her fingers across his arm and made a low, appraising hum. He could barely feel her touch. With the keloids, it was either too much sensation or nothing at all. Sometimes they burned powerfully or throbbed so much he couldn’t sleep. His doctors had said that it was a real pain, but also not a real pain. They stopped short of saying it was psychosomatic. They didn’t like that term, because it implied an unreal element, no matter how careful they were about contextualizing their comments. “What happened?” she asked. “If that’s not too personal?” “I tried to kill myself. Which, I guess, is a little obvious. But I made a real hash of it. My roommate found me. Then I did some inpatient stuff. And some outpatient stuff. Not a lot of room for extracurriculars.” “Sounds like a lot.” “Yeah, last year, I was just . . . in this bad way. I felt really unsafe. I felt so sick, all the time. Like, really sick. Like my heart was going to jump out of my chest. And I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat. Couldn’t think. That was hardest—the not thinking. My mind wasn’t even empty, just hazy. Like standing in a room you know perfectly well, but you can’t see anything because it’s full of this burning smoke. It was just. Impossible, and I was so scared—like this was going to be my life, I was never going to be okay again. I wanted some relief, I guess. I wanted to get out.” “Did you always struggle with that stuff?” “No,” Lionel said. “Well . . . yes? No and yes. I was always anxious. But the first two years of grad school were really hard, brutal. And I found it really hard to cope. It’s like when a plane descends, you know? Gradually, down through the clouds, and suddenly you can’t see anything? Except, with a plane, eventually you see the city. There was no city for me.”

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Back in his room he took a swig straight from the bottle. Jeez, the stuff was awful. It burned his throat. Here’s to us, Kathy, he said. This time he poured himself a shot and gulped it down. It got easier. By his sixth shot he was blotto. He lay on the floor while his room spun around. Whirlybeds. It didn’t feel good. He crept on all fours to the bathroom—spinning spinning—and puked his guts out. Then he fell back on the cool tile floor and everything went black. [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00033.jpg] [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00033.jpg] SURVIVORSThey Live to Tell Their StoriesBy Henry AmmermanFEB. 15 — The bus driver’s classic call to “step to the rear” might be heeded by airline passengers. Most of the survivors of the National Airlines DC-6 crash on Feb. 11 had been seated in the rear of the aircraft. When the plane broke apart in the crash it left the rear section less damaged and more accessible to rescuers. Gabrielle Wenders, the stewardess, was the only surviv ing member of the crew. She had been found hanging upside down, still strapped in her seat. “I don’t know how I ever got out alive. It was a fiery nightmare. We were all so helpless. If it hadn’t been for that young man, Mason McKittrick—a name I’ll always remember—I might have died that way.” Chubby little Patty Clausen, age 5, was unharmed, but her mother perished. With her father hospitalized, hospital authorities put out a plea. “Can’t someone take this most adorable child home? She keeps asking for her ‘bow wow.’ ” The dog had been left in a kennel while the family went on vacation. Her uncle picked her up last night, but said he would wait before telling her of her mother’s death. Hospitalized newlywed Linda West, 25, was unaware of the status of William, her husband. They were married at noon on Feb. 10, and pulled from the wreckage 12 hours later. “When can I see my husband?” She begged her mother to bring him to her bedside. Her mother didn’t know how to break the news to her daughter that Mr. West had died of a fractured skull and brain injuries the previous night. In much better spirits was 17-year-old Cele Bell, who was anxious to get on another flight. “I want to go on vacation to Miami! I’d go tomorrow if I could,” she told reporters. She had been traveling with her mother, who was pinned under her seat after the crash. But Cele was able to pull her to safety. They had been in the last two seats on the right side of the plane. Of the 38 who survived the initial crash, two have died in the hospital. Some remain in critical condition, but the prognosis for most is good. 24 [image "image" file=Image00005.jpg] [image file=Image00005.jpg] NatalieNatalie’s parents took her to New York, to the Central Park West office of some old man who smelled bad.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Get her mind off…get her out in the fresh air.” “And what about her dancing?” “There will be classes there.” “How do you know?” “Entertainers have classes. And since when do we want to encourage her to pursue this cockamamie idea she has of becoming the next Ruby Keeler?” Natalie held her breath when he said “Ruby”—how did he know? How could he possibly know? —but when he said “Keeler,” Natalie understood he had no idea about her Ruby. “We have to save her, Corinne.” “If we can’t save her here, how can we save her there?” “We have to try. I’m begging you to reconsider.” “And I’m begging you to forget this crazy idea. Who’s behind it—Longy? And when it fails—and you come home begging for forgiveness—and there’s nothing left of your practice or our marriage, then what? How will we live? How will we pay for treatment for Natalie, send Steve to college and Fern to Vail-Deane? You expect my family to support us? You’ve always resented my family money but now, all of a sudden, it smells clean to you? You’re a fool, Arthur. I never thought I’d say that but it’s the truth.” “I don’t think you understand, Corinne. Natalie is very sick. If we don’t do something we could lose her.” Corinne breathed in, teared up, waved a hand at her husband. “Don’t ever say that again! There’s nothing wrong with her. She’s just sensitive. It’s all been too hard on her. That’s why she stopped eating.” “And I’m saying get her out of here so she doesn’t have to worry about planes crashing into houses, into schools, so she doesn’t have to think about death and dying.” Natalie slumped to the floor of the car, her hands over her ears. [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00034.jpg] [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00034.jpg] FATHER OF ELIZABETH CRASH VICTIM SUES FOR $250,000FEB. 18 — Thomas Granik of Sunnyside, Queens, filed suit today in Federal Court against Miami Airlines, Inc., for the death of his daughter, Ruby. She was a passenger in the airplane that crashed on Dec. 16 in Elizabeth. Mr. Granik said that the 22-year-old woman, a nightclub dancer, was the sole support of his family. 25 [image "image" file=Image00005.jpg] [image file=Image00005.jpg] MiriAt school the following Monday, as Eleanor and Miri walked to English class together, Eleanor asked, “Are you still best friends with Natalie?” Miri hesitated. “Yes,” she said, but the truth was, she wasn’t sure. “Why was she absent all last week and again today?” “I don’t know. When I saw her last Sunday she wasn’t feeling well.” “Have you talked to her?” “No.” “Her parents?” “No.” “Why not?” “I’ve called a bunch of times but there’s never any answer.” She didn’t say she’d talked to Steve or that she hadn’t believed a word of what he’d said. “I don’t like the way this sounds,” Eleanor said.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  But Buddhism appealed to me. Not in its later, elaborated northern form, the Mahayana with its infinite regress of paradises, its countless bodhisattvas (those compassionate midwives), its efficacious prayers and praying effigies given over to the pornography of worship, squirming nude maidens representing the anima straddling the erect lingam of the meditating animus. No, what I liked was the earlier Hinayana, those austere instructions that lead to an extinction of desire (in Sanskrit, nirvana means “to extinguish,” as one might blow out a candle flame). I felt a strong affinity to this curiously life-hating religion that teaches us we have no soul and that the self is merely a baggage depot where random parcels have been checked (labeled emotions, sensations, memories and so on) soon enough to be collected by different owners, an emptying out that will leave the room blissfully vacant. That emptiness, that annihilation is what the Christian most dreads but the Buddhist most earnestly craves—or would if craving itself were not precisely what must be extirpated. Desire—hankering after sex, money, fame, security—ties us to the world and condemns us to rebirth, “the cycle of rebirth” I pictured as a wheel on which the sinner was stretched and bound, the wheel that crushed him as it turned but cruelly failed to kill him. I felt the need to free myself of desire. I must not want anything. I must feel no attachments. Above all, no attractions. I must give up all hope, plans, glad anticipations. I must study oblivion. I must give room and board to silence and pay tuition to the void. Even the slightest flicker of longing must be stilled. Every wire must be pulled until the console goes dead and all dials point to zero. My mother discovered a Buddhist church some thirty miles away. She gamely drove me down to it one Sunday (Sunday! I mentally sniffed, already the ascetic snob; Church! I exclaimed, an Oriental purist). On the preceding Saturday night I dreamed of opening wicker gates, the process shot as the wizened abbot walks toward me on a treadmill, getting nowhere fast against a rear projection of a retreating, expanding universe of thickening blue sandalwood incense and swaying, saffron-robed monks. Instead I encountered a congregation of grinning Japanese families in a former Baptist church and heard announcements of the Young Buddhists Association’s annual picnic and basketball practice as well as disappointingly melodic hymns with words such as “Dearest Amida, Your Light Is Shining Through the Gloomy World of Sin” sung by us all to a wheezing organ accompaniment, then a tedious sermon on the evils of adultery. I fled, red-cheeked and offended, my puzzled mother reluctantly following me (“But I liked it, dear. It seemed so Christian, though of course they were much better dressed than your average Christian”).

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Big Davis jumps up, reaches for the red bucket on the counter where he keeps the scraps. He shoves it under her face, and the smell of it—the rotting, wet food from breakfast and lunch, the woozy smell of grease and stale bread, the soggy, sad grits—draws the vomit out of her, and she empties herself into the bucket. Her stomach clenches. Her chest clenches. Fire spreads through her veins. She leans back, her vision all splotches and luminescent squiggles. Enid presses a wet cloth to her forehead. Grace reaches, holds her hand and sighs. “Just call him,” she says. “Just call him, please.” “Now isn’t the time, Grace,” Enid says. “You have to call him. He’s afraid of you. But you have to call him.” Big Davis drops the bucket on the counter. Braces himself. “You better worry about yourself.” “Call him,” she says. “And say what?” “Tell him the truth. Tell him you love him,” Grace says. “If he doesn’t know that after all this time, that I love him, then that boy is worse off than you.” Grace sinks low in the chair. Enid is blotting her brow. “Well, that we can agree on,” Grace says. “You need rest,” Enid says. “You overdid it.” “She has a room,” Big Davis says. Enid nods at this, loops Grace’s arm over her shoulder, whispers reassuring things to her about strength and patience and balance. Grace feels embarrassed for her, the way she sometimes feels when she can hear Enid praying in the next room in that tiny apartment of hers. Some things you should get to keep to yourself. • • • GRACE SITS by her room’s wide window, from which she can see the deep green pond. The old forest rimming the property line. The sleepy fields. The house is full of sounds, night music. Enid sleeps in the adjoining room that had belonged to Davis. When they were little, the two of them would spend a portion of each night passing back and forth, leaving small things for each other. Sometimes, Davis pranked her. Or left frogs under her bed. But that night of the picnic all those years ago, when her grandmother had slapped her and locked her in this very room, Davis had come in from his side. Grace was on the ground sobbing, her face hot from her grandmother’s palm. She’d been banging at the door, begging to be let out. It hadn’t even occurred to her that Davis’s side would be open, but when she looked up, there he was. Her brother. He handed her a small kitten. It looked so young that it might not have even been weaned yet.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Every afternoon I’d stumble home exhausted to my room, but once there my real work would begin, which was to imagine Helen in my arms, Helen beside me laughing, Helen looking up at me through the lace suspended from the orange-blossom chaplet, Helen with other boys, kissing them, unzipping her shorts and stepping out of them, pushing her hair back out of her serious, avid eyes. She was a puppet I could place in one playlet after another, but once I’d invoked her she became independent, tortured me, smiled right through me at another boy, her approaching lover. Her exertions with other men fascinated me, and the longer I suffered, the more outrageous were the humiliations I had other men inflict on her. I became ill with mononucleosis, ironically the “kissing disease” that afflicted so many teenagers in those days. I was kept out of school for several months. Most of the time I slept, feverish and content: exempted. Just to cross the room required all my energy. Whether or not to drink another glass of ginger ale could absorb my attention for an hour. That my grief had been superseded by illness relieved me; I was no longer willfully self-destructive. I was simply ill. Love was forbidden—my doctor had told me I mustn’t kiss anyone. Tommy called me from time to time but I felt he and I had nothing in common now—after all, he was just a boy, whereas I’d become a very old man. ONE We’re going for a midnight boat ride. It’s a cold, clear summer night and four of us—the two boys, my dad and I—are descending the stairs that zigzag down the hill from the house to the dock. Old Boy, my dad’s dog, knows where we’re headed; he rushes down the slope beside us, looks back, snorts and tears up a bit of grass as he twirls in a circle. “What is it, Old Boy, what is it?” my father says, smiling faintly, delighted to be providing excitement for the dog, whom he always called his best friend. I was bundled up, a sweater and a Windbreaker over today’s sunburn. My father stopped to examine the bottom two steps just above the footpath that traveled from cottage to cottage on our side of the lake. This afternoon he had put in the new steps: fresh boards placed vertically to retain the sand and dirt, each braced by four wooden stakes pounded into the ground. Soon the steps would sag and sprawl and need to be redone. Whenever I came back from a swim or a trip in the outboard down to the village grocery store, I passed him crouched over his eternal steps or saw him up on a ladder painting the house, or heard his power saw arguing with itself in the garage, still higher up the hill on the road.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Viewed simply as a novel, “Lolita” deals with situations and emotions that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader had their expression been etiolated by means of platitudinous evasions. True, not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by their absence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prude’s comfort, an editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a certain type of mind might call “aphrodisiac” (see in this respect the monumental decision rendered December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably more outspoken, book), one would have to forego the publication of “Lolita” altogether, since those very scenes that one might ineptly accuse of a sensuous existence of their own, are the most strictly functional ones in the development of a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes the same claim; the learned may counter by asserting that “H.H” ’s impassioned confession is a tempest in a test tube; that at least 12% of American adult males—a “conservative” estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann (verbal communication)—enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special experience “H.H.” describes with such despair; that had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psychopathologist, there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book. This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that “offensive” is frequently but a synonym for “unusual”; and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise. I have no intention to glorify “H.H.” No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I felt a strong affinity to this curiously life-hating religion that teaches us we have no soul and that the self is merely a baggage depot where random parcels have been checked (labeled emotions, sensations, memories and so on) soon enough to be collected by different owners, an emptying out that will leave the room blissfully vacant. That emptiness, that annihilation is what the Christian most dreads but the Buddhist most earnestly craves—or would if craving itself were not precisely what must be extirpated. Desire—hankering after sex, money, fame, security—ties us to the world and condemns us to rebirth, “the cycle of rebirth” I pictured as a wheel on which the sinner was stretched and bound, the wheel that crushed him as it turned but cruelly failed to kill him. I felt the need to free myself of desire. I must not want anything. I must feel no attachments. Above all, no attractions. I must give up all hope, plans, glad anticipations. I must study oblivion. I must give room and board to silence and pay tuition to the void. Even the slightest flicker of longing must be stilled. Every wire must be pulled until the console goes dead and all dials point to zero. My mother discovered a Buddhist church some thirty miles away. She gamely drove me down to it one Sunday ( Sunday! I mentally sniffed, already the ascetic snob; Church! I exclaimed, an Oriental purist). On the preceding Saturday night I dreamed of opening wicker gates, the process shot as the wizened abbot walks toward me on a treadmill, getting nowhere fast against a rear projection of a retreating, expanding universe of thickening blue sandalwood incense and swaying, saffron-robed monks. Instead I encountered a congregation of grinning Japanese families in a former Baptist church and heard announcements of the Young Buddhists Association’s annual picnic and basketball practice as well as disappointingly melodic hymns with words such as “Dearest Amida, Your Light Is Shining Through the Gloomy World of Sin” sung by us all to a wheezing organ accompaniment, then a tedious sermon on the evils of adultery. I fled, red-cheeked and offended, my puzzled mother reluctantly following me (“But I liked it, dear. It seemed so Christian, though of course they were much better dressed than your average Christian”). I desperately needed a new beginning. The thought of resuming my life made me want to end it—unless I could change it completely. If my homosexuality was due to a surfeit of female company at home (for so ran the most popular psychological theory of the day), then I should correct the imbalance by entering an all-male world. In order to become a heterosexual I decided I should attend a boys’ boarding school (for so ran my wonderfully logical addendum to the theory).

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  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. I saw Lolita’s eyes, and they seemed to be more calculating than frightened. I heard her saying to a kind lady that her father was having a fit. Then for a long time I lay in a lounge chair swallowing pony upon pony of gin. And next morning I felt strong enough to drive on (which in later years no doctor believed). 22 The two-room cabin we had ordered at Silver Spur Court, Elphinstone, turned out to belong to the glossily browned pinelog kind that Lolita used to be so fond of in the days of our carefree first journey; oh, how different things were now! I am not referring to Trapp or Trapps. After all—well, really … After all, gentlemen, it was becoming abundantly clear that all those identical detectives in prismatically changing cars were figments of my persecution mania, recurrent images based on coincidence and chance resemblance. Soyons logiques , crowed the cocky Gallic part of my brain—and proceeded to rout the notion of a Lolita-maddened salesman or comedy gangster, with stooges, persecuting me, and hoaxing me, and otherwise taking riotous advantage of my strange relations with the law. I remember humming my panic away. I remember evolving even an explanation of the “Birdsley” telephone call … But if I could dismiss Trapp, as I had dismissed my convulsions on the lawn at Champion, I could do nothing with the anguish of knowing Lolita to be so tantalizingly, so miserably unattainable and beloved on the very eve of a new era, when my alembics told me she should stop being a nymphet, stop torturing me. An additional, abominable, and perfectly gratuitous worry was lovingly prepared for me in Elphinstone. Lo had been dull and silent during the last lap—two hundred mountainous miles uncontaminated by smoke-gray sleuths or zigzagging zanies. She hardly glanced at the famous, oddly shaped, splendidly flushed rock which jutted above the mountains and had been the take-off for nirvana on the part of a temperamental show girl. The town was newly built, or rebuilt, on the flat floor of a seven-thousand-foot-high valley; it would soon bore Lo, I hoped, and we would spin on to California, to the Mexican border, to mythical bays, saguaro deserts, fatamorganas. José Lizzarrabengoa, as you remember, planned to take his Carmen to the Etats Unis . I conjured up a Central American tennis competition in which Dolores Haze and various Californian schoolgirl champions would dazzlingly participate. Good-will tours on that smiling level eliminate the distinction between passport and sport. Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  No plane crashes. I’d have my own horse.” “But where would you go to school?” “They have schools. At least I think they do. I’d go anywhere to get out of this place. But first I have to eat.” She jumped up and grabbed a banana from the snack table. “I’ve been eating bananas without throwing up. Next is sweet potatoes. Did you know sweet potatoes are a perfect food? All the vitamins and minerals you could want wrapped into one tuber. Come on, let’s go…” She grabbed Miri’s hand and led her down the hall, back to her room. “I’ve been studying food groups in science. My tutor—did you know I have a tutor?” “No.” “She graduated from Teachers College at Columbia. She’s Lulu’s tutor, too.” Natalie pushed open the door to her room. “The trouble with Lulu is she wants to die. I don’t want to die. I really don’t.” Miri reached for Natalie’s hand and for just a moment Natalie looked right into her eyes. “Will you miss me if I go?” “You know I will.” Did she mean die or move to Nevada? Lulu said, “If I wanted to die that badly I’d be dead by now, Goldilocks.” “She pulls out her tubes,” Natalie said. “She tricks the nurses. You know what she has? It’s called anorexia nervosa.” “You have it, too, cutie pie.” Lulu looked at Miri and pointed a finger at Natalie. “She has it, too.” “You never know if she’s telling the truth or lying,” Natalie said with a nod toward Lulu. “You can’t believe anything she says. If she croaks I just hope she does it when I’m not around.” “I’ll remember that, Golden One.” “See this banana,” Natalie said to Miri, as she began to peel back the skin. “Don’t eat that in front of me or I’ll vomit,” Lulu said. “She can’t even look at food.” “I can if it’s a picture in a magazine. Just not the real stuff. Not the smelly stuff.” “I have to go outside to eat a banana,” Natalie said. “Banana!” she shouted, wagging it in front of Lulu. Lulu gagged and reached for her call button. A nurse came into the room. “What now, Lulu?” “She made me gag.” “I didn’t make her gag,” Natalie said. “I showed her the banana, that’s all.” Miri snuck a look at her watch. She wanted to get out of there in the worst way. “I think your mother is waiting for me,” she told Natalie. She picked up the gift-wrapped copy of Seventeenth Summer from the chair where she’d set it down earlier and handed it to Natalie. “I brought this for you.” “I hope it’s not chocolates.” “It’s a book.” “Let’s see,” Lulu said as Natalie tore the paper off Miri’s gift. “Seventeenth Summer… how sweet. Are you in love with her?” Lulu asked Miri. “Don’t answer that!” Natalie said. Then, quietly, she told Miri, “I already read it.” “I know,” Miri said.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Gently I rolled back to town, in that old faithful car of mine which was serenely, almost cheerfully working for me. 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. 35I 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.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  In no dark sayings, such as limed the foolish folk of old, before the Lamb of God who taketh sins away, was slain, but in clear words, and with precise discourse, answered that love paternal, hidden and revealed by his own smile: “Contingency, which beyond the sheet of your material stretcheth not, is all limned in the eternal aspect; albeit it deriveth not necessity from this, no more than doth the ship that droppeth down the stream from the sight wherein she doth reflect herself. 4 Thence, 5 as cometh to the ear sweet harmony from an organ, cometh to my sight the time that is in store for thee. As Hippolytus was severed from Athens by machination of his cruel and perfidious stepmother, 6 so must thou needs sever thee from Florence. So it is willed, so already plotted, and so shall be accomplished soon, by him who pondereth upon it in the place where Christ, day in day out, is put to sale. 7 The blame shall cleave unto the injured side in fame, as is the wont; but vengeance shall bear witness to the truth which doth dispense it. Thou shalt abandon everything beloved most dearly; this is the arrow which the bow of exile shall first shoot. Thou shalt make trial of how salt doth taste another’s bread, and how hard the path to descend and mount upon another’s stair. And that which most shall weigh thy shoulders down, shall be the vicious and ill company with which thou shalt fall down into this vale, for all ungrateful, all mad and impious shall they become against thee; but, soon after, their temples and not thine shall redden for it. 8 Of their brurishness their progress shall make proof, so that it shall be for thy fair fame to have made a party for thyself. Thy first refuge and first hostelry shall be the courtesy of the great Lombard, who on the ladder beareth the sacred bird, 9 for he shall cast so benign regard on thee that of doing and demanding, that shall be first betwixt you two, which betwixt others most doth lag. With him shalt thou see the one who so at his birth stamped by this strong star, that notable shall be his deeds. Not yet have folk taken due note of him, because of his young age, for only nine years have these wheels rolled round him. 10 But ere the Gascon have deceived the lofty Henry, sparkles of his virtue shall appear in carelessness of silver and of toils. 11 His deeds munificent shall yet be known so that concerning them his very foes shall not be able to keep silent tongues.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  4 Why should Psyche be sorry that she had listened to the reed, as the MSS (reading paenitendo) imply? The exact opposite is the case, and is supplied by Petschenig's emendation as in the text. 267 LUCIUS APULEIUS diligenter instructa illa cessavit, sed observatis omni- bus furatrina facili flaventis auri mollitie congestum gremium Veneri reportat. Nec tamen apud domi- nam saltem secundi laboris periculum secundum testimonium meruit, sed contortis superciliis surri- dens amarum sic inquit: * Nec me praeterit huius quoque facti auctor adulterinus. Sed iam nune ego sedulo periclitabor, an oppido forti animo singu- larique prudentia sis praedita. Videsne insistentem celsissimae illi rupi montis ardui verticem, de quo fontis atri fuscae defluunt undae proxumaeque con- ceptaculo vallis inclusae Stygias irrigant paludes et rauca Cocyti fluenta nutriunt? Indidem mihi de summi fontis penita scaturigine rorem rigentem hauritum ista confestim defer urnula. Sic aiens erystallo dedolatum vasculum, insuper ei graviora comminata, tradidit. 14 “At illa studiose gradum celerans montis extre- mum petit cumulum certe vel illie inventura vitae pessimae finem. Sed cum primum praedicti iugi con- terminos locos appulit, videt rei vastae letalem diffi- cultatem : namque saxum immani magnitudine procerum et inaccessa salebritate lubricum mediis e faucibus lapidis fontes horridos evomebat, qui statim proni foraminis lacunis editi perque proclive delapsi et angusti canalis exarato! contecti tramite 1 So Petschenig with great probability for the MSS’ exarto, 268 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK VI memory, and with all diligence went and gathered up such locks as she found and put them in her apron and carried them home to Venus: howbeit the danger of this second labour did not please her, nor give her sufficient witness of the good service of Psyche, but twisting her brows with a sour resemblance of laughter, she said: ‘Of a certainty I know that another is the author of this thy deed, but I will prove if thou be truly of so stout a courage and singular prudence as thou seemest. Seest thou the high rock that overhangs the top of yonder great hill, from whence there runneth down water of black and deadly colour which is gathered together in the valley hard by and thence nourisheth the marshes of Styx and the hoarse torrent of Cocytus? Icharge thee to go thither and bring me a vessel of that freezing water from the middest flow of the top of that spring’: wherewithal she gave her a bottle of carven crystal, menacing and threatening her more rigorously than. before.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  When this was done, out came a woman in the middle of the Theatre arrayed in mourning vesture, and bearing a childe in her armes. And after her came an old woman in ragged robes, crying and howling likewise: and they brought with them the Olive boughs wherewith the three slaine bodies were covered on the Beere, and cried out in this manner: O right Judges, we pray by the justice and humanity which is in you, to have mercy upon these slaine persons, and succour our Widowhood and losse of our deare husbands, and especially this poore infant, who is now an Orphan, and deprived of all good fortune: and execute your justice by order and law, upon the bloud of this Theefe, who is the occasion of all our sorrowes. When they had spoken these words, one of the most antient Judges did rise and say, Touching this murther, which deserveth great punishment, this malefactor himselfe cannot deny, but our duty is to enquire and try out, whether he had Coadjutors to help him. For it is not likely that one man alone could kill three such great and valiant persons, wherefore the truth must be tried out by the racke, and so wee shall learne what other companions he hath, and root out the nest of these mischievous murtherers. And there was no long delay, but according to the custome of Grecia, the fire, the wheele, and many other torments were brought in. Then my sorrow encreased or rather doubled, in that I could not end my life with whole and unperished members. And by and by the old woman, who troubled all the Court with her howling, desired the Judges, that before I should be tormented on the racke, I might uncover the bodies which I had slaine, that every man might see their comely shape and youthfull beauty, and that I might receive condign and worthy punishment, according to the quality of my offence: and therewithall shee made a sign of joy. Then the Judge commanded me forthwith to discover the bodies of the slain, lying upon the beere, with myne own handes, but when I refused a good space, by reason I would not make my fact apparent to the eies of all men, the Sergeant charged me by commandement of the Judges, and thrust me forward to do the same. I being then forced by necessity, though it were against my wil, uncovered the bodies: but O good Lord what a strange sight did I see, what a monster? What sudden change of all my sorrows?

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “She lives in Pennsylvania.” She has another son, Miri thought. A son and a daughter. That’s good, isn’t it? Suppose Tim was her only child? How many times had Rusty reminded Miri, You’re my only child. You’re my life. So when it comes to doing stupid things, don’t. Because I couldn’t stand it if I lost you. Do you understand? Now Miri thought she understood. There was a burden to being the only child. “Daisy, will you try to find Corinne?” Dr. O asked, handing her an appointment book with a needlepoint cover. “I’m going to take Mrs. Barnes home.” He draped a coat around Mrs. Barnes’s shoulders and led her to the kitchen door. Fern clung to Mrs. Barnes’s leg. “I want to come with you.” “You stay here with Daisy until Mommy comes home,” Dr. O said. “No, I want to come with Barnesy!” Mrs. Barnes looked down at Fern, as if for the first time. “You’ll be fine, Fern Ella.” Fern didn’t argue. She let go of Mrs. Barnes’s leg. When Daisy asked if she’d like to hear a story, Fern choose Madeline from her bookshelf. “Madeline is brave,” she told Daisy. Daisy asked Miri to do something about the volume of the music coming from the finished basement. Miri opened the door and crept down the stairs, afraid of what she might find. “Nat…Natalie,” she called softly. The only light was coming from the jukebox, the volume pumped way up. It took a minute for her eyes to adjust, for her to see Natalie crouched on the floor in the corner, rocking back and forth, mumbling to herself, like an old man davening on the High Holidays. When Miri snapped on the overhead lights, Natalie covered her eyes. “Don’t.” But Miri left the lights on and pulled the plug on the jukebox. Now it was completely quiet. Eerily quiet. “Come on, Nat,” Miri said, grabbing her by both arms. Natalie resisted. “I’m too tired.” “We’re all tired.” Miri hadn’t realized how true that was until that minute. She felt heavy, as if she could sleep for a week. Finally, Natalie stood. Miri practically pushed her up the stairs. In the kitchen, Natalie spied her quilt and pillow on the floor. She grabbed them and ran up to her bedroom, where she threw herself onto her bed, and held the pillow over her head. Miri followed. “They’re out to get us,” Natalie said, from under the pillow. “It’s only a matter of time. Ruby says there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” “What are you talking about? Who’s out to get us?” “I’m trying to tell you but you’re not listening.” Miri lifted the pillow off Natalie’s head so she could see her face, hear her words more clearly. “I am listening but you’re not making any sense.” “You think any of this makes sense? Mrs. Barnes’s son, and Phil’s cousin, the one coming home from Syracuse. She was here New Year’s Eve. Remember? Kathy Stein.