Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  The long, hot summer of 1976 was my last at Bedford College. In the autumn I would begin a new career as a schoolteacher, a prospect that filled me with gloom. Thanks to the failure of my thesis, I had no luck in my applications for academic posts, but when I started applying to high schools, I got the very first job I put in for. It was a good position in a prestigious school in South London, and there was a strong possibility of my being promoted to head of department in a year or so. But I just did not want to do it. I felt shades of the prison house begin to close around me, and I was determined, during these few sultry months, to have fun. I was befriended by a group of mature students at Bedford who were about my own age, and they invited me to their parties, introduced me to their friends, and life took on the hectic, crazy quality of a delayed adolescence. And of course, there were men. I would not dignify these encounters with the term “love affairs,” but there was at least some good humor and affection. I have not spoken at all in these pages about my so-called love life, because it has been a dead end. My more serious relationships have usually been (to paraphrase Hobbes) nasty, brutish, and not as short as they should have been. Last summer I was having dinner with two gay friends in upstate New York. They quizzed me about my single state, perhaps expecting me to come out to them. But to their delight and to the utter astonishment of the young waiter, who was uncorking our bottle of wine, I explained that I was a “failed heterosexual.” I added that though I liked men very much, and had often been in love, men did not seem to see me as female. They either looked through me with an indifference that is almost comical or saw me as a dear old pal— “one of the boys.” Throughout our relationship, one of my former lovers, who was not English, persistently used the masculine form of the local endearment—as it were, caro instead of cara. Now that I am older, I no longer expect male attention, and as I explained that evening to my gay friends, the problem has been compounded by the fact that I have enjoyed some success and have money, which men of my generation sometimes find difficult. “Sounds good to me!” said our waiter.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  And so there was. If a thesis is failed—not simply referred back to the student for correction, but failed outright, as mine had been—the examiner is expected to write a very detailed report, going through the text page by page, point by point, and drawing attention to errors and flaws. Professor Courtney, however—at least, this is what I was told—had written half a paragraph to the effect that I was a clever young woman, but that in his view the topic of my thesis was unsuitable for a doctorate. This reflected badly on the university, which had approved the subject, and the faculty was furious. Now, apparently, when it was too late, the Academic Board was also incensed that I had not had an internal examiner, and insulted by what they regarded as Courtney’s arrogant brevity. They wrote back, I was told, telling him that he had failed as an examiner on eleven points and that it would be a long time before he was invited to examine for Oxford again. But what were they going to do with me? For five months, the faculty discussed my fate. In any other university, I expect that the thesis could have been reexamined, but Oxford was a law unto itself. There had not been a case like this before (though a few dons darkly recalled something similar happening fifteen years earlier in the History Faculty), and many felt that reexamination would create a dangerous precedent. Any student could demand the right to get a better result. To my surprise, I found that I had powerful champions. Some of the most distinguished members of the board pleaded my cause and argued for me with passion, and this I found consoling: not everybody, apparently, thought I was a fool and a failure. Some remembered my very nice undergraduate degree and were outraged by what had happened. For months there was deadlock. I had very little hope of a favorable outcome, and knew that whatever happened, there would always be something questionable about me in academic circles. In any event, in July 1975, Dame Helen, the chairman of the board, settled the matter. An injustice had been done, she told the dean of graduate studies, who was staunchly on my side. She was very sorry for Miss Armstrong, but the sanctity of the Oxford doctorate could only be impaired by reexamination.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The driver had had a high collar shadowing his face, and had never moved his gaze from his horse - but there had been a certain twitching of the lace at the dark carriage windows, that let me know that I was being observed, carefully, from within.I had strolled about a bit, and lit a cigarette. I didn’t, for obvious reasons, do carriage jobs. Gents on wheels, I knew from my friends at Leicester Square, were demanding. They paid well, but expected correspondingly large favours: bumwork, bed-work - nights, sometimes, in hotels. Even so, it never hurt to show off a bit: the gent inside might remember me on another, more pedestrian, occasion. I had ambled up and down the edges of the Square for a good ten minutes, occasionally reaching down to give a twitch to my groin - for, in the rather flamboyant spirit in which I had dressed that night, I had padded my drawers with a rolled silk cravat, instead of my usual kerchief or glove, and the material was slippery, and kept edging along my thigh. Still, I thought, such a gesture might not prove unpleasing to the distant eye of an interested gent ...The carriage, however, with its taciturn driver and bashful occupant, had at last jerked into life and pulled away.Since then my admirers had all, apparently, been as cautious as that last one; I had sensed a few interested glances slither my way, but had managed to hook none of them with my own more frankly searching one. By now it had grown very dark, and almost chill. It was time, I thought, to pick my slow way home. I felt disappointed. Not with my own performance, but with the evening itself, which had opened with such promise and had finished such a flop. I had not earned so much as a threepenny-bit: I should now have to borrow a little cash from Mrs Milne, and spend longer, more resolute, less choosy hours on the streets over the following week, until my luck turned.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “What do you want to do next week?” I had asked at the end of the hour. They gazed at me blankly. “Dunno,” one of the boys eventually volunteered. “You must have some idea,” I had said, a little testily. Silence. “What about Keats?” “Oh no,” the girl groaned. “Oh no—anything but Keats.” “What have you got against Keats?” I demanded. What could anyone have against Keats? Didn’t they admire those extraordinary odes, the sonnets—the letters, for heaven’s sake? The students continued to look at me expectantly, and for a wild moment I longed for one of them to get up and yell that he absolutely hated Keats, that he thought Keats was insufferably indulgent, pretentious, and overrated. I would have welcomed any sign of involvement or commitment. “Do you really not like Keats?” I asked again, hoping to coax them into a reaction. They shrugged and smiled sweetly. There was no hostility; they were perfectly . . . pleasant. I gave up. “Well, what about John Clare?” “Okay,” the girl replied equably, “I’ll do Clare.” I had given them a reading list and an essay title, which they had written down diligently, and we had parted cordially. But now, as I hurtled northward on the rattling train, I wondered what on earth was the point. Of course, not all the students were so passive. Only last week I had had a splendid session with two highly intelligent girls. But what had those three students actually learned this afternoon, and what would they learn about Clare? Certainly they would acquire a little information about him, but was their course teaching them to think? Was it enhancing their lives? Would the world be a better place because they had shared Clare’s insights? Or were they simply passing the time pleasantly? I shook myself irritably out of this reverie. I was glad to have this job. I couldn’t expect the moon. And yet I had thought, at some absurd level of my being, that if only I could get an academic post, everything would fall neatly into place. I had believed that I would find a new vocation.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “And then what?” I pursued. I had recently been discovering feminism, which as yet was only of academic interest to me. So far men had scarcely impinged upon my life, though I could see that in the future, when I would have to compete with men for jobs, my gender would count against me. We entered Holywell Manor and climbed the stairs leading to Jane’s apartment. It did seem unjust that Jane, who was by far the abler of the two, should sacrifice her career for Mark’s. “Then what? God knows!” Jane shrugged. We entered the lovely modern flat that had come with her prestigious junior fellowship. “The outlook is fairly bleak. I told Dorothy Bednarowska the news yesterday, and she just said: ‘Oh Jane, I am so sorry!’ Not exactly a ringing endorsement for the plan! But there is a university at Lancaster—and if I got a job there I could commute, I suppose.” She put on the kettle for coffee. “If not, it’ll be me and the kitchen sink—not forgetting the sheep, of course.” She looked thwarted. And indeed, what became of highly educated women who married men less clever than themselves? I didn’t know what I should do, if ever I were in Jane’s position. I knew that I would resent any man who would take that kind of sacrifice for granted, and I did not envy Mark. Jane was a powerful lady and I did not fancy his chances if she were cooped up in an isolated manor house for too long. Now, my sister, Lindsey, was quite different. She had called in to see me a few days earlier to tell me that she was emigrating to Canada. I began to tell Jane the story as we sat down with our coffee. “Your sister—the famous actress?” Jane asked with raised eyebrows. “I thought she was starring in Crossroads. What’s she doing in Canada?” Lindsey had trained as an actress, rather to my parents’ dismay. For a time they had had the dubious pleasure of saying that they had two daughters: one was an actress and the other a nun. We did not meet very often, since we had such different lives and interests. Lindsey led a highly precarious life in London, doing odd typing and waitressing jobs while “resting” between plays. She had grown up tall, sexy, and glamorous and always made me feel an ugly duckling that had no hope of turning into a swan. But during the last year, I had seen quite a lot of her on television, because she had landed a part in a popular soap opera. Nanny and I had become quite addicted to it, and even Jane had watched the odd episode with us. “She’s been written out of Crossroads,” I explained, “and now she’s going to Canada to join a man she met on holiday in Cyprus last summer.” “A holiday romance? Is that wise?” Jane asked. “How long has she known him?”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  What had happened was this. Antipas was married to a foreign princess, but then fell in love with his own niece, Herodias, who was at the time married to Antipas’s half brother Philip. (Anyone who wants to understand the Herodian family tree should be prepared to take a long weekend, a very large sheet of paper, and an ice pack.) The foreign princess was sent back home, and Antipas and Herodias became husband and wife. John the Baptist publicly denounced this arrangement. I don’t think he was simply concerned with Antipas’s immoral behavior, though that was flagrant enough. I think the point was, more tellingly, that anyone who behaved in that way could not possibly, not ever, not in a million years, be regarded as the true “king of the Jews.” John was expecting a true “king of the Jews”; Antipas had just demonstrated his utter unsuitability for the position. John pointed this out. Not surprisingly, then, John ended up in one of Antipas’s dungeons. But John believed that Jesus, his cousin, was the coming king! He was the one through whose work God would at last become king—would at last break the power of tyrants and set his people free! If that was going to happen, surely John himself was a case in point? After all, John’s own public career had reached its climax in launching Jesus on his mission, in setting him up as the man for God’s moment! So why wasn’t Jesus doing something about John’s plight? Meanwhile, John, who was in prison, heard about these messianic goings-on. He sent word through his followers. “Are you the one who is coming?” he asked. “Or should we be looking for someone else?” “Go and tell John,” replied Jesus, “what you’ve seen and heard. Blind people are seeing! Lame people are walking! People with virulent skin diseases are being cleansed! Deaf people can hear again! The dead are being raised to life! And—the poor are hearing the good news! And God bless you if you’re not upset by what I’m doing.” As the messengers were going away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John. “What were you expecting to see,” he asked, “when you went out into the desert? A reed wobbling in the wind? No? Well, then, what were you expecting to see? Someone dressed in silks and satins? If you want to see people like that you’d have to go to somebody’s royal palace. All right, so what were you expecting to see? A prophet? Ah, now we’re getting there: yes indeed, and much more than a prophet!

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  As its title suggests, this second volume attempted to tell the story of my return to secular life. But it was far too soon to write about those years, which had been extremely painful, even traumatic. I had scarcely begun to recover and was certainly not ready to see this phase of my life in perspective. Yet there was another reason for the failure of Beginning the World. At almost the exact moment when I sent the manuscript off to the publishers, my life changed completely in a most unexpected way. I started on an entirely new course, which took me off in a direction that I never could have anticipated. As a result, the years 1969 to 1982, which I had tried to describe in this memoir, took on a wholly different meaning. In that first, ill-conceived sequel, I had tried to show that I had put the convent completely behind me, had erased the damage and completed the difficult rite of passage to a wholly secular existence: I had indeed “begun the world.” But I had done no such thing. As I am going to try to show this time around, I have never managed to integrate fully with “the world,” although I have certainly tried to do so. Despite my best endeavors, I have in several important ways remained an outsider. I was much closer to the truth at the end of Through the Narrow Gate, when I predicted that I would in some sense be a nun all my life. Of course, it is true that in superficial ways, my present life is light-years away from my convent experience. I have dear friends, a pretty house, and money. I travel, have a lot of fun, and enjoy the good things of life. Nothing nunnish about any of this. But although I tried a number of different careers, doors continually slammed in my face until I settled down to my present solitary existence, writing, thinking, and talking almost all day and every day about God, religion, and spirituality. In this book I have tried to show how this came about and what it has meant.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It was hot, inconvenient, and unhygienic. But the modern dress gave the nuns greater freedom of movement, and I noticed that some of them fidgeted in their pews, as though the imposed stillness had become more of a strain. Or—and this was an arresting thought—perhaps I had not been the only one who had had difficulties with prayer. The next morning, I knelt with a few other seculars in the chapel for Mass, which was now said facing the people, in accordance with the directives of the Vatican Council. When the nuns processed up the aisle to receive Communion, I glanced at Rebecca and felt the shock as acutely as though I were seeing her emaciated frame for the first time. The whole decorous structure of the convent suddenly seemed a sham. The nuns who gathered together around the altar seemed an image of prayerful community, and yet they were allowing one of their number to waste away before their very eyes. They might have comfortable chairs in the community room and take more frequent baths, but the old attitudes were still in place. How could women who had spent thirty or forty years in the religious life and been even more indelibly shaped by the old system than I change overnight? No, I told myself as I watched them file back to their seats, their eyes cast down and their gaze directed inward, it was no good looking back with nostalgia. When the world outside seemed baffling, I sometimes felt homesick for a way of life that, with all its shortcomings, was at least familiar, just as I had instinctively relaxed when I had walked into the convent yesterday. I could only move forward, however difficult that might seem. “Karen, my dear, how very nice to see you.” I looked up from my breakfast, which I was enjoying in the elegant parlor. How odd it was to be waited on in this way, as I had so often waited on visitors, bringing in coffee, toast, and eggs, while a few hundred yards away the community were eating cornflakes, bread, and margarine. There were some advantages to secular life, I reflected, helping myself to more marmalade but hastily suppressing my involuntary smile of enjoyment when Mother Frances came into the room. She looked somewhat less imposing in her new habit, but she had recently been promoted to become one of the provincial councillors. “But I’m interrupting your breakfast.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “I understand—let’s not belabor it. My only regret is that the imaging system couldn’t quite keep up with you and I had to keep telling you to slow down. I hope you had an okay orgasm even so?” “Oh, it was a dandy. No, that was fine that you told me to slow down—slow is good.” She told me that I could set up an appointment with her in several weeks to go over the nerve-profiles. “But from what I saw on the monitors, I would suggest that you switch to your left hand if you want to get rid of your carpal-tunnel problem.” “I’ll begin tomorrow,” I said. “Thank you, doctor.” I couldn’t quite say “Susan” at this point. “Thank you for taking part,” she said. We shook hands. Then, smiling, she snapped her fingers. “Just like that?” “Right, just like that,” I said, pleased. I snapped my fingers for her, and while she stood fixedly, still in the midst of her good-natured, faintly flirtatious leave-taking smile, I kissed her name-tag and removed the white Post-It note from inside her bra. It would only have perplexed and disturbed her to discover it stuck to her breast (that soft, heavy, somewhat sticky breast) that evening. And what if she took off her bra in front of her husband, and he noticed it there before she did—a note saying THANKS on her breast? It would have caused needless suffering. To recuperate from the experiment, I spent the next five days snapped into the Fold reading Louisa May Alcott; I didn’t go near a computer keyboard or my penis the whole time. My wrist pain, which at first was so bad I could barely open a piece of junk mail, moderated considerably. I borrowed a friend’s Hermes manual portable and used it to do some of my creative rotting; the deeper keystrokes were, as Dr. Orowitz-Rudman had suggested, a kind of physical therapy. And I did briefly try to teach myself to jack ambidickstrously, but I failed: my left hand simply did not feel good enough. After a month, I called Dr. Orowitz-Rudman to schedule a follow-up visit. She called me back that evening. I told her that my wrist was doing a lot better, thanks to her. I asked her how the motion studies were going, and she said they were going well. “We’ve decided to focus on keyboard problems for now, though,” she said. “Oh? But what about—other obvious causes? You were so enthusiastic. You were so—forgive the jargon—sex-positive.” I couldn’t help sounding slightly disappointed. “We established the link informally and that’s as far as we can take it for the time being,” she said. “I want to concentrate on keyboard-related injuries for right now.” “I knew it,” I said sadly. “I was too talkative in the magnet.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  And I was also determined not to fall into the trap of making the book merely a clever, shallow rebuttal of God’s existence. That would be not only boring and predictable, but also inappropriate. This could not be a wholly cerebral book, because images of God had, surely, much to tell us about the pathos of human aspiration. Nobody thought much of the idea, however, and it was a long time before my new agent found a publisher. “It can’t be done,” said one of the editors who saw my synopsis. “It’s impossible to condense such a huge idea into a single volume.” “Who’s going to read it?” asked another. “Religious people won’t want to hear that their God is on a par with the gods of other faiths, and unbelievers won’t be interested.” “It’s so religious!” sighed a friend who worked in one of the houses that had rejected the book. “Karen, don’t write this book now! You need to do something more mainstream.” More secular, she meant. “You read English at college. Perhaps you could do something literary? A new biography of Fanny Burney or George Eliot.” “What about a travel book?” Charlotte asked. “You enjoyed the travel you did with the Israelis, didn’t you? Why not go on a journey to somewhere important. Japan, for instance. What about a look at modern Japan?” Anything, it seemed, would be better than God. This was sensible advice. After all, I wasn’t a believer, so why let my career be hamstrung by this religious stuff? The book on the Crusades had been a disaster and the dismal sales figures would not endear me to a future publisher. Better to make it clear that I had turned over a new leaf and abjured my unprofitable past. Yet despite the lack of encouragement, I refused to relinquish the project. Why? It was not as though I were passionately in love with the subject. I had rarely read a book about God that was not, at least in part, abstract and dull. Why should my own be any different? I had no training in philosophy or metaphysics, and might write something hopelessly naïve. And why go on producing religious books in Britain, where only about 6 percent of the population attended a service on a regular basis? It seemed a doomed and even a self-destructive project. Many found the very idea hilarious. “Hi, Karen—how’s God?” they would ask, as though inquiring about a mutual acquaintance. Others raised their eyebrows in mild disapproval. “Do you think you can find anything new to say? Do we really need yet another book about God?”

• From Bold Move

  And hey, I immediately feel better! Until I don’t. For example, about a decade ago, my biggest goal was to eventually become a director of a research lab at the legendary (in my mind) Massachusetts General Hospital. For those of you who are not academics (read: nerds), this means “you are a rock star and you made it to the top.” As such, I was thrilled when an associate director position opened up at the center where I was working. At the time, I was the most senior person on the team, and so I assumed I would just be awarded the position, no questions asked. However, when I approached the new director to discuss it, she told me that “only individuals who hold a medical degree” were being considered for the position. I was crushed; even though I had a PhD, I was out of the running! In that moment, I not only saw my dreams slip away from me, but I also felt as if I didn’t belong (in this institution, in this career, on this team). My thoughts began to spiral: If I’m not a medical doctor (MD), I’ll never direct a research lab! I don’t belong and I never will! Although there were a million ways I could have handled the situation—including discussing it further with my superiors—I avoided. And I did so in a super reactive way. Literally minutes after that brief interaction with the director of the lab, I practically ran back into my office and decided that I was going to apply to another job and leave this position. If I was never going to be a leader and belong at Mass General, I better go somewhere else, and fast. While from your perspective this might seem a bit rash, at the time I didn’t think this was avoidance at all. In fact, I thought I was being super proactive! It all seemed quite logical. As such, I immediately started to research job openings in psychology, wrote out cover letters, and even went as far as asking a few trusted colleagues for letters of recommendation. As long as I was doing something, I felt slightly better (avoidance is powerful!). Yet, after a weekend of preparing to apply to dozens of academic jobs all across the country, I still didn’t feel fully better. That is when David called me out. He gently asked me why I was so upset with my boss, and it wasn’t until I began explaining the situation that I realized I just felt threatened, like I didn’t belong at all because of my degree (or lack thereof). David asked me if I really intended to move to a new city, or if there was another way to address this problem.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It did not. I was not sufficiently photogenic, and though the series got good ratings, religion could only be of minority interest in England. Even my friends rarely bothered to tune in. “How can you be interested in this stuff?” they would ask in bewilderment. “Who cares about it?” But I was finding it increasingly interesting—though strictly as a detached observer. After my return to London, I made two interview series. The first was called Varieties of Religious Experience. I talked to ten people from very different religious backgrounds about their faith. Tongues of Fire focused on poetry. Six poets—Craig Raine, D. M. Thomas, Seamus Heaney, Czeslaw Milosz, Derek Walcott, and Peter Levi—read their favorite religious poems and discussed them with me. These series were not very successful. Interviewing is an extremely difficult and underestimated skill, and I did not have it. I was too full of my own ideas, and was therefore unable to draw out my interviewee and make the best of him or her. Often I arrogantly thought that I could give more interesting answers to the questions myself, which was absolutely the wrong attitude. It was fun to meet the interviewees and a privilege to meet the poets, but the knowledge that I acquired while preparing for the programs, mastering the rudiments of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Sufism, and Kabbalah, remained superficial. Television is a transient medium. One week I would interview a rabbi, the next a Buddhist monk, and as soon as he had left the studio, I started to prepare for the following week’s faith healer. It was not like The First Christian, when I had lived with Saint Paul for nearly eighteen months and had learned to hear the emotional resonance of his ideas. My brief from John Ranelagh was to quiz my interviewees as though I were a news reporter, exposing the holes in their logic, and to interlard their reflections with sharp, incisive comments of my own. This skeptical approach was evident in the two books that I published at this time. The first of these was a poetry anthology, called Tongues of Fire, which came out with the series. I chose the poems and wrote short introductions to the various sections, exploring the similarity between religious experience and poetic creativity. This was potentially a fruitful line of inquiry, but I concluded, in my own mind, that religion was only an art form, a purely natural activity, and therefore could not be seen as divine in any way. The second book was far more critical. The Gospel According to Woman developed some of the ideas in the piece that I had done for Opinions. Like The Body of Christ, it was a polemic, and traced the misogyny that had been the Achilles heel of Christianity. It was clever but inherently hostile to faith.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I had told the headmistress about the book, of course, and promised that I would confine my writing to the school holidays and weekends, so that it did not detract from my schoolwork. She had smiled and wished me luck. I see now that she probably expected the book to creep humbly into the back of the book-stores, gain a couple of kind notices in some obscure religious journals, and die an early death. That did not happen. June had sold the serial rights to a tabloid newspaper, which had also run a big interview with me, complete with photographs, in the Sunday edition. There were more profiles and photographs in some of the women’s magazines, and I had appeared on several radio and television programs. The children were agog, arriving in school each day brandishing copies of the Express and looking at me with new eyes. I was no longer just a boring teacher who nagged them about their punctuation, but had suddenly acquired celebrity status and had a kinky past. Of course, it was only a nine days’ wonder, and by the time I received my quietus from the school, the excitement had long subsided. The head had never remonstrated with me about the fuss, but she did not need to. A grim air of disapproval and reserve had made her position quite clear. This kind of notoriety was not what she expected from her staff. I myself had doubts about the wisdom of this publicity. Writing Through the Narrow Gate had been an act of restoration and self-discovery. It had redeemed the time I had spent in the religious life and set it in proper perspective. As I had unearthed more and more layers of the experience, I had felt that I was reclaiming my past. But now my inner journey had become a sensational story in the popular press. Any subtlety that the book might have had had been lost in the Express’s abridgement, especially when the newspaper text was punctuated with such subheadings as WHIP, TEARS, ANGUISH, and BLOOD. When I had written the last pages of Through the Narrow Gate, I had realized that those years had probably been the most significant of my life; they had changed me forever. I might have lost my faith, I could no longer believe in God or the doctrines of the church, but I still longed for the sense of heightened intensity and transcendence that the convent had promised to give me. Was I still a nun, living in the world and yearning for a deity that did not exist?

• From The Fermata (1994)

  She hadn’t liked it. How very sad and disappointing. Had she listened to all of it and then decided she didn’t like it, or had she hated it so much that she had tossed it halfway through? I pushed up on my glasses and checked her car stereo: yes, Suzanne Vega was back in place. Nor were Adele’s nipples noticeably erect under her pink floral sweater. Was she made of stone? Imagine her chucking my cassette right out the window! Hours and hours of work, all custom joinery, all for her, dismissed. Of course I had said that she should feel free to do that, but still, I hadn’t expected her to do it. My pride was hurt. I paced around in the tall grass where I thought I had seen the tape land, but I couldn’t find it. And I didn’t want to spend much time out of the car, because the grass I walked in had the same disturbingly blurred quality that the road had—I felt I would inflict some rending injury to the network of cosmic wormholes if I walked on the median strip for too long. I started up time and drove slowly, until Adele was way ahead of me. At the next exit, I turned around and drove home. When I woke up the next morning, my Fold-powers were gone. [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 16THE WEEK FOLLOWING MY FAILED DRIVE, I WORKED FIFTEEN hours of overtime at a consulting firm. I was bothered by a persistent tingly feeling in the base of my right palm and increasing pain in my forearm. I needed at least a week off from typing, but because my Fermatal visitation-rights were now denied, I didn’t get one. What was clearly a carpal-tunnel problem got quite bad over the next several months. An over-the-counter wrist brace didn’t fit properly and made the pain worse. I was able to alleviate the symptoms a little by sleeping with my arm embracing a spare pillow. After a particularly trying stint typing an eighty-page price list, I went to Commonhealth and saw several nurse practitioners and doctors. Each of them tapped the inside of my wrist hard and asked what it felt like. Every diagnostic tap further injured the nerve, it seemed to me. I went up the chain of specialists until I reached the in-house repetitive-motion expert, Dr. Susan Orowitz-Rudman, a short cheerful woman of forty. I told her that I was a career temp and that I really had to be able to continue using the keyboard. She was full of ideas and theories. I found her hyphenated name powerfully attractive.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I was pleased and relieved to be summoned to a viva. In the English Faculty, only those who were borderline cases between classes, or who were being considered for a first-class degree, had to undergo an oral examination. No viva, therefore no first. For the umpteenth time I mentally reviewed my papers. A viva, I knew, could last for hours. But when I looked again at the examiners, I felt my hopes plummet. I cannot do this, I thought bleakly. All my written answers had been carefully contrived. During the long weeks of revision, I had prepared essays that could be adapted to meet almost any contingency. They were my usual Gothic cathedral creations, intricate edifices of other people’s thoughts. But now I knew that there was no chance that I would be able to think on my feet in the way that would be expected of me. I still sat tongue-tied in class, marveling at the way the others could play confidently with ideas, get fresh insights in the course of a discussion, and produce arguments to support their case at a moment’s notice. I was especially impressed by the ease with which other people could say, “I think.” I had no notion what “I” thought. When I scoured my brain, I still encountered the old blank. There was no way that I could talk freely and impressively to the board. Miserably I listened for my name as the chairman of the examiners read out the list of our names, telling each of us (all of whose names began with the letter A) what time we should present ourselves. He didn’t mention me, and for a moment, compounded of both disappointment and wild relief, I thought it had all been a mistake. I had got a safe second and wouldn’t have to face the examiners after all. Then the chairman nodded at me with the same courteous little smile that he had given to the others. “And Miss Armstrong, would you stay here now, please?” I stood up slowly, adjusting my gown, while the others filed out of the room. “Come over here.” The chairman gestured toward the chair and I began the interminable journey across the carpet. It took a while before I recognized the sudden explosion of sound that stopped me in my tracks. It was clapping. I looked up to find that the examiners had risen to their feet and were applauding. The men had doffed their mortarboards. All were smiling broadly. And I remembered the old tradition. “Miss Armstrong,” the chairman said when the decorous clapping had petered out, “we wish to congratulate you on your papers, which were all quite excellent.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I always wanted to find out more, to see things clearly. And once an idea had been suggested to me, I got real pleasure from it—even if I could rarely come up with ideas of my own. But these three might as well have been studying quantum mechanics. “What do you want to do next week?” I had asked at the end of the hour. They gazed at me blankly. “Dunno,” one of the boys eventually volunteered. “You must have some idea,” I had said, a little testily. Silence. “What about Keats?” “Oh no,” the girl groaned. “Oh no—anything but Keats.” “What have you got against Keats?” I demanded. What could anyone have against Keats? Didn’t they admire those extraordinary odes, the sonnets— the letters, for heaven’s sake? The students continued to look at me expectantly, and for a wild moment I longed for one of them to get up and yell that he absolutely hated Keats, that he thought Keats was insufferably indulgent, pretentious, and overrated. I would have welcomed any sign of involvement or commitment. “Do you really not like Keats?” I asked again, hoping to coax them into a reaction. They shrugged and smiled sweetly. There was no hostility; they were perfectly . . . pleasant. I gave up. “Well, what about John Clare?” “Okay,” the girl replied equably, “I’ll do Clare.” I had given them a reading list and an essay title, which they had written down diligently, and we had parted cordially. But now, as I hurtled northward on the rattling train, I wondered what on earth was the point. Of course, not all the students were so passive. Only last week I had had a splendid session with two highly intelligent girls. But what had those three students actually learned this afternoon, and what would they learn about Clare? Certainly they would acquire a little information about him, but was their course teaching them to think? Was it enhancing their lives? Would the world be a better place because they had shared Clare’s insights? Or were they simply passing the time pleasantly? I shook myself irritably out of this reverie. I was glad to have this job. I couldn’t expect the moon. And yet I had thought, at some absurd level of my being, that if only I could get an academic post, everything would fall neatly into place. I had believed that I would find a new vocation. When I arrived home that evening, my flat did little to cheer me. I had been rather spoiled by life at the Harts’, where there was always something interesting going on. I had also been horrified by the exorbitant rents charged for the most meager of rooms in London and had been lucky to find this quite reasonable apartment near Highgate.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Jie holds the broomstick and I hold the radio. The copper wire wraps around both ends of the broomstick and the radio is taped to one end, the hair-clump of extra wire dragging on the ground like a tail. Jie switches the radio to AM and the morning news sounds like someone getting strangled, all static, a sound like the sea muffled inside our mouths. We discipline the dirt. Rake into rows and follow along. I warm the radio on my skin while it announces the weather: the sky cussing rain at us in the afternoon, more rain tomorrow morning. Jie skims the soil with the broomstick, sweeping its splintered end in half-circles, shushing me even though I’m not talking. When we’re near metal, the radio will whine with another voice, a song in gold’s frequency. I hear nothing until the static sours into something higher and raspier, almost Ma’s voice. Jie says, Dig here. We’re on a square of land where shadows don’t seem to survive. We dig with our bare hands, but we’re only a fist deep when we find an old lawnmower blade. The radio sings in three more spots, but the quicker we dig, the sooner we surrender to our suspicions: that the gold’s gone. In its place: five spent bullets, a dog whistle, a saw blade, some pennies, a bike chain, a whisk, a blank dog tag. The bullets glisten like dog eyes and my toes remember when they were shot, their ache outdated and residing in my spine. Jie finds and adds two more bullets to our metal shitpile. We’ve never seen the gold ourselves, and neither of us says it, but we know there is nothing here. The radio’s still tuned in to the soil’s soprano, the static louder where we’ve dug up nothing but the dark. Jie throws down the broomstick, stomps on it with both feet. It breaks easy as bone. I hope there’s really nothing to find, Jie says, though I disagree. I think it’s better to have something to lose, even if the gold’s now archived with the bones and the bullets. But Jie says the gold is better off buried, womb-safe, our lives spent waiting for its birth. Jie and I rebury everything we find. It feels like we’ve disturbed a cemetery, rifling through lives that aren’t ours to remember. I keep the blank dog tag and promise to carve it a name worth carrying home. _ We find Ba in the bedroom, bellydown on the mattress, his face so glossed with spit he looks candied. While he’s asleep, Jie says, we should detect for metals in his body. Maybe the gold is still buried inside him.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I remember when I finally allowed this question to surface. It was toward the end of my first term and I was hurrying home to my flat in North London. The underground station at King’s Cross was packed with commuters and I tried to find a quiet place in my mind away from the crowds, the noise, and the bustle. Two free research days lay ahead. I could stay at home, finish the chapter that I was working on, and go to the British Library. Wonderful! Two whole days away from college! But then I stopped short: why was I so delighted? For the last couple of months I had been telling myself how lucky I was to have landed this job, but now, as I stood on the crowded platform, I asked myself: Is this it, then? Was this what I really wanted to do with the rest of my life? Of course, it was all very . . . pleasant. That was the word that continually came to mind when I tried to describe my new life. But it seemed wrong somehow. “Pleasant” sounded so insipid, so bland. They had been wrong at St. Anne’s, I thought. I can do this job, very easily indeed. Perhaps it was too easy? Had that entire struggle, all that striving led to something that was merely pleasant? Of course, I enjoyed it all. It was fun gossiping with Richard and Jackie. Moreover, I was hugely privileged to have a job that was pleasant, for heaven’s sake. And it wasn’t as though there was anything else that I wanted to do. There was no other profession for which I was remotely qualified. But somehow I had always thought that life should be more than merely pleasant. I tried to push the thought away. I am doing a useful job of work, I told myself firmly as I boarded the train and stood crammed against other bodies, swaying in unison with them through the dark subterranean tunnels. But was I? Only that afternoon, I had been giving a tutorial on the Romantic period to three students. They had been quiet, docile, and attentive, carefully noting down my every word—even the jokes—but had not seemed at all excited by Coleridge’s poetry. None of them had asked me anything, except how to spell a word or to repeat a date. But then, who was I to talk? I knew what it was like to feel tongue-tied in class, to have nothing to say. But these students had worried me. However empty and numb I may have felt, I had always been caught up intellectually in what I was studying. I always wanted to find out more, to see things clearly. And once an idea had been suggested to me, I got real pleasure from it—even if I could rarely come up with ideas of my own. But these three might as well have been studying quantum mechanics.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “And it does,” I concluded. If I had found it impossible to beat the conditioning, why should the nuns find it any easier to adapt? Rebecca and I looked at each other bleakly. There was no need to spell out the implications for us. That, I thought, was the best thing about talking to Rebecca. She knew what it was like, and nobody else really had a clue. “What are you going to do?” I asked. “Oh, my father has got me a job with The Tablet. Nothing much; nothing too onerous. But it will be interesting, I think.” “Is that a good idea?” I asked, startled. I didn’t want to be discouraging, but The Tablet seemed far too depressingly familiar. It is the chief intellectual Catholic journal in Britain. It was, no doubt, a very worthy and, in its own way, even an excellent paper, but frankly I had no desire ever to set eyes on it again, let alone help to produce it. “Isn’t it a little . . . er . . . Catholic?” Rebecca smiled. “Very Catholic indeed. Yes, I know what you mean. But I’m not sure that I could cope with anything more challenging. Not yet, at any rate. No, it will be nice. There’s a tiny office—just three or four of us. It will be quite a little community, in a way. Quite comforting, in fact.” I could see it all: a small enclosed world that viewed everything entirely from the church’s perspective, and whose radius of interest rarely extended beyond Catholic preoccupations. At an instinctive level, I could understand exactly why Rebecca wanted to work for The Tablet, even though I felt it to be a mistake. But it was then that I recalled my conversation with Charlotte. Was I really any better? So we’re leaving,” Jane told me grimly as we left the English Faculty Library and headed for her flat. “It’s definite. Keswick, here we come!” Jane and Mark had married the previous summer, and Mark, who was currently a lecturer in a teachers’ training college in London, had just accepted a promotion in a similar college in the Lake District. And as a good wife, Jane, of course, was going with him. “How do you feel about it?” I asked cautiously. This could mean the end of Jane’s career, or at least of a certain kind of career. Unlike me, Jane had been pegged for stardom. The powers that be wanted to keep her in Oxford. “Not great.” Jane grimaced, until her ebulliently positive nature asserted itself. “But hey—it’s beautiful up there. We’ve rented a lovely old eighteenth-century manor house—it’s even in Pevsner. It’s a mess at the moment. We’ll have to paint it from top to bottom. But when that’s over and Markie has started in college, it will be just the sheep and me. No distractions. It will force me to finish the damn thesis.”

• From Wild (2012)

  “That’s what the Australians told me. Did you ever meet them?” I shook my head. “They’re a married couple on their honeymoon. They decided to ditch the PCT too. They took off to go hike the AT instead.” It was only once I’d decided to hike the PCT that I learned about the AT—the Appalachian Trail, the far more popular and developed cousin of the PCT. Both were designated national scenic trails in 1968. The AT is 2,175 miles long, approximately 500 miles shorter than the PCT, and follows the crest of the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia to Maine. “Did Greg go to the AT too?” I squeaked. “Nah. He didn’t want to keep missing so much of the trail, doing all these bypasses and taking alternate routes, so he’s coming back to hike it next year instead. That’s what the Australians told me, anyway.” “Wow,” I said, feeling sick at the news. Greg had been a talisman for me since the day I met him in the very hour I’d decided to quit. He’d believed that if he could do this, I could too, and now he was gone. So were the Australians, a pair I’d never met, but a picture of them formed instantly in my mind anyway. I knew without knowing that they were buff and Amazonian, dazzlingly fit for the rugged outdoors by virtue of their Australian blood in ways I would never be. “Why aren’t you going to hike the AT instead?” I asked, worried he’d reveal that in fact he was. He thought about it for a while. “Too much traffic,” he said. He continued looking at me, at Bob Marley’s face so big on my chest, as if he had more to say. “That’s a seriously awesome shirt, by the way.”