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 Heptaméron (1559)

  The widow's beauty attracted round her many great lords and gentlemen as suitors, some of whom were ac- tuated only by love, others had an eye to her wealth ; for, in addition to her beauty, she was very rich, One gentleman especially, named the Seigneur des Cheriots, was so assiduous in his wooing that he never failed to pre- sent himself at her lever 2a\^ her coucher, and spent as much time in her society as he possibly could. The prince, who thought that a man of such mean birth and appearance did not deserve to be treated so favourably, was not at all pleased with his assiduities, and often remonstrated with the widow on the subject ; but as she was a duke's daughter, she excused herself, saying that she talked generally to everybody, and that their intimacy would be less observed when it was seen that she did not talk more to one than to another. After some time, this Sieur des Cheriots pressed his suit so much that she prom- ised to marry him, more in consequence of his importunity than of her preference for him, on condition that he would not require her to declare the marriage until her daughters were married. After this promise, the gentle- man used to go to her chamber without scruple, at any hour he pleased ; and there was only a femme-de-cham- bre and a man who were privy to the affair. The prince was so displeased at seeing the gentle- 438 TirE IIEPTAMEKO.V OF THE [Nin'el 53. man becoming more and more domesticated with her he loved, that he could not help saying to her, " I have always prized your honour as that of my own sister. You know with what propriety I have always addressed you, and what pleasure I feel in loving a lady so discreet and virtuous as you ; but if I thought that another ob- tained by importunity what I would not ask for against your inclination, I could not endure it, nor would it do you honour. I say this to you because you are young and fair,' and have hitherto enjoyed a good reputation ; but you are beginning to be the subject of reports greatly to your disadvantage. Though this person has neither birth, fortune, credit, knowledge, nor good looks in com- parison with you, it would have been better, nevertheless, that you had married him than have given rise to sus- picion, as you are doing. Tell me then, I entreat, if you are resolved to love him ; for I dp not choose to have him for a companion, but v^ill leave you wholly to him, and will no longer entertain for you the sentiments I have hitherto cherished-"

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was one of the most astonishing pieces of film I had ever seen, and I felt a thrill at the violent intrusion as well as dismay at the smashing of something so strange and intricate; I was disappointed when the attendant, realising I was there and perhaps in need of encouragement, tapped a button and transformed the picture into the relative banality of American college boys sticking their cocks up each other’s assholes. ‘Cinema, sir?’ he said. ‘We’ve got some really hot-core hard films …’ His heart wasn’t in it so I paid him my fiver and left him to the wonderful world of nature. I went down the stairs, lit by one gloomy red-painted bulb. The cinema itself was a small cellar room, the squalor of which was only fully apparent at the desolating moment in the early hours when the show ended for the night and the lights were suddenly switched on, revealing the bare, damp-stained walls, the rubbish on the floor, and the remaining audience, either asleep or doing things best covered by darkness. It had perhaps ten tiers of seats, salvaged from the refurbishment of some bona fide picture house: some lacked arms, which helped patrons get to know each other, and one lacked a seat, and was the repeated cause of embarrassment to diffident people, blinded by the dark, who chose it as the first empty place to hand and sat down heavily on the floor instead. I had not been there for months and was struck again by its character: pushing open the door I felt it weigh on sight, smell and hearing. The smell was smoke and sweat, a stale, male odour tartishly overlaid with a cheap lemon-scented air-freshener like a taxi and dusted from time to time with a trace of Trouble for Men. The sound was the laid-back aphrodisiac pop music which, as the films had no sound-track, played continuously and repetitively to enhance the mood and cover the quieter noises made by the customers. The look of the place changed in the first minute or so, as I waited just inside the door for my eyes to accustom themselves to the near dark. The only light came from the small screen, and from a dim yellow ‘Fire Exit’ sign. I had once taken this exit, which led to a fetid back staircase with a locked door at the top. Smoke thickened the air and hung in the projector’s beam. It was important to sit near the back, where it was darker and more went on, but also essential to avoid the attentions of truly gruesome people. Slightly encumbered with my bag I moved into a row empty except for a heavy businessman at the far end. It was not a very good house, so I settled down to watch and wait. Occasionally cigarettes were lit and the men shifted in their seats and looked around; the mood faltered between tension and lethargy.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  And he is not alone: On a nearby mat, in the other 171-pound 3A semifinal, an undefeated wrestler named Austin Boehm has pinned his opponent in even less time to earn his spot against Jay for the state title. Boehm is from Urbandale, a Des Moines suburb, and he will take the local goodwill along with his season record of 38–0 into Sat urday night. Jay has been around the sport too long to put much stock in an undefeated record, because, in Iowa as everywhere else, the issue is almost always quality of competition. All Jay really knows is that Boehm is good enough to be the other last person standing, and that, somewhere, there will be someone who thinks Boehm can take down Borschel in the biggest match of Jay’s life. And, once again, that is all Jay needs to know. It’s enough. They begin wrapping things up on Saturday afternoon inside the Barn: Stories, careers, endings. The people file in and out of the freezing cold, some of them standing in the lobby trying to get their hands on tickets for the evening finals session, the only one of the State Tournament to which a reserved seat is necessary. Naturally, all those seats were sold last fall, and so now it’ll be a seller’s market. “But they won’t scalp—you’ll get the ticket for face value,” says a father from Glenwood, a man looking, however improbably, for five seats together for Saturday night. “It would be unsportsmanlike to scalp at an event like this.” In the afternoon consolations, some of those wrestling stories are being told. With the full North-Linn crowd in the stands, Ben Fisher, still in the aftermath of his two Friday defeats, goes out for the final match of his career and finds himself wrestling for fifth place against his old nemesis, Alex Riniker, the boy to whom Ben lost at conference and districts but beat at sectionals. Considering everything, Ben appears surprisingly ready to wrestle; it’s not until the match begins that it becomes easy to see how physically depleted both boys are. From the start of the match forward, it is a grim struggle for position on the mat, two wrestlers who know each other’s moves well enough to blunt almost every offensive maneuver. Each time Ben tries to dive for Riniker’s ankle, Riniker deftly moves backward. Riniker, in turn, can’t get a decent hold on one of Ben’s legs, because Ben knows better than to let his opponent beat him with that move. It’s exhausting to watch. Three full periods of grind produce a 1–1 tie that spills into overtime, and then Ben makes the mistake—he has made it before—of appearing for just an instant to stop wrestling as the two boys near the edge of the mat. It’s a tiny let-up, almost nothing, but Riniker notices. He summons up the energy to maneuver around Ben for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it takedown, and that is the end of it. Ben finishes in sixth place.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  In the first year after Jay, the Lions sent five wrestlers to Des Moines, only one of them—Matt McDonough—a returnee from the year before. McDonough battled through the 3A bracket at 112 pounds to capture his first state title, becoming only the fourth individual champion in school history. Jay’s gradually appreciating assessment of Matt as a freshman had proved spot-on; in his sophomore season, Matt was stronger, more assured and consistently tenacious. But Doug Streicher had other reasons to be pleased: Jason Nelson made a surprise run at 152 pounds that resulted in a second-place finish; Wes Shetterly took sixth at his weight class. Linn-Mar, after four years of being known for Jay’s exploits, was producing good wrestlers up and down the scale. By all accounts, it had been another solid wrestling year for the high-schoolers in eastern Iowa. Of course, it couldn’t compare with 2005, when that bumper crop of talent had come blasting through. That group was epic. It would be impossible to re-create that kind of magic. Anyway, they were long gone. So it seemed. When the Iowa wrestling world came unhinged in the spring of 2006 , it did so in the manner Hemingway once suggested of the man who went broke: gradually and then suddenly. The Jim Zalesky years at the University of Iowa had built up this pressure, season by season, championship aspiration followed by NCAA disappointment. Recriminations flew among the bickering faithful, with many calling for Zalesky to go. The ghost of Gable, and all that winning, seemed to hover everywhere. It was finally too much. Zalesky’s team had rallied from a lackluster season the year before to finish second at the NCAAs in the spring of 2004, giving rise to the optimism that Iowa might prove strong enough to rebuild itself from within. Two winters later, that belief was almost fully diminished. Iowa finished the 2005–06 regular season with a 10-7 dual record, absorbing its most defeats in nearly forty years, and the Hawkeyes limped home a distant sixth place at the Big Ten Conference championships, which many Iowans interpreted as a rebuke either of the talent Zalesky had picked for his team or of his ability to coach it. A fourth-place finish at the NCAAs, at which the Hawkeyes crowned no individual national champions for the second straight year, confirmed things: Iowa no longer was perceived as an automatic threat to win. Something had to be done. Still, it took an almost staggering turn of events for things to eventually blow apart the way they did. A job opening had been created at Ohio State, and rumors were flying around the national wrestling community as to who might be recruited to it. Two of the names near the top of the list were Cael Sanderson, the Iowa State assistant, and Tom Brands.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  When the Iowa wrestling world came unhinged in the spring of 2006, it did so in the manner Hemingway once suggested of the man who went broke: gradually and then suddenly. The Jim Zalesky years at the University of Iowa had built up this pressure, season by season, championship aspiration followed by NCAA disappointment. Recriminations flew among the bickering faithful, with many calling for Zalesky to go. The ghost of Gable, and all that winning, seemed to hover everywhere. It was finally too much. Zalesky’s team had rallied from a lackluster season the year before to finish second at the NCAAs in the spring of 2004, giving rise to the optimism that Iowa might prove strong enough to rebuild itself from within. Two winters later, that belief was almost fully diminished. Iowa finished the 2005–06 regular season with a 10-7 dual record, absorbing its most defeats in nearly forty years, and the Hawkeyes limped home a distant sixth place at the Big Ten Conference championships, which many Iowans interpreted as a rebuke either of the talent Zalesky had picked for his team or of his ability to coach it. A fourth-place finish at the NCAAs, at which the Hawkeyes crowned no individual national champions for the second straight year, confirmed things: Iowa no longer was perceived as an automatic threat to win. Something had to be done. Still, it took an almost staggering turn of events for things to eventually blow apart the way they did. A job opening had been created at Ohio State, and rumors were flying around the national wrestling community as to who might be recruited to it. Two of the names near the top of the list were Cael Sanderson, the Iowa State assistant, and Tom Brands. Among the Iowa faithful, the notion of Ohio State taking its program to championship heights on the back of Sanderson or Brands was too much to bear, and it prompted a seismic shift. On the same day in March, Iowa fired Zalesky with a year remaining on his contract, and Iowa State University announced the surprise “retirement” of longtime coach Bobby Douglas. It was a one-two punch unprecedented in the annals of the sport in the state—and it was a direct response to the perceived outside threat. For Iowa State, moving Douglas aside meant creating room to immediately anoint Sanderson as the coach and the recruiting face of the program, and to get him away from Ohio State’s clutches. Iowa’s interest in Zalesky’s successor lay a bit farther east. For Tom Brands, Iowa’s offer to have him return as head coach was to be

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Tim seemed fine with Sandy, but when we got in Eddie’s car he suddenly got out and went to sit in front with Eddie, so it was S., Chancey & me in the back. Ch was bursting with vulgar health, his skin, close up, had a waxy smoothness like church candles. I felt how big he was, squashed up next to me—his trousers immaculately white & straining. S., who thinks him so handsome (as well as a boor), cd barely be fagged to speak to him; whilst I, who don’t think he’s handsome, chatted to him happily enough—the usual thing. Tim & Eddie were madly earnest in front & talked about the League of Nations all the way to Witney. Tom Flew had brought the dogs in his van, & since a couple of other friends of Eddie’s joined us at Witney (one of them I thought I’d seen before, fair & amiable with a broken nose), they went on the last bit in the car, while Chancey & I took a ride in the van. The smell, as ever, was asphyxiating, & what with the lurching of the van I thought I was going to bring up the excellent kidneys and bacon Matthew had fixed for me earlier on. Old Tom himself, in his dog-eared, dog-mouthed, dogshit-coloured cap & hacking jacket, stank as bad as the dogs. He kept turning round while he was driving & swearing at them through the cage. Then they wd yap & whine, panting all the while in a rank, warm, excited sort of way. I was quite glad to be penned up against Chancey (we had a buttock each on the passenger’s seat) for he at least smelt of shaving-soap & hair-lotion. We stopped just in time. Tom’s boy (who improves on acquaintance—farcically rustic, of course, but his hands are magnificent, an octave and a half, I shd think) said there had been a fair few hares—but he’d been kicking about in the lane for hours, marking the spot, & it seemed fairly hopeless. At this stage I wd have been glad to find myself back in Oxford, & Sandy was pretty tragically keen on the idea of bed, a darkened room & a bottle of aspirins. Still, off we set, for what turned out to be an utterly futile morning’s sport, with poor visibility, a kind of clinging drizzle in the air, the mud making things very tricky, & not a sniff of a hare less than several hours old. Eventually Tim called off & we toiled through to another road, up which Tom’s boy miraculously appeared in Hubert’s car, looking absolutely terrified, with the lunch in the back.

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

  In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court again reinforced the protections that shield prosecutors from accountability. A month before an inmate named John Thompson was scheduled to be executed in Louisiana, a crime lab report was uncovered that contradicted the State’s case against him for a robbery-murder that had taken place fourteen years earlier. State courts overturned his conviction and death sentence, and he was subsequently acquitted of all charges and released. He filed a civil suit, and a New Orleans jury awarded Thompson $14 million. The jury found that the district attorney, Harry Connick Sr., had illegally suppressed evidence of Thompson’s innocence and had allowed him to spend fourteen years in prison for a crime he had not committed. Connick appealed the judgment, and the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the award in a bitterly divided 5–4 decision. As a result of immunity law, the Court held that a prosecutor cannot be held liable for misconduct in a criminal case, even if he intentionally and illegally withheld evidence of innocence. The Court’s decision was strongly criticized by scholars and Court observers, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a compelling dissent, but Thompson did not get any money. We faced similar obstacles in Walter’s case. After a year of depositions, hearings, and pretrial litigation, we eventually reached a settlement with most of the defendants that would provide Walter with a few hundred thousand dollars. Walter’s claim against Monroe County for Sheriff Tate’s misconduct could not be settled, so we appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Law enforcement officers generally have no personal resources to pay damages to victims of misconduct, so the city, county, or agency that employs them is typically the target of any civil action that seeks compensation. That’s why we had sought relief from Monroe County for the misconduct of its sheriff. The county took the position that even though the sheriff’s jurisdiction is limited to the county, he’s elected by people only in the county, and he’s paid by the county, he’s not an employee of the county. The county sheriff was an employee of the State of Alabama, the county claimed. State governments are broadly shielded from recovery for their employees’ misconduct unless the employee works for an agency that can be sued. If Tate was a state officer, Monroe County would have no liability for his misconduct and no recovery would be possible from the State of Alabama. Unfortunately for Walter, the Supreme Court ruled that county sheriffs in Alabama are state officers, again in a close 5–4 decision, which limited our ability to recover damages for the most egregious misconduct in Walter’s case. We ultimately reached settlement with all parties, but I was disappointed that we couldn’t get more for Walter. Adding insult to injury, Tate went on to be re-elected sheriff, and he remains in office today; he has been sheriff continuously for more than twenty-five years. —

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

  The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals courtroom was on the second floor. The chief judge of the court was former governor John Patterson. He had made national news in the 1960s as a fierce opponent of civil rights and racial integration. In 1958, with the backing of the Ku Klux Klan, he defeated George Wallace for governor. His positions were even more pro-segregation than Wallace’s (who, having learned his lesson, would become the most famous segregationist in America, declaring in 1963 “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” just a block away from this courthouse). When he was attorney general before becoming governor, Patterson banned the NAACP from operating in Alabama and blocked civil rights boycotts and protests in Tuskegee and Montgomery. As governor, he withheld law enforcement protection for the Freedom Riders—the black and white college students and activists who traveled south in the early 1960s to desegregate public facilities in recognition of new federal laws. When the Freedom Riders’ bus traveled through Alabama, they were abandoned by the police. Alone and unprotected, they were beaten violently, and their bus was bombed. Still, I forced myself to be hopeful. That was all long ago. During my argument, the court’s five judges looked at me with curiosity but asked few questions. I chose to interpret their silence as agreement. I hoped they saw so little support for the conviction that they didn’t think there was much to discuss. Judge Patterson’s only remark during the oral argument came at the end, when he slowly but firmly asked a single question that echoed through the mostly empty courtroom. “Where are you from?” I was thrown by the question and hesitated before answering. “I live in Montgomery, sir.” I had foolishly discouraged McMillian’s family from attending the oral argument because I knew that the issues were fairly arcane and that there would be very little discussion of the facts. Supporters would have to take off from work and make the long drive to Montgomery for an early morning argument. Since each side had only thirty minutes to present, I hadn’t thought it worth the effort. When I sat down after the argument, I regretted that decision. I would have appreciated some sympathetic faces in the courtroom to signal to the court that this case was different, but there were none. An assistant attorney general then presented the State’s arguments—capital cases on appeal were managed by the attorney general, not the local district attorney. The State’s lawyer argued that this was a routine capital murder case and that the death penalty had been appropriately imposed. Following the oral argument, I still had hope that the court would overturn the conviction and sentence because it was so clearly unsupported by reliable facts. State law required credible corroboration of accomplice testimony in a murder case, and there simply wasn’t any in Walter’s case. I believed that the court would have a hard time affirming a conviction with so little evidence. I was wrong. —

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  I need to call my father, I said, which was how we always referred to him in that house, my mother never called him by name. I dropped my bag by the door (I had brought my schoolbooks with me, a few overnight things) and went to the kitchen where the phone hung on the wall. My mother could see I was upset, she followed me and asked me again what was wrong, Tell me before you call him, she said, you need to calm down. But I didn’t want to calm down, I liked the indignation I felt and that I thought my father would share, I wanted to call him while it was still hot. I imagined him comforting me, telling me he would make things right, as he used to take it upon himself as a matter of course to do. But this confidence disappeared the instant he picked up, which he did too quickly, on the first ring. He was waiting for me to call, which meant that my stepmother had already spoken with him, and by the tone in his voice I knew he was convinced of her side of things. I couldn’t expect any sympathy, he would make me apologize to her, I would have to apologize again and again until she was satisfied; it would be humiliating, I thought, and she would love it. I prepared for it as I began to tell my father how outrageously she had acted, It’s where I live, I said to him, she can’t just kick me out. I went on for some time and he listened without saying a word, so that I might almost have thought the line had been cut except that I could sense his presence so clearly. His silence made me feel I was being led somewhere other than I intended, as if I were digging my own grave; and so I stopped short and waited for him to speak, leaning into his silence. I waited for what seemed like a long time, until finally I spoke again. Tell her to let me back in the house, I said to my father, and if I used the imperative I spoke with a tone of defeat. I knew I was waiting for admonishment, but I took it for granted that once I had apologized enough they would let me back in; it was my home, and in the world I came from children weren’t simply turned out. Tell her to let me back in, I said, and here my father did make a sound. I heard him shifting his weight in his chair, and then he exhaled, it wasn’t quite a sigh, it wasn’t angry or sad but emotionless, and he spoke for the first time since his greeting.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  have the speed, the quickness and the determination that he showed last year. I really think he misses Daniel that much.” Nick was 14-0 with eight pins at the time. In Des Moines, Nick managed to become an integral component of perhaps the greatest team in North-Linn history and leave himself and his father wanting more. The Lynx finished second to Don Bosco in the Class 1A standings, earning the school’s first team trophy from the State Tournament, and they sent three wrestlers to the finals of their respective weight classes: Ryan Mulnix, Tyler Burkle and Nick. Chris LeClere finished his freshman season with a promising eighth-place showing, with teammate Ben Morrow going seventh at his weight class. Burkle capped an undefeated season with a 12–0 rout of his opponent at 152 pounds, earning the championship in his senior year. But Nick, after turning in an inspired effort in winning his semifinal match, went flat in the 145-pound finals, losing a 7–1 decision that left him hurting and Doug both disappointed and determined. “Nick has one last chance to be a state champion [next season] and I will do everything to help him get that done,” Doug wrote in an e-mail. “I’m having a very hard time with it, but I will move on.” Still, even Doug knew that North-Linn had just completed a season for the books. The future, even without Dan, looked bright. At Linn-Mar of Marion, the mood also was upbeat. In the first year after Jay, the Lions sent five wrestlers to Des Moines, only one of them—Matt McDonough—a returnee from the year before. McDonough battled through the 3A bracket at 112 pounds to capture his first state title, becoming only the fourth individual champion in school history. Jay’s gradually appreciating assessment of Matt as a freshman had proved spot-on; in his sophomore season, Matt was stronger, more assured and consistently tenacious. But Doug Streicher had other reasons to be pleased: Jason Nelson made a surprise run at 152 pounds that resulted in a second-place finish; Wes Shetterly took sixth at his weight class. Linn-Mar, after four years of being known for Jay’s exploits, was producing good wrestlers up and down the scale. By all accounts, it had been another solid wrestling year for the high- schoolers in eastern Iowa. Of course, it couldn’t compare with 2005, when that bumper crop of talent had come blasting through. That group was epic. It would be impossible to re-create that kind of magic. Anyway, they were long gone. So it seemed.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Julian Messner. $3 . I N HER biography of Frederick Douglass, Shir ley Graham has gathered together an absolutely staggering number of details and has approached her subject with an all but breathless reverence and a high purpose-that of revealing the extent of the heroism of this former slave and his significance during the most crucial part of our history. Since she has won the Julian Messner Award for having written the best book combating intolerance in America, the larger implications of her subject are inescapable-the position of the Negro in American society today. Yet I cannot see that Miss Graham has made any contribution to interracial understanding, for she is so obviously determined to Uplift the Race that she makes Douglass a quite unbelievable hero and has robbed him of dignity and humanity alike. As serious biography this performance is very nearly ludicrous; and in the battle against intolerance it seems to me that the book's effect will be negligible. Part of the trouble lies in the serious limitations of fictionalized biography. At best it usually manages to be simply a readable account of a historical figure: most often the validity of the characterization suffers in the degree that it is fictional. It is just not possible for a contemporary biographer to know what So-and-So said to his wife at the breakfast table in 18 66, or how he felt walking through the woods, or his physiological reactions to heartbreak. The attempt, presumably made in order to bring the reader closer to the subject, actually operates to alienate the reader and to inject an element of unreality. And the false intimacy vulgarizes the subject. Miss Graham begins her story when Douglass is sixteen and, wild-eyed with adoration, follows him till he drops some three hundred pages later. From the first sentence to the last his eyes are on a star; the people Sharing his Vision are sometimes allowed to be confused or misguided but arc intrinsically noble, and all, with the same monotonous flash of insight, are struck with awe when they see him.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I was interested to see what effect this would have on Phil, who was washing in a thorough, slightly over-hearty way; but though he glanced shyly at what was going on, his own simple little cock remained unstirred. A couple of Cypriot men, who talked loudly and securely in Greek, old friends with thick moustaches and frames rectangular with muscle, shampooed flossily opposite me; and some greyer specimens, voyeurs who came only for the showers, mooned hungrily at the other end of the room. I was quite brisk, and followed his Lordship out to the drying area. He had a rough old towel, the grey of institutional laundering. He gathered it into a knot and dabbed at himself with it, breathing in a manner that was nearly a whistle, and seemed always about to become a well-known Mozartian tune. I paced around drying myself, then tied my towel round my waist in a kind of Polynesian skirt and couldn’t resist saying to him, with a step forwards and a bid for his attention: ‘Are you feeling better now?’ ‘Hello, hello,’ he said, not at all taken aback. ‘Goodness me …’ he looked around as if something interesting had just started happening somewhere else. ‘I was surprised to see you swimming so soon after your … accident.’ ‘Like to swim you know,’ he said promptly. ‘Floating around in lovely, lovely water.’ I waited for some recognition of the drift of my remarks. He wouldn’t really look at me, though. ‘Do you know, I’ve been swimming here for over forty years? Oh yes—up and down. I expect I’ve swum right round the globe by now—if you added it all together, you know. Splish-splosh, flippety-flop!’ I identified already the abstracted tone with which he produced these inane jingling phrases, as if to prevent objections being made by filling up the space and time with nonsense. Yet somehow, at this stage, I wasn’t going to let him escape. ‘I was there, you know,’ I remarked factually, ‘in Kensington Gardens, when you were taken ill.’ He looked at me with a suddenly summoned attentiveness. ‘I’m quite over all that nasty business now,’ he said patiently. ‘In fact,’ I pursued, ‘it was I who looked after you, you know …’ This seemed to knock him rather, and he started to shamble off into the changing-room and then to think better of it, coming back to me in a sideways manner. His eyes ran down my front and he looked at my long, gappy toes as he said, ‘You were the chappy that, er, puff-puff, bang-bang … I say, goodness me. My dear fellow!’ He did not know what to do. ‘Anyway,’ I said, disappointed of a show of gratitude, ‘I’m glad to see you’ve recovered’—and I moved away feeling foolish and a little cross.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  We had not seen each other since Paris. Well, I wanted to go, that is, I wanted to see Norman; but I did not want to sec any people, and so the tone of my acceptance was not very enthusiastic. I realized that he felt this, but I did not know what to do about it. He gave me train schedules and hung up. Getting to Connecticut would have been no hassle if I could have pulled myself together to get to the train. And I was sorry, as I meandered around my house and time flew and trains left, that I had not been more honest with Norman and told him exactly how I felt. But I had not known how to do this, or it had not really occurred to me to do it, especially not over the phone. So there was another phone call, I forget who called whom, which went something like this: N: Don't feel you have to. I'm not tryi ng to bug you. ]: It's not that. It's jus t- N: You don't really want to come, do you? ]: I don't really feel up to it. N: I understand. I guess you just don't like the Connecticut gentry. ]: Well-don't you ever come to the city? N: Sure. We'll see each other. ]: I hope so. I' d like to see you . N: Okay, till th en. And he hung up. I thought, I ought to write him a letter, but of cour se I did nothing of the sort. It was around this time I went South, I think; anyway, we did not sec each other for a long time. But I thought about him a great deal. The grapevine keeps all of us advised of the others' movements, so I knew when Norman left Connecticut for New York, heard that he had 276 NOBODY KN OWS MY NAME been present at this or that party and what he had said: usually something rude, often something penetrating, sometimes something so hilariously silly that it was difficult to believe he had been serious. (This was my reaction when I first heard his famous running-for-President remark. I dismissed it. I was wrong.) Or he had been seen in this or that Village spot, in which unfailingly there would be someone-out of spite, idle ness, envy, exasperation, out of the bottomless, eerie, aimless hostility which characterizes almost every bar in New York, to speak only of bars-to put him down.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  He’s gone; the church has messed things up; nothing has really changed. It was a nice dream, but it’s over. If there is any truth in Christianity, it’s about a private spiritual experience. Nothing to do with the real, public world. Billy disagrees. Yes, it doesn’t look much as though Jesus is running the world right now, but that’s because he is at the moment Lord of the upper world, of “heaven,” not of earth. “Now above the sky he’s king,” as the hymn puts it. But one day, Billy believes, Jesus will return to sort it all out. Then, and only then, he’ll be truly the king of everything. Billy prefers to believe that Jesus will do this by establishing a new heaven-and-earth reality, but knows of some other Christians who think that the final kingdom-establishing act will be blowing creation to bits in a huge Armageddon moment and establishing a completely otherworldly “kingdom” in a different sphere altogether. This reminds Billy of the soldiers in Vietnam who explained that they had to destroy the village in order to save it. But the point remains: Jesus will be Lord one day, but he isn’t really at the moment. Chris and Davie are both convinced that neither Andy nor Billy is taking seriously the claims either of Jesus himself or of the New Testament. Jesus, as we have seen throughout this book, believed that God was indeed becoming king in and through his own work and that his death would be critical in bringing this about. After his resurrection, he really does seem to have taught and claimed that God’s kingdom was now becoming a reality in a new way. It really had been launched. This is the claim that Andy denies and Billy postpones. Do Chris and Davie have anything better to offer? Chris is excited about the vision of Paul in Colossians, according to which Jesus is already in charge of the world. Paul declares that “the gospel has been announced in all creation under heaven” (1:23), and he can’t mean that every human being then alive had heard about Jesus. He must mean that with Jesus’s death and resurrection something happened to the very structure of the cosmos itself: a kind of deep-level earthquake running through all reality. So Chris declares that the lordship of Jesus isn’t a matter of church members going out and telling people about him, or working to improve the world. That, Chris thinks, is simply dualistic, as though the church is “outside” the world and trying to “do things to it.” Instead, it’s a matter of the church waking up to what God is doing in the world already. The signs of Jesus’s kingdom are to be seen, Chris suggests enthusiastically, in the movements of thought and belief that shape the lives of millions.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But this book will tell you, as simply as possible, what I’ve found out so far. The Challenge to the Churches With Jesus, it’s easy to be complicated and hard to be simple. Part of the difficulty is that Jesus was and is much, much more than people imagine. Not just people in general, but practicing Christians, the churches themselves. Faced with the gospels—the four early books that give us most of our information about him—most modern Christians are in the same position I am in when I sit down in front of my computer. My computer will, I am reliably informed, do a large number of complex tasks. I only use it, however, for three things: writing, e-mail, and occasional Internet searches. If my computer were a person, it would feel frustrated and grossly undervalued, its full potential nowhere near realized. We are, I believe, in that position today when we read the stories of Jesus in the gospels. We in the churches use these stories for various obvious things: little moralizing sermons on how to behave in the coming week, aids to prayer and meditation, extra padding for a theological picture largely constructed from elsewhere. The gospels, like my computer, have every right to feel frustrated. Their full potential remains unrealized. Worse, Jesus himself has every right to feel frustrated. Many Christians, hearing of someone doing “historical research” on Jesus, begin to worry that what will emerge is a smaller, less significant Jesus than they had hoped to find. Plenty of books offer just that: a cut-down-to-size Jesus, Jesus as a great moral teacher or religious leader, a great man but nothing more. Christians now routinely recognize this reductionism and resist it. But I have increasingly come to believe that we should be worried for the quite opposite reason. Jesus—the Jesus we might discover if we really looked!—is larger, more disturbing, more urgent than we—than the church!—had ever imagined. We have successfully managed to hide behind other questions (admittedly important ones) and to avoid the huge, world-shaking challenge of Jesus’s central claim and achievement. It is we, the churches, who have been the real reductionists. We have reduced the kingdom of God to private piety, the victory of the cross to comfort for the conscience, and Easter itself to a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale. Piety, conscience, and ultimate happiness are important, but not nearly as important as Jesus himself. You see, the reason Jesus wasn’t the sort of king people had wanted in his own day is—to anticipate our conclusion—that he was the true king, but they had become used to the ordinary, shabby, second-rate sort. They were looking for a builder to construct the home they thought they wanted, but he was the architect, coming with a new plan that would give them everything they needed, but within quite a new framework.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I felt certain they didn’t; they were engaged, in a silently agreed silence, in looking out endlessly for something they couldn’t have. I was not shy but too proud and priggish to take up my place among them, and it was with only a moment’s hesitation that I resolved not to do so. I walked to the far end of the room, where the washbasins were, and looking in the mirror above them, commanded a view back along the whole enfilade of urinals and cabins to the door. I would only allow a minute or so for the Arab boy, if he hadn’t come by then I would go, perhaps follow him to wherever he had gone, if he was still in sight. I affected to look at myself in the mirror, ran a hand over my short fair hair, did catch myself looking terribly excited, a gash of pink along my cheekbones, my mouth tense. There were footsteps on the stairs outside, but slow and heavy, and accompanied by short-winded singing, wordless and baritonal. Clearly not my boy. Disappointment was mixed, I realised, with a kind of relief, and I ran my hands unconsciously under the taps, switching quickly between the cold and the very hot hot. An elderly man had appeared behind me and, still tootling away in a manner that suggested all was right with the world, advanced to the urinals where he stood leaning forward, propping himself with a hand that grasped the copper pipe in front of him, and smiling sociably to the disgruntled looking fellow on his right. I turned round in search of the towel, and as I yanked it down and it gave out its reluctant click, the elderly newcomer said ‘Oh deary me’ in a speculative sort of way, and half fell forward, still gripping the pipe, while his feet, taking the stress from the new angle, slewed round and across the raised step on which he and the others were standing. Now half turned towards me, he lost his footing completely and slid down heavily, his head coming to rest on the porcelain buttress at the side of the stall, while his substantial, tweed-clad figure sprawled across the damp tile floor. From his fly, his surprisingly long, silky penis still protruded. He wore a self-chastising expression, as if he had just realised he had forgotten to do something very important. There was a slight foam about his lips, his facial expression became strangely fixed, his cheeks genuinely bluish in colour. The man who had been at the adjacent place said ‘Oh my Christ’ and hurried out. All along the rank of urinals there was a hasty doing-up of flies, and faces that spoke both of concern and of a sense that they had been caught, turned in my direction.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Lawrence, in his book, is aware of this. But, "In revenge I vowed to make the Arab revolt the engine of its own success, as well as hand- maid to our Egyp tian campaign: and vowed to lead it so madly in the final victory that expediency should counsel to the Powers a fair settlement of the Arabs' moral cla ims.") The film begins with a long, overhead shot of a motorcycle in a sunlit square. A khaki-clad man appears and begins fool ing around with the motorcycle : walk s of f, comes back. A closer shot reveals that he is trying to get the motorcycle started. He starts it, gets on it, and we ride with him through the English countryside, on a sunny day. For those who know that Lawrence died in a motorcycle accident, the film is be ginning at the end of Lawrence's lif e: later on, we may ask ourselves why. The motorcycle goes off the road, crashes. We are then present at Lawrence's funeral, a very impressive one, treated to vehemently conflicting views of him-emanating from the military-and the film begins. Since the Empire must be kept in the background-and yet, always be present, hence the overwhelming music-the great burden of this film is on the shoulders of Lawrence, played CHAPTE R TWO 539 by Peter O'Toole. But the star of the film is the desert: the vast, technicolored backdrop of the desert meant to invest with splendor a stammering tale. For, this overwhelming desert, though it exists geographi cally, and was actually filmed by an actual camera crew, sent there for that purpose, is put to a use which is as far from reality as are most of the people we encounter in it. The least real of these people is Lawrence himself. This is not O'Tool e's fault: but so grave an adventure can scarcely be ascribed to the vagaries and idealism of a single man. Lawrence's courage and steadfastness are given as admirable, because hard-won here, the film, unconsciously, rather patronizes Lawrence; his complexities are barely-or, rather, perhaps, endl essly-h inted at, that is to say never illumi nated. His rapport with the Arabs is of great use to the British, whose attitude toward him, otherwise, is, at best, ambivalent. The film takes the view that he was a valiant, maverick, nai\'e and headstrong, brutally broken in battle, and betrayed, less by his country than by his inability to conf ront-as do his superiors-the hard facts of lif e: the hard facts of lif e, in this case, referring, principally, to the limits and exigencies of power.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘He always had a small following,’ explained Charles, as though this were something rather sinister. ‘I only met him once, not long before he died. He drank most frightfully and never ate a crumb. Did you want something to eat?’ ‘No, thank you.’ ‘That’s very much what he would have said. He went off abroad—he liked Africa: That’s what we were supposed to have in common. We did write to each other—just one letter each way, I think. Then I was out of the country of course. I heard about his death years later, from Gerald Berners. He was with him at the time as far as I recall.’ ‘You don’t still have his letter?’ I asked, preparing for disappointment, and disparaging the possibility in my own mind. ‘Perhaps,’ said Charles. I didn’t want to bother or bore him. It was something he declined to see the interest in. I thought of how thrilled James would be to know about this: he had once paid hundreds of pounds in an auction for some postcards by Firbank saying almost nothing at all. ‘If you go to the bookcase,’ Charles said, ‘you’ll find one of his books.’ He went on talking as I scanned the shelves and I interrupted him as I spotted it and pulled open the tall door with its trembling panes of old glass. It was The Flower Beneath the Foot, in a still crisp, slightly torn grey wrapper with a drawing of a nun on the front. It felt deliciously light, cool and precious in my hand. Reverently, almost timidly, turning to the frontispiece, which was a drawing of the author protected by that sexy tissue that was strewn throughout Ronald Staines’s photographs, I found it to fall open half-way through, where a small cream envelope was packed right into the stitching. I took it out gently. It was addressed to Charles at Khartoum, in violet ink and large round writing, and bore at the top left-hand corner the pictorial device of the ‘Grand Hotel, Helouan’: a group of palm trees reflected in the Nile, a single distant pyramid, and a houseboat going by. The postmark, orthographically at variance, was ‘Hilwan-les-Bains’, with a blurred date in 1926. ‘What have you found there?’ said Charles, with a hint of possessiveness in his voice. I handed him the envelope with some excitement. It was empty. ‘Hey-ho,’ he said philosophically. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, old darling. Why don’t you keep the book, though. I’m sure you’ll get more out of it than I will.’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  But perhaps, when your grandfather … is dead—and I’m dead—you’ll come round to it.’ ‘All I could write now,’ I said, ‘would be a book about why I couldn’t write the book.’ I shrugged. ‘I suppose there are enough unwritten books of that kind to make that of some interest.’ Charles was not following me. ‘It was naughty to keep back so much—though I kept thinking you would be bound to learn about all that from other people. I felt sure our friend Bill, for instance, would spill the beans.’ ‘Bill’s a pretty careful, secretive character,’ I said, my benign and contemptuous views of him appearing to me suddenly at the same time. ‘We’ll still be the most terrific friends, won’t we? I mean, it has been worth it, even if, you know …’ ‘Of course it has.’ I didn’t want to get caught up in all this today. ‘What brought you into the Club?’ ‘Oh—a meeting. Very dull, I’m afraid. And you’ve been swimming, I imagine. Gosh how I envy you,’ he unnaturally rushed on. ‘There’s nothing like it, is there? It’s one’s real element. It was a thing one missed most frightfully inside—you know.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I must say this coffee’s quite revolting. I must get them to do something about it. Maurice you say? I’ve seen him before, of course. And now I think I’d better shuffle home. You couldn’t, my dear …?’ I gave him my arm, and we made our way slowly up to the hall. I knew that, although he came to meetings and could get the coffee changed, he valued being seen with some young thing more, as a sign that he belonged and was wanted. I felt my familiar bafflement with him, and that our meeting had not been at all as I hoped. It was so brief and profitless. ‘You won’t kind of believe me when I say this,’ he began. ‘But old Ronnie Staines has found something most frightfully interesting. Not what you’re thinking; indeed quite the opposite, by all accounts. I’m going to go and see it tomorrow after lunch. Ronnie said actually he wondered if you would come. And I think—I daren’t tell you more—that you should bring that friend of yours you’ve told me about, the Prancing Nigger buff, you know.’ ‘It’s an invitation I could normally resist—but Ronnie has promised me some pictures, which I must go soon to collect.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  " The best thing," said Simontault, " is, that every one should follow the bent of his nature, and love or not, as he pleases, but always without dissimulation." 142 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE [Novel 15. "Would to God," exclaimed Saffredent, "that the observance of this law were as productive of honour as it would be of pleasure ! " But Dagoucin could not refrain from observing, " Those who would rather die than make known their sentiments, could not endure your law." " Die ! " cried Hircan. " The good knight is yet un- born who would die for any such cause. But let us say no more of what is impossible, and see to whom Simoa- tault will give his voice." " To Longarine," replied the gentleman thus ap- pealed to; "for I observed her just now talking to herself. I suspect she was conning over some good thing, and she is not wont to disguise the truth either against man or woman." " Since you think me such a friend to the truth," said Longarine, " I will tell you a story, which, though not quite so much to the credit of our sex as I could wish, will, nevertheless, show you that there are women who have as much spirit and as sound wits as men, and are not inferior to them in cunning. If my story is somewhat long, I will endeavour to make you amends by a little gayety." NOVEL XV. How a lady of the court, being neglected by her husband, whose love was bestowed elsewhere, retaliated upon him. There was at the court of King Francis the First a gentleman whom I could name if I would. He was poor, not having five hundred livres a year ; but the king prized him so highly for his great endowments, that he bestowed 1^ Second day.] QUEEN OF NA VARRE. 1 4^