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 Ice Storm (1994)

  Where Paul would engage in hand-to-hand combat with the abominable snowman, until Richard Nixon appeared, in person, to plead for peace, as he had done in F.F . #106. Paul’s dad hated comic books, of course. The idea that hard-earned Schackley and Schwimmer dollars might trickle down into the hands of the Marvel Comics Group needled him. Maybe it was because he and Ben Grimm were too much alike. Neither of them wanted to be reminded of it. But it wasn’t only the comics that his father disliked. He disliked Paul’s helmet of long, wavy hair, and his loneliness, and his lack of athletic prowess. Radio club and chorus and recreational tennis failed to impress Paul’s dad. So Paul had given up trying. He hung out with the stoners. Paul was a garbage head! A loser, as they were called among stoners. Paul bought oregano and thought it was good shit. He borrowed nutmeg from a master at school, hoping to catch its buzz. He had smoked a Quaalude; he had overdosed on cold pills. Paul Hood, eater of morning glory seeds. Decipherer of obscure lyrics. He and his roommate had parakeets named Aragorn and Galadriel. He had pored over The Chronicles of Narnia and the pronouncements of Michael Valentine Smith. He had black-light posters and tapestries and he burned incense and wore wire-frame glasses and played military strategy games. He managed to keep one shirttail untucked at all times. His tweed jackets and khakis looked as though he had slept in them. He wore them again today. Top-Siders without socks. His shirttail stirred in the breeze, like a flag from the nation of the feckless and affluent. There was a rush along the Fulham Road! Stamford was a vast, flat expanse below I-95, below the train station. The public-housing projects, a number of circular buildings over to the left there, languished disconsolately on the skyline. Beyond them rose Stamford’s lone office tower. It was a gleaming rocket, sort of like the Fantastic Four’s pogo plane in its sleek design. Or sort of like the Baxter Building. He could easily imagine them taking off from this impressive launchpad to battle Dr. Doom or Blaastar. —Flame on, Paul said. When the train arrived, he took up residence in one of the four-seaters, with his feet propped up across. There was the usual fracas when he realized again that he hadn’t availed himself of the ticket window in Stamford. The conductor invoked a surcharge. —Begging your pardon, Charles, Paul said. The conductor stared blankly at him. —The fault’s all mine, sir. May I please purchase my ticket to Grand Central at the higher price? Then he was thinking about school again. The Kittredge Cult—that was the name they had been given at St. Pete’s. He and his friends. They were Cultists. They had all opted to hide out in the dormitory of that name, one otherwise considered cheap, modern, and lifeless. For two years now, they had all lived there.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  As I said at the outset of this book, many parents and advocates work tirelessly to combat the messages girls receive from the youngest ages that reduce them to their bodies or demand the illusion of perpetual sexual availability. Back when my daughter was tiny, for example, I would point to Disney heroines whose eyes were larger than their wrists (“Are your eyes bigger than your wrists? And look at her waist! Where do you think she keeps her uterus? In her purse?”). Honestly? I doubt I would’ve done that with a son. Yet, boys grow up in the same distorted, commodified, misogynist culture as girls; the concern over porn, while valid, can distract from the damaging impact of mainstream entertainment. Remember that, unchecked, media consumption of any kind is associated with greater tolerance for sexual harassment, belief in rape myths, early sexual initiation, sexual risk-taking, a greater number of partners, and stereotyping of women. Boys, too, then, need a strong counternarrative to develop grounded, realistic perspectives on women, men, sex, and love. Frankly, without it, there is a chance that they won’t see women as fully human, and that they will view sex as something a female partner does for them and that they do to her. Start young, by offering little boys books, films, and other media featuring complex female protagonists. Take notice when women are absent or misrepresented on-screen or the playing field. Intervene, even if it annoys guys, to question how the media they consume presents gender roles, bodies (men’s as well as women’s), race, sex (is it valued or cheapened? Is there respect? Coercion? Consent?). Andrew Smiler suggests that while watching TV together, parents could periodically ask, “Would that really happen in real life?” “What is missing?” or “Who is missing?” That works whether characters are engaging in “romantic” behavior that could also be read as stalking, moving directly from kissing to intercourse in the span of fifteen seconds, or hooking up for the first time without any fumbling or awkwardness. One friend of mine told me she encourages her son to play his music in the car, but when she hears lyrics that are demeaning toward women or glorify violence or drugs, she turns it off and insists they talk about it. “We’ve never made it through more than about twenty seconds of a song,” she said wryly. Promote the Healthy and Name the Toxic

• From The City of God

  Books That Matter: The City of God › The gladiator revolt of Spartacus managed to sustain itself for several years as a hostile community in the heart of Italy itself. › Ninus, the mythical founder of Nineveh, was the first to suffer imperii cupiditate—lust of rule—and made Assyria in its day larger and greater than the Roman Empire itself. „ What Augustine establishes What Augustine establishes is not that is not that politics is crime, politics is crime, but that politics is but that politics is not not essentially different from crime essentially different from crime and vice versa. To and vice versa. To say that politics say that politics is nothing is nothing but criminal would be but criminal would be a cynical claim, possible only a cynical claim, possible only if if you imagine that politics you imagine that politics could be could be something something other than power-driven. other than power-driven. But Augustine refuses to imagine that recognition of political reality should cause outrage and disappointment and encourage a belief that some other sort of politics is possible. „ The second part of the attack is a critique of the rhetoric—of the ways that history and symbols, including religions, are used to obscure political realities. Augustine ruthlessly dissects the piety surrounding Roman patriotism, both its nostalgia for the glorious past and the myths and gods it creates to frame the past as a sign of divine favor. › The Romans assumed that their ancestors’ behavior was heroic and morally pure, from which they could judge the present and to which they could aspire. On the contrary, Augustine quotes Sallust’s belief that it was a mortal fear of Carthage that inspired Romans’ focused, ruthlessly self- sacrificial, and collegial behavior, not inherent virtue. 138

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  I cried, “Oh, don’t take Rupert. I’ll come get you and drive you to Henry’s.” “It’s too late to change plans. I told Rupert everything.” “Everything? That you and Hugo are still married?” “No! Don’t even say that out loud. I told Rupert I had heard from old friends that Hugo cannot pay his rent, and that I’m indebted to Hugo for his taking care of my family and me when we had nothing. I explained that I want to help Hugo financially when I get my diary published and Rupert said it was a good plan. Isn’t Rupert wonderful?” “Maybe now you could tell Rupert the truth about—” “No! But along those lines, I need your help with Henry.” “Of course,” I said, though I didn’t think she would need my help. I was convinced that the moment Henry saw her, he would be besotted again. “We have to prevent Henry from telling Rupert that I’m still married to Hugo,” she said urgently. “Does Henry know?” “Henry met Rupert eighteen years ago when we visited him in Big Sur, and our social circles here overlap so he’s probably heard that I’m married to Rupert. Would you believe Henry and Hugo are still friends and talk on the phone?” “But Henry will protect you, won’t he? I’m sure he’s still in love with you.” She gave an embarrassed laugh. “Oh, I don’t think so. And Henry is completely unpredictable. If he gets riled up he could say anything in front of Rupert.” “Then don’t bring Rupert!” I didn’t want Rupert standing there when the sparks flew between Anaïs and Henry. “I have to bring Rupert. He’s part of my whole life now,” she said with her uncanny ability to remain unperturbed by her contradictions. [image file=image_rsrc3R3.jpg] Rupert drove the Thunderbird with the top down. Anaïs wore a kerchief and kept the window rolled up on the passenger side while I sat on the rump seat, my long hair blowing into my eyes and mouth. Anaïs bent towards me to speak, the wind whipping away her words. “Remember, you need to help keep the discussion on track with Henry,” she told me. “I’ll do my best,” I sputtered through a mouthful of hair. She turned back to the road, leaving me to savor my anticipation of what would happen when Henry Miller opened the door and saw Anaïs in her new Rudi Gernreich dress. She would start to give Henry a buss on each cheek, and despite Rupert standing there, Henry would take her face in his hands and kiss her mouth, and she would respond. When Henry opened the door to his surprisingly conventional white ranch house, I saw a bald troll holding onto a walker, and my heart sank. Anaïs air-kissed his wrinkled, sagging cheeks.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Augustine’s rejection of Pelagius is doubly complex. First, there was the rivalry for the affections and attention of the well-connected Romans whose support Augustine craved so strongly throughout his career. At the same time, Augustine and his world had changed, and what was needed now was to bring official teaching into line with views that had evolved over time. The teachings of the younger Augustine that had shaped his vision of Christianity as a religion that gentlemen could share had evolved as he read scripture and as he found himself embroiled in the struggles of the African churches. The evolution of the Pelagian controversy over the last twenty years of Augustine’s life depended on the choices he made in 411–12, choices he could have made quite differently. The anti-Pelagian venture was an endless struggle for high principles with no prospect of success. Augustine failed to see that his doctrinal positions were unsustainable as a matter of pastoral practice and thus would be subject to attacks in his own lifetime and for centuries after, from the best-intentioned of his coreligionists. Jerome had shown the way here. Augustine rarely shows us how deeply conscious he was of the anti-Origenist theological wars of the early 400s, but he seems to have missed their main lesson, perhaps because Jerome was the persecuted, rather than the persecutor, in that case. But the “Origenist controversy,” like the “Pelagian controversy” was marked by the same willful creation of a polemical target by those with good intentions and high principles but insufficient detachment and objectivity. It ended with the same mainly counterproductive results.499 So Pelagius sailed away from Africa in 411; the aristocratic refugees from Rome sailed away as well; and the Donatists stayed behind. Augustine always wrote as if it were the other way around. The battles with Pelagianism that sapped Augustine’s energies for years are ones we will return to. THE SILENCE OF EMERITUS

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  When he was gone, no shrine and no cloud of miracle stories marked where he had walked. Was this his choice? The only miracle story his biographer tells isn’t much. While Augustine was dying, the story goes, a sick man was brought to him and Augustine was asked to lay his hand upon him to make him well. Augustine ventured what, for him, was almost a joke: if he had any power of this sort, he said, he would have used it on himself first. But then the man’s friend tells Augustine about a dream he had in which he heard a voice say to him, “Go to Bishop Augustine to have him lay hands on this man and he will recover.” When Augustine heard that, he did as he had been asked and the sick man went away healed. A fragment of divine power pushed its way through its (reluctant?) instrument, just that once. And then the performance was over. By many measures, Augustine died a failure. The barbarians were at the gates, literally. Invited to Africa by the Roman general Boniface to support his own ambitions, these eighty thousand barbarians (the number may well exaggerate) proved impossible to control. They threatened the whole sweep of Romanized north Africa from the straits of Gibraltar to Carthage and up into the highlands of Numidia. They landed far west of Augustine, in 429, and by the following August they were besieging the city where Augustine neared his end. He escaped to the afterlife before the city surrendered, but surrender it did, not long after. Nine more years passed until, in 439, the Vandal general Gaiseric entered Carthage and seized control of the province. Before Augustine could take to his deathbed, he had had to answer the bishops of his vicinity coming to ask whether they were obliged to stay at their posts as the enemy approached. His answer left them room to flee more or less honorably. The ones whose communities were not much more than fortified farmsteads were likely grateful to do so, while Augustine stayed where he was. His books escaped destruction, we know not how. The poignancy of that lonely death room, the isolation of the bishop, and the atmosphere of fading future are all carefully constructed by Possidius to achieve an effect. These barbarians offer a powerful narrative resolution to the life story of a saint. We know too easily, again today, what barbarians are and how they give us parts to play in a story larger than ourselves, innocent (because civilized!) victims of historical forces too vast to control. Augustine was not an innocent victim, but he knew a lot about escaping from experience into stories. His own deeds had smoothed the path for those barbarians and his ideas helped make it hard for his contemporaries, and for us, to see the barbarians as anything but bogeymen and heretics.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  There was no one else. Prolific writer, inspired imaginer of divine truths, powerful controversialist, Augustine was intellectually childless and left behind a depredated church and community. There had been would-be disciples, like Orosius and Consentius, but they embarrassed the master. The other defenders of Augustine in the generation after his death were invariably single-minded and unimaginative: Quodvultdeus, Marius Mercator, and Prosper of Aquitaine spoke up for the master’s most controverted ideas, and did so energetically, but their limitations outweighed their abilities. The “barbarians” were Augustine’s to answer for as well. They came to Africa at the invitation of a political ally of Augustine’s (but Augustine had gone cool on the alliance and thus weakened it), as pawns in a chess game that went bad for Augustine’s party. They succeeded in destroying the church to which Augustine had given his career. The catholicism that Augustine had helped invent and sustain was tossed out bodily by the Arian churchmen the barbarians brought with them. Augustine’s own basilica they made their own, and their burials are the ones we find traces of now. The story we are told by his party is that a hundred years would lapse until orthodox armies from Constantinople dislodged the African barbarians and restored the religion that Augustine preached. Restore it, that is, until the next wave of “barbarians,” this time Islamic invaders from the east, came to uproot it once again in the seventh century, sweeping back east to west over Augustine’s country by about the year 700. But settled Christianity would not have been so easily overturned and eventually uprooted in Africa had Augustine himself not led an astonishingly successful ecclesiastical putsch of his own against the well-rooted native Christian tradition. In the name of catholicism he brought the full and clumsy might of Roman government to bear on compelling his coreligionists to sing his tune, the government’s tune, in his churches. The mass of believers complied, but the effect was in the long run disastrous. The anti-Pelagian quarrels were of little importance in comparison with the struggle close to home, in which the state-supported puppet church Augustine represented imposed its name and will on recalcitrant believers. By the end of his life, Augustine had very quietly rewritten his original views about the church to which he belonged in order to find a place where his intellectually ambitious practice could live side by side with a whole raft of behaviors that he had once boldly called “superstition.” It was too little, too late. WHEN SAINTS DIE Inventing saints took a long time. What began as a courtesy title became eventually a brand name, handed out carefully after only the most rigorous scrutiny. The modern formal process of canonization does not date back before the tenth century and the title depended before that on the spontaneous voice of public acclaim.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  His sainthood remains alive most visibly in the interest that people give to the way he lived his life. The power of his Confessions has assured a lively interest. Contemporary readers who come to Augustine most often take up the Confessions first, which is remarkable enough testimony to that work’s power. If readers of the last generation pick up even one book about Augustine, that first book is almost always a biography, and a particular biography—Peter Brown’s classic Augustine of Hippo (1967).617 Brown’s book, marvelous, imperfect, and enduring, was the first modern biography and easily outclassed all competitors. Whatever Augustine taught and did, he is reduced by this preference for life-story-telling to a more ordinary saint than he really is. Having achieved great repute, he is the more readily trivialized. Since he became the first saint known to have his own website (since 1994, when this writer became his webmaster), he has attracted a fairly steady flow of questions and inquiries. Many are quite specific and studious, even scholarly, but the commonest are more superficial. That he was born and lived in Africa leaves many readers, in an age of renewed consciousness of the troubled history of African relations with the developed world, wondering, “Was Augustine black?”618 No less rooted in contemporary concerns is the commonest doctrinal question, a search for a particular quotation: Did Augustine really say the benevolent ecumenical words recommending “in essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity”? No, he did not, but many have heard he did and very much hope he did, seeking an august, ancient, and improbable patronage for a contemporary predilection for ecumenism.619 What the dying saint thought, what he did, what was of his own doing, what was that of his friends, and what was that of those of us who have read and written of him since—these forces have turned him into a celebrity, known for being known, an object of curiosity, a pawn in our contemporary conversations. He saw us coming, deploring “a tribe eager to know about another man’s life, too lazy to amend their own.”620 Trivialization is not the only risk his future faces. The place of the churches that have been fondest of him is changing in our world, and those churches themselves have been reinventing themselves in ways that need less of him or figures like him. With them or without them, his future begins to shimmer uncertainly.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  My big weekend is approaching – and by “big” I mean that I have Friday night until Sunday afternoon kid-free – and I try to pin him down to make plans. He is vague about his schedule and finally writes a heartfelt text that he doesn’t think he should see me, that it’s unwise for him to invest further time and feelings in me when it seems unlikely that he will get what he wants out of this relationship. He wants a wife – not me as his wife, but not me if I don’t have the potential to someday be a wife. He says I should call him if I want to discuss it, but I don’t. I thank him for being straightforward and kind, tell him I have loved our time together and I hope he soon finds the lucky woman he can commit to. I feel a pang of disappointment and loss that takes me by surprise. Though we didn’t see much of each other, we had forged a strong connection and it had been reassuring to know there was someone out there who was keeping track of me, who felt invested in me. Will I ever meet another man as gentle and decent as this one? Truthfully, it seems unlikely, but aside from abandoning my life here in the city, tantalizing as that may seem, the writing on the wall is pretty clear: it’s time to move on. #4 has been equally dodgy about making plans for my free weekend, though he and I have only been in touch sporadically. Finally, I text him that I am anxious to cement plans so that I can maximize this rare opportunity of kid-free time, and he texts me back that he is sorry but it’s his family’s busy season at the orchard and he has to help. “I enjoy spending time with you, but I don’t want to chase after someone who doesn’t want to be chased by me. I know you’re busy, but I feel like you’re blowing me off and I would rather you just say so straight out so I stop suggesting we make plans. No hard feelings, I just want to be clear,” I text him. Later in the afternoon, my phone rings and I am surprised to see that it is him as we have never before spoken on the phone. I am walking in the door with Georgia after school, and I take the phone into my shower stall and close the glass door behind me for privacy. “Yeah, so hey listen, I got your text and I don’t want you to feel like I’m blowing you off. I really like being with you, it’s just that it felt like it was getting serious too quickly,” he says.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  The explanations, which she bestowed on little Johann in return were suitable for awakening in him the idea that all his contemporaries were heavily afflicted with scrofula and "bad juices" - only he was not. And that didn't exactly help to strengthen his already lacking trust and impartiality. Senator Buddenbrook knew nothing of such details; but he saw that the development of his son, by nature and as a result of external influences, was by no means, for the time being, taking the direction which he wished to give it. If he had taken his education into his own hands, worked on his mind daily and hourly be able! But he didn't have the time for it, and he had to watch with pain how occasional attempts to do so failed miserably and only made the relationship between father and child colder and stranger. He had an image in mind that he longed to model his son: the image of Hanno's great-grandfather, as he himself knew him as a boy - a bright head, jovial, simple, humorous and strong... Couldn't he become like that? Was that impossible? And why?... He could at least have suppressed and banished the music, which alienated the boy from practical life, was certainly not useful to his physical health and was absorbing his mental faculties! Didn't his dreamy nature sometimes border on the insane? One afternoon, three quarters of an hour before dinner, which was at four o'clock, Hanno went down to the first floor alone. He had been practicing on the grand piano for a while and was now idle in the living room. He sat half reclining on the chaise longue, fumbling with the sailor's knot on his chest, and as his eyes slid sideways without searching for anything, he saw an open leather folder on his mother's dainty walnut desk - the folder with the family papers. He rested his elbow on the back pad and his chin in his hand and looked at things from afar for a while. No doubt Papa had occupied himself with it after second breakfast today and left it for further use. One was stuck in the folder, loose sheets lying outside had been weighed down with a metal ruler for the time being, Hanno slipped carelessly off the ottoman and went to the desk. The book was opened at the point where in the manuscripts of several of his ancestors and finally in his father's the entire family tree of the Buddenbrooks was arranged with brackets and rubrics in clear data. Kneeling with one leg on the writing chair, his softly wavy light brown hair propped in the palm of his hand, Hanno examined it Manuscript a little to one side, with the dull critical and a little contemptuous seriousness of complete indifference, and let his free hand play with Mama's pen, which was half gold and half ebony.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  As I listen to his tales of America I see how absurd it is to expect of Gandhi that miracle which will deroute the trend of destiny. India’s enemy is not England, but America. India’s enemy is the time spirit, the hand which cannot be turned back. Nothing will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole world. America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit. He thinks the Americans are a very gullible people. He tells me about the credulous souls who succored him there—the Quakers, the Unitarians, the Theosophists, the New Thoughters, the Seventh-day Adventists, etc. He knew where to sail his boat, this bright young man. He knew how to make the tears come to his eyes at the right moment; he knew how to take up a collection, how to appeal to the minister’s wife, how to make love to the mother and daughter at the same time. To look at him you would think him a saint. And he is a saint, in the modern fashion; a contaminated saint who talks in one breath of love, brotherhood, bathtubs, sanitation, efficiency, etc. The last night of his sojourn in Paris is given up to “the fucking business.” He has had a full program all day—conferences, cablegrams, interviews, photographs for the newspapers, affectionate farewells, advice to the faithful, etc., etc. At dinner time he decides to lay aside his troubles. He orders champagne with the meal, he snaps his fingers at the garçon and behaves in general like the boorish little peasant that he is. And since he has had a bellyful of all the good places he suggests now that I show him something more primitive. He would like to go to a very cheap place, order two or three girls at once. I steer him along the Boulevard de la Chapelle, warning him all the while to be careful of his pocketbook. Around Aubervilliers we duck into a cheap dive and immediately we’ve got a flock of them on our hands. In a few minutes he’s dancing with a naked wench, a huge blonde with creases in her jowls. I can see her ass reflected a dozen times in the mirrors that line the room—and those dark, bony fingers of his clutching her tenaciously. The table is full of beer glasses, the mechanical piano is wheezing and gasping. The girls who are unoccupied are sitting placidly on the leather benches, scratching themselves peacefully just like a family of chimpanzees. There is a sort of subdued pandemonium in the air, a note of repressed violence, as if the awaited explosion required the advent of some utterly minute detail, something microscopic but thoroughly unpremeditated, completely unexpected.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  True idleness—ski-instructing, for example—was frowned upon in her family, but there was no need to hazard an office job. Generations of Caseys had pursued art collecting. They had donated a great number of cubist works, selected by Libbets’s savvy grandmother, to the Museum of Modern Art. The Caseys had also established the reputations of some nineteenth-century American painters—Eakins, Childe Hassam. Collecting was a more than adequate vocation. As were any of the arts-related pastimes. Her mother was a docent at the Metropolitan Museum, and her various older sisters and brothers, all of them out in the world now, were art historians and gallery owners. As long as Libbets kept painting, she was in good shape. The doormen at 930 Park let Paul up without buzzing. He suspected that they, too, had enjoyed her company for a joint or a beer. Libbets was everybody’s friend. Her comportment was flawless. She knew the kids who hung out in the Central Park band shell; she knew Adam Purple, the guy who shoveled horse shit in the park for his garden downtown; she knew David Cassidy, whose father lived in the building. The doormen at 930 had long hair and shifty smiles, the smiles of men uncomfortable with the way their fetching-and-carrying jobs stretched out in front of them. These countercultural doormen knew the difference between their station and Libbets’s, and they were ready for the first sign of condescension, just as they cherished the notion, like Libbets did, that the rich were just people, too. They could all share some dope. It was cool. So one of the doormen asked Paul if there was a party. Paul shook his head, mumbled. He skidded out of that scrape and into the next one. The elevator opened right into the Caseys’ foyer. They had the entire fourth floor of 930 Park. Paul set his blazer on a chair in the front hall. His heart raced with the recollection of Libbets’s peasant dresses, with the smell of the skin lotion she used, with the lopsided way she smiled. Except for the dim stutter of the television down the hall, there was an austere stillness to the premises. The foyer was carpeted with antique Orientals and decorated with pre-Columbian urns and with small American impressionist paintings by artists recognizable from any day-camp art-appreciation course. The elevator slid shut behind him. Libbets called out cheerfully. She came running out of the den. She slid, in stocking feet, across a bare strip of parquet. —Excellent, she said. We were waiting! We? We were waiting? The revelation of that horrible plural struck Paul like a blow in the solar plexus. We? And yet he followed his hostess. Sure enough, in the den, he found Francis Chamberlain Davenport IV, cleaning an ounce of dope on an open copy of Six Crises by Richard M. Nixon. All hope drained from Paul. —You oughta read this, Hood, Davenport said distractedly. All you need to know about the travails of life.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  Instead of kissing her mouth, Henry shoved a snapshot in our faces. “Look at my new girlfriend.” He grinned, sunlight through the paned window of the front door shining on his bald pate. “That’s Hoki. She’s brought me back to life!” Rupert said, “She’s very beautiful.” Anaïs said, “She’s very young.” “Twenty-seven,” Henry leered, his face crumpling like a squashed piece of paper. Goosebumps of revulsion crept up my arms as I imagined his young girlfriend touching that old man’s wizened body. As if reading my mind, Henry said, “She won’t touch me because she thinks, at seventy-five, I’m too old for her. But I’ll win her. I won’t give up. All for love, heh, Anaïs?” “Until you win her,” Anaïs said under her breath. “You think I’m deaf, but I heard that.” His troll eyes twinkled. “What has happened to your faith in the inspiration of Eros, Anaïs? What does it matter how it ends, heh? It’s all the insanely beautiful, hellish and holy chase, doncha know?” Anaïs made a beeline to a couch and chairs and settled there. We all followed, Henry shuffling on his walker. He lowered himself into his armchair where a profusion of books and his dashed-off watercolors covered a side table. “So Henry,” Anaïs began, “I’m here because the last time we corresponded you begged me to let you pay me back.” “Pay you back for what?” he snarled. “For all the help I gave you at the beginning of your career.” He immediately softened. “Yes, yes, of course. Anything, Anaïs, I owe you.” Grinning lasciviously, he turned to Rupert. “She gave me everything she had, doncha know? Everything.” He hummed to himself and added, “Even her typewriter.” He tried to raise himself from the chair. “Do you need money?” His hands went to his pockets as if looking for his wallet, a clown doing mime. His round face looked eager as a child’s. “Give me the chance to repay you.” “Thank you. You are a good friend, Henry.” Anaïs smiled. “What I need from you is your help in getting my diary published.” “Anything I can do! I’ll call Barney Rosset at Grove. I always said that diary was your ticket to fame.” His sentences trailed off into the introspective hum that Anaïs had described in the diary pages she’d let me read about her affair with Henry. “But you’ll make peanuts from royalties, Anaïs, doncha know, hmm, hmm. Pea-nuts!” “They must be paying you something, Henry; this is an expensive house.” Anaïs looked around. I could tell she was not impressed with its bourgeois conventionality. “Yeah, running it is expensive, too. And so are my children, and my ex-wives, and Hoki’s new Jag, and all the hangers-on who come here needing to be fed. Sell your papers to a university, Anaïs, that’s where you get the dough.” “I tried that.” “No luck? Those white-gloved special collectors at UCLA bought everything from me. They should pay for your diaries ’cause I’m in ’em.”

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Governor Abbott was there and said a few kind words of the sort that might be said of anyone not convicted of a felony. The deceased and the governor represented different parties, but L.D. thought it a smart move on Abbott’s part to plant a flag in the district, which had been solidly Democratic since the Civil War, but after Trump the chickens were out of the coop. At least, L.D. hoped so. The governor slyly called Walter a “friend and occasional ally,” overlooking votes that might be inconvenient to recall in the face of the fierce widow in the front row with the folded flag of Texas in her lap. Walter might be dead, but his influence lingered. After the eulogies—there must have been seven or eight of them, all on the same themes, good family man, selfless public servant, little truth in any of it—L.D. got in line to toss a few desiccated clods into Walter’s grave. He noticed old Ben Fortson hobbling in his direction so he moved off a bit to avoid him, but Ben would not be dodged. “My oh my oh my, looky who’s here,” Ben said, his eyes alight with deviltry. “Good day to you, Judge.” “You come all this way for Walter Dunne?” “He was a good man.” “True or not, he’s no use to you now,” Ben observed. “You’re a harsh old bastard, Ben.” Ben’s laugh detoured into a dry cough. “I seen you casting your eyes over this lot,” he said when he recovered. “I mighta been,” L.D. allowed. “What’s it to you?” “Walter’s not even in the ground and you’re shopping for his replacement.” “Not shopping. Poking around, like.” “Waste of your time.” Ben spat into the dust, the only moisture the soil had experienced in months. “You oughter run over to Alpine, talk to the mayor, he’s got an appetite for higher office, they tell me. Sees hisself as governor one day.” “He’s about as likely to get a blow job from the Queen of England.” L.D. indicated a portly man with slicked-back hair, dyed black, and jowls like a Great Dane. “What about Morales? Big family, Chamber of Commerce…” “Cartel money,” Ben said under his breath. A prosperous-looking figure was shaking hands with everybody in reach. “That would be who?” L.D. asked. “Charlie Ford. Owns the bank in Marfa. Beats his wife.” L.D. sighed. He had never expected this to be easy, especially out here in ground zero of nowhere. These people didn’t seem entirely real to him, more like actors with strong features, rounded up and dressed appropriately for a scene in which L.D. discovers the next Ronald Reagan. How likely was that? And they certainly felt the same about him, a stock character from the Big City in a gray Italian suit who happens to drop in, a visit to the zoo. He even had the pocket square, a true dude. “A female would be nice,” he said. “Keep up with the times.”

• From Going Clear (2013)

  The auctioneer stood on a podium over the sawdust arena, spitting out numbers in a cascade of sixteenth notes as the ring manager paraded an emaciated steer in front of a couple dozen ranchers, who were more likely to be sellers than buyers. The animal and the audience shared a sleepy acceptance regarding their destiny, accounting for the submerged quality of the proceedings. Too many folks like Sonny had made the mistake of waiting for rain that never came. Now they were unloading their herds in a hurry, capsizing the market. The land wasn’t the only thing that had dried up; money had moved on, followed by hope. West Texas waged eternal war on optimists. Powdery motes swam in the air. Sonny spotted Doris at the top of the bleachers, so he hiked himself up the stairs. She had lines in her face that would do the Marlboro Man proud. Used to being the object of gossip just short of scandal, Doris surrounded herself with a harsh sense of humor like an electric fence, which kept the critics at a respectful distance. She ran the café in Alpine. She was a character. She was also Sonny’s mother. “What are you doing here?” Doris asked as Sonny sat down. “I might ask the same of you.” “I just came to ogle the boys,” Doris said, flicking the ash off her cigarette. “Look at the ass on that one.” Sonny didn’t respond to that. It could be a joke or she could be dead serious. “You got any stock left?” Doris asked. “We’re hanging on to the calves. Hope for better next year.” “Ed put down three heifers,” Doris said. “Right out in the field. Too weak to get in the trailer.” “Really, Mom, why are you here?” “I’m seeing Bud Schotz,” she said, indicating the auctioneer, Joe Frank’s dad. Buddy Holly glasses and a jaw like a doorknob. “Is that really true?” “We’re an item,” she declared. “We’ve been seen together.” “Well, I guess that’s good news.” “You guess right. He’s a man of means, and, you know, still functioning below the belt buckle.” “Mom, stop.” “Tender little ears you got.” Sonny had a kid sister, Marlene, who had long since packed up and moved off to Bangor, Maine, which if you look at the map is about the farthest point in the continental United States from Presidio County. So the parenting duties, in the sense of taking care of Doris, not the other way around, rested entirely on Sonny. “Any buyers here?” “Mostly the slaughterhouse. Fatso in the flat-brim buckaroo.” Doris indicated a corpulent individual down front. “Keep your voice down, Mom. He’s looking at you.” “Horrors.”

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  There is a road that seems much less thorny for the woman, that of masochism. When one works, struggles, and takes responsibilities and risks during the day, it is relaxing to abandon oneself at night to vigorous caprices. In love or naive, the woman in fact is often happy to annihilate herself for the benefit of a tyrannical will. But she still has to feel truly dominated. It is not easy for a woman who lives daily among men to believe in the unconditional supremacy of males. I have been told about the case of a not really masochistic but very “feminine” woman, that is, one who deeply appreciated the pleasure of abdication in masculine arms; from the age of seventeen, she had had several husbands and numerous lovers, all of whom gave her great satisfaction; having successfully carried out a difficult project where she managed men, she complained of having become frigid: her once-blissful submission became impossible for her because she had become used to dominating males and because their prestige had vanished. When the woman begins to doubt men’s superiority, their claims can only diminish her esteem for them. In bed, at moments where the man feels he is most fiercely male, the very fact of his miming virility makes him look infantile to knowing eyes: he is merely warding off the old castration complex, the shadow of his father, or some other fantasy. It is not always out of pride that the mistress refuses to give in to her lover’s caprices: she wants to interact with an adult who is living a real moment of his life, not a little boy fooling himself. The masochistic woman is particularly disappointed: a maternal, exasperated, or indulgent complaisance is not the abdication she dreams of. Either she herself will also have to make do with meaningless games, pretending to be dominated and subjugated, or she will run after men considered “superior” in the hope of coming across a master, or else she will become frigid.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  One might say that in general women do not make such a fuss; they seize the occasion without much questioning, and then they make do with their pride and sensuality. That is true. But it is also true that they bury in the secret of their hearts many disappointments, humiliations, regrets, and grievances whose equivalents are unknown—on the whole—to men. The man will almost surely get the benefit of pleasure from a more or less unsuccessful affair; the woman might well not profit from it at all; even if indifferent, she politely lends herself to lovemaking when the decisive moment arrives. The lover might prove to be impotent, and she will suffer from having compromised herself in a ludicrous escapade; if she does not reach arousal, then she feels “had,” deceived; if she is satisfied, she will want to hold on to her lover for a longer time. She is rarely completely sincere when she claims to envisage nothing more than a short-term adventure just for pleasure, because pleasure, far from freeing her, binds her; separation, even a so-called friendly one, wounds her. It is far more rare to hear a woman talk good-naturedly about a former lover than a man about his mistresses.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  But the very circumstances that orient the woman toward creation also constitute obstacles she will often be unable to overcome. When she decides to paint or write just to fill the emptiness of her days, paintings and essays will be treated as “ladies’ work”; she will devote little time or care to them, and they will be worth about as much. To compensate for the flaws in her existence, often the woman at menopause feverishly takes up the brush or pen: it is late; without serious training, she will never be more than an amateur. But even if she begins quite young, she rarely envisages art as serious work; used to idleness, never having experienced in her life the austere necessity of a discipline, she will not be capable of a steady and persevering effort, she will not compel herself to acquire a solid technique; she balks at the thankless and solitary trials and errors of work that is never exhibited, that has to be destroyed and done over again a hundred times; and as from childhood she was taught to cheat in order to please, she hopes to get by with a few ruses. This is what Marie Bashkirtseff admits. “Yes, I don’t take the trouble to paint, I watched myself today, I cheat.” The woman easily plays at working, but she does not work; believing in the magic virtues of passivity, she confuses conjurations and acts, symbolic gestures and effective behavior; she disguises herself as a Beaux-Arts student, she arms herself with her arsenal of brushes; planted in front of her easel, she allows her gaze to wander from the blank canvas to her mirror; but the bouquet of flowers, the bowl of apples, do not appear on their own on the canvas. Seated at her desk, musing over vague stories, the woman acquires a peaceful alibi in imagining she is a writer: but she must at some point make signs on the blank page; they have to have a meaning in the eyes of others. So the trickery is exposed. To please one need only to create mirages: but a work of art is not a mirage, it is a solid object; to construct it, one must know one’s craft. It is not only thanks to her gifts or personality that Colette became a great writer; her pen was often her livelihood, and she demanded of it the careful work that a good artisan demands of his tool; from Claudine to La naissance du jour (Break of Day), the amateur became professional: the progress brilliantly shows the advantages of a strict apprenticeship. Most women, though, do not understand the problems that their desire for communication poses: and this is what largely explains their laziness.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  This reasonable modesty is what has above all defined the limits of feminine talent until now. Many women have eluded—and they increasingly elude—the traps of narcissism and faux wonderment; but no woman has ever thrown prudence to the wind to try to emerge beyond the given world. In the first place, there are, of course, many who accept society just as it is; they are par excellence the champions of the bourgeoisie since they represent the most conservative element of this threatened class; with well-chosen adjectives, they evoke the refinements of a civilization “of quality”; they extol the bourgeois ideal of happiness and disguise their class interests under the banner of poetry; they orchestrate the mystification intended to persuade women to “remain women”; old houses, parks and kitchen gardens, picturesque grandparents, mischievous children, laundry, jams and jellies, family gatherings, clothes, salons, balls, suffering but exemplary wives, the beauty of devotion and sacrifice, small disappointments and great joys of conjugal love, dreams of youth, mature resignation—women novelists from England, France, America, Canada, and Scandinavia have exploited these themes to the utmost; they have attained glory and wealth but have not enriched our vision of the world. Far more interesting are the women insurgents who have indicted this unjust society; protest literature can give rise to strong and sincere works; George Eliot drew from her revolt a detailed and dramatic vision of Victorian England; however, as Virginia Woolf shows, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and George Eliot had to spend so much negative energy freeing themselves from external constraints that they arrived out of breath at the point where the major masculine writers were starting out; they have little strength left to benefit from their victory and break all the ties that bind them: for example, they lack the irony, the nonchalance, of a Stendhal or his calm sincerity. Nor have they had the wealth of experience of a Dostoevsky, a Tolstoy: it is why the great book Middlemarch does not equal War and Peace; Wuthering Heights, in spite of its stature, does not have the scope of Brothers Karamazov. Today, women already have less trouble asserting themselves; but they have not totally overcome the age-old specification that confines them in their femininity. Lucidity, for example, is a conquest they are justly proud of but with which they are a little too quickly satisfied. The fact is that the traditional woman is a mystified consciousness and an instrument of mystification; she tries to conceal her dependence from herself, which is a way of consenting to it; to denounce this dependence is already a liberation; cynicism is a defense against humiliation and shame: it is the first stage of assuming responsibility. In trying to be lucid, women writers render the greatest service to the cause of women; but—without generally realizing it—they remain too attached to serving this cause to adopt, in front of the whole world, the disinterested attitude that opens up wider horizons. When they pull away the veils of illusion and lies, they think they have done enough: nonetheless, this negative daring still leaves us with an enigma; for truth itself is ambiguity, depth, mystery: after its presence is acknowledged, it must be thought, re-created. It is all well and good not to be duped: but this is where it all begins; the woman exhausts her courage in dissipating mirages, and she stops in fear at the threshold of reality. This is why, for example, there are sincere and endearing women’s autobiographies: but none can compare with Confessions or Memoirs of an Egotist. We women are still too preoccupied with seeing clearly to try to penetrate other shadows beyond that clarity.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I cared less about the fact that Bob was gone than about the disruption his departure would inevitably cause. He was just the latest casualty in a long line of failed paternal candidates. There was Steve, a soft-spoken man with a temperament to match. I used to pray that Mom would marry Steve because he was nice and had a good job. But they broke up, and she moved on to Chip, a local police officer. Chip was kind of a hillbilly himself: He loved cheap beer, country music, and catfish fishing, and we got along well until he, too, was gone. One of the worst parts, honestly, was that Bob’s departure would further complicate the tangled web of last names in our family. Lindsay was a Lewis (her dad’s last name), Mom took the last name of whichever husband she was married to, Mamaw and Papaw were Vances, and all of Mamaw’s brothers were Blantons. I shared a name with no one I really cared about (which bothered me already), and with Bob gone, explaining why my name was J.D. Hamel would require a few additional awkward moments. “Yeah, my legal father’s last name is Hamel. You haven’t met him because I don’t see him. No, I don’t know why I don’t see him.” Of all the things that I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures. To her credit, Mom had avoided abusive or neglectful partners, and I never felt mistreated by any of the men she brought into our home. But I hated the disruption. And I hated how often these boyfriends would walk out of my life just as I’d begun to like them. Lindsay, with the benefit of age and wisdom, viewed all of the men skeptically. She knew that at some point they’d be gone. With Bob’s departure, I had learned the same lesson. Mom brought these men into our lives for the right reasons. She often wondered aloud whether Chip or Bob or Steve made good “father figures.” She would say: “He takes you fishing, which is really good” or “It’s important to learn something about masculinity from someone closer to your age.” When I heard her screaming at one of them, or weeping on the floor after an especially intense argument, or when I saw her mired in despair after a breakup, I felt guilty that she was going through this for my sake. After all, I thought, Papaw was plenty good as a father figure. I promised her after each breakup that we would be okay or that we’d get over this together or (echoing Mamaw) that we didn’t need any damned men. I know Mom’s motives were not entirely selfless: She (like all of us) was motivated by the desire for love and companionship. But she was looking out for us, too. The road to hell, however, is paved with good intentions.