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 Blue Nights (2011)

  I feel impelled to locate, by way of establishing at least one survivor of the period, a recent photograph of Sophia Loren. I type her name into Google Images. I find such a photograph: Sophia Loren arriving at some kind of publicity event, one of those red-carpet arrivals during which the PR people hover close, alerting the photographers to the approach of the celebrity. As I check the caption on the photograph I notice in passing that Sophia Loren was born in 1934, the same year in which I myself was born. I am spellbound: Sophia Loren, too, is seventy-five years old. Sophia Loren is seventy-five years old and no one on that red carpet, to my knowledge, is yet suggesting that she is making an inadequate adjustment to aging. This entirely meaningless discovery floods me with restored hope, a revived sense of the possible. 35When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not. One day we are turning the pages of whatever has arrived in the day’s mail with real enthusiasm—maybe it is Vogue, maybe it is Foreign Affairs, whatever it is we are intensely interested, pleased to have this handbook to keeping up, this key to staying alive—yet the next day we are walking uptown on Madison past Barney’s and Armani or on Park past the Council on Foreign Relations and we are not even glancing at their windows. One day we are looking at the Magnum photograph of Sophia Loren at the Christian Dior show in Paris in 1968 and thinking yes, it could be me, I could wear that dress, I was in Paris that year; a blink of the eye later we are in one or another doctor’s office being told what has already gone wrong, why we will never again wear the red suede sandals with the four-inch heels, never again wear the gold hoop earrings, the enameled beads, never now wear the dress Sophia Loren is wearing. The sun damage inflicted when we swam off the raft in our twenties against all advice is only now surfacing (we were told not to burn, we were told what would happen, we were told to wear sunscreen, we ignored all warnings): melanoma, squamous cell, long hours now spent watching the dermatologist carve out the carcinomas with the names we do not want to hear. Long hours now spent getting the intravenous infusions of the medication that promises to replace the bone lost to aging. Long hours now spent getting the intravenous infusions and wondering why the Vitamin D we thought we were accumulating by not wearing sunscreen failed to realize its bone-building potential.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  And yet human society has not been reconstituted in accordance with the principles of Jesus Christ. In the first place, it is necessary to remind ourselves that Christian writers who describe the influence of Christianity on human life are always tempted to emphasize the contrast between heathenism and Christian society by selecting the darkest aspects of the former and the brightest sides of the latter. The witticisms of heathen satirists and the sombre invectives of Christian moralists are quoted to characterize heathen life. But if some socialist historian of the twenty-fifth century should ransack the files of our comic papers and of our “muck-raking” magazines, what an appalling, unrelieved, and unfair picture he would get of society under our individualistic régime! On the other hand, in describing Christian society we are apt to assume that Christian theory was identical with Christian practice; that the declamations of some ancient Christian rhetorician were sober scientific estimates; and that the highly moral edicts of Christian emperors were enforced better than the highly moral laws of Kansas or New York. We are apt, also, to forget that the moral force of Christianity was usually only one factor in producing such a change as the abolition of slavery or piracy, and that over against the benign influences of the Church must be set the malign and divisive influences which she created by persecuting zeal, intellectual intolerance, or religious wars. In short, we must soberly face the fact that a good many deductions have to be made from the popular panegyrics, and that the Church has not accomplished all that is often claimed for her. In the next place, the social effects which are usually enumerated do not constitute a reconstruction of society on a Christian basis, but were mainly a suppression of some of the most glaring evils in the social system of the time. For instance, amid the incessant feuds of the Middle Ages the Church for a short time and within a limited area succeeded in imposing the Truce of God and so giving the harassed people a chance to breathe. In our own time it has aided in mitigating the suffering entailed by war through the Red Cross conventions and otherwise. But it has never yet turned more than a fragment of its moral force against war as such. The Church is rendering some service to-day in opposing child labor and the sweat-shop system, which are among the culminating atrocities of the wages system, but its conscience has not at all awakened to the wrongfulness of the wages system as a whole, on which our industry rests. Thus, in general, the Church has often rendered valuable aid by joining the advanced public conscience of any period in its protest against some single intolerable evil, but it has accepted as inevitable the general social system under which the world was living at the time, and has not undertaken any thoroughgoing social reconstruction in accordance with Christian principles.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  She forgave this passing acquaintance his silliness, and blamed him only for having failed to please her. In her memory — that of a healthy woman with a forgetful body — Monsieur Roland was now only a powerful animal, slightly ridiculous and, when it came to the point, so very clumsy. Lea would now have denied that, one rainy evening when the showers were falling in fragrance on the rosegeraniums, a flood of blinding tears had served to blot out Monsieur Roland behind the image of Cheri. This brief encounter had left Lea unembarrassed and unregretful. In the villa she had taken at Cambo, the ‘idiot’ and his frolicking old mother would have been made just as welcome as before. They could have gone on enjoying the well-arranged meals, the rocking-chairs on the wooden balcony, all the creature comforts that Lea dispensed with such justifiable pride. But the idiot had felt sore and gone away, leaving Lea to the attentions of a stiff, handsome officer, greying at the temples, who aspired to marriage with ‘Madame de Lonval.’ Our years, our fortunes, the taste we both have for independence and society, doesn’t everything show that we were destined for each other? * murmured the colonel, who still kept his slim waist. She laughed, and enjoyed the company of this dry, dapper man, who ate well and knew how to hold his liquor. He mistook her feelings and he read into the lovely blue eyes, and the trustful, lingering smiles of his hostess, the acceptance he was expecting. The end of their dawning friendship was marked by a decisive gesture on her part: one she regretted in her heart of hearts and for which she was honest enough to accept the blame. “It’s my own fault. One should never treat a Colonel Ypoustegue, descendant of an ancient Basque family, as one would treat a Monsieur Roland. I’ve never given anyone such a snub. All the same, it would have been gentlemanly, and intelligent too, if he had come back as usual the next day in his dogcart, to smoke his cigar, meet the two old girls, and pull their legs.” She failed to understand that a middle-aged man could accept his dismissal, but not certain glances — glances appraising his physique, comparing him in that respect so unmistakably with another, unknown and invisible. L6a, caught in his sudden kiss, had subjected him to the searching, formidable gaze of a woman who knows exactly where to find the tell-tale marks of age. From the dry, wellcared-for hands, ribbed with veins and tendons, her glance rose to the pouched chin and furrowed brows, returning cruelly to the mouth entrapped between double lines of inverted commas. Whereupon all the aristocratic refinement of the ‘Baroness de Lonval’ collapsed in an ‘ Oh, la la,’ so insulting, so explicit, so common, that the handsome figure of Colonel Ypoustegue passed through her door for the last time.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  But our age is so drunk with the love of money that anything which does not pan out in cold cash has to take a back seat. Our newspapers constantly speak of college professors and ministers in a tone of patronizing condescension. The salaries of teachers are pitifully inadequate when compared with their value to the community. They turn boys and girls into nobler men and women; a successful writer of advertisements may turn a lie into dollars; clearly he deserves the higher pay. There have been times when the community had a truer judgment of comparative values and gave its spiritual leaders veneration and love. Our commercial system has begotten a fierce competitive thirst for wealth. It has concentrated all minds on money, and accordingly all callings which serve the intellectual and spiritual life have dropped in the relative importance and honor assigned to them. The ministry is one of them. It has lost its best perquisites. Most ministers are proletarians. They live from hand to mouth on their wages like other wage-earners and have no share in the wealth-producing capital of the nation. They may not share in the class-consciousness of the wage-workers, but they do share in their sufferings. They, too, know the bitterness of hunting for a job and finding a long line of applicants ahead of them. Their tenure, too, has become insecure; what used to be a life-position has become a rapid shifting. Committees naturally tend to use the same methods in hiring or dismissing a minister which are used in hiring or “sacking” any other employee. Ministers, too, find that old men are not wanted, and that when the buoyancy of their youth has been used up, they are put aside with no provision for their age. They, too, find that the trusts can advance prices much more easily than the wage-worker can advance his wage. Thus the minister is dragged down with his class, even though he does not recognize that he belongs to that class. Ill health, changes of belief, painful experiences in the pastorate, or inability to secure a position often make it seem desirable to a minister to earn his living in some other way. He casts his eye wistfully toward other professions. If there were an economical organization of the working ability of the community and a brisk demand for men, he might find an opportunity. If the labor market is overstocked, especially with elderly men, he finds himself shut up to the ministry and resumes his work there; but now no longer with the old sense of free dedication, but with the consciousness of economic compulsion. If a man knows that he can leave, he may not want to leave. If he knows that he never can leave, he may yearn to leave and pull his oar like a galley-slave. For the spirit of the ministry it is desirable that the door of exit shall be wide open.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The organizing ability which might have reconstituted social life was expended on the organization of the hierarchy and the monastic orders. The State is the organization through which men cooperate for the larger social ends. If men conceive of political duties as a high religious service to man and God, the State can be a powerful agent in the bettering of human life. As long as the Church was in opposition to the State, the Church denied that the functions of the State had any sacredness and deterred its members from entering political service. But even when the Church and the State had entered into a compact of friendship, the Church did not infuse the moral vigor and enthusiasm into the political life which it might have imparted. It turned aside many of the ablest and choicest spirits to the monastic life and to hierarchical careers. It has often been said that when the organization of the Empire was tottering to its fall, a new social edifice was rising in the organization of the Church. But the question may fairly be asked if the Church did not hasten the fall of the Empire by draining off so much of the best strength from civil life and using it for her own organization. The influence of the Church on humane legislation was neutralized by her anxiety to secure benefits for herself. The historian Schiller, in speaking of the failure of the Church to act against slavery, says, “In general it is astonishing how little influence the Church always exerted on the development of law.” But the laws conferring financial gifts on the Church herself and exemptions on her clergy were very numerous and important. In the perpetual conflicts between the civil and ecclesiastical powers in the Middle Ages it is often difficult for us to see that the cause of Christianity was in any sense at stake. Doubtless the great fighting princes of the Church, men of the granite quarry like Hildebrand, were convinced that the supremacy of the Church was essential to the supremacy of spiritual interests and the reign of God over man. Doubtless they were partly right, and every good churchman of to-day, if he had lived then, would have gone with enthusiasm into the fight about lay investiture. But from our present perspective we see clearly enough that the cause of the Church was not at all identical with the cause of God, and that the power of Christ over humanity did not advance at even pace with the power of the pope over the princes. It was largely a class struggle, the conflict of an ecclesiastical aristocracy with a secular aristocracy, and the welfare of the people was not the real issue. When the Church fought for her own political interests, and not for the cause of the people, her influence on the State was often a disturbing and disastrous one. Where clericalism is a political power, it thrusts an alien influence into every political question.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Civic questions are not decided on their own merit, but according to the profit the clerical machine may get out of them. This disturbing influence is greatly increased if the Church is not a national body, but is governed from a foreign centre. In that case Roman schemes or the ambitions of Italian upstarts may determine the civil policies of Germany or France. Thus when Christianity was embodied in an all-absorbing and all-dominating ecclesiastical organization, its social effectiveness was crippled. Its ethical influence was lowered and vitiated. Its fraternal helpfulness was largely absorbed by the clerical machine. Its organizing ability was spent on strengthening its own organization. Its influence on the State was used to secure benefits for itself rather than for the people. By connecting all religious life with its own organization, it left the common life unhallowed and unrenewed. In making these historical criticisms on ecclesiasticism, I do not belittle the immense value and importance of Christian churches. Religion demands social expression like all other great human impulses. Without an organization to proclaim it, to teach it, to stimulate it, the religious life would probably be greatly weakened in the best, and in many would be powerless and unknown. The mischief begins when the Church makes herself the end. She does not exist for her own sake; she is simply a working organization to create the Christian life in individuals and the kingdom of God in human society. She is an agent with large powers, and like all other agents she is constantly tempted to use her powers for herself. Our modern political parties were organized to advocate certain political principles and realize them in public life. Gradually they have come to regard their perpetuation as an end in itself, and public welfare is subordinated to party victory. Our public-service corporations exist for the public, but we know how these our servants have become our masters, so that the public exists for their dividends. This slow, historical embezzlement of public powers, this tendency of organizations and institutions to aggrandize themselves at the expense of the ends for which they were called into existence, is one of the most important phenomena in moral life. There is no permanent institution but has succumbed to this temptation. The organization of the Church is simply one sinner among many, and not the worst by any means. Her history is the story of how she fell by rising, and rose by falling. No one who loves her can serve her better than by bringing home to her that by seeking her life she loses it, and that when she loses her life to serve the kingdom of God, she will gain it. Subservience to the State Ideally the State is the organization of the people for their larger common interests. Actually all States have been organizations of some section of the people to protect their special interests against the rest. Ideally the chief function of the State should be the maintenance of justice.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Thus land prices act as an automatic brake on church extension, and this brake presses the harder, the steeper the uphill grade is which the Church has to climb. This is one simple explanation of the fact so often lamented, that the Church does not keep pace with the population in large cities. A certain church in New York fifty years ago planted a number of missions in the growing suburbs of that day by holding cottage meetings in the homes of its members and renting vacant stores in which it organized Sunday-schools. Several of these missions developed into vigorous churches. Forty years later the same church desired to resume its early missionary career, but its members now lived in tenement houses, and the cheapest store in sight cost $600 a year. It was numerically and financially stronger than in its early days, but rent had increased faster than the ability of the church, and high rent quenched its missionary impulse. The pioneer work which formerly rested on the spontaneous zeal of plain people becomes dependent on the assistance of wealthy individuals or city mission organizations. That conduces to prudence, and also to officialism. Of course single churches may profit by the land system which hampers the Church at large. A church occasionally sells its old site at an enormous increase and builds luxuriously in a new neighborhood on the proceeds. Several denominations in New York City are forging ahead of others, not simply by superior spiritual efficiency, but because they have long had an endowment in city land and are able to feed their religious work with the “unearned increment” created by the community. In general our land system works against the great majority of churches which have to live from hand to mouth. It has long seemed to me that the land-tax system advocated by Henry George would create almost ideal conditions for the ordinary church. A church would then pay an annual rental or tax on the site occupied, just as if it occupied land under a perpetual lease. It would not have to raise a large sum for the initial purchase of the land, but could devote its available capital to the church edifice, and hope to pay its annual land-tax from its current income, just as it now pays interest on the church debt. The needs of modern industry shift and change the population. They denude the country and gather the people about the shops and mines. They invade a residence neighborhood with factories, scatter the old population, and fill the chinks between the shops and warehouses with a population of lower grade, and perhaps of alien faith and tongue. This affects the churches profoundly. Fine old country churches are left high and dry. When a trust transfers a shop to another city, some church may be left behind, like Rachel, mourning for her children. Protestant churches wake up and find themselves in an Italian or Jewish neighborhood.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  The sacrifices June made for Henry. Were they sacrifices, or were they things she did to heighten her personality? It is I who question this. She makes no obscure sacrifices. Flamboyant ones, yes. Dramatic ones. I have made obscure sacrifices, whether small or big. But I prefer June’s prostitution, gold digging, comedies. In between, Henry can starve. She will serve him unreliably and fantastically or not at all. She urged Henry to leave his job. She wanted to work for him. (Secretly I have envisaged prostitution, and to say it is for Henry is only to find a justification.) So June has found a magnificent justification. She has made heroic sacrifices for Henry. And all of it has contributed to the personality of June. I say to Henry, “Why are you so savage about her defects? And why do you write less about the magnificence?” “That is what June says. She repeats, ‘And you forget this, and you forget that. You only remember the wrongs.’ The truth is, Anaïs, that I take goodness for granted. I expect everybody to be good. It is evil which fascinates me.” I remember a feeble effort at living out one of my own fantasies. I came back to Henry one afternoon after he had teased me, full of the devil. I told him that I was going out with a woman the next evening. In Gare St. Lazare I had seen a whore I wanted so much to talk to, and I imagined myself going out with her. Now, bursting into Henry’s apartment, as June might have done, I could have brought about a curious event, which Henry would have liked to have heard about later. But instantly I became aware that he had been writing, he was in a serious mood, I had disturbed him. He had been hoping I would sit down with him and help him organize his book. My mood evaporated. I even felt contrite. June would have interrupted the writing, precipitated Henry into more experiences, delayed the digestion of them, shone with the brilliancy of a Fate in motion, and Henry would have cursed her and then said, “June is an interesting character.” So I went home to Louveciennes and slept. And the next day when Henry asks me, “What did you do last night?” I wish I had something to tell him. I assume a strange look. He thinks he will read about it later in the journal.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  I hated to see the look on her face when it wasn’t Barry. A tone I’d never heard crept into her voice, serrated, like the edge of a saw. I didn’t understand how this could happen, how he could give us fireworks and Catalina, how he could hold that cold cloth to my forehead, and talk about taking us to Bali, and then forget our address. ONE AFTERNOON, we stopped by his house unannounced. “He’s going to be mad,” I said. “We were just in the neighborhood. Just thought we’d stop by,” she said. I could no more keep her from doing this than I could keep the sun from coming up through the boiled smog on an August morning, but I didn’t want to see it. I waited in the car. She knocked on the door and he answered wearing a seersucker bathrobe. I didn’t have to hear her to know what she was saying. She wore her blue gauze dress, the hot wind ruffling her hem, the sun at her back, turning it transparent. He stood in his doorway, blocking it, and she held her head to one side, moving closer, touching her hair. I felt a rubber band stretching in my brain, tighter and tighter, until they disappeared into his house. I played the radio, classical music. I couldn’t stand to hear anything with words. I imagined my own ice-blue eyes looking at some man, telling him to go away, that I was busy. “You’re not my type,” I said coolly into the rearview mirror. A half hour later she reappeared, stumbling out to the car, tripping over a sprinkler, as if she were blind. She got in and sat behind the steering wheel and rocked back and forth, her mouth open in a square, but there was no sound. My mother was crying. It was the final impossibility. “He has a date,” she finally said, whispering, her voice like there were hands around her throat. “He made love with me, and then said I had to leave. Because he has a date.” I knew we shouldn’t have come. Now I wished she’d never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July. I was afraid to let her drive like this, with her eyes wild, seeing nothing. She’d kill us before we got three blocks. But she didn’t start the car. She sat there, staring through the windshield, rocking herself, holding herself around her waist.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  But it is clear that the religion which elicited the charity, at the same time thwarted it, and that under these religious conceptions a sane Christianization of social relations would never be undertaken. As long as asceticism ruled in Christianity, the force of religion was exerted to lift men out of their social relations, instead of bringing them into normal relations. It would seek to suppress the natural instincts instead of finding the right and happy channels for them. Monasticism It is a remarkable demonstration of the incurably social nature both of man and of Christianity that when religion sought most earnestly to escape from social life, it turned its hand once more to build up a true social life. Every monastery proposed to be an ideal community. The idea that society and the State were ruled by demons and were anti-Christian in their character, was abandoned as a matter of course when the Church was supported by the State and society became Christian in name. But this primitive pessimism was not supplanted by any true conception of this world as the very place in which the kingdom of God was to be built up by making all natural relations normal and holy. The older view was replaced by another pessimistic amalgamation of Greek philosophy and biblical ideas. Philosophy had speculated about the original condition of humanity as a state of freedom and equality. The Bible told of a happy state in paradise before man fell. Man then must have been by nature free from those evils from which ascetic piety now painfully strove to free him once more. Originally man was free from sexual desire and from covetousness; there was no family nor private property, no commercial machinery for money-getting, no difference of rich and poor, or of master and slave. The ideal life, then, would consist in the abandonment of all these social institutions. Their abolition was out of the question for the mass of fallen humanity, but the chosen few at least could leave the sinful social life and create a little world apart in which they would live out the holy life which God originally ordained for man. These social ideas blended with the ascetic desire for self-discipline to create the monastic community. Here the foundations of civil society, the family, property and worldly profession, were annihilated, and here the life of Christian perfection was to be lived. Throughout the Middle Ages an incalculable quantity of moral and spiritual energy was put into the organization and reformation of monastic communities. Whoever desired to live a consecrated Christian life, became a monk as a matter of course. Every monastic order was a society for Christian endeavor. The noblest and greatest minds spent themselves in summoning men to a still higher type of ascetic community life, or in repairing these fragile human edifices which were built on a contradiction of nature and persisted in obeying the law of gravitation and sliding down to ruin.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  Still seated, she dawdled over tidying away her various odds and ends, and her eyes began to glance round the room, as if some chair were missing. But what she was looking for was her old energy, the old anxiety to see at once that everything was as it should be in her comfortable home. “Oh I That trip I” she sighed. “How could I? How exhausting it all is!” She frowned, once again with that irritable jerk of her chin, when she noticed the broken glass of a little picture by Chaplin which she thought perfectly lovely - the head of a young girl, all silver and rose. “And I could put both hands through that tear in the lace curtains. ... And that’s only the beginning. ... What a fool I was to stay away so long! And all in his honour! As if I couldn’t just as well have nursed my grief here, in peace and comfort!” She rose, disgruntled, and, gathering up the flounces of her teagown, went over to ring the bell, saying to herself, “ Get along with you, you old baggage 1” Her maid entered, under a heap of underclothes and silk stockings. ‘Eleven o’clock. Rose. And my face hasn’t been done yet. I’m late.’ ‘ There’s nothing to be late for. There aren’t any old maids now to drag Madame off on excursions, or turn up at crack of dawn to pick every rose in the place. There’s no Monsieur Roland to' drive Madame mad by throwing pebbles through her window. * Rose, there’s only too much to keep us busy in the house. The proverb may well be true that three moves are as bad as a fire, but I’m quite convinced that being away from home for six months is as bad as a flood. I suppose you’ve noticed the hole in the curtain? ’ ‘That’s nothing. ... Madame has not yet seen the linen-room: mouse-droppings everywhere and holes nibbled in the floor. And it’s a funny thing that I left fimerancie with twenty-eight glass-cloths and I come back to find twenty-two.’ ‘Nol’ ‘It’s the truth - every word I say, Madame.’ They looked at each other, sharing the same indignation, both of them deeply attached to this comfortable house, muffled in carpets and silks, with its well-stocked cupboards and its shiny white basement. Lea gave her knee a determined slap. ‘We’ll soon change all that, my friend. If Ernest and Lmerancie don’t want their week’s notice, they’ll manage to find those six glass-cloths. And did you write to Marcel, and tell that great donkey which day to come back?’ ‘He’s here, Madame.’ Lea dressed quickly, then opened the window and leaned out, gazing complacently at her avenue of trees in bud. No more of those fawning old maids, and no more of Monsieur Roland — the athletic young heavyweight at Cambo. ... “The idiot,” she sighed.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  She frowned. She had lines between her eyebrows from frowning at girls like me, girls who didn’t believe anybody could love them, least of all their dangerous parents. “I can’t tell you how few children I have whose parents write. They’d be thrilled to death.” “Yeah, I’m super lucky,” I said, but I dutifully put them in my pack. I finished my food, watching the kids jump off the net onto one small boy who couldn’t find his feet in the ball pit. Over and over they jumped onto him, laughing while he screamed. His teenaged mother was too busy talking to her friend to help him. Finally, she yelled something at the other kids, but she didn’t get up or do anything to protect her son. When she turned back to her friend, our eyes met. It was Kiki Torrez. We made no sign that we knew each other, we just looked a little longer than a casual glance, and then she went on talking to her friend. And I thought, prisoners probably traded just that glance, when they met on the outside. When I got home, Yvonne was in front of the TV on the figured green velvet couch, watching a talk show for teenagers. “This is the mother,” she told me, not taking her eyes from the screen. “She gave up the daughter when she was sixteen. They never saw each other before this second.” Big child’s tears dripped down her face. I didn’t know how she could stand to watch this, it was as phony as an ad. I couldn’t help thinking of the adopted mother who’d raised the girl, how sick it must make her feel to see her carefully raised daughter in the arms of a stranger, applauded by the talk show audience. But I knew Yvonne was imagining herself coming back into her baby’s life twenty years from now, slim, confident, dressed in a blue suit with high heels and perfect hair, her grown child embracing her, forgiving her everything. And what were the chances of that. I sat down next to Yvonne and looked through my mother’s letters, opened one. Dear Astrid, Why don’t you write? You cannot possibly hold me responsible for Claire Richards’s suicide. That woman was born to overdose. I told you the first time I saw her. Believe me, she’s better off now. On the other hand, I am writing from Ad Seg, prison within a prison. This is what is left of my world, an 8x8 cell shared with Lunaria Irolo, a woman as mad as her name. During the day, the crows caw, dissonant and querulous, a perfect imitation of the damned. Of course, nothing that sings would alight near this place.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  Desmond threw himself back in his chair and, as it swerved through the air, his monocle shot a piercing flash of sunlight into Cheri’s eye. ‘Five hundred! You make me laugh!* He was boasting. He did not know bow to laugh: his nearest approach was a sort of sob of the shoulders. He drank some coffee, to excite Cheri’s curiosity, and then put down his cup again. ‘Three thousand, three hundred, and eighty-two, my boy. And do you know how much that puts in my pocket? ’ ‘No,* Cheri interrupted, ‘and I don’t give a damn. That’s enough. My mother does all that for me if I want it. Besides ...’ He rose, and added in a hesitant voice: 4 Besides, money doesn’t interest me.’ * Strange,’ said Desmond, hurt. * Strange. Amusing.’ If you like. No, can’t you understand, money doesn’t interest me ... doesn’t interest me any more.’ These simple words fell from his lips slowly. Cheri spoke them without looking up, and kicked a biscuit crumb along the carpet; his embarrassment at making this confession, his secretive look, restored for a fleeting instant the full marvel of his youth. For the first time Desmond stared at him with the critical attention of a doctor examining a patient,44 Am I dealing with a malingerer?” Like a doctor, he had recourse to confused and soothing words. We all go through that. Everyone’s feeling a little out of sorts. No one knows exactly where he stands. Work is a wonderful way of putting you on your feet again, old boy. Take me, for instance. ...’ know,’ Cheri interrupted. ‘You’re going to tell me I haven’t enough to do.’ Yes, it’s your own fault.’ Desmond’s mockery was condescending in the extreme. ‘For in these wonderful times ...’ He was going on to confess his deep satisfaction with business, but he pulled himself up in time.4 It’s also a question of upbringing. Obviously, you never learned the first thing about life under Lea’s wing. You’ve no idea how to manage people and things.’ 4 So they say.’ Cheri was put out. ‘Lea herself wasn’t fooled. You mayn’t believe me, but though she didn’t trust me, she always consulted me before buying or selling.’ He thrust out his chest, proud of the days gone by, when distrust was synonymous with respect. You’ve only got to apply yourself to it again — to money matters,’ Desmond continued, in his advisory capacity. ‘It’s a game that never goes out of fashion.’ ‘Yes/ Cheri acquiesced rather vaguely. ‘Yes, of course. Pm only waiting.’ ‘Waiting for what?’ ‘I’m waiting. ... What I mean is ... I’m waiting for an opportunity ... abetter opportunity. ...’ ‘Better than what? ’ ‘What a bore you are. An excuse - if you like - to take up again everything the war deprived me of years ago. My fortune, which is, in fact ...’

• From White Oleander (1999)

  Smiling her half-smile, waving like royalty returning from exile, happy but still mistrusting the masses. She had made it through trial without me. She was free. Paul ate his kebab sandwich, dropping pieces of salad back onto the bag as I quickly read the story, more shocked than I’d thought I would be. They’d taken the defense that Barry had committed suicide and made it look like murder. I was appalled that it worked. My mother was quoted saying how grateful she was that justice had been done, she looked forward to taking a bath, she thanked the jurors from the bottom of her heart. She said she’d received offers to teach, to publish her autobiography, to marry an ice-cream millionaire and pose for Playboy, and she was going to accept them all. Paul offered me a falafel, I shook my head. Suddenly, I wasn’t hungry anymore. “Save it for later,” he said, and dropped the bag by the side of the bed. His rich brown eyes asked every question. He didn’t have to say a word. I rested my head in the crook of his shoulder and gazed at the squares of blue TV light shining through the frost blossoms on our window from the windows just across the way. I tried to imagine what she was feeling right now. In Los Angeles it was noon. A bright sunny February, it looked from the picture. I imagined her in a hotel room, courtesy Susan D. Valeris, some luxury suite full of flowers from well-wishers, waking up on fresh sheets. She would have her bath in a double-wide tub, and write a poem overlooking the winter roses. Then she might take a few interviews, or rent a white convertible for a spin down the beach, where she’d pick up a young man with clear eyes and sand in his hair, and make love to him until he wept with the beauty of it. What else would you do when you were acquitted of murder? It was too much to imagine her tempering her joy with a moment of grief, a moment for the knowledge of what her triumph had cost. I couldn’t expect that from her. But I had seen her remorse, and it had nothing to do with Barry or anyone else, it was a gift offered despite a price she had had no way to estimate then, it could have been heavy as mourning, final as a tomb.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I felt his presence. I looked up at him, so tenderly. But the heaviness of my mood stifled me. For me everything was finished. Things die when my confidence dies. And yet . . . Henry went home and wrote me a love letter. The next day I telephoned and said, “Come to Louveciennes if you are not in the mood to work.” He came immediately. He was gentle, and he took me. We both needed that, but it did not warm me, resuscitate me. It seemed to me that he, too, was fucking just to reassure himself. What a leaden weight on me, on my body. We had only one hour together. I walked with him to the station. As I walked back I reread his letter. It seemed insincere to me. Literature. Facts tell me one thing, my instincts another. But are my instincts just my old neurotic fears? Strange, I forgot my appointment with Allendy today and I didn’t telephone him. I need him terribly, and yet I want to fight alone, grapple with life. Henry writes a letter, comes to me, appears to love me, talks to me. Empty. I am like an instrument which has stopped registering. I don’t want to see him tomorrow. I asked him again the other day, “Shall I send money to June so that she can come, instead of giving it to you so you can go to Spain?” He said no. I begin to think a great deal about June. My image of a dangerous, sensual, dynamic Henry is gone. I do all I can to recapture it. I see him humble, timorous, without self-confidence. When I said playfully the other day: “You’ll never have me again,” he answered, “You’re punishing me.” What I realize is that his insecurity is equal to mine, my poor Henry. He wants as much to prove to me how beautifully he can make love, prove his potency, as I want to know that I arouse potency. Yet I showed courage. When that scene, so unbearably like the one with John, happened, I showed no concern, no surprise. I stayed in his arms, quietly laughing and talking. I said, “Love spoils fucking.” But this was more bravado than anything else. The way I suffered was a truer self-revelation. Despite all this I risked my marriage and happiness to sleep with Henry’s letter under my pillow, with my hand on it. I am going to Henry without joy. I am afraid of that gentle Henry I am going to meet, too much like myself. I remember that from the first day I expected him to take the lead, in talk, in action, in all things. I thought bitterly of June’s magnificent willfulness, initiative, tyranny. I thought, it isn’t strong women who make men weak, but weak men who make women overstrong. I stood before Henry with the submissiveness of a Latin woman, ready to be overwhelmed.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The members of the Church individually have been politically disfranchised and subject to their rulers, and that has made them passive on questions of political morality. While the Church lived in the hostile and heathen Empire, its members had to keep aloof from public life and to find all their interests in the narrow circle of the family and the churches. Hence, so far as asceticism permitted, the ethics of the family was developed and leavened with Christian ideas. The early narrowness of interest left its record in the writings of the apostles and the early Fathers, and set a precedent for later times. But even when Christianity was tolerated and encouraged, the mass of men were shut out from active participation in government. Politics was the occupation of a privileged class. But where there are no political rights, there are no political duties, and the sense of political obligation is not developed. A man is not likely to take a keen and intelligent interest in a sphere of action over which he has no control and in which he is never called to act. Moreover, if a preacher had an audience of subject peasants, he had no incentive to preach politics to them, unless he was a popular agitator. What political duties could he preach to them except to render obedience to the king and their feudal lord, and to be content in the station in which it had pleased God to place them? And of that kind of political preaching there has always been more than enough. There has never been any feeling of treading on ground alien to religion when the few but invaluable texts were reached in which law and order are enjoined. It was only when a preacher spoke before kings and gentry like Latimer, or before the citizens of free cities like Savonarola, or when some great national movement stirred all classes in a common interest against a foreign enemy, that social or political preaching could be attempted, and right valiantly did many a Christian man use such opportunities. But the limits set by a despotic age have continued into our democratic age. They have become theological tradition. The sermons of one generation are read and imitated by the next. Theological text-books and teachers move along the trodden paths. The wider interests thrown open by the advent of the people to political power have very slowly called forth corresponding religious thought. The old historical conditions have evolved a theory by which a circle of short radius is drawn about the individual. The relations lying within that circle are supposed to be within the province of religious thought and church teaching; those lying beyond it are outside of the realm of religion. The ethics of the private life, of the family, and of friendly social intercourse, together with the interests of education, literature, and to some extent of art, lie within this circle. Industry, commerce, and politics in the main lie outside of it.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  People of a lower class who demand our help are “cases”; people of our own class are folks. The demand for equality is often ridiculed as if it implied that all men were to be of identical wealth, wisdom, and authority. But social equality can coexist with the greatest natural differences. There is no more fundamental difference than that of sex, nor a greater intellectual chasm than that between an educated man and his little child, yet in the family all are equal. In a college community there are various gradations of rank and authority within the faculty, and there is a clearly marked distinction between the students and the faculty, but there is social equality. On the other hand, the janitor and the peanut vender are outside of the circle, however important they may be to it. The social equality existing in our country in the past has been one of the chief charms of life here and of far more practical importance to our democracy than the universal ballot. After a long period of study abroad in my youth I realized on my return to America that life here was far poorer in music, art, and many forms of enjoyment than life on the continent of Europe; but that life tasted better here, nevertheless, because men met one another more simply, frankly, and wholesomely. In Europe a man is always considering just how much deference he must show to those in ranks above him, and in turn noting jealously if those below him are strewing the right quantity of incense due to his own social position. That fundamental democracy of social intercourse, which is one of the richest endowments of our American life, is slipping from us. Actual inequality endangers the sense of equality. The rich man and the poor man can meet on a level if they are old friends, or if they are men of exceptional moral qualities, or if they meet under unusual circumstances that reduce all things to their primitive human elements. But as a general thing they will live different lives, and the sense of unlikeness will affect all their dealings. With women the spirit of social caste seems to be even more fatally easy than with men. It may be denied that the poor in our country are getting poorer, but it cannot well be denied that the rich are getting richer. The extremes of wealth and poverty are much farther apart than formerly, and thus the poor are at least relatively poorer. There is a rich class and a poor class, whose manner of life is wedged farther and farther apart, and whose boundary lines are becoming ever more distinct. The difference in housing, eating, dressing, and speaking would be a sufficient barrier. The dominant position of the one class in industry and the dependence of the other is even more decisive.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I have got him to love me first, to betray his love. If this is joy, I don’t want it. He is aware of my reaction. “This seems tame to you?” There is only his body to fascinate me. He is the unknown. Eduardo, to whom I pour out this story, is glad I am moving towards Allendy. Both of them hate Henry. Still, I want Henry tonight, my love, my husband, whom I am going to betray soon with as much sorrow as I felt when I betrayed Hugo. I crave to love wholly, to be faithful. I love the groove in which my love for Henry has been running. Yet I am driven by diabolical forces outside of all grooves. Hugo is being greatly helped and strengthened by Allendy. He is beginning to love him, because there is in him a certain element of homosexuality. Allendy is now a devil god directing all our lives. Last night as Hugo talked I could observe Allendy’s deft and beautiful influence. I laughed riotously when Hugo said Allendy had told him I needed to be dominated. Hugo answered, “Yes, but that is easy. Anaïs is Latin and so pliable.” Allendy must have smiled. Then Hugo comes home and throws himself on me with a new savagery, and I enjoy myself, oh, I enjoy myself. It seems to me that at this moment I am blessed with three wonderful men and quite able to love all three. I suppose only a scruple keeps me from enjoying them. I wish Allendy were more forceful. He submits to women. He liked my aggressivity in our sexual games. His first sexual experience was a passive one when he was sixteen and an older woman made love to him. I went back to see him with great impatience, trembling now with cold, now with fever. We have discarded analysis. We talked about Eduardo, Hugo, astrology. I asked him to come and see me, but he feels he cannot yet because of his analysis of Hugo. We laughed together about the domination question. I like the way he caresses me. He makes none of Henry’s obscene gestures, yet I feel the man whose planetary symbol is the Bull. I like it when we kiss standing up and I am made to feel small in his arms. He knows me better than I know him. I am baffled by his enigmatic character. I told him that I trusted him blindly, that we should just let things happen. I refused to analyze. This, he understood. From his house I went to a café on the corner, where I had asked Henry to meet me. Before I saw Allendy, I talked with Eduardo. And at eight-thirty I agreed to meet Hugo. When I saw Henry, I felt estranged from him. I hated my capriciousness.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  “Religion has nothing to do with politics and sociology.” This circular division has no rational justification. It is an historical product of an age when the common people were shut out from participation in public affairs. It is now out of date and its perpetuation is wholly bad. The people now have political and social rights, yet the Church is not giving adequate teaching on the duties corresponding to those novel rights. Industrial and political affairs press upon the life of every man with a force unknown formerly, yet the organization which ought to discuss the new moral problems is silent or inefficient in its teaching. The great sociologist Schaeffle, speaking of the slowness with which the larger relations of commerce and politics have been affected by Christianity, truly says, “The great need of our time is a public morality.” The dependence of the Church on the State, and the political passivity of the subject people, combined to cripple the social efficiency of the Church in former times, and the precedents and theories set up in the pre-democratic age continue to operate even where the causes which justified them have passed away. The disappearance of church democracy The subjection of the Church to the State would have been neutralized and overcome if only the churches had preserved the Christian democracy of their own organization. The primitive churches set out with an organization as democratic and simply patriarchal as a Teutonic town-meeting. By the beginning of the second century they were passing under the limited monarchy of a single bishop, and the limited monarchy tended to shake off all limitations and thrust down all competing forces. In ever widening areas monarchical organization grew up, and this tendency finally culminated in the absolutism of the papacy, in which all power flows from the head downward. The clergy became a hierarchy graded on monarchical principles. At the same time the laity were gradually ousted from all the rights of election, church discipline, and self-government, which they had originally possessed, and reduced to the helpless passivity of a subject population under a bureaucratic despotism. This slow revolution was due partly to the ambition and lust for power inherent in human nature, but mainly to the assimilating influence of secular institutions. The churches step by step copied the forms of organization prevalent about them. The centralization of church power in the clergy and the bishop in the third century took place simultaneously with a centralization of power in the organization of the Empire. The Church poured its organization into the moulds furnished by imperial Rome, and when the mould was broken and crumbled away, the Church in its system of government stood erect as an ecclesiastical duplicate of the Empire. For the purposes of ecclesiastical aggrandizement it was worth a great deal to the Church that it inherited the results of the organizing genius of Rome, but the inheritance was deadly to the revolutionary social influence of the Church.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The owners or managers of industry are rich or highly paid; they have technical knowledge, the will to command, the habits of mind bred by the exercise of authority; they say “Go,” and men go; they say “Do this,” and an army of men obeys. On the other side is the mass who take orders, who are employed or dismissed at a word, who use their muscles almost automatically, and who have no voice in the conduct of their own shop. These are two distinct classes, and no rhetoric can make them equal. Moreover, such a condition is inseparable from the capitalistic organization of industry. As capitalism grows, it must create a proletariat to correspond. Just as militarism is based on military obedience, so capitalism is based on economic dependence. We hear passionate protests against the use of the hateful word “class” in America. There are no classes in our country, we are told. But the hateful part is not the word, but the thing. If class distinctions are growing up here, he serves his country ill who would hush up the fact or blind the people to it by fine phrases. A class is a body of men who are so similar in their work, their duties and privileges, their manner of life and enjoyment, that a common interest, common conception of life, and common moral ideals are developed and cement the individuals. The business men constitute such a class. The industrial workers also constitute such a class. In old countries the upper class gradually adorned itself with titles, won special privileges in court and army and law, and created an atmosphere of awe and apartness. But the solid basis on which this was done was the feudal control of the land, which was then the great source of wealth. The rest was merely the decorative moss that grows up on the rocks of permanent wealth. With the industrial revolution a new source of wealth opened up; a new set of men gained control of it and ousted the old feudal nobility more or less thoroughly. The new aristocracy, which is based on mobile capital, has not yet had time to festoon itself with decorations, but likes to hasten the process by intermarriage with the remnants of the old feudal nobility. Whether it will ever duplicate the old forms in this country is immaterial, as long as it has the fact of power. In some way the social inequality will find increasing outward expression and will tend to make itself permanent. Where there are actual class differences, there will be a dawning class consciousness, a clear class interest, and there may be a class struggle. In the past the sympathy between the richer and the poorer members of American society has still run strong. Many rich men and women were once poor and have not forgotten their early struggles and the simple homes of their childhood.