Disgust

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 Folding Star (1994)

  I went for a wander through the cluster of ancient buildings which formed the still religious heart of the old town—the Cathedral, the Bishop's Palace, the low dormered quadrangle of the Hospital—and out into the alleyways behind the Museum, to find that it was the day of the animal market. The vendors' pickups and trailers were drawn up tight against the wall, and in between, on low barrows or simply standing on the cobbles, were the rustling, rackety cages that contained their wares. There was a ripe, unhappy smell that I remembered from the circus that ran up one childhood summer outside our windows at Rough Common; and then, as I walked along through a light crowd that seemed oppressive in the narrowly overhung street, a smell of frying onions, sausages and chips from one van and of fresh whelks and shrimps from another. I'd heard about this market from someone at the Cassette, and knew it was popular with the local children, who were here now, laughing at a marmoset sprinting in a wheel or trying to provoke some reaction from the comatose tree-snakes and elderly, moulting parakeets, who stood first on one leg, then on the other, looking cynically about. I saw lizards, kittens, carp, canaries; I saw a little ginger monkey rubbing its nose like a person who is embarrassed; I saw tiny fluffy dogs you might mistake for slippers and insects you might think were shrivelled fallen leaves. One old woman had a biscuit-tin of spiders, and a scientific-looking man stood behind a glass case half full of earth, challenging you to believe that it contained a pair of nocturnal burrowing voles. I hung about with the families, who were in a mood of subdued hilarity, and strolled among the boys who were standing with their bikes, their expressions mingling teen contempt with innocent absorption. Occasionally a few francs would exchange hands, and the purchaser of a rabbit or a piranha would walk off briskly, as from a shady deal; I was being very English, no doubt, but I wondered what heartless caprice could lead anyone to buy here. I avoided the sellers' eyes, and had the feeling that if I let them snare me with their sudden patter, or worse a huckster's wordless beckon and hand on the elbow, I would be shown some further unwelcome curiosity, something uniquely poisonous or malformed.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Aldo grew confidential. ‘Is very old-fashion,’ he explained. ‘I am in another part, in the garden. There I met the young milordo, and we do all sort of thing, and up a ladder too. Now he is on holiday, and the servant is left—just Derek and Raymond and Abdul.’ Aldo fluttered his lashes at me, restoring an illusion of gentility, as if we had been discussing the new vicar, and whether or not he favoured the Series III communion. I couldn’t pretend that I hadn’t wondered what it would be like to make a porn film. I had cast my own on parched, electric mornings after, putting the boys through their paces; but those were unstable little loops, that oxidised and decomposed in the light of day. I wasn’t sure it would be possible to watch these acts, fearing to be aroused, fearing not to be. Charles laid his hand on my forearm. ‘Isn’t our chef a splendid fellow? He’s devoted to me, you know. Utterly devoted.’ The camera had not yet begun to run, but Abdul, seemingly careless of whether or not he started, strolled back on to the set. He wore a sumptuous calf-length fur coat, and, as one saw when he sat back on the bed and it fell open, nothing else. His flat stomach was crossed by the longest scars I had ever seen, as though long ago, and with the crudest means, someone had removed all his insides. With his scarred black skin inside the thick black fur he struck me, who adored him for a moment, like some exquisite game animal, partly skinned and then thrown aside still breathing. I excused myself for the lavatory, tiptoed to the front door; but then slammed it behind me.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 2: Further, the uncleanness which is particularly the result of gluttony would seem to be connected with vomiting, according to Is. 28:8, “All tables were full of vomit and filth.” But this seems to be not a sin but a punishment; or even a useful thing that is a matter of counsel, according to Ecclus. 31:25, “If thou hast been forced to eat much, arise, go out, and vomit; and it shall refresh thee.” Therefore it should not be reckoned among the daughters of gluttony. Objection 3: Further, Isidore (QQ. in Deut. xvi) reckons scurrility as a daughter of lust. Therefore it should not be reckoned among the daughters of gluttony. On the contrary, Gregory (Moral. xxxi, 45) assigns these daughters to gluttony. I answer that, As stated above ([3501]AA[1],2,3), gluttony consists properly in an immoderate pleasure in eating and drinking. Wherefore those vices are reckoned among the daughters of gluttony, which are the results of eating and drinking immoderately. These may be accounted for either on the part of the soul or on the part of the body. on the part of the soul these results are of four kinds. First, as regards the reason, whose keenness is dulled by immoderate meat and drink, and in this respect we reckon as a daughter of gluttony, “dullness of sense in the understanding,” on account of the fumes of food disturbing the brain. Even so, on the other hand, abstinence conduces to the penetrating power of wisdom, according to Eccles. 2:3, “I thought in my heart to withdraw my flesh from wine, that I might turn my mind in wisdom.” Secondly, as regards the. appetite, which is disordered in many ways by immoderation in eating and drinking, as though reason were fast asleep at the helm, and in this respect “unseemly joy” is reckoned, because all the other inordinate passions are directed to joy or sorrow, as stated in Ethic. ii, 5. To this we must refer the saying of 3 Esdra 3:20, that “wine . . . gives every one a confident and joyful mind.” Thirdly, as regards inordinate words, and thus we have “loquaciousness,” because as Gregory says (Pastor. iii, 19), “unless gluttons were carried away by immoderate speech, that rich man who is stated to have feasted sumptuously every day would not have been so tortured in his tongue.” Fourthly, as regards inordinate action, and in this way we have “scurrility,” i.e. a kind of levity resulting from lack of reason, which is unable not only to bridle the speech, but also to restrain outward behavior. Hence a gloss on Eph. 5:4, “Or foolish talking or scurrility,” says that “fools call this geniality—i.e. jocularity, because it is wont to raise a laugh.” Both of these, however, may be referred to the words which may happen to be sinful, either by reason of excess which belongs to “loquaciousness,” or by reason of unbecomingness, which belongs to “scurrility.”

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "You may think it strange, but I have never much cared for sex, despite what I have been saying; nor would it have been easy for me. I live with my mother, who is now ninety-four but has only recently become fully blind. I have always relied on the clean and easy practice of what used to be called self-abuse. I'm proud to say that I have climaxed at least once every day since 1937. "Hot hunks 12 certainly lived up to its name! Please let me know if you have any further films with the admirable young Casey in . . ." The writing was clear, slanting, impatient. His was in every sense a busy professional hand. I could hardly think of a less appropriate person than Matt to confide in, though I understood the scientific attitude with which he would read a letter like this. His was a service industry, which entailed a certain respect for the fantasies it serviced. I had seen him at his silver-screened lap-top intently answering such queries; and listened to the muted rattling runs that followed the pause as he thought through some cruder provocation and gave a little cackle or a throaty "Oh yeah . . . " The trick, it seemed, was to be both direct and archly metaphorical, the result having an enthusiastic, illiterate tone, in its obscene way not unlike the work of my aunt Tina. Love was blindly introduced and as a prefix was fully interchangeable with fuck: love-poles were destined as a rule for love-holes, and at the end it was geysers of white-hot love-juice that (paradoxically) cooled the lovers down. I answered one or two of these enquiries myself and discovered a natural aptitude for it: "Pretty-faced Lance soon gags on Chad's massive love-meat, and Chad turns all his attentions to the youngster's pleading love-hole." Later on I tried variations drawn from Gerard Manley Hopkins: "Rick worships Cody's massive mansex . . . Doug and Darren dauntlessly double-fuck the freshman's dewy down-side . . ." I felt a little uneasy, though, in the half-world of Matt's room, treading on so many things. The long knots of the bedding looked a bit too squalid without him, lean and white, sprawled amongst them. I noticed more than before the musty smell of the bathroom where the soiled underwear that he stole and sold collected behind the door and stopped it from opening. There was something eerie, as the deaf woman banged and sang through the wall, about finding the right fuck-film and copying it on to a new tape on two parallel VCRs. I perched among the junk, wrapping stained jockey-shorts in tissue paper and adding an authenticating ticket whilst the machines worked almost silently, with steady red lights, and the ritual imagery of love-meat passed along the cables. The phone rang again. "Hello." "Hello! Matt's not there, right?" "Did you ring before? Is that Dirk?" "Oh yes it is."

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  Once the budget is balanced, the trickier foreign policy is sues have been settled, and pot is legal and available in every supermarket, the boy-girl thing finally bubbles to the surface. Call it midnight. And once you get on the topic of sex and re lationships you never get off it, because nothing ever gets set tled in that area. We had more gals than guys in the circle that night—Jimmy and Big Herman were at a Blackhawks game, I think. The pre vious night there had been a strange incident at one of the fra ternities on the local campus, and the rumors were flying. “It’s called a train,” said Seth. He waved a thin white hand dismissively, sending a trail of smoke floating upward. “Dis gusting, really, but certainly not a crime.” “Sounds like the police think it was a crime,” said Jennifer. “I heard they dragged a bunch of hungover frat guys in for questioning.” Seth shrugged. “Of course, if the woman files a complaint afterward, they have to investigate.” “Investigate what?” asked Amy. “Can someone tell me what the hell a ‘train’ is?” “A gang-bang, of sorts,” said Seth. He pushed back a lock of dark, lank hair and went into professor mode. “A woman at a party decides she wants to take on all comers. She’ll go into a room, and the guys will line up outside the door to take their turn. A whole train of guys, one after the other.” “But why?” asked Amy helplessly. “I don’t know, you tell me,” said Seth. “Must be a deep down female fantasy.” “I don’t think so,” said Doris, and other girls shook their heads as well. “It’s repulsive.” “Lack of self-esteem, probably,” said Jennifer. “Some girls get so brainwashed by our male-dominated society that they equate putting out with being popular.” This was a typical Jennifer Chase troll, and everyone ig nored it. Brad shifted in his beanbag and said, “I was in a bar once and a girl got up on a stool and announced she was going to give a blowjob to every guy there. She said she lost some kind of bet, but obviously that was just a silly excuse.” Jennifer raised an eyebrow. “And?” He shrugged sheepishly. “What do you think? I was like third in line, out of a dozen. It’s not like she was wasted or high or something—she knew what she was doing.” Jennifer snorted. “Oh, so then it’s okay.” Brad looked embarrassed. “So what, you think I shouldn’t have?” “I wouldn’t expect anything different from a man.” “I can’t believe a woman would ever do that,” said Amy. “So demeaning.” I spoke up. “If she does it of her own free will, and on her terms, is it really demeaning? I mean, if she has a fantasy about a gang-bang or whatever, can’t you give her credit for feeling liberated enough to act on it?” Several people spoke at once. Fatefully, it was Jennifer who

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Her daughter's personality changes, and obscenities she has never used before become a part of her speech. (Though she over hears the mother using some of them: over the trans-Atlantic telephone, to her father, who is estranged from her mother.) The daughter also plays around with a ouija board, and has made a friend in the spirit world, called Captain Howdy. The mother worries over all these manifestations, both worldly and other-worldly, of the mysteries now being confronted by her growing daughter with all of the really dreadful apathy of the American middle class, reassuring herself that nothing she has done, or left undone, has irreparably damaged her child; who will certainly grow up, therefore, to be as healthy as her mother and to make as much money. But, eventually, at a very posh Georgetown party, of which her mother is the host ess, this daughter comes downstairs in her nightgown, and, while urinating on the floor, tells a member of the party that he is going to die. After this, her affliction, or possession, develops apace. 570 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK The plot now compels us to consider a Jesuit priest, young, healthy, athletic, intelligent, presumably celibate, \vith a dying mother, and in trouble with his faith. His mother dies, alone, in a dingy flat in New York, where he has been compelled to leave her, and he is unable to forgive himself for this. There is the film director, a drunken, cursing agnostic, other priests, psychiatrists, doctors, a detective-well: all people we have met before, and there is very little to be said about them. One of the psychiatrists is nearly castrated by Regan, the daughter, who has abnormal strength while in the grip of Satan. Along with the mumbo-jumbo of levitating beds and discontented furniture and Wuthering Heights tempests, there is the mo ment when the daughter is compelled by Satan to masturbate with a crucifix, after which she demands that her mother lick her, after which she throws her mother across the room, after which the mother screams, after which she faints. It develops that the film director, dead in a mysterious accident, has ac tually been pushed, by Regan, through her bedroom \vindow, to his death: again, while in the grip of Satan. All else having failed, the aged priest is called fr om his retreat to perform the exorcism: the young priest is his assistant.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  There was another small envelope among the photographs, on which the word "Private" had provocatively been written. I opened it circumspectly, the old gum still duily tacky, and slid out yet another set of photos, that made me wince and hesitate. I knew for a moment or two what "Private" meant—desires expressed without the filter of art, glum shaming needs . . . I made my interest scientific, dimly thinking what a prig I was when it came to women and the indignities men demanded of them. It figured that the downside of Orst's mysticism should be something coarse and exacting. The young Jane—I didn't know what to call her—had a wary look now: she was a professional, she would have upped the fee, but she was not an actress like her predecessor. There was a sense, that was perhaps the cruel erotic pivot of the pictures, that though she was a working woman she was a good Catholic too, who believed in eternal fire and wondered, as she took the lash or pissed herself for Orst's camera, if that might land her there. There were only half a dozen of them. In the first, she stood with one foot on a table, one on a chair, looking back over her shoulder (he seemed to like that startled supplicating glance), two fingers spreading her cunt from behind. There was a glistening detail to it that was far beyond the things I had puzzled out long ago from Charlie's under-mattress stash of Escorts and Parades. Then I noticed indignantly that she was wearing the collar of medals: her dead original's magnificent choker was part of the apparatus of bondage. In the next she lay sprawled on the carpet, fettered to what?, the camera-tripod?, with Andromeda's chain. In another she was bending over and I saw with a little protesting "Oh . . ." the black boss of a turd lodged patiently in the tight opening of her arse. I put them back thinking, "Well, after all, these aren't the worst things"—they wouldn't quite go in, there was something in the envelope that stopped them. I funnelled it and tapped out on to the table a sprig of orange hair tied with a thread, a tiny crinkly switch. Somehow one knew it had not been taken from the head. Cherif was crouching barefoot in the armchair, with his overcoat on, drawn tent-like round his knees. "Baby, you're not even dressed," I said. "I've been waiting for you, so that we can go out and get lunch."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But white men did-as follows: The root of the word, mulatto, is Spanish, according to Webster, fr om mulo, a mule. The word refers to: (1) a person, CHAP TER TWO 5 1 5 one of whose parents is Negro and the other Caucasian, or white; and (2) popularly, any person with mixed Negro and Caucasian ancestry. A mule is defined as (1) the offspring of a donkey and a horse, especially the offspring of a jackass and a mare-mules are ttsttally sterile. And, a further definition: in biology, a hy brid, especially a sterile hybrid. (Italics mine.) The idea of producing a child, on condition, and under the guarantee, that the child cannot reproduce must, after all, be relatively rare: no matter how dim a view one may take of the human race. It argues an extraordinary spiritual condition, or an unspeakable spiritual poverty: to produce a child with the intention of using it to gain a lease on limbo, or, failing that, on purgatory: to produce a child with the extinction of the child as one's hope of heaven. Mulatto: for that outpost of Christianity, that segment of the race which called itselfwhite, which found itself stranded among the heathen on the North American continent, under the necessity of destroying all ev idence of sin, including, if need be, those children who were proof of abandonment to savage, heathen passion, and under the absolute necessity of preserving its idea of itself by any means necessary, the use of the word, mulatto, was by no means inadvertent. It is one of the keys to American history, present, and past. Americans are still destroying their own children: and, infanticide being but a step away fr om geno cide, not only theirs. If we do not know where the mulatto came from, we certainly know where a multitude went, dis patched by their own fathers, and we know where multitudes are, until today, plotting death, plotting life, groaning in the chains in which their fathers have bound them. Om-fathers, indeed, for here we all are: and we encounter an invitation to discover the essential decency of this history (this is known as progress) in the person of the Sheriff in a film made some fifty-odd years later, In the Heat of the Night. This film has no mulattoes: unless one wishes to examine, with a certain rigor, the roles played by some of the towns people: we will return to this speculation: and, apart from the brief cotton-picking sequence, seen from the window of the Sheriff's moving car, it is hard to locate the niggers. (This, also, is progress.) The man who lodges the black detecti\'e 516 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK comes close to being a nigger. The lady who arranges abor tions is dark indeed, but is clearly passing-through; and Mr. Virgil Tibbs comes fr om fr eedom-loving Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. To this haven, he will return, if he lives.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  End of joke. Then, there is the scene with the lady who deals in abor tions. I have described this lady somewhat rudely; she may have passed through the West Indies, or Africa, and, at that, speedily; but she surely do not come from around here. She appears to be looking for a home, and, fr om the way Virgil Tibbs treats her, no wonder-I would, too. Demanding to know who, in the town, is paying for an abortion, he informs her (speaking of the prison sentence with which he is threat ening her) that "there's white time and black time-and ain't nothing worse than black time!" The lady who deals in abor tions appears to be utterly astounded and downcast by this news and rolls her eyes toward (I suppose) her suitcase. But she is saved by the arrival of the exhibitionistic girl: who, see ing Virgil Tibbs (they have met before), runs out into the night. Virgil runs after her (while the lady who deals in abortions flees into the back room, to pack, and book passage to Can ada, or Algeria) and picks up the fleeing poor white chick in his arms. In this unlucky posture he is found as headlights flash, before, and behind, and all around him, and white men leap out of their cars: into the heat of the night. This is the penultimate, exciting scene. One of the white men is the poor white brother of the poor white girl, and, naturally, he intends to lynch the nigger, whose black hands are still on the body of his white sister. With great presence of mind, Mr. Tibbs drops the sister and points to the real killer, who has the money for the abortion in his pocket. The attention of the murderous mob is thus distracted, naturally, fr om the nigger and the white chick to this creep, who promptly shoots the brother, dead: end of exciting scene. There remains the obligatory, fade-out kiss. I am aware that men do not kiss each other in American films, nor, for the most part, in America, nor do the black detective and the white Sheriff kiss here.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The Founding Fathers shared this view, eminently, Thomas Jefferson, and The Great Emancipator fr eed those slaves he could not reach, in order to create, hopefully, a fifth column behind the Confederate lines. This ambivalence con tains the key to American literature-in a way, it can be said to be American literature-all the way fr om The Scarlet Letter to The Big Sleep. In any case, what Europe really felt about the black presence in America is revealed by the stratagems the European-Americans have used, and use, to avoid it: that is, by American history, or the actual, present condition of any American city. The first image, then, of The Birth of a Nation is immensely and unconsciously revealing. Were it not for their swarthy color-or not even that, so many immigrants having been transformed into white men only upon arrival, and, as it were, by decree-were it not for the title preceding the image: they CHAPTER TWO 5 1 3 would look exactly like European passengers, huddled, silent, patient, and hopeful, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. (Give us your poor! Many of the poor, not only in America, but all over the world, are beginning to find that these tamous lines have a somewhat sinister ring.) These slaves look as though they want to enter the Promised Land, and are re garding their imminent masters in the hope of being bought. This is not exactly the way blacks looked, of course, as they entered America, nor were they yet covered by European clothes. Blacks got here nearly as naked as the day they were born, and were sold that way, every inch of their anatomy exposed and examined, teeth to testicles, breast to bottom. That's how darkies were born: more to the point, here, it is certainly how mulattoes were born. For, the most striking thing about the merciless plot on which The Birth of a Nation depends is that, although the legend of the nigger controls it the way the day may be con trolled by threat of rain, there are really no niggers in it. The plot is entirely controlled by the image of the mulatto, and there are two of them, one male and one female. All of the energy of the film is siphoned off into these two dreadful and improbable creatures. It might have made sense-that is, might have made a story-if these two mulattoes had been related to each other, or to the renegade politician, whose wards they are: but, no, he seems to have dreamed them up (they are like creatures in a nightmare someone is having) and they are related to each other only by their envy of white people. The renegade politician, I should already have told you-but this is one of the difficulties of trying to follow a plot-is also the heroine's father. This fact brings about his belated enlightenment, the final victory of the Klan, the film's denouement, and a double wedding.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Short of genius, such a career demands attentions and even stratagems for which I was little suited. Those set traps, always the same, and the monotonous routine of perpetual advances, leading no further than conquest itself, have palled on me. The technique of a great seducer requires a facility and an indifference in passing from one object of affection to another which I could never have; however that may be, my loves have left me more often than I have left them, for I have never been able to understand how one could have enough of any beloved. The desire to count up exactly the riches which each new love brings us, and to see it change, and perhaps watch it grow old, accords ill with multiplicity of conquests. I used once to believe that a certain feeling for beauty would serve me in place of virtue, and would render me immune from solicitations of the coarsest kind. But I was mistaken. The lover of beauty ends by finding it everywhere about him, a vein of gold in the basest of ores; by handling fragmentary masterpieces, though stained or broken, he comes to know a collector's pleasure in being the sole seeker after pottery which is commonly passed by. A problem more serious (for a man of taste) is a position of eminence in human affairs, with the risks from adulation and lies which are inherent in the possession of almost absolute power. The idea that anyone should sham in my presence, even in the slightest degree, is enough to make me pity and despise or even hate him. Indeed I have suffered from the inconveniences of my fortune as a poor man does from those of his privations. One step more and I could have accepted the fiction of pretending that one is a seducer when one knows oneself to be merely the master. But that is the road to disgust, or perhaps to fatuity. One would end by preferring the plain truths of debauchery to the outworn stratagems of seduction if there, too, lies did not prevail. In principle I am ready to admit that prostitution is an art like massage or hairdressing, but for my part I find it hard to get much enjoyment from barbers or masseurs. There is nothing more crude than an accomplice. The sidelong glance of the tavernkeeper who would reserve the best wine for me (and consequently deprive some other customer) sufficed even in my younger days to dull my appetite for the amusements of Rome.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  A man frustrated was weeping over himself. Ideas jarred upon each other; words ground on without meaning; voices rasped and buzzed like locusts in the desert or flies on a dung pile; our ships with sails swelling out like doves' breasts were carriers for intrigue and lies; on the human countenance stupidity reigned. Death, in its aspect of weakness or decay, came to the surface everywhere: the bad spot on a fruit, some imperceptible rent at the edge of a hanging, a carrion body on the shore, the pustules of a face, the mark of scourges on a bargeman's back. My hands seemed always somewhat soiled. At the hour of the bath, as I extended my legs for the slaves to shave, I looked with disgust upon this solid body, this almost indestructible machine which absorbed food, walked, and managed to sleep, and would, I knew, reaccustom itself one day or another to the routines of love. I could no longer bear the presence of any but those few servants who remembered the departed one; in their way they had loved him. My sorrow found an echo in the rather foolish mourning of a masseur, or of the old negro who tended the lamps. But their grief did not keep them from laughing softly amongst themselves as they took the evening air along the river bank. One morning as I leaned on the taffrail I noticed a slave at work in the quarters reserved for the kitchens; he was cleaning one of those chickens which Egypt hatches by the thousands in its dirty incubators; he gathered the slimy entrails into his hands and threw them into the water. I had barely time to turn away to vomit. At our stop in Philae, during a reception offered us by the governor, a child of three met with an accident: son of a Nubian porter and dark as bronze, he had crept into the balconies to watch the dancing, and fell from that height. They did the best they could to hide the whole thing; the porter held back his sobs for fear of disturbing his master's guests, and was led out with the body through the kitchen doors; in spite of such precautions I caught a glimpse of his shoulders rising and falling convulsively, as under the blows of a whip.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  everything else. The former members of the Red Rebels had to wear white armbands that described their various crimes. They were made to kowtow before the Mao statue several times a day while classmates kicked them from behind. The former Red Rebels had become like the reviled teachers, cowed and obedient. Jianhua was forced to do the most menial labor, and having had enough of this, in early summer of 1968 he returned to his hometown. His father sent him and his brother to a farm deep in the mountains where they could be safe and work as laborers. In September, determined to finish his studies, Jianhua returned to school. The few months away had given him some perspective, and now when he looked at the East-Is-Red Middle School, it appeared in a very different light: everywhere he saw signs of unbelievable destruction—classrooms completely torn up with no desks or chairs, the walls full of peeling posters and crumbling plaster; the science labs devoid of all equipment; piles of rubble around the campus; unmarked graves; the music hall blown up by a bomb; and hardly a reputable teacher or official left to resume their education. All of this destruction in a few short years, and for what? What did Heping and Yulan and Zongwei and so many others die for? What had they been fighting over? What had they learned? He could no longer figure it out, and the waste of their young lives filled him with disgust and despair. Soon Jianhua and his brother joined the army, to escape the school and bury their memories. Over the following years, as he drove an army truck delivering stone and cement, he and his comrades watched the slow disassembling of the Cultural Revolution, all of its former leaders falling into disgrace. After the death of Mao in 1976, the Communist Party itself finally condemned the Cultural Revolution as a national catastrophe. • • • Interpretation: The above story and characters come from the book Born Red (1987) by Gao Yuan. (After the Cultural Revolution, the author changed his name from Gao Jianhua to Gao Yuan.) It is his nonfiction account of the events he participated in at his school during the Cultural Revolution. In essence, the Cultural Revolution was Mao’s attempt to try to alter human nature itself. According to Mao, through millennia of capitalism in various forms, humans had become individualistic and conservative, bound to their social class. Mao wanted to wipe the slate clean and start over. As he explained it, “A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.” To get his blank canvas, Mao would have to shake things up on a mass scale by uprooting old habits and ways of thinking and by eradicating people’s mindless respect for those in authority. Once he accomplished this, Mao could start to paint something bold and new on the clean sheet. The result would be a

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Later there was a horrible bedroom where the light came back off silvery "abstract" wallpaper, and two skinny boys who couldn't get erections were doggedly sixty-nining. It must actually have been someone's room, of course, probably the director's if you could call him that—he would spend the night there, perhaps alone, after he had paid the boys their drug-money, less than they needed—the room glinted with bad faith. I said, "This is the worst thing I've ever seen." Above the bed a female saint, perhaps the Virgin herself, turned saucer eyes heavenwards. I pretended to sleep, and then slept. Later still—a minute later? twenty minutes?—there was a young man lying face down on the bed, naked and pale, but bigger and stronger than most of the movie's phantom crew. His legs were apart and you saw the dusk of hair on his balls; his face was buried in the pillows. The camera prowled down on him as a fly settled and walked about on his white arse. It flew off when the camera panned away to show the door half-open and behind it a man standing—fortyish, bearded, overweight in a T-shirt. His jeans were round his knees—he was already wanking as he spied on the boy; he seemed genuinely into it, it was a new note in the film, something voluntary and felt and so in a way more difficult to watch. "That's the guy who made the video," said Matt. The boy was standing with his back to us, we saw him only from the shoulders down, whilst a pair of hairy hands mauled and probed his backside. Like everything in the film it went on for ever—you felt you could have flown to Athens or read The Spoils of Poynton in the time it took to change to something new. I was bewildered to think anyone could watch this for pleasure, it seemed to mock any thought of sexual happiness. Then at last we were round the front, where the man was kneeling, the boy's limp cock in his mouth. He went at it and went at it; sometimes he took it in his hand and pistoned it into a semblance of life, but then it died again. We never saw the young man's face, only the strong, lean body; but he began to generate a vague sense of apology, his hands reluctantly caressed his fellator's thinning scalp, and lingered there long enough for us to see the skull charm of a ring that bit into his finger and the tattooed letters R, O, S, E.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I again went through what we had already seen, to the point of revulsion, during the Dacian campaigns. Our enemies burned their prisoners alive; we began to slaughter ours, for lack of means to transport them to slave markets in Rome or Asia. The stakes of our palisades bristled with severed heads. The enemy tortured their hostages; several of my friends perished in this way. One of them dragged himself on his bleeding limbs as far as the camp; he had been so disfigured that I was never able, thereafter, to recall his former aspect. The winter took its toll of victims; groups of horsemen caught in the ice or carried off by the river floods, the sick racked by cough, groaning feebly in their tents, wounded men with frozen extremities. Some admirable spirits gathered round me; this small, closely bound company whose devotion I held had the highest form of virtue, and the only one in which I still believe, namely, the firm determination to be of service. A Sarmatian fugitive whom I had made my interpreter risked his life to return to his people, there to foment revolts or treason; I succeeded in coming to an understanding with this tribe, and from that time on its men fought to protect our advance posts. A few bold strokes, imprudent in themselves but skillfully contrived, demonstrated to the enemy the absurdity of attacking the Roman State. One of the Sarmatian chieftains followed the example of Decebalus: he was found dead in his tent of felt; beside him lay his wives, who had been strangled, and a horrible bundle which contained the bodies of their children. That day my disgust for waste and futility extended to the barbarian losses themselves; I regretted these dead whom Rome might have absorbed and employed one day as allies against hordes more savage still. Our scattered attackers disappeared as they had come, into that obscure region from which no doubt many another storm will break forth. The war had not ended. I was obliged to take it up again and finish it some months after my accession. Order reigned for the moment, at least, on that frontier. I returned to Rome covered with honors. But I had aged. My first consulate proved also to be a year of campaign, but this time the struggle was secret, though incessant, and was waged on behalf of peace. It was not, however, a struggle carried on alone. Before my return a change of attitude parallel to my own had taken place in Licinius Sura, Attianus, and Turbo alike, as if in spite of the severe censorship which I exercised over my letters these friends had already understood, and were either following me or had gone on ahead.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Stuffing themselves on certain feast days has always been the ambition, joy, and natural pride of the poor. At army festivities I liked the aroma of roasted meats and the noisy scraping of kettles, and it pleased me to see that the army banquets (or what passes for a banquet in camp) were just what they always should be, a gay and hearty contrast to the deprivations of working days. I could stand well enough the smell of fried foods in the public squares at the Saturnalia, but the banquets of Rome filled me with such repugnance and boredom that if at times I have expected to die in the course of an exploration or a military expedition I have said to myself, by way of consolation, that at least I should not have to live through another dinner! Do not do me the injustice to take me for a mere ascetic; an operation which is performed two or three times a day, and the purpose of which is to sustain life, surely merits all our care. To eat a fruit is to welcome into oneself a fair living object, which is alien to us but is nourished and protected like us by the earth; it is to consume a sacrifice wherein we sustain ourselves at the expense of things. I have never bitten into a chunk of army bread without marveling that this coarse and heavy concoction can transform itself into blood and warmth, and perhaps into courage. Alas, why does my mind, even in its best days, never possess but a particle of the assimilative powers of the body? It was in Rome, during the long official repasts, that I began to think of the relatively recent origins of our riches, and of this nation of thrifty farmers and frugal soldiers formerly fed upon garlic and barley now suddenly enabled by our conquests to luxuriate in the culinary arts of Asia, bolting down those complicated viands with the greed of hungry peasants. We Romans cram ourselves with ortolans, drown in sauce, and poison ourselves with spice. An Apicius glories in the succession of courses and the sequence of sweet or sour, heavy or dainty foods which make up the exquisite order of his banquets; these dishes would perhaps be tolerable if each were served separately, and consumed for its own sake, learnedly savored by an expert whose taste and appetite are both unspoiled. But presented pell-mell, in the midst of everyday vulgar profusion, they confound a man's palate and confuse his stomach with a detestable mixture of flavors, odors, and substances in which the true values are lost and the unique qualities disappear. My poor Lucius used to amuse himself by concocting delicacies for me; his pheasant pasties with their skillful blending of ham and spice bore witness to an art which is as exacting as that of a musician or painter, but I could not help regretting the unadulterated flesh of the fine bird.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  In the small carpeted lift (which this morning I allowed myself to take) one would meet strangers who were just polite, incredibly well dressed, sometimes carrying tiny fancy dogs. James liked the insularity of his flat, liked having a place all to himself, but was clearly affected by this mood of transience, a sense of valuelessness despite the climbing prices and the mortgage. He could never bring himself to do much to it, and though he loved pictures seemed not to notice the half-furnished bareness of his own few rooms. He had a fine Piranesi—all tumbled masonry and sprouting bushes—that he had bought years ago in a sale but had never framed. It was propped, sagging in its mount, on the mantelpiece, above the dusty and ornate black ironwork of the blocked-off grate. There were comfortable, nondescript armchairs, and a heavyweight stereo system. He was obsessed with Shostakovich and had innumerable records of baleful quartets and sarcastic little songs. They put me into a gloom and a fidget within seconds but I think their bleakness met some otherwise inarticulate inner compulsion of his own, of a piece perhaps with the featurelessness of the apartment and his fatalistic disdain of possessions. I heated up some coffee in the kitchen. James’s life—like Phil’s in a way—followed such awkward and demanding patterns, was so thrown out for the service of others, that ordinary things like mealtimes and provisions obeyed a quite different logic. Often he would live for weeks on three-minute snacks, and he was used to breakfasting at five in the morning or lunching at five in the afternoon. The fridge and cupboards were always full of little items to eat, many of them bought from the local Japanese supermarket. I riffled through packets of seaweed, red-hot crackers and the sprouts of various beans before deciding that coffee alone, perhaps, would be the thing. There were two kinds of specialist publication James took. As I sat on a stool and leafed through to the end of the Guardian , I was alarmed to find one of them underneath, lying on the kitchen work-top. This was Update , a medical monthly that kept GPs abreast of the latest in sores, goitres, growths and malformations of all kinds. The articles were sober to a fault, and cast an assumption of disturbing normality over conditions which the accompanying photographs showed to be quite revoltingly unusual. This effect was worsened by the colour spectrum used, a flashlight glare which lent to the contorted limbs, the misted-over eyes and weeping wounds the high tonality of well-hung game. It was hard to imagine looking forward to the arrival of Update as one might to that of Autocar or Hampshire Life. The other mags were not left lying about.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The vendors' pickups and trailers were drawn up tight against the wall, and in between, on low barrows or simply standing on the cobbles, were the rustling, rackety cages that contained their wares. There was a ripe, unhappy smell that I remembered from the circus that ran up one childhood summer outside our windows at Rough Common; and then, as I walked along through a light crowd that seemed oppressive in the narrowly overhung street, a smell of frying onions, sausages and chips from one van and of fresh whelks and shrimps from another. I'd heard about this market from someone at the Cassette, and knew it was popular with the local children, who were here now, laughing at a marmoset sprinting in a wheel or trying to provoke some reaction from the comatose tree-snakes and elderly, moulting parakeets, who stood first on one leg, then on the other, looking cynically about. I saw lizards, kittens, carp, canaries; I saw a little ginger monkey rubbing its nose like a person who is embarrassed; I saw tiny fluffy dogs you might mistake for slippers and insects you might think were shrivelled fallen leaves. One old woman had a biscuit-tin of spiders, and a scientific-looking man stood behind a glass case half full of earth, challenging you to believe that it contained a pair of nocturnal burrowing voles. I hung about with the families, who were in a mood of subdued hilarity, and strolled among the boys who were standing with their bikes, their expressions mingling teen contempt with innocent absorption. Occasionally a few francs would exchange hands, and the purchaser of a rabbit or a piranha would walk off briskly, as from a shady deal; I was being very English, no doubt, but I wondered what heartless caprice could lead anyone to buy here. I avoided the sellers' eyes, and had the feeling that if I let them snare me with their sudden patter, or worse a huckster's wordless beckon and hand on the elbow, I would be shown some further unwelcome curiosity, something uniquely poisonous or malformed. The animal-sellers were a collection as rickety as the animals. Even the young ones had the weathered, impassive look of market-people everywhere, silent for long periods as if without expectation, then breaking into vaguely fraudulent animation. From the signs on their vans and their registrations it was clear that they came in from Holland, from the Ardennes, from northern France, and for a moment I caught a glimpse of this makeshift menagerie rattling from place to place across the rainy roads of Flanders, a reluctant fraternity, showing up each week or each month. There was shouting from further down the street, the yap of a dog and one or two other voices indistinctly raised.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I covered my face with my hands; then, when Matt had wandered to the kitchen, I reached for the remote control and fast-forwarded for ages. Matt woke me with a shake and I sat up and frowned at a couple of men going at it dementedly, with the noiseless hysteria of an early motion picture. He took the remote, and abruptly slowed the film—I groaned at the artless dawdling of ordinary time, the wanton deferral. Later there was a horrible bedroom where the light came back off silvery "abstract" wallpaper, and two skinny boys who couldn't get erections were doggedly sixty-nining. It must actually have been someone's room, of course, probably the director's if you could call him that—he would spend the night there, perhaps alone, after he had paid the boys their drug-money, less than they needed—the room glinted with bad faith. I said, "This is the worst thing I've ever seen." Above the bed a female saint, perhaps the Virgin herself, turned saucer eyes heavenwards. I pretended to sleep, and then slept. Later still—a minute later? twenty minutes?—there was a young man lying face down on the bed, naked and pale, but bigger and stronger than most of the movie's phantom crew. His legs were apart and you saw the dusk of hair on his balls; his face was buried in the pillows. The camera prowled down on him as a fly settled and walked about on his white arse. It flew off when the camera panned away to show the door half-open and behind it a man standing—fortyish, bearded, overweight in a T-shirt. His jeans were round his knees—he was already wanking as he spied on the boy; he seemed genuinely into it, it was a new note in the film, something voluntary and felt and so in a way more difficult to watch. "That's the guy who made the video," said Matt. The boy was standing with his back to us, we saw him only from the shoulders down, whilst a pair of hairy hands mauled and probed his backside. Like everything in the film it went on for ever—you felt you could have flown to Athens or read The Spoils of Poynton in the time it took to change to something new.

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

  Smith was severely addicted to drugs at the time of the crime and ultimately rejected a death sentence. The jury instead decided Kenny should be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. But Alabama law allowed the trial judge— who would soon be running for re-election—to override the jury’s verdict and impose a death sentence, which is exactly what he did. It was that judge’s decision that put Mr. Smith on the gurney when the State of Alabama first tried but failed to end his life. State officials blamed Mr. Smith for their inability to kill him in 2022, arguing that his appeals to stop his execution “frustrated the process” and shortened the time to carry out a lethal injection. Mr. Smith had sued to prevent the State from executing him because Alabama had bungled the two executions immediately preceding his. Two months earlier, Alan Miller survived a botched execution during which state officials strapped him down and jabbed him for several hours before returning him to his cell. The failed execution of Mr. Miller followed the disastrous execution of a condemned man named Joe James, who was killed by state officials after hours of unsuccessful stabbing to access his veins. The autopsy revealed that Mr. James suffered multiple cuts and injuries over the course of the three-hour execution process—one of the longest ever recorded. Reports circulated that the attempted execution of Mr. James was so upsetting that at least one member of the execution team fled the death chamber in distress. Citing these accounts, Mr. Smith persuaded a federal court to issue an order stopping his November 17, 2022, execution. But the State appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which vacated the stay and allowed the execution to proceed. State officials later contended that Mr. Smith’s successful litigation before the Supreme Court’s ruling left them only two hours to execute him before the expiration of his death warrant—too little time given the complications of accessing his veins. The governor ordered a review of the multiple botched executions. After a truncated internal review, the State announced that it would make no changes to the execution process. Instead, Alabama adopted a plan where state officials would have a whole week to execute a condemned prisoner instead of just one day. For its second execution of Mr. Smith, Alabama decided to try a new, untested method involving the use of nitrogen gas. Rather than inject lethal chemicals into his veins, Alabama planned to put a gas mask over Mr. Smith’s face and pump in nitrogen, which would kill him by depriving him of oxygen. Some experts contended this would amount to torture. One federal appeals court judge, the Hon. Jill Pryor, argued that the execution should be stopped. In a dissent from her colleagues’ decision allowing the execution to proceed, she wrote: Inside the chamber, he will be strapped to a gurney, the same one that held him for hours as he endured excruciating pain just over a year ago.