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 Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Go home and wash your face.” He walked off without paying for the drinks. In a few days, however, the princess was installed. She’s a genuine princess, of that we’re pretty certain. But: she has the clap. Anyway, life is far from dull here. Fillmore has bronchitis, the princess, as I was saying, has the clap, and I have the piles. Just exchanged six empty bottles at the Russian épicerie across the way. Not a drop went down my gullet. No meat, no wine, no rich game, no women. Only fruit and paraffin oil, arnica drops and adrenalin ointment. And not a chair in the joint that’s, comfortable enough. Right now, looking at the princess, I’m propped up like a pasha. Pasha! That reminds me of her name: Macha. Doesn’t sound so damned aristocratic to me. Reminds me of The Living Corpse . At first I thought it was going to be embarrassing, a ménage à trois , but not at all. I thought when I saw her move in that it was all up with me again, that I should have to find another place, but Fillmore soon gave me to understand that he was only putting her up until she got on her feet. With a woman like her I don’t know what an expression like that means; as far as I can see she’s been standing on her head all her life. She says the revolution drove her out of Russia, but I’m sure if it hadn’t been the revolution it would have been something else. She’s under the impression that she’s a great actress; we never contradict her in anything she says because it’s time wasted. Fillmore finds her amusing. When he leaves for the office in the morning he drops ten francs on her pillow and ten francs on mine; at night the three of us go to the Russian restaurant down below. The neighborhood is full of Russians and Macha has already found a place where she can run up a little credit. Naturally ten francs a day isn’t anything for a princess; she wants caviar now and then and champagne, and she needs a complete new wardrobe in order to get a job in the movies again. She has nothing to do now except to kill time. She’s putting on fat. This morning I had quite a fright. After I had washed my face I grabbed her towel by mistake. We can’t seem to train her to put her towel on the right hook. And when I bawled her out for it she answered smoothly: “My dear, if one can become blind from that I would have been blind years ago.” And then there’s the toilet, which we all have to use. I try speaking to her in a fatherly way about the toilet seat. “Oh zut!” she says. “If you are so afraid I’ll go to a café.” But it’s not necessary to do that, I explain. Just use ordinary precautions.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Listen... piss on the floor, if you like. I wish I could take a crap in the bureau drawer.” He feels so utterly disgusted with himself and everything else that he doesn’t know what to do by way of venting his feelings. He walks over to the bed with the bottle in his hand and pulling back the covers he sprinkles Calvados over the mattress. Not content with that he digs his heel into the mattress. Unfortunately there’s no mud on his heels. Finally he takes the sheet and cleans his shoes with it. “That’ll give them something to do,” he mutters vengefully. Then, taking a good swig, he throws his head back and gargles his throat, and after he’s gargled it good and proper he spits it out on the mirror. “There, you cheap bastards! Wipe that off when I go!” He walks back and forth mumbling to himself. Seeing his torn socks lying on the floor he picks them up and tears them to bits. The paintings enrage him too. He picks one up—a portrait of himself done by some Lesbian he knew and he puts his foot through it. “That bitch! You know what she had the nerve to ask me? She asked me to turn over my cunts to her after I was through with them. She never gave me a sou for writing her up. She thought I honestly admired her work. I wouldn’t have gotten that painting out of her if I hadn’t promised to fix her up with that cunt from Minnesota. She was nuts about her... used to follow us around like a dog in heat... we couldn’t get rid of the bitch! She bothered the life out of me. I got so that I was almost afraid to bring a cunt up here for fear that she’d bust in on me. I used to creep up here like a burglar and lock the door behind me as soon as I got inside. ... She and that Georgia cunt—they drive me nuts. The one is always in heat and the other is always hungry. I hate fucking a woman who’s hungry. It’s like you push a feed inside her and then you push it out again. ... Jesus, that reminds me of something... where did I put that blue ointment? That’s important. Did you ever have those things? It’s worse than having a dose. And I don’t know where I got them from either. I’ve had so many women up here in the last week or so I’ve lost track of them. Funny too, because they all smelled so fresh. But you know how it is. ...” The maid has piled his things up on the sidewalk. The patron looks on with a surly air.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  However she doesn’t look as if she had gone through much suffering. She weighs almost as much as a camel-backed locomotive; she drips with perspiration, has halitosis, and still wears her Circassian wig that looks like excelsior. She has two big warts on her chin from which there sprouts a clump of little hairs; she is growing a mustache. The day after Olga was released from the hospital she commenced making shoes again. At six in the morning she is at her bench; she knocks out two pairs of shoes a day. Eugene complains that Olga is a burden, but the truth is that Olga is supporting Eugene and his wife with her two pairs of shoes a day. If Olga doesn’t work there is no food. So everyone endeavors to pull Olga to bed on time, to give her enough food to keep going, etc. Every meal starts off with soup. Whether it be onion soup, tomato soup, vegetable soup, or what not, the soup always tastes the same. Mostly it tastes as if a dish rag had been stewed in it—slightly sour, mildewed, scummy. I see Eugene hiding it away in the commode after the meal. It stays there, rotting away, until the next meal. The butter, too, is hidden away in the commode; after three days it tastes like the big toe of a cadaver. The smell of rancid butter frying is not particularly appetizing, especially when the cooking is done in a room in which there is not the slightest form of ventilation. No sooner than I open the door I feel ill. But Eugene, as soon as he hears me coming, usually opens the shutters and pulls back the bedsheet which is strung up like a fishnet to keep out the sunlight. Poor Eugene! He looks about the room at the few sticks of furniture, at the dirty bed-sheets and the wash basin with the dirty water still in it, and he says: “I am a slave!” Every day he says it, not once, but a dozen times. And then he takes his guitar from the wall and sings. But about the smell of rancid butter. … There are good associations too. When I think of this rancid butter I see myself standing in a little, old-world courtyard, a very smelly, very dreary courtyard. Through the cracks in the shutters strange figures peer out at me… old women with shawls, dwarfs, rat-faced pimps, bent Jews, midinettes , bearded idiots. They totter out into the courtyard to draw water or to rinse the slop pails. One day Eugene asked me if I would empty the pail for him. I took it to the corner of the yard. There was a hole in the ground and some dirty paper lying around the hole. The little well was slimy with excrement, which in English is shit . I tipped the pail and there was a foul, gurgling splash followed by another and unexpected splash.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Having a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in no way prepared my brother for the sprawling financial mess he saw on the floor in front of him. There were piles of credit card receipts, stacks of pink overdraft notices from my bank, and duplicate and triplicate billings from all of the stores through which I had so recently swirled and charged. In a separate, more ominous pile were threatening letters from collection agencies. The chaotic visual impact upon entering the room reflected the higgledy-piggledy, pixilated collection of electric lobes that only a few weeks earlier had constituted my manic brain. Now, medicated and dreary, I was obsessively sifting through the remnants of my fiscal irresponsibility. It was like going on an archaeological dig through earlier ages of one’s mind. There was a bill from a taxidermist in The Plains, Virginia, for example, for a stuffed fox that I for some reason had felt I desperately needed. I had loved animals all of my life, had at one point wanted to be a veterinarian: How on earth could I have bought a dead animal? I had adored foxes and admired them for as long as I could remember; I thought them fast and smart and beautiful: How could I have so directly contributed to killing one? I was appalled by the grisly nature of my purchase, disgusted with myself, and incapable of imagining what I would do with the fox once it actually arrived. In an attempt to divert myself, I began pawing my way through the credit card slips. Near the top of the pile was a bill from the pharmacy where I had gotten my snakebite kits. The pharmacist, having just filled my first prescription for lithium, had smiled knowingly as he rang up the sale for my snakebite kits and the other absurd, useless, and bizarre purchases. I knew what he was thinking and, in the benevolence of my expansive mood, could appreciate the humor. He, unlike me, however, appeared to be completely unaware of the life-threatening problem created by rattlesnakes in the San Fernando Valley. God had chosen me, and apparently only me, to alert the world to the wild proliferation of killer snakes in the Promised Land. Or so I thought in my scattered delusional meanderings. In my own small way, by buying up the drugstore’s entire supply of snakebite kits, I was doing all I could do to protect myself and those I cared about. In the midst of my crazed scurryings up and down the aisles of the drugstore, I had also come up with a plan to alert the Los Angeles Times to the danger. I was, however, far too manic to tie my thoughts together into a coherent plan.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  From Germany Servetus went to Switzerland and spent some time at Basel. There he first ventilated his heresies on the trinity and the divinity of Christ. He importuned Oecolampadius with interviews and letters, hoping to convert him. But Oecolampadius was startled and horrified. He informed his friends, Bucer, Zwingli, and Bullinger, who happened to be at Basel in October, 1530, that he had been troubled of late by a hot-headed Spaniard, who denied the divine trinity and the eternal divinity of our Saviour. Zwingli advised him to try to convince Servetus of his error, and by good and wholesome arguments to win him over to the truth. Oecolampadius said that he could make no impression upon the haughty, daring, and contentious man. Zwingli replied: "This is indeed a thing insufferable in the Church of God. Therefore do everything possible to prevent the spread of such dreadful blasphemy." Zwingli never saw the objectionable book in print. Servetus sought to satisfy Oecolampadius by a misleading confession of faith, but the latter was not deceived by the explanations and exhorted him to "confess the Son of God to be coequal and coeternal with the Father;" otherwise he could not acknowledge him as a Christian. § 141. The Book against the Holy Trinity. Servetus was too vain and obstinate to take advice. In the beginning of 1531, he secured a publisher for his book on the "Errors of the Trinity," Conrad Koenig, who had shops at Basel and Strassburg, and who sent the manuscript to Secerius, a printer at Hagenau in Alsace. Servetus went to that place to read the proof. He also visited Bucer and Capito at Strassburg, who received him with courtesy and kindness and tried to convert him, but in vain.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  high priest Onias, obtained the high priesthood by bribing the king, and proceeded to build a gymnasium and introduce the Greek way of life in Jerusalem. (The word helle¯nismos , “Hellenism,” is used here for the first time to refer to the Greek way of life.) His innovations were greeted with enthusiasm by some people. Some priests, we are told, neglected the service of the temple in their eagerness for athletic contexts. Then a man named Menelaus, who was not of the high priestly family, outbid Jason and became high priest. Menelaus also contrived to have the legitimate high priest, Onias, murdered. When Antiochus Epiphanes invaded Egypt for the second time (in 168 B.C.E.), Jason attempted unsuccessfully to stage a coup. When the king heard of fighting in Jerusalem, he thought that the city was in revolt and sent in the troops. Shortly after this he took measures to suppress the Jewish religion. According to 2 Maccabees, the temple became a place where prostitutes had intercourse with Gentiles and Jews were compelled to celebrate a festival in honor of the Greek god Dionysus. The account of these events in 2 Maccabees is generally more satisfactory than that of 1 Maccabees. It becomes clear that the king’s actions were not entirely unprovoked but were a response to what he perceived as rebellion on the part of the Jews. Nonetheless, the attempt to suppress the Jewish religion is extraordinary in antiquity and remains extremely puzzling. Some scholars suspect that the persecution may have been the idea of Menelaus, as a way of crushing the opposition of traditional Jews. All the ancient accounts, however, place the responsibility on the king. It may be, as some ancient authors suggest, that the king regarded the Jewish religion as barbaric. It was certainly highly distinctive in the ancient world, in its insistence on monotheism and rejection of idolatry. On this account, the king would have been trying to make it like a Greek cult, in effect, to “normalize” it. But his actions are still hard to explain. There was no precedent in the Greek world for an attempt to suppress a cult in this manner. Better precedents, in fact, can be found in the biblical tradition, notably in the reform of King Josiah (2 Kings 22–23), which suppressed the cults of the Israelite high places. In placing so much emphasis on the Hellenistic reform, 2 Maccabees represents the basic conflict as one between Hellenism and Judaism. Yet it should be noted that on any account the “reforms” of Jason and the building of the gymnasium encountered no significant opposition. It was only when the king attempted to suppress the traditional forms of Jewish worship that a revolt broke out. The essential conflict, then, was not over broad cultural issues but over the freedom of the Jewish people to practice their traditional religion as they saw fit.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  Goel Ratzon’s female followers were expected to observe restrictions regarding communication, associations, diet, and personal conduct, which were explicitly set down within a written rulebook, including fines for infractions.439 One rule specifically stipulated, “No conversation is permitted in rooms other than the living room.”440 The children all had the name Goel, which means “savior” in Hebrew. And they were taught to kiss Ratzon’s feet whenever he visited.441 Ratzon called his polygamist family a “cooperative.”442 He sent the women out to work, while others stayed at home as caregivers and did housekeeping.443 A neighbor described them as “isolated” and said, “They never say hello, and always bow their heads if you go by. One mother would take seven kids to school, [and] then go to work. Another would stay at home with the smaller ones. When Goel would arrive he would get out of his car like he was a king, and they would run behind him carrying bags, clothes, even furniture.”444 In a televised documentary before the police raid, Goel Ratzon claimed to be “perfect” and said, “I have everything a woman wants, all the qualities a woman wants. I give women the attention they want. It’s made of many things, but fortunately, I have everything.” Women in the group tattooed his image on their bodies with words such as “Goel Ratzon, my love forever” and “To Goel, with love.” A Kabbalah teacher and supposed healer, Ratzon took on supernatural significance to his followers. One woman in the group claimed, “He’s the Messiah that everyone talks about. The day he decides to reveal himself, this country will see it.”445 Private investigator Asher Wizman said Ratzon preyed on troubled young women. Once they were within the group, those women invited sisters, cousins, and friends to join. Ratzon was also known to recruit within Tel Aviv shopping malls.446 The woman who finally exposed Goel Ratzon and his crimes to police said, “I was in that house from the age of 5. I had no freedom of choice.” At nineteen she began to have doubts, but didn’t finally run away until she was twenty-two. “He started to disgust me. I couldn’t stand his smell and his caresses made me shudder,” she said.447 Inbar Yehezkeli-Blilious, legal consultant for the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel explained, “Ratzon put pressure on his wives and they submitted because he had the status of a guru…Even if these women agreed to the actions, they did it because of the illusion of special powers they attributed to the man. From past experience, they probably knew of the harm being done to their girls, but lacked the strength to object.”448 Dr. Hanita Zimrin, founder and director of the Israel Association for Child Protection, told the press, “This was not a normal family. The children were educated to worship a man and prevented from growing up in a normal environment, and each of their mothers was a victim.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Un acte gratuit pour vous, cher monsieur si bien coupé en tranches! How a man can wander about all day on an empty belly, and even get an erection once in a while, is one of those mysteries which are too easily explained by the “anatomists of the soul.” On a Sunday afternoon, when the shutters are down and the proletariat possesses the street in a kind of dumb torpor, there are certain thoroughfares which remind one of nothing less than a big chancrous cock laid open longitudinally. And it is just these highways, the Rue St. Denis, for instance, or the Faubourg du Temple—which attract one irresistibly, much as in the old days, around Union Square or the upper reaches of the Bowery, one was drawn to the dime museums where in the show windows there were displayed wax reproductions of various organs of the body eaten away by syphilis and other venereal diseases. The city sprouts out like a huge organism diseased in every part, the beautiful thoroughfares only a little less repulsive because they have been drained of their pus. At the Cité Nortier, somewhere near the Place du Combat, I pause a few minutes to drink in the full squalor of the scene. It is a rectangular court like many another which one glimpses through the low passageways that flank the old arteries of Paris. In the middle of the court is a clump of decrepit buildings which have so rotted away that they have collapsed on one another and formed a sort of intestinal embrace. The ground is uneven, the flagging slippery with slime. A sort of human dump heap which has been filled in with cinders and dry garbage. The sun is setting fast. The colors die. They shift from purple to dried blood, from nacre to bister, from cool dead grays to pigeon shit. Here and there a lopsided monster stands in the window blinking like an owl. There is the shrill squawk of children with pale faces and bony limbs, rickety little urchins marked with the forceps. A fetid odor seeps from the walls, the odor of a mildewed mattress. Europe—medieval, grotesque, monstrous: a symphony in B-mol. Directly across the street the Ciné Combat offers its distinguished clientele Metropolis . Coming away my mind reverts to a book that I was reading only the other day. “The town was a shambles; corpses, mangled by butchers and stripped by plunderers, lay thick in the streets; wolves sneaked from the suburbs to eat them; the black death and other plagues crept in to keep them company, and the English came marching on; the while the danse macabre whirled about the tombs in all the cemeteries. …” Paris during the days of Charles the Silly! A lovely book! Refreshing, appetizing. I’m still enchanted by it.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  But all this is only to make an impression on me. He hasn’t the slightest intention of buying himself oysters, or meat, or fish. Not as long as I am there, at least. For the time being we are going to nourish ourselves on lentils and rice and all the dry foods he has stored away in the attic. And the butter he bought last week, that won’t go to waste either. When he commences to cure the butter the smell is unbearable. I used to run out at first, when he started frying the butter, but now I stick it out. He’d be only too delighted if he could make me vomit up my meal—that would be something else to put away in the cupboard along with the dry bread and the moldy cheese and the little grease cakes that he makes himself out of the stale milk and the rancid butter. For the last five years, so it seems, he hasn’t done a stroke of work, hasn’t turned over a penny. Business has gone to smash. He talks to me about pearls in the Indian ocean—big fat ones on which you can live for a lifetime. The Arabs are ruining the business, he says. But meanwhile he prays to the lord so-and-so every day, and that sustains him. He’s on a marvelous footing with the deity: knows just how to cajole him, how to wheedle a few sous out: of him. It’s a pure commercial relationship. In exchange for the flummery before the cabinet every day he gets his ration of beans and garlic, to say nothing of the swollen testicles under his arm. He is confident that everything will turn out well in the end. The pearls will sell again some day, maybe five years hence, maybe twenty—when the Lord Boomaroom wishes it. “And when the business goes, Endree, you will get ten per cent—for writing the letters. But first Endree, you must write the letter to find out if we can get credit from India. It will take about six months for an answer, maybe seven months... the boats are not fast in India.” He has no conception of time at all, the little duck. When I ask him if he has slept well he will say: “Ah, yes, Endree, I sleep very well... I sleep sometimes ninety-two hours in three days.” Mornings he is usually too weak to do any work. His arm! That poor broken crutch of an arm! I wonder sometimes when I see him twisting it around the back of his neck how he will ever get it into place again. If it weren’t for that little paunch he carries he’d remind me of one of those contortionists at the Cirque Médrano.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  We came from different places, each of us, but we had something in common—a whole lot, I might say. We were getting sentimental, as Americans do when it comes time to part. We were getting quite foolish about the cows and sheep and the big open spaces where men are men and all that crap. If a boat had swung along instead of the train we’d have hopped aboard and said good-bye to it all. But Collins was never to see America again, as I learned later; and Fillmore … well, Fillmore had to take his punishment too, in a way that none of us could have suspected then. It’s best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it’s always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman or beast. It doesn’t exist, America. It’s a name you give to an abstract idea. … Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can’t wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked. I returned to Paris with money in my pocket—a few hundred francs, which Collins had shoved in my pocket just as I was boarding the train. It was enough to pay for a room and at least a week’s good rations. It was more than I had had in my hands at one time for several years. I felt elated, as though perhaps a new life was opening before me. I wanted to conserve it too, so I looked up a cheap hotel over a bakery on the Rue du Château, just off the Rue de Vanves, a place that Eugene had pointed out to me once. A few yards away was the bridge that spans the Montparnasse tracks. A familiar quarter. I could have had a room for a hundred francs a month, a room without any conveniences to be sure—without even a window—and perhaps I would have taken it, just to be sure of a place to flop for a while, had it not been for the fact that in order to reach this room I would have been obliged to first pass through the room of a blind man. The thought of passing his bed every night had a most depressing effect upon me. I decided to look elsewhere. I went over to the Rue Cels, just behind the cemetery, and I looked at a sort of rat trap there with balconies running around the courtyard. There were birdcages suspended from the balcony too, all along the lower tier. A cheerful sight perhaps, but to me it seemed like the public ward in a hospital. The proprietor didn’t seem to have all his wits either.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  She fishes around in the box with her fat fingers, nibbles a tiny piece to see if there is any juice inside, and then throws it on the floor for the dogs. The meal over, the guests rush away. They rush away precipitously, as if they feared a plague. Serge and I are left with the dogs—his wife has fallen asleep on the couch. Serge moves about unconcernedly, scraping the garbage for the dogs. “Dogs like very much,” he says. “Very good for dogs. Little dog he has worms... he is too young yet.” He bends down to examine some white worms lying on the carpet between the dog’s paws. Tries to explain about the worms in English, but his vocabulary is lacking. Finally he consults the dictionary. “Ah,” he says, looking at me exultantly, “tapeworms!” My response is evidently not very intelligent. Serge is confused. He gets down on his hands and knees to examine them better. He picks one up and lays it on the table beside the fruit. “Huh, him not very beeg,” he grunts. “Next lesson you learn me worms, no? You are gude teacher. I make progress with you. ...” Lying on the mattress in the hallway the odor of the germicide stifles me. A pungent, acrid odor that seems to invade every pore of my body. The food begins to repeat on me—the Quaker Oats, the mushrooms, the bacon, the fried apples. I see the little tapeworm lying beside the fruit and all the varieties of worms that Serge drew on the tablecloth to explain what was the matter with the dog. I see the empty pit of the Folies-Bergère and in every crevice there are cockroaches and lice and bedbugs; I see people scratching themselves frantically, scratching and scratching until the blood comes. I see the worms crawling over the scenery like an army of red ants, devouring everything in sight. I see the chorus girls throwing away their gauze tunics and running through the aisles naked; I see the spectators in the pit throwing off their clothes also and scratching each other like monkeys. I try to quiet myself. After all, this is a home I’ve found, and there’s a meal waiting for me every day. And Serge is a brick, there’s no doubt about that. But I can’t sleep. It’s like going to sleep in a morgue. The mattress is saturated with embalming fluid. It’s a morgue for lice, bedbugs, cockroaches, tapeworms. I can’t stand it. I won’t stand it! After all I’m a man, not a louse. In the morning I wait for Serge to load the truck. I ask him to take me in to Paris. I haven’t the heart to tell him I’m leaving. I leave the knapsack behind, with the few things that were left me.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Un acte gratuit pour vous, cher monsieur si bien coupé en tranches! How a man can wander about all day on an empty belly, and even get an erection once in a while, is one of those mysteries which are too easily explained by the “anatomists of the soul.” On a Sunday afternoon, when the shutters are down and the proletariat possesses the street in a kind of dumb torpor, there are certain thoroughfares which remind one of nothing less than a big chancrous cock laid open longitudinally. And it is just these highways, the Rue St. Denis, for instance, or the Faubourg du Temple—which attract one irresistibly, much as in the old days, around Union Square or the upper reaches of the Bowery, one was drawn to the dime museums where in the show windows there were displayed wax reproductions of various organs of the body eaten away by syphilis and other venereal diseases. The city sprouts out like a huge organism diseased in every part, the beautiful thoroughfares only a little less repulsive because they have been drained of their pus. At the Cité Nortier, somewhere near the Place du Combat, I pause a few minutes to drink in the full squalor of the scene. It is a rectangular court like many another which one glimpses through the low passageways that flank the old arteries of Paris. In the middle of the court is a clump of decrepit buildings which have so rotted away that they have collapsed on one another and formed a sort of intestinal embrace. The ground is uneven, the flagging slippery with slime. A sort of human dump heap which has been filled in with cinders and dry garbage. The sun is setting fast. The colors die. They shift from purple to dried blood, from nacre to bister, from cool dead grays to pigeon shit. Here and there a lopsided monster stands in the window blinking like an owl. There is the shrill squawk of children with pale faces and bony limbs, rickety little urchins marked with the forceps. A fetid odor seeps from the walls, the odor of a mildewed mattress. Europe—medieval, grotesque, monstrous: a symphony in B-mol. Directly across the street the Ciné Combat offers its distinguished clientele Metropolis . Coming away my mind reverts to a book that I was reading only the other day. “The town was a shambles; corpses, mangled by butchers and stripped by plunderers, lay thick in the streets; wolves sneaked from the suburbs to eat them; the black death and other plagues crept in to keep them company, and the English came marching on; the while the danse macabre whirled about the tombs in all the cemeteries. …” Paris during the days of Charles the Silly! A lovely book! Refreshing, appetizing. I’m still enchanted by it.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  The colors die. They shift from purple to dried blood, from nacre to bister, from cool dead grays to pigeon shit. Here and there a lopsided monster stands in the window blinking like an owl. There is the shrill squawk of children with pale faces and bony limbs, rickety little urchins marked with the forceps. A fetid odor seeps from the walls, the odor of a mildewed mattress. Europe—medieval, grotesque, monstrous: a symphony in B-mol. Directly across the street the Ciné Combat offers its distinguished clientele Metropolis. Coming away my mind reverts to a book that I was reading only the other day. “The town was a shambles; corpses, mangled by butchers and stripped by plunderers, lay thick in the streets; wolves sneaked from the suburbs to eat them; the black death and other plagues crept in to keep them company, and the English came marching on; the while the danse macabre whirled about the tombs in all the cemeteries. ...” Paris during the days of Charles the Silly! A lovely book! Refreshing, appetizing. I’m still enchanted by it. About the patrons and prodromes of the Renaissance I know little, but Madam Pimpernel, la belle boulangère, and Maître Jehan Crapotte, l’ orfèvre, these occupy my spare thoughts still. Not forgetting Rodin, the evil genius of The Wandering Jew, who practiced his nefarious ways “until the day when he was en-flamed and outwitted by the octoroon Cecily.” Sitting in the Square du Temple, musing over the doings of the horse knackers led by Jean Caboche, I have thought long and ruefully over the sad fate of Charles the Silly. A halfwit, who prowled about the halls of his Hôtel St. Paul, garbed in the filthiest rags, eaten away by ulcers and vermin, gnawing a bone, when they flung him one, like a mangy dog. At the Rue des Lions I looked for the stones of the old menagerie where he once fed his pets. His only diversion, poor dolt, aside from those card games with his “low- born companion,” Odette de Champdivers. It was a Sunday afternoon, much like this, when I first met Germaine. I was strolling along the Boulevard Beaumarchais, rich by a hundred francs or so which my wife had frantically cabled from America. There was a touch of spring in the air, a poisonous, malefic spring that seemed to burst from the manholes. Night after night I had been coming back to this quarter, attracted by certain leprous streets which only revealed their sinister splendor when the light of day had oozed away and the whores commenced to take up their posts. The Rue du Pasteur-Wagner is one I recall in particular, corner of the Rue Amelot which hides behind the boulevard like a slumbering lizard.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  She fishes around in the box with her fat fingers, nibbles a tiny piece to see if there is any juice inside, and then throws it on the floor for the dogs. The meal over, the guests rush away. They rush away precipitously, as if they feared a plague. Serge and I are left with the dogs—his wife has fallen asleep on the couch. Serge moves about unconcernedly, scraping the garbage for the dogs. “Dogs like very much,” he says. “Very good for dogs. Little dog he has worms… he is too young yet.” He bends down to examine some white worms lying on the carpet between the dog’s paws. Tries to explain about the worms in English, but his vocabulary is lacking. Finally he consults the dictionary. “Ah,” he says, looking at me exultantly, “tapeworms!” My response is evidently not very intelligent. Serge is confused. He gets down on his hands and knees to examine them better. He picks one up and lays it on the table beside the fruit. “Huh, him not very beeg,” he grunts. “Next lesson you learn me worms, no? You are gude teacher. I make progress with you. …” Lying on the mattress in the hallway the odor of the germicide stifles me. A pungent, acrid odor that seems to invade every pore of my body. The food begins to repeat on me—the Quaker Oats, the mushrooms, the bacon, the fried apples. I see the little tapeworm lying beside the fruit and all the varieties of worms that Serge drew on the tablecloth to explain what was the matter with the dog. I see the empty pit of the Folies-Bergère and in every crevice there are cockroaches and lice and bedbugs; I see people scratching themselves frantically, scratching and scratching until the blood comes. I see the worms crawling over the scenery like an army of red ants, devouring everything in sight. I see the chorus girls throwing away their gauze tunics and running through the aisles naked; I see the spectators in the pit throwing off their clothes also and scratching each other like monkeys. I try to quiet myself. After all, this is a home I’ve found, and there’s a meal waiting for me every day. And Serge is a brick, there’s no doubt about that. But I can’t sleep. It’s like going to sleep in a morgue. The mattress is saturated with embalming fluid. It’s a morgue for lice, bedbugs, cockroaches, tapeworms. I can’t stand it. I won’t stand it! After all I’m a man, not a louse. In the morning I wait for Serge to load the truck. I ask him to take me in to Paris. I haven’t the heart to tell him I’m leaving. I leave the knapsack behind, with the few things that were left me. When we get to the Place Péreire I jump out. No particular reason for getting off here. No particular reason for anything. l’m free —that’s the main thing.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  It doesn’t look like a twat any more: it’s like a dead clam or something.” He describes to me how, his curiosity aroused, he got out of bed and searched for his flashlight. “I made her hold it open and I trained the flashlight on it. You should have seen me. ... it was comical. I got so worked up about it that I forgot all about her. I never in my life looked at a cunt so seriously. You’d imagine I’d never seen one before. And the more I looked at it the less interesting it became. It only goes to show you there’s nothing to it after all, especially when it’s shaved. It’s the hair that makes it mysterious. That’s why a statue leaves you cold. Only once I saw a real cunt on a statue—that was by Rodin. You ought to see it some time... she has her legs spread wide apart. ... I don’t think there was any head on it. Just a cunt you might say. Jesus, it looked ghastly. The thing is this—they all look alike. When you look at them with their clothes on you imagine all sorts of things: you give them an individuality like, which they haven’t got, of course. There’s just a crack there between the legs and you get all steamed up about it—you don’t even look at it half the time. You know it’s there and all you think about is getting your ramrod inside; it’s as though your penis did the thinking for you. It’s an illusion! You get all burned up about nothing... about a crack with hair on it, or without hair. It’s so absolutely meaningless that it fascinated me to look at it. I must have studied it for ten minutes or more. When you look at it that way, sort of detached like, you get funny notions in your head. All that mystery about sex and then you discover that it’s nothing—just a blank. Wouldn’t it be funny if you found a harmonica inside... or a calendar? But there’s nothing there... nothing at all. It’s disgusting. It almost drove me mad.... Listen, do you know what I did afterwards? I gave her a quick lay and then I turned my back on her. Yeah, I picked up a book and I read. You can get something out of a book, even a bad book... but a cunt, it’s just sheer loss of time. ...” It just so happened that as he was concluding his speech a whore gave us the eye. Without the slightest transition he says to me abruptly: “Would you like to give her a tumble? It won’t cost much... she’ll take the two of us on.”

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Mona at the window waving good-bye. White heavy face, hair streaming wild. And now it is a heavy bedroom, breathing regularly through the gills, sap still oozing from between her legs, a warm feline odor and her hair in my mouth. My eyes are closed. We breathe warmly into each other’s mouth. Close together, America three thousand miles away. I never want to see it again. To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth —I count that something of a miracle. Nothing can happen now till morning. ... I wake from a deep slumber to look at her. A pale light is trickling in. I look at her beautiful wild hair. I feel something crawling down my neck. I look at her again, closely. Her hair is alive. I pull back the sheet—more of them. They are swarming over the pillow. It is a little after daybreak. We pack hurriedly and sneak out of the hotel. The cafés are still closed. We walk, and as we walk we scratch ourselves. The day opens in milky whiteness, streaks of salmon-pink sky, snails leaving their shells. Paris. Paris. Everything happens here. Old, crumbling walls and the pleasant sound of water running in the urinals. Men licking their mustaches at the bar. Shutters going up with a bang and little streams purling in the gutters. Amer Picon in huge scarlet letters. Zigzag. Which way will we go and why or where or what? Mona is hungry, her dress is thin. Nothing but evening wraps, bottles of perfume, barbaric earrings, bracelets, depilatories. We sit down in a billiard parlor on the Avenue du Maine and order hot coffee. The toilet is out of order. We shall have to sit some time before we can go to another hotel. Meanwhile we pick bedbugs out of each other’s hair. Nervous. Mona is losing her temper. Must have a bath. Must have this. Must have that. Must, must, must... “How much money have you left?” Money! Forgot all about that. Hôtel des Etats-Unis. An ascenseur. We go to bed in broad daylight. When we get up it is dark and the first thing to do is to raise enough dough to send a cable to America. A cable to the fetus with the long juicy cigar in his mouth. Meanwhile there is the Spanish woman on the Boulevard Raspail—she’s always good for a warm meal. By morning something will happen. At least we’re going to bed together. No more bedbugs now. The rainy season has commenced. The sheets are immaculate. ... A new life opening up for me at the Villa Borghese. Only ten o’clock and we have already had breakfast and been out for a walk. We have an Elsa here with us now. “Step softly for a few days,” cautions Boris. The day begins gloriously: a bright sky, a fresh wind, the houses newly washed.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  It doesn’t look like a twat any more: it’s like a dead clam or something.” He describes to me how, his curiosity aroused, he got out of bed and searched for his flashlight. “I made her hold it open and I trained the flashlight on it. You should have seen me. … it was comical. I got so worked up about it that I forgot all about her. I never in my life looked at a cunt so seriously. You’d imagine I’d never seen one before. And the more I looked at it the less interesting it became. It only goes to show you there’s nothing to it after all, especially when it’s shaved. It’s the hair that makes it mysterious. That’s why a statue leaves you cold. Only once I saw a real cunt on a statue—that was by Rodin. You ought to see it some time… she has her legs spread wide apart. … I don’t think there was any head on it. Just a cunt you might say. Jesus, it looked ghastly. The thing is this—they all look alike. When you look at them with their clothes on you imagine all sorts of things: you give them an individuality like, which they haven’t got, of course. There’s just a crack there between the legs and you get all steamed up about it—you don’t even look at it half the time. You know it’s there and all you think about is getting your ramrod inside; it’s as though your penis did the thinking for you. It’s an illusion! You get all burned up about nothing… about a crack with hair on it, or without hair. It’s so absolutely meaningless that it fascinated me to look at it. I must have studied it for ten minutes or more. When you look at it that way, sort of detached like, you get funny notions in your head. All that mystery about sex and then you discover that it’s nothing—just a blank. Wouldn’t it be funny if you found a harmonica inside… or a calendar? But there’s nothing there… nothing at all. It’s disgusting. It almost drove me mad…. Listen, do you know what I did afterwards? I gave her a quick lay and then I turned my back on her. Yeah, I picked up a book and I read. You can get something out of a book, even a bad book… but a cunt, it’s just sheer loss of time. …” It just so happened that as he was concluding his speech a whore gave us the eye. Without the slightest transition he says to me abruptly: “Would you like to give her a tumble? It won’t cost much… she’ll take the two of us on.” And without waiting for a reply he staggers to his feet and goes over to her. In a few minutes he comes back. “It’s all fixed,” he says. “Finish your beer. She’s hungry.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Eugene complains that Olga is a burden, but the truth is that Olga is supporting Eugene and his wife with her two pairs of shoes a day. If Olga doesn’t work there is no food. So everyone endeavors to pull Olga to bed on time, to give her enough food to keep going, etc. Every meal starts off with soup. Whether it be onion soup, tomato soup, vegetable soup, or what not, the soup always tastes the same. Mostly it tastes as if a dish rag had been stewed in it—slightly sour, mildewed, scummy. I see Eugene hiding it away in the commode after the meal. It stays there, rotting away, until the next meal. The butter, too, is hidden away in the commode; after three days it tastes like the big toe of a cadaver. The smell of rancid butter frying is not particularly appetizing, especially when the cooking is done in a room in which there is not the slightest form of ventilation. No sooner than I open the door I feel ill. But Eugene, as soon as he hears me coming, usually opens the shutters and pulls back the bedsheet which is strung up like a fishnet to keep out the sunlight. Poor Eugene! He looks about the room at the few sticks of furniture, at the dirty bed-sheets and the wash basin with the dirty water still in it, and he says: “I am a slave!” Every day he says it, not once, but a dozen times. And then he takes his guitar from the wall and sings. But about the smell of rancid butter. ... There are good associations too. When I think of this rancid butter I see myself standing in a little, old-world courtyard, a very smelly, very dreary courtyard. Through the cracks in the shutters strange figures peer out at me... old women with shawls, dwarfs, rat- faced pimps, bent Jews, midinettes, bearded idiots. They totter out into the courtyard to draw water or to rinse the slop pails. One day Eugene asked me if I would empty the pail for him. I took it to the corner of the yard. There was a hole in the ground and some dirty paper lying around the hole. The little well was slimy with excrement, which in English is shit. I tipped the pail and there was a foul, gurgling splash followed by another and unexpected splash. When I returned the soup was dished out. All through the meal I thought of my toothbrush—it is getting old and the bristles get caught in my teeth. When I sit down to eat I always sit near the window. I am afraid to sit on the other side of the table—it is too close to the bed and the bed is crawling. I can see bloodstains on the gray sheets if I look that way, but I try not to look that way. I look out on the courtyard where they are rinsing the slop pails.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  At a party in Cambridge one night, a loud and raucous affair, I felt the urge to escape and was followed out of the house by a girl a few years older than I was. It was well past midnight and I was hungry, the kind of hunger that goes with having had a bit too much alcohol. “My house is around the corner,” she said, inviting me to come over. I relented—a free meal was a rare treat. As we approached her house, I realized with a start that we were in an old familiar neighborhood. I recognized the houses and was struck with panic when we entered her house—it was next door to Sacred Heart Hall, on Putnam Avenue, the house where Father and the Big Brothers had lived before we moved to Still River. I wanted to bolt, to disappear, but I was trapped. Why did I ever let my guard down? I chastised myself as I followed her into the kitchen that smelled of fried food, that rancid odor that clings to the gritty wallpaper because the ventilation system is broken, or worse, never existed. Sitting down at the square metal table that filled most of the walking space in the cramped kitchen, I invoked my guardian angel, that heavenly protector I had become less reliant upon as I had gained confidence in the “evil world.” Suddenly the girl seemed vulgar, her voice too loud, her manners coarse. “Who’s there?” came a yell from upstairs. “It’s just my old lady,” the girl whispered as I started. “Ignore her.” The creaking stairs told me that the girl’s mother was on her way down. As she stomped into the kitchen I found myself repulsed. Bundled in a decrepit housecoat and with rollers in her hair, her sunken eyes and wrinkled face carried the evidence of a life of abuse—too much alcohol and too many cigarettes. “Whatch youz girls doin’ up at this hour?” she barked. “Been drinkin’? Need some eggs and bacon?” She was already at the refrigerator hauling out items, as though this were her nightly routine. A cast-iron frying pan was sitting on the stove, grease still thick on its black surface. She tossed a package of bacon onto the uncleaned pan, without so much as separating the strips, and as it turned into a ball of curling, fat-spewing, burned-at-the-edges lump of bacon, she flipped it onto a plate and then cracked the eggs into the sizzling inch-deep fat. This was bacon and eggs ? My stomach retched as she passed me a plate laden with the inedible. Only the toast and coffee saved the meal. It’s your own fault , I thought as I contrasted this notion of a meal with the elegance and flavor of meals at the Center. I cringed as the girl shoved food into her mouth, using the back of her hand as a napkin and holding her fork as though it were a weapon.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In 1232 the conduct of the Inquisition was largely committed to their care. Northern France, Spain, and Germany fell to their lot.880 The stern Torquemada was a Dominican, and the atrocious measures which were afterwards employed to spy out and punish ecclesiastical dissent, have left an indelible blot upon the name of the order. The student of history must regard those efforts to maintain the orthodox faith as heartless, even though it may not have occurred to the participants to so consider them. The order’s device, given by Honorius, was a dog bearing a lighted torch in his mouth, the dog to watch, the torch to illuminate the world. The picture in their convent S. Maria Novella, at Florence, represents the place the order came to occupy as hunters of heretics. It portrays dogs dressed in the Dominican colors, black and white, chasing away foxes, which stand for heretics, while pope and emperor, enthroned and surrounded by counsellors, look on with satisfaction at the scene. It was in connection with his effort to exterminate heresy that Dominic founded, in 1220, the "soldiery of Christ," composed of men and women, married and unmarried. Later, the order called itself the Brothers and Sisters of Penitence, or the Third Order, or Tertiaries of St. Dominic. As was the case with the Franciscan Tertiaries, some of them lived a conventual life. The rosary also had a prominent place in the history of the Dominicans. An untrustworthy tradition assigns to Dominic its first use. During the crusades against the Albigenses, Mary, so the story runs, appeared to Dominic, and bade him use the rosary as a means for the conversion of the heretics. It consists of fifteen pater nosters and one hundred and fifty ave Marias, told off in beads. The Dominicans early became devotees of the rosary, but soon had rivals in the Carmelites for the honor of being the first to introduce it. The notorious Dominican inquisitor and hunter of witches, Jacob Sprenger, founded the first confraternity of the rosary. Pius V. ascribed the victory of Lepanto, 157l, to its use. In recent times Pius IX. and Leo XIII. have been ardent devotees of the rosary. Leo, in his encyclical of Sept. 1, 1883, ascribed its introduction to the great Dominic, as a balm for the wounds of his contemporaries." This encyclical represents Mary as "placed on the highest summit of power and glory in heaven … who is to be besought that, by her intercession, her devout Son may be appeased and softened as to the evils which afflict us."881 Leo XIII. paid highest honor to the Dominicans when he pronounced Thomas Aquinas the authoritative teacher of Catholic theology and morals, and the patron of Catholic schools. CHAPTER IX.MISSIONS.§ 73. Literature and General Survey.