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 Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Swimming is hard work and therefore good exercise, but not swimming where the undertow locks the swimmer’s limbs in leaden embrace and drags him down. We cannot conceal from ourselves that in some directions the temptations of modern life are so virulent that characters and reputations are collapsing all about us with sickening frequency. The prevalence of fraud and the subtler kinds of dishonesty for which we have invented the new term “graft,” is a sinister fact of the gravest import. It is not merely the weak who fall, but the strong. Clean, kindly, religious men stoop to methods so tricky, hard, and rapacious, that we stand aghast whenever the curtain is drawn aside and we are shown the inside facts. Every business man who has any finer moral discernment will realize that he himself is constantly driven by the pressure of business necessity into actions of which he is ashamed. Men do not want to do these things; but in a given situation they have to, if they want to survive or prosper, and the sum of these crooked actions gives an evil turn to their life. If it were proposed to invent some social system in which covetousness would be deliberately fostered and intensified in human nature, what system could be devised which would excel our own for this purpose? Competitive commerce exalts selfishness to the dignity of a moral principle. It pits men against one another in a gladiatorial game in which there is no mercy and in which ninety per cent of the combatants finally strew the arena. It makes Ishmaels of our best men and teaches them that their hand must be against every man, since every man’s hand is against them. It makes men who are the gentlest and kindliest friends and neighbors, relentless taskmasters in their shops and stores, who will drain the strength of their men and pay their female employees wages on which no girl can live without supplementing them in some way. It spreads things before us and beseeches and persuades us to buy what we do not want. The show windows and bargain-counters are institutions for the promotion of covetousness among women. Men offer us goods on credit and dangle the smallness of the first instalment before our eyes as an incentive to go into debt heedlessly. They try to break down the foresight and self-restraint which are the slow product of moral education, and reduce us to the moral habits of savages who gorge to-day and fast to-morrow. Kleptomania multiplies. It is the inevitable product of a social life in which covetousness is stimulated by all the ingenuity of highly paid specialists. The large stores have to take the most elaborate precautions against fraud by their employees and pilfering by their respectable customers. The finest hotels are plundered by their wealthy patrons of anything from silver spoons down to marked towels.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s trade” is not in our decalogue. The same instinct of rapacity cheats the consumer. They sell us fruit-jam made without fruit; butter that never saw the milk-pail; potted chicken that grunted in the barnyard; all-wool goods that never said “baah,” but leave it to the buyer to say it. If a son asks for bread, his father will not offer him a stone; but ground soapstone is freely advertised as an adulterant for flour. Several years ago the Secretary of Agriculture, on the basis of an extensive inquiry, estimated that thirty per cent of the money paid for food products in the United States is paid for adulterated or misbranded goods. We are fortunate if the title of the food is false, but the food is wholesome. But when fruit flavors are made with coal-tar and benzoic acid, and when the milk for our children is preserved with formaldehyde, the rapacity becomes murderous. The life of a mother or a child may depend on the purity of a medicine administered at the critical stage of a disease; but we have very little guarantee that our medicines are not adulterated. In 1904 the Board of Health in New York City had a list of about three hundred druggists and dealers who had attempted to sell spurious mixtures to the very officers of the Board. Most of the patent medicines to which our people trust are cheap and worthless concoctions. Others are insidious conveyers of narcotic poisons which are intended to set up a morbid appetite in the consumers for the profit of the dealers. And if patent medicines were as health giving as they claim to be, the very principle of patenting and withholding from general use a beneficent invention for the saving of human life would be a shameful confession of selfish greed. The liquor traffic presents a striking case of a huge industry inducing people to buy what harms them. It is militant capitalism rotting human lives and characters to distil dividends. In the atrocities on the Congo we have the same capitalism doing its pitiless work in a safe and distant corner of the world, on an inferior race, and under the full support of the government. The rapacity of commerce has been the secret spring of most recent wars. Speculative finance is the axis on which international politics revolve. The counts in the indictment against our marvellous civilization could be multiplied at pleasure. It is a splendid sinner, “magnificent in sin.” The words which Bret Harte addressed to San Francisco in its earlier days, characterize the whole of modern society:— “I know thy cunning and thy greed, Thy hard, high lust and wilful deed, And all thy glory loves to tell Of specious gifts material.” It defrauds the customer who buys its goods. It drains and brutalizes the workman who does its work. It hunts the business man with fear of failure, or makes him hard with merciless success.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  Edmee smiled without answering, bent her head, and adjusted the lace that edged the low-cut neck of her dress by tweaking it between her fingers. The movement drew Cheri’s attention to her bodice, and through the yellow lawn he noticed that the points of her breasts and their mauve aureolas looked like twin bruises. He shuddered, and his shudder made him realize that the conventional beauty and all the most secret details of her charming body, that the whole of this young woman, in fact, so close and so disloyal, no longer aroused in him anything but positive repugnance. Nonsense, nonsense; but he was whipping a dead horse. And he listened to Charlotte’s ever flowing stream of nasal burblings. *... and then again, the day before yesterday, I was saying in your presence, that motor for motor, well — I’d far rather have a taxi, a taxi, any day, than that prehistoric old Renault of L£a’s - and if it wasn’t the day before yesterday, it was yesterday, that I said - speaking of Lia - that if you’re a woman living on your own and you’ve got to have a manservant, you might just as well have a good-looking one. And then Camille was saying, only the other day when you were there, how angry she was with herself for having sent a second barrel of Quarts-de-Chaumes round to Lea instead of keeping it for herself. I’ve complimented you often enough on your fidelity, my darling; I must now scold you for your ingratitude. Lea deserved better of you. Edmee will be the first to admit that!’ * The second,’ Edmee corrected. * Never heard a word of it,’ Cbiri said. He was gorging himself with hard pink July cherries, and flipping them from beneath the lowered blind at the sparrows in the garden, where, after too heavy a watering, the flower beds were steaming like a hot spring. Edm£e, motionless, was cogitating on Cheri’s comment, * Never heard a word of it.’ He certainly was not lying, and yet his off-hand assumed schoolboyishness, as he squeezed the cherry stones and took aim at a sparrow by closing his left eye, spoke clearly enough to Edmee. “What can he have been thinking about, if he never heard a word? ” Before the war, she would have looked for the woman in the case. A month earlier, on the day following the looking-glass scene, she would have feared reprisals, some Red Indian act of cruelty, or a bite on the nose. But no ... nothing ... he lived and roamed about innocently, as quiet in his freedom as a prisoner in the depths of a gaol, and as chaste as an animal brought from the Antipodes, which does not bother to look for a kindred female in our hemisphere.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  In 1891 the Working Women’s Society of New York began to agitate for proper sanitary accommodations and seats for the female clerks in the department stores. This sensible bill was annually met and defeated at Albany by a lobby of the retail merchants. In 1896 it was at last enacted and the right of inspection and enforcement was given to the local boards of health. For eighteen months it was enforced in New York in the most tyrannical manner to make the law odious. The Tammany mayor then appointed one of the owners of a great department store as president of the Board of Health. This man said that he desired the position partly to quash an indictment against a certain philanthropic enterprise of his and partly to paralyze the Mercantile Inspection Law. The mayor suggested that the necessary appropriation be withheld, and so the law became a dead letter. To secure special concessions and privileges and to evade public burdens have always been the objects for which dominant classes used their political power. For instance, the feudal nobility of France originally held their lands as franchises from the crown, in return for a tax of service, chiefly military, to be rendered to the nation. When the old feudal levies proved inefficient in the Hundred Years.’ War with England, a standing army was organized and supported by a money tax. The nobility were thereby relieved from their old obligation of levying and supporting soldiers, yet they successfully evaded their share of the tax. This is merely a sample case. It can safely be asserted that throughout history the strongest have been taxed least, and the weakest most. The same condition prevails in our country. The average homes in the cities are usually taxed to the limit; the most opulent homes, and especially their contents, are taxed lightly. Vacant lots, held for speculation, are often flagrantly favored, though they are a public nuisance. In 1856 taxes were paid in New York State on $148,473,154 worth of personal property over and above the capital of banks and trust companies. During the following forty years the increase in personal property in the State was immense, yet in 1896 the amount found for taxation had increased by only $66,000,000. In that year a study was made of 107 estates, taken at random in the State of New York and ranging from $54,559 to $3,319,500. After the death of the owners these estates disclosed personalty aggregating $215–132, 366; but the year before their deaths the owners had been assessed only $3,819,412 on their personal property. Thirty-four of them had escaped taxation altogether. An investigation by Professor E.W. Bemis in Ohio in 1901 showed that while farms and homes were assessed at about sixty per cent of their value, railways were assessed at from thirty-five per cent down to thirteen per cent of the market value of their stocks and bonds.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  After the annual Ladies’ Day at a prominent club in Chicago over two hundred spoons and two hundred thirty-seven sprigs of artificial decoration, besides miniature vases and bric-à-brac, were missing, and that is always the case after Ladies’ Day, and never at other times. At a reform school for boys two lads were pointed out to me as the sons of two men of great wealth. They had been placed there by their parents to cure them of their inveterate habit of stealing. Their fathers were in the United States Senate. Our business life borders so closely on dishonesty that men are hardly aware when they cross the line. It is a penal offence for a government officer to profit by a contract which he awards or mediates; in business life that is an everyday occurrence. No wonder that our officials are corrupt when their corruption is the respectability of business life. Gambling is the vice of the savage. True civilization ought to outgrow it, as it has outgrown tattooing and cannibalism. Instead of that our commercial life stimulates the gambling instinct. Our commerce is speculative in its very nature. Of course risk is inseparable from human life. It is the virtue of the pioneer to take risks boldly. Every field sown by the farmer represents a certain risk. But the element of labor is the main thing in the farmer’s work and that makes the process wholesome. In the measure in which productive labor is eliminated and the risk taken becomes the sole title to the profit gained, the transaction approximates gambling. Above the entrance of an Eastern penal institution the motto has been inscribed, “The worst day in the life of a young man is when he gets the idea that he can make a dollar without doing a dollar’s worth of work for it.” That is good sense, but how would that motto look on the walls of the New York Stock Exchange or the Chicago Produce Exchange? If a man buys stock or wheat on a margin and clears a hundred dollars, what labor or service has he given for which this is the reward? In what respect does it differ from crap-shooting in which a boy risks his pennies and uses his skill just like the peculator? In Europe, lotteries are state institutions and prized privileges of churches and benevolent undertakings. We have fortunately outlawed them in our country, but gambling is one of our national vices because our entire commerce is saturated with the spirit of it. The social nature of man makes him an imitative creature. The instinct of imitation and emulation may be a powerful lever for good if individuals and classes set the example of real culture and refinement of manners and taste. But the processes of competitive industry have poured vast wealth into the lap of a limited number and have created an unparalleled lavishness of expenditure which has nothing ennobling about it.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  ‘Do tell me exactly what you mean, child. We’re alone.’ She smoothed back her sparse hennaed hair, cut boyishly short. Her mushroom-coloured garb held in her body as an iron hoop clamps a cask. “A woman. ... She has been a woman. ... Fifty-eight. ... Sixty ...” Cheri was thinking. She turned on him her lovely velvety eyes, brimming with maternal coquetry, the feminine power of which he had long forgotten. This sudden charm of his mother’s warned him of the danger lying ahead, and the difficulty of the confession towards which she was leading him. But he felt empty and listless, tormented by what he lacked. The hope of shocking her drove him on still further. ‘Yes/ he said, in answer to his own question. eYou have your blankets, your macaroni and spaghetti, your legions d’honneur. You joke about the meetings of the Chambre des Deputes and the accident to young Lenoir. You are thrilled by Madame Caillaux, and by the hot springs at Passy. Edmee’s got her shopful of wounded and her Physician-in-Charge. Desmond dabbles in dance-halls, wines and spirits, and white slavery. Filipesco bags cigars from Americans and hospitals, to hawk them round night clubs. Jean de Touzac ... is in the surplus store racket. What a set! What —’ * You’re forgetting Landru,’ Charlotte put in edgeways. His eyes twinkled as he gave the slyest of winks, in silent tribute to the malicious humour that rejuvenated his old pugilist of a mother. * Landru? That doesn’t count, there’s a pre-war flavour about that. There’s nothing odd about Landru. But as for the rest — well... well, to cut it short, there’s not one who’s not a rotter and ... and I don’t like it. That’s all.’ * That’s certainly short, but not very clear,’ Charlotte said, after a moment. ‘You’ve a nice opinion of us. Mind you, I don’t say you’re wrong. Myself, I’ve got the qualities of my defects, and nothing frightens me. Only, it doesn’t give me an inkling of what you’re really after.’ Cheri swayed awkwardly on his chair. He frowned so furiously that the skin on his forehead contracted in deep wrinkles between his eyes, as though trying to keep a hat on his head in a gusty wind. ‘What I’m really after ... I simply don’t know. I only wish people weren’t such rotters. I mean to say, weren’t only rotten. ... Or, quite simply, I should like to be able not to notice it.’ He showed such hesitancy, such a need of coining to terms with himself, that Charlotte made fun of it. ‘Why notice it, then?’ ‘Ah, well. ... That’s just the point, you see.*

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Those who have to work hard for their money will, as a rule, be careful how they spend it. Those who get it without effort, will spend it without thought. Thus parasitic wealth is sure to create a vicious luxury, which then acts as a centre of infection for all other classes. Fashions operate downward. Each class tries to imitate the one higher up, and to escape from the imitation of those lower down. Thus the ostentation of the overfull purses of the predatory rich lures all society into the worship of false gods. It intensifies “the lust of the eye and the pride of life” unnaturally, and to that extent expels “the love of the Father,” which includes the love of all true values. Any one can test the matter in his own case by asking himself how much of his money, his time, and his worry is consumed in merely “keeping up with the procession,” and is diverted from real culture to mere display by the compulsion of social requirements about him. The man who lives only on his labor is brought into social competition with people who have additional income through rents and profits, and must break his back merely to keep his wife and children on a level with others. The very spirit of democracy which has wiped out the old class lines in modern life, makes the rivalry keener. In Europe a peasant girl or a servant formerly was quite content with the dress of her class and had no ambition to rival the very different dress of the gentry. With us the instinct of imitation works without a barrier from the top of the social pyramid to the bottom, and the whole process of consumption throughout society is feverishly affected by the aggregation of unearned money at the top. The embezzlements of business men, the nervous breakdown of women, the ruin of girls, the neglect of home and children, are largely caused by the unnatural pace of expenditures. If the rich had only what they earned, and the poor had all that they earned, all wheels would revolve more slowly and life would be more sane. Industry and commerce are in their nature productive and therefore good. But in our industry a strong element of rapacity vitiates the moral qualities of business life. A railway president in New York said to me—half in joke, of course: “The men who go down town on the Elevated at seven and eight o’clock really make things. We who go down at nine and ten, only try to take things away from one another.” Supplying goods to the people is, of course, the main thing; but crowding out the other man, who also wants to supply them, takes a large part of the time and energy of business. Our competitive life has so deeply warped our moral judgment that not one man in a thousand will realize anything immoral in attracting another man’s customers.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  That means a revaluation of social values. Things that are now “exalted among men” must become “an abomination” to him because they are built on wrong and misery. Unless a man finds his judgment at least on some fundamental questions in opposition to the current ideas of the age, he is still a child of this world and has not “tasted the powers of the coming age.” He will have to repent and believe if he wants to be a Christian in the full sense of the world. No man can help the people until he is himself free from the spell which the present order has cast over our moral judgment. We have repeatedly pointed out that every social institution weaves a protecting integument of glossy idealization about itself like a colony of tent-caterpillars in an apple tree. For instance, wherever militarism rules, war is idealized by monuments and paintings, poetry and song. The stench of the hospitals and the maggots of the battle-field are passed in silence, and the imagination of the people is filled with waving plumes and the shout of charging columns. A Russian general thought Verestchagin’s pictures ought to be destroyed because they disenchanted the people. If war is ever to be relegated to the limbo of outgrown barbarism, we must shake off its magic. When we comprehend how few wars have ever been fought for the sake of justice or the people; how personal spite, the ambition of military professionals, and the protection of capitalistic ventures are the real moving powers; how the governing classes pour out the blood and wealth of nations for private ends and exude patriotic enthusiasm like a squid secreting ink to hide its retreat—then the mythology of war will no longer bring us to our knees, and we shall fail to get drunk with the rest when martial intoxication sweeps the people off their feet. In the same way we shall have to see through the fictions of capitalism. We are assured that the poor are poor through their own fault; that rent and profits are the just dues of foresight and ability; that the immigrants are the cause of corruption in our city politics; that we cannot compete with foreign countries unless our working class will descend to the wages paid abroad. These are all very plausible assertions, but they are lies dressed up in truth. There is a great deal of conscious lying. Industrialism as a whole sends out deceptive prospectuses just like single corporations within it. But in the main these misleading theories are the complacent self-deception of those who profit by present conditions and are loath to believe that their life is working harm. It is very rare for a man to condemn the means by which he makes a living, and we must simply make allowance for the warping influence of self-interest when he justifies himself and not believe him entirely.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints Course Guidebook (2023)

  6. Radegund: Survivor, Queen, Abbess 42 An Unwilling Wife Until this point, martyrdom had been the main route through which women had been acknowledged as saints. Virginity was also increasingly emphasized as one of the few paths to holiness available to women in the 4th and 5th centuries. However, Radegund was neither a virgin nor a martyr. She presented her hagiographers with several challenges—most notably, her marriage to Chlotar and the 10 years spent openly sharing his bed as one of his queens. Our dates are uncertain, but around the late 530s, after at least 5 years at Athies, Radegund was considered as being of marriageable age, and Chlotar married her. Radegund made her lifelong distaste for Chlotar clear in writing and action: She ran away from him before they were betrothed, she avoided attending public events with him, she finally abandoned his court entirely, and even after his death, she contributed to a bitter poetic recounting of his sins against her and her family. The crime of marital rape would not have been recognized by a Merovingian court, but today, we can at least understand a little how deep Radegund’s scars may have gone after years of forced intimacy with her family’s killer. She lived at Chlotar’s court as one of his wives until at least 550 CE. Medieval marriage was often an arranged union, conducted in an informal secular setting, involving the exchange of property and promises before witnesses, followed by consummation. The partnership would likely not have the expectation of monogamy on the male side, but women were expected to restrict their sexual partners. Scholars have traditionally regarded Radegund as establishing a new formula for royal sanctity, which became a dominant trend among saints made in the early Middle Ages. 43 6. Radegund: Survivor, Queen, Abbess

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  If the muddy green paint — ‘ The green of hospital corridors,’ Lea called it - flaked off in one of the passages, Madame Peloux would have it repainted a similar muddy green; or if the maroon velvet on a chaise-longue needed replacing, she was careful to choose the same maroon velvet. Chiri paused by the open door of a dressing-room. Embedded in die maroon marble-topped wash-stand were jug and basin of plain white with a monogram, and over the two electric-light fittings were lily-shaped bead shades. Cheri shuddered as though caught in a violent draught - “Good God, how hideous, what an old junkshop!” He hurried away. At the end of the passage, he came upon a window edged with small pieces of red and yellow stained glass. 4That’s the last straw!’ he said grumpily. He turned to the left and roughly opened a door - the door of his nursery - without knocking. A little cry came from the bed where Edmee was just finishing her breakfast. Cheri closed the door and stared at his wife without going any closer. ‘Good morning,’ she said with a smile. ‘You do look surprised to see me here!’ She lay bathed in a steady blue light reflected from the snow outside. Her crimped ashy chestnut hair was down, but barely covered her prettily curved shoulders. With her pink-and-white cheeks matching her nightgown, and her rosy lips paler than usual from fatigue, she looked like a light-toned picture, not quite finished and rather misty. * Aren’t you going to say good morning to me, Fred? * she insisted. He sat down close beside his wife and took her in his arms. She fell back gently, dragging him with her. Cheri propped himself on his elbow to look down more closely at her. She was so young that even when tired she still looked fresh. He seemed astonished by the smoothness of her fully rounded lower eyelids, and by the silvery softness of her cheeks. ‘How old are you?* he asked suddenly. Edmde opened her eyes, which she had closed voluptuously. Chdri stared at the brown of their pupils and at her small square teeth. 4 Oh, come! I shall be nineteen on the fifth of January, and do try and remember it/ He drew his arm away roughly and the young woman slipped into the hollow of the bed like a discarded scarf. ‘Nineteen, it’s prodigious! Do you know that I’m over twentyfive? ’ ‘But of course I know that, Fred. ...’ He picked up a pale tortoiseshell mirror from the bed-table and gazed at himself. ‘Twenty-five years old!* Twenty-five years of age and a face of white marble that seemed indestructible. Twenty-five, but at the outer corners of the eye and beneath it — delicately plagiarizing the classical design of the eyelid — were two lines, visible only in full light, two incisions traced by the lightest, the most relentless, of fingers.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  She picked up the photographs again and, before throwing them away, subjected each to the closest scrutiny of which her blue eyes were capable. A postcard with a dark background of a powerful lady encased in full-length stays, doing her best to veil her hair and the lower part of her face with a wisp of tulle, in the teeth of a strong sea-breeze. ‘ To dearest Lea, in memory of exquisite hours spent at Guethary. Anita* Another photograph, stuck on the middle of a piece of cardboard with a surface like dried mud, portrayed a large and lugubrious family. They might have been a penal colony, with a dumpy, heavily painted grandmother in charge. Holding above her head a tambourine tricked out with favours, she was resting one foot on the bent knee of what looked like a robust and shifty young butcher-boy. “That should never have seen the light of day,” Lea said decisively, crumpling the rough-cast cardboard. She smoothed out an unmounted print, to disclose two old provincial spinsters. An eccentric, loud-voiced, and aggressive couple, they were to be found every morning on a bench somewhere along a promenade, and every evening between a glass of cassis and their needlework-frames, on which they were embroidering black pussycats, fat toads, or a spider. ‘ To our beautiful fairy/ From her little friends at Le Trayas, Miquette and Riquette.’ Lea destroyed these souvenirs of her travels — and brushed a hand across her forehead. “It’s horrible. And there’ll be dozens and dozens more after these, just as there were dozens before them, all much the same. There’s nothing to be done about it. It’s life. Maybe wherever a Lda is to be found, there .at once spring from the earth a myriad creatures like Charlotte Peloux, de la Berche, and Aldonza, or old horrors who were once handsome young men, people who are ... well, who are impossible, impossible, impossible. ...” She heard, so fresh was her memory, voices that had called out to her from the top of hotel steps or hailed her with a ‘Hoo-hoo’ from afar, across golden sands, and she lowered her head in anger like a bull. She had returned, after an absence of six months, thinner, more flabby, less serene. Now and again a nervous twitch of the jaw jerked her chin down against her neck, and careless henna-shampooing had left too orange a glint in her hair; but her skin had been tanned to amber by sea and wind. This gave her the glowing complexion of a handsome farmer’s wife, and she might have done without rouge. All the same, she would have to arrange something carefully round her neck, not to say cover it up completely; for it had shrunk and was encircled with wrinkles that had been inaccessible to sunburn.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  James Baldwin 38 seemed to be doing most of the drinking. There were the usual paunchy, bespectacled gentle- men with avid, sometimes despairing eyes, the usual, knife-blade lean, tight-trousered boys. One could never be sure, as concerns these latter, whether they were after money or blood or love. They moved about the bar incessantly, cadging cigarettes and drinks, with something behind their eyes at once terribly vulnerable and terribly hard. There were, of course, les folles, always dressed in the most improbable combinations, screaming like parrots the details of their latest love affairs— their love affairs always seemed to be hilarious. Occasionally one would swoop in, quite late in the evening, to convey the news that he—but they always called each other 'she'—had just spent time with a celebrated movie star, or boxer. Then all of the others closed in on this newcomer and they looked like a peacock garden and sounded hke a barnyard. I always found it difficult to beUeve that they ever went to bed with anybody, for a man who wanted a woman would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted a man would certainly not want one of them. Perhaps, indeed, that was why they screamed so loud. There was the boy who worked all day, it was said, in the post office, who came out at night wearing makeup and earrings and with his heavy blond hair piled high. Sometimes he actually wore a skirt and high heels. He usually stood alone unless Guillaume walked over to tease him. People GIOVANNI'S ROOM 39 said that he was very nice, but I confess that his utter grotesqueness made me imeasy; per- haps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people's stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not—so grotesquely—resemble human beings.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  We read of a fag at Shrewsbury who was thrown into a bath of boiling water by some older boys because he liked to take his bath very warm; but this experiment turned out badly, for the little fellow died and the affair could not be hushed up, though it was finally dismissed as a regrettable accident. The English are proud of the fact that they hand over a good deal of the school discipline to the older boys: they attribute this innovation to Arnold of Rugby and, of course, it is possible if the supervision is kept up by a genius, that it may work for good and not for evil; but usually it turns the school into a forcing-house of cruelty and immorality. The older boys establish the legend that only sneaks would tell anything to the masters, and then they are free to give rein to their basest instincts. The two Monitors in our big bedroom in my time were a strapping big fellow named Dick F…, who tired all the little boys by going into their beds and making them frig him till his semen came. The little fellows all hated to be covered with his filthy slime, but they had to pretend to like doing as he told them, and usually he insisted on frigging them by way of exciting himself. Dick picked me out once or twice but I managed to catch his semen on his own nightshirt, and so after calling me a “dirty little devil” he left me alone. The other monitor was Jones, a Liverpool boy of about seventeen, very backward in lessons but very strong, the “Cock” of the school at fighting. He used always to go to one young boy’s bed whom he favored in many ways. Henry H… used to be able to get off any fagging and he never let out what Jones made him do at night, but in the long run he got to be chums with another little fellow and it all came out. One night when Jones was in Henry’s bed, there was a shriek of pain and Jones was heard to be kissing and caressing his victim for nearly an hour afterwards. We all wondered whether Jones had had him, or what had happened. Henry’s chum one day let the cat out of the bag. It appeared that Jones used to make the little fellow take his sex in his mouth and frig him and suck him at the same time. But one evening he had brought up some butter and smeared it over his prick and gradually inserted it into Henry’s anus and this came to be his ordinary practice. But this night he had forgotten the butter and when he found a certain resistance, he thrust violently forward, causing extreme pain and making his pathic bleed. Henry screamed and so after an interval of some weeks or months the whole procedure came to be known.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  We read of a fag at Shrewsbury who was thrown into a bath of boiling water by some older boys because he liked to take his bath very warm; but this experiment turned out badly, for the little fellow died and the affair could not be hushed up, though it was finally dismissed as a regrettable accident. The English are proud of the fact that they hand over a good deal of the school discipline to the older boys: they attribute this innovation to Arnold of Rugby and, of course, it is possible if the supervision is kept up by a genius, that it may work for good and not for evil; but usually it turns the school into a forcing-house of cruelty and immorality. The older boys establish the legend that only sneaks would tell anything to the masters, and then they are free to give rein to their basest instincts. The two Monitors in our big bedroom in my time were a strapping big fellow named Dick F…, who tired all the little boys by going into their beds and making them frig him till his semen came. The little fellows all hated to be covered with his filthy slime, but they had to pretend to like doing as he told them, and usually he insisted on frigging them by way of exciting himself. Dick picked me out once or twice but I managed to catch his semen on his own nightshirt, and so after calling me a “dirty little devil” he left me alone. The other monitor was Jones, a Liverpool boy of about seventeen, very backward in lessons but very strong, the “Cock” of the school at fighting. He used always to go to one young boy’s bed whom he favored in many ways. Henry H… used to be able to get off any fagging and he never let out what Jones made him do at night, but in the long run he got to be chums with another little fellow and it all came out. One night when Jones was in Henry’s bed, there was a shriek of pain and Jones was heard to be kissing and caressing his victim for nearly an hour afterwards. We all wondered whether Jones had had him, or what had happened. Henry’s chum one day let the cat out of the bag. It appeared that Jones used to make the little fellow take his sex in his mouth and frig him and suck him at the same time. But one evening he had brought up some butter and smeared it over his prick and gradually inserted it into Henry’s anus and this came to be his ordinary practice. But this night he had forgotten the butter and when he found a certain resistance, he thrust violently forward, causing extreme pain and making his pathic bleed. Henry screamed and so after an interval of some weeks or months the whole procedure came to be known.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The appalling moment when Betsy McAllister, past president of the United Fund, might ask for a B&B and be told there was no Benedictine must be staved off at all costs, as must the equally shocking moment when a guest would inflict a wound on himself and not find in each of the six bathrooms a fully stocked medicine cabinet. But if high, unforgiving standards were ascribed to real or potential guests, the hosts were as eager to judge their friends. A man who dropped in would be laughed at for wearing cologne or even the chastest ring or for showing his calf when he crossed his leg or for turning the creases in his trousers when he sat down as poor men do, and his wife would invariably have too loud a voice and too much jewelry and she’d smoke and drink too much, availing herself, in other words, of those very bottles we’d laid in and those silver felt-bottomed lighters we’d posed on side tables with such anxiety to make them appear casual. It was a milieu where even the most passing acknowledgment of the body was considered “off color.” Now that I’d lived away from home for several years at boarding school and college, I found myself breaking the delicate membrane that sealed off decent talk from the world’s grossness. That night, my stepmother escorted Annie to her room, far from mine, since in those days there was no question of putting an unmarried man and woman even in adjoining rooms. My father lit another cigar and said, “Damn nice young woman. And seems to have a good head on her shoulders. She asked good solid questions about group versus individual life insurance.” I doubt whether my father thought Annie was either solid or nice, but she was a woman—a step in the right direction. My stepmother discovered in the morning that the entire ham and turkey had vanished from the refrigerator overnight. That evening, when my father arose, he found that his sink had stopped up. The blocked drain was located exactly one floor below in Annie’s bathroom. When he put on his special, comical plumber’s cap and overalls and roguishly opened the pipe leading down from her sink, his face fell, his mouth turned down in disgust, and he pulled out stinking, half-chewed gobs of turkey and ham with his bare hands. “I just don’t understand,” my stepmother whispered. “Why couldn’t your friend get sick in the toilet instead of the sink? And it seems such a waste of good food—I was planning a cold supper.” Annie had tried to prevent my father from opening the drain, but once he did she calmed down and packed her bag. My stepmother drove her to the station and waited as I put her on the train. On the platform Annie said, “Are you furious?” “No, it serves them right,” I said smiling.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  And the worst of it all is that the highest function of man has been degraded by foul words so that it is almost impossible to write the body’s hymn of joy as it should be written. The poets have been almost as guilty in this respect as the priests: Aristophanes and Rabelais are ribald, dirty: Boccaccio cynical while Ovid leers cold-bloodedly and Zola like Chaucer finds it difficult to suit language to his desires. Walt Whitman is better though often merely commonplace. The Bible is the best of all; but not frank enough even in the noble Song of Solomon which now and then by sheer imagination manages to convey the ineffable! We are beginning to reject Puritanism and its unspeakable, brainless pruderies; but Catholicism is just as bad. Go to the Vatican Gallery and the great Church of St. Peter in Rome and you will find the fairest figures of ancient art clothed in painted tin, as if the most essential organs of the body were disgusting and had to be concealed. I say the body is beautiful and must be lifted and dignified by our reverence: I love the body more than any Pagan of them all and I love the soul and her aspirations as well; for me the body and the soul are alike beautiful, all dedicate to Love and her worship. I have no divided allegiance and what I preach today amid the scorn and hatred of men will be universally accepted tomorrow; for in my vision, too, a thousand years are as one day. We must unite the soul of Paganism, the love of beauty and art and literature with the soul of Christianity and its human lovingkindness in a new synthesis which shall include all the sweet and gentle and noble impulses in us. What we all need is more of the spirit of Jesus: we must learn at length with Shakespeare: “Pardon’s the word for all!” I want to set this Pagan-Christian ideal before men as the highest and most human too. Now one word to my own people and their peculiar shortcomings. Anglo-Saxon domineering combativeness is the greatest danger to Humanity in the world today. Americans are proud of having blotted out the red Indian and stolen his possessions and of burning and torturing negroes in the sacred name of equality. At all costs we must get rid of our hypocrisies and falsehoods and see ourselves as we are—a domineering race, vengeful and brutal, as exemplified in Haiti; we must study the inevitable effects of our soulless, brainless selfishness as shown in the world-war.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  If you do not think, ladies, that this tale sufficiently shows that women are as bad as men, I will tell you others. It strikes me, however, that this one is enough to show you that a woman who has lost shame does evil a thousand times more audaciously than a man. There was not a lady in the company who, on hear- * " The adventure related by Margaret in this novel is one of the most piqjiant in the whole Heptameron. It would be very interesting to know the real names of the persons concerned. Brantome has not disclosed them ; he only says : ' I knew a very great lady, a widow. * * * * Although she was in a manner adored by a very great person, yet she could not do without some other lovers in private, that she might not lose any time, or remain idle. I refer to that lady in the Cent Nouvelles of the Queen of Navarre who had three lovers at once, and was so clever that she managed to entertain them all three very affably.' — (Dame Galanies, Discours iv.) As for the principal hero, the name of Hastillon, by which he is designated, warrants us in making a conjecture. May he not have been Jacques de Chastillon, chamberlain of Charles VIII. and Louis XII., and lieutenant of the hundred gentlemen of Charles VIII., who was killed at the siege of Ravenna in 1512.? Brantome has devoted to him the nineteenth Discours of his work on Les Capitaine Francais." — Bibliophiles Francais, Fifth day\ Q VEEN OF NA VA RRE. 4 1 g ing this story, did not make so many signs of the cross, that one would have thought she saw all the devils in hell. " Let us humble ourselves, mesdames," said Oisille, " at the contemplation of such horrible conduct, the more so as the person abandoned by God becomes like him with whom she unites. As those who attach them- selves to God are animated by his spirit, so those who follow the devil are urged by the spirit of the devil ; and nothing can be more brutified than those whom God abandons." " Whatever this poor lady did," said Ennasuite, " I cannot applaud those who boasted of their prison." "It is my belief," said Longarine, "that a man finds it as hard to keep his good fortune secret as to pursue it. There is no hunter who does not take pleasure in blowing his horn over his quarry, or lover who is not very glad to proclaim the glory of his victory."

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  5There are two especially vivid aspects of her that I would like to hold up simultaneously before my eyes in conclusion of her haunting image. The first lived for a long while within me quite separately from the Polenka I associated with doorways and sunsets, as if I had glimpsed a nymphean incarnation of her pitiful beauty that were better left alone. One June day, the year when she and I were both thirteen, on the banks of the Oredezh, I was engaged in collecting some so-called Parnassians—Parnassius mnemosyne, to be exact—strange butterflies of ancient lineage, with rustling, glazed, semitransparent wings and catkin-like flossy abdomens. My quest had led me into a dense undergrowth of milky-white racemosa and dark alder at the very edge of the cold, blue river, when suddenly there was an outburst of splashes and shouts, and from behind a fragrant bush, I caught sight of Polenka and three or four other naked children bathing from the ruins of an old bathhouse a few feet away. Wet, gasping, one nostril of her snub nose running, the ribs of her adolescent body arched under her pale, goose-pimpled skin, her calves flecked with black mud, a curved comb burning in her damp-darkened hair, she was scrambling away from the swish and clack of water-lily stems that a drum-bellied girl with a shaven head and a shamelessly excited stripling wearing around the loins a kind of string, locally used against the evil eye, were yanking out of the water and harrying her with; and for a second or two—before I crept away in a dismal haze of disgust and desire—I saw a strange Polenka shiver and squat on the boards of the half-broken wharf, covering her breasts against the east wind with her crossed arms, while with the tip of her tongue she taunted her pursuers. The other picture refers to a Sunday at Christmastide in 1916. From the silent, snow-blanketed platform of the little station of Siverski on the Warsaw line (it was the nearest to our country place), I was watching a distant silvery grove as it changed to lead under the evening sky and waiting for it to emit the dull-violet smoke of the train that would take me back to St. Petersburg after a day of skiing. The smoke duly appeared and at the same moment, she and another girl walked past me, heavily kerchiefed, in huge felt boots and horrible, shapeless, long quilted jackets, with the stuffing showing at the torn spots of the coarse black cloth, and as she passed, Polenka, a bruise under her eye and a puffed-up lip (did her husband beat her on Saturdays?) remarked in wistful and melodious tones to nobody in particular: “A barchuk-to menya ne priznal [Look, the young master does not know me]—” and that was the only time I ever heard her speak.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Last month a tenant was asked to leave because someone saw him wandering one morning up and down the tenth floor with no clothes on having locked himself out the night before with the garbage he could not fit into the incinerator but it made no difference the floor captain cut the leads to his cable TV and he left covered in tangled wires of shame his apartment was reconsecrated by a fumigator I am so glad I am moving Although workmen will descend at $100 an hour to scrape my breath from the walls to refinish the air and the floors with their eyes and charge me with the exact amount of whatever I have coming back to me called equity I am so glad to be moving from the noise of psychic footsteps beating a tune that is not my own louder than any other sound in the neighborhood except the blasting that goes on all day and all night from the city’s new toilet being built outside the main entrance from the spirits who live in the locks of the other seven doors bellowing secrets of living hells revealed but not shared for everybody’s midnights know what the walls hide our toilets are made of glass wired for sound 24 stories full of tears flushing at midnight our only community room children set their clocks to listen at the tissue walls gazing upward from their stools from one flight to another catching the neighbors in private struggles next morning it will all be discussed at length in the elevators with no secrets left I am so glad to be moving no more coming home at night to dream of caged puppies grinding their teeth into cartoonlike faces that half plead and half snicker then fold under and vanish back into snarling strangers I am so glad I am moving. But when this grim house goes slipping into the sewer prepared for it then this whole city can read its own obituary written on the broken record of dreams of ordinary people who wanted what they could not get and so pretended to be someone else ordinary people having what they never learned to want themselves and so becoming pretension concretized. Change of Season Am I to be cursed forever with becoming somebody else on the way to myself? Walking backward I fall into summers behind me salt with wanting lovers or friends a job wider shoes a cool drink freshness something to bite into a place to hide out of the rain out of the shifting melange of seasons where the cruel boys I chased and their skinny dodgeball sisters flamed and died in becoming the brown autumn left in search of who tore the streamers down at graduation christmas my wedding day and as winter wore out the babies came angry effort and reward in their appointed seasons my babies tore out of me like poems after I slept and woke to the thought that promise had come again this time more sure than the dream of being sweet sixteen and somebody else walking five miles through the august city with a free dog thinking now we will be the allamerican family we had just gotten a telephone and the next day my sister cut his leash on Broadway that dog of my childhood bays at the new moon as I reach into time up to my elbows extracting the taste and sharp smell of my first lover’s neck rough as the skin of a brown pear ripening I was terribly sure I would come forever to april with my first love who died on a sunday morning poisoned and wondering would summer ever come.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  1 arrived at the usual time,' he said. 1 felt very good today. He was not there when I arrived and I cleaned the bar as usual and had a httle drink and a little something to eat. Then he came and I could see at once that he was in a dangerous mood—perhaps he had just been humiliated by some young boy. It is funny* and he smiled—'you can tell when Guillaume is in a dangerous mood because he then becomes so respectable. When something has happened to humiUate him and make him see, even for a moment, how disgusting he is, and how alone, then he remembers that he is a member of one of the best and oldest families in France. But maybe, then, he remembers that his name is going to die with him. Then he has to do some- thing, quick, to make the feeling go away. He — GIOVANNI'S ROOM 141 has to make much noise or have some very pretty boy or get drunk or have a fight or look at his dirty pictures/ He paused and stood up and began walking up and down again. 1 do not know what happened to him today, but when he came in he tried at first to be very business-Uke—he was trying to find fault with my work. But there was nothing wrong and he went upstairs. Then, by and by, he called me. I hate going up to that little pied-d-terre he has up there over the bar, it always means a scene. But I had to go and I found him in his dressing gown, covered with perfume. I do not know why, but the moment I saw him hke that, I began to be angry. He looked at me as though he were some fabulous coquette— and he is ugly, ugly, he has a body just like sour milk! and then he asked me how you were. I was a little astonished, for he never mentions you. I said you were fine. He asked me if we still lived together. I think perhaps I should have lied to him but I did not see any reason to he to such a disgusting old fairy, so I said, Bien sur. I was trying to be calm. Then he asked me terrible questions and I began to get sick watching him and listening to him. I thought it was best to be very quick with him and I said that such ques- tions were not asked, even by a priest or a doctor, and I said he should be ashamed. Maybe he had been waiting for me to say something like that, for then he became angry and he re- minded me that he had taken me out of the —