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 Speak, Memory (1966)

  Mademoiselle never found out how potent had been the even flow of her voice. The subsequent claims she put forward were quite different. “Ah,” she sighed, “comme on s’aimait—didn’t we love each other! Those good old days in the château! The dead wax doll we once buried under the oak! [No—a wool-stuffed Golliwogg.] And that time you and Serge ran away and left me stumbling and howling in the depths of the forest! [Exaggerated.] Ah, la fessée que je vous ai flanquée—My, what a spanking I gave you! [She did try to slap me once but the attempt was never repeated.] Votre tante, la Princesse, whom you struck with your little fist because she had been rude to me! [Do not remember.] And the way you whispered to me your childish troubles! [Never!] And the nook in my room where you loved to snuggle because you felt so warm and secure!” Mademoiselle’s room, both in the country and in town, was a weird place to me—a kind of hothouse sheltering a thick-leaved plant imbued with a heavy, enuretic odor. Although next to ours, when we were small, it did not seem to belong to our pleasant, well-aired home. In that sickening mist, reeking, among other woolier effluvia, of the brown smell of oxidized apple peel, the lamp burned low, and strange objects glimmered upon the writing desk: a lacquered box with licorice sticks, black segments of which she would hack off with her penknife and put to melt under her tongue; a picture postcard of a lake and a castle with mother-of-pearl spangles for windows; a bumpy ball of tightly rolled bits of silver paper that came from all those chocolates she used to consume at night; photographs of the nephew who had died, of his mother who had signed her picture Mater Dolorosa, and of a certain Monsieur de Marante who had been forced by his family to marry a rich widow. Lording it over the rest was one in a fancy frame incrusted with garnets; it showed, in three-quarter view, a slim young brunette clad in a close-fitting dress, with brave eyes and abundant hair. “A braid as thick as my arm and reaching down to my ankles!” was Mademoiselle’s melodramatic comment. For this had been she—but in vain did my eyes probe her familiar form to try and extract the graceful creature it had engulfed. Such discoveries as my awed brother and I did make merely increased the difficulties of that task; and the grown-ups who during the day beheld a densely clothed Mademoiselle never saw what we children saw when, roused from her sleep by one of us shrieking himself out of a bad dream, disheveled, candle in hand, a gleam of gilt lace on the blood-red dressing gown that could not quite wrap her quaking mass, the ghastly Jézabel of Racine’s absurd play stomped barefooted into our bedroom.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  Let us set out the characteristics of those whom 2 Peter rebukes. They twist Scripture to make it suit their own purpose (1:20, 3:16). They bring the Christian faith into disrepute (2:2). They are greedy and seek personal gain, and they exploit others (2:3, 2:14-15). They are doomed and will share the fate of the sinning angels (2:4), the world before the Flood (2:5), the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah (2:6) and the false prophet Balaam (2:15). They are irrational and sensual creatures, ruled by their animal instincts (2:12) and dominated by their lusts (2:10, 2:18). Their eyes are full of adultery (2:14). They are presumptuous, self-willed and arrogant (2:10, 2:18). They spend even the daylight hours in abandoned and luxurious revelry (2:13). They speak of liberty; but what they call liberty is unrestrained licence, and they themselves are the slaves of their own lusts (2:19). Not only are they deluded, they also delude others and lead them astray (2:14, 2:18). They are worse than those who never knew the right, because they knew what goodness is and have lapsed into evil, like a dog returning to its vomit and a sow returning to the mud after it has been washed (2:20-2). It is clear that Peter is describing antinomians, those who used God's grace as a justification for sinning. In all probability they were Gnostics, who said that only spirit was good and that matter was essentially evil and that, therefore, what we did with the body was not important and that we could follow physical appetites to excess and it made no difference. They lived the most immoral lives and encouraged others to do so, and they justified their actions by distorting grace and interpreting Scripture to suit themselves. The Denial of the Second Coming Further, these evil people denied the second coming (3:3-4). They argued that this was a stable world in which things remained unalterably the same, and that God was so slow to act that it was possible to assume that the second coming was never going to happen at all. The answer of 2 Peter is that this is not a stable world; that it has, in fact, been destroyed by water in the Flood and that it will be destroyed by fire in the final conflagration (3:5-7). What they regard as unnecessary delay is in fact God withholding his hand in patience to give men and women another chance to repent (3:8-9). But the day of destruction is coming (3:1o). A new heaven and a new earth are on the way; therefore, goodness is an absolute necessity if people are to be saved in the day of judgment (3:11-14). With this Paul agrees, however difficult his letters may be to understand, and however false teachers deliberately misinterpret them (3:15-16). The duty of Christians is to stand fast, firmly founded in the faith, and to grow in grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ (3:17-18). The Doubts of the Early Church

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Various sounds reached me in my various situations. It might be the dinner gong, or something less usual, such as the foul music of a barrel organ. Somewhere near the stables the old tramp would grind, and on the strength of more direct impressions imbibed in earlier years, I would see him mentally from my perch. Painted on the front of his instrument were Balkan peasants of sorts dancing among palmoid willows. Every now and then he shifted the crank from one hand to the other. I saw the jersey and skirt of his little bald female monkey, her collar, the raw sore on her neck, the chain which she kept plucking at every time the man pulled it, hurting her badly, and the several servants standing around, gaping, grinning—simple folks terribly tickled by a monkey’s “antics.” Only the other day, near the place where I am recording these matters, I came across a farmer and his son (the kind of keen healthy kid you see in breakfast food ads), who were similarly diverted by the sight of a young cat torturing a baby chipmunk—letting him run a few inches and then pouncing upon him again. Most of his tail was gone, the stump was bleeding. As he could not escape by running, the game little fellow tried one last measure: he stopped and lay down on his side in order to merge with a bit of light and shade on the ground, but the too violent heaving of his flank gave him away. The family phonograph, which the advent of the evening set in action, was another musical machine I could hear through my verse. On the veranda where our relatives and friends assembled, it emitted from its brass mouthpiece the so-called tsïganskie romansï beloved of my generation. These were more or less anonymous imitations of gypsy songs—or imitations of such imitations. What constituted their gypsiness was a deep monotonous moan broken by a kind of hiccup, the audible cracking of a lovesick heart. At their best, they were responsible for the raucous note vibrating here and there in the works of true poets (I am thinking especially of Alexander Blok). At their worst, they could be likened to the apache stuff composed by mild men of letters and delivered by thickset ladies in Parisian night clubs. Their natural environment was characterized by nightingales in tears, lilacs in bloom and the alleys of whispering trees that graced the parks of the landed gentry. Those nightingales trilled, and in a pine grove the setting sun banded the trunks at different levels with fiery red. A tambourine, still throbbing, seemed to lie on the darkening moss. For a spell, the last notes of the husky contralto pursued me through the dusk. When silence returned, my first poem was ready.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  As one observer remarked in 1608, the heavy concentrations of poor created a subterranean colony of dirty and disfigured “monsters” living in “caves.” They were accused of breeding rapidly and infecting the city with a “plague” of poverty, thus figuratively designating unemployment a contagious disease. Distant American colonies were presented as a cure. The poor could be purged. In 1622, the famous poet and clergyman John Donne wrote of Virginia in this fashion, describing the new colony as the nation’s spleen and liver, draining the “ill humours of the body . . . to breed good bloud.” Others used less delicate imagery. American colonies were “emunctories,” excreting human waste from the body politic. The elder Richard Hakluyt unabashedly called the transportable poor the “offals of our people.” 19 The poor were human waste. Refuse. The sturdy poor, those without physical injuries, elicited outrage over their idleness. But how could vagabonds, who on average migrated some twenty to eighty miles in a month, be called idle? William Harrison, in his popular Description of England (1577), offered an explanation. Idleness was wasted energy. The vagabonds’ constant movement led nowhere. In moving around, they failed (like the Indians) to put down healthy roots and join the settled labor force of servants, tenants, and artisans. Harrison thought of idleness in the same way we might today refer to the idling motor of a car: the motor runs in place; the idle poor were trapped in economic stasis. Waste people, like wastelands, were stagnant; their energy produced nothing of value; they were like festering weeds ruining an idle garden. 20 Wasteland, then, was an eyesore, or what the English called a “sinke hole.” Waste people were analogized to weeds or sickly cattle grazing on a dunghill. But unlike the docile herd, which were carefully bred and contained in fenced enclosures, the poor could become disruptive and disorderly; they occasionally rioted. The cream of society could not be shielded from the public nuisance of the poor, in that they seemed omnipresent at funerals, church services, on highways and byways, in alehouses, and they loitered around Parliament—even at the king’s court. James I was so annoyed with vagrant boys milling around his palace at Newmarket that he wrote the London-based Virginia Company in 1619 asking for its help in removing the offensive population from his sight by shipping them overseas. 21 As masterless men, detached and unproductive, the vagrant poor would acquire colonial masters. For Hakluyt and others, a quasi-military model made sense. It had been used in Ireland. In the New World, whether subduing the Native population or contending with other European nations with colonial ambitions, fortifications would have to be raised, trenches dug, gunpowder produced, and men trained to use bows. Militarization served other crucial purposes.

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

  1. Our Lord washes His robes in wine, that is to say, He washes our souls in His own Blood. He comes from the depth of His tribulation with dyed raiment, because in all His sorrow He loved us and washed us with Blood, making us white and clean. 2. When the Scripture says that wine gladdens the heart, we take the mystical meaning of the words, and learn how the loving heart and the faithful soul are gladdened by the Blood of Jesus. The blood of the grape is the Blood of the Lamb which we all receive from the Altar. This draught gladdens the hearts of the good, for, giving the comfort of spiritual gladness, it heals the sadness which comes from guilt. 3. The Blood of the true Abel is always pleading with God for pardon and mercy. We rose up against Him and slew Him in the field amid His flocks and herds; and He forgave His murderers and died for them, and ever liveth to make intercession for them at the throne of God. N. Now remember that three kinds of persons are terribly rebuked in Holy Scripture as sinning grievously against the Blood of our Saviour: a, the unclean in body; b, the hardened in heart; c, the wicked stewards. The first dare to drink the Blood of Christ unworthily, for they are in mortal sin; the second refuse to be converted by the Blood of Christ; the third make gain of the Blood of Christ, and turn that gain to their own bad ends. a. St. Paul says in effect that sinners like these try to drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils at the same time. The cup of devils is luxury and filth, both of the flesh and of the world. Their wine is the gall of dragons, as the prophet says. They who make themselves drunk with the filthiness of this muddy drink, and then pour upon it the most Precious Blood of God, defile Him so far as they can, and, being guilty of a fearful sin, deserve a fearful punishment. They who do this do commit three sins, according to St. Paul: (a) they tread the Son of God under foot; (b) they count the Blood of the testament and unholy thing; (c) they insult, and so blaspheme, the Holy Ghost.

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

  a. Unbelievers are they whose hearts are so blinded by malice and the guile of the devil that they do not believe, and do not know those heavenly Sacraments which the wonderful wisdom of God has instituted for the salvation of the world. If they think of it at all, they do not believe that our Lord can give us His Flesh to eat. They wander in error, ignorant of the Sacraments of God, because they are blinded by malice. b. The careless are they who are so wrapped up in temporal gains and the business of the world that they neglect to receive Holy Communion at the proper time. As to the excuses made to the king by those whom he had invited, it is said, ‘To go to the farm is to give ourselves too earnestly to earthly work, and to go to the merchandise is to seek too greedily for worldly gain. They who neglect the banquet of this Divine Sacrament, though they may seem to have faith and to do certain works of charity, if they do not repent will perish.’ St. Paul speaks of the height and depth of the love of Christ, and of his words it is said, ‘The deeps of love are the Sacraments of the Church. Deep they are, nay, unfathomable; and they are also the foundation of charity, without which it availeth nothing, for the outward sign of charity will not bring to everlasting life those who make light of the Sacraments.’ In the old law the soul that was clean and neglected the Phase without a hindrance of necessity was cut off from the people for its neglect. c. The despisers are they who cleave to their sin with such strong love that they count it but a little thing to receive the Body of the Lord. With just judgment they are condemned and cut off, because they love their sins more than their preparation to receive the Body of Jesus. There is a canon which says, ‘They who shall, through sin, stay away two or three years from Communion shall be excommunicated till they do penance.’ (2) The second thing to be considered about this way of receiving is the greatness of the happiness of the good who worthily receive the Body of their Lord. Now this is proved in three ways: a, by the choice of the best part; b, by being made partakers of the Holy Ghost; c, by the assured indwelling of Jesus Himself.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Though an Anglican minister presided over Princess Pocahontas’s marriage to the planter John Rolfe, one member of the Jamestown council dismissed her as the heathen spawn of a “cursed generation” and labeled her a “barbarous[ly] mannered” girl. Even Rolfe considered the union a convenient political alliance rather than a love match. 11 We should not expect Disney to get that right when the fundamental principle of the classless American identity—sympathetic communion—is at stake. The film builds on another mythic strand of the oft-told tale: it is John Smith (blond and brawny in his animated form), not Rolfe, who takes on the role of Pocahontas’s lover. Exaggerating her beauty and highlighting her choice to save Smith and become an ally of the English is not new. When a less-than-flattering portrait appeared in 1842, making her plump and ungainly, and not the lovely and petite Indian princess, there was a storm of protest over what one critic called a “coarse and unpoetical” rendering. Her Anglicized beauty is nonnegotiable; her primitive elegance makes her assimilation tolerable. Indeed, it is all that makes acceptance of the Indian maiden possible. 12 The Pocahontas story requires the princess to reject her own people and culture. This powerful theme has persisted, as the historian Nancy Shoemaker observes, because it contributes to the larger national rationale of the Indians’ willing participation in their own demise. Yet this young girl did not willingly live at Jamestown; she was taken captive. In the garden paradise of early Virginia that never was, war and suffering, greed and colonial conquest are conveniently missing. Class and cultural dissonance magically fade from view in order to remake American origins into a utopian love story. 13 • • • Can we handle the truth? In the early days of settlement, in the profit-driven minds of well-connected men in charge of a few prominent joint-stock companies, America was conceived of in paradoxical terms: at once a land of fertility and possibility and a place of outstanding wastes, “ranke” and weedy backwaters, dank and sorry swamps. Here was England’s opportunity to thin out its prisons and siphon off thousands; here was an outlet for the unwanted, a way to remove vagrants and beggars, to be rid of London’s eyesore population. Those sent on the hazardous voyage to America who survived presented a simple purpose for imperial profiteers: to serve English interests and perish in the process. In that sense, the “first comers,” as they were known before the magical “Pilgrims” took hold, were something less than an inspired lot. Dozens who disembarked from the Mayflower succumbed that first year to starvation and disease linked to vitamin deficiency; scurvy rotted their gums, and they bled from different orifices. By the 1630s, New Englanders reinvented a hierarchical society of “stations,” from ruling elite to household servants.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  What they showed instead was that women cannot wear “white trash” or “redneck” as a badge of honor. 5 Allison is the better writer. That said, a spare prose may have been intentional for Chute. She captures events as they are happening, offering few insights into the inner life of her white trash subjects. The Beans are a sprawling extended tribe who take over the underbelly of Egypt. They are an assorted lot. There is Beal and his mother, Merry Merry Bean, the latter of whom is crazy and kept locked in a tree house. Reuben is a violent drunk who ends up in prison; Auntie Roberta pops out babies like the rabbits she skins and eats. Reuben’s girlfriend, Madeline, endures beatings at his hand. The characters’ only talents are shooting and procreating. Beal sleeps with Roberta, and some of her children may be his. She, meanwhile, would never win any awards for mothering, allowing her babies to roam at will and to spit, hiss, and swallow pennies. Beal rapes (or doesn’t rape) his neighbor Earlene Pomerleau, who becomes his wife, though he continues to sleep at his aunt’s. Madeline parades around in flimsy halters that let her breasts fall out. 6 Earlene is a step ahead of the Beans in class terms, at once disgusted by and attracted to them. She compares her first sexual encounter with Beal to being mauled by a bear. She is horrified by his large feet. As she completes the sex act, she “pictures millions of possible big Bean babies, fox-eyed, yellow-toothed, meat-gobbling Beans.” Beal injures his eye at work, loses his job, and is racked by pain and a range of physical disabilities, but still he forbids Earlene to get food stamps. He refuses to go to a hospital until he is finally carried away by rescue workers. “I ain’t worth a piss,” the broken man says, scowling. He dies in a hail of police bullets after shooting out the windows of a wealthy family’s home. Earlene watches him fall, the gun clasped in his hand. 7 The Beans are waste people. Their women are breeders. They talk about Bean blood, and they all look alike. Earlene’s father damns the Beans as uncivilized predators: “If it runs, a Bean will shoot it. If it falls, a Bean will eat it.” Earlene’s father is superior to these “tackiest people on earth,” he believes, because they inhabit an old trailer, while he built his own house. As to the womenfolk, he singles out Roberta, muttering that there should be a law that after nine children with no husband, “you get the knife,” that is, “tyin’ the tubes.” And when Reuben is taken away by the police, he voices the hope that they will “hog-tie the rest of the heathens.” What he means is: round up the children and exterminate them before they become “full-blown Beans.” 8 In The Beans of Egypt, Maine, class warfare is played out at the lowest level.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  20 We need to look honestly at the real perils of our electoral system in this age of media celebrity and instantaneous communication, especially when compounded lies cease to shock and a cacophony of voices among insistent ideologues compromise constitutional principles and make it harder and harder to know which policies stand the best chance of improving the lives of more citizens. We need to stop thinking that some Americans are the real Americans, the deserving, the talented, the most patriotic and hardworking, while others can be dismissed as less deserving of the American dream. One thing we can do in the interest of national self-improvement is to further the conversation about the manipulations of class identity by political aspirants, who game the system each time they sell unreal expectations to people whose interests they only pretend to represent. If we do not study ourselves with due attention to disturbing patterns in our history, we will be learning little, and democracy can scarcely claim to be the best form of government. O PREFACE ne of the most memorable films of all time is To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), a classic portrait of the legacy of slavery and racial segregation in the South. It is a film that I have been teaching for over two decades, and is one of President Obama’s favorite movies. Yet when my students watch this film (even if they were exposed to it in high school), they see for the first time that the drama within has not one but two disturbing messages. One plotline is about the brave, principled lawyer Atticus Finch, who refuses to perpetuate the racial double standard: despite opposition, he agrees to defend an Afro-American, Tom Robinson, on the charge of raping a poor white girl, Mayella Ewell. Though the court finds Robinson guilty, we the viewers know he is innocent. An honorable, hardworking family man, he stands well above the degraded Ewells, his accusers. The shabbily attired Mayella is cowed by her bully of a father, a scrawny man seen in overalls, who is devoid of merit or morality. Bob Ewell demands that the all-white jury of common men take his side, which they do in the end. He insists that they help him avenge his daughter’s honor. Not satisfied when Robinson is killed trying to escape from prison, he attacks Atticus Finch’s two children on Halloween night. Bob Ewell’s full name is Robert E. Lee Ewell. But he is not an heir of one of the aristocratic families of the Old South. As Harper Lee described them in the novel from which the classic film was adapted, the Ewells were members of the terminally poor, those whose status could not be lifted or debased by any economic fluctuation—not even the Depression. They were human waste. In the author’s words, “No truant officers could keep their numerous offspring in school; no public health officer could free them from congenital defects, various worms, and diseases indigenous to filthy surroundings.”

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  All of America, as it were, had become North Carolina. A suffocating mixture of moisture and heat had produced stagnant waters, “gross herbiage,” and miasmas of the air, which retarded the size and diversity of species. Buffon sounded at times like the colorful William Byrd, complaining of the “noxious exhalations” in America that blocked the sun, which made it impossible to “purify” the soil and air. Swamp creatures multiplied in this environment: “moist plants, reptiles, and insects, and all animals that wallow in the mire.” Domestic animals shrank in size in comparison to their European counterparts, and their flesh was less flavorful. Only Carolina’s prized critter, the hog, thrived in such a godforsaken terrain. 19 Native Americans were not just savages to Buffon; they were a constitutionally enfeebled breed, devoid of free will and “activity of mind.” As the forgotten stepchildren of Mother Nature, they lacked the “invigorating sentiment of love, and the strong desire for multiplying their species.” They were “cold and languid,” spending their days in “stupid repose,” without the strong affective bonds that united people into civilized societies. Buffon had converted Indians into quasi-reptilian swamp monsters. They lurked in marshes, hunting prey, ignorant of the fate of their offspring, concerned only with the next meal or battle. The desire to reproduce, Buffon contended, was the “spark” of life and the fire of genius. This essential quality was missing from their constitution—all because they languished amid a debilitating environment. 20 In contesting Buffon, Jefferson had to wipe the canvas clean of the swamp monsters and paint a very different, eco-friendly picture. He conjured another America, a sublime place of endless diversity. His Blue Ridge Mountains were majestic; the Mississippi River was alive with birds and fish in a way comparable to the Nile—the birthplace of Western civilization. Native Americans existed in an uncultivated state, he admitted, yet they were endowed with a manly ardor and displayed a noble mind. America was not plagued with pathetic stocks of animals or people. On the contrary, the young continent heralded one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the age: the bones of the woolly mammoth, ranked as the largest species known to man, which according to Jefferson still roamed the forests. English and European settlers had excelled, not suffered. That rare spark of genius, nurtured in Washington, Franklin, and David Rittenhouse, the Philadelphia astronomer, was solid proof, to his mind, of the invigorating and regenerative natural landscape. 21 Jefferson fundamentally agreed with Buffon’s science. He did not abandon the Frenchman’s ruling premise that the physical surroundings were crucial in cultivating races and classes of people, or that land could be either regenerative or degenerative. Buffon’s theory wasn’t wrong then; his observations were incomplete.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The ingenuity with which most special cases of association are formulated in this mechanical language of struggle and inhibition, is great, and surpasses in analytic thoroughness anything that has been done by the British school. This, however, is a doubtful merit, in a case where the elements dealt with are artificial; and I must confess that to my mind there is something almost hideous in the glib Herbartian jargon about Vorstellungsmassen and their Hemmungen and Hemmungssummen , and sinken and erheben and schweben , and Verschmelzungen and Complexionen . Herr Lipps, the most recent systematic German Psychologist, has, I regret to say, carried out the theory of ideas in a way which the great originality, learning, and acuteness he shows make only the more regrettable.[506] Such elaborately artificial constructions are, it seems to me, only a burden and a hindrance, not a help, to our science.[507] In French, M. Rabier in his chapter on Association,[508] handles the subject more vigorously and acutely than any one. His treatment of it, though short, seems to me for general soundness to rank second only to Hodgson's. In the last chapter we already invoked association to account for the effect of use in improving discrimination. In later chapters we shall see abundant proof of the immense part which it plays in other processes, and shall then readily admit that few principles of analysis, in any science, have proved more fertile than this one, however vaguely formulated it often may have been. Our own attempt to formulate it more definitely, and to escape the usual confusion between causal agencies and relations merely known, must not blind us to the immense services of those by whom the confusion was unfelt.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  There, ladies, is a story which well confirms what St Paul says to the Corinthians, that God makes use of weak things to confound the strong, and of those who seem useless in men's eyes to overthrow the glory and splendour of those who, thinking themselves something, are yet in reality nothing. There is no good in any man but what God puts into him by His grace ; and there is no temptation out of which one does not come victorious, when God grants aid. You see this by the confession of a monk, who was believed to be a good man, and by the elevation of a girl whom he wished to exhibit as criminal and wicked. In this we see the truth of our Lord's saying, that " He that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted." " How many worthy people this monk deceived ! " said Oisille ; " for I have seen how they trusted in him more than in God." " I should not have been one of those he deceived ! " said Nomerfide, " for I have such a horror of the very sight of a monk that I could not even confess to them, believing them to be worse than all other men, and never to frequent any house without leaving in it some shame or dissension.'' '• There are some good men amongst them," said Oisille ; " and the wickedness of an individual ought not to be imputed to the whole body ; but the best are those who least frequent secular houses and women." " That is very well said," observed Ennasuite, " for the less one sees and knows them the better one esteems them ; for upon more experience one comes to know their real nature." " Let us leave the monastery where it is," said Nomer- fide, "and see to whom Geburon will give his voice." " To Madame Oisille," replied Geburon, " in order 2 28 THE HEPTAMEROiY OF THE \Novd zy that she may tell us something in honour of the regular clergy."

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

  "Listen, my son," he said with mild emphasis, and the child looked a little timidly at the organist's large larynx, which moved up as he spoke, whereupon it quietly and quickly went back to its place, as if it could continue of the game and the talks. A movement of Haydn, a few pages of Mozart, a sonata by Beethoven were performed. Then, however, while Gerda was fetching new music, the violin under her arm, the surprising thing happened that Herr Pfühl, Edmund Pfühl, organist at Sankt Marien, gradually slipped into a very strange style with his free interlude, whereby in his distant gaze a sort of bashful happiness shone ... Under his fingers a swelling and blooming, a weaving and singing began, from which, softly at first and then wafting away again, then more and more clearly and pithy, in artful counterpoint, an old-fashioned grandiose, wonderfully pompous march motif emerged ... An increase, an intertwining, a transition ... and with the resolution the violin began in fortissimo . The Meistersinger prelude passed. Gerda Buddenbrook was a passionate admirer of new music. But as far as Herr Pfühl was concerned, she had encountered such wildly indignant resistance from him that at first she had despaired of winning him over. On the day that theyhimhad put piano reductions from "Tristan und Isolde" on the lectern for the first time and asked him to play them for her, he had jumped up after twenty-five bars and hurried back and forth between bay window and grand piano with every sign of extreme disgust. 'I'm not playing this, madam, I'm your most humble servant, but I'm not playing this! It's not music... believe me... I always thought I knew a little bit about music! This is the mess! This is demagogy, blasphemy and madness! This is a perfumed smoke with flashes! This is the end of all morality in art! I won't play it!' And with these words he threw himself back on the chair and, while his larynx moved up and down, gulped and coughed out another twenty-five bars, and then closed the piano and called out: "Pooh! No, Lord my God, this is going too far! Forgive me, dear lady, I speak frankly... You honor me, you have paid me for my services for years and years... and I am a man of modest living. But I'm resigning, I'll renounce it, if you force me to commit these nefarious acts...! And the child, there the child is sitting on his chair! It came in quietly to listen to music! Are you trying to poison his mind altogether?" ... But fearful as he behaved, slowly and step by step, through habit and persuasion, she drew him over to her. 'Pfühl,' she said, 'be cheap and take it easy. His unfamiliar use of harmonies confuses you...You find Beethoven pure, clear and natural by comparison. But consider how Beethoven upset his contemporaries, who were educated in the old way...

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

  We live in a very pretty square in the middle of the city, with a fountain in the middle, like ours in the market, and our house is very close to the town hall. I have never seen such a house! It is painted in all kinds of colors from top to bottom, with Saint George slaying the dragon and old Bavarian princes in full regalia and coats of arms. Yes, I really like Munich. The air is said to be very nerve-wracking and my stomach is fine at the moment. I drink a great deal of beer with great pleasure, especially since the water is not entirely healthy; but I can't really get used to the food yet. There are too few vegetables and too much flour, for example in the sauces, on which may God have mercy. No one here has any idea what a proper saddle of veal is, because the butchers cut everything up in the most pathetic way. And I really miss the fish. And then it's insane to constantly swallow cucumber and potato salad mixed with beer! My stomach makes noises. In general, you have to get used to some things, you can imagine, you are in a foreign country. There is the unfamiliar coin, there is the difficulty in communicating with the common people, the servants, because I speak too quickly for them and they too gibberish for me - and then there is Catholicism; I hate him, as you know, I don't think much of it... Here the Consul began to laugh, leaning back on the sofa, a piece of buttered bread with grated herb cheese in his hand. "Yes, Tom, you're laughing..." his mother said, letting the middle finger of her hand fall on the tablecloth a couple of times. 'But what I really like about her is that she holds to the faith of her fathers and loathes the unevangelical mumbo-jumbo. I know that in France and Italy you have developed a certain sympathy for the papal church, but that is not religiosity with you, Tom, but something else, and I also understand what; but although we ought to be tolerant, playing and fondness in these things is highly punishable, and I must ask God to give you and your Gerda - for I know she is not exactly one of the solid ones either, with the years the necessary ones there is seriousness in it. You will forgive your mother for that remark.” "On top of the fountain," she read on, "which I can see from my window, there is a Maria, and sometimes it is wreathed, and then there are people of the common people kneeling with rosaries and praying, which looks quite nice, but it is written: Go into your little room. One often sees monks on the street here, and they look quite venerable.

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

  There were fried potatoes, two kinds of vegetables, and two kinds of compote, and the circling bowls contained portions, as if each one were not an accompaniment and an ingredient, but the main course for everyone to gorge themselves on. Old red wine from the Möllendorpf company was drunk. Little Johann sat between his parents and with difficulty stowed a white piece of breast meat and farce in his stomach. He couldn't eat as much as Aunt Thilda, but felt tired and not very well; he was just proud that he was allowed to dine with the grown-ups, that one of those delicious milk rolls sprinkled with poppy seeds had been lying on his artfully folded serviette, that in front of him too three wine glasses stood there, while he usually drank from the small golden cup that Uncle Kröger had given him as a godfather … But when, while Uncle Justus began pouring oil-yellow Greek wine into the smallest glasses, the ice meringues appeared – red, white and brown - his appetite was stimulated again. Although it hurt his teeth almost unbearably, he ate a red one, then half a white one, finally had to try a piece of the brown one filled with chocolate ice cream, crunched the waffles with it, and sipped at that sweet wine and listened to Uncle Christian, who had started to talk. He talked about the Christmas party in the club, which had been very jolly. "Dear God!" he said in the tone he used to use when speaking of Johnny Thunderstorm. "The fellows drank Swedish punch like water!" "Ugh," the consul remarked curtly, lowering her eyes. But he ignored that. His eyes began to wander, and thoughts and memories were so vivid in him that they crossed his gaunt face like shadows. 'Do any of you know,' he asked, 'what it's like to have too much Swedish punch? I don't mean the drunkenness, but what comes next day, the aftermath... they're weird and disgusting... yes, weird and disgusting at the same time." "Enough reason to describe them in detail," said the senator. " Assez , Christian, we're not interested in that at all," said the Consul. But he ignored it. It was his peculiarity that at such moments no objection reached him. He was silent for a while, and then suddenly what was on his mind seemed ripe for communication. "You walk around feeling nauseous," he said, turning to his brother with a wrinkled nose. “Headaches and messy guts… well, that happens on other occasions too. But you feel dirty - ' and Christian rubbed his hands with a completely distorted face - 'you feel dirty and unwashed all over. You wash your hands, but it's no use, they feel damp and unclean, and your nails have something greasy... You bathe, but it doesn't help, your whole body seems sticky and unclean. Your whole body irritates you, irritates you, you disgust yourself...

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

  In order to treat, fill and, if necessary, extract the teeth, Herr Brecht lived with his Josephus in Mühlenstrasse; and to regulate digestion there was castor oil in the world, good, thick, silvery castor oil, which, taken from a tablespoon, slid down your throat like a slippery newt, and which you smelled, tasted, felt in your gullet for three days, where you went and where you stood … Oh, why was it all so insurmountably disgusting? Only once - Hanno had been lying in bed quite ill, and his heart was guilty of particular irregularities - Dr. Langhals had, with a certain nervousness, proceeded to prescribe a drug that had given little Johann pleasure and had done him so incomparably good: and those had been arsenic pills. As a result, Hanno often asked about it, driven by an almost tender need for these small, sweet, happy pills. But he no longer received them. happy pills driven. But he no longer received them. happy pills driven. But he no longer received them. Cod liver oil and castor oil were good things, but Doctor Langhals was in complete agreement with the senator that they alone were not enough to make little Johann a capable and resilient man if he didn't do his part. For example, there were the gymnastics games, conducted by the gymnastics teacher Herr Fritsche, which were held every week in the summertime outside on the "Burgfelde" and gave the young men of the city the opportunity to show and cultivate courage, strength, dexterity and presence of mind. But to his father's anger, Hanno laid nothing but disgust at a mute, reserved, almost arrogant distaste for such wholesome conversations... Why was he so completely out of touch with his class and contemporaries with whom he would later have to live and work? Why was he always huddled with this little, half-washed Kai, who was a good kid but had a rather dubious existence and was hardly a friendship for the future? In some way a boy has to win the trust and respect of those around him who grow up with him and on whose esteem he depends throughout his life. There were the two sons of the Consul Hagenstrom: fourteen and twelve years old, two splendid fellows, fat, strong and high-spirited, who engaged in veritable fist duels in the surrounding woods. were the best gymnasts in the school, swam like seals, smoked cigars and were ready for any outrage. They were feared, loved and respected. Her cousins, the two sons of the public prosecutor, Doctor Moritz Hagenstrom, on the other hand, of a more delicate constitution and gentler morals, distinguished themselves intellectually and were model pupils, ambitious, submissive, quiet and diligent, tremblingly attentive and almost consumed by the desire to always be first class and to receive the Number One testimony. They received it and enjoyed the respect of their more stupid and lazy comrades.

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

  But at the same moment he sank back onto the cushion with a groan of disgust. The music … the music began again, with a silly noise that was supposed to mean a gallop and in which drum and cymbal marked a rhythm that the other premature and delayed sound masses did not stop, an obtrusive and in its naive ingenuity unbearably provoking Chaos of creaks, smashes and quinquils, torn apart by the ludicrous whistles of the piccolo. – Sixth Chapter "Oh Bach! Sebastian Bach, dearest lady!” exclaimed Herr Edmund Pfühl, organist at Sankt Marien, who was pacing through the salon in great motion, while Gerda was smiling, head in hand, sitting at the grand piano, and Hanno, listening in an armchair, one of his Knee clasped with both hands… “Certainly… as you say… he is the one through whom the harmonic triumphed over the contrapuntal… he created modern harmony, certainly! But by what? Do I have to tell you how? Through the progressive development of the contrapuntal style - you know it as well as I do! So what is this been the driving principle of this development? The harmonics? Oh no! no way! But the counterpoint, dear lady! The counterpoint!... What, I ask you, would the absolute experiments in harmony have led to? I warn . . . as long as my tongue obeys me, I warn against mere experiments in harmonics!' His enthusiasm was great in such conversations, and he gave it free rein, because he felt at home in this salon. Every Wednesday afternoon, his tall, squat and slightly high-shouldered figure appeared on the threshold in a coffee-brown tunic whose skirts covered the backs of his knees, and in anticipation of his partner he lovingly opened the Bechstein grand piano, arranged the violin parts on the carved standing desk, and then preluded for a moment, lightly and artfully, letting his head loll complacently from one shoulder to the other. An amazing growth of hair, a bewildering amount of small, tight, fox-brown and mottled gray curls made this head appear unusually thick and heavy, although it was enthroned freely on the long neck with a very large larynx knot, which protruded from the folding collar. The unkempt, puffy mustache, the color of his hair, protruded further from his face than the small, squat nose... Under his round eyes, which were brown and shiny, and his gaze, while making music, dreamily seeing through things and beyond them appearance seemed to be at rest, the skin was swollen a little bag-like... This face was not important, at least it did not bear the stamp of a strong and alert intelligence. His eyelids were usually half lowered and his shaven chin often hung Incidentally, the severity and dignity of his character contrasted quite strangely with this softness of his outward appearance. Edmund Pfühl was a widely respected organist, and the reputation of his contrapuntal erudition had not remained within the walls of his native city.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  3Besides dreams of velocity, or in connection with them, there is in every child the essentially human urge to reshape the earth, to act upon a friable environment (unless he is a born Marxist or a corpse and meekly waits for the environment to fashion him). This explains a child’s delight in digging, in making roads and tunnels for his favorite toys. Our son had a tiny model of Sir Malcolm Campbell’s Bluebird, of painted steel and with detachable tires, and this he would play with endlessly on the ground, and the sun would make a kind of nimbus of his longish fair hair and turn to a toffee tint his bare back crisscrossed by the shoulder straps of his knitted navy-blue shorts (under which, when undressed, he was seen to be bottomed and haltered with natural white). Never in my life have I sat on so many benches and park chairs, stone slabs and stone steps, terrace parapets and brims of fountain basins as I did in those days. The popular pine barrens around the lake in Berlin’s Grunewald we visited but seldom. You questioned the right of a place to call itself a forest when it was so full of refuse, so much more littered with rubbish than the glossy, self-conscious streets of the adjoining town. Curious things turned up in this Grunewald. The sight of an iron bedstead exhibiting the anatomy of its springs in the middle of a glade or the presence of a dressmaker’s black dummy lying under a hawthorn bush in bloom made one wonder who, exactly, had troubled to carry these and other widely scattered articles to such remote points of a pathless forest. Once I came across a badly disfigured but still alert mirror, full of sylvan reflections—drunk, as it were, on a mixture of beer and chartreuse—leaning, with surrealistic jauntiness, against a tree trunk. Perhaps such intrusions on these burgherish pleasure grounds were a fragmentary vision of the mess to come, a prophetic bad dream of destructive explosions, something like the heap of dead heads the seer Cagliostro glimpsed in the ha-ha of a royal garden. And nearer to the lake, in summer, especially on Sundays, the place was infested with human bodies in various stages of nudity and solarization. Only the squirrels and certain caterpillars kept their coats on. Gray-footed goodwives sat on greasy gray sand in their slips; repulsive, seal-voiced males, in muddy swimming trunks, gamboled around; remarkably comely but poorly groomed girls, destined to bear a few years later—early in 1946, to be exact—a sudden crop of infants with Turkic or Mongol blood in their innocent veins, were chased and slapped on the rear (whereupon they would cry out, “Ow-wow!”); and the exhalations coming from these unfortunate frolickers, and their shed clothes (neatly spread out here and there on the ground) mingled with the stench of stagnant water to form an inferno of odors that, somehow, I have never found duplicated anywhere else. People in Berlin’s public gardens and city parks were not permitted to undress; but shirts might be unbuttoned, and rows of young men, of a pronounced Nordic type, sat with closed eyes on benches and exposed their frontal and pectoral pimples to the nationally approved action of the sun. The squeamish and possibly exaggerated shudder that obtains in these notes may be attributed, I suppose, to the constant fear we lived in of some contamination affecting our child. You always considered abominably trite, and not devoid of a peculiar Philistine flavor, the notion that small boys, in order to be delightful, should hate to wash and love to kill.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  To be honest, it didn’t do anything for me. Anything good. Like I said, I was already pretty drunk, and the pot just put me over the edge. I got sick about five minutes into it. I felt like I was stuck in a suitcase at the bottom of a ship in the middle of a storm. Everything started sloshing around in my stomach. My hands and forehead began to sweat and my knees felt weak and yellow. I was poultry. We walked back to Dean’s house, and I lay down in his dog-smelling backyard. I slipped into seasick dreams of alligators and TBN talk show hosts. Jason came out and lay next to me and went on and on about what truth was, and did I think there was anybody out there. Jason had come to believe that truth was something imparted to you when you were high. Later he would go off to college. Friends of mine told me that he became known for waking up miles from campus, in his underwear, never knowing how he got there. On this night he was telling me about truth, about how it is something you know but you don’t know you are knowing it. He was saying the key to the meaning of life is probably on other planets. “Don. Don.” He tried to get my attention. “What, man?” I lay there, seasick. “They could live on that one, man.” “Who, Jason?” “Aliens, man.” As soon as one of the guys sobered up enough to drive, they took me home. I crawled through my bedroom window, stretched out on the floor, and waited for the ship to run aground. I wondered, in that moment, about the conviction I had felt so many years before, the conviction about my mother’s Christmas present. I figured all of this was God’s fault. I thought that if God would make it so I felt convicted all the time, I would never sin. I would never get drunk or smoke pot. I didn’t feel worldly wise that night, rolling over on my stomach trying to hold down the vomit. I didn’t feel like a guy after a tennis match at Wimbledon. I don’t guess Mr. Burkebile was all that happy when he was drunk and wrecking police cars either. If he was happy he probably wouldn’t have sobered up, and he probably wouldn’t have to attend all those meetings. I think the things we want most in life, the things we think will set us free, are not the things we need. I wrote a children’s story about this idea, but it’s not really for children . . . There once was a Rabbit named Don Rabbit. Don Rabbit went to Stumptown Coffee every morning. One Morning at Stumptown, Don Rabbit saw Sexy Carrot. And Don Rabbit decided to chase Sexy Carrot. But Sexy Carrot was very fast. And Don Rabbit chased Sexy Carrot all over Oregon. And all over America,

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  The like often happens, ladies, to those who take pleasure in such tricks. If the gentleman had not wanted to eat at another's expense, he would not have had such a nasty draught at his own. It is true that my story is not very decorous, but you gave me permission to speak the truth. I have done so, to show that when a deceiver is deceived no one is sorry for it. " It is commonly said that words do not stink," said Hircan ; "but those who utter them cannct help smell- ing of them." " It is true," said Oisille, " that words of this sort do not stink; but there are others called dirty, which have such a bad odour that the soul suffers from them more than the body would suffer from smelling a sugar-loaf like that you have spoken of." "Do tell me, pray," rejoined Hircan, "what words you know so dirty that they make a woman of honour suffer both in body and soul." " It would be a fine thing," replied Oisille, " if I were to say to you words which I would not advise any woman to say." " I imderstand now what those words are," said Saf- Sixth Jay ] QUEEN OF NA VARRE. ^^35 fredent. " Women like to appear demure, and do not commonly use such language. But I should like to ask those present why they laugh so readily when they are uttered before them, since they will not themselves utter them. I cannot understand their laughing at a thing which is so offensive to them." " It is not at those pretty words we laugh/' said Par- lamente, " but by reason of the natural propensity every- one feels to laugh either when we see some one fall, or when we hear something said out of place, as it often happens to the b&st speakers to say one thing instead of another. But when men talk filth intentionally, and with premeditation, I know no honourable woman but feels intense aversion for such people, and, far from lis- tening to them, shuns their society." " It is true," said Geburon, " that I have seen women cross themselves on hearing that sort of words which seemed more disgusting the more they were repeated." " But," said Simontault, " how often have they put on their masks to laugh behind them as heartily as they pre- tended to be vexed } " " Even that were better than to show that one took pleasure in such language," said Parlamente. " So, then," remarked Dagoucin, " you praise hypoc- risy ill ladies as much as virtue .-•" " Virtue would be much better," replied Longarine ; " but when it is v/anting we must have recourse to hy- pocrisy, as we use high-heeled shoes to hide our little- ness. If we can hide our defects, even that is no little advantage."