Embarrassment

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)

  2Our spelling master was a carpenter’s son. In the magic-lantern sequence that follows, my first slide shows a young man we called Ordo, the enlightened son of a Greek Catholic deacon. On walks with my brother and me in the cool summer of 1907, he wore a Byronic black cloak with a silver S-shaped clasp. In the deep Batovo woods, at a spot near a brook where the ghost of a hanged man was said to appear, Ordo would give a rather profane and foolish performance for which my brother and I clamored every time we passed there. Bending his head and flapping his cloak in weird, vampiric fashion he would slowly cavort around a lugubrious aspen. One wet morning during that ritual he dropped his cigarette case and while helping to look for it, I discovered two freshly emerged specimens of the Amur hawkmoth, rare in our region—lovely, velvety, purplish-gray creatures—in tranquil copulation, clinging with chinchilla-coated legs to the grass at the foot of the tree. In the fall of that same year, Ordo accompanied us to Biarritz, and a few weeks later abruptly departed, leaving a present we had given him, a Gillette safety razor, on his pillow, with a pinned note. It seldom happens that I do not quite know whether a recollection is my own or has come to me secondhand, but in this case I do waver, especially because, much later, my mother, in her reminiscent moods, used to refer with amusement to the flame she had unknowingly kindled. I seem to remember a door ajar into a drawing room, and there, in the middle of the floor, Ordo, our Ordo, crouching on his knees and wringing his hands in front of my young, beautiful, and dumbfounded mother. The fact that I seem to see, out of the corner of my mind’s eye, the undulations of a romantic cloak around Ordo’s heaving shoulders suggests my having transferred something of the earlier forest dance to that blurred room in our Biarritz apartment (under the windows of which, in a roped-off section of the square, a huge custard-colored balloon was being inflated by Sigismond Lejoyeux, a local aeronaut).

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  5It was indeed a miserable concoction, containing many borrowings besides its pseudo-Pushkinian modulations. An echo of Tyutchev’s thunder and a refracted sunbeam from Fet were alone excusable. For the rest, I vaguely remember the mention of “memory’s sting”—vospominan’ya zhalo (which I had really visualized as the ovipositor of an ichneumon fly straddling a cabbage caterpillar, but had not dared say so)—and something about the old-world charm of a distant barrel organ. Worst of all were the shameful gleanings from Apuhtin’s and Grand Duke Konstantin’s lyrics of the tsïganski type. They used to be persistently pressed upon me by a youngish and rather attractive aunt, who could also spout Louis Bouilhet’s famous piece (À Une Femme), in which a metaphorical violin bow is incongruously used to play on a metaphorical guitar, and lots of stuff by Ella Wheeler Wilcox—a tremendous hit with the empress and her ladies-in-waiting. It seems hardly worthwhile to add that, as themes go, my elegy dealt with the loss of a beloved mistress—Delia, Tamara or Lenore—whom I had never lost, never loved, never met but was all set to meet, love, lose. In my foolish innocence, I believed that what I had written was a beautiful and wonderful thing. As I carried it homeward, still unwritten, but so complete that even its punctuation marks were impressed on my brain like a pillow crease on a sleeper’s flesh, I did not doubt that my mother would greet my achievement with glad tears of pride. The possibility of her being much too engrossed, that particular night, in other events to listen to verse did not enter my mind at all. Never in my life had I craved more for her praise. Never had I been more vulnerable. My nerves were on edge because of the darkness of the earth, which I had not noticed muffling itself up, and the nakedness of the firmament, the disrobing of which I had not noticed either. Overhead, between the formless trees bordering my dissolving path, the night sky was pale with stars. In those years, that marvelous mess of constellations, nebulae, interstellar gaps and all the rest of the awesome show provoked in me an indescribable sense of nausea, of utter panic, as if I were hanging from earth upside down on the brink of infinite space, with terrestrial gravity still holding me by the heels but about to release me any moment.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  He looked at his watch, and I looked at mine, and we parted, and I wandered around the town in the rain, and then visited the Backs, and for some time peered at the rooks in the black network of the bare elms and at the first crocuses in the mist-beaded turf. As I strolled under those sung trees, I tried to put myself into the same ecstatically reminiscent mood in regard to my student years as during those years I had experienced in regard to my boyhood, but all I could evoke were fragmentary little pictures: M. K., a Russian, dyspeptically cursing the aftereffects of a College Hall dinner; N. R., another Russian, romping about like a child; P. M. storming into my room with a copy of Ulysses freshly smuggled from Paris; J. C. quietly dropping in to say that he, too, had just lost his father; R. C. charmingly inviting me to join him on a trip to the Swiss Alps; Christopher something or other, wriggling out of a proposed tennis double upon learning that his partner was to be a Hindu; T., a very old and fragile waiter, spilling the soup in Hall on Professor A. E. Housman, who then abruptly stood up as one shooting out of a trance; S. S., who was in no way connected with Cambridge, but who, having dozed off in his chair at a literary party (in Berlin) and being nudged by a neighbor, also stood up suddenly—in the middle of a story someone was reading; Lewis Carroll’s Dormouse, unexpectedly starting to tell a tale; E. Harrison unexpectedly making me a present of The Shropshire Lad, a little volume of verse about young males and death. The dull day had dwindled to a pale yellow streak in the gray west when, acting upon an impulse, I decided to visit my old tutor. Like a sleepwalker, I mounted the familiar steps and automatically knocked on the half-open door bearing his name. In a voice that was a jot less abrupt, and a trifle more hollow, he bade me come in. “I wonder if you remember me …” I started to say, as I crossed the dim room to where he sat near a comfortable fire. “Let me see,” he said, slowly turning around in his low chair, “I do not quite seem …” There was a dismal crunch, a fatal clatter: I had stepped into the tea things that stood at the foot of his wicker chair. “Oh, yes, of course,” he said, “I know who you are.”

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  The pair having entered a cabaret, the advocate said to the servant girl, " Make us a good fire, and give us some good bread and good wine, and something nice with it ; " for he fancied he had wherewithal to pay. They were served to their liking ; but as they grew warm with eating and drinking, the sugar-loaf, which the advocate carried in his bosom, began to thaw, and gave out such a stench that, thinking it came from elsewhere, he said to the servant, " You have the most fetid and stinking house I ever was in." La Tireliere, who had his share of this fine perfume, said the same thing. The servant, incensed at thus being accused of sluttishness, replied, " By St. Peter, my masters, the house is so neat and clean that there is no nastiness in it but what you have brought in with you.'' The two friends rose from table, spitting and holding their noses, and stood near the fire ; and pres- ently, while warming himself, the advocate took his handkerchief out of his bosom, disgustingly smeared with the syrup of the melted sugar-loaf, which he pro- duced with it. You may well believe that the servant made fine fun of them after the insult they had offered her, and that the advocate was sorely confounded at find- ing himself the dupe of an apothecary's man, whom he had always made the butt of his wit. The servant, instead of taking pity on them, made them pay as hand- somely as they had been served ; and said that no doubt they must be greatly intoxicated, since they had drunk both by nose and mouth. The poor wights slunk away with their shame and their cost. They were no sooner in the street than they saw the apothecary's man going about and asking everyone if 28 434 ^■^^ HEPTAMERON OF THE \^'<n'el $2, diey had seen a loaf of sugar wrapped up in paper. They tried to avoid him, but he shouted to the advocate, " Monsieur, if you have my loaf of sugar I beg you will give it back to me ; for it is a double sin to rob a poor servant." His shouts brought many people to the spot out of curiosity to witness the dispute ; and the real state of the case was so well verified that the apothecary's man was as glad to have been robbed as the others were vexed at having committed such a nasty theft. They comforted themselves, however, with the hope of one day giving him tit for tat.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  I should add that during this and the following, still more crowded, still more awful Sunday afternoon sessions, I was haunted by the reverberations of certain family tales I had heard. In the early eighties, my maternal grandfather, Ivan Rukavishnikov, not finding for his sons any private school to his liking, had created an academy of his own by hiring a dozen of the finest professors available and assembling a score of boys for several terms of free education in the halls of his St. Petersburg house (No. 10, Admiralty Quay). The venture was not a success. Those friends of his whose sons he wanted to consort with his own were not always compliant, and of the boys he did get, many proved disappointing. I formed a singularly displeasing image of him, exploring schools for his obstinate purpose, his sad and strange eyes, so familiar to me from photographs, seeking out the best-looking boys among the best scholars. He is said to have actually paid needy parents in order to muster companions for his two sons. Little as our tutor’s naïve lantern-slide shows had to do with Rukavishnikovian extravaganzas, my mental association of the two enterprises did not help me to put up with Lenski’s making a fool and a bore of himself, so I was happy when, after three more performances (“The Bronze Horseman” by Pushkin; “Don Quixote”; and “Africa—the Land of Marvels”), my mother acceded to my frantic supplications and the whole business was dropped. Now that I come to think of it, how tawdry and tumid they looked, those jellylike pictures, projected upon the damp linen screen (moisture was supposed to make them blossom more richly), but, on the other hand, what loveliness the glass slides as such revealed when simply held between finger and thumb and raised to the light—translucent miniatures, pocket wonderlands, neat little worlds of hushed luminous hues! In later years, I rediscovered the same precise and silent beauty at the radiant bottom of a microscope’s magic shaft. In the glass of the slide, meant for projection, a landscape was reduced, and this fired one’s fancy; under the microscope, an insect’s organ was magnified for cool study. There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.

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

  He can't leave" - Ida said, "wake up" - "without talking to you and your mama, and if you don't want to, yes, you should have sent him to wake up earlier..." 'You're right, Ida; but I couldn't do that, because after all it's supposed to be! I just have to keep thinking: Still can I'm back, it's not too late yet! And there I lie, tormenting myself..." 'Like him, Tonychen? Tell me honestly!« "Yes, Ida. I would have to lie if I wanted to deny that. He's not handsome, but that doesn't matter in this life, and he's a fundamentally good man and incapable of malice, believe me. When I think of Grünlich... oh God! he kept saying that he was active and resourceful, and in a sly way cloaked his ruthlessness... Permaneder isn't like that, you see is a reproach again because he's definitely not going to be a millionaire and I think he's a bit inclined to let himself go and muddle along like they say down there... Because they're all down there like that and that's what I wanted to say, Ida, that's the thing. Namely in Munich, where he was among his own kind, among people who spoke and were like him, I really loved him, I found him so nice, so trusting and comfortable. And I noticed right away that it was mutual – which perhaps contributed to the fact that he thinks I'm a rich woman, richer than I am, I'm afraid, because mother can't give me much to take away with me, as you know... But that I'm sure he won't mind. So much money, it's not to his liking… Enough… what was I saying, Ida?” 'In Munich, Tonychen; but here?" "But here, Ida! You see what I'm trying to say. Here, where he has been completely torn out of his real surroundings, where everyone is different, stricter and more ambitious and more dignified, so to speak... Here I often have to feel embarrassed for him, yes, I'll admit it to you, Ida, I'm an honest woman , I am embarrassed for him, although it is perhaps a bad thing on my part! You see ... several times it just happened that he said "me" instead of "me" in conversation. That's what they do down there, Ida, it happens, it happens to the most educated people when they're in a good mood, and it doesn't hurt anyone and doesn't cost anything and gets lost along with it, and nobody's surprised. But here mother sees him from the side and Tom raises his eyebrow and Uncle Justus pulls himself together and almost jumps like the Krögers always do and Pfiffi Buddenbrook looks at her mother or Friederike or Henriette and then I feel so ashamed , that I would like to run out of the room, and I can't imagine marrying him..." "Oh, Tonychen! You're supposed to be living with him in Munich, too." "You're right, Ida.

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

  "Well, it's kind of congruent," he said flattered. "As for certain nutrients..." Then, while Tony was having breakfast and the young Schwarzkopf continued to smoke his pipe, they began to chatter about Sesemi Weichbrodt, about Tony's retirement days, about her friends, Gerda Arnoldsen, who was now back in Amsterdam, and Armgard von Schilling, whose white house could be seen from the beach, at least on a clear day... Later, when she had finished eating and was wiping her mouth, Tony asked, pointing to the newspaper: "Is there anything new in it?" The young blackhead laughed and shook his head with mock pity. "Oh no... I wonder what it's supposed to say?... You know, those City Advertisements are a pitiful piece of paper!" "Oh?... But Papa and Mama always held her?" 'Yes, well!' he said, blushing… 'I read them too, as you can see, because there's nothing else to hand. But that the wholesaler Consul So and So is planning to celebrate his silver anniversary is not too shocking... Yes - yes! You laugh... But you should read other papers, the Königsberger Hartungsche Zeitung... or the Rheinische Zeitung... you would find something else there! Whatever the King of Prussia may say..." "What does he say?" "Yes ... no, unfortunately I can't quote that in front of a lady ..." And he blushed again. 'He's been pretty rude about this press,' he went on with a somewhat violently ironic smile that embarrassed Tony for a moment. "She doesn't treat the government very kindly, you know, with the nobles, with priests and squires... she's all too adept at running the censors by the nose..." "Well, and you, don't you treat the nobles kindly?" "Me?" he asked, feeling embarrassed… Tony stood up. 'Well, we'll have to talk about that some other time. How about if I go to the beach now? See, it's almost all blue. It won't rain anymore today. I have the greatest desire to jump into the sea again. Would you like to accompany me down?..." Seventh Chapter She had put on her large straw hat and opened her parasol, for although there was a little sea breeze, it was intensely hot. The young Schwarzkopf, in his gray felt hat, book in hand, walked beside her and sometimes looked at her sideways. They walked along the "front row" and strolled through the spa garden, which lay there silent and shadowless with its gravel paths and rose gardens. The music temple, hidden between conifers, stood silently opposite the Kurhaus, the confectionery and the two Swiss houses connected by a long intermediate building. It was about half past twelve; the bathers must still be on the beach. The two walked across the children's playground with the benches and the big swing; they passed close to the warm bath house and wandered slowly over the field of lights.

• From The Hours (1998)

  “Good morning,” Ralph says brightly and nervously to Virginia. His broad, placid, handsome face is red, his forehead practically aglow, and she can immediately see that, for him, it is not a good morning at all. Leonard must have growled at some inefficiency, either of recent vintage or left over from yesterday, and now Ralph sits reading proofs and saying “Good morning” with the flushed ardency of a scolded child. “Good morning,” she answers, in a voice that is cordial but carefully unsympathetic. These young men and women, these assistants, will come and go; already Marjorie has been hired (with her terrible drawl, and where is she just now?) to do the jobs Ralph considers beneath him. It won’t be long, surely, before Ralph and then Marjorie have gone on and she, Virginia, emerges from her study to find someone new wishing her a red-faced, chastened good morning. She knows Leonard can be gruff, stingy, and all but impossibly demanding. She knows these young people are often criticized unfairly but she will not side with them against him. She will not be the mother who intervenes, much as they beg her to with their eager smiles and wounded eyes. Ralph, after all, is Lytton’s worry, and Lytton is welcome to him. He, like his brothers or sisters to come, will go on and do whatever they do in the greater world—no one expects them to make a career out of assisting at the press. Leonard may be autocratic, he may be unfair, but he is her companion and caretaker, and she will not betray him, certainly not for handsome, callow Ralph, or Marjorie, with her parakeet’s voice. “There are ten errors in eight pages,” Leonard says. The brackets around his mouth are so deep you could slip a penny in. “Lucky to have found them,” Virginia says. “They seem to congregate around the middle section. Do you think bad writing actually attracts a higher incidence of misfortune?” “How I’d love to live in a world in which that were true. I’m going for a walk to clear my head, then I’ll come and pitch in.” “We’re making good progress,” Ralph says. “We should be through by the end of the day.” “We shall be lucky,” Leonard says, “to be through by this time next week.”

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

  He always presses his Spanish reed, which has a round bone plate as a handle, against his long goatee, which is almost light green because he dyed it black for many years. Well, you should have seen him! He didn't answer at all, adjusted his glasses, blinked his red eyes, nodded at me with his potato nose, giggled and eyed me so impertinently that I didn't know where to stay. Then he examined me and saidbit palsy. – O Mama, entrust it to good papa very carefully so that he writes it down in the family papers. You will hear more as soon as possible! Give my best regards to Papa, Christian, Klara, Thilda and Ida Jungmann. I recently wrote to Thomas after Amsterdam. Your loyally obedient daughter Antonie . August 2, 1846. my dear thomas, It was with pleasure that I received your information about your being together with Christian in Amsterdam; it may have been some happy days. I still have no news of your brother's onward journey to England via Ostend, I hope to God, however, that it will be a happy one. May it not be too late for Christian to learn something good from his principal, Mr. Richardson, after Christian has decided to give up his scientific career, and may his mercantile career be accompanied by success and blessings! Mr. Richardson (Threedneedle Street), as you know, is a close associate of my house. I consider myself lucky to have placed my two sons in companies that are very friendly to me. You can already feel the blessing of this: I feel complete satisfaction that Mr. van der Kellen has already increased your salary in this quarter and will continue to grant you additional income; I am positive, Despite all this, it pains me that your health is not quite up to par. What you wrote me about nervousness reminded me of my own youth, when I worked in Antwerp and had to go from there to Ems to use the cure. If something similar should prove necessary for you, my son, I am of course ready to assist you with advice and action, although I shy away from other such expenses for us in these politically turbulent times. Anyway, your mother and I made a trip to Hamburg around the middle of June to visit your sister Tony. Her husband had not invited us, but received us with great cordiality, and during the two days we spent with him devoted himself so completely to us that he neglected his business and hardly gave me time to visit Duchamps' in the city . Antonie was in her fifth month; her doctor assured her that everything would proceed in a normal and happy manner. – I would also like to mention a letter from Herr van der Kellen, from which I was pleased to learn that you are also a welcome guest in his family circle.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Kitty enters, and brings with her an aura of cleanliness and a domestic philosophy; a whole vocabulary of avid, nervy movements. She is an attractive, robust, fleshy, large-headed woman several years younger than Laura (it seems that everyone, suddenly, is at least slightly younger than she). Kitty’s features, her small eyes and delicate nose, are crowded into the center of her round face. In school she was one of several authoritative, aggressive, not quite beautiful girls so potent in their money and their athletic confidence they simply stood where they stood and insisted that the local notion of desirability be reconfigured to include them. Kitty and her friends— steady, stolid, firm-featured, large-spirited, capable of deep loyalties and terrible cruelties—were the queens of the various festivals, the cheerleaders, the stars of the plays. “I need a favor,” Kitty says. “Sure,” Laura says. “Can you sit a minute?” “Mm-hm.” Kitty sits at the kitchen table. She says a friendly, slightly dismissive hello to the little boy as he watches suspiciously, even angrily (why has she come?) from a place of relative safety near the stove. Kitty, with no children of her own yet (people are starting to wonder), does not attempt to seduce the children of others. They can come to her, if they like; she will not go to them. “I’ve got coffee on,” Laura says. “Would you like a cup?” “Sure.” She pours a cup of coffee for Kitty, and one for herself. She glances nervously at the cake, wishing she could hide it. There are crumbs caught in the icing. The “n” in “Dan” is squashed against a rose. Following Laura’s eyes, Kitty says, “Oh, look, you made a cake.” “It’s Dan’s birthday.” Kitty gets up, comes and stands beside Laura. Kitty wears a white short-sleeved blouse, green plaid shorts, and straw sandals that make a small, crisp sound when she walks. “Aw, look,” she says. “One of my maiden attempts,” Laura says. “It’s harder than you’d think, writing in frosting.” She hopes she is careless, debonair, charmingly unconcerned. Why did she put the roses on first, when any idiot would have known to begin with the message? She finds a cigarette. She is someone who smokes and drinks coffee in the mornings, who is raising a family, who has Kitty as a friend, who doesn’t mind if her cakes are less than perfect. She lights her cigarette.

• From The Hours (1998)

  “It’s cute,” Kitty says, and punctures Laura’s brash, cigarette self at its inception. The cake is cute, Kitty tells her, the way a child’s painting might be cute. It is sweet and touching in its heartfelt, agonizingly sincere discrepancy between ambition and facility. Laura understands: There are two choices only. You can be capable or uncaring. You can produce a masterful cake by your own hand or, barring that, light a cigarette, declare yourself hopeless at such projects, pour yourself another cup of coffee, and order a cake from the bakery. Laura is an artisan who has tried, and failed, publicly. She has produced something cute, when she had hoped (it’s embarrassing, but true) to produce something of beauty. “When is Ray’s birthday?” she says, because she has to say something. “September,” Kitty answers. She returns to the kitchen table. What more can be said about the cake? Laura follows with the coffee cups. Kitty needs friends (her own husband’s earnest, slightly stunned charm is not holding up particularly well in the larger world, and there is the matter of their continued childlessness), and so Laura is someone she visits, someone from whom she asks favors. Still, they both know how relentlessly Kitty would have snubbed her in high school, had they been the same age. In another life, not very much unlike this one, they’d have been enemies, but in this life, with its surprises and perversities of timing, Laura is married to a celebrated boy, a war hero, from Kitty’s graduating class and has joined the aristocracy in much the way a homely German princess, no longer young, might find herself seated on a throne beside an English king. What surprises her—what occasionally horrifies her—is how much she revels in Kitty’s friendship. Kitty is precious, just as Laura’s husband is lovely. Kitty’s preciousness, the golden hush of her, the sense of enlarged moment she brings to a room, is like that of a movie star. She has a movie star’s singularity, a movie star’s flawed and idiosyncratic beauty; like a movie star she seems both common and heightened, in the way of Olivia De Havilland or Barbara Stanwyck. She is deeply, almost profoundly, popular. “How is Ray?” Laura asks as she sets a cup in front of Kitty. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

• From The Hours (1998)

  will show herself again, embarrassed by her own interest. She is not given to fawning over celebrities, no more than most people, but can’t help being drawn to the aura of fame—and more than fame, actual immortality—implied by the presence of a movie star in a trailer on the corner of MacDougal and Spring Streets. These two girls standing beside Clarissa, twenty if not younger, defiantly hefty, slouching into each other, laden with brightly colored bags from discount stores; these two girls will grow to middle and then old age, either wither or bloat; the cemeteries in which they’re buried will fall eventually into ruin, the grass grown wild, browsed at night by dogs; and when all that remains of these girls is a few silver fillings lost under ground the woman in the trailer, be she Meryl Streep or Vanessa Redgrave or even Susan Sarandon, will still be known. She will exist in archives, in books; her recorded voice will be stored away among other precious and venerated objects. Clarissa allows herself to continue standing, foolish as any fan, for another few minutes, in hope of seeing the star emerge. Yes, just another few minutes, before the humiliation is simply too much to bear. She remains before the trailer with her flowers. She watches the door. After several minutes have passed (nearly ten, although she hates admitting it) she leaves suddenly, indignantly, as if she’s been stood up, and walks the few blocks uptown to Richard’s apartment.

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

  But Christian looked sideways at his sister with a mixed expression of moquerie and anxiety, as if to say: "Will you be able to take responsibility for that, too? Won't you get embarrassed when you get up too? How awkward!' Tony caught that look as she rose; but she was not at all embarrassed. If the deceased Consul, with his rapturous love for God and the Crucified, was the first of his generation to have known and nurtured unusual, unbourgeois and differentiated feelings, his two sons seemed to be the first Buddenbrooks, before the free and naive the emergence of such feelings sensitively recoiled. Certainly Thomas had experienced his father's death with a more irritable capacity for pain than, say, his grandfather had experienced the loss of his. Yet he was not in the habit of sinking on his knees at the grave, he had never thrown himself over the table like his sister Tony, to sob like a child, he found it extremely embarrassing to hear the big words mixed with tears, with which Madame Grünlich loved to celebrate the character traits and the personality of her dead father between the roast and dessert. In the face of such outbursts he had a tactful seriousness, a calm one Silence, a cautious nod of the head... and just when no one had mentioned or thought of the deceased, without changing his facial expression, his eyes slowly filled with tears. It was different with Christian. He could not keep his composure in the face of his sister's naive and childish outbursts; he bent over his plate, turned away, showed a need to crawl, and several times even interrupted her with a low and agonized, "God...Tony..." his large nose wrinkled in innumerable ways. Yes, he displayed disquiet and embarrassment as soon as the conversation turned to the deceased, and it seemed as if he feared and avoided not only the indelicate expressions of deep and solemn feelings, but the feelings themselves. He had never been seen shedding a tear over his father's death. The long weaning alone did not explain this. The strange thing, however, was that, in contrast to his usual reluctance to have such conversations, he always took his sister Tony aside all alone, so that she could tell him in detail what had happened on that terrible afternoon when he died: because Madame Grünlich told most vividly. "So he looked yellow?" he asked for the fifth time... "What did the girl scream when she rushed towards you?... So he looked all yellow?... And couldn't say anything more before he died?... What did that say Girl? How could he have done? 'Ua... ua'?...' He was silent, silent for a long time, while his small, round, deep-set eyes roamed the room quickly and thoughtfully. » Ugly ' he said suddenly, and you could see he shivered as he got up.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  My mother’s brother Vasiliy was in the diplomatic service, which he treated, however, far more lightly than my uncle Konstantin did. For Vasiliy Ivanovich it was not a career, but a more or less plausible setting. French and Italian friends, being unable to pronounce his long Russian surname, had boiled it down to “Ruka” (with the accent on the last syllable), and this suited him far better than did his Christian name. Uncle Ruka appeared to me in my childhood to belong to a world of toys, gay picture books, and cherry trees laden with glossy black fruit: he had glass-housed a whole orchard in a corner of his country estate, which was separated from ours by the winding river. During the summer, almost every day at lunchtime his carriage might be seen crossing the bridge and then speeding toward our house along a hedge of young firs. When I was eight or nine, he would invariably take me upon his knee after lunch and (while two young footmen were clearing the table in the empty dining room) fondle me, with crooning sounds and fancy endearments, and I felt embarrassed for my uncle by the presence of the servants and relieved when my father called him from the veranda: “Basile, on vous attend.” Once, when I went to meet him at the station (I must have been eleven or twelve then) and watched him descend from the long international sleeping car, he gave me one look and said: “How sallow and plain [jaune et laid] you have become, my poor boy.” On my fifteenth nameday, he took me aside and in his brusque, precise and somewhat old-fashioned French informed me that he was making me his heir. “And now you may go,” he added, “l’audience est finie. Je n’ai plus rien à vous dire.”

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  He looked at his watch, and I looked at mine, and we parted, and I wandered around the town in the rain, and then visited the Backs, and for some time peered at the rooks in the black network of the bare elms and at the first crocuses in the mist-beaded turf. As I strolled under those sung trees, I tried to put myself into the same ecstatically reminiscent mood in regard to my student years as during those years I had experienced in regard to my boyhood, but all I could evoke were fragmentary little pictures: M. K., a Russian, dyspeptically cursing the aftereffects of a College Hall dinner; N. R., another Russian, romping about like a child; P. M. storming into my room with a copy of Ulysses freshly smuggled from Paris; J. C. quietly dropping in to say that he, too, had just lost his father; R. C. charmingly inviting me to join him on a trip to the Swiss Alps; Christopher something or other, wriggling out of a proposed tennis double upon learning that his partner was to be a Hindu; T., a very old and fragile waiter, spilling the soup in Hall on Professor A. E. Housman, who then abruptly stood up as one shooting out of a trance; S. S., who was in no way connected with Cambridge, but who, having dozed off in his chair at a literary party (in Berlin) and being nudged by a neighbor, also stood up suddenly—in the middle of a story someone was reading; Lewis Carroll’s Dormouse, unexpectedly starting to tell a tale; E. Harrison unexpectedly making me a present of The Shropshire Lad, a little volume of verse about young males and death. The dull day had dwindled to a pale yellow streak in the gray west when, acting upon an impulse, I decided to visit my old tutor. Like a sleepwalker, I mounted the familiar steps and automatically knocked on the half-open door bearing his name. In a voice that was a jot less abrupt, and a trifle more hollow, he bade me come in. “I wonder if you remember me …” I started to say, as I crossed the dim room to where he sat near a comfortable fire. “Let me see,” he said, slowly turning around in his low chair, “I do not quite seem …” There was a dismal crunch, a fatal clatter: I had stepped into the tea things that stood at the foot of his wicker chair. “Oh, yes, of course,” he said, “I know who you are.”

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

  That's different from your clergymen..." "Each in his own way, Tom." "Agreed! I'm going… By the way!' he said, gripping the door handle. 'You made a definite impression on him, Tony! No, without a doubt! Do you know what he called you down there just now? 'A dear fellow' - these are his words..." Here, however, Frau Grünlich turned and said in a loud voice: “Okay, Tom, you tell me this… he probably didn’t tell you not to, but I still don’t know if it’s appropriate for you to bring it up to me. But I know that, and I would like to say it, that in this life it is not important how something is pronounced and expressed, but how it is meant and felt in the heart, and if you make fun of Mr. Permaneder's way of expression ... if you find him ridiculous..." "Whom?! But Tony, I'm not even thinking about it! What are you getting worked up about…” » Ace! ' said the consul, and gave her son a serious and pleading look, which meant: spare her! "Well, don't be angry, Tony!" he said. “I didn't mean to annoy you. Well, and now I'll go and give the order for someone from the warehouse people to get the suitcase here ... Goodbye!" Fifth Chapter Herr Permaneder moved into Mengstrasse, dined the following day with Thomas Buddenbrook and his wife and on the third, a Thursday, made the acquaintance of Justus Kröger and his wife, the Buddenbrook ladies from the Breitenstrasse, who found him terribly funny - they said "terrible" ... Sesemi Weichbrodts, who treated him quite severely, as well as that of poor Klothilde and little Erika, to whom he gave a bag of "Gutzeln", i.e. sweets ... He was in an indestructibly comfortable mood, with his peevish heaving sighs, which meant nothing and seemed to spring from an abundance of comfort, his pipe, his curious language, the undaunted sedentary spirit with which he remained in his place long after meals, in the most comfortable posture, smoked , drank and chatted, and although he added an entirely new and strange touch to the quiet life in the old house, although his whole being brought something anti-style into these rooms, he nevertheless disturbed none of the prevailing habits. He faithfully attended the morning and evening prayers, asked permission to listen to the consul's Sunday school and even appeared in the hall for a moment on "Jerusalem evening" to be introduced to the ladies, whereupon he, of course, His appearance was quickly known in the city, and in the big houses people spoke with curiosity about Buddenbrook's guest from Bavaria; but he had no connections either in the family or in the stock exchange, and as the season was advanced and most people were preparing to go to sea, the Consul refrained from introducing Mr. Permaneder to the company. He himself devoted himself to the guest with enthusiasm and concern.

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

  Too polite to turn away and evade his breathing, she sat stiffly and as tall as possible, looking down at him, eyelids lowered. But he did not notice at all how constrained and uncomfortable their situation was. 'How is it, ma'am,' he said… 'I think we've done business together before? At that time, of course, it was only ... what else? Treats, confectionery, eh?... And now for a whole house..." "I don't remember," said Frau Permaneder, stiffening her neck even more because his face was indecently and unbearably close to her... "You don't remember?" 'No, to be honest, I don't know anything about candies. I have in mind something like lemon rolls with fat sausage... a really disgusting breakfast sandwich... I don't know whether it was mine or yours... We were children back then... But today's house is entirely Mr. Gosch's business..." She gave her brother a quick, grateful look, for he had seen her distress and came to her aid by asking whether the gentlemen would mind going through the house for the time being. They were ready, they said goodbye to Frau Permaneder for the time being, because they hoped to have the pleasure again later... and then the senator led the two guests out through the dining room. He led them upstairs and downstairs and showed them the rooms on the second floor and those along the corridor on the first floor were located, and the ground floor rooms, even the kitchen and cellar. As for the offices, they refrained from entering as the tour fell within the working hours of the insurance officials. A few remarks were exchanged about the new director, whom Consul Hagenstrom twice declared to be an honest man, and the senator fell silent. They then went through the bare garden lying in half-melted snow, peered into the "portal," and returned to the front courtyard, to where the scullery was, and from there along the narrow cobbled passage between the walls to go through the back courtyard, where the oak tree stood, to the back building. There was nothing here but neglected old age. Grass and moss grew rampant between the cobblestones of the yard, the stairs of the house were in complete decay, and the free cat family in the billiard room could only be alarmed fleetingly by opening the door without stepping in, for the floor here was not safe. Consul Hagenstrom was silent and evidently occupied with deliberations and plans. "Well, yes," he said constantly, indifferently defensive, indicating that if he were to become master here, of course it could not stay like this. With the same expression he stood for a while on the hard clay floor at ground level and looked up at the desolate attics. "Well, yes," he repeated, swinging the thick and damaged winch rope that had hung motionless in the middle of the room for many years, with its rusted iron hook at the end, and then turned on his heel.

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

  It read: »The prosecutor - !' Then when director Hugo Weinschenk, late as always, because he was overwhelmed with business, entered the room and, balancing his fists, unusually lively swaying in the waist of his frock coat, walked to his seat, his lower lip under his narrow mustache with a cheeky expression down, the conversation fell silent, and an embarrassing, sultry silence settled over the table, until the senator helped everyone out of their embarrassment by casually and as if it were a matter of some kind of business asking the director about the state of the matter inquired. And Hugo Weinschenk replied that things were going very well, they were, as it couldn't be otherwise, excellent... whereupon he spoke lightly and happily of something else. He was much tidier than before let his eyes wander with a certain wild impartiality and asked many times, without receiving an answer, how Gerda Buddenbrook's violin was doing. In general he chatted The only thing that was lively and lively, and unpleasant was the fact that in his frankness he did not always check his words enough and, being in an excessively good mood, now and then brought up stories that were not quite appropriate. For example, one anecdote he related concerned a wet nurse who had damaged the health of the child entrusted to her by suffering from flatulence; in a manner which he no doubt considered humorous, he imitated the family doctor who had exclaimed, 'Who stinks like that! Who is it that stinks so badly in here!' and late or never he noticed that his wife was blushing violently, that the Consul, Thomas and Gerda were sitting motionless, the ladies at Buddenbrook were exchanging piercing looks, themselvessmellySeverin at the bottom of the table looked offended and at most the old Consul Kröger whispered quietly … What was it with director Weinschenk? This serious, active, and vigorous man, this man who, averse to all sociability and with a rough exterior, was devoted only to his work with tenacious loyalty to his duties—this man should not be a times, no, repeatedly found himself guilty of a serious misdemeanor, yes, he was accused, indicted in court, several times for carrying out a business maneuver that was not questionable but rather unclean and criminal, and a lawsuit whose outcome was not refraining was afoot against him! – What was he charged with? - Fires had taken place in various places, larger conflagrations which would have cost large sums to the society contracted to those affected. Director Weinschenk, however, should only have taken out reinsurance with another company and passed on the damage to them only after he had received rapid, confidential information from his agents about the accidents, i.e. deliberately fraudulently. “Thomas,” the consul said privately to her son, “please… I don't understand anything. What am I to make of it!' And he answered: 'Yes, my dear mother... what can I say! Unfortunately, one has to doubt that everything is in order.

• From The Hours (1998)

  You can be capable or uncaring. You can produce a masterful cake by your own hand or, barring that, light a cigarette, declare yourself hopeless at such projects, pour yourself another cup of coffee, and order a cake from the bakery. Laura is an artisan who has tried, and failed, publicly. She has produced something cute, when she had hoped (it’s embarrassing, but true) to produce something of beauty. “When is Ray’s birthday?” she says, because she has to say something. “September,” Kitty answers. She returns to the kitchen table. What more can be said about the cake? Laura follows with the coffee cups. Kitty needs friends (her own husband’s earnest, slightly stunned charm is not holding up particularly well in the larger world, and there is the matter of their continued childlessness), and so Laura is someone she visits, someone from whom she asks favors. Still, they both know how relentlessly Kitty would have snubbed her in high school, had they been the same age. In another life, not very much unlike this one, they’d have been enemies, but in this life, with its surprises and perversities of timing, Laura is married to a celebrated boy, a war hero, from Kitty’s graduating class and has joined the aristocracy in much the way a homely German princess, no longer young, might find herself seated on a throne beside an English king. What surprises her—what occasionally horrifies her—is how much she revels in Kitty’s friendship. Kitty is precious, just as Laura’s husband is lovely. Kitty’s preciousness, the golden hush of her, the sense of enlarged moment she brings to a room, is like that of a movie star. She has a movie star’s singularity, a movie star’s flawed and idiosyncratic beauty; like a movie star she seems both common and heightened, in the way of Olivia De Havilland or Barbara Stanwyck. She is deeply, almost profoundly, popular. “How is Ray?” Laura asks as she sets a cup in front of Kitty. “I haven’t seen him in a while.” Kitty’s husband is Laura’s chance to right the balance between them; to offer Kitty her sympathy. Ray is not an embarrassment, exactly—not a complete failure—but he is somehow Kitty’s version of Laura’s cake, writ large. He was Kitty’s high-school boyfriend. He played center on the basketball team, and went on to do well but not spectacularly at USC. He spent seven months as a prisoner of war in the Philippines. He is now some sort of mysterious functionary in the Department of Water and Power, and already, at thirty, is beginning to demonstrate how heroic boys can, by infinitesimal degrees, for no visible reasons, metamorphose into middle-aged drubs. Ray is crew-cut, reliable, myopic; he is full of liquids. He sweats copiously.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  WHEN I WAS IN SUNDAY SCHOOL AS A KID , MY teacher put a big poster on the wall that was shaped in a circle like a target. She had us write names of people we knew who weren’t Christians on little pieces of paper, and she pinned the names to the outer circle of the target. She said our goal, by the end of the year, was to move those names from the outer ring of the circle, which represented their distance from knowing Jesus, to the inner ring, which represented them having come into a relationship with Jesus. I thought the strategy was beautiful because it gave us a goal, a visual. I didn’t know any people who weren’t Christians, but I was a child with a fertile imagination so I made up some names; Thad Thatcher was one and William Wonka was another. My teacher didn’t believe me which I took as an insult, but nonetheless, the class was excited the very next week when both Thad and William had become Christians in a dramatic conversion experience that included the dismantling of a large satanic cult and underground drug ring. There was also levitation involved. Even though they didn’t exist, Thad and William were the only people to become Christians all year. Nobody else I knew became a Christian for a very long time, mostly because I didn’t tell anybody about Jesus except when I was drunk at a party, and that was only because so many of my reservations were down, and even then nobody understood me because I was either crying or slurring my words. When I moved downtown to attend Imago-Dei, the church Rick started, he was pretty serious about loving people regardless of whether they considered Jesus the Son of God or not, and Rick wanted to love them because they were either hungry, thirsty, or lonely. The human struggle bothered Rick, as if something was broken in the world and we were supposed to hold our palms against the wound. He didn’t really see evangelism, or whatever you want to call it, as a target on a wall in which the goal is to get people to agree with us about the meaning of life. He saw evangelism as reaching a felt need. I thought this was beautiful and frightening. I thought it was beautiful because I had this same need; I mean, I really knew I needed Jesus like I need water or food, and yet it was frightening because Christianity is so stupid to so much of our culture, and I absolutely hate bothering people about this stuff. So much of me believes strongly in letting everybody live their own lives, and when I share my faith, I feel like a network marketing guy trying to build my down line.