Excitement

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 H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The last photograph I saw only once. I never want to see it again. But I can never stop seeing it. Blurred, taken from a low angle, far too low; an empty London street. Sodium lights, dusk, a wall tipped sideways from the vertical and running into the distance; a vanishing point of sallow, stormy sky. 12 Outlaws ‘Come on, Mabel!’ I’m kneeling on the carpet and holding out a dead day-old cockerel chick. My freezer is packed with their sad, fluffy corpses, by- products of industrial egg production. Mabel loves them. She stares longingly at the one in my glove. I hold it just out of reach and whistle. ‘You can do it!’ I say. ‘Jump!’ But she is doing everything she can to avoid jumping. It is comical. She leans. She leans further. She stretches her neck as far as it will go and opens her beak hopefully. The food is just there. She can’t reach it. She over-balances, scrambles upright. A change in tactics is required. She makes a cobra-strike grab for the meat with one great, grasping foot. Her reach is astonishing; her legs are almost as long as she is. One feathered shin flashes out, tawny as a lion’s, and her talons very nearly catch on the glove. But not quite. Now she is cross. She paces up and down. She stamps and grips her perch. Her black-feathered moustaches harden into frown-lines down her jaw, and I can feel her bristling. She snakes her head from side to side, reckoning distances. Something is changing in her. I sense it with a shiver. It is as if the room is darkening, contracting to a point. Then something happens. My hand is hit, hard, with a blow so unexpectedly powerful the shock is carried down my spine to the tips of my toes. Hitting someone’s hand with a baseball bat would have a similar effect. She is on the glove, mantling her great, barred wings over it, gripping it fiercely and tearing at the meat. Disarticulated pieces of chicken disappear fast down her throat. I am delighted. She has crossed a great psychological gulf, one far wider than the ten inches of air between her perch and the glove she’s landed upon. Not that she’s landed on it: she’s killed it. There is no mercy in that ratcheting, numbing grip. Mabel can keep up this pressure with no effort whatsoever. It is an effort for her to let go. I choose my moment. When her head is up swallowing a mouthful of chick, I tug its remains through my palm and spirit it away. She looks down, then behind her, then at the floor. Where did it go? I persuade her to step back onto her perch. Then I hold the chick out once more, and further away. Instantly I feel that terrible blow. It is a killing blow, but there is something about the force of it that reminds me that I am alive.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Then in April White drove to Croydon to pick up a new hawk. He called her Cully. She was in a dreadful state. On being trapped half her tail feathers had broken off, along with most of the primaries on her left wing. White frowned over diagrams in falconry books, cut buzzard feathers to size, and glued and sewed these replacements into the trimmed quills of her wings and tail. Imping , they called it: he knew it was one of the falconers’ Great Arts. But it was a bad job, the fixing, and all the bating in her eight weeks of training left her tail-less, part-winged, barely able to fly. But fly she did. The hawk flew free. Heart in mouth, he flew her free. Finally he would hunt with a hawk he had trained himself. His dazzling dreams of self-sufficiency, his dreams of innocent cruelty: both were within his reach. But it was getting late in the season, and he knew that Cully should be put down to moult. Hawks shed and replace all their feathers once every year, and during this time they are not flown, but loosed in a spacious enclosure and fed ad libitum . But he needed this one success. And one evening out on the Ridings, after days of fruitless stalking, he loosed his tattered hawk at a rabbit on Tofield’s Riding and after a hapless, ragged flight – at one point running after the rabbit, rather than flying – Cully grabbed it by the head. White rushed to the scene, took his hunting knife and pinned the rabbit’s skull to the ground. Desires that had never flowered in his courting of the nurse were unleashed in a wave of darkness. ‘ Think of Lust,’ he wrote, of killing the rabbit. ‘Real blood-lust is like that.’ 18 Flying free Tonight. The weather is perfect, the hawk’s weight too. I race about the house, fizzing with anticipation, filling my morning with small and mundane tasks. I scrub mutes from the vinyl cloth on the floor, whistle happily, wash and dry my hair. But some invisible needle is picking away inside me: as the afternoon wears on, things begin to unravel. First I fight with my mother on the phone for no good reason, then when Christina arrives to see the hawk fly I snap at her for no reason whatsoever. Picking up my hawking waistcoat in the kitchen I hear her say gridlock but the word doesn’t register at all. I should have listened. There’d been a horrendous crash on the A14 outside Cambridge. Stuart had been stranded in its aftermath, stuck in his Land Rover under a flyover stanchion, air ambulances roaring overhead through roiling clouds of smoke.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  This is terrible falconry. ‘Never let a goshawk self-hunt,’ say the books. ‘Such independence is the fastest way to lose your hawk.’ I know I shouldn’t slip her unless there’s quarry, right there, in front of her. But how can I resist this method of hawking? Today I walked up to the crest of a hill on a freezing, smoky afternoon, the whole Cambridgeshire countryside laid out in front in woods and fields and copses beneath us, all bosky and bright with golden sunshine, and I can see that what Mabel wants to do is launch a prospecting attack on the hedgerow over the rise. I let her go. Her tactical sense is magnificent. She drops from the fist, and sets off, no higher than a hand’s width above the ground, using every inch of the undulating relief as cover , gathering speed until the frosty stubble winks and flashes under her, and she curves over the top of the hill. Then she sets her wings and glides, using gravity and momentum to race downhill, flash up over the top of the hedge in a sudden flowering of cream and white, a good hundred yards away, and then continue down the hedge’s far side, invisible to me. I’m running, all this time, my feet caked with mud, feeling earthbound but transported at the same time. I find her in the hedge bottom, holding onto a rabbit. ‘Mabel,’ I say, ‘you are behaving like a wild hawk. Shocking.’ This is nerve-racking falconry, but a wonderful thing. I am testing the lines between us that the old falconers would have called love. They have not broken; they do not look likely to break. Maybe they will. I raise her weight even more, and slowly the world widens. But I’m pushing my luck, and I know it. She’s not in condition , I tell myself all the way there in the car . You’ll lose her . It is two days later , and I can hear the voice of reason telling me to go back home. I keep driving. Rain spots the windscreen and spines the nearside windows. Will the rabbits be lying out, in this weather? Maybe. I park on the muddy verge against the wet fence at the far side of the field. She’s not in yarak, but she’s looking about. Whatever , I think; I change her jesses and let her go. She chases a rabbit to its hole and swings up into an oak tree. I whistle. She doesn’t seem to hear me. The rain starts falling in earnest. At this point, I realise something has changed about the space between the goshawk and me. Usually it’s taut with attention. When she flies into a tree all my attention is turned to the hawk, and the hawk turns all her attention to me. Not any more. She ignores me.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  We stand there in the gloom and watch runners come up, split, and then stream past us. Of course they don’t see us. We are motionless. ‘Perhaps runners are like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park,’ I tell her. ‘They can’t see things that aren’t moving.’ It is raining quite hard now, and the hawk’s flat head is beaded with tiny gems of water that glow in the light from the sodium lamps. She balances on the balls of her feet, as she does when she’s calm. Her pupils are wide and catlike in the dark. What the hell, I think. She’s jumped to the fist inside the house. I wonder if she’ll do it out here. Right next to us is a wooden barrier enclosing a young lime sapling. I plonk her down on the top of the post, and she jumps, blam, just like that, leash-length from the post to my fist for food. With the wind blowing the wrong way, with rain in her eyes, with joggers thundering past us, she jumps three times, and then rouses, sending raindrops in a spray of metallic orange around us both. Brilliant. 13 Alice, falling The light is laid evenly on the grass, the cows are back in the fields after milking, and the far sky towards Buckingham builds towards dusk in dinted pewter clouds. Gos is perched twenty yards away on the railings of the well, and White is pleased with himself. He has solved the great and simple mystery of falconry: he knows now that the hawk will fly to him if it is hungry. It will misbehave if it is not. And now he has fashioned a creance from a long length of tarred twine – doubled in two to make it stronger, because it has a tendency to snap – and he has tied it to Gos’s swivel. And now he is here, and the hawk is over there, and he is whistling the tune of the hymn that calls the hawk to him. The Lord is My Shepherd. I shall not want. He . . . He rubs his eyes. They have begun to ache. He has been whistling the tune for ten minutes now, the old Scottish melody to Psalm 23, and it is hard to keep to the right notes when your lips are dry and the mosquitoes are starting to bite. The Lord is My Shepherd; I shall not want. He does want. He wants very much. He waves the glove again. The jointed rabbit leg waggles. Come on, Gos! Come on! He casts the hymn’s sad notes once more into the evening air. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Is the hawk looking at him? Surely he is. Why does he not come? He must be patient. The hawk will come. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was scented with burning roses, and with the spice from the wine, Smelling it, with Zena warm against my shoulder, I began suddenly to feel drunker than I had all night. Perhaps it was only that my head was reeling, from the force. of Diana’s blow. I swallowed. Zena put a handkerchief to her nose, and grew a little stiller. There came, from the floors below, the sound of running feet, a furious thundering upon the piano, and a scream of laughter. ‘Just listen to them!’ I said, growing bitter again. ‘Partying like anything! They have forgotten all about us, sitting miserable up here ...’ ‘Oh, I hope they have!’ ‘Of course they have. We might be doing anything, it wouldn’ t matter to them! Why, we might be having a party of our own!’ She blew her nose, then giggled. My head gave a sort of tilt. I said: ‘Zena! Why shouldn’t we have a party, just the two of us! How many bottles of champagne are there left, in the kitchen?’ ‘There are loads of ’em.’ ‘Well, then. Just you run down and fetch us one.’ She bit her lip. ‘I don’t know ...’ ‘Go on, you shan’t be seen. They are all in the drawing-room, and you can go by the back stairs. And if anyone does see you, and asks, you can say you are fetching it for me. Which is true.’ ‘Well...’ ‘Go on! Take your candle!’ I rose, then took hold of her hands and pulled her to her feet; and she - infected at last by my new recklessness - gave another giggle, put her fingers to her lips, then tip-toed from the room. While she was gone I lit a lamp, but kept it turned very low. She had left her cap upon the bed: I picked it up and set it on my own head, and when she returned five minutes later and saw me wearing it she laughed out loud. She carried a dewy bottle and a glass. ‘Did you see any ladies?’ I asked her. ‘I saw a couple, but they never saw me. They were at the scullery door and - oh! they was kissing the guts out of each other!’ I imagined her standing in the shadows, watching them. I went to her and took the bottle, then peeled away the lead wrapper from its neck. ‘You’ve shaken it up,’ I said. ‘It’ll go off with a real bang!’ She put her hands over her ears, and shut her eyes. I felt the cork squirm in the glass for a second; then it leapt from my fingers, and I gave a yell: ‘Quick! Quick! Bring a glass!’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  You sit in a box, and make sure the audience gets a look at you: it might give them ideas above their station.’‘It might give Nancy ideas above her station,’ said Alice. ‘We couldn’t have that.’ Then she laughed, as Tony tightened his grip about her waist and leaned to kiss her. It would not have been quite the thing, I suppose, for city girls to go to music halls unchaperoned; but people weren’t so very prim about things like that in Whitstable. Mother only gave a frown and a mild tut-tut when I spoke, next day, of returning to the Palace; Alice laughed and declared that I was mad: she wouldn’t come with me, she said, to sit all night in the smoke and the heat for the sake of a glimpse of a girl in trousers - a girl whose turn we had seen and songs we had listened to not four-and-twenty hours before.I was shocked by her carelessness, but secretly rather glad at the thought of gazing again at Miss Butler, all alone. I was also more thrilled than I cared to let on by Tony’s promise that I might sit in a box. For my trip to the theatre the night before I had worn a rather ordinary dress; now, however - it had been a slow day in the Parlour, and Father let us shut the shop at six - I put on my Sunday frock, the frock I usually wore to go out walking in with Freddy. Davy whistled when I came down all dressed up; and there were one or two boys who tried to catch my eye all through the ride to Canterbury. But I knew myself - for this one night, at least! - apart from them. When I reached the Palace I nodded to the ticket-girl, as usual; but then I left my favourite gallery seat for someone else to sweat in, and made my way to the side of the stage, to a chair of gilt and scarlet plush. And here - rather unnervingly exposed, as it turned out, before the idle, curious or envious gaze of the whole, restless hall - here I sat, while the Merry Randalls shuffled to the same songs as before, the comic told his jokes, the mentalist staggered, the acrobats dived.Then Tricky bade us welcome, once again, our very own Kentish swell ... and I held my breath.This time, when she called ‘Hallo!’ the crowd replied with a great, genial roar: word must have spread, I think, of her success. My view of her now, of course, was side-on and rather queer; but when she strode, as before, to the front of the stage it seemed to me her step was lighter - as if the admiration of the audience lent her wings. I leaned towards her, my fingers hard upon the velvet of my unfamiliar seat.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He wore a shirt of green with a deep white collar - he was always a fancy dresser — and the armpits of the shirt were dark with sweat. I said, ‘You really mean it, Walter?’ and he nodded: ‘Nancy, I do.’ He kept us busy, that day, all through the afternoon. The outing we had planned, the Sunday stroll, was all forgotten, the driver who was waiting he paid off and sent away. The house being empty, we worked at Mrs Dendy’s piano, quite as hard as if it were a weekday morning - except that now I sang too, and not to save Kitty’s voice, as I had sometimes done before, but to try out my own alongside it. We sang again the song that Walter had caught us singing, ‘If Ever I Cease to Love’ — but, of course, we were self-conscious now, and it sounded terribly lame. Then we tried some of Kitty’s songs, that I had heard her sing at Canterbury and knew by heart; and they went a little better. And finally we tried a new song, one of the West End songs that were fashionable then — the one about strolling through Piccadilly with a pocket so full of sovereigns all the ladies look, and smile, and wink their eyes. It is sung by mashers even now; but it was Kitty and I who had it first, and when we tried it out together that afternoon - changing the author’s ‘I’ to ‘we’, linking our arms, and promenading over the parlour-rug with our voices raised in a harmony - well, it sounded sweeter and more comical than I could have thought possible. We sang it once, and then a second time, and then a third and fourth; and each time I grew a little freer, a little gayer, and a little less certain of the foolishness of Walter’s plan ... At length, when our throats were hoarse and our heads were swimming with sovereigns and winks, he closed the piano lid and let us rest. We made tea, and talked of other things. I looked at Kitty and remembered that I had another, more pressing, reason to be gay and giddy, and I began to wish that Walter would leave us. That, and my tiredness, made me dull with him: I believe he thought he had overworked me. So very soon he did leave; and when the door was closed on him I rose and went to Kitty, and put my arms about her. She wouldn’t let me kiss her in the parlour; but after a moment she led me up through the darkening house, back to our bedroom.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Time passed. Hawks gorge themselves in the wild and can spend days without food. I knew the hawk would not eat from my hand today. She was scared, she wasn’t hungry; the world was an insult. Both of us needed a break. I popped the hood back over her head. There. Fleeting panic, nerves afire, and then she relaxed because the day had turned to night and I had disappeared. The terror had gone. Hoodwinked. It was an ancient piece of trickery and an excusable one: the darkness would give her space to set her frayed nerves to rights. As would it mine. On her perch, she slept. I slept too, wrapped in a duvet dragged over the sofa. Later, when I picked her up again, the mood in the room had changed. She had done this before; was no longer entirely certain I was a monster. She bated, once, towards the floor, but it was a bate to the floor, not away from me in blind terror. I lifted her back onto the glove. We sat some more. Then, instead of fixing her gaze on me in horror, she began to examine her surroundings. New things. Shelves, walls, floor: she inspected them all carefully with small, sideways movements of her head. Hawk parallax, judging perfect distances. She observed the ceiling as far as it would go, the lines of the bookshelves beneath it, cocked her head to consider the strip of messy tassels along the edge of the rug. Then came a decisive moment. It was not the one I was hoping for, but it was thrilling all the same. Regarding the room with simple curiosity, she turned her head and saw me. And jumped. Jumped exactly like a human in surprise. I felt the scratch of her talons and her shock, too, cold and electric. That was the moment. Until a minute ago I was so terrifying I was all that existed. But then she had forgotten me. Only for a fraction of a second, but it was enough. The forgetting was delightful because it was a sign that the hawk was starting to accept me. But there was a deeper, darker thrill. It was that I had been forgotten. 8 The Rembrandt interior

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Of course they don’t see us. We are motionless. ‘Perhaps runners are like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park , ’ I tell her. ‘They can’t see things that aren’t moving.’ It is raining quite hard now, and the hawk’s flat head is beaded with tiny gems of water that glow in the light from the sodium lamps. She balances on the balls of her feet, as she does when she’s calm. Her pupils are wide and catlike in the dark. What the hell , I think. She’s jumped to the fist inside the house. I wonder if she’ll do it out here . Right next to us is a wooden barrier enclosing a young lime sapling. I plonk her down on the top of the post, and she jumps, blam , just like that, leash-length from the post to my fist for food. With the wind blowing the wrong way, with rain in her eyes, with joggers thundering past us, she jumps three times, and then rouses, sending raindrops in a spray of metallic orange around us both. Brilliant. 13 Alice, falling The light is laid evenly on the grass, the cows are back in the fields after milking, and the far sky towards Buckingham builds towards dusk in dinted pewter clouds. Gos is perched twenty yards away on the railings of the well, and White is pleased with himself. He has solved the great and simple mystery of falconry: he knows now that the hawk will fly to him if it is hungry. It will misbehave if it is not. And now he has fashioned a creance from a long length of tarred twine – doubled in two to make it stronger , because it has a tendency to snap – and he has tied it to Gos’s swivel. And now he is here, and the hawk is over there, and he is whistling the tune of the hymn that calls the hawk to him. The Lord is My Shepherd. I shall not want. He . . . He rubs his eyes. They have begun to ache. He has been whistling the tune for ten minutes now, the old Scottish melody to Psalm 23, and it is hard to keep to the right notes when your lips are dry and the mosquitoes are starting to bite. The Lord is My Shepherd; I shall not want. He does want. He wants very much. He waves the glove again. The jointed rabbit leg waggles. Come on, Gos! Come on! He casts the hymn’s sad notes once more into the evening air. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Is the hawk looking at him? Surely he is. Why does he not come?

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

  (2) The glossolalia in the Corinthian church, with which that at Caesarea in Acts 10:46, and that at Ephesus, 19:6, are evidently identical, we know very well from the description of Paul. It occurred in the first glow of enthusiasm after conversion and continued for some time. It was not a speaking in foreign languages, which would have been entirely useless in a devotional meeting of converts, but a speaking in a language differing from all known languages, and required an interpreter to be intelligible to foreigners. It had nothing to do with the spread of the gospel, although it may, like other devotional acts, have become a means of conversion to susceptible unbelievers if such were present. It was an act of self-devotion, an act of thanksgiving, praying, and singing, within the Christian congregation, by individuals who were wholly absorbed in communion with God, and gave utterance to their rapturous feelings in broken, abrupt, rhapsodic, unintelligible words. It was emotional rather than intellectual, the language of the excited imagination, not of cool reflection. It was the language of the spirit (pneu'ma) or of ecstasy, as distinct from the language of the understanding (nou'"). We might almost illustrate the difference by a comparison of the style of the Apocalypse which was conceived ejn pneuvmati (Apoc. 1:10) with that of the Gospel of John, which was written ejn noi>v. The speaker in tongues was in a state of spiritual intoxication, if we may use this term, analogous to the poetic "frenzy" described by Shakespeare and Goethe. His tongue was a lyre on which the divine Spirit played celestial tunes. He was unconscious or only half conscious, and scarcely knew whether he was, "in the body or out of the body." No one could understand this unpremeditated religious rhapsody unless he was in a similar trance. To an unbelieving outsider it sounded like a barbarous tongue, like the uncertain sound of a trumpet, like the raving of a maniac (1 Cor. 14:23), or the incoherent talk of a drunken man (Acts 2:13, 15). "He that speaketh in a tongue speaketh not to men, but to God; for no one understandeth; and in the spirit he speaketh mysteries; but he that prophesieth speaketh unto men edification, and encouragement, and comfort. He that speaketh in a tongue edifieth himself; but he that prophesieth edifieth the church" (1 Cor. 14:2–4; comp. 26–33).

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I don’t want to leave . I sulk. I fret. I scowl at the fire, hot with self-pity. Then I hear the door open and Erin’s tousled head appears round the frame. It wears a vastly conspiratorial expression. I sense a plan is brewing. And a minute later I’m helping him drag their huge Christmas tree out of the room and onto the snowy lawn, tip snaking through the rough trail it makes, branches skittering over and cutting through the crust that glitters in the sparse light. We prop it up in the deep snow as if it had grown there. I have no idea what is going on. ‘OK, Macca, let’s burn this!’ he says. Puzzlement. ‘It’s traditional. It’s what we do here. In America . ’ I don’t believe him for a second. ‘In England we dump them on the street, traditionally , ’ I say. ‘Absolutely let’s burn it.’ ‘I’ll get the firelighter!” he yells. I can feel the madness to this, its contagious pagan glee. He runs back from the house with a squeezy plastic bottle of firelighting gel and in the snowy hush, fog collecting around us as the thaw turns ice to water that hangs in the warming air, he decorates the tree with gloopy green strings that drip and stick like glutinous tinsel. ‘Stand back!’ he commands. He strikes a match. A branch catches with a tearing scratch of flame. For a few moments this is pretty: a soft yellow light in the monochromatic gloom. But then there is an explosive, tearing waterfall of rearing flame that bursts into appalling brightness. Erin’s eyebrows go up. He steps back a good few paces. And now I am laughing so much I can hardly stand. ‘Jesus, Erin,’ I shout. It’s as if he’s set light to the whole of the world: a twenty-foot pyramid of flame lighting the lawn , the house , the river , the far side of the river , sending black shadows out from trees that a moment ago were lost in darkness, and our faces are gilded with fierce, orange fire. What the hell have we done ? The smoke mixes with the fog so that everything, everywhere is on fire. The incandescent tree, black twigs sintering, clicking, crumbling, and smoke, and Erin and I now wearing the faces of people who are going to be in serious trouble. ‘I think we might be seeing the fire truck any moment now,’ Erin shouts, and we’re both of us children again, delighted at what we have made and fearful of disaster . And then the fire is out. The skeleton stands in the snow, all its complexity gone.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  “Ain’t nothing gonna change, Mr. Obama,” she said. “We just gonna concentrate on saving our money so we can move outta here as fast as we can.” CHAPTER THIRTEEN [image file=image_rsrc2W2.jpg] I’M TELLING YOU, MAN, the world is a place.” “Say, the world is a place, huh.” “That’s just what I’m saying.” We were walking back to the car after dinner in Hyde Park, and Johnnie was in an expansive mood. He often got like this, especially after a good meal and wine. The first time I met him, when he was still working with a downtown civic group, he had started explaining the relationship between jazz and Eastern religion, then swerved into an analysis of black women’s behinds, before coming to a stop on the subject of Federal Reserve Bank policy. In such moments his eyes would grow wide; his voice would speed up; his round, bearded face would glow with a childlike wonder. That was part of the reason I’d hired Johnnie, I suppose, that curiosity of his, his appreciation of the absurd. He was a philosopher of the blues. “I’ll give you an example,” Johnnie was saying to me now. “The other day, I’m headed for a meeting up in the State of Illinois Building. You know how it’s open in the middle, right … big atrium and all that. Well, the guy I’m supposed to be meeting with is late, so I’m just standing there looking down at the lobby from the twelfth floor, checking out the architecture, when all of a sudden this body flies past me. A suicide.” “You didn’t tell me about that—” “Yeah, well, shook me up pretty good. High up as I was, I could hear the body land like it was right there next to me. Terrible sound. Soon as it happened, these office workers rushed up to the guardrail to see what was going on. We’re all looking down, and sure enough the body’s lying there, all twisted and limp. People started screaming, covering their eyes. But the strange thing was, after people got through screaming, they’d go back to the railing to get a second look. Then they’d scream and cover their eyes all over again. Now why would they do that? Like, what do they expect the second time around? But see, folks are funny like that. We can’t help ourselves with that morbid shit …. “Anyway, the cops come, they rope things off and take the body away. Then the building crew starts cleaning up. Nothing special, you know—just a broom and a mop. Sweeping up a life. Whole thing’s cleaned up in maybe five minutes. Makes sense, I guess …. I mean, it’s not like you need special equipment or suits or something. But it starts me thinking, How’s that gonna feel to be one of those janitors, mopping up somebody’s remains? Somebody’s got to do it, right? But how you gonna feel that night eating dinner?” “Who was it that jumped?”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  That was months away, months and months and weeks and weeks; I saw them all spread out before me, each one full of nights in Kitty’s dressing-room, and good-night kisses, and dreams.I gave a cry, I think; and Tony took a swig of Bass, complacently. Then Alice appeared, demanding to know what it was that must be talked about in whispers, and shrieked over, on the stairs ... ? I didn’t wait for Tony’s answer, I thundered down to the door and into the street, and ran to the station like a hoyden, with my hat flapping about my ears -because I had forgotten, after all, to pin it properly.I had hardly expected Kitty to swagger to Whitstable in her suit and her topper and her lavender gloves; but even so, when she stepped from the train and I saw that she was clad as a girl, and walked like a girl, with her plait fastened to the back of her head and a parasol over her arm, I felt a little pang of disappointment. This swiftly turned, however - as always - to desire, and then to pride, for she looked terribly smart and handsome on that dusty Whitstable platform. She kissed my cheek when I went up to her, and took my arm, and let me lead her from the station to our house, across the sea-front. She said, ‘Well! And this is where you were born, and grew up?’‘Oh yes! Look there: that building, beside the church, is our old school. Over there - see that house with the bicycle by the gate? - that’s where my cousins live. Here, look, on this step, I once fell down and cut my chin, and my sister held her handkerchief to it, the whole way home ...’ So I talked and pointed, and Kitty nodded, biting her lip. ‘How lucky you are!’ she said at last; and as she said it, she seemed to sigh.I had feared that the afternoon would be dismal and hard; in fact, it was merry. Kitty shook hands with everyone, and had a word for them all, such as, ‘You must be Davy, who works in the smack’, and ‘You must be Alice, who Nancy talks about so often, and is so proud of.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The idea was a fantastic one - and yet every time her gaze swept the crowded hall it seemed to brush my own, and dally with it a little longer than it should. I ceased my whispered singing and merely stared, and swallowed. I saw her leave the stage - again, her gaze met mine - and then return for her encore. She sang her ballad and plucked the flower from her lapel, and held it to her cheek, as we all expected. But when her song was finished she did not peer into the stalls for the handsomest girl, as she usually did. Instead, she took a step to her left, towards the box in which I sat. And then she took another. In a moment she had reached the corner of the stage, and stood facing me; she was so close I could see the glint of her collar-stud, the beat of the pulse in her throat, the pink at the corner of her eye. She stood there for what seemed to be a small eternity ; then her arm came up, the flower flashed for a second in the beam of the lime - and my own hand, trembling, rose to catch it. The crowd gave a broad, indulgent cheer of pleasure, and a laugh. She held my flustered gaze with her own more certain one, and made me a little bow. Then she stepped backwards suddenly, waved to the hall, and left us.I sat for a moment as if stunned, my eyes upon the flower in my hand, which had been so near, so recently, to Kitty Butler’s cheek. I wanted to raise it to my own face - and was about to, I think, when the clatter of the hall pierced my brain at last, and made me look about me and see the inquisitive, indulgent looks that were turned my way, and the nods and the chuckles and the winks that met my up-turned gaze. I reddened, and shrank back into the shadows of the box. With my back turned to the bank of prying eyes I slipped the rose into the belt of my dress, and pulled on my gloves. My heart, which had begun to pound when Miss Butler had stepped towards me across the stage, was still beating painfully hard; but as I left my box and made my way towards the crowded foyer and the street beyond, it began to feel light, and glad, and I began to want to smile.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  They might, I suppose, have taken Diana for my mother; for various reasons, the idea was not a nice one. Once, though, I had stopped at a shoe-black while Diana and her friends stood near to watch it, and the man - catching sight of Dickie and reading tommishness, as many regular people do, as a kind of family likeness - asked me if she, Dickie, were not my Auntie, taking me out for the day; and it had been worth being mistaken for a schoolboy, for the sake of her expression. She once or twice tried to compete with me, on the question of suits. The night of my birthday, for example, she wore a shirt with cuff-links and, above her skirt, a short gent’s cloak. At her throat, however, she had a jabot - I should never have worn anything so effeminate. She did not know it - she would have been horrified to know it! - but she looked like nothing so much as a weary old mary-anne - one of the kind you see sometimes holding court, with younger boys, on Piccadilly: they have rented so long they’re known as queens.Our supper was a very fine one, and when it was over Diana sent a waiter for a cab. As I have said, I had thought her plan not much of a treat; but even I could not help being excited as our hansom joined the line of rocking carriages at the door of the Royal Opera, and we - Diana, Maria, Dickie and I - entered the crush of gentlemen and ladies in the lobby. I had never been here before; had never, in a year of fitful chaperoning, been part of such a rich and handsome crowd - the gents, like me, all in cloaks and silk hats and carrying glasses; the ladies in diamonds, and wearing gloves so high and slender they might all have just left off dipping their arms, to the armpit, in tubs of milk.We stood jostling in the lobby for a moment or two, Diana exchanging nods with certain ladies that she recognised, Maria holding Satin at her bosom, out of the crush of heels and trains and sweeping cloaks.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I knew winter had arrived only when Diana’s walking-dresses changed from silk to corduroy, her cloaks from grenadine to sable; and when my own closet rail sagged with astrakhan, and camel’s-hair, and tweed.But there was one anniversary from the old order of things that, even in the enchanted atmosphere of Felicity Place, surrounded by so much narcotic luxury, I could not quite forget. One day, when I had been Diana’s lover for a little less than a year, I was woken by the rustle of news-sheet. My mistress was beside me with the morning paper, and I opened my eyes upon a headline. Home Rule Bill, it said; Irish to Demonstrate June 3rd. I gave a cry. It was not the words which arrested me - they meant nothing to me. The date, however, was as familiar as my own name. June the third was my birthday; in a week I should be twenty-three.‘Twenty-three!’ said Diana when I told her, in a kind of delight. ‘What a really glorious age that is! With your youth still hot upon you, like a lover in a pant; and time with his face around the curtain, peeping on.’ She could talk like this, even first thing in the morning; I only yawned. But then she said that we must celebrate - and at that, I looked livelier. ‘What shall we do,’ she said, ‘that we haven’t done before? Where shall I take you ... ?’Where she hit upon, in the end, was the Opera.The idea sounded a terrible one to me, though I did not like to show it - I had not yet grown sulky with her, as I was later to do. And I was still too much of a child to be anything other than enchanted with my own birthday, when it finally arrived; and of course, there were presents - and presents never lost their charm.I was given them at breakfast, in two gold parcels. The first, was large, and held a cloak - a proper opera-going cloak, it was, and very grand; but then, I had expected that, and hardly considered it a gift at all. The second parcel, however, proved more marvellous. It was small and light: I knew at once it must be some piece of jewellery - perhaps, a pair of links; or a stud for my cravats; or a ring. Dickie wore a ring on the smallest finger of her left hand, and I had often admired it - yes, I was sure it must be a ring, like Dickie’s.But it was not a ring. It was a watch, of silver, on a slender strap of leather. It had two dark arms to show the minutes and the hours, and a faster, sweeping arm to count the seconds. Upon the face, there was glass: the arms were moved by the winder.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  This year, however, I felt I had surpassed myself. I had bought her, all by post and in secret, a marble bust of the Roman page Antinous. I had taken his story out of a paper at the Cavendish, and had smiled to read it, because - apart of course from the detail of Antinous being so miserable, and finally throwing himself in the River Nile - it seemed to resemble my own. I had given the bust to Diana at breakfast, and she had adored it at once, and had it set up on a pedestal in the drawing-room. ‘Who would have thought the boy had so much cleverness in him!’ she had said a little later. ‘Maria, you must have chosen it for him - didn’t you?’ Now, while the ladies all assembled at the party below, I stood in my bedroom, trembling before the glass, garbing myself as Antinous himself. I had a skimpy little toga that reached to my knee, with a Roman belt around it - what they called a zone. I had put powder on my cheeks to make them languorous, and spit-black on my eyes to make them dark. My hair I had covered entirely in a sable wig that curled to my shoulders. About my neck there was a garland of lotus flowers — and I can tell you, the lotus flowers had been harder to organise, in London, in January, than anything. I had another garland to hand to Diana: this I also placed about my neck. Then I went to the door and listened and, since the moment seemed right, I ran to Diana’s closet and took out a cloak of hers and wrapped it tight about me, and raised the hood. And then I went downstairs. There, in the hall, I found Maria. ‘Nancy, dear boy!’ she cried. Her lips looked very red and damp where they showed through the slit of her pasha’s whiskers. ‘Diana has sent me out to find you. The drawing-room is positively pullulating with women, all of them panting for a peek at your pose plastique!’ I smiled - a pullulating audience was precisely what I wanted - then let her lead me into the room, still with the cloak about me, and hand me into the alcove behind the velvet curtain. Then, when I had bared my costume and struck my pose, I murmured to her and she pulled the tasselled cord, and the velvet twitched back and uncovered me. As I walked amongst them the guests all fell silent and looked knowing, and Diana - standing just where I could have wished her, beside the bust of Antinous on its little pedestal — raised a brow. Now, at the sight of me in my toga and belt, the ladies sighed and murmured. I gave them a moment, then stepped over to Diana, lifted the extra garland from around my neck, and wound it about hers.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  During his year in office (508–507), Cleisthenes introduced some startling reforms.69 He completely reorganized the ancient tribal system, in a way that weakened the authority of the aristocratic leaders. He also redesigned and enlarged Solon’s Council of Four Hundred: it now had five hundred members, who were chosen from each of the new tribes. Members were elected annually from the middle classes, and could hold office only twice in their lifetime, which meant that most farmers, artisans, and merchants would serve on the council at some point, and thus became citizens in an entirely new and meaningful way. Athens was still ruled by nine magistrates, elected from the upper classes, who were responsible for the festivals, the army, and the administration of justice; they were answerable to the aristocratic Council of Elders, which met on the rocky hillock of the Areopagus, near the agora. Even though the nobility still governed the city, the Council of Five Hundred and the People’s Assembly could challenge any abuse of power. This was the most egalitarian polity yet devised, and it had an electrifying effect on the Greek world. Other poleis tried similar experiments, and there was a surge of fresh energy in the region. Cleisthenes was asking a great deal of his citizens. Since the Council of Five Hundred met three times a month, ordinary farmers and merchants were expected to dedicate about a tenth of their time to politics during their year in office. They did not lose their enthusiasm, however, and they learned a great deal from the experience. By the fifth century, the middle classes were able to participate in council debates and follow the thinking of the most intelligent people in Athens. The experiment showed that if citizens were properly educated and motivated, a government did not have to rely on brute force, and that it was possible to reform ancient institutions in a rational manner. The Athenians called their new system isonomia (“equal order”).70 The polis was now more evenly balanced, with farmers and traders on a more equal footing with the aristocrats. Truth was no longer a secret, esoteric revelation for a select few. It was now en mesoi (“in the center”) of the political domain,71 but the Greeks still regarded their political life as sacred and the polis as the extension of divinity into human affairs. Athens remained a devoutly religious city, even though it was increasingly a city of logos. As more people participated in government, they began to apply the debating skills they had acquired on the council floor to other spheres of knowledge. Political speeches and laws were now subjected to stringent criticism, and logos, the speech of the hoplites, continued to be aggressive. Debate was characterized by conflict, antithesis, and the desire to exclude an opposing point of view.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Then, good fortune struck, in the form of two American women. They were teaching in Nairobi, connected to some religious organization, I think, and one day they came into the office where Barack was working. Your father struck up a conversation with them, and soon these women became his friends. They loaned him books to read and invited him to their house, and when they saw how smart he was, they told him that he should go to a university. He explained that he had no money and no secondary school certificate, but these women said they could arrange for him to take a correspondence course that would give him the certificate he needed. If he was successful, they said, they would try to help him get into a university in America. Barack became very excited and immediately wrote away for this correspondence course. For the first time in his life he worked diligently. Every night, and during his lunch hours, he would study his books and do the lessons in his notebooks. A few months later, he sat for the exam at the American embassy. The exam took several months to score, and during this wait he was so nervous he could barely eat. He became so thin that we thought he would die. One day, the letter came. I was not there to see him open it. I know that when he told me the news, he was still shouting out with happiness. And I laughed along with him, for it was just as things had been so many years before, when he used to come home after school to boast about his marks. He still had no money, though, and no university had yet accepted him. Onyango had softened towards his son when he saw that he was becoming more responsible, but even he could not raise the money to pay university fees and transport abroad. Some in the village were willing to help, but many were afraid that if Barack went off with their money they would never see him again. So Barack wrote to universities in America. He wrote and he wrote. Finally, a university in Hawaii wrote back and told him they would give him a scholarship. No one knew where this place was, but Barack didn’t care. He gathered up his pregnant wife and son and dropped them off with me, and in less than a month he was gone.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  amb. To me it sounds like intelligence, but go on. Taja. It’s a way that I move, because I don’t want to make it seem like I have a problem with being uncomfortable, because I also know that discomfort is part of an experience of moving through a growing edge. For example, being a performance artist, I get scared before I get on stage, but it’s really exhilarating, and it requires me to pull from that space that Audre Lorde talks about. I really have to unblock myself and become a channel and a medium for what needs to move through me so that I can deliver the ritual of performance. And it’s exhilarating. I have to confront parts of myself that I wouldn’t otherwise in daily life because I am doing the work of performance art. So I really try to move with what is feeling good. And be really mindful of when I’m not feeling good. I’ve quit jobs that created “security,” you know, biweekly paychecks and health insurance, because I was like: this is making me unhappy. And my reaction to this is making me unhappy. I need to switch up who I am inside of this and also where I am so that I can feel good and be good inside of my life. amb. We are kindred in this. Taja. The last thing I’ll say about cultivating pleasure—burlesque is a really big part of that. It’s not my main genre of performance. I identify as a multimedia interdisciplinary performance artist, because it’s performance, it’s visual, it’s installation, it’s some shit in between. It’s a little amorphous, but people are very familiar with my performance work and less so the burlesque. The burlesque stuff has not been at the forefront until more recently. But I really enjoy being an ecdysiast, that’s what we call it: an ecdysiast. The art of the striptease. amb. Okay: pleasure vocabulary! Taja. Burlesque informs my work conceptually. Like, even for my piece This Ain’t a Eulogy: A Ritual for Re-membering, I employ beauty as reverence, you know? It’s a performance piece honoring ancestors whose lives were taken because of state-sanctioned violence. In the Bag Lady Manifesta, my costuming, what I’m doing with trash bags, it’s an item that we know we’re supposed to throw away, but for me, repurposing them or recycling them, one, it’s a call for what we need to do in our communities and in our world, and it’s basically a metaphor for oppression. How [do] we transform our reality to create beauty and reverence? How do we hold on and also repurpose the shit to create the world that we wanna live in?