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.

Page 57 of 182 · 20 per page

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Next day, after lunch, I went to see “our” doctor, a friendly fellow whose perfect bedside manner and complete reliance on a few patented drugs adequately masked his ignorance of, and indifference to, medical science. The fact that Lo would have to come back to Ramsdale was a treasure of anticipation. For this event I wanted to be fully prepared. I had in fact begun my campaign earlier, before Charlotte made that cruel decision of hers. I had to be sure when my lovely child arrived, that very night, and then night after night, until St. Algebra took her away from me, I would possess the means of putting two creatures to sleep so thoroughly that neither sound nor touch should rouse them. Throughout most of July I had been experimenting with various sleeping powders, trying them out on Charlotte, a great taker of pills. The last dose I had given her (she thought it was a tablet of mild bromides—to anoint her nerves) had knocked her out for four solid hours. I had put the radio at full blast. I had blazed in her face an olisbos-like flashlight. I had pushed her, pinched her, prodded her—and nothing had disturbed the rhythm of her calm and powerful breathing. However, when I had done such a simple thing as kiss her, she had awakened at once, as fresh and strong as an octopus (I barely escaped). This would not do, I thought; had to get something still safer. At first, Dr. Byron did not seem to believe me when I said his last prescription was no match for my insomnia. He suggested I try again, and for a moment diverted my attention by showing me photographs of his family. He had a fascinating child of Dolly’s age; but I saw through his tricks and insisted he prescribe the mightiest pill extant. He suggested I play golf, but finally agreed to give me something that, he said, “would really work”; and going to a cabinet, he produced a vial of violet-blue capsules banded with dark purple at one end, which, he said, had just been placed on the market and were intended not for neurotics whom a draft of water could calm if properly administered, but only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries. I love to fool doctors, and though inwardly rejoicing, pocketed the pills with a skeptical shrug. Incidentally, I had had to be careful with him. Once, in another connection, a stupid lapse on my part made me mention my last sanatorium, and I thought I saw the tips of his ears twitch. Being not at all keen for Charlotte or anybody else to know that period of my past, I had hastily explained that I had once done some research among the insane for a novel. But no matter; the old rogue certainly had a sweet girleen.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  It was then that I sprang my surprise. Oh, what a dreamy pet! She walked up to the open suitcase as if stalking it from afar, at a kind of slow-motion walk, peering at that distant treasure box on the luggage support. (Was there something wrong, I wondered, with those great gray eyes of hers, or were we both plunged in the same enchanted mist?) She stepped up to it, lifting her rather high-heeled feet rather high, and bending her beautiful boy-knees while she walked through dilating space with the lentor of one walking under water or in a flight dream. Then she raised by the armlets a copper-colored, charming and quite expensive vest, very slowly stretching it between her silent hands as if she were a bemused bird-hunter holding his breath over the incredible bird he spreads out by the tips of its flaming wings. Then (while I stood waiting for her) she pulled out the slow snake of a brilliant belt and tried it on. Then she crept into my waiting arms, radiant, relaxed, caressing me with her tender, mysterious, impure, indifferent, twilight eyes—for all the world, like the cheapest of cheap cuties. For that is what nymphets imitate—while we moan and die. “What’s the katter with misses?” I muttered (word-control gone) into her hair. “If you must know,” she said, “you do it the wrong way.” “Show, wight ray.” “All in good time,” responded the spoonerette. Seva ascendes, pulsata, brulans, kitzelans, dementissima. Elevator clatterans, pausa, clatterans, populus in corridoro. Hancnisi mors mihi adimet nemo! Juncea puellula, jo pensavo fondis-sime, nobserva nihil quidquam; but, of course, in another moment I might have committed some dreadful blunder; fortunately, she returned to the treasure box. From the bathroom, where it took me quite a time to shift back into normal gear for a humdrum purpose, I heard, standing, drumming, retaining my breath, my Lolita’s “oo’s” and “gee’s” of girlish delight. She had used the soap only because it was sample soap. “Well, come on, my dear, if you are as hungry as I am.” And so to the elevator, daughter swinging her old white purse, father walking in front (nota bene: never behind, she is not a lady). As we stood (now side by side) waiting to be taken down, she threw back her head, yawned without restraint and shook her curls. “When did they make you get up at that camp?” “Half-past—” she stifled another yawn—“six”—yawn in full with a shiver of all her frame. “Half-past,” she repeated, her throat filling up again.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  His eyes blinked and glowered and squinted and widened in mocking wonder behind the intense magnification of his glasses, but once denuded they lost all power of expression and seemed as pale and vulnerable as new skin under a bandage. Although he’d never traveled anywhere he was teaching himself French and of course German; he had pinned up photos of Berchtesgaden and the Riviera over his desk. He brewed espresso in a tin Napoletano that, when reversed, threw sputtering drops onto the glowing coils of the strictly forbidden hot plate, and he played over and over again his one record of Juliette Greco, the chanteuse beloved of the Existentialists, the waif who’d emerged out of the ruins of war with black eyes all pupils and lyrics all plangent, tough-guy sentimentality. Howie’s ties came from Charvet on the Place Vendôme because that had been Proust’s haberdasher. He and I shared the irregular, never-foreseen status of students too clever for afternoon study hall and too inept for afternoon sports. As a result we alone were free to spend those long vacant hours from two to six in the empty dorms or, when the weather was good, on walks through the baronial grounds of the estate. The weather, however, was usually polar and he and I then found our exercise in stubborn, smoldering debates about equality and democracy (I for, he against). I can still taste the bitter black coffee and hear the jolly accordion and sweeping strings of Juliette Greco’s accompaniment, music we’d have sneered at as polka-Polish or Hollywood-snythetic had it not been French, but that, since it was, we relished and hummed along to though neither of us was ever quite capable of translating the words (“Something … something … if you something I’ll always? Toujours? Is that toujours? Play it again”). Howie had a face only a medieval Japanese woman could have loved: perfectly round, pasty, just a wisp of fine hair above, below a dark, tiny dead rosebud of a mouth, the rudiment of a chin, like a child’s hand poking through a sheet, and those eyes, so arrogant and expressive with glasses, so myopic and defenseless without. “No, I don’t concede your point. Not at all,” he’d say, lowering his head so that the child’s hand poked farther out through the sheet and his voice, naturally high and nervous, took on a swallowed, subdued tone. “In fact,” he’d add, letting his features become beatifically composed, “I think you’re a fool.” I could hardly breathe. And yet, calling to me across the smoking valley sang a soprano telling me how exciting all this was, this verbal game that could at any moment take a nasty turn but that as of now remained a parody of spite. Until now I’d never known anyone my own age who was so willing to flout the bland convention that held that the normal unit of conversation should be the unfunny joke and the expected response a mirthless giggle.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  At last she blinked and snapped the glass shut. “I still feel like a young girl, as though everything is about to happen. And don’t you see”—her dry, rough hand with the painted nails seized mine—“I am a sort of spiritual debutante.” In our imaginations the adults of our childhood remain extreme, essential—we might say radical since they are the roots that feed luxuriant later systems. Those first bohemians, for instance, stay operatic in memory even though were we to meet them today—well, what would we think, we who’ve elaborated our eccentricities with a patience, a professionalism they never knew? Soon after I first met Fred and Marilyn they decided I must learn German in order to read the novels of Hermann Hesse, at that time still largely untranslated. Hesse’s mix of suicide, mysticism and sexual ambiguity had launched them into a thrilling void; reading him, they said, was like being in an airplane above the breathable stratosphere. He wasn’t healthy. In fact, a smell of taint seeped off his pages. He wasn’t right or even wise, but they never stopped to check his words against what they knew to be true since they adored him precisely as an exit out of experience and an entrance into the magic theater of sensations wholly invented. In place of the torpor of everyday life Hesse called them to a disciplined quest—even if the Grail he offered was vaporous and poisoned. The teacher they’d selected for me was a part-time professor at the university. He lived in one room in a huge pile thrown up as faculty and graduate-student housing. He had a double bed that pulled down out of the wall; by day it hid behind two white doors with cut-glass doorknobs. When he greeted me for my first lesson I was overwhelmed by his size. He was six foot four and brawny and I looked up into chestnut hair sprouting from his nostrils; my hand was lost in his. He was at once formal and hearty and spoke with a strong German accent. Our lessons followed an exact system and began and ended at fixed times without interludes or chitchat. By the same token the professor bounded about in a shirt open to his navel, his sleeves rolled up above his massive biceps, and on his desk I saw a photograph of him in a swim-suit at the beach holding his girl friend aloft with just one hand. Like many athletes he found it impossible to sit still, and his grammatical points and pronunciation tips were underscored with a ceaseless tattoo. He slapped his knees.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Soon, a manuscript arrived in the mail by way of an aspiring writer with no agent. Jackson picked it up, hoping to uncover treasure. The book, called Iggie’s House , was unpolished. The young characters were one-dimensional and the villain—an unapologetically bigoted local mom who rallies the town to reject and harass the new neighbors—was particularly overdrawn. Still, Jackson saw something in it. Among other things, he noticed that the author had a knack for capturing children’s voices, with an impeccable ear for dialogue. Years later, Silsbee recalled him saying that the original manuscript for Iggie’s House “wasn’t very good… but there was something there.” So Jackson took a chance. He picked up the phone and called this untested writer. A woman answered, and her voice lifted when he introduced himself and explained why he was getting in touch. He could see she lived in New Jersey—would she be able to come by the office sometime soon? Judy Blume could barely wait to get out her response. “The day he called and said he’d like to meet me and talk about the manuscript was the most exciting day of my life,” Blume later told Publishers Weekly . The morning of their appointment, she was so nervous her stomach lurched. She took a pill to try to settle it, which helped, but then the medicine dried out her mouth. Generally, her health had improved since she’d started writing, but a meeting with a real editor was stressful enough to throw her body back into crisis mode. Judy hopped into the car, hoping she wouldn’t have to do too much talking. When she arrived at Prentice Hall, Jackson—who was stylishly dressed and bore more than a slight resemblance to the freshly minted talk-show host Dick Cavett—greeted her warmly. Judy was taken aback by his good looks; he was “a stunningly beautiful man,” she told the New Yorker. He led her to his cramped office, his desk piled high with stacks of manuscripts. Jackson confessed he wasn’t sure about publishing Iggie’s House yet, but he had some questions. The protagonist, for instance—who was Winnie, really? Beyond getting to know the new kids in town, what else did she want? Judy wrote down everything he said. An hour and a half later, she had promised to revise the book for Jackson, in the hopes that Bradbury would give it a home. Books in the swinging sixties were getting bolder. Just as there wasn’t a defined middle grade category yet, there also wasn’t a market around what we now know as young adult books, or reads just for older teenagers. There were books that starred teens, like The Catcher in the Rye , but Salinger’s cantankerous 1951 manifesto was packaged as an adult novel. Then came The Outsiders . Published in 1967, The Outsiders is widely considered to be the first young adult (YA) book. It was written by a teenager named Susan Hinton: her pen name was the gender-ambiguous S. E.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Chuck forged an invitation from his mother to me, something I could show the school authorities, and he drove me for the weekend to his family’s deserted beach house. His parents were off in Florida. Everything here was gray and thawing, the sky and the lake anagrams for each other, iceberg of cloud above a cumulus of ice. We played a record of Big Bill Broonzy over and over again as we lounged about and looked out the plate-glass windows at a surrealists’ world in which whatever had been hard seemed to be going soft. We drank beer after beer (Chuck pried the caps off with his teeth), we fell asleep in our clothes on adjoining couches, we were continuously hung over, we set out giant steaks to thaw, we awoke at dawn or dusk, who knew which in that long weekend of freedom, melting ice and nausea. Although I certainly wasn’t a straight-A student I’d at least always been conscientious in school. In one sense my doggedness was a way of hedging my bets, so that no matter how despairing I might be I was implicitly counting on my eventual happiness. Even as I made much of present miseries I was cautiously planning my bourgeois future. There was nothing cautious about Chuck. He had his own trust fund from a grandmother who owned a cosmetics firm. He had a loud, maniacal laugh, he was big physically and knew it and half-scared people with his craziness, his drunk sprees, the way he’d twitch or shoot his cuffs or without warning scythe the air between you with a closed fist and shriek like a samurai. He scared the masters because he didn’t want or need their approval and because he’d set himself up as an arbiter of absurdity. If a teacher said something banal or foolish or pompous in class, Chuck would quake with silent laughter until he was weeping and had slid halfway out of his seat onto the floor, a helpless sprawl of laughter. He appeared to be in actual pain and every eye was on him. No number of demerits or revoked privileges or low grades intimidated him. He had no particular ambition to go on to college, nor did he doubt his own intelligence which, in the Amercian fashion of that day, had been Tested; he’d been Certified as falling well within the Genius Range and declared that most appealing of creatures, the Underachiever, a status he jealously preserved except in English class, an honors section conducted by a half-blind white-haired amphibian who paddled at the air with one wounded web, who pronounced poetry as “putrid” minus the final d and who was so absent-minded he’d once heard the bell for class and stepped off a high library ladder into thin air.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Jackson had practiced his people skills growing up among Detroit’s upper crust as the son of a Hudson Motor Car bigwig, then moved east to attend Yale Drama. After graduating in 1957 he was drafted and did a two-year stint in the army. When he moved to New York and his acting career flopped, he enrolled in a master’s program in publishing at NYU in 1962. In 1968, Jackson co-founded his own company, called Bradbury Press, with his friend Robert “Bob” Verrone. The gregarious Verrone had been working at Prentice Hall at the time, and the pair opened up a small office within Prentice’s sprawling North Jersey compound near the Hudson River. “These two guys sort of considered themselves pirates, because they had gotten out of big publishing,” remembered Peter Silsbee, a Bradbury Press author who first met Jackson when he landed a job as his assistant in the early 1980s. Jackson and Verrone set out to shake up the world of children’s books. Back then, picture books were the name of the game: colorful, cozy reads that taught young readers life lessons. Verrone, who had what Silsbee called “an antic sense of humor,” thought books for this age group could be more fun. Meanwhile, Jackson was lit up by an emerging area of the business: novels for readers ages eight to twelve, or the pre-teen set. Middle grade didn’t really exist as a publishing category until the 1970s. And of the novels for older children that got printed, the vast majority were fantasy stories. Think of E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web , which came out in 1952 and put serious conversations about death into the mouths of talkative animals. Roald Dahl’s books, such as James and the Giant Peach (1961) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), were gorgeous, but absurdist. Then, in 1962, there was Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time , a brilliant intergalactic battle between good and evil. The exception was Beverly Cleary’s work, which featured ordinary children. Cleary dominated the children’s market and Jackson wanted to publish more books like hers: “Books about real kids for real kids,” Silsbee said of his onetime boss’s mission. “He really hated anything remotely didactic… he wanted books that kids would pick and would just feel like they were a part of.” Cleary had won over young audiences with her lively stories about middle-class white children, mostly living in the Pacific Northwest, where she had grown up. Young readers couldn’t get enough of Henry Huggins (1950), Ellen Tebbits (1951), and Beezus and Ramona (1955), about nine-year-old Beatrice “Beezus” Quimby weathering the high jinks of her spirited younger sister. The pair starred in a wildly popular follow-up in 1968 called Ramona the Pest . To find the next Cleary, Jackson and Verrone resorted to unconventional measures. They dug deep into their pockets and spent a precious $5,000 to take out an ad in Writer’s Digest . It said they were seeking “realistic fiction” for eight- to twelve-year-olds.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Not yet.” Pause. “I hear you gotta warm ’em up.” “That’s correct.” “How do you do it?” I had read a marriage manual. “Well, you turn the lights down and kiss a long time first.” “With your clothes on?” “Of course. Then you take off her top and play with her breasts. But very gently. Don’t get too rough—they don’t like that.” “Does she play with your boner?” “Not usually. An older, experienced woman might.” “You been with an older woman?” “Once.” “They get kinda saggy, don’t they?” “My friend was beautiful,” I said, offended on behalf of the imaginary lady. “Is it real wet and slippery in there? Some guy told me it was like wet liver in a milk bottle.” “Only if the romantic foreplay has gone on long enough.” “How long’s enough?” “An hour.” The silence was thoughtful, as though it were an eyelash beating against a pillowcase. “The guys back home? Guys in my neighborhood?” “Yes?” I said. “We all cornhole each other. You ever do that?” “Sure.” “What?” “I said sure.” “Guess you’ve outgrown that by now.” “Well, yeah, but since there aren’t any girls around …” I felt as a scientist must when he knows he’s about to bring off the experiment of his career: outwardly calm, inwardly jubilant, already braced for disappointment. “We could try it now.” Pause. “If you want to.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth I felt he wouldn’t come to my bed; he had found something wrong with me, he thought I was a sissy, I should have said “Right” instead of “That’s correct.” “Got any stuff?” he asked. “What?” “You know. Like Vaseline?” “No, but we don’t need it. Spit will”—I started to say “do,” but men say “work”—“work.” My penis was hard but still bent painfully down in the jockey shorts; I released it and placed the head under the taut elastic waistband. “Naw, you gotta have Vaseline.” I might be knowledgeable about real sex, but apparently Kevin was to be the expert when it came to cornholing. “Well, let’s try spit.” “I don’t know. Okay.” His voice was small and his mouth sounded dry. I watched him come toward me. He, too, had jockey shorts on, which appeared to glow. Though barechested now, he’d worn a T-shirt all through Little League season that had left his torso and upper arms pale; his ghost shirt excited me, because it reminded me he was captain of his team. We pulled off our shorts. I opened my arms to Kevin and closed my eyes. He said, “It’s colder than a witch’s tit.” I lay on my side facing him and he slipped in beside me. His breath smelled of milk.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  At home I heard the muted strains of discordant music. One night my stepmother, hard and purposeful, drove back downtown unexpectedly to my father’s office after midnight. Still later I could hear her shouting in her wing of the house; I hid behind a door and listened to my father’s patient, explaining drone. The next morning Alice, my colleague, broke down, wept, locked herself in the ladies’ room. When she came out, her eyes, usually so lovely and unfocused, narrowed with spite and pain as she muttered a stream of filth about my stepmother and my father (he’d tried to lure her to one of those fleabag hotels). On the following morning I learned she’d been let go, though by that time I knew how to get the endless mailings out on my own. She’d been let go—into what? That man’s embrace around the waist set me spinning like a dancer across the darkened stage of the city; my turns led me to Fountain Square, the center. After nightfall the downtown was nearly empty. A cab might cruise by. One high office window might glow. The restaurants had closed by eight, but a bar door could swing open to impose on me the silhouette of a man. Shabby city of black stone whitened by starlings, poor earthly progeny of that mystic metal dove poised on the outstretched wrist of the goddess of the fountain. Men from across the river sat around the low granite rim of the basin—at least, I guessed they were hillbillies from their accents, a missing tooth, greased-back hair, their way of spitting, of holding a Camel cupped between the thumb and third finger, of walking with a hard, loud, stiff-legged tread across the paved park as though they hoped to ring sparks off the stone. Others sat singly along the metal fence that enclosed the park, an island around which traffic flowed. They perched on the steel rail, legs wide apart, bodies licked by headlights, and looked down, into the slowly circling cars.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I left her there and went off to swim all by myself, going against the waves with clean strokes of my arms, thrusting my chest forward and head on. The following Saturday, I could scarcely conceal my impatience to see my parents leave. The long Sabbath lunch seemed to me to be literally endless, and I could barely stand it as I watched the kids receiving their weekly pocket money. As for Aunt Maissa who had come with her sad nun’s face to swell the crowd, she drove me nearly insane. Finally, however, the house was silent. Once the door had closed on the last of them all, I leaped from the couch where I lay trying to read, and feverishly began to do my best to make our dining-room tidy. Actually, I limited my efforts to kicking all stray shoes beneath the furniture and stuffing the clothes just anyhow into the sideboard. On the table, I spread again our Friday night’s white tablecloth and set two chairs side by side. Then I left the door ajar, so that Ginou need not wait till I came and opened it, thus she would avoid being seen by any of the neighbors. But it was still too early and I was so impatient that the time seemed to go by very slowly. So I went back to the couch and again tried to read, but in vain for my eyes somehow failed to come to grips with the text. All the joys that I was anticipating were too illicit, too new, too mysterious, too rich in promises. Furtively, she knocked twice on our door, then understood and walked in without further ado. I rushed to meet her and found her already in our foyer. So I closed the door, slamming it as if to cut us off from the world. Nobody would be able to know that we were there together, just the two of us. She carried in her hand a notebook, all wrinkled from being rolled tightly, and she now put it on the table. As soon as she noticed the two chairs, she sat down hurriedly. So I said, without waiting any longer, without even stopping to greet her: “Let’s get down to work!” I sat down on the other chair, as if our job were an urgent one, as if our unaccustomed presence here required immediate justification. All our comradeship that we had experienced in the sunlight and that had always been so uncomplicated had now vanished. It was indeed as if we were meeting for the first time. As I undertook to explain to her the main themes of Racine’s tragedy, Phèdre, I could hear my own voice in a key that was several tones lower than usual, a baritone that sounded almost husky. Meanwhile, she remained silent, trying to take notes with a bit of a pencil that had a copper ring around it and badly needed sharpening, the wood almost completely covering the lead.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I wanted to go out toward men and thought I could help them. For myself, my decision was certainly a happy one: I immediately felt better. ~ 4. THE CAMP ~ All through the long day’s journey the worn-out springs of the old truck passed on to us the smallest bumps in the road. We had left Tunis almost gaily at dawn, with rucksacks on our backs, which reminded us of our youth movement excursions. The sharp air and the warm sun were just as promising then, and when one of us burst into a marching song we all joined in. I was lighthearted as I left, for I had left nothing behind me. The evening before, Ginou had yielded to the last of my arguments and admitted that we were not made for each other. I must confess that I had indulged in some histrionics for a quarter of an hour as I tried to find in my heart a pain that was not there. But I had to leave her hurriedly in order to pack my bag and had no time to think more of it. Ten minutes after our departure, I was already singing with the others, standing in the wind, full of the healthy impression of having volunteered for a great adventure. At the first alarm, however, we stopped singing. Aircraft appeared suddenly from behind the hills and crossed the road in a streak firing their machine guns, sometimes quite insistently. Lying in a ditch we waited for them to be gone before we resumed our uncomfortable positions, tightly packed against each other. The men joked and bragged to hide the anxiety which grew in us as we moved further south. The landscape became more and more rugged with eroded purple rocks, thorny vegetation and cactus, and the atmosphere of a silent Western movie. At last the truck entered the bed of a dried-up oued and jogged and bounded over the white stones of the river bed. At the far end of the oued, the camp appeared in the middle of a circle of chalk cliffs, like a big white hole surrounded by red bushes. Above, on the ridges, there were a few meager bushes with tiny mauve blossoms. A long line of men stood waiting by the kitchen, and the cook was filling each bowl in turn like an automaton. There were tents of coarse canvas all around the edge. With difficulty, the truck climbed into the hollow and stopped. The men looked at us and, when they saw we were only a new contingent of workers, took no further notice of us. Dusty, silent, and motionless on the parched earth, they looked like hungry locusts. My companions no longer had the courage even to pretend and were silent.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Which when she had said, they put off all their garments and refreshed themselves by the fire. And after they were washed and noynted with oyle, they sate downe at the table garnished with all kind of dainty meats. They were no sooner sate downe, but in came another company of yong men more in number than was before, who seemed likewise to bee Theeves, for they brought in their preyes of gold and silver, Plate, jewels, and rich robes, and when they had likewise washed, they sate among the rest, and served one another by order. Then they drank and eat exceedingly, laughing, crying and making much noyse, that I thought that I was among the tyrannous and wilde Lapithes, Thebans, and Centaures. At length one of them more valiant than the rest, spake in this sort, We verily have manfully conquered the house of Milo of Hippata, and beside all the riches and treasure which by force we have brought away, we are all come home safe, and are increased the more by this horse and this Asse. But you that have roved about in the country of Boetia, have lost your valiante captaine Lamathus, whose life I more regarded than all the treasure which you have brought: and therfore the memory of him shall bee renowned for ever amongst the most noble kings and valiant captains: but you accustome when you goe abroad, like men with ganders hearts to creepe through every corner and hole for every trifle. Then one of them that came last answered, Why are you only ignorant, that the greater the number is, the sooner they may rob and spoyle the house? And although the family be dispersed in divers lodgings, yet every man had rather to defend his own life, than to save the riches of his master: but when there be but a few theeves, then will they not only rather regard themselves, but also their substance, how little or great soever it be. And to the intent you may beleeve me I will shew you an example: wee were come nothing nigh to Thebes, where is the fountain of our art and science, but we learned where a rich Chuffe called Chriseros did dwell, who for fear of offices in the publique wel dissembled his estate, and lived sole and solitary in a small coat, howbeit replenished with aboundance of treasure, and went daily in ragged and torn apparel. Wherefore wee devised with our selves to go to his house and spoyl him of all his riches. And when night came we drew towards the dore, which was so strongly closed, that we could neither move it, nor lift it out of the hooks, and we thought it best not to break it open lest by the noyse we should raise up to our harm the neighbours by.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “Did you know Roy Rogers has a penis but Roy Rabbit doesn’t have one, even though he’s a boy bunny?” “Yes, I know.” “I told you, right?” “About a hundred times.” Fern said, “I flew one time when I was little, all the way to Birmingham, where my grandma lived. I got to sit on her hospital bed. Then she died. I didn’t see her dead. Only sleeping.” She was quiet for a minute, then she popped back up. “Do you know this song?” She twisted her hands upside down, making goggles for her eyes with her thumb and second finger. She started to sing. Into the air, Junior Birdman Into the air upside down Into the air, Junior Birdman Keep your noses off the ground. “Where’d you learn that?” Miri asked. “Natalie learned it at summer camp and taught it to me.” By the time Miri figured out how to make the mask with her hands, the plane was on the move, picking up speed. Faster, faster, faster, until they were airborne. Into the air, Junior Birdman. They were flying. She was flying. She thought it would feel different, more like the ride at the amusement park that pins you against the wall with centrifugal force. That ride was both thrilling and terrifying but so was this one. Once they’d leveled off she pretended she was on a train, except when she looked out the window all she saw was sky with a bank of fluffy clouds under the plane. Somewhere there’s heaven, she sang to herself. Because if there was a heaven, wouldn’t this be it? Separated from earth by white fluffy clouds. She half expected to see angels wearing flowing white gowns playing harps. She half expected to see Penny, tapping on the window of the plane to get her attention. If only she believed in heaven. “What?” Fern asked. “Nothing. I was just singing to myself.” “What song?” “Just some song I know.” “Teach it to me.” Somewhere there’s music How faint the tune Somewhere there’s heaven How high the moon “How high is the moon?” “Pretty high.” “How do you know you can hear music there?” “Because you can always hear music.” “That’s good. Isn’t that good?” “Yes, it’s very good.” —IT WAS a long trip. First they landed in Chicago, where they changed planes. Between Chicago and Los Angeles a fancy lunch was served on a tray. Miri couldn’t imagine how they managed to cook steak and French fries on a plane. The Parker House roll came with a pat of butter stamped TWA. She had never seen such tiny salt and pepper shakers. She thought about sneaking them into her bag but didn’t want to set a bad example for Fern. For dessert there was ice cream with a chocolate chip cookie. After lunch the stewardess handed out decks of cards. Miri and Fern played War until Fern’s eyes closed.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you’re going to die anyway. — We were all stoned (but I was more stoned than everyone) when we piled into Adrian’s green Triumph and headed for a discotheque. There were five of us sardined into that tiny car: Bennett; Marie Winkleman (a very bosomy college classmate of mine whom Bennett had sort of picked up at the party—she was a psychologist); Adrian (who was driving, after a fashion); me (head back, like the first Isadora, post-strangulation); and Robin Phipps-Smith (the mousy British candidate with frizzy hair and German eyeglass frames who talked all the time about how he detested “Ronnie” Laing—something which endeared him to Bennett’s heart). Adrian, on the other hand, was a follower of Laing, had studied with him, and could do excellent imitations of his Scottish accent. At least I thought they were excellent—but then I didn’t know how Laing spoke. We zigzagged through the streets of Vienna, over the cobblestones and trolley tracks, across the muddy brown Danube. I don’t know the name of the discotheque, or the street, or anything. I go into states where I notice nothing about the landscape except the male inhabitants and which organs of mine (heart, stomach, nipples, cunt) they cause to palpitate. The discotheque was silver. Chrome paper on the walls. Flashing white lights. Mirrors everywhere. The glass tables elevated on platforms of chrome. The seats white leather. Ear-splitting rock music. Call the place whatever you like: the Mirrored Room, the Seventh Circle, the Silvermine, the Glass Balloon. I know, at least, that the name was in English. Very trendy and forgettable. Bennett, Marie, and Robin said they were sitting down to order drinks. Adrian and I began to dance, our drunken gyrations repeated in the endless mirrors. Finally we sought a nook between two mirrors where we could kiss, watched only by infinite numbers of ourselves. I had the distinct sensation of kissing my own mouth—like when I was nine and used to wet a piece of my pillow with saliva and then kiss it to try to imagine what “soul-kissing” was like.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  such to me appeared—so may I see it again!—a light coming o’er the sea so swiftly, that no flight is equal to its motion; from which, when I had a while withdrawn mine eyes to question my Leader, I saw it brighter and bigger grown. Then on each side of it appeared to me a something white; and from beneath it, little by little, another whiteness came forth. My Master yet did speak no word, until the first whitenesses appeared as wings; then, when well he knew the pilot, he cried: “Bend, bend thy knees; behold the Angel of God: fold thy hands: henceforth shalt thou see such ministers. Look how he scorns all human instruments, so that oar he wills not, nor other sail than his wings, between shores so distant. See how he has them heavenward turned, plying the air with eternal plumes, that are not mewed like mortal hair.” Then as more and more towards us came the bird divine, brighter yet he appeared, wherefore mine eye endured him not near: but I bent it down, and he came on to the shore with a vessel so swift and light that the waters nowise drew it in. On the stern stood the celestial pilot, such, that blessedness seemed writ upon him, and more than a hundred spirits sat within. “in exitu Israel de Ægypto,” sang they all together with one voice, with what of that psalm2 is thereafter written. Then made he to them the sign of Holy Cross, whereat they all flung them on the strand and quick even as he came he went his way. The throng that remained there seemed strange to the place, gazing around like one who assayeth new things. On every side the sun, who with his arrows bright had chased the Goat from midst of heaven, was shooting forth the day,3 when the new people lifted up their faces towards us, saying to us: “If ye know show us the way to go to the mount.” And Virgil answered: “Ye think perchance that we have experience of this place, but we are strangers even as ye are. We came but now, a little while before you, by other way which was so rough and hard, that the climbing now will seem but play to us.” The souls who had observed me by my breathing that I was yet alive, marvelling grew pale; and as to a messenger, who bears the olive, the folk draw nigh to hear the news, and none shows himself shy at trampling; so on my face those souls did fix their gaze, fortunate every one, well nigh forgetting to go and make them fair. I saw one of them draw forward to embrace me with such great affection, that he moved me to do the like. O shades empty save in outward show! thrice behind it my hands I clasped, and as often returned with them to my breast.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  His eyes blinked and glowered and squinted and widened in mocking wonder behind the intense magnification of his glasses, but once denuded they lost all power of expression and seemed as pale and vulnerable as new skin under a bandage. Although he’d never traveled anywhere he was teaching himself French and of course German; he had pinned up photos of Berchtesgaden and the Riviera over his desk. He brewed espresso in a tin Napoletano that, when reversed, threw sputtering drops onto the glowing coils of the strictly forbidden hot plate, and he played over and over again his one record of Juliette Greco, the chanteuse beloved of the Existentialists, the waif who’d emerged out of the ruins of war with black eyes all pupils and lyrics all plangent, tough-guy sentimentality. Howie’s ties came from Charvet on the Place Vendôme because that had been Proust’s haberdasher. He and I shared the irregular, never-foreseen status of students too clever for afternoon study hall and too inept for afternoon sports. As a result we alone were free to spend those long vacant hours from two to six in the empty dorms or, when the weather was good, on walks through the baronial grounds of the estate. The weather, however, was usually polar and he and I then found our exercise in stubborn, smoldering debates about equality and democracy (I for, he against). I can still taste the bitter black coffee and hear the jolly accordion and sweeping strings of Juliette Greco’s accompaniment, music we’d have sneered at as polka-Polish or Hollywood-snythetic had it not been French, but that, since it was, we relished and hummed along to though neither of us was ever quite capable of translating the words (“Something … something … if you something I’ll always? Toujours? Is that toujours? Play it again”). Howie had a face only a medieval Japanese woman could have loved: perfectly round, pasty, just a wisp of fine hair above, below a dark, tiny dead rosebud of a mouth, the rudiment of a chin, like a child’s hand poking through a sheet, and those eyes, so arrogant and expressive with glasses, so myopic and defenseless without. “No, I don’t concede your point. Not at all,” he’d say, lowering his head so that the child’s hand poked farther out through the sheet and his voice, naturally high and nervous, took on a swallowed, subdued tone. “In fact,” he’d add, letting his features become beatifically composed, “I think you’re a fool.” I could hardly breathe. And yet, calling to me across the smoking valley sang a soprano telling me how exciting all this was, this verbal game that could at any moment take a nasty turn but that as of now remained a parody of spite. Until now I’d never known anyone my own age who was so willing to flout the bland convention that held that the normal unit of conversation should be the unfunny joke and the expected response a mirthless giggle.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Humbert is being too modest at the outset of Lolita when he says “it is only a game,” for it is one in which everything on the board “breath[es] with life,” as Nabokov writes of the match between Luzhin and Turati in The Defense. Radical and dizzying shifts in focus are created in the reader’s mind as he oscillates between a sense that he is by turns confronting characters in a novel and pieces in a game—as if a telescope were being spun 360 degrees on its axis, allowing one to look alternately through one end and then the other. The various “levels” of Lolita are of course not the New Criticism’s “levels of meaning,” for the telescopic and global views of the “plaything” should enable one to perceive these levels or dimensions as instantaneous—as though, to adapt freely an image used by Mary McCarthy to describe Pale Fire, one were looking down on three or more games being played simultaneously by two chess masters on several separate glass boards, each arranged successively above the other.34 A first reading of Lolita rarely affords this limpid, multiform view, and for many reasons, the initially disarming and distractive quality of its ostensible subject being foremost. But the uniquely exhilarating experience of rereading it on its own terms derives from the discovery of a totally new book in place of the old, and the recognition that its habit of metamorphosis has happily described the course of one’s own perceptions. What Jorge Luis Borges says of Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote, surely holds for Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita: he “has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading.” ALFRED APPEL, JR. Palo Alto, California January 31, 1968 Wilmette, Illinois May 21, 1990

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Think of all the hotels they’re building.” “But it’s so far away.” “It is far away. I can’t deny that.” “My parents…” “I know. It’s hard to leave family behind.” “They’d never agree to let me go.” “But you’d have plenty of vacation time to come home and visit. And you could make it a two-year commitment, like going away to college, except instead of paying, you get paid. You’d make good money, too.” “But I wouldn’t know anyone.” “You’d know me. And Dr. O. And you and Jack would make new friends.” “Jack is 1-A. He could get called up at any time.” “Let’s hope that ridiculous war ends before then.” “Daisy—can I tell you something? You’d have to keep it to yourself. I mean it, no one can know. But if I don’t tell someone, I’m going to explode.” “You can trust me, Christina.” “I know I can.” Daisy waited for more. Christina finally bit the bullet and blurted out, “Jack and I are secretly married. We eloped to Elkton.” Daisy came out from behind her desk. “Oh, Christina.” She put her arms around her. “I hope you’ll be very happy.” Then, “You didn’t have to get married, did you?” Christina laughed. “No. And that doctor you sent me to…he fitted me for a diaphragm so I won’t have to worry.” “When are you going to tell your parents?” “I haven’t figured that out yet.” “Well, don’t say anything about Las Vegas yet. First, Dr. O has to make up his mind. But I have a feeling he’s going to do it, and I admit I’m kind of excited about going. I’m starting to feel like a pioneer.” A pioneer, Christina thought. The Wild West. She’d have to learn to ride a horse, she supposed. The idea of it made her giddy. DaisyChristina and Jack were married! She knew Christina had something on her mind but a secret marriage had never occurred to her. She should have guessed. Hadn’t she done the same at Christina’s age—running off with Gerald Dupree, né Dorfman, to Elkton? Gerald Dupree. What a name. And Daisy Dupree —even better. A fabulous name, she’d thought at the time, a name fit for a stripper, or, even better, a movie star, which made her laugh—the only good thing that had come out of her hasty young marriage, annulled two weeks after they’d eloped. But that was a lifetime ago. Gerry had been older, twenty-five to her eighteen. He’d been working for ten years by then, for the Stasio boys, number runners, then bootleggers. It was 1936, times were hard. She was a year out of Linden High School, where she’d won every award in the business program—for typing, steno, bookkeeping. She was lucky to find a job working as a secretary for an insurance agent in Newark. She wasn’t his número uno, as he called his longtime secretary, but he liked Daisy, admired her for her organizational skills.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Roman held up sections of Miri’s hair. “Nice,” he said. “Some natural wave, but you’ll have to set the new cut in pin curls at night. Are you sure about this?” He was making Miri nervous. Was he trying to talk her out of cutting her hair? “Because once I start,” he said, “there’s no turning back.” “But how do you think it will look?” Miri asked, hoping for reassurance. He kissed the tips of his fingers. “Fabuloso.” Was that an Italian word? If so, did it mean what it sounded like? Either way, the decision was made. Mr. Roman picked up his scissors and, snip snip snip, the process began. Was she making a big mistake or would she leave the shop looking like Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun ? She stuffed two pieces of Fleer’s Dubble Bubble into her mouth, then blew bubbles so big they burst against her cheeks, until Mr. Roman told her he found such a habit distracting and not worthy of a lovely young lady. Under the dryer she read Silver Screen and Photoplay. Ava Gardner was on the cover of both. Two hours later she paid with her babysitting money, trying not to think about the Fosters. Would they approve of her spending the money they’d paid her for watching Penny and Betsy on a haircut, while Betsy was being treated for severe burns and Mr. and Mrs. Foster were keeping a vigil at her bedside? Was she a terrible person for thinking of how she looked when they still didn’t know if Betsy would live or die? She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she left the beauty parlor and at first wasn’t sure who it was. She looked older, but nothing like Elizabeth Taylor. She shouldn’t have let Mr. Roman use hairspray. She hated hairspray. She walked home without her hat, letting the cold winter wind whip her hair around. Before going inside she ran her fingers through it and checked herself in the mirror of her Volupté compact, a birthday present from Leah. That was better. At home she’d have to hurry to get ready. Frekki was picking her up at 11:30. She prayed Rusty wouldn’t hear her come in—anything to avoid an argument today. It was laundry day, vacuuming day—Miri was responsible for her room, which she’d cleaned last night. But just as she opened the front door Rusty was coming up from the basement with the laundry basket. Miri braced for the worst. “Cute,” Rusty said, barely looking at her, which threw Miri for a loop. This was so unlike the reaction she’d expected, it worried her. When she was almost ready, in her cashmere sweater and pencil skirt, Rusty brought her the strand of pearls her parents had given her on her sixteenth birthday. Pearls, even though Rusty’s father had lost his business and was working behind the counter for next to nothing at his friend’s bakery.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  she can’t breathe at all. When he lets go, she pushes her sunglasses up so she can get a look at him. Did she hope he wouldn’t be attractive? He grabs her hand. “I’m so glad to see you.” “I’m glad to see you, too.” The voice that comes out doesn’t sound like hers. “Can I give you a ride to the lunch?” he asks. Christina and Jack have a car, so do Henry and Leah, but Miri says, “Sure,” and walks with Mason around the block to his red Mazda RX-7. She almost laughs because Andy drives the same car. “I’d know you anywhere,” he says, “even with the hair.” “I’d know you, too, even without it.” He’s not really without it, just has less on his head, more on his face. He laughs. And just like that, she’s fifteen again. Except she’s not. — THEY’RE SEATED at different tables at lunch. She’s with Christina and Jack, Henry and Leah, four others. He’s across the room with Gaby and her handsome husband, their grown children and young grandchildren, and two men who were boys at Janet then, boys who helped rescue the trapped passengers. None of her old crowd is here. Suzanne lives in Seattle, married to a neurosurgeon. Miri tries to see her every year. Robo is divorced and has a gift shop in Westfield. Aside from two years at Boston U, she’s never left New Jersey. Eleanor is a professor of mathematics at Purdue, married to an economist. She hasn’t won the Nobel Prize yet and didn’t laugh when, a few years ago, Miri mentioned the possibility. Some things aren’t funny, Eleanor told her. Miri and Mason steal looks at one another through lunch. Miri doesn’t blush the way Rusty does, but she feels her cheeks flush. She drinks two glasses of wine, too fast. It goes straight to her head. You go to my head... She must have sung that line out loud because the woman next to her, a daughter of the Secretary of War who was killed when the second plane crashed, says, “What?” Miri knows she sometimes sings a line from a song out loud when she means to sing it only inside her head. “I was just thinking of an old song,” she says. “Don’t you love the old songs?”