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 Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  All that is here related moves with imaginary feet along the parallels of dead orbs; all that is seen with the empty sockets bursts like flowering grass. Out of nothingness arises the sign of infinity; beneath the ever-rising spirals slowly sinks the gaping hole. The land and the water make numbers joined, a poem written with flesh and stronger than steel or granite. Through endless night the earth whirls toward a creation unknown. … Today I awoke from a sound sleep with curses of joy on my lips, with gibberish on my tongue, repeating to myself like a litany—“Fay ce que vouldras!… fay ce que vouldras!” Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy. So much crowds into my head when I say this to myself: images, gay ones, terrible ones, maddening ones, the wolf and the goat, the spider, the crab, syphilis with her wings outstretched and the door of the womb always on the latch, always open, ready like the tomb. Lust, crime, holiness: the lives of my adored ones, the failures of my adored ones, the words they left behind them, the words they left unfinished; the good they dragged after them and the evil, the sorrow, the discord, the rancor, the strife they created. But above all, the ecstasy! Things, certain things about my old idols bring the tears to my eyes: the interruptions, the disorder, the violence, above all, the hatred they aroused. When I think of their deformities, of the monstrous styles they chose, of the flatulence and tediousness of their works, of all the chaos and confusion they wallowed in, of the obstacles they heaped up about them, I feel an exaltation. They were all mired in their own dung. All men who over-elaborated. So true is it that I am almost tempted to say: “Show me a man who over-elaborates and I will show you a great man!” What is called their “over-elaboration” is my meat: it is the sign of struggle, it is struggle itself with all the fibers clinging to it, the very aura and ambiance of the discordant spirit. And when you show me a man who expresses himself perfectly I will not say that he is not great, but I will say that I am unattracted… I miss the cloying qualities. When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears. I see in the beautifully bloated pages that follow the interruptions the erasure of petty intrusions, of the dirty footprints, as it were, of cowards, liars, thieves, vandals, calumniators.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  By the time you get to New York this’ll be nothing more than a bad dream.” This got him so excited that his feet were moving convulsively, as if he were trying to run inside the cab. At the bank his hand was trembling so that he could hardly sign his name. That was one thing I couldn’t do for him—sign his name. But I think, had it been necessary, I could have sat him on the toilet and wiped his ass. I was determined to ship him off, even if I had to fold him up and put him in a valise. It was lunch hour when we got to the British Consulate, and the place was closed. That meant waiting until two o’clock. I couldn’t think of anything better to do, by way of killing time, than to eat. Fillmore, of course, wasn’t hungry. He was for eating a sandwich. “Fuck that!” I said. “You’re going to blow me to a good lunch. It’s the last square meal you’re going to have over here—maybe for a long while.” I steered him to a cosy little restaurant and ordered a good spread. I ordered the best wine on the menu, regardless of price or taste. I had all his money in my pocket—oodles of it, it seemed to me. Certainly never before had I had so much in my fist at one time. It was a treat to break a thousand franc note. I held it up to the light first to look at the beautiful watermark. Beautiful money! One of the few things the French make on a grand scale. Artistically done, too, as if they cherished a deep affection even for the symbol. The meal over, we went to a café. I ordered Chartreuse with the coffee. Why not? And I broke another bill—a five-hundred franc note this time. It was a clean, new, crisp bill. A pleasure to handle such money. The waiter handed me back a lot of dirty old bills that had been patched up with strips of gummed paper; I had a stack of five and ten franc notes and a bagful of chicken feed. Chinese money, with holes in it. I didn’t know in which pocket to stuff the money any more. My trousers were bursting with coins and bills. It made me slightly uncomfortable also, hauling all that dough out in public. I was afraid we might be taken for a couple of crooks. When we got to the American Express there wasn’t a devil of a lot of time left. The British, in their usual fumbling farting way, had kept us on pins and needles. Here everybody was sliding around on castors. They were so speedy that everything had to be done twice. After all the checks were signed and clipped in a neat little holder, it was discovered that he had signed in the wrong place. Nothing to do but start all over again.

• From The Girls (2016)

  jumpy and I laughed out loud, for no reason—the hills were so dark against the sky and no one from my real life knew where I was and it was the solstice, and who cared if it wasn’t actually the solstice? I had distant thoughts of my mother, houndish nips of worry, but she’d assume I was at Connie’s. Where else would I be? She couldn’t conceive of this kind of place even existing, and even if she could, even if by some miracle she showed up, she wouldn’t be able to recognize me. Suzanne’s dress was too big, and it often slipped off my shoulders, but pretty soon I wasn’t as quick to pull the sleeves back up. I liked the exposure, the way I could pretend I didn’t care, and how I actually started not to care, even when I accidentally flashed most of a breast as I hitched up the sleeves. Some stunned, blissed-out boy—a painted crescent moon on his face—grinned at me like I’d always been there among them. The feast was not a feast at all. Bloated cream puffs sweating in a bowl until someone fed them to the dogs. A plastic container of Cool Whip, green beans boiled to structureless gray, augmented by the winnings of some dumpster. Twelve forks clattered in a giant pot—everyone took turns scooping out a watery vegetal pabulum, the mash of potatoes and ketchup and onion soup packets. There was a single watermelon, rind patterned like a snake, but no one could find a knife. Finally Guy cracked it open violently on the corner of a table. The kids descended on the pulpy mess like rats. It was nothing like the feast I’d been imagining. The distance made me feel a little sad. But it was only sad in the old world, I reminded myself, where people stayed cowed by the bitter medicine of their lives. Where money kept everyone slaves, where they buttoned their shirts up to the neck, strangling any love they had inside themselves. — How often I replayed this moment again and again, until it gained a meaningful pitch: when Suzanne nudged me so I knew the man walking toward the fire was Russell. My first thought was shock—he’d looked young as he approached, but then I saw he was at least a decade older than Suzanne. Maybe even as old as my mother. Dressed in dirty Wranglers and a buckskin shirt, though his feet were bare—how strange that was, how they all walked barefoot through the weeds and the dog

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  “He thinks as he goes along”—very charming, charming indeed, as Borowski would say, but really very painful, particularly when the thinker is nothing but a spavined horse. Boris hands me money to buy liquor. Going for the liquor I am already intoxicated. I know just how I’ll begin when I get back to the house. Walking down the street it commences, the grand speech inside me that’s gurgling like Mrs. Wren’s loose laugh. Seems to me she had a slight edge on already. Listens beautifully when she’s tight. Coming out of the wine shop I hear the urinal gurgling. Everything is loose and splashy. I want Mrs. Wren to listen. … Boris is rubbing his hands again. Mr. Wren is still stuttering and spluttering. I have a bottle between my legs and I’m shoving the corkscrew in. Mrs. Wren has her mouth parted expectantly. The wine is splashing between my legs, the sun is splashing through the bay window, and inside my veins there is a bubble and splash of a thousand crazy things that commence to gush out of me now pell-mell. I’m telling them everything that comes to mind, everything that was bottled up inside me and which Mrs. Wren’s loose laugh has somehow released. With that bottle between my legs and the sun splashing through the window I experience once again the splendor of those miserable days when I first arrived in Paris, a bewildered, poverty-stricken individual who haunted the streets like a ghost at a banquet. Everything comes back to me in a rush—the toilets that wouldn’t work, the prince who shined my shoes, the Cinema Splendide where I slept on the patron’s overcoat, the bars in the window, the feeling of suffocation, the fat cockroaches, the drinking and carousing that went on between times, Rose Cannaque and Naples dying in the sunlight. Dancing the streets on an empty belly and now and then calling on strange people—Madame Delorme, for instance. How I ever got to Madame Delorme’s, I can’t imagine any more. But I got there, got inside somehow, past the butler, past the maid with her little white apron, got right inside the palace with my corduroy trousers and my hunting jacket—and not a button on my fly. Even now I can taste again the golden ambiance of that room where Madame Delorme sat upon a throne in her mannish rig, the goldfish in the bowls, the maps of the ancient world, the beautifully bound books; I can feel again her heavy hand resting upon my shoulder, frightening me a little with her heavy Lesbian air. More comfortable down below in that thick stew pouring into the Gare St. Lazare, the whores in the doorways, seltzer bottles on every table; a thick tide of semen flooding the gutters. Nothing better between five and seven than to be pushed around in that throng, to follow a leg or a beautiful bust, to move along with the tide and everything whirling in your brain.

• From The Girls (2016)

  showered, standing in the hot water until my skin splotched red, my hair slippery with conditioner. I put on a plain T-shirt and white cotton shorts, what I might have worn when I was younger, trying to appear scrubbed and sexless enough to comfort my mother. Though maybe I didn’t need to try so hard—she wasn’t looking closely enough to warrant the effort. The times we did have dinner together, a mostly silent affair, she would fuss at her food like a picky child. Inventing reasons to talk about Frank, inane weather reports from her own life. I could have been anyone. One night I didn’t bother to change, showing up at the table in a voile halter top that showed my stomach. She didn’t say anything, plowing her spoon through her rice with a distracted air until she seemed suddenly to remember my presence. Darting a slanted look at me. “You’re getting so skinny,” she announced, gripping my wrist and letting it drop in jealous measurement. I shrugged and she didn’t bring it up again. — When I finally met him in person, Mitch Lewis was fatter than I expected someone famous to be. Swollen, like there was butter under his skin. His face was furred with sideburns, his feathered golden hair. He brought a case of root beer for the girls and six netted bags of oranges. Stale brownies with German-chocolate frosting, in individual frilled cups like Pilgrims’ bonnets. Nougat candy in bright pink tins. The dregs of gift baskets, I assumed. A carton of cigarettes. “He knows I like this kind,” Suzanne said, hugging the cigarettes to her chest. “He remembered.” They all spoke of Mitch with that possessiveness, like he was an idea more than an actual person. They’d preened and prepared for Mitch’s visit with girlish eagerness. “You can see the ocean from his hot tub,” Suzanne told me. “Mitch put lights up so the water is all glowy.” “His dick is really big,” Donna added. “And like, purple.” Donna was washing her armpits in the sink, and Suzanne rolled her eyes. “Whore’s bath,” she murmured, but she’d changed into a dress. Even Russell slicked back his hair with water, giving him a polished, urbane air.

• From The Girls (2016)

  5 Even later, even knowing the things I knew, it was impossible, that first night, to see beyond the immediate. Russell’s buckskin shirt, smelling of flesh and rot and as soft as velvet. Suzanne’s smile blooming in me like a firework, losing its colored smoke, its pretty, drifting cinders. — “Home on the range,” Donna said as we climbed down from the bus that afternoon. It took me a moment to see where I was. The bus had gone far from the highway, bumping down a dirt road that ended deep in the blond summer hills, cupped with oaks. An old wooden house: the knobby rosettes and plaster columns giving it the air of a minor castle. It was part of a grid of ad hoc existence that included, as far as I could see, a barn and a swampy-looking pool. Six fleecy llamas drowsing in a pen. Far-off figures were hacking at brush along the fence. They raised their hands in greeting, then bent again to their work. “The creek is low, but you can still swim,” Donna said. It seemed magical to me that they actually lived there together. The Day-Glo symbols crawling up the side of the barn, clothes on a line ghosting in a breeze. An orphanage for raunchy children. They had once filmed a car commercial at the ranch, Helen said in her baby voice. “A while ago, but still.” Donna nudged me. “Pretty wild out here, huh?” I said, “How’d you even find this place?” “This old guy used to live here, but he had to move out ’cause the roof was bad.” Donna shrugged. “We fixed it, kind of. His grandson rents it to us.” To make money, she explained, they took care of the llamas and

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  There is a wonderful kind of excitement in modern neuroscience, a romantic, moon-walk sense of exploring and setting out for new frontiers. The science is elegant, the scientists dismayingly young, and the pace of discovery absolutely staggering. Like the molecular biologists, the brain-scanners are generally well aware of the extraordinary frontiers they are crossing, and it would take a mind that is on empty, or a heart made of stone, to be unmoved by their collective ventures and enthusiasms. I was, in spite of myself, caught up by the science, wondering whether these hyperintensities were the cause or the effect of illness, whether they became more pronounced over time, where in the brain they localized, whether they were related to the problems in spatial orientation and facial recognition that I and many other manic-depressives experience, and whether children who were at risk for manic-depressive illness, because one or both of their parents had the disease, would show these brain abnormalities even before they became ill. The clinical side of my mind began to mull about the visual advantages of these and other imaging findings in convincing some of my more literary and skeptical patients that (a) there is a brain, (b) their moods are related to their brains, and (c) there may be specific brain-damaging effects of going off their medications. These speculations kept me distracted for a while, as changing gears from the personal side of having manic-depressive illness to the professional role of studying and treating it often does. But, invariably, the personal interest and concerns returned. When I got back to Johns Hopkins, where I was now teaching, I buttonholed neurology colleagues and grilled my associates who were doing the MRI studies. I scurried off to the library to read up on what was known; it is, after all, one thing to believe intellectually that this disease is in your brain; it is quite another thing to actually see it. Even the titles of some of the articles were a bit ungluing: “Basal Ganglia Volumes and White Matter Hyperintensities in Patients with Bipolar Disorder,” “Structural Brain Abnormalities in Bipolar Affective Disorder: Ventricular Enlargement and Focal Signal Hyperintensities,” “Subcortical Abnormalities Detected in Bipolar Affective Disorders, Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging”; on and on they went. I sat down to read. One study found that “Of the 32 scans of the patients with bipolar disorder, 11 (34.4%) showed hyperintensities, while only one scan (3.2%) from the normal comparison group contained such abnormalities.”

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  My mind was beginning to have to scramble a bit to keep up with itself, as ideas were coming so fast that they intersected one another at every conceivable angle. There was a neuronal pileup on the highways of my brain, and the more I tried to slow down my thinking the more I became aware that I couldn’t. My enthusiasms were going into overdrive as well, although there often was some underlying thread of logic in what I was doing. One day, for example, I got into a frenzy of photocopying: I made thirty to forty copies of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, an article about religion and psychosis from the American Journal of Psychiatry, and another article, “Why I Do Not Attend Case Conferences,” written by a prominent psychologist who had elucidated all of the reasons why teaching rounds, when poorly conducted, are such a horrendous waste of time. All three of these articles seemed to me, quite suddenly, to have profound meaning and relevance for the clinical staff on the ward. So I passed them out to everyone I could. What is interesting to me now is not that I did such a typically manic thing; rather, it’s that there was some prescience and sense in those early days of incipient madness. The ward rounds were a complete waste of time, although the ward chief was less than appreciative of my pointing it out to everyone (and even less appreciative of my circulating the article to the entire staff). The Millay poem, “Renascence,” was one I had read as a young girl, and, as my mood became more and more ecstatic, and my mind started racing ever and ever faster, I somehow remembered it with utter clarity and straightaway looked it up. Although I was just beginning my journey into madness, the poem described the entire cycle I was about to go through: it started with normal perceptions of the world (“All I could see from where I stood / Was three long mountains and a wood”) and then continued through ecstatic and visionary states to unremitting despair and, finally, reemergence into the normal world, but with heightened awareness. Millay was nineteen years old when she wrote the poem, and, although I did not know it at the time, she later survived several breakdowns and hospitalizations. Somehow, in the strange state I was in, I knew that the poem had meaning for me; I understood it totally. I gave it to the residents and interns as a metaphorical description of the psychotic process and the important possibilities in a subsequent renewal. The residents, unaware of the internal flurry that propelled the readings, seemed to respond well to the articles and, almost to the person, expressed pleasure in the break from their regular medical reading.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  My interest in medicine, however, was lasting, and my parents fully encouraged it. When I was about twelve years old, they bought me dissecting tools, a microscope, and a copy of Gray’s Anatomy; the latter turned out to be inordinately complicated, but its presence gave me a sense of what I imagined real Medicine to be. The Ping-Pong table in our basement was my laboratory, and I spent endless late afternoons dissecting frogs, fish, worms, and turtles; only when I moved up the evolutionary ladder in my choice of subjects and was given a fetal pig—whose tiny snout and perfect little whiskers finally did me in—was I repelled from the world of dissection. Doctors at the hospital at Andrews Air Force Base, where I volunteered as a candy striper, or nurse’s aide, on weekends, gave me scalpels, hemostats, and, among other things, bottles of blood for one of my many homemade experiments. Far more important, they took me and my interests very seriously. They never tried to discourage me from becoming a doctor, even though it was an era that breathed, If woman, be a nurse. They took me on rounds with them and let me observe and even assist at minor surgical procedures. I carefully watched them take out sutures, change dressings, and do lumbar punctures. I held instruments, peered into wounds, and, on one occasion, actually removed stitches from a patient’s abdominal incision. I would arrive at the hospital early, leave late, and bring books and questions with me: What was it like to be a medical student? To deliver babies? To be around death? I must have been particularly convincing about my interest on the latter point because one of the doctors allowed me to attend part of an autopsy, which was extraordinary and horrifying. I stood at the side of the steel autopsy table, trying hard not to look at the dead child’s small, naked body, but being incapable of not doing so. The smell in the room was vile and saturating, and for a long while only the sloshing of water and the quickness of the pathologist’s hands were saving distractions. Eventually, in order to keep from seeing what I was seeing, I reverted back to a more cerebral, curious self, asking question after question, following each answer with yet another question. Why did the pathologist make the cuts he did? Why did he wear gloves? Where did all the body parts go? Why were some parts weighed and others not?

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Part One [image file=image_rsrcW2.jpg] THE WILD BLUE YONDERInto the Sun [image file=image_rsrcW1.jpg] I was standing with my head back, one pigtail caught between my teeth, listening to the jet overhead. The noise was loud, unusually so, which meant that it was close. My elementary school was near Andrews Air Force Base, just outside Washington; many of us were pilots’ kids, so the sound was a matter of routine. Being routine, however, didn’t take away from the magic, and I instinctively looked up from the playground to wave. I knew, of course, that the pilot couldn’t see me—I always knew that—just as I knew that even if he could see me the odds were that it wasn’t actually my father. But it was one of those things one did, and anyway I loved any and all excuses just to stare up into the skies. My father, a career Air Force officer, was first and foremost a scientist and only secondarily a pilot. But he loved to fly, and, because he was a meteorologist, both his mind and his soul ended up being in the skies. Like my father, I looked up rather more than I looked out. When I would say to him that the Navy and the Army were so much older than the Air Force, had so much more tradition and legend, he would say, Yes, that’s true, but the Air Force is the future. Then he would always add: And—we can fly. This statement of creed would occasionally be followed by an enthusiastic rendering of the Air Force song, fragments of which remain with me to this day, nested together, somewhat improbably, with phrases from Christmas carols, early poems, and bits and pieces of the Book of Common Prayer: all having great mood and meaning from childhood, and all still retaining the power to quicken the pulses. So I would listen and believe and, when I would hear the words “Off we go into the wild blue yonder,” I would think that “wild” and “yonder” were among the most wonderful words I had ever heard; likewise, I would feel the total exhilaration of the phrase “Climbing high, into the sun” and know instinctively that I was a part of those who loved the vastness of the sky.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  THE MODERN REDISCOVERY OF THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST For much of Western history, these ancient civilizations were known primarily from the accounts of Greek historians such as Herodotus (fifth century B.C.E.) and from references in the Bible. The modern recovery of the native Near Eastern sources began with Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798–1802. Napoleon took with him a group of scholars whom he charged with the task of preparing a record of the country. In the course of their work, they found an inscription on stone in Greek, classical Egyptian (hieroglyphics), and Egyptian demotic script (a popular form of Egyptian from the later half of the first millennium B.C.E.). This inscription became known as the Rosetta Stone. Since the same text was written in both Greek and Egyptian, it became possible to decipher hieroglyphics for the first time. (Names that were identified in all parts of the inscription provided the key.) The decipherment was accomplished by a French scholar, Jean-François Champollion. The rediscovery of ancient Mesopotamia also began in the early nineteenth century. An employee of the East India Company named Claudius Rich carried out a study of the ruins of Babylon, beginning in 1807. His collection of artifacts, including many cuneiform tablets, was purchased by the British Museum. The first explorations of Assyrian sites (Nineveh, Khorsabad) were carried out in the 1840s by a Frenchman, Paul-Émile Botta, and then, beginning in 1845, by an Englishman, Austen Henry Layard, who excavated palaces at Nimrud and Nineveh. Large quantities of Assyrian sculpture found their way to the British Museum, and some to private collectors in England. The key to the decipherment of Akkadian was provided by an inscription by a Persian king Darius on the rock of Behistun in Persia. The Behistun inscription was written with cuneiform signs in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian. The decipherment was accomplished mainly by H. C. Rawlinson, an Englishman, and Edward Hincks, an Irishman, in the 1850s. In the 1870s, the great works of Akkadian literature such as the creation story Enuma Elish and the Gilgamesh Epic were discovered and first translated. The Babylonian flood story, which was contained in the Epic of Gilgamesh, caused a sensation because of its similarity to the story of Noah and the ark. British 19th-century archaeologist Sir Austen Layard directs the removal of a sculpted human-headed bull from the mound at Nineveh.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions. Beside the perfection of Turgenev I put the perfection of Dostoevski. (Is there anything more perfect than The Eternal Husband?) Here, then, in one and the same medium, we have two kinds of perfection. But in Van Gogh’s letters there is a perfection beyond either of these. It is the triumph of the individual over art. There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books. Nobody, so far as I can see, is making use of those elements in the air which give direction and motivation to our lives. Only the killers seem to be extracting from life some satisfactory measure of what they are putting into it. The age demands violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions. Revolutions are nipped in the bud, or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly exhausted. Men fall back on ideas, comme d’habitude . Nothing is proposed that can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million lives in the space of a generation. In the study of entomology, or of deep sea life, or cellular activity, we derive more… The telephone interrupts this thought which I should never have been able to complete. Someone is coming to rent the apartment. … It looks as though it were finished, my life at the Villa Borghese. Well, I’ll take up these pages and move on. Things will happen elsewhere. Things are always happening. It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are like lice—they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can’t get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It’s in the blood now—misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch—until there’s no skin left. However, the effect upon me is exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged, or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death. So fast and furiously am I compelled to live now that there is scarcely time to record even these fragmentary notes. After the telephone call, a gentleman and his wife arrived. I went upstairs to lie down during the transaction. Lay there wondering what my next move would be. Surely not to go back to the fairy’s bed and toss about all night flicking bread crumbs with my toes. That puking little bastard! If there’s anything worse than being a fairy it’s being a miser.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  To me it looked easy, simple as rolling off a log. The whole thing was working itself out rapidly in my mind. I knew just what each step would be. Clear as a bell, I was. “Whose money is that in the bank?” I asked. “Is it her father’s or is it yours?” “It’s mine!” he exclaimed. “My mother sent it to me. I don’t want any of her goddamned money.” “That’s swell!” I said. “Listen, suppose we hop a cab and go back there. Draw out every cent. Then we’ll go to the British Consulate and get a visa. You’re going to hop the train this afternoon for London. From London you’ll take the first boat to America. I’m saying that because then you won’t be worried about her trailing you. She’ll never suspect that you went via London. If she goes searching for you she’ll naturally go to Le Havre first, or Cherbourg. ... And here’s another thing—you’re not going back to get your things. You’re going to leave everything here. Let her keep them. With that French mind of hers she’ll never dream that you scooted off without bag or baggage. It’s incredible. A Frenchman would never dream of doing a thing like that ... unless he was as cracked as you are.” “You’re right!” he exclaimed. “I never thought of that. Besides, you might send them to me later on—if she’ll surrender them! But that doesn’t matter now. Jesus, though, I haven’t even got a hat!” “What do you need a hat for? When you get to London you can buy everything you need. All you need now is to hurry. We’ve got to find out when the train leaves.” “Listen,” he said, reaching for his wallet, “I’m going to leave everything to you. Here, take this and do whatever’s necessary. I’m too weak. ... I’m dizzy.” I took the wallet and emptied it of the bills he had just drawn from the bank. A cab was standing at the curb. We hopped in. There was a train leaving the Gare du Nord at four o’clock, or thereabouts. I was figuring it out—the bank, the Consulate, the American Express, the station. Fine! Just about make it. “Now buck up!” I said, “and keep your shirt on! Shit, in a few hours you’ll be crossing the Channel. Tonight you’ll be walking around in London and you’ll get a good bellyful of English. Tomorrow you’ll be on the open sea—and then, by Jesus, you’re a free man and you needn’t give a fuck what happens. By the time you get to New York this’ll be nothing more than a bad dream.” This got him so excited that his feet were moving convulsively, as if he were trying to run inside the cab. At the bank his hand was trembling so that he could hardly sign his name. That was one thing I couldn’t do for him—sign his name.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  His voice is raucous, scraping, booming, a heavy blunt weapon that wedges its way through flesh and bone and cartilage. Boris calls me down to be introduced. He is rubbing his hands, like a pawnbroker. They are talking about a story Mr. Wren wrote, a story about a spavined horse. “But I thought Mr. Wren was a painter?” “To be sure,” says Boris, with a twinkle in his eye, “but in the wintertime he writes. And he writes well... remarkably well.” I try to induce Mr. Wren to talk, to say something, anything, to talk about the spavined horse, if necessary. But Mr. Wren is almost inarticulate. When he essays to speak of those dreary months with the pen he becomes unintelligible. Months and months he spends before setting a word to paper. (And there are only three months of winter!) What does he cogitate all those months and months of winter? So help me God, I can’t see this guy as a writer. Yet Mrs. Wren says that when he sits down to it the stuff just pours out. The talk drifts. It is difficult to follow Mr. Wren’s mind because he says nothing. He thinks as he goes along—so Mrs. Wren puts it. Mrs. Wren puts everything about Mr. Wren in the loveliest light. “He thinks as he goes along”— very charming, charming indeed, as Borowski would say, but really very painful, particularly when the thinker is nothing but a spavined horse. Boris hands me money to buy liquor. Going for the liquor I am already intoxicated. I know just how I’ll begin when I get back to the house. Walking down the street it commences, the grand speech inside me that’s gurgling like Mrs. Wren’s loose laugh. Seems to me she had a slight edge on already. Listens beautifully when she’s tight. Coming out of the wine shop I hear the urinal gurgling. Everything is loose and splashy. I want Mrs. Wren to listen. ... Boris is rubbing his hands again. Mr. Wren is still stuttering and spluttering. I have a bottle between my legs and I’m shoving the corkscrew in. Mrs. Wren has her mouth parted expectantly. The wine is splashing between my legs, the sun is splashing through the bay window, and inside my veins there is a bubble and splash of a thousand crazy things that commence to gush out of me now pell- mell. I’m telling them everything that comes to mind, everything that was bottled up inside me and which Mrs.

• From The Girls (2016)

  docile as dosed lab chimps. Those of us at the ranch functioned on a whole other level, fighting against the miserable squall, and so what if you had to mess with the straight people to achieve larger goals, larger worlds? If you checked yourself out of that old contract, Russell told us, refused all the bullshit scare tactics of civics class and prayer books and the principal’s office, you’d see there was no such thing as right and wrong. His permissive equations reduced these concepts to hollow relics, like medals from a regime no longer in power. — I asked Teddy for a drink. Lemonade, I figured, soda, anything but what he brought me, his hand shaking nervously when he passed me the glass. “Do you want a napkin?” he said. “Nah.” The intensity of his attention seemed exposing, and I laughed a little. I was just starting to learn how to be looked at. I took a deep drink. The glass was full of vodka, cloudy with the barest slip of orange juice. I coughed. “Your parents let you drink?” I asked, wiping at my mouth. “I do what I want,” he said, proud and uncertain at the same time. His eyes gleamed; I watched him decide what to say next. It was strange to watch someone else calibrate and worry over their actions instead of being the one who was worrying. Was this what Peter had felt around me? A limited patience, a sense of power that felt heady and slightly distressing. Teddy’s freckled face, ruddy and eager—he was only two years younger than me, but the distance seemed definitive. I took a large swallow from the glass, and Teddy cleared his throat. “I have some dope if you want it,” he said. — Teddy led me to his room, expectant as I glanced around at his boyish novelties. They seemed arranged for viewing, though it was all junk: a captain’s clock whose hands were dead, a long-forgotten ant farm, warped and molding. The glassy stipple of a partial arrowhead, a jar of pennies, green and scuzzy as sunken treasure. Usually I’d make some crack to Teddy. Ask him where he got the arrowhead or tell him about the

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  what a woman!” In a second he’s out again, with his hat on and the cracked cane in his hand. “I knew something like that was going to happen. She’s crazy!” He rummages around in the kitchen a while and then comes back to the studio with a bottle of Anjou. I have to sit up and down a glass with him. As far as I can piece the story together the whole thing started at the Rond-Point des Champs Elysées where he had dropped off for a drink on his way home. As usual at that hour the terrasse was crowded with buzzards. This one was sitting right on the aisle with a pile of saucers in front of her; she was getting drunk quietly all by herself when Fillmore happened along and caught her eye. “I’m drunk,” she giggled, “won’t you sit down?” And then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to do, she began right off the bat with the yarn about her movie director, how he had given her the go-by and how she had thrown herself in the Seine and so forth and so on. She couldn’t remember any more which bridge it was, only that there was a crowd around when they fished her out of the water. Besides, she didn’t see what difference it made which bridge she threw herself from—why did he ask such questions? She was laughing hysterically about it, and then suddenly she had a desire to be off—she wanted to dance. Seeing him hesitate she opens her bag impulsively and pulls out a hundred franc note. The next moment, however, she decided that a hundred francs wouldn’t go very far. “Haven’t you any money at all?” she said. No, he hadn’t very much in his pocket, but he had a checkbook at home. So they made a dash for the checkbook and then, of course, I had to happen in just as he was explaining to her the “No tickee, no shirtee” business. On the way home they had stopped off at the Poisson d’Or for a little snack which she had washed down with a few vodkas. She was in her element there with everyone kissing her hand and murmuring Princesse, Princesse . Drunk as she was, she managed to collect her dignity. “Don’t wiggle your behind like that!” she kept saying, as they danced. It was Fillmore’s idea, when he brought her back to the studio, to stay there. But, since she was such an intelligent girl and so erratic, he had decided to put up with her whims and postpone the grand event. He had even visualized the prospect of running across another princess and bringing the two of them back. When they started out for the evening, therefore, he was in a good humor and prepared, if necessary, to spend a few hundred francs on her. After all, one doesn’t run across a princess every day.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  “He thinks as he goes along”—very charming, charming indeed, as Borowski would say, but really very painful, particularly when the thinker is nothing but a spavined horse. Boris hands me money to buy liquor. Going for the liquor I am already intoxicated. I know just how I’ll begin when I get back to the house. Walking down the street it commences, the grand speech inside me that’s gurgling like Mrs. Wren’s loose laugh. Seems to me she had a slight edge on already. Listens beautifully when she’s tight. Coming out of the wine shop I hear the urinal gurgling. Everything is loose and splashy. I want Mrs. Wren to listen. … Boris is rubbing his hands again. Mr. Wren is still stuttering and spluttering. I have a bottle between my legs and I’m shoving the corkscrew in. Mrs. Wren has her mouth parted expectantly. The wine is splashing between my legs, the sun is splashing through the bay window, and inside my veins there is a bubble and splash of a thousand crazy things that commence to gush out of me now pell-mell. I’m telling them everything that comes to mind, everything that was bottled up inside me and which Mrs. Wren’s loose laugh has somehow released. With that bottle between my legs and the sun splashing through the window I experience once again the splendor of those miserable days when I first arrived in Paris, a bewildered, poverty-stricken individual who haunted the streets like a ghost at a banquet. Everything comes back to me in a rush—the toilets that wouldn’t work, the prince who shined my shoes, the Cinema Splendide where I slept on the patron’s overcoat, the bars in the window, the feeling of suffocation, the fat cockroaches, the drinking and carousing that went on between times, Rose Cannaque and Naples dying in the sunlight. Dancing the streets on an empty belly and now and then calling on strange people—Madame Delorme, for instance. How I ever got to Madame Delorme’s, I can’t imagine any more. But I got there, got inside somehow, past the butler, past the maid with her little white apron, got right inside the palace with my corduroy trousers and my hunting jacket—and not a button on my fly. Even now I can taste again the golden ambiance of that room where Madame Delorme sat upon a throne in her mannish rig, the goldfish in the bowls, the maps of the ancient world, the beautifully bound books; I can feel again her heavy hand resting upon my shoulder, frightening me a little with her heavy Lesbian air. More comfortable down below in that thick stew pouring into the Gare St. Lazare, the whores in the doorways, seltzer bottles on every table; a thick tide of semen flooding the gutters. Nothing better between five and seven than to be pushed around in that throng, to follow a leg or a beautiful bust, to move along with the tide and everything whirling in your brain.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  I was a senior in high school when I had my first attack of manic-depressive illness; once the siege began, I lost my mind rather rapidly. At first, everything seemed so easy. I raced about like a crazed weasel, bubbling with plans and enthusiasms, immersed in sports, and staying up all night, night after night, out with friends, reading everything that wasn’t nailed down, filling manuscript books with poems and fragments of plays, and making expansive, completely unrealistic, plans for my future. The world was filled with pleasure and promise; I felt great. Not just great, I felt really great. I felt I could do anything, that no task was too difficult. My mind seemed clear, fabulously focused, and able to make intuitive mathematical leaps that had up to that point entirely eluded me. Indeed, they elude me still. At the time, however, not only did everything make perfect sense, but it all began to fit into a marvelous kind of cosmic relatedness. My sense of enchantment with the laws of the natural world caused me to fizz over, and I found myself buttonholing my friends to tell them how beautiful it all was. They were less than transfixed by my insights into the webbings and beauties of the universe, although considerably impressed by how exhausting it was to be around my enthusiastic ramblings: You’re talking too fast, Kay. Slow down, Kay. You’re wearing me out, Kay. Slow down, Kay. And those times when they didn’t actually come out and say it, I still could see it in their eyes: For God’s sake, Kay, slow down. I did, finally, slow down. In fact, I came to a grinding halt. Unlike the very severe manic episodes that came a few years later and escalated wildly and psychotically out of control, this first sustained wave of mild mania was a light, lovely tincture of true mania; like hundreds of subsequent periods of high enthusiasms it was short-lived and quickly burned itself out: tiresome to my friends, perhaps; exhausting and exhilarating to me, definitely; but not disturbingly over the top. Then the bottom began to fall out of my life and mind. My thinking, far from being clearer than a crystal, was tortuous. I would read the same passage over and over again only to realize that I had no memory at all for what I just had read. Each book or poem I picked up was the same way. Incomprehensible. Nothing made sense. I could not begin to follow the material presented in my classes, and I would find myself staring out the window with no idea of what was going on around me. It was very frightening.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  One day, during my freshman year, I was walking through the botanical gardens at UCLA, and, gazing down into the small brook that flows through the gardens, I suddenly and powerfully was reminded of a scene from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Something, I think, about the Lady of the Lake. Compelled with an immediate and inflaming sense of urgency, I ran off to the bookstore to track down a copy of it, which I did. By the time I left the student union I was weighed down with at least twenty other books, some of which were related to Tennyson’s poem, but others of which were only very tangentially connected, if at all, to the Arthurian legend: Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and T. H. White’s The Once and Future King were added, as were The Golden Bough, The Celtic Realm, The Letters of Héloïse and Abelard, books by Jung, books by Robert Graves, books about Tristan and Isolde, anthologies of creation myths, and collections of Scottish fairy tales. They all seemed very related to one another at the time. Not only did they seem related, but they seemed together to contain some essential key to the grandiosely tizzied view of the universe that my mind was beginning to spin. The Arthurian tragedy explained everything there was to know about human nature—its passions, betrayals, violence, grace, and aspirations—and my mind wove and wove, propelled by the certainty of absolute truth. Naturally, given the universality of my insights, these purchases seemed absolutely essential at the time. Indeed, they had a certain rapturous logic to them. But in the world of more prosaic realities, I could ill afford the kind of impulsive buying that this represented. I was working twenty to thirty hours a week in order to pay my way through college, and there was no margin at all for the expenses I ran up during these times of high enthusiasms. Unfortunately, the pink overdraft notices from my bank always seemed to arrive when I was in the throes of the depressions that inevitably followed my weeks of exaltation. Much as it had during my senior year in high school, my classwork during these galvanized periods seemed very straightforward, and I found examinations, laboratory work, and papers almost absurdly easy during the weeks that the high-flying times would last. I also would become immersed in a variety of political and social causes that included everything from campus antiwar activities to slightly more idiosyncratic zealotries, such as protesting cosmetic firms that killed turtles in order to manufacture and sell beauty products. At one point I picketed a local department store with a homemade placard that showed two very badly drawn sea turtles scrunching their way across the sand, with bits of starlight overhead—a crushing reminder, I thought, of their remarkable navigational abilities—and the words YOUR SKIN HAS COST THEM THEIRS printed in large red letters beneath the picture.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  She was a lascivious bitch, this Marcelle, and pleasant at the same time. She soon got rid of the other girl, I noticed, and then we settled down for a long and intimate conversation which was interrupted unfortunately by the announcement that dinner was ready. There were about twenty of us at the table, and Marcelle and I were placed at one end opposite Jimmie and his wife. It began with the popping of champagne corks and was quickly followed by drunken speeches, during the course of which Marcelle and I played with each other under the table. When it came my turn to stand up and deliver a few words I had to hold the napkin in front of me. It was painful and exhilarating at the same time. I had to cut the speech very short because Marcelle was tickling me in the crotch all the while. The dinner lasted until almost midnight. I was looking forward to spending the night with Marcelle in that beautiful home up on the cliff. But it was not to be. Collins had planned to show us about and I couldn’t very well refuse. “Don’t worry about her,” he said. “You’ll have a bellyful of it before you leave. Tell her to wait here for you until we get back.” She was a bit peeved at this, Marcelle, but when we informed her that we had several days ahead of us she brightened up. When we got outdoors Fillmore very solemnly took us by the arm and said he had a little confession to make. He looked pale and worried. “Well, what is it?” said Collins cheerfully. “Spit it out!” Fillmore couldn’t spit it out like that, all at once. He hemmed and hawed and finally he blurted out—“Well, when I went to the closet just a minute ago I noticed something. …” “Then you’ve got it!” said Collins triumphantly, and with that he flourished the bottle of “Vénétienne.” “Don’t go to a doctor,” he added venomously. “They’ll bleed you to death, the greedy bastards. And don’t stop drinking either. That’s all hooey. Take this twice a day … shake it well before using. And nothing’s worse than worry, do you understand? Come on now. I’ll give you a syringe and some permanganate when we get back.” And so we started out into the night, down toward the waterfront where there was the sound of music and shouts and drunken oaths, Collins talking quietly all the while about this and that, about a boy he had fallen in love with, and the devil’s time he had to get out of the scrape when the parents got wise to it. From that he switched back to the Baron de Charlus and then to Kurtz who had gone up the river and got lost. His favorite theme. I liked the way Collins moved against this background of literature continuously; it was like a millionaire who never stepped out of his Rolls Royce.