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 7 of 182 · 20 per page

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  After us not another book—not for a generation, at least. Heretofore we had been digging in the dark, with nothing but instinct to guide us. Now we shall have a vessel in which to pour the vital fluid, a bomb which, when we throw it, will set off the world. We shall put into it enough to give the writers of tomorrow their plots, their dramas, their poems, their myths, their sciences. The world will be able to feed on it for a thousand years to come. It is colossal in its pretentiousness. The thought of it almost shatters us. For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grâce , it needs to be blown to smithereens. Not one of us is intact, and yet we have in us all the continents and the seas between the continents and the birds of the air. We are going to put it down—the evolution of this world which has died but which has not been buried. We are swimming on the face of time and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown. It will be enormous, the Book. There will be oceans of space in which to move about, to perambulate, to sing, to dance, to climb, to bathe, to leap somersaults, to whine, to rape, to murder. A cathedral, a veritable cathedral, in the building of which everybody will assist who has lost his identity. There will be masses for the dead, prayers, confessions, hymns, a moaning and a chattering, a sort of murderous insouciance; there will be rose windows and gargoyles and acolytes and pallbearers. You can bring your horses in and gallop through the aisles. You can butt your head against the walls—they won’t give. You can pray in any language you choose, or you can curl up outside and go to sleep. It will last a thousand years, at least, this cathedral, and there will be no replica, for the builders will be dead and the formula too. We will have postcards made and organize tours. We will build a town around it and set up a free commune. We have no need for genius—genius is dead. We have need for strong hands, for spirits who are willing to give up the ghost and put on flesh. … The day is moving along at a fine tempo. I am up on the balcony at Tania’s place. The drama is going on down below in the drawing room. The dramatist is sick and from above his scalp looks more scabrous than ever. His hair is made of straw. His ideas are straw. His wife too is straw, though still a little damp. The whole house is made of straw.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  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. A timid, quaking little bugger who lived in constant fear of going broke some day—the 18th of March perhaps, or the 25th of May precisely. Coffee without milk or sugar. Bread without butter. Meat without gravy, or no meat at all. Without this and without that! That dirty little miser! Open the bureau drawer one day and find money hidden away in a sock. Over two thousand francs—and checks that he hadn’t even cashed. Even that I wouldn’t have minded so much if there weren’t always coffee grounds in my beret and garbage on the floor, to say nothing of the cold cream jars and the greasy towels and the sink always stopped up. I tell you, the little bastard he smelled bad—except when he doused himself with cologne. His ears were dirty, his eyes were dirty, his ass was dirty. He was double-jointed, asthmatic, lousy, picayune, morbid. I could have forgiven him everything if only he had handed me a decent breakfast! But a man who has two thousand francs hidden away in a dirty sock and refuses to wear a clean shirt or smear a little butter over his bread, such a man is not just a fairy, nor even just a miser—he’s an imbecile! But that’s neither here nor there, about the fairy. I’m keeping an ear open as to what’s going on downstairs. It’s a Mr. Wren and his wife who have called to look at the apartment. They’re talking about taking it. Only talking about it, thank God. Mrs. Wren has a loose laugh—complications ahead. Now Mister Wren is talking.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  When we sallied out we had to pass through the red-light district where there were more grandmothers with shawls about their necks sitting on the doorsteps fanning themselves and nodding pleasantly to the passers-by. All such good-looking, kindly souls, as if they were keeping guard over a nursery. Little groups of sailors came swinging along and pushed their way noisily inside the gaudy joints. Sex everywhere: it was slopping over, a neap tide that swept the props from under the city. We piddled along at the edge of the basin where everything was jumbled and tangled; you had the impression that all these ships, these trawlers and yachts and schooners and barges, had been blown ashore by a violent storm. In the space of forty-eight hours so many things had happened that it seemed as if we had been in Le Havre a month or more. We were planning to leave early Monday morning, as Fillmore had to be back on the job. We spent Sunday drinking and carousing, clap or no clap. That afternoon Collins confided to us that he was thinking of returning to his ranch in Idaho; he hadn’t been home for eight years and he wanted to have a look at the mountains again before making another voyage East. We were sitting in a whorehouse at the time, waiting for a girl to appear; he had promised to slip her some cocaine. He was fed up with Le Havre, he told us. Too many vultures hanging around his neck. Besides, Jimmie’s wife had fallen in love with him and she was making things hot for him with her jealous fits. There was a scene almost every night. She had been on her good behavior since we arrived, but it wouldn’t last, he promised us. She was particularly jealous of a Russian girl who came to the bar now and then when she got tight. A troublemaker. On top of it all he was desperately in love with this boy whom he had told us about the first day. “A boy can break your heart,” he said. “He’s so damned beautiful! And so cruel!” We had to laugh at this. It sounded preposterous. But Collins was in earnest. Around midnight Sunday Fillmore and I retired; we had been given a room upstairs over the bar. It was sultry as the devil, not a breath of air stirring. Through the open windows we could hear them shouting downstairs and the gramophone going continually. All of a sudden a storm broke—a regular cloudburst. And between the thunderclaps and the squalls that lashed the window-panes there came to our ears the sound of another storm raging downstairs at the bar. It sounded frightfully close and sinister; the women were shrieking at the tops of their lungs, bottles were crashing, tables were upset and there was that familiar, nauseating thud that the human body makes when it crashes to the floor.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  We were brought up on Schumann and Hugo Wolf and sauerkraut and kümmel and potato dumplings. Toward evening we’re sitting around a big table with the curtains drawn and some fool two-headed wench is rapping for Jesus Christ. We’re holding hands under the table and the dame next to me has two fingers in my fly. And finally we lie on the floor, behind the piano, while someone sings a dreary song. The air is stifling and her breath is boozy. The pedal is moving up and down, stiffly, automatically, a crazy, futile movement, like a tower of dung that takes twenty-seven years to build but keeps perfect time. I pull her over me with the sounding board in my ears; the room is dark and the carpet is sticky with the kümmel that has been spilled about. Suddenly it seems as if the dawn were coming: it is like water purling over ice and the ice is blue with a rising mist, glaciers sunk in emerald green, chamois and antelope, golden groupers, sea cows mooching along and the amber jack leaping over the Arctic rim. … Elsa is sitting in my lap. Her eyes are like little belly-buttons. I look at her large mouth, so wet and glistening, and I cover it. She is humming now “Es wär’ so schön gewesen . …” Ah, Elsa, you don’t know yet what that means to me, your Trompeter von Säckingen . German Singing Societies, Schwaben Hall, the Turnverein… links um, rechts um … and then a whack over the ass with the end of a rope. Ah, the Germans! They take you all over like an omnibus. They give you indigestion. In the same night one cannot visit the morgue, the infirmary, the zoo, the signs of the zodiac, the limbos of philosophy, the caves of epistemology, the arcana of Freud and Stekel. … On the merry-go-round one doesn’t get anywhere, whereas with the Germans one can go from Vega to Lope de Vega, all in one night, and come away as foolish as Parsifal. As I say, the day began gloriously. It was only this morning that I became conscious again of this physical Paris of which I have been unaware for weeks. Perhaps it is because the book has begun to grow inside me. I am carrying it around with me everywhere. I walk through the streets big with child and the cops escort me across the street. Women get up to offer me their seats. Nobody pushes me rudely any more. I am pregnant. I waddle awkwardly, my big stomach pressed against the weight of the world. It was this morning, on our way to the Post Office, that we gave the book its final imprimatur. We have evolved a new cosmogony of literature, Boris and I. It is to be a new Bible—The Last Book . All those who have anything to say will say it here—anonymously . We will exhaust the age.

• 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)

  borrowed car, a Trans Am, possibly Mitch’s. Suzanne turned up the radio, KFRC, K. O. Bayley on the big 610. Both Suzanne and Donna seemed energized, and so was I. Happy to be back among them. Suzanne pulled into a glass-fronted Safeway that was familiar to me, the cant of its green roof. Where my mother shopped occasionally. “Grubby grub time,” Donna announced, making herself laugh. Donna hoisted herself over the lip of the dumpster, avid as an animal, knotting her skirt around her hips so she could dig deep. She got off on it, happy to muck around in the trash, the wet squelch. On the way back to the ranch, Suzanne made an announcement. “Time for a little trip,” she said, loudly recruiting Donna into the plan. I liked knowing she was thinking of me, trying to placate me. I noticed a new desperation around her after Mitch. I was more conscious of her attentions, of how to keep her eyes on me. “Where?” I asked. “You’ll see,” Suzanne said, catching Donna’s gaze. “It’s like our medicine, like a little cure for what ails you.” “Ooh,” Donna said, leaning forward. She seemed to have understood immediately what Suzanne was talking about. “Yes, yes, yes.” “We need a house,” Suzanne said. “That’s the first thing. An empty house.” She flashed a look at me. “Your mom’s gone, right?” I didn’t know what they were going to do. But I recognized a tinge of alarm, even then, and had the sense to spare my own home. I shifted in the seat. “She’s there all day.” Suzanne made a disappointed hum. But I was already thinking of another house that might be empty. And I offered it up to them, easily. I gave Suzanne directions, watching the roads grow more and more familiar. When Suzanne stopped the car and Donna got out and smeared mud on the first two numbers of the license plate, I only worried a little. I gathered an unfamiliar braveness, a sense of pushing past limitations, and tried to give myself up to the uncertainty. I was locked into my body in a way that was unfamiliar. It was the knowledge, perhaps, that I would do whatever Suzanne wanted me to do. That was a strange thought—that there was just this banal sense of being moved along the bright river of whatever was going to happen. That it could be as easy as this.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  The daydreams of my childhood were becoming a reality as I explored the world. The following year, when Susan was offered a job in Philadelphia, she asked me if I’d move there with her and I seized the opportunity like a prize. It didn’t matter that there was no job offer for me. I ached to be out of Boston, to be able to spread my wings in a place where I was anonymous, to have the opportunity to climb the next few rungs on the ladder to a career in the business world. With my family now secure and thriving, I no longer felt the need to hover. There was no boyfriend to keep be back. My love life was in the doldrums—maybe Philadelphia would prove to be a springboard for both my career and romance. I was particularly elated when my advisor at Boston University’s Metropolitan College, where I was now enrolled, encouraged me to take courses at Wharton School, promising me that they would count toward my degree. * * * The day after I moved into a spacious apartment overlooking Rittenhouse Square in Center City Philadelphia, I had an interview with the research department of The Pennsylvania Group, a broker/dealer located in Bala Cynwyd, a few miles out of the city. The discussion between me and the four research analysts—an all-male cast in a nearly all-male industry—remains vivid. They were looking for a statistician, they said, someone who could put together financial spreadsheets covering an array of industries that included airlines, railroads, hospitality and lodging, as well as insurance. The position sounded easy—I’d been doing similar work in Boston since being promoted from receptionist to assistant to a research analyst. But challenging, rather than easy, was what I was in search of, yearning for an opportunity to catapult myself forward in the business world, and I was pointed in my request. “I would like to do more than crunch numbers for you. Are you willing to answer the questions I have so that I can understand how each of the companies in these industries work?” They were unanimous in their agreement to work with me and so I took the job. Helen Reddy had just released her hit song, “I Am Woman,” and I felt one with her—I was “strong, not a novice any longer, invincible, with a long, long way to go.” Boston was a six-hour drive from Philadelphia, and that summer I made the trip on several occasions as my siblings and I planned a surprise twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party for our parents. It was exactly a year since all seven of us were out of the Center. My parents were beloved by the Center’s expatriate community, and we knew we’d have a houseful. Keeping the party a secret was nearly impossible—the surprise would simply be in the number of friends who showed up. How distant their days as Brother James Aloysius and Sister Elizabeth Ann now seemed.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  In addition to the Regents exams, two of my classmates and I had been practicing for the upcoming SATs, and on a bright Saturday morning in early June, Sister Ann Mary drove the three of us juniors to Groton School, the prestigious boys’ prep school in central Massachusetts. As we entered our assigned classroom, I beheld a sea of young men, each more handsome than the next. With long, tousled, dirty-blond hair falling over their eyes and smiles that showed off straight white teeth, they were hard to differentiate—tall, lanky frames with khaki trousers and open-collared shirts. They wore shoes with no socks on feet that shuffled. Slouched in their seats, their long legs stretched out beyond their desks, they had an air about them, as though the place was their domain. My insides went topsy-turvy. There were girls, too, with lipstick and high heels and handbags and skirts that ended halfway up their thighs. I was shocked—shocked and fascinated. As I took an aisle seat with my classmates at the back of the giant classroom, I realized that we, too, were being stared at, but for a different reason. Identically dressed in long, pleated navy dresses and white blouses with sleeves down to our wrists, black lace-up shoes, and a hairstyle that seemed more Tyrolean than American, it was evident that we created our own spectacle. I wanted to hide under the desk—to vanish. After a few glances our way, the gorgeous-looking boys ignored us. But I couldn’t keep from staring at their broad shoulders from the back of the room. Concentrate , I told myself. But it was no easy task. It would be a long time before I would forget those young men, milling about, jostling with each other, all-knowing in that foreign, evil world. And I wondered: Could one of them, one day, be for me? 44 The Spanish Invasion 1965 B rother Stanislaus served as master of ceremonies at the Center. Originally from Barcelona, or Catalonia as he liked to say, his heavy Spanish accent did nothing to inhibit his perpetual enthusiasm as he spoke his own brand of rapid, staccato English. He was unique among the Big Brothers, by dint of his enormous energy and magnetic personality. It was evident that both Father and Sister Catherine held him in great affection. Before coming to the Center, Brother Stanislaus had been studying for his Ph.D. in geology at Harvard. Now in the community, it was his role to oversee the altar boys, as well as the rituals and rubrics for our religious services, a job he carried out with meticulous care and great pride. It was an evening in September, shortly after I began my senior year of high school, when Sister Catherine entered our refectories with Brother Stanislaus at her side. “Little Sisters and Brothers, Brother Stanislaus has arranged for the choir of the University of Valencia to come for a visit.” She stepped aside and let him provide the details.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  The questions spilled out as the seven of us Walshes huddled together in the front room. What were the names of our grandparents? Laura and Bill McKinley. I thought of the president by the same name—were we related? No. Where did they live? In Cambridge. Did Sister Elizabeth Ann ever speak to them? Not in a long time. Did she have any brothers and sisters? A much younger sister who had two children. What was not divulged was that my aunt was twice divorced. Such information was considered scandalous. How many cousins did I have? The meeting came to an end leaving not enough time to have all my questions answered. But at least the Center could now craft a rebuttal to the claim that we children knew nothing about our families. The court case was drawing near as I entered my sophomore year, at age fifteen. To my surprise, Sister Mary Clare, who normally was one of the cooks for the guests and who also played the organ, was now assigned to be our English tutor. During the first week of tutoring, she introduced us to Shakespeare—Julius Caesar , The Merchant of Venice , Macbeth , and Hamlet . As she paced back and forth at the head of the classroom, her vibrant African American black eyes gleamed with energy. Holding the script at arm’s length, she impersonated, with gesture and voice, each of the characters in the play, as though she were on stage. Her passion was intoxicating. In a matter of days, English became my favorite subject. I delighted in exploring the world of literature, a world that included Keats and Shelley, Wordsworth and Masefield, George Eliot and Mark Twain. A few weeks later, when the authorities in the local school district came to observe us in the classroom, Sister Catherine introduced Sister Mary Clare as a “brilliant graduate of Radcliffe with her master’s in education.” At that moment, I understood the ploy. Sister Catherine had assigned Sister Mary Clare as one of our tutors to prove that our teachers were as good as the teachers out in the world. That was a savvy move on her part—upgrading the credentials of the tutors—but Sister Catherine chose to keep one step back from truly capitalizing on the intellectual prowess of the adults within the community. Not a single one of the Big Brothers was allowed to be a tutor, despite their array of extraordinary credentials—physicists, mathematicians, writers, geologists, poets. She kept those brilliant men relegated to menial tasks, where they posed less of a threat to her power. Our history tutoring room now had a newly installed corkboard wall that was crammed with newspaper clippings and articles from Time and Life , two magazines that Father had long told us were “of the devil.” I devoured the information they shed on the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and President John Kennedy.

• From The Girls (2016)

  salt factory in the Yucatán where they’d stayed for six months, the cloudy lagoon where Nico had learned to swim. It was painful to imagine what I had been doing at the same time: drinking the tepid, metallic water from my school’s drinking fountain. Biking to Connie’s house. Reclining in the dentist’s chair, hands politely in my lap, while Dr. Lopes worked in my mouth, his gloves slick with my idiot drool. — The night was warm and the celebration started early. There were maybe forty of us, swarming and massing in the stretch of dirt, hot air gusting over the run of tables, the wavy light from a kerosene lamp. The party seemed much bigger than it actually was. There was an antic quality that distorted my memory, the house looming behind us so everything gained a cinematic flicker. The music was loud, the sweet thrum occupying me in an exciting way, and people were dancing and grabbing for one another, hand over wrist: they skipped in circles, threading in and out. A drunken, yelping chain that broke when Roos sat down hard in the dirt, laughing. Some little kids skulked around the table like dogs, full and lonesome for the adult excitement, their lips scabby from picking. “Where’s Russell?” I asked Suzanne. She was stoned, like me, her black hair loose. Someone had given her a shrub rose, half-wilted, and she was trying to knot it in her hair. “He’ll be here,” she said. “It doesn’t really start till he’s here.” She brushed some ash off my dress and the gesture stirred me. “There’s our little doll,” Donna cooed when she saw me. She had a tinfoil crown on her head that kept falling off. She’d drawn an Egyptian pattern on her hands and freckled arms with kohl before clearly losing interest—it was all over her fingers, smeared on her dress, along her jaw. Guy swerved, avoiding her hands. “She’s our sacrifice,” Donna told him, her words already careening around. “Our solstice offering.” Guy smiled at me, his teeth stained from wine. — They burned a car that night in celebration, and the flames were hot and

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  In the same second Sister Willson caught his tie, looped it over her fist a few times, and pressed down on him. There wasn't time to laugh or cry before all three of them were down on the floor behind the altar. Their legs spiked out like kindling wood. Sister Monroe, who had been the cause of all the excitement, walked off the dais, cool and spent, and raised her flinty voice in the hymn, “I came to Jesus, as I was, worried, worn and sad, I found in Him a resting place and He has made me glad.” The minister took advantage of already being on the floor and asked in a choky little voice if the church would kneel with him to offer a prayer of thanksgiving. He said we had been visited with a mighty spirit, and let the whole church say Amen. On the next Sunday he took his text from the eighteenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke, and talked quietly but seriously about the Pharisees, who prayed in the streets so that the public would be impressed with their religious devotion. I doubt that anyone got the message—certainly not those to whom it was directed. The deacon board, however, did appropriate funds for him to buy a new suit. The other was a total loss. Our presiding elder had heard the story of Reverend Taylor and Sister Monroe, but I was sure he didn't know her by sight. So my interest in the service's potential and my aversion to Reverend Thomas caused me to turn him off. Turning off or tuning out people was my highly developed art. The custom of letting obedient children be seen but not heard was so agreeable to me that I went one step further: Obedient children should not see or hear if they chose not to do so. I laid a handful of attention on my face and tuned up the sounds in the church. Sister Monroe's fuse was already lit, and she sizzled somewhere to the right behind me. Elder Thomas jumped into the sermon, determined, I suppose, to give the members what they came for. I saw the ushers from the left side of the church near the big windows begin to move discreetly, like pallbearers, toward Sister Monroe's bench. Bailey jogged my knee. When the incident with Sister Monroe, which we always called simply “the incident,” had taken place, we had been too astounded to laugh. But for weeks after, all we needed to send us into violent outbursts of laughter was a whispered “Preach it.” Anyway, he pushed my knee, covered his mouth and whispered, “I say, preach it.” I looked toward Momma, across that square of stained boards, over the collection table, hoping that a look from her would root me safely to my sanity. But for the first time in memory Momma was staring behind me at Sister Monroe.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  19 The last inch of space was filled, yet people continued to wedge themselves along the walls of the Store. Uncle Willie had turned the radio up to its last notch so that youngsters on the porch wouldn't miss a word. Women sat on kitchen chairs, dining-room chairs, stools and upturned wooden boxes. Small children and babies perched on every lap available and men leaned on the shelves or on each other. The apprehensive mood was shot through with shafts of gaiety, as a black sky is streaked with lightning. “I ain't worried 'bout this fight. Joe's gonna whip that cracker like it's open season.” “He gone whip him till that white boy call him Momma.” At last the talking was finished and the string-along songs about razor blades were over and the fight began. “A quick jab to the head.” In the Store the crowd grunted. “A left to the head and a right and another left.” One of the listeners cackled like a hen and was quieted. “They're in a clench, Louis is trying to fight his way out.” Some bitter comedian on the porch said, “That white man don't mind hugging that niggah now, I betcha.” “The referee is moving in to break them up, but Louis finally pushed the contender away and it's an uppercut to the chin. The contender is hanging on, now he's backing away. Louis catches him with a short left to the jaw.” A tide of murmuring assent poured out the doors and into the yard. “Another left and another left. Louis is saving that mighty right ...” The mutter in the Store had grown into a baby roar and it was pierced by the clang of a bell and the announcer's “That's the bell for round three, ladies and gentlemen.” As I pushed my way into the Store I wondered if the announcer gave any thought to the fact that he was addressing as “ladies and gentlemen” all the Negroes around the world who sat sweating and praying, glued to their “master's voice.” There were only a few calls for R. C. Colas, Dr Peppers, and Hire's root beer. The real festivities would begin after the fight. Then even the old Christian ladies who taught their children and tried themselves to practice turning the other cheek would buy soft drinks, and if the Brown Bomber's victory was a particularly bloody one they would order peanut patties and Baby Ruths also. Bailey and I lay the coins on top of the cash register. Uncle Willie didn't allow us to ring up sales during a fight. It was too noisy and might shake up the atmosphere. When the gong rang for the next round we pushed through the near-sacred quiet to the herd of children outside. “He's got Louis against the ropes and now it's a left to the body and a right to the ribs. Another right to the body it looks like it was low ...

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  23 The children in Stamps trembled visibly with anticipation. Some adults were excited too, but to be certain the whole young population had come down with graduation epidemic. Large classes were graduating from both the grammar school and the high school. Even those who were years removed from their own day of glorious release were anxious to help with preparations as a kind of dry run. The junior students who were moving into the vacating classes' chairs were tradition-bound to show their talents for leadership and management. They strutted through the school and around the campus exerting pressure on the lower grades. Their authority was so new that occasionally if they pressed a little too hard it had to be overlooked. After all, next term was coming, and it never hurt a sixth grader to have a play sister in the eighth grade, or a tenth-year student to be able to call a twelfth grader Bubba. So all was endured in a spirit of shared understanding. But the graduating classes themselves were the nobility. Like travelers with exotic destinations on their minds, the graduates were remarkably forgetful. They came to school without their books, or tablets or even pencils. Volunteers fell over themselves to secure replacements for the missing equipment. When accepted, the willing workers might or might not be thanked, and it was of no importance to the pregraduation rites. Even teachers were respectful of the now quiet and aging seniors, and tended to speak to them, if not as equals, as beings only slightly lower than themselves. After tests were returned and grades given, the student body, which acted like an extended family, knew who did well, who excelled, and what piteous ones had failed. Unlike the white high school, Lafayette County Training School distinguished itself by having neither lawn, nor hedges, nor tennis court, nor climbing ivy. Its two buildings (main classrooms, the grade school and home economics) were set on a dirt hill with no fence to limit either its boundaries or those of bordering farms. There was a large expanse to the left of the school which was used alternately as a baseball diamond or a basketball court. Rusty hoops on the swaying poles represented the permanent recreational equipment, although bats and balls could be borrowed from the P. E. teacher if the borrower was qualified and if the diamond wasn't occupied. Over this rocky area relieved by a few shady tall persimmon trees the graduating class walked. The girls often held hands and no longer bothered to speak to the lower students. There was a sadness about them, as if this old world was not their home and they were bound for higher ground. The boys, on the other hand, had become more friendly, more outgoing. A decided change from the closed attitude they projected while studying for finals. Now they seemed not ready to give up the old school, the familiar paths and classrooms.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Just the same, as we glance over the terrasse there is hardly a whore in sight whom he hasn’t fucked at some time or other. Standing at the bar he points them out to me, one by one, goes over them anatomically, describes their good points and their bad. “They’re all frigid,” he says. And then begins to mold his hands, thinking of the nice, juicy virgins who are just dying for it. In the midst of his reveries he suddenly arrests himself, and grabbing my arm excitedly, he points to a whale of a woman who is just lowering herself into a seat. “There’s my Danish cunt,” he grunts. “See that ass? Danish. How that woman loves it! She just begs me for it. Come over here... look at her now, from the side! Look at that ass, will you? It’s enormous. I tell you, when she climbs over me I can hardly get my arms around it. It blots out the whole world. She makes me feel like a little bug crawling inside her. I don’t know why I fall for her—I suppose it’s that ass. It’s so incongruous like. And the creases in it! You can’t forget an ass like that. It’s a fact... a solid fact. The others, they may bore you, or they may give you a moment’s illusion, but this one—with her ass!— zowie, you can’t obliterate her... it’s like going to bed with a monument on top of you.” The Danish cunt seems to have electrified him. He’s lost all his sluggishness now. His eyes are popping out of his head. And of course one thing reminds him of another. He wants to get out of the fucking hotel because the noise bothers him. He wants to write a book too so as to have something to occupy his mind. But then the goddamned job stands in the way. “It takes it out of you, that fucking job! I don’t want to write about Montparnasse. ... I want to write my life, my thoughts. I want to get the dirt out of my belly. ... Listen, get that one over there! I had her a long time ago. She used to be down near Les Halles. A funny bitch. She lay on the edge of the bed and pulled her dress up. Ever try it that way? Not bad. She didn’t hurry me either. She just lay back and played with her hat while I slugged away at her. And when I come she says sort of bored like —‘Are you through?’ Like it didn’t make any difference at all. Of course, it doesn’t make any difference, I know that goddamn well... but the cold-blooded way she had... I sort of liked it... it was fascinating, you know? When she goes to wipe herself she begins to sing. Going out of the hotel she was still singing.

• From The Girls (2016)

  I kept talking about the ranch, about Russell. The way I tossed free Mitch’s name, like Donna had that day on the bus, with studied, careful deployment. The closer we got, the more worked up I became. Like horses that bolt with barn sickness, forgetting their rider. “It sounds nice,” Tom said. I could tell my stories had charged him, a dreamy excitement in his features. Mesmerized by bedtime tales of other worlds. “You could hang out for a while,” I said. “If you wanted.” Tom brightened at the offer, gratitude making him shy. “Only if I’m not intruding,” he said, a blush clotting his cheeks. — I imagined Suzanne and the others would be happy with me for bringing this new person. Expanding the ranks, all the old tricks. A pie-faced admirer to raise his voice with ours and contribute to the food pool. But it was something else, too, that I wanted to extend: the taut and pleasant silence in the car, the stale heat raising vapors of leather. The warped image of myself in the side mirrors, so I caught only the quantity of hair, the freckled skin of my shoulder. I took on the shape of a girl. The car crossed the bridge, passing through the shit-stench veil of the landfill. I could see the span of another distant highway, sided by water, and the marshy flats before the sudden drop into the valley, the ranch hidden in its hills. — By that time, the ranch I’d known was a place that no longer existed. The end had already arrived: each interaction its own elegy. But there was too much hopeful momentum in me to notice. The leap in me when Tom’s car had first turned down the ranch drive: it had been two weeks, not long at all, but the return was overwhelming. And only when I saw everything still there, still alive and strange and half-dreamy as ever, did I understand I’d worried it might be gone. The things I loved, the miraculous house—like the one in Gone with the Wind, I’d realized, coming upon it again. The silty rectangle of pool, half-full, with its teem of algae and exposed concrete: it could all pass back into my possession.

• From The Girls (2016)

  here.” Even though she’d seen Mrs. Dutton stop me, she kept glancing at Tom like he was the reason I’d left. Poor Tom, who wandered the grassy yard with the hesitant shuffle of museumgoers. His nose pricking from the animal smells, the backed-up outhouse. Suzanne’s face was shuttered with the same distant confusion as Donna’s: they could no longer conceive of a world where you could be punished. I was suddenly guilty for the nights with Tamar, the whole afternoons when I didn’t even think of Suzanne. I tried to make my father’s apartment sound worse than it had been, as if I’d been watched at every moment, suffered through endless punishments. “Jesus,” Suzanne snorted. “Dragsville.” — The shadow of the ranch house stretched along the grass like a strange outdoor room, and we occupied this blessing of shade, a line of mosquitoes hovering in the thin afternoon light. The air crackled with a carnival sheen—the familiar bodies of the girls jostling against mine, knocking me back into myself. The quick metal flash through the trees— Guy was bumping a car through the back ranch, calls echoing and disappearing. The drowsy shape of the children, mucking around a network of shallow puddles: someone had forgotten to turn off the hose. Helen had a blanket around herself, pulled up to her chin like a woolly ruff, and Donna kept trying to snap it away and expose the homecoming queen body underneath, the hematoma on Helen’s thigh. I was aware of Tom, sitting awkwardly in the dirt, but mostly I thrilled to Suzanne’s familiar shape beside me. She was talking quickly, a glaze of sweat on her face. Her dress was filthy, but her eyes were shining. Tamar and my father weren’t even home yet, I realized, and how funny it was to already be at the ranch when they didn’t even know I was gone. Nico was riding a tricycle that was too small for him, the bike rusted and clanging as he pedaled hard. “Cute kid,” Tom said. Donna and Helen laughed. Tom wasn’t sure what he’d said that was funny, but he blinked like he was willing to learn. Suzanne plucked at a stalk of oat grass, sitting in an old winged chair pulled from the house. I was keeping an eye out for

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ‘Wanda, you must teach me to foxtrot,’ smiled Stephen. Jamie was blundering round the room with Barbara clasped to her untidy bosom; then she and Barbara started to sing the harmless, but foolish words of the foxtrot—if the servants were singing their old Breton hymns along in the kitchen, no one troubled to listen. Growing hilarious, Jamie sang louder, spinning with Barbara, gyrating wildly, until Barbara, between laughing and coughing, must implore her to stop, must beg for mercy. Wanda said: ‘You might have a lesson now, Stephen.’ Putting her hands on Stephen’s shoulders, she began to explain the more simple steps, which did not appear at all hard to Stephen. The music seemed to have got into her feet so that her feet must follow its rhythm. She discovered to her own very great amazement that she liked this less formal modern dancing, and after a while she was clasping Mary quite firmly, and they moved away together while Wanda stood calling out her instructions: ‘Take much longer steps! Keep your knees straight—straighter! Don’t get so much to the side—look, it’s this way—hold her this way; always stand square to your partner.’ The lesson went on for a good two hours, until even Mary seemed somewhat exhausted. She suddenly rang the bell for Pierre, who appeared with the tray of simple supper. Then Mary did an unusual thing—she poured herself out a whiskey and soda. ‘I’m tired,’ she explained rather fretfully in answer to Stephen’s look of surprise; and she frowned as she turned her back abruptly. But Wanda shied away from the brandy as a frightened horse will shy from fire; she drank two large glasses of lemonade—an extremist she was in all things, this Wanda. Quite soon she announced that she must go home to bed, because of her latest picture which required every ounce of strength she had in her; but before she went she said eagerly to Stephen: ‘Do let me show you the Sacré Cœur. You have seen it of course, but only as a tourist; that is not really seeing it at all, you must come there with me.’ ‘All right,’ agreed Stephen. When Jamie and Barbara had departed in their turn, Stephen took Mary into her arms: ‘Dearest . . . has it been a fairly nice Christmas after all?’ she inquired almost timidly. Mary kissed her: ‘Of course it’s been a nice Christmas.’ Then her youthful face suddenly changed in expression, the grey eyes growing hard, the mouth resentful: ‘Damn that woman for what she’s done to us, Stephen—the insolence of it! But I’ve learnt my lesson; we’ve got plenty of friends without Lady Massey and Agnes, friends to whom we’re not moral lepers.’ And she laughed, a queer, little joyless laugh. Stephen flinched, remembering Brockett’s warning.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She laughed bitterly: ‘Why should I be merciful to you? Isn’t it enough that I accept your challenge, that I offer you the freedom of my house, that I don’t turn you out and forbid you to come here? Come by all means, whenever you like. You may even repeat our conversation to Mary; I shall not do so, but don’t let that stop you if you think you may possibly gain some advantage.’ He shook his head: ‘No, I shan’t repeat it.’ ‘Oh, well, that must be as you think best. I propose to behave as though nothing had happened—and now I must get along with my work.’ He hesitated: ‘Won’t you shake hands?’ ‘Of course,’ she smiled; ‘aren’t you my very good friend? But you know, you really must leave me now, Martin.’ 3 After he had gone she lit a cigarette; the action was purely automatic. She felt strangely excited yet strangely numb—a most curious synthesis of sensations; then she suddenly felt deathly sick and giddy. Going up to her bedroom she bathed her face, sat down on the bed and tried to think, conscious that her mind was completely blank. She was thinking of nothing—not even of Mary. CHAPTER 53 1 W ith Martin’s return Stephen realized how very deeply she had missed him; how much she still needed the thing he now offered, how long indeed she had starved for just this—the friendship of a normal and sympathetic man whose mentality being very much her own, was not only welcome but reassuring. Yes, strange though it was, with this normal man she was far more at ease than with Jonathan Brockett, far more at one with all his ideas, and at times far less conscious of her own inversion; though it seemed that Martin had not only read, but had thought a great deal about the subject. He spoke very little of his studies, however, just accepting her now for the thing that she was, without question, and accepting most of her friends with a courtesy as innocent of patronage as of any suspicion of morbid interest. And thus it was that in these first days they appeared to have achieved a complete reunion.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And now here they actually were in London, established at a quiet and expensive hotel; but the problem of Angela’s birthday present had, it seemed, only just begun for Stephen. She had not the least idea what she wanted, or what Angela wanted, which was far more important; and she did not know how to get rid of her mother, who appeared to dislike going out unaccompanied. For three days of the four Stephen fretted and fumed; never had Anna seemed so dependent. At Morton they now led quite separate lives, yet here in London they were always together. Scheme as she might she could find no excuse for a solitary visit to Bond Street. However, on the morning of the fourth and last day, Anna succumbed to a devastating headache. Stephen said: ‘I think I’ll go and get some air, if you really don’t need me—I’m feeling energetic! ’ ‘Yes, do—I don’t want you to stay in,’ groaned Anna, who was longing for peace and an aspirin tablet. Once out on the pavement Stephen hailed the first taxi she met; she was quite absurdly elated. ‘Drive to the Piccadilly end of Bond Street,’ she ordered, as she jumped in and slammed the door. Then she put her head quickly out of the window: ‘And when you get to the corner, please stop. I don’t want you to drive along Bond Street, I’ll walk. I want you to stop at the Piccadilly corner.’ But when she was actually standing on the corner—the left-hand corner—she began to feel doubtful as to which side of Bond Street she ought to tackle first. Should she try the right side or keep to the left? She decided to try the right side. Crossing over, she started to walk along slowly. At every jeweller’s shop she stood still and gazed at the wares displayed in the window. Now she was worried by quite a new problem, the problem of stones, there were so many kinds. Emeralds or rubies or perhaps just plain diamonds? Well, certainly neither emeralds nor rubies—Angela’s colouring demanded whiteness. Whiteness—she had it! Pearls—no, one pearl, one flawless pearl and set as a ring. Angela had once described such a ring with envy, but alas, it had been born in Paris. People stared at the masculine-looking girl who seemed so intent upon feminine adornments. And some one, a man, laughed and nudged his companion: ‘Look at that! What is it?’ ‘My God! What indeed?’ She heard them and suddenly felt less elated as she made her way into the shop. She said rather loudly: ‘I want a pearl ring.’ ‘A pearl ring? What kind, madam?’ She hesitated, unable now to describe what she did want: ‘I don’t quite know—but it must be a large one.’ ‘For yourself?’ And she thought that the man smiled a little . Of course he did nothing of the kind; but she stammered: ‘No—oh, no—it’s not for myself, it’s for a friend.

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

  The beginnings of Christianity are now absorbing the attention of scholars. During the present generation early church history has been vastly enriched by new sources of information, and almost revolutionized by independent criticism. Among the recent literary discoveries and publications the following deserve special mention: The Syriac Ignatius (by Cureton 1845 and 1849), which opened a new chapter in the Ignatian controversy so closely connected with the rise of Episcopacy and Catholicism; the Philosophumena of Hippolytus (by Miller 1851, and by Duncker and Schneidewin, 1859), which have shed a flood of light on the ancient heresies and systems of thought, as well as on the doctrinal and disciplinary commotions in the Roman church in the early part of third century; the Tenth Book of The Pseudo-Clementine Homilies (by Dressel, 1853), which supplements our knowledge of a curious type of distorted Christianity in the post-apostolic age, and furnishes, by an undoubted quotation, a valuable contribution to the solution of the Johannean problem; the Greek Hermas from Mt. Athos (the Codex Lipsiensis, published by Anger and Tischendorf, 1856); a new and complete Greek MS. of the First Epistle of the Roman Clement with several important new chapters and the oldestwritten Christian prayer (about one tenth of the whole), found in a Convent Library at Constantinople (by Bryennios, 1875); and in the same Codex the Second (so called) Epistle of Clement, or post-Clementine Homily rather, in its complete form (20 chs. instead of 12), giving us the first post-apostolic sermon, besides a new Greek text of the Epistle of Barnabus; a Syriac Version of Clement in the library of Jules Mohl, now at Cambridge (1876); fragments of Tatian’s Diatessaron with Ephraem’s Commentary on it, in an Armenian version (Latin by Mösinger 1878); fragments of the apologies of Melito (1858), and Aristides (1878); the complete Greek text of the Acts of Thomas (by Max Bonnet, 1883); and the crowning discovery of all, the Codex Sinaiticus, the only complete uncial MS. of the Greek Testament, together with the Greek Barnabus and the Greek Hermas (by Tischendorf, 1862), which, with the facsimile edition of the Vatican Codex (1868–1881, 6 vols.), marks an epoch in the science of textual criticism of the Greek Testament and of those two Apostolic Fathers, and establishes the fact of the ecclesiastical use of all our canonical books in the age of Eusebius. In view of these discoveries we would not be surprised if the Exposition of the Lord’s Oracles by Papias, which was still in existence at Nismes in 1215, the Memorials of Hegesippus, and the whole Greek original of Irenaeus, which were recorded by a librarian as extant in the sixteenth century, should turn up in some old convent. In connection with these fresh sources there has been a corresponding activity on the part of scholars.