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 The Decameron (1353)

  Calandrino gave ear to their talk and presently, seeing that it was no secret, he rose to his feet and joined himself to them, to the no small satisfaction of Maso, who, pursuing his discourse, was asked by Calandrino where these wonder-working stones were to be found. Maso replied that the most of them were found in Berlinzone, a city of the Basques, in a country called Bengodi,[371] where the vines are tied up with sausages and a goose is to be had for a farthing[372] and a gosling into the bargain, and that there was a mountain all of grated Parmesan cheese, whereon abode folk who did nothing but make maccaroni and ravioli[373] and cook them in capon-broth, after which they threw them down thence and whoso got most thereof had most; and that hard by ran a rivulet of vernage,[374] the best ever was drunk, without a drop of water therein. 'Marry,' cried Calandrino, 'that were a fine country; but tell me, what is done with the capons that they boil for broth?' Quoth Maso, 'The Basques eat them all.' Then said Calandrino, 'Wast thou ever there?' 'Was I ever there, quotha!' replied Maso. 'If I have been there once I have been there a thousand times.' 'And how many miles is it distant hence?' asked Calandrino; and Maso, 'How many? a million or more; you might count them all night and not know.' 'Then,' said Calandrino, 'it must be farther off than the Abruzzi?' 'Ay, indeed,' answered Maso; 'it is a trifle farther.' [Footnote 371: _i.e._ Good cheer.] [Footnote 372: A play upon the double meaning of _a denajo_, which signifies also "for money."] [Footnote 373: A kind of rissole made of eggs, sweet herbs and cheese.] [Footnote 374: _Vernaccia_, a kind of rich white wine like Malmsey.]

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  In a few minutes we were opposite three or four blazing railway carriages and the wreck of an engine. “How awful!” cried Gertie. “Let’s get over the fence”, I replied, “and go close!” The next moment I had thrown myself on the wooden paling and half vaulted, half clambered over it. But Gertie’s skirts prevented her from imitating me. As she stood in dismay, a great thought came to me: “Step on the low rail, Gertie”, I cried, “and then on the upper one and I’ll lift you over. Quick!” At once she did as she was told and while she stood with a foot on each rail hesitating and her hand on my head to steady herself, I put my right hand and arm between her legs and pulling her at the same moment towards me with my left hand, I lifted her over safely but my arm was in her crotch and when I withdrew it, my right hand stopped on her sex and began to touch it: It was larger than E…’s and had more hairs and was just as soft but she did not give me time to let it excite me so intensely. “Don’t!” she exclaimed angrily: “take your hand away!” And slowly, reluctantly I obeyed, trying to excite her first; as she still scowled: “Come quick!” I cried and taking her hand drew her over to the blazing wreck. In a little while we learned what had happened: a goods train loaded with barrels of oil had been at the top of the siding; it began to glide down of its own weight and ran into the Irish Express on its way from London to Holyhead. When the two met, the oil barrels were hurled over the engine of the express train, caught fire on the way and poured in flame over the first three carriages, reducing them and their unfortunate inmates to cinders in a very short time. There were a few persons burned and singed in the fourth and fifth carriages; but not many. Open-eyed we watched the gang of workmen lift out charred things like burnt logs rather than men and women, and lay them reverently in rows alongside the rails: about forty bodies, if I remember rightly, were taken out of that holocaust. Suddenly Gertie realised that it was late and quickly hand in hand we made our way home: “they’ll be angry with me”, said Gertie, “for being so late, it’s after midnight.” “When you tell them what you’ve seen!” I replied, “they won’t wonder that we waited.” As we parted I said, “Gertie dear, I want to thank you—” “What for” she said shortly. “You know”, I said cunningly, “it was so kind of you”—she made a face at me and ran up the steps into her house. Slowly I returned to my lodgings, only to find myself the hero of the house when I told the story in the morning.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  For the first half hour all went according to program. Charlie and I moved the cattle together and drove them over the waves of prairie towards the river; it all seemed as easy as eating and we had begun to push the cattle into a fast walk when suddenly there was a shot in front and a sort of stampede! At once Charlie shot out on the left as I shot out on the right and using our whips, we quickly got the herd into motion again, the rear ranks forcing the front ones on; the cattle were soon pressed into a shuffling trot and the difficulty seemed overcome. Just at that moment I saw two or three bright flames half a mile away on the other side of Charlie and suddenly I heard the zip of a bullet pass my own head and turning, saw pretty plainly a man riding fifty yards away from me. I took very careful aim at his horse and fired and was delighted to see horse and man come down and disappear. I paid no further attention to him and kept on forcing the pace of the cattle. But Charlie was very busily engaged for two or three minutes because the fusillade was kept up from behind till he was joined by Bent and shortly afterwards by Bob. We were all now driving the cattle as hard as they could go, straight towards the ford. The shots behind us continued and even grew more frequent, but we were not further molested till three quarters of an hour later we reached the Rio Grande and began urging the cattle across the ford. There progress was necessarily slow. We could scarcely have got across had it not been that about the middle Bob came up and made his whip and voice a perfect terror to the beasts in the rear. When we got them out on the other side I began to turn them westwards towards our wooded knoll, but the next moment Bob was beside me shouting—“Straight ahead, straight ahead; they are following us and we shall have to fight. You get on with the herd always straight north and I’ll bring Charlie back to the bank so as to hold ’em off.” Boylike, I said I would rather go and fight, but he said: “You go on. If Charlie killed, no matter. I want you.” And I had perforce to do what the little devil ordered. When Texan cattle have been brought up together the largest herd can be driven like a small bunch. They have their leader and they follow him religiously and so one man can drive a thousand head with very little trouble. For two or three miles I kept them on the trot and then I let them gradually get down to a walk. I did not want to lose any more of them; some fat cows had already died in their tracks through being driven so fast.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Mike excused himself, but the danger, if danger there was, appealed to me almost as much as the big pay: my only fear was that they’d think me too small or too young. I had told Mrs. Mulligan I was sixteen, for I didn’t want to be treated as a child and now I showed her the eighty cents I had earned that morning boot-blacking, and she advised me to keep on at it and not go to work under the water; but the promised five dollars a day won me. Next morning Mike took me to Brooklyn Bridge soon after five o’clock to see the Contractor: he wanted to engage Mike at once but shook his head over me. “Give me a trial”, I pleaded, “You’ll see, I’ll make good.” After a pause, “O.K.”, he said, “four shifts have gone down already underhanded; you may try.” I’ve told about the work and its dangers at some length in my novel “The Bomb”, but here I may add some details just to show what labor has to suffer. In the bare shed where we got ready the men told me no one could do the work for long without getting the “bends”; the “bends”, it appeared, were a sort of convulsive fit that twisted one’s body like a knot and often made you an invalid for life. They soon explained the whole procedure to me. We worked, it appeared, in a huge bell-shaped caisson of iron that went to the bottom of the river and was pumped full of compressed air to keep the water from entering it from below: the top of the caisson is a room called the “material chamber” into which the stuff dug out of the river passes up and is carted away. On the side of the caisson is another room, called the “airlock”, into which we were to go to be “compressed.” As the compressed air is admitted, the blood keeps absorbing the gasses of the air till the tension of the gasses in the blood becomes equal to that in the air: when this equilibrium has been reached, men can work in the caisson for hours without serious discomfort if sufficient pure air is constantly pumped in. It was the foul air that did the harm, it appeared; “if they’d pump in good air, it would be O.K.: but that would cost a little time and trouble and men’s lives are cheaper.” I saw that the men wanted to warn me, thinking I was too young, and accordingly I pretended to take little heed.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  My wild excitement made me shiver; I could have struck her for drawing away; but soon I noticed that she let my sex touch her clitoris with pleasure and I began to use my cock as a finger, caressing her with it. In a moment or two I began to move it more quickly and as my excitement grew to the height, I again tried to slip it into her pussy, and now as her love-dew came, I got my sex in a little way which gave me inexpressible pleasure; but when I pushed to go further, she drew away again with a sharp cry of pain. At the same moment my orgasm came on for the first time and seed like milk spurted from my sex. The pleasure thrill was almost unbearably keen: I could have screamed with the pang of it; but Jessie cried out, “Oh, you’re wetting me” and drew away with a frightened “Look, look!” And there, sure enough, on her round white thighs were patches of crimson blood. “Oh! I’m bleeding”, she cried, “what have you done?” “Nothing”, I answered, a little sulky, I’m afraid, at having my indescribable pleasure cut short, “nothing” and in a moment I had got out of bed, and taking my handkerchief soon wiped away the telltale traces. But when I wanted to begin again, Jessie wouldn’t hear of it at first: “No, no”, she said. “You’ve hurt me really, Jim, (my Christian name, I had told her, was James) and I’m scared, please be good.” I could only do her will, till a new thought struck me. At any rate I could see her now and study her beauties one by one, and so still lying by her I began kissing her left breast and soon the nipple grew a little stiff in my mouth. Why, I didn’t know and Jessie said she didn’t, but she liked it when I said her breasts were lovely and indeed they were, small and firm while the nipples pointed straight out. Suddenly the thought came, surprising me: it would have been much prettier if the circle surrounding the nipples had been rose-red instead of merely umber brown. I was thrilled by the bare idea. But her flanks and belly were lovely; the navel like a curled sea-shell, I thought, and the triangle of silky brown hairs on the Mount of Venus seemed to me enchanting, but Jessie kept covering her beauty-place. “It’s ugly”, she said, “please, boy”, but I went on caressing it and soon I was trying to slip my sex in again; though Jessie’s “O’s” of pain began at once and she begged me to stop.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “I’m obliged to you, you’re certainly a good loser, or winner perhaps I ought to have said, and altogether a remarkable boy. Are you really under sixteen?” I nodded smiling, and the rest of the prize-giving went off without further incident, save that when I appeared on the platform to get the Form prize of books, he smiled pleasantly at me and led the cheering. I’ve described the whole incident, for it illustrates to me the English desire to be fair: it is really a guiding impulse in them, on which one may reckon, and so far as my experience goes, it is perhaps stronger in them than in any other race. If it were not for their religious hypocrisies, childish conventions and above all, their incredible snobbishness, their love of fair play alone would make them the worthiest leaders of humanity. All this I felt then as a boy as clearly as I see it today. I knew that the way of my desire was open to me. Next morning I asked to see the Head; he was very amiable; but I pretended to be injured and disappointed. “My father”, I said, “reckons, I think, on my success and I’d like to see him before he hears the bad news from anyone else. Would you please give me the money for my journey and let me go today? It isn’t very pleasant for me to be here now.” “I’m sorry”, said the Doctor (and I think he was sorry), “of course I’ll do anything I can to lighten your disappointment. It’s very unfortunate but you must not be down-hearted: Professor S... says that your papers ensure your success next year, and I—well, I’ll do anything in my power to help you.” I bowed: “Thank you, Sir. Could I go today? There’s a train to Liverpool at noon?” “Certainly, certainly, if you wish it”, he said, “I’ll give orders immediately” and he cashed the cheque for ten pounds as well, with only a word that it was nominally to be used to buy books with, but he supposed it did not matter seriously. By noon I was in the train for Liverpool with fifteen pounds in my pocket, five pounds being for my fare to Ireland. I was trembling with excitement and delight; at length I was going to enter the real world and live as I wished to live. I had no regrets, no sorrows, I was filled with lively hopes and happy presentiments.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “Why do you smile?” he asked. “Because, sir, pay like water tends to find its level!” “What the devil d’ye mean by its level?” “The level,” I went on, “is surely the market price; sooner or later it’ll rise towards that and I can wait.” His keen grey eyes suddenly bored into me. “I begin to think you’re much older, than you look, as my nephew here tells me,” he said. “Put yourself down at a hundred a month for the present and in a little while we’ll perhaps find the ‘level,’” and he smiled. I thanked him and went out to my work. It seemed as if incidents were destined to crowd my life.... A day or so after this the taciturn steward, Payne, came and asked me if I’d go out with him to dinner and some theatre or other? I had not had a day off in five or six months so I said “Yes.” He gave me a great dinner at a famous French restaurant (I forget the name now) and wanted me to drink champagne. But I had already made up my mind not to touch any intoxicating liquor till I was twenty one and so I told him simply that I had taken the pledge. He beat about the bush a great deal, but at length said that as I was bookkeeper in place of Curtis, he hoped we should get along as he and Curtis had done. I asked him just what he meant but he wouldn’t speak plainly which excited my suspicions. A day or two afterwards I got into talk with a butcher in another quarter of the town and asked him what he would supply seventy pounds of beef and fifty pounds of mutton for, daily for a hotel; he gave me a price so much below the price Payne was paying that my suspicions were confirmed. I was tremendously excited. In my turn I invited Payne to dinner and led up to the subject. At once he said “of course there’s a ‘rake-off’ and if you’ll hold in with me, I’ll give you a third as I gave Curtis. The ‘rake-off’ don’t hurt anyone,” he went on, “for I buy below market-price.” Of course I was all ears and eager interest when he admitted that the ‘rake-off’ was on everything he bought and amounted to about 20 per cent. of the cost. By this he changed his wages from two hundred dollars a month into something like two hundred dollars a week.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I threw myself on French like a glutton and this was my method, which I don’t recommend but simply record, though it brought me to understand everything said by the end of the first week. I first spent five whole days on the grammar, learning all the verbs, especially the auxiliary and irregular verbs by heart, till I knew them as I knew my Alphabet. I then read Hugo’s Hernani with a dictionary in another long day of eighteen hours and the next evening went to the gallery in the Comédie Française to see the play acted by Sarah Bernhardt as Doña Sol and Mounet Sully as Hernani. For a while the rapid speech and strange accent puzzled me; but after the first act I began to understand what was said on the stage and after the second act I caught every word and to my delight when I came out into the streets, I understood everything said to me. After that golden night with Sarah’s grave, _traînante_ voice in my ears, I made rapid because unconscious progress. Next day in the restaurant I picked up a dirty torn copy of Madame Bovary that lacked the first eighty pages. I took it to my room and swallowed it in a couple of breathless hours, realising at once that it was a masterwork; but marking a hundred and fifty new words to turn out in my pocket dictionary afterwards. I learned these words carefully by heart and have never given myself any trouble about French since. What I know of it and I know it fairly well now, has come from reading and speaking it for thirty odd years. I still make mistakes in it chiefly of gender, I regret to say, and my accent is that of a foreigner, but taking it by and large I know it and its literature and speak it better than most foreigners and that suffices me. After some three weeks Ned Bancroft came from the States to live with me. He was never particularly sympathetic to me and I cannot account for our companionship save by the fact that I was peculiarly heedless and full of human, unreflecting kindness. I have said little of Ned Bancroft who was in love with Kate Stevens before she fell for Professor Smith; but I have just recorded the unselfish way he withdrew while keeping intact his friendship both for Smith and the girl: I thought that very fine of him. He left Lawrence and the University shortly after we first met and by “pull” obtained a good position on the railroad at Columbus, Ohio.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  There was a poetry reading last night at the library, with a wide range of age and ability among the poets, but the audience was very responsive. It reminded me again of how important poetry can be in the life of an ordinary Black community when that poetry is really the poetry of the lives of the people who make up that community. I suspect I shall have to concentrate upon how painful it is to think about death all the time. [In the spring of 1984, I spent three months in Berlin conducting a course in Black american women poets and a poetry workshop in English for German students. One of my aims for this trip was to meet Black German women. I’d been told there were quite a few in Berlin, but I had been unable to obtain much information about them in New York.] May 23, 1984 Berlin, West Germany Who are they, the German women of the diaspora? Where do our paths intersect as women of Color—beyond the details of our particular oppressions, although certainly not outside the reference of those details? And where do our paths diverge? Most important, what can we learn from our connected differences that will be useful to us both, Afro-German and Afro-American? Afro-German. The women say they’ve never heard that term used before. I asked one of my Black students how she’d thought about herself growing up. “The nicest thing they ever called us was ‘warbaby,’” she said. But the existence of most Black Germans has nothing to do with the Second World War, and, in fact, predates it by many decades. I have Black German women in my class who trace their Afro-German heritage back to the 1890s. For me, Afro-German means the shining faces of Katharina and May in animated conversation about their fathers’ homelands, the comparisons, joys, disappointments. It means my pleasure at seeing another Black woman walk into my classroom, her reticence slowly giving way as she explores a new self-awareness, gains a new way of thinking about herself in relation to other Black women. “I’ve never thought of Afro-German as a positive concept before,” she said, speaking out of the pain of having to live a difference that has no name, speaking out of the growing power self-scrutiny has forged from that difference. I am excited by these women, by their blossoming sense of identity as they’re beginning to say in one way or another, “Let us be ourselves now as we define us. We are not a figment of your imagination or an exotic answer to your desires. We are not some button on the pocket of your longing.” I can see these women as a growing force for international change, in concert with other Afro-Europeans, Afro-Asians, Afro-Americans.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Then came my hardest task: I had to tell Kendrick and Mr. Cotton that I must leave. They were more than astonished: at first they took it to be a little trick to extort a rise in salary: when they saw it was sheer boyish adventure-lust they argued with me but finally gave in. I promised to return to them as soon as I got back to Chicago or got tired of cowpunching. I had nearly eighteen hundred dollars saved, which, by Mr. Cotton’s advice, I transferred to a Kansas City bank he knew well. LIFE ON THE TRAIL. On the tenth of June, we took train to Kansas City, the Gate at that time of the “Wild West.” In Kansas City I became aware of three more men belonging to the outfit: Bent, Charlie and Bob, the Mexican. Charlie, to begin with the least important, was a handsome American youth, blue-eyed and fair-haired, over six feet in height, very strong, careless, light-hearted: I always thought of him as a big, kind, Newfoundland dog, rather awkward but always well-meaning. Bent was ten years older, a war-veteran, dark, saturnine, purposeful; five feet nine or ten in height with muscles of whipcord and a mentality that was curiously difficult to fathom. Bob, the most peculiar and original man I had ever met up to that time, was a little dried up Mexican, hardly five feet three in height, half Spaniard, half Indian, I believe, who might be thirty or fifty and who seldom opened his mouth except to curse all Americans in Spanish. Even Reece admitted that Bob could ride “above a bit” and knew more about cattle than anyone else in his world. Reece’s admiration directed my curiosity to the little man and I took every opportunity of talking to him and of giving him cigars—a courtesy so unusual that at first he was half inclined to resent it. It appeared that these three men had been left in Kansas City to dispose of another herd of cattle and to purchase stores needed at the ranch. They were all ready, so the next day we rode out of Kansas City, about four o’clock in the morning; our course roughly south by west. Everything was new and wonderful to me. In three days we had finished with roads and farmsteads and were on the open prairie; in two or three days more, the prairie became the great plains which stretched four or five thousand miles from north to south with a breadth of some seven hundred. The plains wore buffalo grass and sage-brush for a garment, and little else save in the river-bottoms, trees like the cottonwood; everywhere rabbits, prairie chicken, deer and buffalo abounded.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  As it so happened, I had gone to the saloon with him on his promise that he would only drink one glass, and though the glass would be full of forty-rod whisky, I knew it would have only a passing effect on Charlie’s superb strength. But it excited him enough to make him call up all the girls for a drink: they all streamed laughing to the bar, all save one. Naturally Charlie went after her and found a very pretty blond girl, who had a strain of Indian blood in her, it was said. At first she didn’t yield to Charlie’s invitation, so he turned away angrily, saying: “You don’t want to drink probably because you want to cure yourself or because you’re ugly where women are usually beautiful.” Answering the challenge the girl sprang to her feet, tore off her jacket and in a moment was naked to her boots and stockings. “Am I ugly?” she cried, pushing out her breasts, “or do I look ill, you fool!” and whirled around to give us the back view! She certainly had a lovely figure with fair youthful breasts and peculiarly full bottom and looked the picture of health. The full cheeks of her behind excited me intensely, I didn’t know why: therefore, it didn’t surprise me when Charlie, with a half-articulate shout of admiration, picked her up bodily in his arms and carried her out of the room. When I remonstrated with him afterwards, he told me he had a sure way of knowing whether the girl, Sue, was diseased or not. I contradicted him and found that this was his infallible test: as soon as he was alone with a girl, he pulled out ten or twenty dollars, as the case might be, and told her to keep the money. “I’ll not give you more in any case”, he would add: “now tell me, dear, if you are ill and we’ll have a last drink and then I’ll go. If she’s ill, she’s sure to tell you—see!” and he laughed triumphantly. “Suppose she doesn’t know she’s ill?” I asked: but he replied: “they always know and they’ll tell the truth when their greed is not against you.” For some time it looked as if Charlie had enjoyed his Beauty without any evil consequences, but a month or so later he noticed a lump in his right groin and soon afterwards a syphilitic sore showed itself just under the head of his penis. We had already started northwards, but I had to tell Charlie the plain truth. “Then it’s serious”, he cried in astonishment, and I replied. “I’m afraid so, but not if you take it in time and go under a rigorous regimen.” Charlie did everything he was told to do and always bragged that gonorrhea was much worse, as it is certainly more painful, than syphilis; but the disease in time had its revenge.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  To get the newer car was to start the day zestfully. Pirogov, the second chauffeur, was a very short, pudgy fellow with a russet complexion that matched well the shade of the furs he wore over his corduroy suit and the orange-brown of his leggings. When some hitch in the traffic forced him to apply the brakes (which he did by suddenly distending himself in a peculiar springy manner), or when I bothered him by trying to communicate with him through the squeaky and not very efficient speaking tube, the back of his thick neck seen through the glass partition would turn crimson. He frankly preferred to drive the hardy convertible Opel that we used in the country during three or four seasons, and would do so at sixty miles per hour (to realize how dashing that was in 1912, one should take into account the present inflation of speed): indeed, the very essence of summer freedom—schoolless untownishness—remains connected in my mind with the motor’s extravagant roar that the opened muffler would release on the long, lone highway. When in the second year of World War One Pirogov was mobilized, he was replaced by dark, wild-eyed Tsiganov, a former racing ace, who had participated in various contests both in Russia and abroad and had had several ribs broken in a bad smash in Belgium. Later, sometime in 1917, soon after my father resigned from Kerenski’s cabinet, Tsiganov decided—notwithstanding my father’s energetic protests—to save the powerful Wolseley car from possible confiscation by dismantling it and distributing its parts over hiding places known only to him. Still later, in the gloom of a tragic autumn, with the Bolshevists gaining the upper hand, one of Kerenski’s aides asked my father for a sturdy car the premier might use if forced to leave in a hurry; but our debile old Benz would not do and the Wolseley had embarrassingly vanished, and if I treasure the recollection of that request (recently denied by my eminent friend, but certainly made by his aide-de-camp), it is only from a compositional viewpoint—because of the amusing thematic echo of Christina von Korff’s part in the Varennes episode of 1791.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  That spring of 1916 is the one I see as the very type of a St. Petersburg spring, when I recall such specific images as Tamara, wearing an unfamiliar white hat, among the spectators of a hard-fought interscholastic soccer game, in which, that Sunday, the most sparkling luck helped me to make save after save in goal; and a Camberwell Beauty, exactly as old as our romance, sunning its bruised black wings, their borders now bleached by hibernation, on the back of a bench in Alexandrovski Garden; and the booming of cathedral bells in the keen air, above the corrugated dark blue of the Neva, voluptuously free of ice; and the fair in the confetti-studded slush of the Horse Guard Boulevard during Catkin Week, with its squeaking and popping din, its wooden toys, its loud hawking of Turkish delight and Cartesian devils called amerikanskie zhiteli (“American inhabitants”)—minute goblins of glass riding up and down in glass tubes filled with pink- or lilac-tinted alcohol as real Americans do (though all the epithet meant was “outlandish”) in the shafts of transparent skyscrapers as the office lights go out in the greenish sky. The excitement in the streets made one drunk with desire for the woods and the fields. Tamara and I were especially eager to return to our old haunts, but all through April her mother kept wavering between renting the same cottage again and economically staying in town. Finally, under a certain condition (accepted by Tamara with the fortitude of Hans Andersen’s little mermaid), the cottage was rented, and a glorious summer immediately enveloped us, and there she was, my happy Tamara, on the points of her toes, trying to pull down a racemosa branch in order to pick its puckered fruit, with all the world and its trees wheeling in the orb of her laughing eye, and a dark patch from her exertions in the sun forming under her raised arm on the raw shantung of her yellow frock. We lost ourselves in mossy woods and bathed in a fairy-tale cove and swore eternal love by the crowns of flowers that, like all little Russian mermaids, she was so fond of weaving, and early in the fall she moved to town in search of a job (this was the condition set by her mother), and in the course of the following months I did not see her at all, engrossed as I was in the kind of varied experience which I thought an elegant littérateur should seek. I had already entered an extravagant phase of sentiment and sensuality, that was to last about ten years. In looking at it from my present tower I see myself as a hundred different young men at once, all pursuing one changeful girl in a series of simultaneous or overlapping love affairs, some delightful, some sordid, that ranged from one-night adventures to protracted involvements and dissimulations, with very meager artistic results. Not only is the experience in question, and the shadows of all those charming ladies useless to me now in recomposing my past, but it creates a bothersome defocalization, and no matter how I worry the screws of memory, I cannot recall the way Tamara and I parted. There is possibly another reason, too, for this blurring: we had parted too many times before. During that last summer in the country, we used to part forever after each secret meeting when, in the fluid blackness of the night, on that old wooden bridge between masked moon and misty river, I would kiss her warm, wet eyelids and rain-chilled face, and immediately after go back to her for yet another farewell—and then the long, dark, wobbly uphill ride, my slow, laboriously pedaling feet trying to press down the monstrously strong and resilient darkness that refused to stay under.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  As soon as I returned from the Eldridge House to lodge with the Gregorys again, Kate showed herself just as kind to me as ever; she would come to my bedroom twice or thrice a week and was always welcome; but again and again I felt that her mother was intent on keeping us apart as much as possible and at length she arranged that Kate should pay a visit to some English friends who were settled in Kansas City. Kate postponed the visit several times: but at length she had to yield to her mother’s entreaties and advice. By this time my hoardings were bringing me in a good deal and so I proposed to accompany Kate and spend the whole night with her in some Kansas City hotel. We got to the hotel about ten and bold as brass I registered as Mr. and Mrs. William Wallace and went up to our room with Kate’s luggage, my heart beating in my throat: Kate, too, was “all of a quiver” as she confessed to me a little later; but what a night we had! Kate resolved to show me all her love and gave herself to me passionately; but she never took the initiative, I noticed, as Mrs. Mayhew used to do. At first I kissed her and talked a little; but as soon as she had arranged her things, I began to undress her: when her chemise fell, all glowing with my caressings she asked: “You really like that?” and she put her hand over her sex, standing there naked like a Greek Venus. “Naturally”, I exclaimed, “and these too” and I kissed and sucked her nipples till they grew rosy-red. “Is it possible to do it—standing up?” she asked in some confusion. “Of course”, I replied, “let’s try! But what put that into your head?” “I saw a man and girl once behind the Church near our house!” she whispered, “and I wondered how—” and she blushed rosily. As I got into her, I felt difficulty: her pussy was really small and this time seemed hot and dry: I felt her wince and at once withdrew: “does it still hurt, Kate?” I asked. “A little at first,” she replied; “but I don’t mind”, she hastened to add, “I like the pain!” By way of answer I slipped my arms around her under her bottom and carried her to the bed: “I will not hurt you tonight”, I said, “I’ll make you give down your love-juice first and then there’ll be no pain.” A few kisses and she sighed: “I’m wet now”, and I got into bed and put my sex against hers. “I’m going to leave everything to you”, I said, “but please don’t hurt yourself.” She put her hand down to my sex and guided it in sighing a little with satisfaction as bit by bit it slipped home.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  During this period of gestation I happened to read André Gide’s novel Lafcadio’s Adventures , and my eye fell upon this felicitous phrase: “History is fiction that did happen; whereas fiction is history that might have happened.” Those words jolted me: they described precisely what I wanted to do—to write fiction that might have happened. I wanted to write a genesis of psychotherapy that would have been entirely possible if history were rotated only slightly on its axis. I wanted the events of my novel to have had a possible existence. As I began to write, I could sense my characters stirring as though they strained to live once again. They needed my full attention, but my duties at Stanford were demanding: I taught residents and medical students, attended departmental meetings, and met with patients in individual and group therapy. To write this novel I knew I needed freedom from all distractions, so in 1990 I arranged for a four-month sabbatical. As always, Marilyn chose the setting for one half, and I the other. I selected one of the quietest, most isolated island chains in the world—the Seychelles—and she, as always, chose Paris. We spent our first month on Mahé, the main island of the Seychelles, and our second month on a smaller island, Praslin. Both were pristine, ringed with spectacular beaches, and almost eerily quiet—no newspapers, no Internet, no phones—the most conducive site for writing I have ever encountered. We wrote the first half of the day, I on my novel and Marilyn on Blood Sisters , an English expanded version of her French-language book about women who were eyewitnesses to the French Revolution. In the afternoons, we explored the island, walked the beaches, and snorkeled—and all the while, my characters were slowly coming to life in my mind. In the evenings we read, played Scrabble, and had dinner at the one nearby restaurant, and I mulled over plot development for the next day’s writing. I began cautiously, sticking close to historical facts whenever possible. My first decision was the time period. I wanted the ailing Nietzsche to have an encounter with therapy, and several considerations pointed to 1882, the year he contemplated suicide and most urgently needed help. His letters from that era describe great suffering for over three hundred days a year, including excruciating headaches, weakness, severe visual problems, and gastric distress. As a result of his poor health, he had resigned his teaching position in 1879 from the University of Basel and was rootless for the rest of his life, traveling from one guesthouse to another throughout Europe in search of atmospheric conditions that might temper his anguish. His correspondence reveals a profound depression. A typical 1882 letter to his one good friend, Franz Overbeck, read: “ … at the very base, immovable black melancholy.… I no longer see any point at all to living even another half year, everything is full, painful, dégoutant. I forgo and suffer too much.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN INTERNSHIP: THE MYSTERIOUS DR. BLACKWOOD A fter graduation, we former medical students, now Doctors of Medicine, entered a one-year internship where we had hands-on experience diagnosing and caring for patients in the hospital. In the first month of my internship at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, I was assigned to the obstetrical service and was struck by how frequently one particular doctor, Dr. Blackwood, was paged on the hospital loudspeakers. While assisting in a delivery I asked the chief resident, “Who is this Dr. Blackwood? I hear his name all the time, but I never see him.” Dr. Gold smiled, and the other nearby staff members chuckled. “I’ll introduce him to you later,” Dr. Gold said. “As soon as we’re finished here.” Later that evening, Dr. Gold escorted me into the doctors’ on-call room, where a spirited poker game was in process. I couldn’t believe my eyes: I felt like a kid in a candy store. “And which one is Dr. Blackwood?” I asked. “And why is he always being paged?” Another loud guffaw from everyone. I seemed to be amusing the entire obstetrical staff. Finally the chief resident clued me in: “Do you play bridge?” he asked. I nodded. “You know the Blackwood convention in bridge bidding?” I nodded again. “Well, there you have it. That’s your Dr. Blackwood. He exists only as a Mount Sinai poker symbol: whenever there is a hand short in this poker game, they page Dr. Blackwood.” The players were mostly obstetricians in private practice whose patients were in labor. House staff and interns were allowed into the game only when they were hard up for a player. Thereafter, for the rest of the year, when I had finished my rounds and was on call and had to spend the night at the hospital, I listened for the “Dr. Blackwood” page, and whenever I was free I charged over to the obstetrics department. The stakes were high, and interns were paid only twenty-five dollars a month (plus a free all-you-can-eat dinner, from which we made lunch sandwiches the next day—we took care of breakfast by ordering extra-large breakfasts for some of our patients). I lost my entire salary at the poker games for the next three or four months before I got a read on the game. After that I took Marilyn to quite a few Broadway shows compliments of Dr. Blackwood. I rotated through several services during the year at Mount Sinai: internal medicine, obstetrics, surgery, orthopedic surgery, emergency room, urology, and pediatrics. I learned how to deliver babies, how to tape sprained ankles, how to treat congestive heart failure, how to draw blood from an infant’s femoral artery, how to diagnose neurological conditions from observing the gait of a patient. In my surgery rotation I was permitted only to hold retractors for the surgeon.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Then came my hardest task: I had to tell Kendrick and Mr. Cotton that I must leave. They were more than astonished: at first they took it to be a little trick to extort a rise in salary: when they saw it was sheer boyish adventure-lust they argued with me but finally gave in. I promised to return to them as soon as I got back to Chicago or got tired of cowpunching. I had nearly eighteen hundred dollars saved, which, by Mr. Cotton’s advice, I transferred to a Kansas City bank he knew well. LIFE ON THE TRAIL. On the tenth of June, we took train to Kansas City, the Gate at that time of the “Wild West.” In Kansas City I became aware of three more men belonging to the outfit: Bent, Charlie and Bob, the Mexican. Charlie, to begin with the least important, was a handsome American youth, blue-eyed and fair-haired, over six feet in height, very strong, careless, light-hearted: I always thought of him as a big, kind, Newfoundland dog, rather awkward but always well-meaning. Bent was ten years older, a war-veteran, dark, saturnine, purposeful; five feet nine or ten in height with muscles of whipcord and a mentality that was curiously difficult to fathom. Bob, the most peculiar and original man I had ever met up to that time, was a little dried up Mexican, hardly five feet three in height, half Spaniard, half Indian, I believe, who might be thirty or fifty and who seldom opened his mouth except to curse all Americans in Spanish. Even Reece admitted that Bob could ride “above a bit” and knew more about cattle than anyone else in his world. Reece’s admiration directed my curiosity to the little man and I took every opportunity of talking to him and of giving him cigars—a courtesy so unusual that at first he was half inclined to resent it. It appeared that these three men had been left in Kansas City to dispose of another herd of cattle and to purchase stores needed at the ranch. They were all ready, so the next day we rode out of Kansas City, about four o’clock in the morning; our course roughly south by west. Everything was new and wonderful to me. In three days we had finished with roads and farmsteads and were on the open prairie; in two or three days more, the prairie became the great plains which stretched four or five thousand miles from north to south with a breadth of some seven hundred. The plains wore buffalo grass and sage-brush for a garment, and little else save in the river-bottoms, trees like the cottonwood; everywhere rabbits, prairie chicken, deer and buffalo abounded.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He dropped the blind and turned back into the room. The telephone rang. He stared at it sourly, thinking More revelations, and picked up the receiver. His agent, Harman, shouted in his ear. “Hello there—Eric? I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday morning, but you’re a pretty hard man to reach. I was thinking of sending you a telegram.” “Am I hard to find? I’ve just been staying home, it seems to me, curled up with that lovely script.” “Don’t shit me, sweetheart. I know you’ve got a hard on for that play, but it’s not that big. You just haven’t been answering your phone. Listen——” “Yes?” “About your screen test—you got a pencil?” “Wait a minute.” He found a pencil on his desk, and a scrap of paper, and returned to the phone. “Go ahead, Harman.” “You’re not going to the Coast. It’s fixed up for you to do it here. You know where the Allied Studios are?” “Yes, naturally.” “Well, it’s set for Wednesday morning. Allied, at ten. Listen. Can you have lunch with me tomorrow?” “Yes. I’d love to.” “Good. I’ll fill you in on all the details. Downey’s okay?” “Right. What time?” “One o’clock. Now—you still with me?” “All ears, baby.” “Well, we finally got that meshugena of a broken-down movie star in town and the rehearsal date is definitely set for a week from tomorrow.” “Next week?” “Right.” “Wonderful. God, I’ll be so glad to be working again.” Vivaldo came out of the bathroom, seeming unutterably huge in his blank, white nakedness, and walked into the kitchen. He looked critically at the coffee pot, came back into the room, and threw himself into the bed. “You’re going to be working from now on, Eric. You’re on your way, sweetheart; you’re going to go right over the top, and, baby, I couldn’t be more delighted.” “Thanks, Harman. I certainly hope you’re right.” “I’ve been in the business longer than you’ve been in the world, Eric. I know a winner when I see one and I’ve never made a mistake, not about that. You be good now, I’ll see you tomorrow. Good-bye.” “Good-bye.” He put down the receiver, filled with a fugitive excitement. “Good news?” “That was my agent. We’re going into rehearsal next week and we’re doing my screen test Wednesday.” Then his triumph blazed up in him and he turned to Vivaldo. “Isn’t that fantastic?” Vivaldo watched him, smiling. “I think we ought to drink to that, baby.” He watched as Eric picked up the empty bottle from the floor. “Ah. Too sad.” “But I’ve got a little bourbon,” Eric said. “Crazy.” Eric poured two bourbons and lowered the flame under the coffee. “Bourbon’s really much more fitting,” he said, happily, “since that’s what they drink in the South, where I come from.” He sat on the bed again, and they touched glasses. “To your first Oscar,” said Vivaldo. Eric laughed. “That’s touching. To your Nobel prize.”

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  GIOVANNI'S ROOM 85 Guillaume were now really beginningto be drunk.It was goingto be ghastly andI won- deredif those poor, patient boys wereever going to get anything to eat. Giovanni talkedto Guillaume for a moment, agreeing toopen up the bar;Jacques was toobusy with thepale tall boy to have muchtimefor me; we saidgood- morning and left them. 1 mustgo home,'I saidto Giovanniwhen we were inthe street. 1 mustpaymy hotel bill.' Giovanni stared. 'Maistu es fou/ hesaid mildly. 'There iscertainlyno pointin going homenow, tofaceanugly conciergeandthen gotosleep inthat roomallby yourself andthen wake up later,witha terrible stomach and a sourmouth,wantingto commitsuicide. Come with me;wewill riseat a civUizedhourand have a gentleaperitif somewhere andthen a little dinner. It will bemuch morecheerfullike that,*he said with a smile, 'you willsee/ 'But Imust getmyclothes,' I said. He tookmy arm. 'Bien sur. But you do not have to getthem now,' I held back. He stopped. 'Come. Iam sure that I ammuch prettier than your wallpaper —oryour concierge. Iwill smile atyou when you wake up.They willnot/ *Ah/ I could only say, 'tues vache.' Itis you who are vache/ he said, 'to want to leave me alone in this lonely place when you know that I am far too drunk to reach my home unaided.' Welaughed together, both caught up in a 86 James Baldwin stinging, teasing sort ofgame. Wereached the Boulevard de Sebastopol. 'But wewill not any longer discuss the painful subject ofhow you desired to desert Giovanni, atso dangerous an hour,in the middle ofahostile city/ I began torealize that he, too, was nervous. Far down the boulevard acab meandered toward us, and he put up hishand. 1 will showyoumy room,' he said. It is perfectly clear thatyou would have tosee it one of these days, anyway.' The taxi stopped beside us, andGiovanni, asthough he were suddenly afraid that Iwouldreally turn and run, pushed mein beforehim. He got inbeside me and toldthedriver:"Nation." The street he livedon was wide,respectable ratherthan elegant,andmassive withfairly re- cent apartment buildings; thestreet endedin a small park. Hisroomwas inthe back,onthe ground floor ofthelast building on thisstreet. Wepassedthevestibule andthe elevator into a short, darkcorridorwhich led tohis room.The roomwassmall, I only made out the outlines ofclutterand disorder,there was the smellof the alcohol heburned inhis stove.He locked the doorbehindus, and then for a moment, in the gloom,we simply staredat eachother — wdthdismay, with relief, and breathing hard. I was trembling.I thought, ifI do notopen the doorat once and get out of here, I amlost. But I knew I couldnot open the door, I knew it was too late;soon itwas too latetodo anything but moan.He pulled meagainst him, putting

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  My wild excitement made me shiver; I could have struck her for drawing away; but soon I noticed that she let my sex touch her clitoris with pleasure and I began to use my cock as a finger, caressing her with it. In a moment or two I began to move it more quickly and as my excitement grew to the height, I again tried to slip it into her pussy, and now as her love-dew came, I got my sex in a little way which gave me inexpressible pleasure; but when I pushed to go further, she drew away again with a sharp cry of pain. At the same moment my orgasm came on for the first time and seed like milk spurted from my sex. The pleasure thrill was almost unbearably keen: I could have screamed with the pang of it; but Jessie cried out, “Oh, you’re wetting me” and drew away with a frightened “Look, look!” And there, sure enough, on her round white thighs were patches of crimson blood. “Oh! I’m bleeding”, she cried, “what have you done?” “Nothing”, I answered, a little sulky, I’m afraid, at having my indescribable pleasure cut short, “nothing” and in a moment I had got out of bed, and taking my handkerchief soon wiped away the telltale traces. But when I wanted to begin again, Jessie wouldn’t hear of it at first: “No, no”, she said. “You’ve hurt me really, Jim, (my Christian name, I had told her, was James) and I’m scared, please be good.” I could only do her will, till a new thought struck me. At any rate I could see her now and study her beauties one by one, and so still lying by her I began kissing her left breast and soon the nipple grew a little stiff in my mouth. Why, I didn’t know and Jessie said she didn’t, but she liked it when I said her breasts were lovely and indeed they were, small and firm while the nipples pointed straight out. Suddenly the thought came, surprising me: it would have been much prettier if the circle surrounding the nipples had been rose-red instead of merely umber brown. I was thrilled by the bare idea. But her flanks and belly were lovely; the navel like a curled sea-shell, I thought, and the triangle of silky brown hairs on the Mount of Venus seemed to me enchanting, but Jessie kept covering her beauty-place. “It’s ugly”, she said, “please, boy”, but I went on caressing it and soon I was trying to slip my sex in again; though Jessie’s “O’s” of pain began at once and she begged me to stop.