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 90 of 182 · 20 per page

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  We were all jolly stirred, though we showed it in different ways. Harrap was particularly struck, & gasped ‘I say, I say’ over & over, taking his hat off & then prudently putting it back on again. I imagine he’ll say ‘I say, I say’ quite a lot more as Africa offers up its wonders. Not that the landfall itself is in the least remarkable: we had shuffled along in & out of sight of land for the last day or more, but it gave nothing of itself away: a certain amount of traffic evidently going in & out of Alex, & smallish freighters passing near enough for us to see our first Africans. Their lack of any sense of occasion was infinitely touching & humbling. Here was your fellah at his changeless labours—and us Englishmen, coming to rule & to help, so young & calm. I was in the most delirious mixture of silliness & solemnity, & as we approached the entrance to the Canal, & saw the cranes on the docks, the frankly undistinguished buildings, soldiers too as we drew closer, & crowds in djellabas somehow indifferent & yet in a flurry at our arrival, Oxford and England and Poppy seemed almost giddily remote. The heat was rocketing up all the time of course, & when the ship finally stopped moving, & we stood along the rail disdaining to wave at the children & waiting for the gangway to be lowered, it slammed in our faces for the first time. We had 12 hours here while refuelling took place, and I was so much looking forward to it that I cd hardly bring myself to go ashore, & had to think hard about deadly serious things to keep myself from grinning like a fool as I went at a canter down the virtually perpendicular gangplank & shot into the melee of people. I longed to look at them & shake their outstretched, begging, greeting hands, instead of marching implacably through, as we had to. Custom dictated that we go to Simon Artz’s emporium to buy our sola topis; Fryer and I stood wearing them in front of a huge dim mirror, which made us look very historic, and rather silly. I found mine uncomfortable, & was afraid it suddenly drew all the character out of my face & turned me into just another hard-hatted, heavy-handed empire-builder.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  As the series went on it became clear that there were many people who wished to possess the articles in more permanent form. At first I was surprised at this, for these articles might be defined as an attempt to popularize the Greek dictionary, and to teach Greek to people who do not know any Greek. But it seems to me that this interest was simply one facet of the quite extraordinary interest in the Bible which exists today and which is becoming ever stronger. I do not think that there ever was a time when people were more interested in what the Bible has to say and in what the Bible means. Therein lies the justification for a book like this. Translation from one language into another is in one sense impossible. It is always possible to translate words with accuracy when they refer to things. A chair is a chair in any language. But it is a different matter when it is a question of ideas. In that case some words need, not another to translate them, but a phrase, or a sentence, or even a paragraph. Further, words have associations. They have associations with people, with history, with ideas, with other words, and these associations give words a certain flavour which cannot be rendered in translation, but which affects their meaning and significance in the most important way. This book is an attempt to take certain great NT words and to find out what these words meant to the writers of the NT and to those who read and heard their message for the first time. To do that means seeking to trace the meaning of these words in classical Greek, in the Septuagint, when they occur there, in Hellenistic Greek and in the papyri.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  These words caused the queen such violent transports that, in order to conceal the commotion of her spirits, she took the gentleman's arm, and went with him into a garden adjoining her chamber, where she walked up and down a long while without being able to speak a single word to him. But the gentleman, seeing her half-con- quered, no sooner reached the end of an alley where no one could see them, than he plied her to good purpose with his long-concealed passion. Being both of one mind, they revenged themselves together ; and it was arranged between them that whenever the king went to visit the gentleman's wife, the gentleman should visit the queen. Thus, the cheaters being cheated, four would share the pleasure which two imagined they had all to 32 THE HEPl'AMERON OF THE ^No^'el % themselves. When all was over, the queen retired to her chamber, and the gentleman went home, both of them so well contented that they thought no more of their past vexations. The gentleman, far from dreading lest the king should visit his wife, on the contrary desired nothing better ; and to afford him opportunity for doing so, he went to the country oftener than he had been used. When the king knew that the gentleman was at his village, which was but half a league from the city, he went at once to the fair lady ; whilst the gentleman re- paired by night to the queen's chamber, where he did duty as the king's lieutenant so secretly that no one perceived it. Things went on in this way for a long while ; but whatever pains the king took to conceal his amour, all the world was aware of it. The gentleman was much pitied by all good-natured people, and ridiculed by the ill-natured, who used to make horns at him behind his back. He knew very well that they did so, and he laughed in his sleeve, for he thought his horns were as good as the king's crown. One day, when the royal gallant was at the gentleman's, casting his eyes on a pair of antlers hung up in the hall, he could not help saying, with a laugh, in the presence of the master of the house himself, "These antlers very well become this place." The gentleman, who had as much spirit as the king, had this inscription put up beneath the antlers after the king was gone: lo porto le corna, ciascun lo vede; Ma tal le porta, chi no lo crede. I wear the horns as all men know ; He wears them too who thinks not so. On his next visit the king observed this inscription, and First day\ QUEEN OF NA VA KRE. 33

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Yes. They’re mostly only glancing—he must have known him at Oxford, and after. There’s no Oxford diary of course. The most interesting one is before Waugh goes to Africa: “Dinner with Alastair, who returns to Cairo on Sunday. We ran over the Abyssinian plan again. Later we were joined by Charlie Nantwich. He was quite drunk, having been at Georgia’s. Georgia says he is having a liaison with a Negro waiter at the Trocadero, and it is not going well. We pretended to know nothing. He passionate about Africa, beauty, grace, nobility etc of Negroes. He gave me copious advice, which I promised to remember. A. very quiet.” ’ ‘Amazing,’ I said. ‘Is that all about him?’ ‘That’s the main thing. Quite juicy, isn’t it? Dearest, you must do this. You are going to, aren’t you?’ I rubbed at my legs with the towel. ‘Actually, I’ve just about come to the decision not to.’ ‘Well, I think you’re mad.’ ‘I know.’ ‘Look, he’s obviously selected you specially. You’re meant to do it.’ In James a scientific mind coexisted with a fantastic and romantic belief in Providence. ‘And you’ve got fuck-all else to do. And you can write—your essay on Coade Stone vases was heart-breaking. And you’re very keen on the grace, nobility and so forth of Negroes. It’s an ideal opportunity. If you don’t do it, some other creep will get on to him. Or worse, the old boy will die. It would be an inestimable advantage,’ James concluded, ‘to do it while he was alive, to talk to about it all.’ ‘You’ve obviously thought about this far more clearly than I have,’ I said flippantly but truthfully. ‘I’d do it myself, but you know how it is—the sick to heal …’ ‘I agree there are reasons for doing it. I’ve just been preoccupied with the reasons for not doing it.’ ‘It’s too pathetic. I know you think you’re too grand to do any work, but you’ve got to commit yourself to something. Otherwise you’ll end up an old-young queen who’s done nothing worthwhile. Famous last words of the third Viscount Beckwith: “Fuck me again”.’ I smirked and half-laughed. ‘I thought my last words were to be “How do I look?” ’ James, himself in his grandest mood, was doing his occasional lecture, for which he stood in, it struck me, as an updated version of Mr Bast. ‘It’s just the thought of it going on for years and years, and perhaps not being interesting in the least.’ ‘There is also the thought that it will undoubtedly be a bestseller. Come on, he was obviously testing you out at his house—what did you think of the pictures, how did you react to the statue of King Thingamy.’ ‘There’s no doubt of that, and he obviously fancies me.’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It gave me a shock but also the pleasure of a bitter little nodding to myself in recognition of what was afoot. ‘Right!’ I thought, and then, after turning quickly at the corner to look back—but there were other people on the street now, and the distance was all a pattern of shadows—more or less forgot about it for the rest of the night. I was too taken up with the honest but slightly unworthy excitement of coming back to my old haunt with such a luscious piece of goods as Phil. It was the half-hour after closing time and the narrow grid of Soho was rowdy with people, some shutting up shop, some stumbling from pubs, and others performing the awkward, drunken transition from one place of amusement to another, where money would pour off them into the early hours of the morning. There was a small crowd outside the Shaft, a gaggle of excited boys, and others waiting, staring challengingly at the arrivals. The thump of the music, like some powerful creature barely contained, came up out of the ground and gathered around us as we went in at the door. On the stairs it began to be really loud, the whole foundations humming with the bass while a thrilling electronic rinse of high-pitched noise set the ears tingling. From now on talk would be shouting, or confidences made with lips and tongue pressed close to the ear: we would be hoarse from our intimacies. The medium of the place was black music, and even the double-jointed spareness of reggae came over the dance floor like a whiplash. At the foot of the stairs, in his pink-bulbed cubbyhole, Denys took our money. ‘Hey Willy, I thought you was dead, man.’ ‘I’ve been resurrected, just for tonight.’ He grinned. ‘Whatever did happen to your nose, eh?’ I pinched the broken bridge with my fingers. ‘Ooh, a bit of trouble with some boys—a bit of rough, you might say.’ ‘Well, you take care, man—because you, are, pretty.’ He fluttered his long lashes, but kept the straightest of faces. ‘And I hope you will have a pleasant evening too sir,’ he said to Phil, who thanked him apprehensively. So we passed on, waved in to the pounding semi-darkness by the impassive Horace, whose twenty-stone bulk, toiling and yet stately in a Hawaiian short-sleeved shirt, was reflected in floor-length mirrors that flanked the door and repeated him ad infinitum, like exotic statuary surrounding a temple.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  How easily we are made to feel, I thought, and with what little foundation, with no foundation at all. At the movie’s climax, a final scene of slaughter and settling of accounts, an old man across the aisle breathed Chestito , well done, just loudly enough to be heard, and it was almost as if I had spoken the word myself. As we neared Varna, the lights of the city drew me back to the windows, to the blurred world glimpsed through glass streaked with rain. We stopped at the edge of the city center, or what I took to be the city center, not at a terminal but in a lot beside a gas station, where Mitko was standing without an umbrella, his shoulders hunched against the rain. I was the first off the bus, bounding out to greet him, so overcome with excitement that he had to send me back for my bag, which I had left on the seat beside me. We both laughed at this, at my eagerness and forgetfulness, and he shook his head in rebuke and indulgence, having provided once again a service beyond the terms of our contract. He took the bag from me, insisting with a show of gallantry when I said I could carry it myself, and led me to a line of taxis. He asked me about the trip, if I was hungry, if I wanted to go straight to the hotel or explore a bit first, though of course he already knew my answer to these questions. It was a short drive to the hotel he had chosen, a nice place, he said, very close to the sea. And it was nice, in a faded way, two old houses around a courtyard on a narrow street off the city’s main square, the pedestrian avenue leading to the sea. There was a single attendant, an old man who came out of his booth, a glassed-in porch attached to one of the buildings, to greet us. He and Mitko shook hands warmly, and I wondered what their relationship was, whether Mitko came here often with men, whether perhaps they had some arrangement. Our room was shabby and spacious, on the first floor with large windows that faced the street and were inadequate against the wind. There was a stand-alone radiator against one of the walls, and Mitko went over to it and switched it on; he must have been chilled to the bone from his wait. He sat on top of it, sighing with pleasure as it warmed. Without getting up, he reached to the old television against the wall and flipped through the few channels, stopping at a station playing videos of Balkan pop-folk songs; he hummed along, wagging his head from side to side with the jagged rhythms as he fiddled with my iPod, which I had set on the bedside table when we arrived and which he immediately snatched up.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  Even their parents would applaud it, they only pretended to disapprove, when what they really felt was indulgence and pride and the sweetness of youth, their own youth that they could remember and relive and sanction. K.’s mother finally allowed us upstairs, though she admonished us as well, telling me to keep an eye on things, to make them behave; she was trusting me, she said, pointing her finger at me jokingly, though she wasn’t joking, I thought, and I said Yes, ma’am, as though I too were part of the rightness of the world. We walked up the narrow corridor of the stairs in single file, K.’s girlfriend first and then K. and then I, and once we were out of sight their hands reached out for each other. As I walked behind them I felt an excitement that was deep and unsettling and, alongside this, a dread that increased as we neared K.’s room. I paused, as if to weigh what I felt, but when K.’s voice called out for me I hurried up the final stairs, turning the corner to see him at the door looking for me quizzically. Come on, he said, still eager, more eager now, and then his face broke into a grin and I forgot my dread. I moved past him into the small room where K. already sat on the bed, crossing and recrossing her legs. I moved toward the only other seat, the wooden chair at K.’s desk, but he stopped me, asking me to wait a minute as he closed the door, or didn’t close it, exactly, which his mother had forbidden, but left it as little ajar as he dared. Then he asked me to sit in front of it, if I didn’t mind; since the door opened into the room I could make sure they wouldn’t be surprised, I might hear his mother coming and I could take my time getting up, delaying her while they composed themselves. Again he apologized, he knew it was an imposition, I would have to sit on the floor; but of course I didn’t object, I welcomed it, it was a service I could provide. And also it meant that I could watch them, since with my back to the door I would face his bed. I had never been in his room before, which was unremarkable, any teenager’s room, with books and his boxy computer and posters of soccer stars on the walls.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘It is rather amusing.’ Staines warmed to the idea. ‘Why don’t you, um, Phil, come and help me with it, and William can get on with the photographs.’ I let them go and soon after came on a picture of Charles: it was just the sort of thing I wanted for my book. Aged perhaps fifty, thickening but handsome, he was sitting in a high-backed chair in front of the big pedimented book-case in the library at Skinner’s Lane. Leaning round the chair, proffering a glass on a salver, was a white-jacketed black. He was surely supposed to be looking at his employer, but had been caught as, for a second, he followed the direction of his gaze, and showed to the camera a shy, devoted smile. I put out various other pictures, of people who were beautiful or eccentric enough to ask about and who I hoped might have a place in the crazed mosaic of Charles’s life. In one of the drawers I was surprised to find a stiff, creamy envelope, embossed ‘Staines, Photographer. New Bond Street’, containing a set of enigmatic, rather beautiful nudes: a thin young man, turning away his head, or slatted by shadow from a venetian blind, or crouched apprehensively on the bare floor of the studio. The boy’s face was always partly hidden, and his personality obscured in the sinister melancholy of the compositions. Even so, I knew who it was from the distinctive curve and mass of his cock—Colin, James’s Corry pal whom I had had on that hot afternoon at my flat a few weeks before. I had started to get a bit excited about this, when I felt a presence in the room. Bobby was standing at the French windows, looking at me expressionlessly. I started tidying up, shuffling together the pictures I wanted. ‘Ronny not here?’ Bobby said; he already sounded a little drunk. ‘No, he’s gone to look for something.’ Bobby let a weary smile onto his lips. ‘I should come with me, if I were you.’ I took this as a bald proposition, but when he had crossed the room to the door, and turned and said, ‘Oh, come on,’ I felt that it wasn’t, and that some kind of trick had been played on me.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Just off the mats at Hempstead High, he appears utterly relaxed, now clowning with his teammates in the bleachers, now putting in the earbuds of his MP3 player to listen to music, waiting for the opening bracket of the 171-pound class to finally come around. He gets to go to work today. At this point, that is all he asks. Jay has been here before. Nobody has to tell him how to deal. When the time for his first match comes, Jay is ready, bouncing back and forth on the balls of his feet, his calf muscles flexing with each movement, upper body loose, arms already well into rehearsals of his moves. Jay switches from court jester to mat dominator with a speed that even his super-senior buddies find severe; you could get whiplash watching him morph from the guy with the tattered T-shirt and the squirt-bottle of water into the three-time state champ who is chasing his Iowa immortality. He is on the mat for barely 30 seconds before pinning his first opponent, a complete testament to the kind of day it is going to be for Jay. The early rounds aren’t always pretty for a top seed, anyway, wrestling against kids who haven’t yet arrived in terms of match readiness, but Jay is especially focused here. He has his friends here today, his wrestling peers. These are the people for whom he had better bring out his best game to show off. Jay wouldn’t have it any other way. Up on the catwalk above the action, Kevin McCauley smiles and shakes his head in light wonder. This is what McCauley stayed around for as a coach, to see days like these, with Jay on the floor tearing a tournament bracket inside out and all the people on hand to witness just how magnificent a wrestler he can be. Jay is so quick for his size and almost impossible to turn over, and yet he prefers an offensive match. He likes to attack, not to stand still. He loves the action of wrestling, not the nuance—but he gets them both, understands them almost instinctively. And Kevin, one of the people who helped develop that instinct in Jay, has stayed around to see the best of it. As a coach, McCauley had one foot out the door at the end of last season. A former Linn-Mar wrestler himself, Kevin looked up one day and realized that, nearing age 40, he had spent more than a dozen years shaping and caring for other people’s kids in the wrestling room—that in addition to his duties for the school district, working with at-risk students. Now, with two young children and a third on the way, Kevin’s own family needed his attention. His wife was a nurse, and she had discovered that she could receive full-time pay and benefits by working two full-shift details at the hospital through the weekends, essentially cramming a week’s work into two long days.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  "This is over!" he repeated. 'It must come to an end! I'm wasting, I'm getting bogged down, I'm getting sillier than Christian!' Oh, it was infinitely thankful that he wasn't in ignorance of how things were with him! It was now in his hands to correct himself! By force!... Let's see... let's see... what was the offer that had been made to him? The harvest... The Pöppenrader harvest on the stalk? "I'll do it!" he said in a passionate whisper, even shaking a hand outstretched index finger. "I will do it!" Wasn't it what you call a coup? An opportunity to quite simply - and to put it a little exaggeratedly - double a capital of, say, forty thousand Kurantmarks?... Yes, it was a pointer, a nod to get up! It was a start, a first blow, and the risk involved was just one more refutation of all moral scruples. If it succeeded, then he was restored, then he would dare again, then he would hold the fortune and power again with those inner elastic clamps... No, unfortunately this catch would elude Messrs. Strunck & Hagenström! There was a local company that in this case had the upper hand because of personal connections!... In fact, the personal was the decisive factor here. It was no ordinary business, done coolly and in the usual manner. Rather, as initiated through Tony's mediation, it had more or less the character of a private matter to be treated with discretion and commitment. Oh no, Hermann Hagenström would hardly have been the man for it!... Thomas used the business cycle as a businessman and also when selling, later, by God, he would know how to use it! On the other hand, however, he performed a service for the beleaguered squire, to which he alone was called, through Tony's friendship with Frau von Maiboom. So write . A tricky thing anyway. A somewhat slippery ground, on which one had to move with some grace... All the more for him! And his steps became even quicker, his breathing deeper. He sat down for a moment, jumped up and wandered through all the rooms again. He thought the whole thing through again, he thought of Mr. Marcus, of Hermann Hagenström, Christian and Tony, saw the yellow-ripe harvest from Pöppenrade swaying in the wind, fantasized about the general upswing of the company that would follow this coup, angrily dismissed all misgivings shook his hand and said, "I'll do it!" Frau Permaneder opened the door to the dining room and called out: "Good night!" He answered without knowing it. Gerda, to whom Christian had said goodbye at the front door, came in and her strange, close-set brown eyes had that enigmatic gleam that music tends to give them.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  In the time of the last Duke Charles there was at Alengon an advocate named Antoine Bacheret, a merry companion, and fond of breakfasting o' mornings. One day, as he was sitting before his door, he saw a gentle- man pass whose name was Monsieur de la Tireliere. He had come on foot upon business he had in town, and the day being cold, he had not forgotten to take with him his great robe, lined with foxskin. Seeing the advocate, who was much such a man as himself, he asked him how he was getting on, and observed that a good breakfast would not amiss. The advocate replied that a breakfast would be found soon enough, provided some- one could be found to pay for it. Thereupon La Tire- liere took him by the arm, saying, " Come along, gaffer, perhaps we shall fall in with some fool who will pay for us both." There happened to be behind them an apothecary's man, a cunning and inventive young fellow, whom the advocate was perpetually making game of. That mo- ment the thought of having his revenge came into his head, and without going more than ten steps out of his way, he found behind a house a fine, big sir reverence, well and duly frozen, which he wrapped up so neatly in paper that it might be taken for a small sugar-loaf. He then looked out for his men, and passing them like a person in great haste, entered a house, and let fall the sugar-loaf from his sleeve, as if inadvertently. The S:x/i dn:] QUEEN OF NAVARRE. 433 advocate picked it up with great glee, and said to La Tireliere, " This clever fellow shall pay our scot ; but let us be off quickly for fear he comes back."

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Around the Wyoming gym, followers from several different schools have diverted their attention to the LeClere-Bader match—a one-point lead in the final seconds, after all, is one of the most electrifying scenes in the sport, and Nick hasn’t been tested this severely in what feels like forever. Bader thrashes and yanks in his effort to get the match back to even, his fans screaming encouragement. Nick won’t budge. He has locked on to his opponent and decided simply to ride out the storm. Bader strains; he claws. His mule-kicking is not enough. Nick is taking this one home. The referee’s whistle blows to end the match, and Doug flies off his chair to congratulate his son. Nick, even though he has another huge match to wrestle today, willingly accepts his father’s hug. “OK, then,” Nick says with a smile. It is, after all—and considering everything—a hell of an accomplishment at a critical time. It isn’t too late for Nick to do something wonderful this season. Taking the mat after Nick, Tyler Burkle goes into the third period and then pins his opponent, earning himself a championship match against Ryan Morningstar. But after Burkle, another trial faces North-Linn. Shannon Hocken, a senior at 171 pounds who has never made State, runs into trouble in the form of a Tipton wrestler, who locks Shannon up and puts him on his back for a pin almost before anyone knows what has happened. Shannon, a good wrestler who has had a good season, gets up stunned and hurt and walks back to the sideline to sit down. He needs to figure out what went wrong, because he needs to get it right in time to salvage this last chance to wrestle in the Barn. Alas, he is going to spend this day learning precisely how distant Des Moines can feel. Around the North-Linn team, Doug is manic. He can’t sit still, isn’t comfortable standing. He paces for a while and then goes back to sitting for a few seconds, repeating the cycle through the day. Doug worries over his sons, Nick more so than Dan, but he’s also a North-Linn guy through and through. He wrestled here. He was part of the first great migratory group of Lynx wrestlers to the State Tournament. This is his program. Oh, sure, Brad coaches it, and it is clear that Doug has good feelings not only about Bridgewater but also about the job Brad is doing in planting and growing the North-Linn program. As Larry Henderson remembers it, it wasn’t but a decade ago that the school district considered the wrestling team so diminished that it discussed combining the program with some other school’s to produce one presumably more competitive unit. Such mergers now are common among the smaller programs across the state, but the transaction would have driven a stake through the heart of any true North-Linn fan. Doug also nods approvingly at Bridgewater’s practices, so lengthy and demanding.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Once you hear, over the vaguely corroded PA system, the name of a wrestler you want to cheer from any vantage point closer than your upper-level seat, you basically just tear downstairs and elbow your way past the folks standing stump-like around the retaining ropes; and on any night other than Finals Night you can, within perhaps a minute or two of decent scrumming, find yourself within a few feet of the wrestlers themselves, going at it on one of the multicolored mats spread about the floor. You can see and hear everything, even amid the din of eight separate matches and a series of announcements all going off at the same time. You can shout very specific instructions—“Single leg! Single leg! Work it! Drive him!”—at your guy. You can wildly and profanely insult the other team’s wrestler without any real concern over retaliation, a fact which Jay already understands pretty well, considering the number of times through the years he has been called a faggot or a queer—or sometimes, even, an overrated wrestler—by the various loons in the crowd. At the Barn, you can pretty much do as you like. But best of all is this: If somebody either achieves the pinnacle of his fantasies or flames out in a spectacular, soul-crushing defeat, you are right there to witness the kill. You don’t need to strain in order to hear what comes out of the losers, the people who have just had their hearts ripped apart with their parents looking on. You get to hear the testosterone-fueled screams of the winners, the ones moving forward—the kids who still can see the horizon lines of their hopes. You can watch young people uncontrollably burst into tears right in front of you, or leap into the arms of their coaches in a post-victory delirium. Maybe, if you are extremely fortunate, you will see a boy quietly remove his wrestling shoes and leave them in the middle of the mat—a compelling and emotional symbolic announcement of his retirement from the sport, right there on the spot, seconds after completing his final struggle. And if either Dan or Jay should somehow screw up this time—well then, the Barn will bear witness to his failure and, simultaneously, to that great moment of ascendance in some other young wrestler’s career. Whoever beats one of these guys is going to be anointed a star. For early arrivals at the State Wrestling Tournament (and they’re all pretty much early arrivals), the sense of time having slowed a little is always near. The fans file inside to the sounds of Foghat and Van Halen being pumped through the building. The tickets cost seven dollars, and with the exception of Finals Night they cannot be purchased beforehand. The people drive from their hometowns, Wapello or Mapleton or Council Bluffs, and check in at the hotels they have had to reserve months in advance.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I have omitted to mention the smell, which as soon as the ship docked & the wind it made was stilled, rose to the nostrils from the land. ‘Ah, the East!’ Harrap had said connoisseurially. It is not a smell one could anticipate, or even much care for in itself, but I relished its authenticity at once—a dusty dryness, & a sweetness, a foetor, as it might be near some perpetual meat-market, a smell utterly unhygienic and inevitable. The other streets here might have borne exploring, but I was thirsty & went to sit in the shade of the tea-terrace. The tea, served impractically in a glass, was refreshing, somehow muddy & more sustaining than tea I am used to. All the while there was Sinai, very hazily apparent in the distance, & near to the spectacle of the ship being refuelled, which is done by an endless chain of Egyptians, some in blue or white djellabas, others naked but for a knotted nappy around the loins, lean, by & large, & sinewy. All the while they pass on baskets of coal, their foreman leading them in monotonous chanting, a call raised, a general echoing response, the words, indistinguishable to my Oxford Arabic, intensifying the impression of changeless pharaonic labour. Meanwhile on the quay, & even for a while from the bows of the ship until an official stopped them, three or four youths, virtually naked & entrancingly wild & fearless, were diving for coins. As I sat & watched them, my pleasure & fascination evident perhaps in my gaze, a handsome young man with the immemorial flat, broad features of the Egyptian, a blue djellaba & a circular embroidered hat that made him look like an exotic afterthought of Tiepolo, sidled among the tables towards me, half-concealing behind him a battered valise. I had been thoroughly trained to expect him & his inevitable offers of fake antiquities, but as I was still alone—the others not yet having arrived at the rendezvous—& in my mood of exultant curiosity & celebration, I let him approach. The major-domo, I noticed, kept an eye out for my reaction, & when I did not object, looked at the youth in a way which suggested some sinister understanding between them, as if, the protocol of deference having been observed, I was now a legitimate victim of their antique trade. ‘You see Lesseps statue, m’sieu,’ he said, standing over me solicitously. ‘No, no,’ I replied tolerantly. ‘Is very good, m’sieu. You like. You like, I take you. Only 50 piastres. Is most instructive.’ ‘No thank you,’ I said firmly, but with an amused look, I suppose, which may have encouraged him—if encouragement were needed—to carry on. He hoisted his case up then on to the table, although I raised a hand to promise him it was no use.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Iowa led the nation in the per-capita obtaining of college undergraduate degrees, and it was said to be the No. 2 book-reading state in the union. The kids show up for school and actually learn something, and they have the diplomas to show for it. Today, Sunday, driving along the snow-blanketed roads that lead to Troy Mills and eventually over to the high school, it is a jolt to come upon a North-Linn parking lot that is absolutely packed, to the point of cars hanging off its edges and parked at all sorts of squeeze-in angles. This is the day of the Little Lynx tournament, a chance for kids from kindergarten through eighth grade to come find competition against like-minded wrestlers. These are the ones who’d rather be inside sweating and grunting than outside in the snow—or, at the very least, the children of parents who feel that way. Inside the North-Linn gymnasium, the world is a blur of color and action and—to put it plainly—the piercing shrieks of the wrestling moms and dads. They say that you haven’t experienced the mania of wrestling until you have seen its littlest practitioners in action, but it’s their parents who put on the real show. There is probably a doctoral thesis in practical psychology to be written about the gyrations and dramatics of the parents, some of whom have come to the conclusion that their 5-year-olds are on track for college scholarships despite their never having wrestled competitively before. They dream of kids who are young and know a few moves but who will become, in time, quicker, stronger, more tolerant of pain. They will become technicians of the sport. They will see two moves ahead of their opponents, like a great shortstop anticipating where a ground ball is likely to be placed by a particular hitter. The parents see these little tykes in the gym on Sunday and they do not see children wrestling on a mat. They see, many of them, a future. In Iowa, the kids’ clubs provide the foundation for almost every top-level wrestler at every class of high school competition. They get the boys early and teach them right, a formula that would come as no surprise to anyone who has ever run a Little League baseball team or a CYO basketball league. Sports are about traditions handed down and coaching secrets passed along early, and it happens that in Iowa, wrestling matters exactly enough for it to be treated with the same care and ultimate respect as the major sports might be anywhere else. The kids clubs are no joke. They are the seeds of serious sport, and they will someday sprout champions. The gym is overflowing with wrestlers and coaches and families, the older athletes working not only on behalf of their schools but as a sort of living example of what the young wrestlers might aspire to.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I kept him at it for about an hour, never stopping as, under the DJ’s gurgling patter, the rhythms of one track, clean and fierce, cut across and then went under the rhythms of the next. It was a sport, where exhaustion was only a spur to more effort, the blood-opiates sang through the system, lap succeeded lap. On the floor there was competition, more athletic than sexual, and I would find myself challenged, magnetised by strangers, drawn into faster and faster action, though no words were said, we affected not even to look at each other. And some of the kids there could dance. Sometimes a ring would suddenly form around one or two of them, and we hung on each other’s shoulders to see them—their brief, fizzy routines of backward handsprings, jack-knife jumps and other crazy things. Boy after boy would follow, explode in action, stumble back into obscurity; and then the ring would dissolve, the crowd would repossess the floor. At last Phil rocked to a stop and gestured for drink. I gasped ‘Lager’ in his ear. Both of us were parched—and all wet outside, so that his hair, when I roughed it and sent him off, stood up, and the bristly back of his neck glistened as if it had been dressed. I lurched off the dance floor and into Stan. Stan was a colossal Guyanan bodybuilder, not only gigantically muscular but six feet six inches tall. ‘Love the arse on your chum,’ he said. ‘I’ve been watching him.’ ‘Heaven, isn’t it?’ ‘Yeah. Where d’you find that then?’ ‘I took him under my wing at the Corry.’ He craned to see where Phil had got to in the further spotlit half-dark. ‘Still go there then?’ ‘Daily. You should come back. We all miss seeing you.’ Stan smiled sweetly and said, ‘I bet you fucking do.’ His mouth, like the rest of him, was vast, so that when he laughed it seemed his whole head would open up like a canteen of cutlery. I had met him at the Corry during my first Oxford vac and fooled about with him rather unsatisfactorily in an alley off the Tottenham Court Road. I remember how struck I was by the contrast of his rocky physique and the beautiful, almost smothering softness of his lips. A term later he had left, for some north London gym more suited to his championship needs. But I would run into him from time to time in clubs and bars, and though we had nothing much in common I seemed to charm him somehow, so that despite his superhuman body he was slightly in awe of me. I rested a hand on the side of his neck, whose shaft, thicker than his head, was buttressed by the gathered, sloping muscles of his shoulders.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  After some efficient sex, we had a glass of Pimm’s and sat on the window-seat in the evening sun. The air was streaming with seeds, to which Colin was sensitive, and after sneezing and screwing up his eyes for a few minutes, he announced that he had to go. I was not sorry; my mind was already running on to the prospect of opening the bag and getting a feel of what lay ahead. When I closed the door of the flat behind Colin, there the bag was, where I had propped it on a chair before making a grab at him. Retrieving it now, I saw how disrespectful I had been to cast it so hastily aside for the sake of that good but rather professional and chilly trick. I took the bag into the dining-room, tugged open its straps and pulled the contents on to the table. I closed the window to prevent papers from blowing round; since Arthur’s disappearance I had been a fiend for light and fresh air. The main part of the archive was a set of quarto notebooks, bound in brown boards, rubbed and worn at the edges—most of them with a clear ink inscription on the front cover; ‘Oxford, 1920’ and ‘1924: Khartoum’ were the first two I picked up. They were written in a fast, elegant and not especially legible hand, in black ink, and there were odd items tucked between the pages—postcards, letters, drawings, even hotel bills and visiting cards. There was also a fat five-year diary, of the kind which can be locked, with other letters and documents, and a large buff envelope bulky with photographs. I drew up a chair at once to look at these, as I believed they would be, although enigmatic, the keys or charms to open the whole case to me. There were snapshots, group photographs and studio portraits, all mixed up together. A mounted picture of a set of cocky young men was captioned ‘University Shooting VIII, 1921’ in the amateur Gothic script still favoured at Oxford for matriculation and team photos. After a bit I was sure that one of the standing figures, a big boy with swept-back glossy hair and an appealing smirk, must be Charles. The face was far leaner than now, and his whole person seemed well set-up; I had seen him less and less in control of his life, and was surprised for a moment to find a young man who would have known how to have a good time. He appeared again in a more studied portrait, where he was less handsome: the spontaneity and camaraderie, perhaps, of the shooting photo had animated him into beauty.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The colours were very subdued, the white almost a light brown, the reds rusty like dried blood. ‘Now, what do you make out?’ I thought about it; it was evidently a Roman pavement—a relic of some riverside palace or temple? I knew nothing about Roman London, had forgotten all but a handful of images from some illustrated lectures that Gavin had given several years before. In the top quarter was a large bearded face, with open mouth and the vestiges of neck and shoulders above a broad rent in the fabric where the tesserae merged into the restorer’s grey cement. To the left at the bottom stylised fish shapes, like an emblem of Pisces, could be made out, sliding past each other; and to the right, and above, the upper parts of two figures could be seen, the one in front turning to the one behind with open, choric mouth as they dissolved into the nothingness beyond the broken edge of the pavement. ‘Nobody is quite agreed on what the figures are,’ Charles conceded hospitably. ‘The chappie at the back could be Neptune but he could be the Thames god with an urn or whatever. Then these are little fishes, évidemment ; and here are these young boys going swimming.’ I nodded. ‘Swimming, you think, do you? Isn’t it a bit hard to tell?’ ‘Oh no, swimming. That’s the whole point. This is the floor of a swimming-bath, do you see. There used to be a great baths here, in the very early days. There were springs. The water soaked through the gravel and what-have-you until it hit the London clay and then out it came!’ He seemed delighted at this trick of geology, as if it had operated for his special benefit. ‘And what’s happened to it now?’ ‘Stuck it in a pipe,’ he replied with breezy contempt. ‘Led it away. Buried it. Whatever. This little bit of the baths is all that’s left to show how all those lusty young Romans went leaping about. Imagine all those naked legionaries in here …’ I did not have to look far to do so. The scenes around the walls were as graphic an imagining as Petronius could have come up with. ‘I think your friend has given us his impression,’ I said. ‘Eh? Oh, Henderson’s pictures, yes.’ He laughed hollowly. ‘They’re a trifle embarrassing, I’m afraid—when eggheads come to look at the floor, you know. They think they’re going to get caught up in an orgy.’ We both looked up at the section nearest us, where a gleaming slave was towelling down his master’s buttocks. In front of them two mighty warriors were wrestling, with legs apart, and bull-like genitals swinging between. ‘Quite amusing though, too, n’est-ce pas? ’ He looked down pointedly at my crotch. ‘They used to fairly turn me on.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  He asked me about the trip, if I was hungry, if I wanted to go straight to the hotel or explore a bit first, though of course he already knew my answer to these questions. It was a short drive to the hotel he had chosen, a nice place, he said, very close to the sea. And it was nice, in a faded way, two old houses around a courtyard on a narrow street off the city’s main square, the pedestrian avenue leading to the sea. There was a single attendant, an old man who came out of his booth, a glassed-in porch attached to one of the buildings, to greet us. He and Mitko shook hands warmly, and I wondered what their relationship was, whether Mitko came here often with men, whether perhaps they had some arrangement. Our room was shabby and spacious, on the first floor with large windows that faced the street and were inadequate against the wind. There was a stand-alone radiator against one of the walls, and Mitko went over to it and switched it on; he must have been chilled to the bone from his wait. He sat on top of it, sighing with pleasure as it warmed. Without getting up, he reached to the old television against the wall and flipped through the few channels, stopping at a station playing videos of Balkan pop-folk songs; he hummed along, wagging his head from side to side with the jagged rhythms as he fiddled with my iPod, which I had set on the bedside table when we arrived and which he immediately snatched up. It took him a moment to realize it wasn’t the same device that had so fascinated him in Sofia, and when I told him that that one had been stolen, that a man had taken it from me during an encounter, he shook his head in sympathy—such is the world—and then his features hardened. When I’m in Sofia, he said, we’ll look for him, you show me who he is and I’ll take care of him. Samo da go vidya i do tam.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It had all been so rapid and inevitable that it was only when he was breathing regularly and we had laid him down on a coat and done up his fly that I felt shaken by a surge of delayed elation. I raced up the steps into mild sunshine and hung around waiting for the ambulance, unable to stop grinning, my hands trembling. Even so, it was too soon to understand. I told myself that I had scooped someone back from the threshold of death, but that seemed incommensurate with the simple routine I had followed, the vital little drill retained from childhood along with all the more complex knowledge that would never prove so useful—convection, sonata form, the names of birds in Latin and French. The Corinthian Club in Great Russell Street is the masterpiece of the architect Frank Orme, whom I once met at my grandfather’s. I remember he carried on in a pompous and incongruous way, having recently, and as if by mistake, been awarded a knighthood. Even as a child I saw him as a fraud and a hotchpotch, and I was delighted, when I joined the Club and learned that he had designed it, to discover just the same qualities in his architecture. Like Orme himself, the edifice is both mean and self-important; a paradox emphasised by the modest resources of the Club in the 1930s and its conflicting aspiration to civic grandeur. As you walk along the pavement you look down through the railings into an area where steam issues from the ventilators and half-open toplights of changing-rooms and kitchens; you hear the slam of large institutional cooking trays, the hiss of showers, the inane confidence of radio disc-jockeys. The ground floor has a severe manner, the Portland stone punctuated by green-painted metal-framed windows; but at the centre it gathers to a curvaceous, broken-pedimented doorway surmounted by two finely developed figures—one pensively Negroid, the other inspiredly Caucasian—who hold between them a banner with the device ‘Men Of All Nations’. Before answering this call, step across the street and look up at the floors above. You see more clearly that it is a steel-framed building, tarted up with niches and pilasters like some bald fact inexpertly disguised. At the far corner there is a tremendous upheaving of cartouches and volutes crowned by a cupola like that of some immense Midland Bank. Finances and inspiration seem to have been exhausted by this, however, and alongside, above the main cornice of the building, rises a two-storey mansard attic, containing the cheap accommodation the Club provides in the cheapest possible form of building. On the little projecting dormers of the lower attic floor the occupants of the upper put out their bottles of milk to keep cool, or spread swimming things to dry, despite the danger of pigeons.