Fear

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 A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Kevin and his family stayed on three more days. Mr. Cork became incoherent with drink one night and cracked the banister as he reeled up to bed. Mrs. Cork exploded the next morning and told my stepmother she loathed eggs “swimming in grease.” Katy, the Hungarian cook, locked herself in her room and emerged red-eyed and sniffling two hours later. Kevin and Mrs. Cork argued with each other, or rather she nagged him and he ridiculed her; when they made up, their embrace was shockingly intimate—prolonged, wordless nuzzling. On a rainy afternoon the boys roughhoused until Peter overturned the table and smashed one of the hand-painted tiles set into the top; his parents seemed almost indifferent to the damage and allowed the pushing and shoving to continue. Mrs. Cork’s way of conspicuously ignoring the pandemonium was to vocalize, full voice. Each night Kevin came to my bed, though now I no longer elaborated daydreams of running away with him. I was a little bit afraid of him; now that he knew I was a sissy, he could make fun of me whenever he chose to. Who knew what he’d do? After witnessing his vituperation against his mother, followed by the weird nuzzling, I could not continue to think of him as the boy next door. The last night I tried kissing him again, but he turned his head away. On the afternoon they left, Mrs. Cork flushed a deep, indignant red and chased Kevin halfway up the stairs. He crouched and shouted, his face contorted, “You scumbag, you old scumbag,” and pushed her down the stairs. My father was furious. He lifted the woman from the floor and said to Kevin, “I think you’ve done enough for one day, young man.” Mr. Cork, not completely sober, kept counting the pieces of luggage. He pretended he hadn’t noticed the outbreak. His wife took on an injured silence as though in heavy mourning. She barely said good-bye to us. But once she had gone through the door and was on the steps to the garage, I saw her flash a crooked little smile at her son. He rushed into her open arms and they nuzzled and stroked each other.

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

  She cited her adopted home state of Florida as a place where “bad politicians who [are] drunk with power, who want to get out there” are using extreme talking points and legislation to do so. “It is so frightening,” Blume told British journalist Laura Kuenssberg. “I think the only answer is for us to speak out and really keep speaking out, or we’re going to lose our way.” Arlene LaVerde, who has spent three decades working for the New York City Department of Education, said that Blume’s novels aren’t challenged nearly as often now, in part because they aren’t as ubiquitous as they were in the 1980s, and also because the bull’s-eye of conservative grievance has moved. Now the young adult books that are most often under attack are ones with LGBTQ+ themes. Of the top thirteen most banned books in 2022 according to the American Library Association’s list, seven contain LGBTQ+ subjects and/or characters, including Gender Queer , All Boys Aren’t Blue , the award-winning graphic novel Flamer by Mike Curato, and transgender writer Juno Dawson’s This Book Is Gay . LaVerde said that thanks to the brouhaha over Critical Race Theory, books that speak openly about race—even straightforward history books—are under fire, too. “Critical Race Theory is not taught in K–12 education,” insisted LaVerde. “But it’s a term that people grab on to and use because they feel like it’s indoctrination. Indoctrinating what? Indoctrinating that in the United States, more than half of the country had slaves? And that it was legal?” She went on: “It’s a shameful part of our history, yeah. But it’s a part of our history and we should learn about it.” In New York City, a book would never get removed from a school library if just one parent or educator complained about it, LaVerde explained. A complaint initiates a formal process, wherein the first step is requesting that the challenger read the book from cover to cover (many parents who balk at certain titles do so because “they looked over a kid’s shoulder and, excuse my language, they saw the word ‘fuck.’ Or they saw the word ‘sex,’ ” she said). If they’re still unhappy after that, they can fill out a challenge form, which then prompts the school to put together a committee of readers, consisting of a school administrator, a representative from the DOE’s library system, and the librarian. If it’s a high school, some students will be invited to sit on the committee as well. The group then meets to discuss the book, its merits, and whether it actually belongs in the building. If the committee votes in favor of retaining the title, it cannot be challenged for another two years. With such a robust system in place, few books end up getting removed—but librarians still absorb strong feelings from parents when they disagree with the reading material that’s been selected for their children.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  After that, whenever I’d pass Mr. Pouchet in the hall, he’d smile and say hi, softening his rejection as much as possible: faintest watermark that had to be held to the light to be seen at all. I decided I had to go to a psychiatrist. In the back of my mind I had kept hoping I’d somehow outgrow this interest in men, an interest I had nonetheless continued to indulge. But now I was becoming frightened. I was being pushed out of the tribe. I had a dream in which I was a waiter in an elegant restaurant where I served happy, elegant couples. That was upstairs. Downstairs the filthy kitchen was staffed by bald, grizzled men, convicts, really, mute, bestial with grief. They wore blood-stained aprons and gleamed with sweat. I was one of them and, although I could rise to circulate among the happy diners, I always had to descend back down to the hopeless workers, each suspicious of the others. And then the police van arrived and the help, all of us, were dragged out into the night street ablaze with revolving red lights. We were hauled off to prison, where we’d remain forever. As I was being herded into the van I could feel on my back the eyes of the diners looking down from the windows upstairs. Now they knew I wasn’t one of them but one of the convicts. I woke with tears in my eyes so salty they burned the canthus. Everything I touched or did spoke to me of sadness. Each article of clothing—shirt, tie, jacket—felt cut out of different bolts of sadness, each a peculiar weave and shape and hang of sadness, as though sadness came in lots of styles. My shoes posed above their reflections on the glossy floor, and they looked to me like imperfect molds cast from the original, perfect sadness; I mean they were big, solid things, crude actually, and yet the frayed end of a lace, the rim around the opening that bulged here and there, the unevenly worn heels—they all spoke of use, my use, they were sensitive records of dailiness, nothing sadder. The father of a classmate was a local psychiatrist and he arranged for me to see a famous analyst John Thomas O’Reilly. O’Reilly’s office was next door to his home, the two buildings unassuming suburban clapboard houses separated by a concrete drive. Once I was inside the office, however, I found the decor to be luxurious and exotic, not at all what I had expected. The waiting room was carpeted in delicate tatami mats bruised by horrid Western shoes. A large birdcage, woven out of bent reeds to resemble a baroque Brazilian church, confined a dozen bright choristers all cheeping at once.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  When I silenced the alarm, fear overtook me. I’d go hungry! The boardinghouse room with the toilet down the hall, blood on the linoleum, Christ in a chromo, crepe-paper flowers—I dressed and packed my gym bag with the bottle of peroxide and two changes of clothes. Had my father gone to bed yet? Would the dog bark when I tried to slip past him? And would that man be on the corner? The boardinghouse room, yes, Negro music on the radio next door, the coquette’s shriek … As I walked down the drive I felt conspicuous under the blank windows of my father’s house and half expected him to open the never-used front door to call me back. I stood on the appointed corner. It began to drizzle but a water truck crept past anyway, spraying the street a darker, slicker gray. No birds were in sight but I could hear them testing the day. A dog without a collar or master trotted past. Two fat maids were climbing the hill, stopping every few steps to catch their breath. One, a shiny, blue-black fat woman wearing a flowered turban and holding a purple umbrella with a white plastic handle, was scowling and talking fast but obviously to humorous effect, for her companion couldn’t stop laughing. The bells of the Catholic school behind the dripping trees across the street marked the quarter hour, the half hour. More and more cars were passing me. I studied every driver—had my friend overslept? The milkman. The bread truck. Damn hillbilly. A bus went by, carrying just one passenger. A quarter to seven. He wasn’t coming. When I saw him the next evening on the square he waved at me and came over to talk. From his relaxed manner I instantaneously saw that he’d duped me and I was powerless. To whom could I report him? Like a heroin addict or a Communist, I was outside the law—outside it but with him, this man. We sat side by side on the same bench. A bad muffler exploded in a volley and the cooing starlings perched on the fountain figure’s arm flew up and away leaving behind only the metal dove. I took off my tie, rolled it up and slipped it inside my pocket. Because I didn’t complain about being betrayed, my friend said, “See those men yonder?” “Yes.” “I could git you one for eight bucks.” He let that sink in; yes, I thought, I could take someone to one of those little fleabag hotels. “Which one do you want?” he said. I handed him the money and said, “The blond.” THREE

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “Finally, let us see what happens if you, a minor, accused of having impaired the morals of an adult in a respectable inn, what happens if you complain to the police of my having kidnaped and raped you? Let us suppose they believe you. A minor female, who allows a person over twenty-one to know her carnally, involves her victim into statutory rape, or second-degree sodomy, depending on the technique; and the maximum penalty is ten years. So I go to jail. Okay. I go to jail. But what happens to you, my orphan? Well, you are luckier. You become the ward of the Department of Public Welfare—which I am afraid sounds a little bleak. A nice grim matron of the Miss Phalen type, but more rigid and not a drinking woman, will take away your lipstick and fancy clothes. No more gadding about! I don’t know if you have ever heard of the laws relating to dependent, neglected, incorrigible and delinquent children. While I stand gripping the bars, you, happy neglected child, will be given a choice of various dwelling places, all more or less the same, the correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile detention home, or one of those admirable girls’ protectories where you knit things, and sing hymns, and have rancid pancakes on Sundays. You will go there, Lolita—my Lolita, this Lolita will leave her Catullus and go there, as the wayward girl you are. In plainer words, if we two are found out, you will be analyzed and institutionalized, my pet, c’est tout. You will dwell, my Lolita will dwell (come here, my brown flower) with thirty-nine other dopes in a dirty dormitory (no, allow me, please) under the supervision of hideous matrons. This is the situation, this is the choice. Don’t you think that under the circumstances Dolores Haze had better stick to her old man?” By rubbing all this in, I succeeded in terrorizing Lo, who despite a certain brash alertness of manner and spurts of wit was not as intelligent a child as her I.Q. might suggest. But if I managed to establish that background of shared secrecy and shared guilt, I was much less successful in keeping her in good humor. Every morning during our yearlong travels I had to devise some expectation, some special point in space and time for her to look forward to, for her to survive till bedtime. Otherwise, deprived of a shaping and sustaining purpose, the skeleton of her day sagged and collapsed. The object in view might be anything—a lighthouse in Virginia, a natural cave in Arkansas converted to a café, a collection of guns and violins somewhere in Oklahoma, a replica of the Grotto of Lourdes in Louisiana, shabby photographs of the bonanza mining period in the local museum of a Rocky Mountains resort, anything whatsoever—but it had to be there, in front of us, like a fixed star, although as likely as not Lo would feign gagging as soon as we got to it.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  When I opened my eyes, his beard was inches from my face, damp with sweat and from the stale beer I could smell on his breath. His eyes were wide, so wide it was as if they couldn’t blink, and they scanned my face, my hair, my ears, my mouth. His lips started off as a straight horizontal line, then curved to a crescent moon smile before becoming a small hole as he saw the worry on my face. He brushed his fingers across my cheek, along my shoulder, and down my chest, pulling the blanket off as he went. I opened my mouth but he put a finger to his lips. “Shh . . . it’s okay. I’m gonna show you something.” With one hand over my mouth, he pulled the blanket off and slid his fingers in the flap of my boxers. I crunched my eyes shut. “Don’t worry. We’re gonna make you a big boy.” At first, the way he stroked my penis was soft and quiet, using his filed fingernails until I had an erection. Then he grabbed and pumped, his calloused palms rubbing raw against me. I turned my head, breathing hard and fast at the moon through the window. Somewhere nearby, someone had started the holiday early and flashes of fireworks broke through the darkness. And he kept whispering wetly the whole time, beer-stained spittle dripping on my face, his grin growing, growing. “That’s good. Good. Good boy. Yes?” It was the first time I’d ejaculated while awake. When it was over, he took his hand from my mouth and smiled, wide, crooked. He sniffed my semen, stuck to his fingers. “There. Good boy. Didn’t that feel good?” IN MY ALL-BOYS HIGH SCHOOL, THE WALLS WERE WHITE, THE floor and ceiling were white, the school was scrubbed meticulously every evening. Cleanliness is next to godliness, we were told, and we were always to have our thoughts on the Lord. Sports were encouraged by the priests and principal because, as they explained, vigorous exercise is the best way to shunt aside sexual thoughts and urges. Neither worked. I tried to hide in plain sight, my head low, my voice quiet, my every move completely average—even my grades—so as not to attract attention. I surrounded myself with loud friends around whom I could become invisible. Nondescript and forgettable. It was the most successful survival technique I’d found after I had been molested.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  And it shall come to passe as thou sittest in the boat thou shalt see an old man swimming on the top of the river, holding up his deadly hands, and desiring thee to receive him into the barke, but have no regard to his piteous cry; when thou art passed over the floud, thou shalt espie old women spinning, who will desire thee to helpe them, but beware thou do not consent unto them in any case, for these and like baits and traps will Venus set to make thee let fall one of thy sops, and thinke not that the keeping of thy sops is a light matter, for if thou leese one of them thou shalt be assured never to returne againe to this world. Then shalt thou see a great and marvailous dogge, with three heads, barking continually at the soules of such as enter in, but he can do them no other harme, he lieth day and night before the gate of Proserpina, and keepeth the house of Pluto with great diligence, to whom if thou cast one of thy sops, thou maist have accesse to Proserpina without all danger: shee will make thee good cheere, and entertaine thee with delicate meate and drinke, but sit thou upon the ground, and desire browne bread, and then declare thy message unto her, and when thou hast received such beauty as she giveth, in thy returne appease the rage of the dogge with thy other sop, and give thy other halfe penny to covetous Charon, and come the same way againe into the world as thou wentest: but above all things have a regard that thou looke not in the boxe, neither be not too curious about the treasure of the divine beauty. In this manner the tower spake unto Psyches, and advertised her what she should do: and immediately she tooke two halfe pence, two sops, and all things necessary, and went to the mountaine Tenarus to go towards hell. After that Psyches had passed by the lame Asse, paid her halfe pennie for passage, neglected the old man in the river, denyed to helpe the woman spinning, and filled the ravenous month of the dogge with a sop, shee came to the chamber of Proserpina. There Psyches would not sit in any royall seate, nor eate any delicate meates, but kneeled at the feete of Proserpina, onely contented with course bread, declared her message, and after she had received a mysticall secret in a boxe, she departed, and stopped the mouth of the dogge with the other sop, and paied the boatman the other halfe penny. When Psyches was returned from hell, to the light of the world, shee was ravished with great desire, saying, Am not I a foole, that knowing that I carrie here the divine beauty, will not take a little thereof to garnish my face, to please my love withall?

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “I’ll send postcards,” Irene sang, looking smart in her new travel suit, and blowing them kisses as she and Ben left for Newark’s Penn Station, where they’d board the Silver Meteor to Miami. “Postcards,” Rusty mumbled as the car pulled away. So on this late-March day Miri was the one to pick up the mail. She’d already walked Mason and Fred to Edison Lanes, where a bum came out of nowhere, pulling on Mason’s sleeve, frightening Miri. He was filthy and he reeked of alcohol. “Get off me,” Mason told him. “Come on, son. You’re a big shot now, a hero,” the bum said. “People must be throwing money at you. How about something for your dear old dad?” She could see the anger in Mason’s face, his jaw tightening, his teeth clenched. “I said, get off me!” The bum looked at Miri. “Who’s this? Your girlfriend?” “Don’t touch her,” Mason said, shielding Miri with his body. Fred barked. “Well, well…it’s Fred, is it?” He tried to pet the dog but Fred growled. Miri had never heard Fred growl. “If you don’t get out of here I’m calling the police,” Mason said. “I am the police, son.” “You were the police, but not anymore. And stop calling me son. ” “Jacky always gives me a fiver.” “Yeah, to get rid of you.” “You want to get rid of me, son? Give me some change.” “Let’s go,” Mason said, grabbing Miri’s hand. He led her inside but turned back to the bum once and called, “You better be gone when I come out. You hear? You better be gone!” He wouldn’t let Miri leave until the coast was clear. “I’m sorry you had to see that drunken excuse of a father,” he told her. That was his father? The father who’d chased him with an ax? Miri was still reeling when she dropped Fred at Mrs. Stein’s house. She walked home looking over her shoulder, making sure the bum who was Mason’s father wasn’t following her. It must be terrible having a father like him, Miri thought, someone you couldn’t trust, someone so unpredictable. Better to have no father or a father in California you never had to see. She let herself into the house, collected the mail from the floor, where it had come in through the slot in the door, and thumbed through it, separating Irene’s and Henry’s from hers and Rusty’s. There was a postcard for her from Irene, showing a wide white beach with one palm tree leaning toward the blue-green ocean. The third postcard this week. Each one had a message beginning, Darling Miri. Then there would be a one-line message: Wish you were here, or You would love this weather, or Having a wonderful time. She tucked the postcard into the waistband of her skirt and headed upstairs, where she dropped the mail on the kitchen table. On top was a creamy white envelope addressed to Naomi Ammerman in slanted handwriting that looked vaguely familiar.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  In speaking these words, and devising with my selfe of our departing the next morrow, lest Meroe the witch should play by us as she had done by divers other persons, it fortuned that Socrates did fall asleepe, and slept very soundly, by reason of his travell and plenty of meat and wine wherewithall hee had filled him selfe. Wherefore I closed and barred fast the doores of the chamber, and put my bed behinde the doore, and so layed mee downe to rest. But I could in no wise sleepe, for the great feare which was in my heart, untill it was about midnight, and then I began to slumber. But alas, behold suddenly the chamber doores brake open, and locks, bolts, and posts fell downe, that you would verily have thought that some Theeves had been presently come to have spoyled and robbed us. And my bed whereon I lay being a truckle bed, fashioned in forme of a Cradle, and one of the feet broken and rotten, by violence was turned upside downe, and I likewise was overwhelmed and covered lying in the same. Then perceived I in my selfe, that certaine affects of the minde by nature doth chance contrary. For as teares oftentimes trickle downe the cheekes of him that seeth or heareth some joyfull newes, so I being in this fearfull perplexity, could not forbeare laughing, to see how of Aristomenus I was made like unto a snail [in] his shell. And while I lay on the ground covered in this sort, I peeped under the bed to see what would happen. And behold there entred in two old women, the one bearing a burning torch, and the other a sponge and a naked sword; and so in this habit they stood about Socrates being fast asleep. Then shee which bare the sword sayd unto the other, Behold sister Panthia, this is my deare and sweet heart, which both day and night hath abused my wanton youthfulnesse. This is he, who little regarding my love, doth not only defame me with reproachfull words, but also intendeth to run away. And I shall be forsaken by like craft as Vlysses did use, and shall continually bewaile my solitarinesse as Calipso. Which said, shee pointed towards mee that lay under the bed, and shewed me to Panthia. This is hee, quoth she, which is his Counsellor, and perswadeth him to forsake me, and now being at the point of death he lieth prostrate on the ground covered with his bed, and hath seene all our doings, and hopeth to escape scot-free from my hands, but I will cause that hee will repente himselfe too late, nay rather forthwith, of his former intemperate language, and his present curiosity. Which words when I heard I fell into a cold sweat, and my heart trembled with feare, insomuch that the bed over me did likewise rattle and shake.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  What mysterious ignorance leaked out of Charles’s words to poison them and render them worthless, inedible? For Charles, like me, haunted the library; I watched his shelf of books in the basement rotate. And Charles was a high deacon of his church, the wizard of his tribe; when he died his splendid robes overflowed his casket. That his nonsense made perfect sense to me alarmed me—was I, like Charles, eating the tripe of knowledge while Dad sat down to the steak? I suppose I never wondered where Blanche or Charles went at night; when it was convenient to do so, I still thought of the world as a well-arranged place where people did work that suited them and lived in houses appropriate to their tastes and needs. But once Blanche called us in the middle of an August night and my father, stepmother and I rushed to her aid. In the big Cadillac we breasted our way into unknown streets through the crowds of naked children playing in the tumult of water liberated from a fireplug (“Stop that!” I shouted silently at them, outraged and frightened. “That’s illegal!”). Past the stoops crowded with grownups playing cards and drinking wine. In one glaring doorway a woman stood, holding her diapered baby against her, a look of stoic indignation on her young face, a face one could imagine squeezing out tears without ever changing expression or softening the wide, fierce eyes, set jaw, everted lower lip. The smell of something delicious—charred meat, maybe, and maybe burning honey—filled the air. “Roll up your windows, for Chrissake, and lock the doors,” my father shouted at us. “Dammit, use your heads—don’t you know this place is dangerous as hell!” A bright miner’s lamp, glass globe containing a white fire devoid of blues and yellows, dangled from the roof of a vendor’s cart; he was selling food of some sort to children. Even through the closed windows I could hear the babble of festive, delirious radios. A seven-foot skinny man in spats, shades, an electric-green shantung suit and a flat-brimmed white beaver hat with a matching green band strolled in front of our car and patted our fender with elaborate mockery. “I’ll kill the bastard,” Dad shouted. “I swear I’ll kill that goddamn ape if he scratches my fender.” “Oh-h-h …” my stepmother sang on a high note I’d never heard before. “You’ll get us all killed. Honey, my heart.” The man, who my father told us was a “pimp” (whatever that might be), bowed to unheard applause, pulled his hat down over one eye like a Parisian and ambled on, letting us pass.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The word “game” commonly denotes frivolity and an escape from the exigencies of the world, but Nabokov confronts the void by virtue of his play-concept. His “game of worlds” (to quote John Shade in Pale Fire) proceeds within the terrifyingly immutable limits defined by the “two eternities of darkness” and is a search for order—for “some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game”—which demands the full consciousness of its players. The author and the reader are the “players,” and when in Speak, Memory Nabokov describes the composition of chess problems he is also telescoping his fictional practices. If one responds to the author’s “false scents” and “specious lines of play,” best effected by parody, and believes, say, that Humbert’s confession is “sincere” and that he exorcises his guilt, or that the narrator of Pnin is really perplexed by Pnin’s animosity toward him, or that a Nabokov book is an illusion of a reality proceeding under the natural laws of our world—then one not only has lost the game to the author but most likely is not faring too well in the “game of worlds,” one’s own unscrambling of pictures. Speak, Memory rehearses the major themes of Nabokov’s fiction: the confrontation of death; the withstanding of exile; the nature of the creative process; the search for complete consciousness and the “free world of timelessness.” In the first chapter he writes, “I have journeyed back in thought—with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went—to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits.” Nabokov’s protagonists live in claustrophobic, cell-like rooms; and Humbert, Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading (1936), and Krug in Bend Sinister (1947) are all indeed imprisoned. The struggle to escape from this spherical prison (Krug is Russian for “circle”) assumes many forms throughout Nabokov; and his own desperate and sometimes ludicrous attempts, as described in Speak, Memory, are variously parodied in the poltergeist machinations of The Eye, in Hazel Shade’s involvement with “a domestic ghost” and her spirit-writing in the haunted barn in Pale Fire, and in “The Vane Sisters” (in Tyrants Destroyed [1975]), where an acrostic in the final paragraph reveals that two vivid images from the story’s opening paragraphs were dictated by the dead Vane sisters.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  their fellows @ tarry behind and bring them tidings what was done concerning the robbery, and so they beat us forward over great hills out of the high way. But I, what with my heavy burden and the steep side of the mountain, and my long journey, did nothing differ from a dead ass ; wherefore I deter- mined with myself, though late yet in good earnest, to seek some remedy of the civil power, and by invocation of the awful name of the Emperor to be delivered from so many miseries. And on a time when it was high day, as I passed through a village of much people, where was a great fair, I came amongst a multitude, and I thought to call upon the renowned name of the Emperor in that same Greek tongue, and I cried out cleverly and aloud, “O,” but “Caesar” I could in no wise pronounce : but the thieves, little regarding my unmusical crying, did lay on and beat my wretched skin in such sort, that after it was neither apt nor meet for leather nor sieves. Howbeit, at last Jupiter ministered unto me an unhoped remedy. For when we had passed by many farms and great houses, I fortuned to espy a pleasant garden, wherein, besides many other flowers of delectable hue, were new and fresh roses that dripped with the morning dew, and gaping onthese (being very joyful and brisk to catch some as I passed by) I drew nearer and nearer. Now while my lips watered upon them, I thought of a better advice more profitable for me: lest if from being an ass I should become Lucius again, I might fall into the hands of the thieves, and either by suspicion that I were some witch, or for fear that I would utter their theft, I should be slain of a surety ; wherefore I abstained for that time, for it was needful, from eating of the roses, and (enduring my present adversity) I ate hay as other asses did. 143 LIBER IV I Diem ferme circa medium, cum iam flagrantia solis caleretur, in pago quodam apud notos ac familiares latronibus senes devertimus ; sic enim primus aditus et sermo prolixus et oscula mutua, quamvis asino, sentire praestabant: nam et rebus eos quibusdam dorso meo depromptis munerabantur, et secretis gannitibus, quod essent latrocinio partae, videbantur indicare. lamque nos omni sarcina levigatos in pratum proximum passim libero pastui tradidere, nec me cum asino vel equo meo compascuus. coetus attinere potuit adhuc insolitum. alioquin prandere faenum ; sed plane pone stabulum prospectum hortu- lum iam fame perditus fidenter invado et, quamvis crudis holeribus, affatim tamen ventrem sagino, deosque comprecatus omnes cuncta prospectabam loca, sicubi forte conterminis in hortulis candens repperirem rosarium. Nam et ipsa solitudo iam mihi bonam fiduciam tribuebat, si devius et frutectis absconditus sumpto remedio de iumenti quadripedis incurvo gradu rursum erectus in hominem, inspec- tante nullo, resurgerem. 2 Ergo igitur cum in isto cogitationis salo fluctuarem,

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  28 “Interim, dum Psyche quaestioni Cupidinis intenta populos circumibat, ille vulnere lucernae dolens in ipso thalamo matris iacens ingemebat. Tunc avis peralba illa gavia, quae super fluctus marinos pinnis natat, demergit sese propere ad Oceani profundum gremium. Ibi commodum Venerem lavantem natan- temque propter assistens, indicat adustum filium eius, gravi vulneris dolore maerentem, dubium salutis iacere, iamque per cunctorum ora populorum rumoribus conviciisque variis omnem Veneris familiam male audire, *quod ille quidem montano scortatu, tu vero marino natatu secesseritis ac per hoe non voluptas ulla, non gratia, non lepos, sed incompta et agrestia et horrida cuncta sint, non nuptiae con- iugales, non amicitiae sociales, non liberum caritates, sed enormis eluvies ! et squalentium foederum insuave fastidium.' Haec illa verbosa et satis curiosa avis in 1 The MSS seem to give gluvies or ingluvies, The suggestion of eluvies is due to Beroaldus, 24€ THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK V thou, Zephyrus, bear down thy mistress, and so she cast herself down from the mountain But she fell not into the valley neither alive nor dead, for all the members and parts of her body were torn amongst the rocks, whereby she was made a prey to the birds and wild beasts, as she worthily deserved, and so she perished. Neither was the vengeance of the other delayed: for Psyche, travelling with wandering feet, fortuned to come to another city,where her other sister did dwell; to whom when she had declared all such things as she told to her first sister, she also was caught in the snare, and being very jealous of her marriage, ran likewise unto the rock, and was slain in like sort. * [n the meantime, Psyche travelled about in the country to seek her husband Cupid, but he was gotten into his mother’s chamber, and there bewailed the sorrowful wound which he caught by the oil of the burning lamp, Then the white bird the gull, which swimmeth with his wings over the waves of the water, flew down to the Ocean sea, where she found Venus washing and bathing herself: to whom she declared her son was burned and suffering from a grievous wound and in danger of death, and moreover that it was a common report in the mouth of every person to speak evil of all the family of Venus; ‘Thy son,’ quoth she, ‘Doth nothing but haunt harlots in the mountain, and thou thyself dost use to riot on the sea, whereby they say there is now nothing any more | gracious, nothing pleasant, nothing gentle, but all is become uncivil, monstrous, and horrible ; moreover, there are no more loving marriages, nor friendships of amity, nor loving of children, but all is disorderly, and there is a very bitter hatred of weddings as base. things.’ This the wordy and curious gull did clatter / Q 241 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  By and by the theeves came home laden with treasure, and many of them which were of strongest courage (leaving behind such as were lame and wounded, to heale and aire themselves) said they would returne backe againe to fetch the rest of their pillage, which they had hidden in a certaine cave, and so they snatched up their dinner greedily, and brought us forth into the way and beate us before them with staves. About night (after that we had passed over many hilles and dales) we came to a great cave, where they laded us with mighty burthens, and would not suffer us to refresh our selves any season but brought us againe in our way, and hied so fast homeward, that what with their haste and their cruell stripes, I fell downe upon a stone by the way side, then they beate me pittifully in lifting me up, and hurt my right thigh and my left hoofe, and one of them said, What shall we do with this lame Ill favoured Asse, that is not worth the meate he eats? And other said, Since the time that we had him first he never did any good, and I thinke he came unto our house with evill lucke, for we have had great wounds since, and losse of our valiant captaines, and other said, As soone as he hath brought home his burthen, I will surely throw him out upon the mountaine to be a pray for wild beasts: While these gentlemen reasoned together of my death, we fortuned to come home, for the feare that I was in, caused my feet to turne into wings: after that we were discharged of our burthens, they went to their fellowes that were wounded, and told them of our great tardity and slownesse by the way, neither was I brought into small anguish, when I perceived my death prepared before my face: Why standest thou still Lucius? Why dost thou not looke for thy death? Knowst thou not that the theeves have ordained to slay thee? seest thou not these sharpe and pointed flints which shall bruise and teare thee in peeces, if by adventure thou happen upon them? Thy gentle Magitian hath not onely given thee the shape and travell of an Asse, but also a skinne so soft and tender as it were a swallow: why dost thou not take courage and runne away to save thy selfe? Art thou afraid of the old woman more then halfe dead, whom with a stripe of thy heele thou maist easily dispatch? But whither shall I fly? What lodging shall I seek? See my Assy cogitation. Who is he that passeth by the way and will not take me up?

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Off we go into the wild blue yonder… She couldn’t keep songs about flying out of her head. And especially the ending of that song—live in fame or go down in flame —not that she’d lived in fame but still…She’d seen what it was like to go down in flame. And she didn’t want any part of it. That was putting it mildly. “I really don’t want to fly,” she told Rusty. Rusty said, “I understand.” “If you understand, why would you make me do it?” “I don’t want you to spend your life avoiding travel. I want you to see the world.” “I’ll drive.” “You can’t drive across the ocean.” “I’ll take a boat.” “Everyone will be flying, Miri.” “That doesn’t mean I have to be like everyone else.” “No, but you don’t want your fears to limit your possibilities.” “That sounds like something Dr. O would say, not you.” “But it makes sense, doesn’t it?” Miri shrugged. Did it? “Christina and Jack are driving to Las Vegas.” “Are you saying you want to go with them? Because I don’t think that would be appropriate.” Before her world fell apart, Miri might have begged to go with them, Mason surely would have been along. She hadn’t seen Christina or Jack since the breakup. She hated that word. Breakup. It reminded her of Henry’s description of the third crash—Like a swollen cream puff that had broken apart. She felt as if she, too, had broken apart. “I still don’t see why we can’t drive.” “The sooner we get there, the sooner we can establish residency.” Rusty was losing patience, Miri could tell. “It takes six weeks before you can get a divorce. And we can’t get married until the divorce is final.” Married. She sometimes forgot that her mother was going to marry Dr. O. He would be her stepfather. He’d be there for dinner at night, asking about her day, like a real father. But what about his kids? How would that make them feel? Sometimes, she didn’t blame Natalie for hating him. ChristinaIt didn’t hit her until they made it to Las Vegas in Jack’s truck, how far she was from home. She cried for two days when she saw the dusty road stop of a desert town with a couple of motels and flashy signs spelling out CASINO or BAR , surrounded by brown and red mountains, mostly untouched by vegetation. She expected green, not brown, and summer flowers, not cacti. She couldn’t get out of bed. She wouldn’t eat. Jack enlisted Daisy’s help. Daisy had arrived before them to start setting up the new office. She’d been there a week when Jack and Christina finally made it.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  What answer could I make to that? I could scream and yell that I was a baby too, that I’d fall apart if he left me, that I’d crack up. Maybe I would. But I wasn’t Adrian’s child, and it wasn’t his business to rescue me. I was nobody’s baby now. Liberated. Utterly free. It was the most terrifying sensation I’d ever known in my life. Like teetering on the edge of the Grand Canyon and hoping you’d learn to fly before you hit bottom. — It was only after he’d left that I was able to gather my terror in my two hands and possess it. We did not part enemies. When I knew I was truly defeated, I stopped hating him. I began concentrating on how to endure being alone. As soon as I ceased expecting rescue from him, I found that I could empathize with him. I was not his child. He had a right to protect his children. Even from me—if he conceived me to be a threat to them. He had betrayed me, but I had sensed all along that this would happen and in some way I had used him as a betrayer just as surely as he had used me as a victim. He was, perversely, an instrument of my freedom. As I watched him drive away, I knew I would fall back in love with him as soon as the distance between us was great enough. He hadn’t left without offering help, either. We had inquired together about airline tickets to London and found that all the planes were booked for the next two days. I could wait till Wednesday or inquire about boat trains the following day. Or I could go to the airport and wait to be called as a standby. I had options. All I had to do was endure the insane pounding of my heart until I could find Bennett again—or someone. Perhaps myself. — I dragged my suitcase back to the café on the Place St. Michel. Suddenly, being without a man, I realized how heavy it was. I had not packed with the expectation of traveling alone. My suitcase was full of guidebooks, a small tape recorder for the article I’d never written, notebooks, my electric hair-setter, ten copies of my first book of poems. Some of these were to be given to a literary agent in London. Others were simply carried out of insecurity; badges of identity to put on for anyone I might meet. They were designed to prove that I was not just an ordinary woman. They were designed to prove that I was exceptional. They were designed to prove that I was to be given safe conduct. I clung pitifully to my status as an exception, because without it, I would be just another lonely female on the prowl. “Do I have your address?” Adrian asked before he took off in the Triumph.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  That is, everything suspenseful and mutable about the society of lovers had been eliminated in favor of an embrace as simple and unvarying (as eternal) as it had necessarily to be cold. Or perhaps I worried that if I had a real, living lover I’d wound him, subject him to all the rage I’d been saving up. Yes, I spent my days thinking about male bodies, each of which was as varied, as sequential as a long Chinese scroll through which the minuscule pilgrim travels in his straw hat, followed by a servant and a horse, now standing back from the steaming falls, now meditating cross-legged under a grass roof held up by bamboo poles as he surveys the valley filling up with mist or as he throws his head back in wild spiritual hilarity in response to the grandeur of the mountain or here, down here, where he’s picking at his rice in the company of monks in the long, narrow hall opened up to the sweet, gasped Oh! of the full moon and the long exhaled Ah-h-h of its reflection in the pond. If I could have lain in a bed beside any of these boys I jostled past every day, whose feet I had to sit on while they did sit-ups or whom I sat beside, shoulder to shoulder, during chapel, I would have explored him just as the Chinese pilgrim traversed that majestic, intimidating terrain to whose rhythm he hoped to adjust himself and from which he expected to take a wisdom not quite tenable. At night I’d pull the covers up to my chin in the cold and listen to the momentary gust of laughter outside as a master and his wife bade farewell to another couple after a late dinner (“Thanks, Rachel.” “So long, Hal”). Car doors slammed. A cold motor struggled to turn over. Success. Lights on. Motor in gear. Final farewells. Then a handkerchief of brightness was drawn across my ceiling, next the magician pulled a beige out of the white, a gray out of the beige, finally black from gray. On that ultimate cloth I tossed the dice: I began to meditate. I threw back the blankets, took off my pajama top and, shivering but determined to master mere flesh, sat cross-legged on my cot. I knew nothing of bonafide Oriental procedures, but I made up my own from scraps of information I’d gathered here and there, overheard table talk at the banquet of bliss. Not limber enough to hook my feet over my thighs, I contented myself with a drooping lotus and pressed my hands together in my lap, thumb tip to thumb tip, second joints of my fingers united (the “people” inside the “church” of a more Christian childhood game).

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  We hurried up five flights of dirty, broken stairs, littered with empty pint bottles, bags of garbage and two dolls (both white, I noticed, and blond and mutilated), past landings and open doors, which gave me glimpses of men playing cards and, across the hall, a grandmother alone and asleep in an armchair with antimacassars. Her radio was playing that Negro music. Her brown cotton stockings had been rolled down below her black knees. Blanche we found wailing and shouting, “My baby, my baby!” as she hopped and danced in circles of pain around her daughter, whose hand, half lopped off, was spouting blood. My father gathered the girl up in his arms and we all rushed off to the emergency room of a hospital. She lived. Her hand was even sewn back on, though the incident (jealous lover with an ax) had broken her mind. Afterward the girl didn’t go back to her job and feared even leaving the building. My stepmother thought the loss of blood had somehow left her feeble-minded. In the hospital parking lot my father fussed over the blood on his suit and on the Cadillac upholstery, though I wondered if his pettiness wasn’t merely a way of silencing Blanche, who kept kissing his whole hand in gratitude. Or perhaps he’d found a way of reintroducing the ordinary into a night that had dipped disturbingly below the normal temperature of tedium he worked so hard to maintain. Years later, when Charles died, my father was the only white man to attend the funeral. He wasn’t welcome, but he went anyway and sat in the front row. After Charles’s death my father became more scattered and apprehensive. He would sit up all night with a stopwatch, counting his pulse. That had been another city—Blanche’s two rooms, scrupulously clean in contrast to the squalor of the halls, her parrot squawking under the tea towel draped over the cage, the chromo of a sad Jesus pointing to his exposed, juicy heart as though he were a free-clinic patient with a troubling symptom, the filched wedding photo of my father and stepmother in a nest of crepe-paper flowers, the bloody sheet torn into strips that had been wildly clawed off and hurled onto the flowered congoleum floor.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Some alien thing is trying to take over Earth. ANGELO VENETTI: UFOs—they’ve been sighted in New Mexico. The Martians want to turn us into zombies so they can control our planet. DERISH GRAY: They want to take dead children to the past, or the future, to show what life was like in the mid-twentieth century on a planet called Earth. Miri tried not to listen, tried to believe what Henry had told her—that both crashes were accidents. But she wasn’t convinced. That wouldn’t explain why three schools were almost hit, first Hamilton, and now Battin and St. Mary’s. And she remembered Leah telling them how close the first plane had come to the Elks Club on the day one hundred little kids were at a holiday party. But why would Martians come to Elizabeth, New Jersey? What was so special about them that made these creatures from outer space come here? Or was it a mistake? Did they mean to land in New York? Were they after only dead children to carry back in their spaceships or did they want living children, too? Is that what they were going to do with Penny, who liked to dress up in her pink ballet slippers and leotard, showing Miri and Suzanne what she’d learned in dance class that week—were they going to turn her into a zombie? She wasn’t even sure what a zombie was. Something undead. Something that feasted on human brains. They’d probably all be dead by June, Miri thought. Forget prom and graduation. She just hoped it would be a quick death so they wouldn’t suffer, so they wouldn’t wind up horribly burned or blinded, or left without arms and legs. It was coming. She didn’t know what it was but it was just a matter of time. She was beginning to believe they were jinxed. DONNY KELLEN: McCarthy’s doing the right thing, going after all the pinko Jew bastards like the Rosenbergs. They’re the ones behind it. They should all be fried. SUZANNE: Leave the Jews out of this. This has nothing to do with Jews. Plenty of Jews were killed on those planes. DONNY KELLEN: You’re such a Jew lover. That was just a cover to make it look like they’re not responsible. CHARLEY KAMINSKY ( to Donny ): You’re an asshole, you know that? Stick your finger up your butt and take a whiff. That’s you. A piece of shit! Donny came after Charley but Charley socked him first, giving him a bloody nose. The other boys held Donny and Charley apart. ELEANOR ( shouting ): It’s sabotage, you idiots! We’re under siege. Get it through your heads. Korea is nothing compared to what’s happening here. Korea is a distraction. You don’t hear Eisenhower saying nominate me for president, and I’ll stop these crashes tomorrow. No, because he can’t. Sure, he can stop the war in Korea. But he can’t stop this one. Because our side doesn’t know who we’re fighting.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  but how from an animal it becomes a human being5 thou seest not yet; this is that point which made one wiser than thou to err; so that by his teaching he made the intellectual faculty separate from the soul, because he saw no organ occupied by it.6 Open thy breast to the truth which is coming, and know that so soon as the organization of the brain is perfect in the embyro, the First Mover turns him to it, rejoicing over such handiwork of nature, and breathes into it a new spirit with virtue filled, which draws into its substance that which it finds active there, and becomes one single soul, that lives, and feels, and turns round upon itself.7 And that thou mayst marvel less at my words, look at the sun’s heat, that is made wine when combined with the juice which flows from the vine. And when Lachesis has no more thread,8 it frees itself from the flesh, and bears away in potency both the human and the divine; the other powers, the whole of them mute; memory, intelligence and will,9 keener far in action than they were before. Staying not, it falls of itself in wondrous wise to one of the shores; there it first learns its ways.10 Soon as it is circumscribed11 in place there, the formative virtue radiates around, in form and quantity as in the living members; and as the air, when it is full saturate, becomes decked with divers colours through another’s rays which are reflected in it, so the neighbouring air sets itself into that form which the soul that is there fixed impresses upon it by means of its virtue; and then, like the flame which follows the fire wheresoever it moves, the spirit is followed by its new form. Inasmuch as therefrom it afterwards has it semblance, it is called a shade; and therefrom it forms the organs of every sense even to sight. By this we speak, and by this we laugh, by this we make the tears and the sighs which thou mayst have heard about the mount. The shade takes its form according as the desires and the other affections prick us, and this is the cause of that whereof thou marvellest.” And now had we come to the last turning, and had wheeled round to the right hand, and were intent on other care. There the bank flashes forth flames, and the cornice breathes a blast upward, which bends them back, and keeps them away from it; wherefore it behoved us to go on the side which was free one by one; and on this side I feared the fire, and on that I feared to fall downward. My Leader said: “Along this place the rein must be kept tight on the eyes, because lightly a false step might be taken.” “Summæ Deus clementiæ“12 I then heard sung in the heart of the great burning, which made me no less eager to turn aside;