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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  As we walked through the city that Saturday night, it was his behavior which disturbed me far more than his wild talk. He wanted us both to close our eyes and cross streets against the lights (to prove we were gods). He would go into stores and ask the storekeepers to take down various items, then handle each one, talk elatedly about each one, and then walk out. He would go into a coffee shop and play with the sugar pourer on every table before he sat down. People kept staring at him. Sometimes the storekeepers or waiters would say, “Take it easy buddy, relax buddy” or sometimes they’d throw him out. Everyone sensed that something was wrong. His agitation jangled the air. To Brian, this was only proof of divinity. “You see,” he said, “they know I’m God and they don’t know how else to react.” It was doubly hard for me because I half believed Brian’s theory. Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world. If God did come back, he would probably wind up in the psycho ward. I was a Laingian way before Laing began publishing. But I was also scared to death. When we finally got home at 2 a.m., Brian was still frantic and wide-awake, though I was exhausted. He wanted to show me his power. He wanted to prove he could satisfy me. He hadn’t screwed me in about six weeks, but now he wouldn’t stop. He fucked like a machine, refusing to succumb to an orgasm himself but urging me to come again and again and again. After the first three times I was sore and wanted to stop. I begged him to stop but he wouldn’t. He kept banging away at me like an ax murderer. I was crying and pleading. “Brian, please stop,” I sobbed. “You thought I couldn’t satisfy you!” he screamed. His eyes were wild. “You see!” he said, lunging into me. “You see! You see! You see!” “Brian, please stop!” “Doesn’t that prove it? Doesn’t that prove I’m God?” “Please stop,” I whimpered. When he stopped at last, he withdrew from me violently and thrust his still-hard penis into my mouth. But I was crying too hard to blow him. I lay on the bed sobbing. What was I going to do? I didn’t want to stay alone with him, but where could I go? For the first time I really began to be convinced he was dangerous.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  She feels the convulsions of the orgasm suck violently around her fingers. Her hand falls to her side and then she sinks into a dead sleep. She dreams she is back in the apartment where she grew up, but this time it was planned by a dream architect. The halls leading to three-walled bedrooms meander like ancient riverbeds and the kitchen pantry is a wind tunnel hung with cabinets too high to reach. The pipes fret like old men gargling; the floorboards breathe. In her bedroom, the frosted doorway glass is full of faces crying their anguish to the moon with O-shaped mouths. A long syllable of moonlight slides forward silvering the floor, then shatters with the sound of breaking glass. The faces in the door are wolfish. Blood stiffens in the corners of their mouths. The maid’s bathroom has a claw-footed tub where a child can imagine herself drowning. Four brass lanterns hang from the living-room ceiling. It is fathoms high and covered with tarnished gold leaf. Above the living room is a balcony with turned railing posts just wide enough apart for a child to ease through and begin floating through the air. One flight farther up and she is in the studio which smells of turpentine. The ceiling points up like a witch’s hat. A spiked iron chandelier hangs dead center from a black chain. It swings slightly in the wind which hisses between the trapezoidal northern window and the trapezoidal southern window. Beethoven’s plaster death mask hangs on the wall. His domed lids are shut. She climbs up on a chair and runs her fingers across them. The black soot streaks the plaster. Now she has left her fingerprints on Beethoven’s eyes. Something dreadful will surely happen. On the table is a skull. Beside it is a candlestick. This is a still life her grandfather has set up. Are there such things as still lives? On the easel is a half-finished painting of the skull and candlestick. Which is more still? The skull? Or the still life of the skull? Which stillness will last longer? In the corner of the room is a closet. Her husband’s green army jacket hangs there, empty. The sleeves flap in the wind. Is he dead? She is terribly frightened. She runs through the studio trapdoor and down the steps. Suddenly she falls, knowing she is going to die when she hits bottom. She struggles to scream and in the struggle wakes herself up. She is surprised to find herself in Paris rather than her parents’ house. He still lies beside her as if dead. She looks at his sleeping face, the long mouth with its curled-up corners, the sketchy eyebrows like Chinese calligraphy, and she thinks that next year this time they will not be together or else they will have a baby who does not look like her. “Merry Christmas,” he says, opening his eyes. They make love hopefully.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Sometimes, wandering around aimlessly, riding the Strassenbahn, stopping for beer and pretzels in a café, or Kaffee und Kuchen in a Konditorei, I would have the fantasy that I was the ghost of a Jew murdered in a concentration camp on the day I was born. Who was to tell me I was not? I devised complicated plots which I pretended to myself were merely surrealistic tales I planned to write. But they were more than tales and I was not writing. At times I thought I was going mad. For the first time in my life, I became intensely interested in the history of the Jews and the history of the Third Reich. I went to the USIS or Special Services Library and began poring over books which detailed the horrors of the deportations and death camps. I read about the Einsatzgruppen and imagined digging my own grave and standing on the brink of a great pit clutching my baby while the Nazi officers readied their machine guns. I imagined the shrieks of terror and the sounds of bodies falling. I imagined being wounded and rolling into the pit with the twitching bodies and having dirt shoveled over me. How could I protest that I wasn’t a Jew but a pantheist? How could I plead worship of the Winter Solstice and the Rites of Spring? For the purposes of the Nazis, I was as Jewish as anyone. Would I turn back into earth and become a flower or a fruit? Was that what had happened to the souls of all the Jews murdered on the day I was born? On rare sunny days, I used to haunt the markets. Germany’s fruit markets fascinated me with their diabolical beauty. There was a Saturday market behind the old Holy Ghost Church in the seventeenth-century town square. It had red and white striped awnings and heaps of fruit bleeding as if with human blood. Raspberries, strawberries, purple plums, blueberries. Masses of roses and peonies. Everything the color of blood and everything bleeding into wooden boxes and out onto the wooden tops of stands. Was this where the souls of the Jewish war babies had gone? Was this why the German passion for gardening disturbed me so? All that misplaced appreciation of the sacredness of life? So much love channeled into the nurturing of fruit and flowers and animals? But we knew nothing about what was happening to the Jews, they told me again and again. It was not written in the papers. It was only twelve years. And I believed them, in a way. And I understood them, in a way. And I wanted to watch them all die slow and horrible deaths. It was the bloody beauty of the markets—the ancient crones who weighed out all that bleeding fruit, the tough blond fräuleins who counted out the roses—which never failed to stir all my most violent feelings about Germany.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Sex, as I said, can be summed up in three P’s: procreation, pleasure, and pride. From the long-range point of view, which we must always consider, procreation is by far the most important, since without procreation there could be no continuation of the race…. So female orgasm is simply a nervous climax to sex relations…and as such it is a comparative luxury from nature’s point of view. It may be thought of as a sort of pleasure-prize like a prize that comes with a box of cereal. It is all to the good if the prize is there, but the cereal is valuable and nourishing if it is not. —Madeline Gray, The Normal Woman (sic), 1967 In my dream Adrian and Bennett were going up and down on a seesaw in the playground in Central Park where I used to go as a child. “Maybe she ought to be analyzed in England,” Bennett was saying as his end of the seesaw swung up in the air. “I’ll turn her passport and shot record over to you.” Adrian had his feet on the ground now and he began shaking the seesaw like a big kid unloosed in the little kids’ playground. “Stop that!” I yelled. “You’re hurting him!” But Adrian kept grinning and shaking the seesaw. “Don’t you see you’re hurting him! Stop it!” I tried to scream, but, as always in dreams, my words became garbled. I was terrified that Adrian was going to bounce Bennett to the ground and break his back. “Please, please stop!” I pleaded. “What’s wrong?” Bennett mumbled. I had awakened him. I always talked in my sleep, and he always answered. “What happened?” “You were on a seesaw with someone. I got scared.” “Oh.” He rolled over. Normally Bennett would have put his arms around me, but we were in narrow beds on opposite sides of the room and instead he went back to sleep.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Every Christmas from the time I was two, we had a Christmas tree. Only we were not celebrating the birth of Christ; we were celebrating (my mother said) “The Winter Solstice.” Gillian, who had a crèche under her Christmas tree and a star of Bethlehem over it, disputed this hotly with me. I resolutely echoed my mother: “The Winter Solstice came before Jesus Christ,” I said. Poor benighted Gillian’s mother had insisted on a baby Jesus and a virgin birth. At Easter, we hunted for painted eggs, but we were not celebrating the resurrection of Christ; we were celebrating “the Vernal Equinox,” the Rebirth of Life, the Rites of Spring. Listening to my mother, you would have thought we were Druids. “What happens to people when they die?” I asked her. “They don’t really die,” she said. “They go back into the earth, and after a while get born again, as grass or maybe even as tomatoes.” This was strangely disquieting. Perhaps it was comforting enough to hear her say, “They don’t really die,” but who wanted to be a tomato? Was that my fate? To become a tomato with all those squishy seeds? But like it or not, it was the only religion I had. We weren’t really Jewish; we were pagans and pantheists. We believed in reincarnation, the souls of tomatoes, even (way back in the 1940s) in ecology. And yet with all this, I began to feel intensely Jewish and intensely paranoid (are they perhaps the same?) the moment I set foot in Germany. Suddenly people on buses were going home to houses where they treasured clever little collections of gold teeth and wedding rings…. The lampshades in the Hotel Europa were suspiciously finely grained…. The soap in the restroom of the Silberner Hirsch smelled funny…. The immaculate railroad trains were really claustrophobic and foul-smelling cattle cars…. The conductor, with his pink marzipan pig face, was not going to let me off…. The station commander, with his high-peaked Nazi hat, was going to inspect my papers on some pretext and hustle me over to one of those green-coated policemen in black leather boots with a matching whip…. The customs guard at the border crossing was surely going to stop me, discover my little cache of Lomotil paregoric, sulfur tablets, V-Cillin, and Librium from the army dispensary—usual supply of goodies for going down to Italy—and take me away to a secret cavern under the Alps where I would be tortured in cruelly ingenious ways until I confessed that beneath my paganism, pantheism and pedantic knowledge of English poetry, I was every bit as Jewish as Anne Frank.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We were both learning how to fish the unconscious. Bennett was sitting almost motionless in the living room pondering his father’s death, his grandfather’s death, all the deaths that had been heaped on his shoulders when he was barely old enough to grasp his own life. I was in my study writing. I was learning how to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past. I was learning how to sneak up on the unconscious and how to catch my seemingly random thoughts and fantasies. By closing me out of his world, Bennett had opened all sorts of worlds inside my own head. Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about. Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed. I began two novels in Heidelberg. Both of them had male narrators. I just assumed that nobody would be interested in a woman’s point of view. Besides, I didn’t want to risk being called all the things women writers (even good women writers) are called: “clever, witty, bright, touching, but lacks scope.” I wanted to write about the whole world. I wanted to write War and Peace—or nothing. No “lady writer” subjects for me. I was going to have battles and bullfights, and jungle safaris. Only I didn’t know a damn thing about battles and bullfights and jungle safaris (and neither do most men). I languished in utter frustration, thinking that the subjects I knew about were “trivial” and “feminine"—while the subjects I knew nothing of were “profound” and “masculine.” No matter what I did, I felt I was bound to fail. Either I would fail by writing or fail by not writing. I was paralyzed. Thanks to my luck, my sadness, my strange relationship with my husband, my stubborn determination (which I did not at all believe in then), I managed to write three books of poems in the next three years. I scrapped two and the third was published. Then a whole new set of problems began. I had to learn to cope with my own fear of success for one thing, and that was almost harder to live with than the fear of failure. If I had learned how to write, mightn’t I also learn how to live? Adrian, it seemed, wanted to teach me how to live. Bennett, it seemed, wanted to teach me how to die. And I didn’t even know which I wanted. Or maybe I had pegged them wrong. Maybe Bennett was life and Adrian death. Maybe life was compromise and sadness, while ecstasy ended inevitably in death. Manichean though I was, I couldn’t even tell the players without a score card. If I could tell good from evil, maybe I could choose, but I was more baffled now than I’d ever been. EIGHTTales from the Vienna Woods

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] IF I HAD rhymes rough and hoarse, as would befit the dismal hole, on which all the other rocky steeps converge and weigh, I should press out the juice of my conception more fully; but since I have them not, not without fear I bring myself to tell thereof: for to describe the bottom of all the universe is not an enterprise for being taken up in sport, nor for a tongue that cries mamma and papa. But may those Ladies help my verse, who helped Amphion with walls to close in Thebes;1 so that my words may not be diverse from the fact. O ye beyond all others, miscreated rabble, who are in the place, to speak of which is hard, better had ye here on earth been sheep or goats! When we were down in the dark pit, under the Giant’s feet, much lower, and I still was gazing at the high wall, I heard a voice say to me: “Look how thou passest: take care that with thy soles thou tread not on the heads of thy weary wretched brothers.” Whereat I turned myself, and saw before me and beneath my feet a lake, which through frost had the semblance of glass and not of water. Never did the Danube of Austria make so thick a veil for his course in winter, nor the Don afar beneath the frigid sky, as there was here: for if Tambernic had fallen on it, or Pietrapana,2 it would not even at the edge have given a creak. And as the frog to croak, sits with his muzzle out of the water, when the peasant-woman oft dreams that she is gleaning:3 so, livid, up to where the hue of shame appears, the doleful shades were in the ice, sounding with their teeth like storks. Each held his face turned downwards; by the mouth their cold, and by the eyes the sorrow of their hearts is testified amongst them. When I had looked round awhile, I turned towards my feet; and saw two so pressed against each other, that they had the hair of their heads intermixed. “Tell me, ye who thus together press your bosoms,” said I, “who you are.” And they bended their necks; and when they had raised their faces towards me, their eyes, which only inwardly were moist before, gushed at the lids, and the frost bound fast the tears between them, and closed them up again. Wood with wood no cramp did ever gird so strongly: wherefore they, like two he-goats, butted one another; such rage came over them. And one, who had lost both ears by the cold, with his face still downwards said: “Why art thou looking so much at us? If thou desirest to know who are these two,4 the valley whence the Bisenzio descends was theirs, and their father Albert’s.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Just as years before, when I was seven, I had presented myself to a minister and had sought for his understanding, in the same way now I was turning to a psychoanalyst for help. I wanted to overcome this thing I was becoming and was in danger soon of being, the homosexual, as though that designation were the mold in which the water was freezing, the first crystals already forming a fragile membrane. The confusion and fear and pain that beset me—initiated by my experience with the hustler, intensified by Mr. Pouchet’s gentle silence and made eerie by my fascination with “The Age of Bronze”—had translated me into a code no one could read, I least of all, a code perhaps designed to defeat even the best cryptographer. Dr. O’Reilly was far too Mosaic to read anything other than the tablets he himself was carrying on which he’d engraved his theory. I subscribed to his theory, I placed myself entirely in his care, because learning his ideas was less frustrating and less perilous than teasing out my own. I had no one and he liked me or at least he said he did. Of course, he needed someone to talk to about his problems, and I was a good listener. I see now that what I wanted was to be loved by men and to love them back but not to be a homosexual. For I was possessed with a yearning for the company of men, for their look, touch and smell, and nothing transfixed me more than the sight of a man shaving and dressing, sumptuous rites. It was men, not women, who struck me as foreign and desirable and I disguised myself as a child or a man or whatever was necessary in order to enter their hushed, hieratic company, my disguise so perfect I never stopped to question my identity. Nor did I want to study the face beneath my mask, lest it turn out to have the pursed lips, dead pallor and shaped eyebrows by which one can always recognize the Homosexual. What I required was a sleight of hand, an alibi or a convincing act of bad faith to persuade myself I was not that vampire. Perhaps—yes, this must be it—perhaps my homosexuality was a symptom of some other deeper but less irrevocable disorder. That’s what Dr. O’Reilly thought. After I’d confessed all, he pressed his hankie to his glistening forehead, gnawed his raw lips and said with a dramatic air of boredom, “But none of that matters at all. In here, you’ll find”—the traveling blue eyes stopped meandering across the ceiling and fixed me—“that we’ll ignore your acting out and concentrate on your real conflicts.”

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  He waved that gross air from his countenance, often moving his left hand before him; and only of that trouble seemed he weary. Well did I perceive that he was a Messenger of Heaven; and I turned to the Master; and he made a sign that I should stand quiet, and bow down to him. Ah, how full he seemed to me of indignation! He reached the gate, and with a wand opened it: for there was no resistance. “O outcasts of Heaven! race despised!” began he, upon the horrid threshold, “why dwells this insolence in you? Why spurn ye at that Will, whose object never can be frustrated, and which often has increased your pain? What profits it to butt against the Fates? Your Cerberus, if ye remember, still bears his chin and his throat peeled for doing so.” 9 Then he returned by the filthy way, and spake no word to us; but looked like one whom other care urges and incites than that of those who stand before him. And we moved our feet towards the city, secure after the sacred words. We entered into it without any strife; and I, who was desirous to behold the condition which such a fortress encloses, as soon as I was in, sent my eyes around; and saw, on either hand, a spacious plain full of sorrow and of evil torment. As at Aries, where the Rhone stagnates, as at Pola near the Quarnaro gulf,10 which shuts up Italy and bathes its confines, the sepulchres make all the place uneven: so did they here on every side, only the manner here was bitterer: for amongst the tombs were scattered flames, whereby they were made all over so glowing-hot, that iron more hot no craft requires. Their covers were all raised up; and out of them proceeded moans so grievous, that they seemed indeed the moans of spirits sad and wounded. And I: “Master, what are these people who, buried within those chests, make themselves heard by their painful sighs?” And he to me: “Here are the Arch-heretics with their followers of every sect; and much more, than thou thinkest, the tombs are laden. Like with like is buried here; and the monuments are more and less hot.” Then, after turning to the right hand, we passed between the tortures and the high battlements.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  And by and by the doors were broken down and a troop of thieves entered in, and kept every part and - corner of the house with weapons. And as men re- sorted to aid. and help them which were within the doors, the thieves resisted and kept them back, for each one was armed with his sword and a torch in his hand, the glimpses whereof did yield out such light as if it had been day. Then they broke open with their axes a great chest shut and sealed with double locks, wherein was laid in the middle of the house all the treasures of Milo, and ransacked the same ; which when they had done, they packed it up and gave every one a portion to carry ; but when they had more bags to bear away than men to carry them, they were at their wits' end for the abundance of all this exceeding wealth, and so they came into the stable and took us two poor asses and my horse and loaded us with the greatest trusses that we were able to bear. And when we were out of the house, they followed and threatened us with greet staves, and willed one of : 141 LUCIUS APULEIUS potest gravioribus sarcinis onerant et domo iam vacua minantes baculis exigunt, unoque de sociis ad specu- landum, qui de facinoris inquisitione nuntiaret, relicto, nos crebra tundentes per avia montium ducunt con- citos. 29 Iamque rerum tantarum pondere et montis ardui vertice et prolixo satis itinere nihil a mortuo differe- bam. Sed mihi sero quidem, serio tamen. subvenit ad auxilium civile decurrere et interposito venerabili principis nomine tot aerumnis me liberare: cum denique iam luce clarissima vicum quempiam fre- quentem et nundinis celebrem praeteriremus, inter ipsas turbelas, Graecorum genuino sermone nomen augustum Caesaris invocare temptavi, et * O " quidem . tantum disertum ac validum clamitavi, reliquum autem Caesaris nomen enuntiare non potui : aspernati latrones clamorem absonum meum, caedentes hinc inde miserum corium nec cribris iam idoneum relin- quunt. Sed tandem mihi inopinatam salutem Iupiter ille tribuit : nam cum multas villulas et casas amplas praeteriremus, hortulum quendam prospexi satis amoenum, in quo praeter ceteras gratas herbulas rosae virgines matutino rore florebant. His inhians et spe salutis alacer ac laetus propius accessi, dumque iam labiis undantibus affecto, consilium me subit longe salubrius, ne si rursum asino remoto prodirem in Lucium, evidens exitium inter manus latronum offenderem vel artis magicae suspectione vel indicii futuri criminatione. Tunc igitur a rosis, et quidem necessario, temperavi, et casum praesentem tolerans in asini faciem faena rodebam. 142 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK III

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  that pointed every way like spears, girt with belts, and on their feet were yellow shoes; and they attired the goddess in silken robe, and put her upon my back. Then they went forth with their arms naked to their shoulders, bearing withthem great swords and mighty axes, shouting and dancing like mad persons to the sound of the pipe. After that we had passed many small villages, we fortuned to come to a certain rich man’s house, where at our first entry they began to howl all out of tune and hurl themselves hither and thither, as though they were mad. They made a thousand gests with their feet and their heads; they would bend down their necks and spin round so that their hair flew out in a circle; they would bite their own flesh ; finally, every one took his twy- edged weapon and wounded his arms in divers places. Meanwhile there was one more mad than the rest, that fetched many deep sighs from the bottom of his heart, as though he had been ravished in spirit, or replenished with divine power, and he feigned a swoon and frenzy, as if (forsooth) the presence of the gods were not wont to make men better than before, but weak and sickly. Mark then how by divine providence he found a just and worthy recompense after that he had somewhat returned to himself, he invented and forged a great lie, noisily prophesying and accusing and charging himself, saying that he had displeased the divine majesty of the goddess by doing of something which was not convenable to the order of their holy religion, wherefore he prayed that vengeance might be done of himself. And therewithal he took a whip, such as is naturally borne by these womanish men, with many twisted knots and tassels of wool, and strung with sheep’s knuckle-bones, and with the knotted thongs scourged 391 LUCIUS APULEIUS ictibus, mire contra plagarum dolores praesumptione munitus. Cerneres prosectu gladiorum ictuque fla- grorum solumspurcitia sanguinis effeminati madescere. Quae res incutiebat mihi non parvam sollicitudinem videnti tot vulneribus largiter profusum cruorem, ne quo casu deae peregrinae stomachus, ut quorundam hominum lactem, sic illa sanguinem concupisceret asininum. Sed ubi tandem fatigati, vel certe suo laniatu satiati, pausam carnificinae dedere, stipes aereas, immo vero et argenteas multis certatim offerentibus, sinu recepere patulo necnon et vini cadum et lactem et caseos et farris et siliginis aliquid, et nonnullis hordeum deae gerulo donantibus. Avidis nimis corradentes omnia et in sacculos huic quaestui de industria praeparatos farcientes dorso meo con- gerunt, ut duplici scilicet sarcinae pondere gravatus, et horreum simul et templum incederem.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I can’t get her to shut up or to release my hand. Now she’s grabbed a pillow and stuffed it in my face. “Whatsa matter, can’t you take it, can’t you take it, play with your poop,” she’s chanting. I turn my head to breathe but she’s right there, applying the pillow to my face in this new position. Her terrible words continue, though the pillow muffles the sound. She’s planted a knee in my chest to hold me down. Terrified of suffocating, I push her off in a frantic burst of energy. I grab the nail scissors and stab her in the hand. Blood leaps out. I drop the scissors; they fall to the floor. I’m aghast, an Indian hopping around on one foot with horror, hooting a little war hoot of anguish: “Oh! Oh! Oh!” But she is transformed into a scientist, a doctor. She watches the blood pulse, pool in her palm, finally coagulate. “Neat,” she whispers with awe. By the time our mother returns, I’m exhausted by my tears of repentance. I’ve been sobbing on the bed, sobbing and sobbing with guilt and fear of punishment. When I hear the door click, I look up. “It was an accident!” I shout. “I hurt her, but it was an accident.” “Oh no, what now! What’s going on here?” Mother shouts, throwing her packages on the foot of the bed. My sister alone seems calm. She has bandaged her hand and pinned back her hair and donned a fresh nightgown. She’s sitting peacefully under a lamp, reading. She’s proud of her wound; it’s made her important. “My baby!” my mother shouts, rushing to my sister’s side. The wound is unbound and revealed. I can tell my mother is confused, since ordinarily I’m the one who’s tormented by my sister. I’m ordinarily the sweet soul, too good for this world, too kind for my own good, too gentle, a little lamb. To discover the wolf cub in lamb’s skin doesn’t suit my mother’s preconceptions, the story of our lives she’s telling herself. She sits on the edge of the bed, magisterial, coldly rational, suffering disappointment but resolved to appear fair. “Start at the beginning. Tell me everything that happened.” My sister and I compete, we try to outshout each other (“You did, I did not, Yes, you did”). Mother opens a bottle of bourbon and calls room service, ordering ice and seltzer water.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Hopeless. I cannot reason myself out of this panic. My breath is coming in short gasps and I am sweating profusely. Try to describe the panic, I tell myself. Pretend you’re writing. Put yourself in the third person. But it’s impossible. I am sinking into the center of the panic. It seems I am being torn asunder by wild horses and that my arms and legs are flying off in different directions. Horrible torture fantasies obsess me. Chinese warlords flaying their enemies alive. Joan of Arc burned at the stake. French Protestants broken on the wheel. Resistance fighters having their eyes plucked out. Nazis torturing Jews with electric shocks, with needles, with unanesthetized “operations.” Southerners lynching blacks. American soldiers cutting the ears off Vietnamese. Indians being tortured. Indians torturing. The whole of history of the human race running with blood and gore and the screams of victims. I press my eyes closed, but the scenes replay themselves on the inside of my burning lids. I feel as if I have been flayed alive, as if all my inner organs are open to the elements, as if the top of my head has blown off and even my brain is exposed. Every nerve ending transmits only pain. Pain is the only reality. It isn’t true, I say. Remember the days when you felt pleasure, when you were glad to be alive, when you felt joy so great you thought you’d burst with it. But I can’t remember. I am nailed to the cross of my imagination. And my imagination is as horrible as the history of the world. I remember my first trip to Europe at the age of thirteen. We spent six weeks in London visiting our English relatives, seeing the sights, accumulating huge bills at Claridge’s which, my father said, were “paid by Uncle Sam….” What a rich uncle. But I spent the trip being terrified by all the torture devices we saw in the Tower of London and all the wax horrors we saw at Madame Tussaud’s. I had never seen thumbscrews and racks before. I had never realized. “Do people still use those things?” I asked my mother. “No, darling. They only used them in the olden days when people were more barbaric. Civilization has progressed since then.” It was civilized 1955, only a decade or so since the Nazi holocaust; it was the era of atomic testing and stockpiling; it was two years after the Korean War, and only shortly after the height of the communist witchhunts, with blacklists containing the names of many of my parents’ friends. But my mother, smoothing the real linen sheets between which I trembled, insisted, that rainy night in London, on civilization. She was trying to spare me. If the truth was too hard to bear, then she would lie to me. “Good,” I said, closing my eyes.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Where the path crossed the logger’s road, Ralph was sitting in a sort of natural hummock created by the exposed roots of an old elm. He had his pants down around his knees and was examining his erect penis with a disbelieving curiosity, a slightly stunned look emptying his face. He called me over and I joined him, as though to examine a curiosity of nature. He persuaded me to touch it and I did. He asked me to lick the red, sticky, unsheathed head and I hesitated. Was it dirty? I wondered. Would someone see us? Would I become ill? Would I become a queer and never, never be like other people? To overcome my scruples, Ralph hypnotized me. He didn’t have to intone the words long to send me into a deep trance. Once I was under his spell he told me I’d obey him, and I did. He also said that when I awakened I’d remember nothing, but he was wrong there. I have remembered everything. FIVE If my sister was happy with other girls in the summer, in the winter she sat home night after night waiting for boys to ask her out on dates she dreaded. Our mother had moved us into a large apartment and furnished it luxuriously—but no one came to visit. By now my sister was certain I was the one who’d been hurting her chances. With a brother so weird, who was in no way athletic or cool or neat, no wonder she had a reputation for being out of it. Since my sister was only four years older than I, she knew precisely what would appeal to my classmates—what sort of penny loafers, which red-and-white-checked short-sleeved shirt, what style of jeans, what manner of low-key joshing. She helped me buy the right clothes and she showed me how to wear them (“You’ve got to roll up the sleeves exactly three times—the folds should be tight, see?—and no more than an inch wide”). She taught me to say hi to as many people as possible in the school corridors, to notice with care who responded and to brave each blank stare with a glittery smile.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Sleeping arrangements were difficult. Randy and Pierre and the kids were to be put up at Pierre’s father’s house down the hill. Lalah and Chloe were to share a double bed in another aunt’s house next door. And I drew a single in a tiny annex of Aunt Françoise’s house. I’d really have preferred to be with Lalah and Chloe than to be alone in that creepy room, sleeping under a crucifix and grubby pictures of the illustrious queen. But there was no space for three in bed, so I sacked out alone, amusing myself before sleep with thoughts of scorpions scampering up the wall, and fatal spider bites, and visions of breaking my neck during the night when I needed to find the outdoor toilet without a flashlight. Oh there was plenty to keep the most phobic mind thoroughly occupied for many busy hours of insomnia. I had been lying there in full phobic flower for about an hour and a half when the door creaked open. “Who is it?” I said, my heart thudding. “Shhhh.” A dark shadow moved toward me. The man under the bed. “For God’s sake!” I was terrified. “Shhh—it’s only me—Pierre,” Pierre said. And then he came over and sat down on the bed. “Jesus—I thought it was some rapist or something.” He laughed. “Jesus wasn’t a rapist.” “I guess not…. What’s up?” It was a poor choice of words under the circumstances. “You seem so depressed,” he said, full of counterfeit tenderness. “I guess I am. All that craziness with Brian last summer and now Charlie…” “I hate to see my little sister depressed,” he said, stroking my hair. And for some reason that “little sister” sent chills through me. “You know I always think of you as my little sister, don’t you?” “Actually I didn’t, but thanks anyway, I’ll be OK. Don’t worry. I’m thinking of going back home and stopping in Italy again for a few days on the way. My ticket gives me a free stop in Rome. I don’t think the climate here agrees with me. Lalah and Chloe are supposed to fly to New York next week anyway and it keeps getting hotter and hotter….” I was babbling on out of nervousness. Meanwhile, Pierre was stretching out on the bed next to me and putting his arms around me. What was I supposed to do? If I fought him off like an ordinary rapist, I’d offend him, but if I took the path of least resistance and went along with him, it was incest. Not to mention the fact that Randy would probably kill me.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  My father chose a school for me merely because it was on the route between his winter and summer houses, a convenient stopover on the long trip for him. Right after Christmas he drove me to the deserted campus, the buildings shrouded in snow like chairs in holland cloth, the rectilinear paths treacherously iced over, the wide-open square, originally designed to resemble a piazza, now an arctic court where the snow played handball with itself, white sports whirling up off the pavement and racing to slam glittering explosions on brick walls tenoned in ice. The architecture of the school had been conceived by a famous Finn and built by an army of Scots who’d stayed on as gardeners and maintenance men (they outnumbered the teachers). The school was nothing but reminiscence—of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia for someone else’s past. Because the school was a fantasy and not a reality, its architecture alternated as in a dream between vague, featureless expanses of wall, the ectoplasmic surround of the action, and by contrast the places the dreamer looks at, concentrates on: maniacally detailed ornaments, chiseled gargoyle heads peering down out of the odd niche, tiled Moorish arches framing a rose garden, scriptural and classical mottoes spelled out in stone along the backs of benches. Those benches circled a deep basin surmounted by a fountain as wide as a barber pole and much taller on which was balanced a stone pineapple that expressed, depending on how literally one took the conceit, either juice or water. The headmaster of Eton (yes, the name, too, had been borrowed) was a great shaggy and strangely yellowed man. He wore tweeds and smoked a pipe and had pale, glutinous hands—really as sticky and shiny as the gluten in kneaded bread—and yellowing white hair that shot straight back from his liver-spotted brow and huge yellow teeth that looked useless for eating though effective enough for polite baring in interviews with intimidated parents. He was tall and unctuous and unintelligent and lived in a rambling “cottage” with fieldstone walls, low black eaves that curled back under on themselves like ingrown toenails, and leaded panes that rattled decoratively in the winter winds in front of solid, modern, cryptically sealed storm windows. He granted us a long interview in which he spoke of the need for “balance” in the training of a young mind and (looking appraisingly over the top of his glasses) of the young male body. A little later he found a way of mentioning again the sound mind that should go with the sound (raised eyebrows) body. I was terrified that what all this meant was more athletics for me, and it did.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  et praesidis nomine cognito veniunt ad deversorii nostri fores claraque voce denuntiant hospiti nostro nos, quos oceultaret apud se certo certius, dedere potius quam discrimen proprii subiret capitis. Nec ille tantillum conterritus salutique studens eius quem in suam receperat fidem, quicquam de nobis fa- tetur ac diebus plusculis nec vidisse quidem illum hortulanum contendit: contra commilitones ibi nec uspiam illum delitescere adiurantes genium principis contendebant. ^ Postremum magistratibus placuit 'obstinate denegantem scrutinio detcgere ; immissis itaque lictoribus ceterisque publicis ministeriis angu- latim cuncta sedulo perlustrari iubent: nec quisquam mortalium ac ne ipse quidem asinus intra limen com- 42 parere nuntiatur. Tunc gliscit violentior utrimque- secus contentio: militum pro comperto de nobis as- severantium fidemque Caesaris identidem imploran- tum, at illius negantis assidueque deum numen obtestantis. Qua contentione et clamoso strepitu cognito, curiosus alioquin et inquieti procacitate praeditus asinus, dum obliquata cervice per quandam fenestrulam quidnam sibi vellet tumultus ille pro- spicere gestio, unus e commilitonibus casu fortuito collimatis oculis ad umbram meam cunctos testatur incoram. Magnus denique continuo clamor exortus est, et emensis protenus scalis iniecta manu quidam me velut captivum detrahunt, Iamque omni sublata cunctatione scrupulosius contemplantes singula, cista etiam illa revelata repertum productumque et oblatum magistratibus miserum hortulanum, poenas scilicet 468 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IX

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Lola snorted and said: “If he is what you think he is, how silly to give him the slip.” “I have other notions by now,” I said. “You should—ah—check them by—ah—keeping in touch with him, fahther deah,” said Lo, writhing in the coils of her own sarcasm. “Gee, you are mean,” she added in her ordinary voice. We spent a grim night in a very foul cabin, under a sonorous amplitude of rain, and with a kind of prehistorically loud thunder incessantly rolling above us. “I am not a lady and do not like lightning,” said Lo, whose dread of electric storms gave me some pathetic solace. We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop. 1001. “Judging by the terminal figure,” I remarked, “Fatface is already here.” “Your humor,” said Lo, “is sidesplitting, deah fahther.” We were in sage-brush country by that time, and there was a day or two of lovely release (I had been a fool, all was well, that discomfort was merely a trapped flatus), and presently the mesas gave way to real mountains, and, on time, we drove into Wace. Oh, disaster. Some confusion had occurred, she had misread a date in the Tour Book, and the Magic Cave ceremonies were over! She took it bravely, I must admit—and, when we discovered there was in kurortish Wace a summer theatre in full swing, we naturally drifted toward it one fair mid-June evening. I really could not tell you the plot of the play we saw. A trivial affair, no doubt, with self-conscious light effects and a mediocre leading lady. The only detail that pleased me was a garland of seven little graces, more or less immobile, prettily painted, barelimbed—seven bemused pubescent girls in colored gauze that had been recruited locally (judging by the partisan flurry here and there among the audience) and were supposed to represent a living rainbow, which lingered throughout the last act, and rather teasingly faded behind a series of multiplied veils. I remember thinking that this idea of children-colors had been lifted by authors Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom from a passage in James Joyce, and that two of the colors were quite exasperatingly lovely—Orange who kept fidgeting all the time, and Emerald who, when her eyes got used to the pitch-black pit where we all heavily sat, suddenly smiled at her mother or her protector.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  The kind Master said: “Now, Son, the city that is named of Dis draws nigh, with its grave citizens, with its great company.”4 And I: “Master, already I discern its mosques, distinctly there within the valley, red as if they had come out of fire.” And to me he said: “The eternal fire, which causes them to glow within, shows them red, as thou seest, in this low Hell.” We now arrived in the deep fosses, which moat that joyless city; the walls seemed to me as if they were of iron. Not before making a long circuit, did we come to a place where the boatman loudly cried to us: “Go out: here is the entrance.” Above the gates I saw more than a thousand spirits, rained from the Heavens,5 who angrily exclaimed: “Who is that, who, without death, goes through the kingdom of the dead?” And my sage Master made a sign of wishing to speak with them in secret. Then they somewhat shut up their great disdain, and said: “Come thou alone; and let that one go, who has entered so daringly into this kingdom. Let him return alone his foolish way; try, if he can: for thou shalt stay here, that hast escorted him through so dark a country.” Judge, Reader, if I was discouraged at the sound of the accursed words: for I believed not that I ever should return hither. “O my loved Guide, who more than seven6 times hast restored me to safety, and rescued from deep peril that stood before me, leave me not so undone,” I said, “and if to go farther be denied us, let us retrace our steps together rapidly.” And that Lord, who had led me thither, said to me: “Fear not, for our passage none can take from us: by Such has it been given to us. But thou, wait here for me; and comfort and feed thy wearied spirit with good hope: for I will not forsake thee in the low world.” Thus the gentle Father goes, and leaves me here, and I remain in doubt: for yes and no contend within my head. I could not hear that which was offered to them; but he had not long stood with them, when they all. vying with one another, rushed in again. These our adversaries closed the gates on the breast of my Lord who remained without; and turned to me with slow steps. He had his eves upon the ground, and his eyebrows shorn of all boldness, and said with sighs: “Who hath denied me the doleful houses?” And to me he said: “Thou, be not dismayed, though I get angry: for I will master the trial, whatever be contrived for hindrance. This indolence of theirs is nothing new:7 for they showed it once at a less secret gate, which still is found unbarred.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Moreover, amongst the branches of the stone appeared the image of Acteon: and how that Diana (which was carved within the same stone, standing in the water) because he did see her naked, did turne him into an hart, and so he was torne and slaine of his owne hounds. And while I was greatly delighted with the view of these things, Byrrhena spake to me and sayd, Cousin all things here be at your commandement. And therewithall shee willed secretly the residue to depart: who being gone she sayd, My most deare Cousin Lucius, I do sweare by the goddesse Diana, that I doe greatly tender your safety, and am as carefull for you as if you were myne owne naturall childe, beware I say, beware of the evil arts and wicked allurements of that Pamphiles who is the wife of Milo, whom you call your Host, for she is accounted the most chief and principall Magitian and Enchantresse living, who by breathing out certain words and charmes over bowes, stones and other frivolous things, can throw down all the powers of the heavens into the deep bottome of hell, and reduce all the whole world againe to the old Chaos. For as soone as she espieth any comely yong man, shee is forthwith stricken with his love, and presently setteth her whole minde and affection on him. She soweth her seed of flattery, she invades his spirit and intangleth him with continuall snares of unmeasurable love.