Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 114 of 263 · 20 per page

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Perhaps, I thought, if they only knew that I had just left an Arab home in the middle of the Halfaouine section, with a fig tree growing in the middle of the patio, and that I had just drunk tea there with Ben Smaan and the others, if only they knew that I was working for them, who I was and what I thought... But I had to overcome the hostility of the ticket collector and teach the shopkeepers not to insult Jewish housewives by calling them bitches, and I had to send Jewish and Moslem girls to the same schools. Our success depended on our work and patience and on time. Naturally, I had my ups and my downs. When I was discouraged, I thought of the sufferings of the Jews, of their despair in the ghetto: “They will never never like us!” I thought also of the utter misery which so blinded the Moslems. How could one cut a path through such tangled darkness? Then again, when I was strong enough to view it all with the calm of a Spinoza and to recover from my own nervousness, I seemed to see the solution clearly, and this vision gave me a certain serenity and a philosopher’s joy. In action, I felt happy and optimistic. For a while, I thought I could discover salvation through trying to save others. After the pogrom, however, as soon as it was again possible to move around, Ben Smaan came to see me. We went for a long walk all around the old ramparts, with me slowing my impatient gait to keep pace with his small unsteady steps. He talked a lot, perhaps to hide his own embarrassment and emotion, and I said almost nothing, not knowing what to say. He had worried about my personal safety but, even more, he admitted, about what I might think, and he now apologized for his doubts. He was sure that I had realized that it had all been cooked up. Yes, I had. It must be explained to all in our respective religious communities. Yes, certainly. (Would mine believe me, I wondered?) It was more than ever necessary to be united. Yes, it was. (I was sick of those nightmarish nights!) He was preparing a petition. Yes, I would sign it. Bissor was dead: what was I to do about this death? Whether it was a miserable European diversionary move or a spontaneous and blind mob action, no amount of research into responsibilities would ever bring him back to life.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Who to notify. I try harder. Still, no name comes to mind. I could give the name of my brother, but my brother lives three thousand miles from what might be defined in New York as an emergency. I could give Griffin’s name, but Griffin is shooting a picture. Griffin is on location. Griffin is sitting in the dining room of one or another Hilton Inn—a few too many people at the table, a little too much noise—and Griffin is not picking up his cell. I could give the name of whichever close friend in New York comes first to mind, but the close friend in New York who comes first to mind is actually, on reflection, not even in New York, out of town, out of the country, away, certainly unreachable in the best case, possibly unwilling in the worst. As I consider the word “unwilling” my lagging cognition kicks in. The familiar phrase “need to know” surfaces. The phrase “need to know” has been the problem all along. Only one person needs to know. She is of course the one person who needs to know. Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep. I imagine telling her. I am able to imagine telling her because I still see her. Hello, Mommies. The same way I still see her weeding the clay court on Franklin Avenue. The same way I still see her sitting on the bare floor crooning back to the eight-track. Do you wanna dance. I wanna dance. The same way I still see the stephanotis in her braid, the same way I still see the plumeria tattoo through her veil. The same way I still see the bright-red soles on her shoes as she kneels at the altar. The same way I still see her, in the darkened upstairs cabin on the evening Pan Am from Honolulu to LAX, inventing the unforeseen uptick in Bunny Rabbit’s fortunes. I know that I can no longer reach her. I know that, should I try to reach her—should I take her hand as if she were again sitting next to me in the upstairs cabin on the evening Pan Am from Honolulu to LAX, should I lull her to sleep against my shoulder, should I sing her the song about Daddy gone to get the rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in—she will fade from my touch. Vanish. Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her. Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes. Go back into the blue. I myself placed her ashes in the wall. I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six. I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  He would sit cross-legged on the bed and, despite the doctor’s continually repeated warnings, begin to chain-smoke those horrible cigarettes that are full of straw and bits of wood and that filled the flat with an acrid, stinking fog. He smoked, then coughed, then spat into the yellow pot that was always at the foot of his bed. Afterwards, he would moan and beg God to help him out of this miserable life. Finally, he would dress in the suffocating fumes of the bedroom and go off for a day of ten uninterrupted hours of work. The younger children had known my father’s illness from birth and were not greatly surprised by his sufferings. If he had an unspectacular attack, once the surprise passed, they would return to their games; and my father took bitter note of this. I could never get used to his illness and each attack further convinced me of my selfishness. At night, I would bury my head in the pillow, trying to stifle the whistling of his anguished chest, his hoarse groans, his appeals to God. I had learned to gauge the gravity of each attack. When he came home on those murderously damp winter evenings and flung himself gasping and with bulging eyes on the bed, I knew the evening would be unpleasant. He would be unable to speak and would wave his hand desperately to my mother who was hurrying to his help. She filled the little fire-yellowed saucer with medicated powder and threw a lighted match into it. My father bent over the smoke, opened his mouth and gasped. At once, he began to cough with all his body and lungs, and the sweat dripped from his face. Sometimes, the cough dragged on and on and never seemed to stop. Caught in the horrible rhythm of his coughs, he became panicky, tried to break out of it, rose suddenly, dropped back onto the bed, and then continued to gasp and cough until, overcome by his anguish, he would thrust his fingers down his own throat. Then, I would pack my notebooks in a briefcase and run from the house, followed a long way down the street by the odor of Legras powder and the sound of my father’s cough. ~ 2. HIGH SCHOOL ~ Created in the city’s image, the French lycée was peopled so variously that I immediately felt lost. I had French, Tunisian, Italian, Russian, Maltese, even Jewish classmates — but the latter were from a background so different from mine that they were as foreign to me as the others. They were rich Jews and of the second generation of Western culture; like all the others, they too made fun of the nasal ghetto accent which they imitated by confusing the French word savon (for soap) and savant (for scientist).

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  One female rape victim told Felitti, “Overweight is overlooked, and that’s the way I need to be.”[19] Weight can protect men, as well. Felitti recalls two guards at a state prison in his obesity program. They promptly regained the weight they had lost, because they felt a lot safer being the biggest guy on the cellblock. Another male patient became obese after his parents divorced and he moved in with his violent alcoholic grandfather. He explained: “It wasn’t that I ate because I was hungry and all of that. It was just a place for me to feel safe. All the way from kindergarten I used to get beat up all the time. When I got the weight on it didn’t happen anymore.” The ACE study group concluded: “Although widely understood to be harmful to health, each adaptation [such as smoking, drinking, drugs, obesity] is notably difficult to give up. Little consideration is given to the possibility that many long-term health risks might also be personally beneficial in the short term. We repeatedly hear from patients of the benefits of these ‘health risks.’ The idea of the problem being a solution, while understandably disturbing to many, is certainly in keeping with the fact that opposing forces routinely coexist in biological systems.…What one sees, the presenting problem, is often only the marker for the real problem, which lies buried in time, concealed by patient shame, secrecy and sometimes amnesia—and frequently clinician discomfort.” Child Abuse: Our Nation’s Largest Public Health ProblemThe first time I heard Robert Anda present the results of the ACE study, he could not hold back his tears. In his career at the CDC he had previously worked in several major risk areas, including tobacco research and cardiovascular health. But when the ACE study data started to appear on his computer screen, he realized that they had stumbled upon the gravest and most costly public health issue in the United States: child abuse. He had calculated that its overall costs exceeded those of cancer or heart disease and that eradicating child abuse in America would reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half, alcoholism by two-thirds, and suicide, IV drug use, and domestic violence by three-quarters.[20] It would also have a dramatic effect on workplace performance and vastly decrease the need for incarceration. When the surgeon general’s report on smoking and health was published in 1964, it unleashed a decades-long legal and medical campaign that has changed daily life and long-term health prospects for millions. The number of American smokers fell from 42 percent of adults in 1965 to 19 percent in 2010, and it is estimated that nearly 800,000 deaths from lung cancer were prevented between 1975 and 2000.[21]

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  The lasting legacy of Breuer and Freud’s 1893 paper is what we now call the “talking cure”: “[W]e found, to our great surprise, at first, that each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words (all italics in original). Recollection without affect almost invariably produces no result.” They explain that unless there is an “energetic reaction” to the traumatic event, the affect “remains attached to the memory” and cannot be discharged. The reaction can be discharged by an action—“from tears to acts of revenge.” “But language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be ‘abreacted’ almost as effectively.” “It will now be understood,” they conclude, “how it is that the psychotherapeutic procedure which we have described in these pages has a curative effect. It brings to an end the operative force…which was not abreacted in the first instance [i.e., at the time of the trauma], by allowing its strangulated affect to find a way out through speech; and it subjects it to associative correction by introducing it into normal consciousness.” Even though psychoanalysis is today in eclipse, the “talking cure” has lived on, and psychologists have generally assumed that telling the trauma story in great detail will help people to leave it behind. That is also a basic premise of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which today is taught in graduate psychology courses around the world. Although the diagnostic labels have changed, we continue to see patients similar to those described by Charcot, Janet, and Freud. In 1986 my colleagues and I wrote up the case of a woman who had been a cigarette girl at Boston’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub when it burned down in 1942.[25] During the 1970s and 1980s she annually reenacted her escape on Newbury Street, a few blocks from the original location, which resulted in her being hospitalized with diagnoses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. In 1989 I reported on a Vietnam veteran who yearly staged an “armed robbery” on the exact anniversary of a buddy’s death.[26] He would put a finger in his pants pocket, claim that it was a pistol, and tell a shopkeeper to empty his cash register—giving him plenty of time to alert the police. This unconscious attempt to commit “suicide by cop” came to an end after a judge referred the veteran to me for treatment. Once we had dealt with his guilt about his friend’s death, there were no further reenactments.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Struggling to get the words out, Mary told us that one evening, when she was thirteen years old, she was raped by her older brother and a gang of his friends. The rape resulted in pregnancy, and her mother gave her an abortion at home, on the kitchen table. The group sensitively tuned in to what Mary was sharing and comforted her through her sobbing. I was profoundly moved by their empathy—they were consoling Mary in a way that they must have wished somebody had comforted them when they first confronted their traumas. When time ran out, Marilyn asked if she could take a few more minutes to talk about what she had experienced during the session. The group agreed, and she told us: “Hearing that story, I wonder if I may have been sexually abused myself.” My mouth must have dropped open. Based on her family drawing, I had always assumed that she was aware, at least on some level, that this was the case. She had reacted like an incest victim in her response to Michael, and she chronically behaved as if the world were a terrifying place. Yet even though she’d drawn a girl who was being sexually molested, she—or at least her cognitive, verbal self—had no idea what had actually happened to her. Her immune system, her muscles, and her fear system all had kept the score, but her conscious mind lacked a story that could communicate the experience. She reenacted her trauma in her life, but she had no narrative to refer to. As we will see in chapter 12, traumatic memory differs in complex ways from normal recall, and it involves many layers of mind and brain. Triggered by Mary’s story, and spurred on by the nightmares that followed, Marilyn began individual therapy with me in which she started to deal with her past. At first she experienced waves of intense, free-floating terror. She tried stopping for several weeks, but when she found she could no longer sleep and had to take time off from work, she continued our sessions. As she told me later: “My only criterion for whether a situation is harmful is feeling, ‘This is going to kill me if I don’t get out.’”

• From Bluets (2009)

  215. It often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing: when it comes round, everything before it, around it, and, perhaps, in front of it, tends to seem fleeting, delusional. Of all the philosophers, Schopenhauer is the most hilarious and direct spokesperson for this idea: “As a rule we find pleasure much less pleasurable, pain much more painful than we expected.” You don’t believe him? He offers this quick test: “Compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.” 216. Today is the fifth anniversary, the radio says, of the day on which “everything changed.” It says this so often that I turn it off. Everything changed. Everything changed . Well, what changed? What did the blade reveal? For whom did it come? “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing,” wrote Emerson. 217. “We’re only given as much as the heart can endure,” “What does not kill you makes you stronger,” “Our sorrows provide us with the lessons we most need to learn”: these are the kinds of phrases that enrage my injured friend. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to come up with a spiritual lesson that demands becoming a quadriparalytic. The tepid “there must be a reason for it” notion sometimes floated by religious or quasi-religious acquaintances or bystanders, is, to her, another form of violence. She has no time for it. She is too busy asking, in this changed form, what makes a livable life, and how she can live it. 218. As her witness, I can testify to no reason, no lesson. But I can say this: in watching her, sitting with her, helping her, weeping with her, touching her, and talking with her, I have seen the bright pith of her soul. I cannot tell you what it looks like, exactly, but I can say that I have seen it. 219. Likewise, I can say that seeing it has made me a believer, though I cannot say what, or in what, exactly, I have come to believe. 220. Imagine someone saying, “Our fundamental situation is joyful.” Now imagine believing it. 221. Or forget belief: imagine feeling , even if for a moment, that it were true. 222. In January 2002, camping in the Dry Tortugas, on an island which is essentially an abandoned fort ninety miles north of Cuba, flipping through a copy of Nature magazine. I read that the color of the universe (whatever this might mean—here I gather that it means the result of a survey of the spectrum of light emitted by around 200,000 galaxies) has finally been deduced. The color of the universe, the article says, is “pale turquoise.” Of course , I think, looking out wistfully over the glittering Gulf. I knew it all along. The heart of the world is blue .

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  In order to avoid any recurrence of this kind of thing, the sergeant decided that all parcels received from home would henceforth be shared in common. As the orphans among us were the majority, our parcels seemed to melt away, leaving the individual receiver a mere biscuit, two candles, or half a chocolate bar. To me, this democratic measure to make us share and share alike was even more hateful. The goodies that we received in our parcels were unaccustomed gifts that we had earned by being far from home, and that was why I never ate them but hoarded them in a tin box, counting them again and again every evening. I got my fill of them by merely looking at them and ate only the broken pieces of candy, when the tin box became too full. In an access of educational or vengeful zeal, the sergeant now made us open all our parcels. His face expressed sheer disgust when he discovered my own sweets, which had begun to melt, all stuck together and their various colors running. He decided that they were not fit to eat, so he ordered me to throw them away. I think I would more gladly have allowed my eyes to be torn out. Fortunately, he was carried away by his own ardor and spared me this martyrdom. His grimy fingers grasped the box as though he were holding some slimy beast, and he hurled the whole mess out of the window, while I felt as though he were tearing open a wound in me. When he went on to my neighbor who was already speechless with fear, I tiptoed out of the dormitory, but my candy had already vanished when I reached the yard.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I said to him, “I have come back.” And he was very happy. But yesterday at four, when I was waiting for her at American Express, the doorman said to me, “Your friend was here this morning and she said good-bye to me as if she were not coming back.” “But we had agreed to meet here.” If I were never again to see June walking towards me—impossible. It was like dying. What did it matter, all I thought the day before. She was unethical, irresponsible—it was her nature. I would not tamper with her nature. My pride about money matters was aristocratic. I was too scrupulous and proud. I would not change anything in June which was basic and at the root of her fantastic being. She alone was without fetters. I was a fettered, ethical being, in spite of my amoral intellect. I could not have let Henry go hungry. I accepted her entirely. I would not fight her. If only she would come and meet me for that last hour. I had dressed ritually for her, in the very costume which created a void between me and other people, a costume which was a symbol of my individualism and which she alone would understand. Black turban, old rose dress with black lace bodice and collar, old rose coat with Medici collar. I had created a stir as I walked, and I was lonelier than ever because the reaction was partly hostile, mocking. Then June came, all in black velvet, black cape and plumed hat, paler and more incandescent than ever, and carrying Count Bruga, as I had asked her to do. The wonder of her face and smile, her smileless eyes . . . I took her to a Russian tearoom. The Russians sang as we felt. June wondered if they were really burning, as it seemed from their voices and intense playing. Probably they were not burning as June and I were. Champagne and caviar with June. It is the only time one knows what champagne is and what caviar is. They are June, Russian voices and June. Ugly, unimaginative, dead people surround us. We are blind to them. I look at June, in black velvet. June rushing towards death. Henry cannot rush on with her because he fights for life. But June and I together do not hold back. I follow her. And it is an acute joy to go along, giving in to the dissolution of the imagination, to her knowledge of strange experiences, to our games with Count Bruga, who bows to the world with the weeping willowness of his purple hair. It is all over. In the street, June says regretfully, “I had wanted to hold you and caress you.” I put her in a taxi.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  And then a beautiful letter from Henry, his sincerest, because of its simplicity: “Anaïs, thanks to you I am not being crushed this time. . . . Don’t lose faith in me, I beg you. I love you more than ever, truly, truly. I hate to put in writing what I wish to tell you about the first two nights with June, but when I see you and tell you, you will realize the absolute sincerity of my words. At the same time, oddly enough, I am not quarreling with June. It is as though I had more patience, more understanding and sympathy than ever before. . . . I have missed you greatly and I have been thinking of you at moments when, God help me, no sane, normal man ought to. . . . And please, dear, dear Anaïs, don’t say cruel things to me as you did over the telephone—that you are happy for me. What does that mean? I am not happy nor am I greatly unhappy; I have a sad, wistful feeling which I can’t quite explain. I want you. If you desert me now I am lost. You must believe in me no matter how difficult it may seem sometimes. You ask about going to England. Anaïs, what shall I say? What would I like? To go there with you—to be with you always. I am telling you this when June has come to me in her very best guise, when there should be more hope than ever, if I wanted hope. But like you with Hugo, I see it all coming too late. I have passed on. And now, no doubt, I must live some sad beautiful lie with her for a while, and it causes you anguish and that pains me terribly. “And perhaps you will be seeing more in June than ever, which would be right and you may hate or despise me but what can I do? Take June for what she is—she may mean a great deal to you—but don’t let her come between us. What you two have to give each other is none of my affair. I love you, just remember that. And please don’t punish me by avoiding me.” Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child’s blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality—to Henry’s selfishness, June’s love of power, my insatiable creativity which must concern itself with others and cannot be sufficient to itself. I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence. So Henry is coming this afternoon, and tomorrow I am going out with June.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  My God! What a son she had! “I can well see,” she said bitterly, “how your father and I will be mourned when we pass on too!” (I promised myself I would certainly avoid going through these histrionics when they too passed away!) The front door of the apartment house was hung with two black drapes which were powdered with the dry dust from the street. As we entered the main door, I was struck at once by the awful odor which, for me, is always linked with death: that of hot black cloth. I signed my name in the mourners’ book that lay on a table, also draped with a black cloth. The few hurried passers-by stopped a moment to press their curious and sullenly solemn noses against the little funeral notice, black-bordered, that was pasted there to announce the age, profession, and numerous and notable merits of the deceased, and also the immense grief of all the branches of the family, carefully named and listed. Several people took the trouble to go as far as the hallway to sign the register of mourners. This would always give pleasure to the bereaved and put them in the obligation of some day returning the compliment: honor the dead and you will be honored in turn. Well, when I die, I shall be sitting pretty, with a collection of all the city’s signatures! My mother lowered her voice but continued gossiping as we climbed the stairs: “Don’t forget to kiss your uncle’s wife and your father! Don’t leave the funeral service until it’s over! Show that you’re...” Abruptly, as we reached the threshold of the flat, she rushed in with a frightful wailing, tore with her nails at her cheeks, and collapsed sobbing into a chair. All this lasted only an instant, but it was like a bolt of lightning hurled into the tearful whispering of the women who, all in black, dutifully seated, were ranged in order against the walls of the empty room. My mother had her place in this picture: her handkerchief in her hand, her eyes full of tears, grinding her teeth mournfully. This explosion of grief-stricken cries, this panoply of black, the women’s odious ceremony of repeatedly bemoaning their loss, it all made me shiver in spite of myself. I hesitated and was still standing in the doorway when my mother, apparently in complete control of herself, motioned me to go into the next room where the men were gathered. Had her cheeks not been savagely torn with red scratches, I would have sworn that my mother had played no part in my emotion. I passed along the women and went into the next room where the corpse lay on the floor, covered by a somber red cloth while, on either side of it, a candle flickered its yellow light. The same attendance, but more orderly, more silent.

• From Bluets (2009)

  206. Perhaps writing is not really pharmakon , but more of a mordant—a means of binding color to its object—or of feeding it into it, like a tattoo needle drumming ink into skin. But “mordant,” too, has a double edge: it derives from mord ē re, to bite —so it is not just a fixative or preserver, but also an acid, a corrosive . Did I have this double meaning in mind when I told you, a little over a year ago, after it became clear that I would lose you, or that I had already lost you, that you were “etched into my heart”? I may not have known then that “etch” derives from etzen or ezjan—to be eaten —but in the days since, I have come to know the full meaning of the root. 207. I can remember a time when I took Henry James’s advice—“Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”—deeply to heart. I think I was then imagining that the net effect of becoming one of those people would always be one of accretion . Whereas if you truly become someone on whom nothing is lost, then loss will not be lost upon you, either. 208. Cornell’s diary entry for February 28, 1947: “Resolve this day as before to transcend in my work the overwhelming sense of sadness that has been so binding and wasteful in past.” 209. Duras did not think of alcohol as a false god, but rather as a kind of placeholder, a squatter in the space made by God’s absence. “Alcohol doesn’t console,” she wrote. “All it replaces is the lack of God.” It does not necessarily follow, however, that if and when a substance vacates the spot (renunciation), God rushes in to fill it. For some, the emptiness itself is God; for others, the space must stay empty. “Lots of space, nothing holy”: one Zen master’s definition of enlightenment (Bodhidharma). 210. For Emerson, dreams and drunkenness were but the “semblance and counterfeit” of an “oracular genius.” Therein lies their danger: they mimic—often quite well—the “flames and generosities of the heart.” I suppose he is advocating, in his “sermons,” which steadily displace the God of theology with one of Nature, what we might now term “a natural high.” 211. But are you sure—one would like to ask—that it really is mimicry, fumisterie? —Well, don’t ask, but look. Look for yourself, and ask not what has been real and what has been false, but what has been bitter, and what has been sweet. 212. If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth. 213. But are you certain—one would like to ask—that it was sweet? 214.—No, not really, or not always. If I am to enforce a rule of “brutal honesty,” perhaps not even often.

• From Bluets (2009)

  Their blue is the blue of skim milk, their smoothness that of a baby’s. I think they look and feel very strange and beautiful. She does not agree. How could she—this is her body; its transformations, her grief. Often we examine parts of her body together, as if their paralysis had rendered them objects of inquiry independent of us both. But they are still hers. No matter what happens to our bodies in our lifetimes, no matter if they become like “pebbles in water,” they remain ours; us, theirs. 110. In Tender Buttons , Stein seems particularly worried about color and pain that seem to come from nowhere, for no reason. “Why is there a single piece of any color . . . Why is there so much useless suffering.” About blue itself, Stein offers but this koan: “Every bit of blue is precocious.” 111. Goethe also worries about colors and pain, though his reports sound more like installments from the battlefield: “Every decided colour does a certain violence to the eye, and forces the organ to opposition.” Instantly I recognize this phenomenon to be true from my years of working in a bright orange restaurant. I worked in this restaurant for ten-hour shifts, from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., sometimes later. The restaurant was incredibly orange. In fact everyone in town called it “the orange restaurant.” Yet every time I came home from work and passed out in my smoke-drenched clothes, my feet propped up on the wall, the dining room reappeared in my dreams as pale blue. For quite some time I thought this was luck, or wish fulfillment—naturally my dreams would convert everything to blue, because of my love for the color. But now I realize that it was more likely the result of spending ten hours or more staring at saturated orange, blue’s spectral opposite. This is a simple story, but it spooks me, insofar as it reminds me that the eye is simply a recorder, with or without our will. Perhaps the same could be said of the heart. But whether there is a violence at work here remains undecided. 112. At times I have heard it said that we don’t dream in color. But surely this is a mistake. Not only can we dream in color, but more importantly: how could anyone else know if we do or do not? At times I have been tempted to think that we dream more colorfully now because of the cinema.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Neighbors and relatives began to cluster around the hearse in the shade, and soon a crowd had gathered. Windows along the street that had been closed for siesta were now flung open, and people leaned out to watch the show. Not knowing who I was, the people around me chatted pleasantly. The funeral had broken up their daily routine and they were, in spite of themselves, in a quietly pleasant mood. Everyone was silent when the coffin appeared; it had been carried with difficulty down the narrow stairwell and now made a hollow sound as they slid it into the hearse. We, the men, lined up behind the hearse, according to our ages, with the oldest standing at the head. So I found myself next to my cousin, Uncle Gagou’s son, who had exactly the same name as I. In the hullabaloo that had begun again, we were able to speak openly to each other. He immediately reproached me bitterly. Why hadn’t I come at once? Our widowed aunt had notified all the members of the family, individually and without delay. Uncle Joseph was entitled to all respect. (I was beginning to know this.) My cousin spoke with confidence, sure of his rights; it was also true that we had the same name, the same given and family name, both of us samples of the same job, and the copy could certainly criticize the original or vice versa, for I was deviating from the well-founded rules of religion, custom, and tradition. He was the real Alexandre Benillouche, dressed in black and deeply involved in his family’s grief for the loss of its head . The hearse began to move. Howling and shrieking suddenly broke loose from all the windows of the apartment we had just left. The women, forbidden by custom to accompany the corpse to the cemetery, were now bidding Uncle Joseph a last farewell. The crowd below was silenced for a moment by the wailing from above. We began the slow procession across the city. I took advantage of every movement in the flow of the procession to move back slightly, away from my cousin, who kept his place. Whenever we passed a Jewish shop in the streets, the doors would be slammed hurriedly so that the image of death should not be cast upon its inside walls. Women looked out of windows all along the way. So we took the deceased across the town, passing all the principal thoroughfares before reaching the gates of the city. There the procession broke up and we continued the journey in carriages.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Why did I put it off so long? I only told my parents of my departure the day before I left — to make things easier, or as a last expression of filial pity? My father did not insist much and my mother understood nothing and cried up to the last minute. Before leaving the house I destroyed my diary. There were already eight big notebooks, and I was taking only a bag on my back, like when I left home for the labor camp. Besides, books are my only possession and they weigh too much. We should have sailed at five o’clock, but the job of loading the ship seemed interminable and we weighed anchor only at sunset. As soon as we came out of the channel that leads into the harbor of Tunis, Henry was sick and went to lie down. I stayed on deck till we were out at sea, leaning on the rail. I lost sight of the coastline as night descended on the ship. It seemed to ooze from the holds, to fill the hatch, and to stain the blue sky with gray. First one star shone, then a second, then thousands. I grew uneasy gazing at the violet sea which attracted me like a sorceress while it heaved and settled, so I went down to the hold to sleep.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I now call Hugo my “little magnate.” He has a new private office the size of a studio. The entire bank building is magnificent and inspiring. I often wait for him in the conference room, where there are murals of New York as seen from an aeroplane, and I feel the power of New York reaching way over here. I do not criticize his work any more because such conflict kills him. We have both accepted the genius-banker as a reality, and the artist as a very vague possibility. However, psychology, being scientific thinking, has become a successful bridge between his banking and my writing. Such a bridge he can cross without much jolting. It is true, as Hugo says, that I do my thinking and speculation in my journal and that he is only aware of the pain I can cause him when an incident happens. However, I am his journal. He can only think aloud with or through me. So Sunday morning he began to think aloud about the same things I had written in my journal, the need of orgies, of fulfillment in other directions. His need came to him in the middle of his own talk. He was wishing he could go to the Quatz Arts Ball. He was just as overwhelmed with surprise at himself as I was by the sudden alteration of his expression, the loosening of his mouth, the rising of instincts he had never before entirely brought to the surface. Intellectually I expected this, but I crumbled. I felt an acute conflict between helping him to accept his own nature and preserving our love. While I asked his forgiveness for my weakness I sobbed. He was tender and desperately sorry—made wild promises which I did not accept. When I had exhausted my pain, we went out in the garden. I offered him all kinds of solutions: one, to let me go away to Zurich to study and give him temporary freedom. We fully realized we could not bear to meet our new experiences under each other’s eyes. Another, to let him live in Paris for a while, and I would stay at Louveciennes and tell Mother he was traveling. All I asked for was time and distance between us to help me face the life we were throwing ourselves into. He refused. He said he could not bear my absence just now. We had simply made a mistake; we had progressed too quickly. We had aroused problems we were not physically able to face. He was worn out, almost ill, and so was I. We want to enjoy our new closeness for a while, live entirely in the present, postpone the other issues. We only ask each other for time to become reasonable again, to accept ourselves and the new conditions. I asked Eduardo, “Is the desire for orgies one of those experiences one must live through? And once lived, can one pass on, without return of the same desires?”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The women, forbidden by custom to accompany the corpse to the cemetery, were now bidding Uncle Joseph a last farewell. The crowd below was silenced for a moment by the wailing from above. We began the slow procession across the city. I took advantage of every movement in the flow of the procession to move back slightly, away from my cousin, who kept his place. Whenever we passed a Jewish shop in the streets, the doors would be slammed hurriedly so that the image of death should not be cast upon its inside walls. Women looked out of windows all along the way. So we took the deceased across the town, passing all the principal thoroughfares before reaching the gates of the city. There the procession broke up and we continued the journey in carriages. Since I was by myself, I was luckily separated from my uncles and cousins. Our coachman set off at once at a trot behind the hearse which was now moving at a lively pace. This fast driving and the late hour brought a freshness which pleased my companions on this trip. First, they talked about the deceased a bit, then they asked each other for news of themselves and their families; they discussed the hardness of the times, the difficulties of making a living, and finally their business. When they’d told a few amusing stories and had teased each other a bit, they became even more cheerful and were soon joking openly in the well-shut carriage. I was the only one who didn’t share their amusement; I, who hadn’t shared their grief before. Our arrival at the cemetery brought all their sad dignity back to my companions. We formed a procession once again and I went back to my place beside my cousin and was not far from my father who stood three rows behind the hearse. The gravediggers were already busy at the grave which was situated between the low monuments of the Jewish graves. This was the first time I had been to the new cemetery. The old one did not impress me; it was in the middle of the city, which had overtaken and surrounded it. Its shattered and abandoned tombs had been invaded by grass and weeds and surely contained by now only scattered and dry bones, disjointed or even turned to dust. But here, we were among fresh corpses and brand-new, well-kept monuments which testified to the increased wealth of the deceased and to the vitality of their heirs: marble sculptured into crowns, birds, and broken columns, wrought- iron gates, golden chains. My God, I said to myself, how ghastly can all this so-called funeral art be! Art, these infamous sandstone vases and odious purple flowers made of celluloid or cloth that became bloated in the rain or shriveled up in the sunlight! But probably it all managed still to arouse some half- religious respect.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  It was late, and I could not hope to sleep after so long a nap. When I reached our Passage, seats and benches were being noisily moved. For all these beings with regular and unconscious lives each hour had its meaning. To avoid useless questions, I sought refuge on the terrace. The moon had risen high and it would have been easy to read. I leaned on the white railing. The scent of the night was forever marked with the sulfurous odor of bombs. Of the eight buildings in the Passage — four to the left and four to the right — three had been hit. The last one to the right was a spectacular ruin, cut in two as by a knife, with a piece of wall hanging from the third floor by its iron supports, motionless above sheer void. Fifteen yards from the ground, the tiles of an open kitchen reflected the blue light. Hard and perpendicular in the Passage, the moonlight flooded the smallest detail. Soon the last sounds died out; a dreaming baby screamed and went back to sleep. Complete silence. The chime of a Westminster clock broke it, and then the hoarse spasms of my father’s fit of coughing seemed to wrench the night air, drowning the elegant chimes, then becoming fainter as the music gained the upper hand, delicate as a thin spiral of smoke that a sudden wind had scattered for an instant. I tried to count the strokes, in spite of the blanks that the cough had blotted out: three... five... six... eight... ten, eleven. Eleven or twelve? How can I find out? The world is dead and I have no watch. For once, Henry planned efficiently and he soon had our passage booked. We were to sail in five days’ time. I used these days to do my share of the preparations and make a few calls. After much hesitation I went to see Poinsot. I had not seen him since the beginning of the German occupation, after the incident I have described. I did not find him at home. Because of a slight nervous depression, he had gone back to France for treatment. Why did this give me a certain strange pleasure? It was as though it excused Poinsot. Even such clear certainties, it seemed, could save nobody, and Poinsot’s piercing vision could also get blurred. There was also a touch of childish regret: he would not give me the last piece of advice for which I had perhaps unconsciously come. Why did I put it off so long? I only told my parents of my departure the day before I left — to make things easier, or as a last expression of filial pity? My father did not insist much and my mother understood nothing and cried up to the last minute.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Most astonishingly, at seventeen, Tasha was undertaking the induction into adult life not only of her sisters Joely and Katharine but of two Los Angeles eighth-graders, one of them Quintana, the other Kenneth and Kathleen Tynan’s daughter Roxana, both avid to grow up, each determined to misbehave. Tasha made certain that Quintana and Roxana got to the correct spot on the beach at Saint-Tropez every afternoon, that summer’s correct spot of choice being the Aqua Club. Tasha made certain that Quintana and Roxana got a proper introduction to the Italian boys who trailed them on the beach, a “proper introduction” for Tasha entailing a meal at the long tables under the lime trees at Le Nid du Duc. Tasha came up from the Aqua Club and Tasha did a perfect beurre blanc for the fish Tony had bought that morning and Tasha watched Quintana and Roxana mesmerize the Italian boys into believing that they were dealing not with fourteen-year-olds last seen in the pastel cotton uniforms of the Westlake and Marlborough Schools for Girls in Los Angeles but with preternaturally sophisticated undergraduates from UCLA. And never ever, not once, not ever, did I hear Tasha blow the whistle on that or on any other of the summer’s romantic fables. Au contraire. Tasha devised the fables, Tasha wrote the romance. The last time I ever saw her was a few nights after she fell on the bunny slope outside Quebec, in a room at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, lying as if about to wake. She was not about to wake. She had been flown down from Montreal while her family met in New York. When I left the hospital after seeing her there were photographers outside, waiting for clear camera lines on the family. I circled around them onto Park Avenue and walked on home. Her first marriage, to the producer Robert Fox, had taken place in my apartment. She had filled the rooms with quince blossoms for the ceremony. The blossoms had eventually fallen but the branches had remained, brittle and dusty, twigs breaking off, nonetheless still passing as decorative elements in the living room. When I walked in from Lenox Hill that night the apartment seemed full of photographs of Tasha and of her father and mother. Her father on location for The Border, riding a Panavision camera. Her father on location in Spain, wearing a red windbreaker, directing Melanie Griffith and James Woods on an HBO project he and John and I did together. Her mother backstage at the Booth Theater on West Forty-fifth Street, the year she and I did a play together. Tasha herself, talking to John at one of the long tables she had arranged outside for the wedding dinner on her farm in Millbrook when she was married a second time, this time to Liam Neeson. She had managed that wedding on the farm as before and after she managed summers at Le Nid du Duc.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Did anyone use the words “pre-syncope symptoms”? Can we find any clues here? Any clue to Jean-Dominique Bauby’s situation? Any clue to my own?) For reasons that I did not at the time entirely understand and have not since wanted to explore, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly had been when it was published extremely meaningful to Quintana, so markedly so that I never told her that I did not much like it, or for that matter even entirely believe it. Only later, when she was for most purposes locked into her own condition, confined to a wheelchair and afflicted by the detritus of a bleed into her brain and the subsequent neurosurgery, did I begin to see its point. Beginning to see its point was when I stopped wanting to explore the reasons why it might have been so markedly meaningful to Quintana. Just let me be in the ground . Just let me be in the ground and go to sleep . I return The Diving Bell and the Butterfly to the table in my office. I align it with Baby Animals and Their Mothers . Colin sur la banquise . This business of the ice floes is familiar to me. I did not need Baby Animals and Their Mothers to bring the image of the ice floes alive. In the first year of Quintana’s hospitalizations I had watched ice floes from her hospital windows: ice floes on the East River from her windows at Beth Israel North, ice floes on the Hudson from her windows at Columbia Presbyterian. I think now of those ice floes and imagine having seen, floating past on one or another slab of breaking ice, a baby polar bear and its mother, heading for the Hell Gate Bridge. I imagine having shown the baby polar bear and its mother to Quintana. Colin sur la banquise . Just let me be in the ground . I resolve to forget the ice floes. I have thought enough about the ice floes. Thinking about the ice floes is like thinking about the transporter being called to take her to the morgue. I walk into Central Park and sit for a while on a bench to which is attached a brass plaque indicating that a memorial contribution has been made to the Central Park Conservancy. There are now in the park many such brass plaques, many such benches. “Quintana Roo Dunne Michael 1966–2005,” the plaque on this bench reads. “In summertime and wintertime.” A friend had made the contribution, and asked me to write out what I wanted the plaque to read.