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.

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• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  4Of her whereabouts I learned unexpectedly a month or so after my arrival in southern Crimea. My family settled in the vicinity of Yalta, at Gaspra, near the village of Koreiz. The whole place seemed completely foreign; the smells were not Russian, the sounds were not Russian, the donkey braying every evening just as the muezzin started to chant from the village minaret (a slim blue tower silhouetted against a peach-colored sky) was positively Baghdadian. And there was I standing on a chalky bridle path near a chalky stream bed where separate, serpentlike bands of water thinly glided over oval stones—there was I, holding a letter from Tamara. I looked at the abrupt Yayla Mountains, covered up to their rocky brows with the karakul of the dark Tauric pine; at the maquis-like stretch of evergreen vegetation between mountain and sea; at the translucent pink sky, where a self-conscious crescent shone, with a single humid star near it; and the whole artificial scene struck me as something in a prettily illustrated, albeit sadly abridged, edition of The Arabian Nights. Suddenly I felt all the pangs of exile. There had been the case of Pushkin, of course—Pushkin who had wandered in banishment here, among those naturalized cypresses and laurels—but though some prompting might have come from his elegies, I do not think my exaltation was a pose. Thenceforth for several years, until the writing of a novel relieved me of that fertile emotion, the loss of my country was equated for me with the loss of my love.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  personal perfections of the Countess of Tripoli, he fell so des- perately in love with her that he pined away, and embarked, in an advanced stage of illness, to go and see her. When the vessel reached the port of Tripoli he was too weak to quit it. Moved by so extraordinary a display of love, the countess visited him on board, took his hand, and spoke graciously and cheeringly to him. Geoffroi could hardly falter out his thanks, and, overcome by emo- tion, instantly expired. First day \ QUEEN OF NAVARRE. 67 Hircan has just said, I beg you to believe that fortune favours those who are bold, and that no man who is loved by a lady fails to obtain from her at last what he demands, either in whole or in part, provided he knows how to set about it sagely and amorously ; but ignorance and timidity make men lose many a good fortune. What is smgular is, that they attribute the loss of them to the virtue of their mistress, which they have never put to the least proof. Be assured, madam, that no fortress was ever well attacked but it was taken at last." " I am shocked at you two," said Parlamente, " that you dare to hold such language. Those whom you have loved have little reason to be obliged to you ; or else you have employed your address upon such easy conquests that you have concluded all others are like them." " For my part, madam," said Saffredent, " I have the misfortune to have nothing to boast of ; but this I at- tribute much less to the virtue of the ladies than to the fault I have committed in not having conducted my en- terprises with sufficient sagacity and prudence. In support of my opinion, I shall cite no other authority than that of the old woman in the ' Romance of the Rose,' who says, ' Without question, fair sir, we are all made for each other ; every she for every he, and every he for every she.' In short, I am persuaded that if a woman is once in love, her lover will compass his end unless he be a booby." " Now if I should name a lady," returned Parlamente, "who loved well, was strongly solicited, pressed, and importuned, and yet remained a virtuous woman, vic- torious over her love and her lover, would you own that this fact, which is truth itself, was possible 1 " " Why, yes," replied Saffredent. 68 THE HEPTAMERO!\f OF THE {Novel lO. "Then you are very incredulous if you do not believe the example adduced by Dagoucin."

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  James Stalker of the United Church College in Aberdeen has said that the letters of Paul take the roof off the early churches and let us see what went on inside. Of none of them is that truer than the letters to Corinth. Here, we see what `the care of all the churches' must have meant to Paul. Here, we see the heartbreaks and the joys. Here, we see Paul, the shepherd of his flock, bearing the sorrows and the problems of his people in his heart. The Corinthian Correspondence Before we read the letters in detail, let us list the progress of the Corinthian correspondence. (i) `The Previous Letter', which may be contained in 2 Corinthians 6:14-7:I. (2) The arrival of Chloe's people, of Stephanas, Fortunatus and Achaicus, and of the letter to Paul from the Corinthian church. (3) r Corinthians is written in reply and is despatched with Timothy. (4) The situation grows worse, and Paul pays a personal visit to Corinth which is such a complete failure that it almost breaks his heart. (5) The consequence is `the Severe Letter', which is almost certainly contained in 2 Corinthians 10-13, and which was despatched with Titus. (6) Unable to wait for an answer, Paul sets out to meet Titus. He meets him in Macedonia, learns that all is well and, probably from Philippi, writes 2 Corinthians 1-9, `the Letter of Reconciliation'. The first four chapters of i Corinthians deal with the divided state of the church of God at Corinth. Instead of being a unity in Christ, it was split into sects and parties who had attached themselves to the names of various leaders and teachers. It is Paul's teaching that these divisions had emerged because the Corinthians thought too much about human wisdom and knowledge and too little about the sheer grace of God. In fact, for all their so-called wisdom, they are really in a state of immaturity. They think that they are wise, but really they are no better than babies. 9Galatians Law and GracePaul under Attack The letter to the Galatians has been likened to a sword flashing in a great warrior's hand. Both Paul and his gospel were under attack. If that attack had succeeded, Christianity might have become just another Jewish sect, dependent upon circumcision and on keeping the law, instead of being a thing of grace. It is strange to think that, if Paul's opponents had had their way, the gospel might have been kept for Jews and we might never have had the chance to know the love of Christ. Paul's Apostleship Attacked It is impossible to possess a vivid personality and a strong character as Paul did and not to encounter opposition; and it is equally impossible to lead such a revolution in religious thought as Paul did and not to be attacked. The first attack was on his apostleship. There were many who said that he was not an apostle at all.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  5Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives. I wish I had kept the whole of our correspondence that way. Tamara’s letters were a sustained conjuration of the rural landscape we knew so well. They were, in a sense, a distant but wonderfully clear antiphonal response to the much less expressive lyrics I had once dedicated to her. By means of unpampered words, whose secret I fail to discover, her high-school-girlish prose could evoke with plangent strength every whiff of damp leaf, every autumn-rusted frond of fern in the St. Petersburg countryside. “Why did we feel so cheerful when it rained?” she asked in one of her last letters, reverting as it were to the pure source of rhetorics. “Bozhe moy” (mon Dieu—rather than “My God”), where has it gone, all that distant, bright, endearing (Vsyo eto dalyokoe, svetloe, miloe—in Russian no subject is needed here, since these are neuter adjectives that play the part of abstract nouns, on a bare stage, in a subdued light). Tamara, Russia, the wildwood grading into old gardens, my northern birches and firs, the sight of my mother getting down on her hands and knees to kiss the earth every time we came back to the country from town for the summer, et la montagne et le grand chêne—these are things that fate one day bundled up pell-mell and tossed into the sea, completely severing me from my boyhood. I wonder, however, whether there is really much to be said for more anesthetic destinies, for, let us say, a smooth, safe, small-town continuity of time, with its primitive absence of perspective, when, at fifty, one is still dwelling in the clapboard house of one’s childhood, so that every time one cleans the attic one comes across the same pile of old brown schoolbooks, still together among later accumulations of dead objects, and where, on summery Sunday mornings, one’s wife stops on the sidewalk to endure for a minute or two that terrible, garrulous, dyed, church-bound McGee woman, who, way back in 1915, used to be pretty, naughty Margaret Ann of the mint-flavored mouth and nimble fingers.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  The mild masquerade in which I indolently joined has left such trifling impressions upon my mind that it would be tedious to continue in this strain. The story of my college years in England is really the story of my trying to become a Russian writer. I had the feeling that Cambridge and all its famed features—venerable elms, blazoned windows, loquacious tower clocks—were of no consequence in themselves but existed merely to frame and support my rich nostalgia. Emotionally, I was in the position of a man who, having just lost a fond kinswoman, realized—too late—that through some laziness of the routine-drugged human soul, he had neither troubled to know her as fully as she deserved, nor had shown her in full the marks of his not quite conscious then, but now unrelieved, affection. As with smarting eyes I meditated by the fire in my Cambridge room, all the potent banality of embers, solitude and distant chimes pressed against me, contorting the very folds of my face as an airman’s face is disfigured by the fantastic speed of his flight. And I thought of all I had missed in my country, of the things I would not have omitted to note and treasure, had I suspected before that my life was to veer in such a violent way.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  I suddenly see myself in the uniform of an officers’ training school: we are strolling again villageward, in 1916, and (like Maurice Gerald and doomed Henry Pointdexter) have exchanged clothes—Yuri is wearing my white flannels and striped tie. During the short week he stayed that year we devised a singular entertainment which I have not seen described anywhere. There was a swing in the center of a small circular playground surrounded by jasmins, at the bottom of our garden. We adjusted the ropes in such a way as to have the green swingboard pass just a couple of inches above one’s forehead and nose if one lay supine on the sand beneath. One of us would start the fun by standing on the board and swinging with increasing momentum; the other would lie down with the back of his head on a marked spot, and from what seemed an enormous height the swinger’s board would swish swiftly above the supine one’s face. And three years later, as a cavalry officer in Denikin’s army, he was killed fighting the Reds in northern Crimea. I saw him dead in Yalta, the whole front of his skull pushed back by the impact of several bullets, which had hit him like the iron board of a monstrous swing, when having outstripped his detachment he was in the act of recklessly attacking alone a Red machine-gun nest. Thus was quenched his lifelong thirst for intrepid conduct in battle, for that ultimate gallant gallop with drawn pistol or unsheathed sword. Had I been competent to write his epitaph, I might have summed up matters by saying—in richer words than I can muster here—that all emotions, all thoughts, were governed in Yuri by one gift: a sense of honor equivalent, morally, to absolute pitch. 2I have lately reread The Headless Horseman (in a drab edition, without pictures). It has its points. Take, for instance, that barroom in a log-walled Texan hotel, in the year of our Lord (as the captain would say) 1850, with its shirt-sleeved “saloon-clerk”—a fop in his own right, since the shirt was a ruffled one “of finest linen and lace.” The colored decanters (among which a Dutch clock “quaintly ticked”) were like “an iris sparkling behind his shoulders,” like “an aureole surrounding his perfumed head.” From glass to glass, the ice and the wine and the monongahela passed. An odor of musk, absinthe, and lemon peel filled the saloon. The glare of its camphine lamps brought out the dark asterisks produced on the white sand of its floor “by expectoration.” In another year of our Lord—namely 1941—I caught some very good moths at the neon lights of a gasoline station between Dallas and Fort Worth.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Her particular fondness for brown dachshunds puzzled my critical aunts. In the family albums illustrating her young years, there was hardly a group that did not include one such animal—usually with some part of its flexible body blurred and always with the strange, paranoiac eyes dachshunds have in snapshots. A couple of obese old-timers, Box I and Loulou, still lolled in the sunshine on the porch when I was a child. Sometime in 1904 my father bought at a dog show in Munich a pup which grew into the bad-tempered but wonderfully handsome Trainy (as I named him because of his being as long and as brown as a sleeping car). One of the musical themes of my childhood is Trainy’s hysterical tongue, on the trail of the hare he never got, in the depths of our Vyra park, whence he would return at dusk (after my anxious mother had stood whistling for a long time in the oak avenue) with the old corpse of a mole in his jaws and burs in his ears. Around 1915, his hind legs became paralyzed, and until he was chloroformed, he would dismally drag himself over long, glossy stretches of parquet floor like a cul de jatte. Then somebody gave us another pup, Box II, whose grandparents had been Dr. Anton Chekhov’s Quina and Brom. This final dachshund followed us into exile, and as late as 1930, in a suburb of Prague (where my widowed mother spent her last years, on a small pension provided by the Czech government), he could be still seen going for reluctant walks with his mistress, waddling far behind in a huff, tremendously old and furious with his long Czech muzzle of wire—an émigré dog in a patched and ill-fitting coat. During our last two Cambridge years, my brother and I used to spend vacations in Berlin, where our parents with the two girls and ten-year-old Kirill occupied one of those large, gloomy, eminently bourgeois apartments that I have let to so many émigré families in my novels and short stories. On the night of March 28, 1922, around ten o’clock, in the living room where as usual my mother was reclining on the red-plush corner couch, I happened to be reading to her Blok’s verse on Italy—had just got to the end of the little poem about Florence, which Blok compares to the delicate, smoky bloom of an iris, and she was saying over her knitting, “Yes, yes, Florence does look like a dïmnïy iris, how true! I remember—” when the telephone rang.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  THEOPHYLACT. After that our Lord had worked the miracle of the loaves, He immediately retires into another spot, lest on account of the miracle, the multitudes should take Him to make Him a king; wherefore it is said, And straightway he entered into a ship with his disciples, and came into the parts of Dalmanutha. AUGUSTINE. (de Con. Evan. 2. 51) Now in Matthew we read that He entered into the parts of Magdala1. But we cannot doubt that it is the same place under another name; for several manuscripts even of St. Mark have only Magdala. It goes on, And the Pharisees came forth, and began to question with him, seeking of him a sign from heaven, tempting him. BEDE. (in Marc. 2, 33) The Pharisees, then, seek a sign from heaven, that He, Who had for the second time fed many thousands of men with a few loaves of bread, should now, after the example of Moses, refresh the whole nation in the last time with manna sent down from heaven, and dispersed amongst them all. THEOPHYLACT. Or they seek for a sign from heaven, that is, they wish Him to make the sun and moon stand still, to bring down hail, and change the atmosphere; for they thought that He could not perform miracles from heaven, but could only in Beelzebub perform a sign on earth. BEDE. (ubi sup.) When, as related above, He was about to refresh the believing multitude, He gave thanks, so now, on account of the foolish petition of the Pharisees, He groans; because, bearing about with Him the feelings of human nature, as He rejoices over the salvation of men, so He grieves over their errors. Wherefore it goes on, And he groaned in spirit, and saith, Why doth this generation seek after a sign? Verily I say unto you, If a sign shall be given to this generation. That is, no sign shall be given; as it is written in the Psalms, (Ps. 89:36) I have sworn once by my holiness, if I shall fail David, that is, I will not fail David. AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) Let no one, however, be perplexed that the answer which Mark says was given to them, when they sought a sign from heaven, is not the same as that which Matthew relates, namely, that concerning Jonah. He says that the Lord’s answer was, that no sign should be given to it; by which we must understand such an one as they asked for, that is, one from heaven; but he has omitted to say, what Matthew has related.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  (3) The result of the letter was that things became worse than ever; and, although we have no direct record of it, we can deduce that Paul paid a personal visit to Corinth. In 2 Corinthians 12:14, he writes: `Here I am, ready to come to you this third time.' In 2 Corinthians 13:1-2, he says again that he is coming to them for the third time. Now, if there was a third time, there must have been a second time. We have the record of only one visit, the story of which is told in Acts 18:1-17. We have no record at all of the second, but it only took two or three days to sail from Ephesus to Corinth. (4) The visit did no good at all. Matters were only exacerbated, and the result was an exceedingly severe letter. We learn about that letter from certain passages in 2 Corinthians. In 2:4, Paul writes: `I wrote to you out of much distress and anguish of heart and with many tears.' In 7:8, he writes: `For even if I made you sorry with my letter, I do not regret it (though I did regret it, for I see that I grieved you with that letter, though only briefly).' It was a letter which was the product of anguish of mind, a letter so severe that Paul was almost sorry that he ever sent it. Scholars call this `the Severe Letter'. Have we got it? It obviously cannot be i Corinthians, because that is not a tearstained and anguished letter. When Paul wrote it, it is clear enough that things were under control. Now, if we read through 2 Corinthians, we find an odd situation. In chapters 1-9, everyone has made up, there is complete reconciliation and all are friends again; but at chapter io comes the strangest break. Chapters 10-13 are the most heartbroken cry Paul ever wrote. They show that he has been hurt and insulted as he never was before or afterwards by any church. His appearance, his speech, his apostleship and his honesty have all been under attack. Most scholars believe that chapters 10-13 are the severe letter, and that they became misplaced when Paul's letters were put together. If we want the real chronological course of Paul's correspondence with Corinth, we really ought to read chapters 10-13 of 2 Corinthians before chapters i-9. We do know that this letter was sent off with Titus (2 Corinthians 2:13, 7:13). (5) Paul was worried about this letter. He could not wait until Titus came back with an answer, so he set out to meet him (2 Corinthians 2:13, 7:5, 7:13). Somewhere in Macedonia, he met him and learned that all was well; and, probably at Philippi, he sat down and wrote 2 Corinthians 1-9, the letter of reconciliation.

• From The Hours (1998)

  I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am. “I’m sorry,” Louis says. “It’s all right. For god’s sake, look at all that’s happened.” “I feel like such an asshole.” He stands and walks to the French doors (seven steps). Through his tears he can see the moss in the low stone troughs, the bronze platter of clear water on which floats a single white feather. He can’t tell why he’s crying. He’s back in New York. He seems to be crying over this odd garden, Richard’s illness (why was Louis spared?), this room with Clarissa in it, everything. He seems to be crying over a Hunter who only resembles the actual one. This other Hunter has a fierce and tragic grandeur, true intelligence, a modest turn of mind. Louis weeps for him. Clarissa follows. “It’s all right,” she says again. “Stupid,” Louis murmurs. “Stupid.” A key turns in the front door. “It’s Julia,” Clarissa says. “Shit.” “Don’t worry. She’s seen men cry.” It’s her goddamn daughter. Louis straightens his shoulders, steps sideways from under Clarissa’s arm. He continues looking out at the garden, trying to bring his face under control. He thinks about moss. He thinks about fountains. He is suddenly, genuinely interested in moss and fountains. How strange, the voice says. Why is he thinking about things like that? “Hello,” says Julia, behind him. Not “hi.” She has always been a grave little girl, smart but peculiar, oversized, full of quirks and tics. “Hi, honey,” Clarissa says. “Do you remember Louis?” Louis turns to face her. Fine, let her see that he’s been crying. Fuck it. “Of course I do,” Julia says. She walks toward him, extending her hand. She is eighteen now, maybe nineteen. She is so unexpectedly handsome, so altered, that Louis worries the tears will start all over again. When he saw her last she was thirteen or so, slouchy and overweight, embarrassed by herself. She still isn’t beautiful, she’ll never be beautiful, but she’s acquired a measure of her mother’s presence, that golden certainty. She is handsome and assured in the way of a young athlete, her head all but shaved, her skin pink. “Julia,” he says. “How nice to see you.” She takes his hand firmly in hers. She wears a thin silver ring in her nose. She is lush and strong, crackling with health, like some kind of idealized Irish farm girl just in from the fields. She must take after her father (Louis has fantasized about him, imagined him as a strapping young blond, hard up, an actor or painter maybe, a lover, a criminal, a desperate boy, down to selling his fluids, blood to the blood bank and sperm to the sperm bank).

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

  Does this woman have a right to sour the pain of these days in such a vulgar way?' "But what is it?" 'First of all, she has an outrageous greed. She goes to the closet, takes out Mother's silk clothes, grabs them by the arm and wants to withdraw. ›Riekchen‹, I say, ›where to put it?‹ – ›Frau Konsul promised me that!‹ – ›Dear Severin!‹ I say and, with all restraint, let her consider the hasty nature of her actions. Do you think it's any use? Not only does she take the silk clothes, she also takes a package of laundry and leaves. I can't fight with her, can I?... And not just her... the girls too... Laundry baskets full of clothes and linen are taken out of the house... The staff divide things up before my eyes, because Severin has the keys to the closets. 'Miss Severin!' I say, 'I want the keys. ‹ What does she answer me? She tells me in plain and ordinary terms that I have nothing to say to her, she is not in my employ, I did not hire her, she will keep the keys until she leaves!” 'Have you got the keys to the silverware? - Good. Let the rest take its course. The same is unavoidable when a household is dissolved in which the government was already a little lax in the end. I don't want to make any noise now. The white stuff is old and broken... By the way, we'll see what's still there. do you have the directories on the table? Good. We'll see in a minute." And they went into the bedroom to stand side by side for a while by the bed, after Frau Antonie had taken the white cloth from the dead woman's face. The Consul was already in the silk robe in which she was to be laid out in the hall this afternoon; it was twenty-eight hours after her last breath. The mouth and cheeks were, since the artificial teeth were missing, sunken like an old man, and the chin pushed up sharply and angularly. All three made a painful effort, looking at those relentlessly closed eyelids, to recognize their mother's face in that face. But under the bonnet that the old lady wore on Sundays, as in real life, was the reddish-brown, smooth-parted toupee that the Buddenbrook ladies on Breite Strasse had so often made fun of... Flowers lay scattered on the quilt. "The most magnificent wreaths have already arrived," said Frau Permaneder softly. “Of all the families… oh, just of all the world! I had everything carried up the corridor; you'll have to see it later, Gerda and Tom. It's sad beautiful. Satin bows of this size…” "How far is the hall?" asked the senator. 'Nearly finished, Tom. Almost ready. Upholsterer Jacobs has made every effort. That too..." and she swallowed for a moment... "the coffin came earlier, too.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  How many opportunities must every one have had of witnessing the progress of intellectual decay, and the coldness that steals upon the once benevolent heart! We quit our country, perhaps at an early period of life, and after an absence of many years we return with all the remembrances of past pleasure which grow more tender as they approach their objects. We eagerly seek him to whose paternal voice we have been accustomed to listen with the same reverence as if its predictions had possessed oracular certainty,—who first led us into knowledge, and whose image has been constantly joined in our mind with all that veneration which does not forbid love. We find him sunk, perhaps, in the imbecility of idiotism, unable to recognize us,—ignorant alike of the past and of the future, and living only in the sensibility of animal gratification. We seek the favorite companion of our childhood, whose tenderness of heart, etc. . . . We find him hardened into a man, meeting us scarcely with the cold hypocrisy of dissembled friendship—in his general relations to the world careless of the misery he is not to feel. . . . When we observe all this, . . . do we use only a metaphor of little meaning when we say of him that he is become a different person, and that his mind and character are changed? In what does the identity consist? . . . The supposed test of identity, when applied to the mind in these cases, completely fails. It neither affects, nor is affected, in the same manner in the same circumstances. It therefore, if the test be a just one, is not the same identical mind." (T. Brown: Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 'on Mental Identity.' [296] "Sir John Cutler had a pair of black worsted stockings, which his maid darned so often with silk that they became at last a pair of silk stockings. Now, supposing these stockings of Sir John's endued with some degree of consciousness at every particular darning, they would have been sensible that they were the same individual pair of stockings both before and after the darning; and this sensation would have continued in them through all the succession of darnings; and yet after the last of all, there was not perhaps one thread left of the first pair of stockings: but they were grown to be silk stockings, as was said before." (Pope's Martinus Scriblerus, quoted by Brown, ibid.) [297] Hours of Work and Play, p. 100. [298] For a careful study of the errors in narratives, see E. Gurney: Phantasms of the Living, vol. I. pp. 126-158. In the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research for May 1887 Mr. Richard Hodgson shows by an extraordinary array of instances how utterly inaccurate everyone's description from memory of a rapid series of events is certain to be. [299] See Josiah Royce (Mind, vol. 13, p. 244, and Proceedings of Am. Soc. of Psych.

• From The Hours (1998)

  This would be the fourth, at least of the ones she knows about. She would like to grab Louis and say, You have to age better than this. I can’t stand to see you make so much of yourself and then offer it all to some boy just because he happens to be pretty and young. “He may be the most gifted student I’ve ever taught,” Louis says. “He does the most remarkable performance pieces about growing up white and gay in South Africa. Incredibly powerful.” “Well,” Clarissa says. She can think of nothing else to say. She feels sorry for Louis, and deeply impatient, and yet, she thinks, Louis is in love. He is in love with a young man. He is fifty-three and still has all that ahead of him, the sex and the ridiculous arguments, the anguish. “He’s amazing,” Louis says. To his complete surprise, he begins to weep. The tears start simply enough, as a heat at the back of his eyes and a furring of his vision. These spasms of emotion take him constantly. A song can do it; even the sight of an old dog. They pass. They usually pass. This time, though, tears start falling from his eyes almost before he knows it will happen, and for a moment a compartment of his being (the same compartment that counts steps, sips, claps) says to itself, He’s crying, how strange. Louis leans forward, puts his face in his hands. He sobs. The truth is that he does not love Hunter and Hunter does not love him. They are having an affair; only an affair. He fails to think of him for hours at a time. Hunter has other boyfriends, a whole future planned, and when he’s moved on, Louis has to admit, privately, that he won’t much miss Hunter’s shrill laugh, his chipped front tooth, his petulant silences. There is so little love in the world. Clarissa rubs Louis’s back with the flat of her hand. What had Sally said? We never fight. It was at dinner somewhere, a year ago or longer. There had been some kind of fish, thick medallions in a puddle of bright yellow sauce (it seemed everything, just then, sat in a puddle of brightly colored sauce). We never fight. It’s true. They bicker, they sulk, but they never explode, never shout or weep, never break a dish. It has always seemed that they haven’t fought yet; that they’re still too new for all-out war; that whole unexplored continents lie ahead once they’ve worked their way through their initial negotiations and feel sufficiently certain in each other’s company to really let loose. What could she have been thinking? She and Sally will soon celebrate their eighteenth anniversary together. They are a couple that never fight. As she rubs Louis’s back, Clarissa thinks, Take me with you. I want a doomed love.

• From The Hours (1998)

  She kneels beside him, puts a hand on his inert shoulder. Gently, very gently, as if she fears waking him, she pulls the robe down from around his head. All she can make sense of in the glistening mass of red, purple, and white are his parted lips and one open eye. She realizes she has made a sound, a sharp exclamation of surprise and pain. She covers his head again with the robe. She remains kneeling at his side, uncertain about what to do next. She returns her hand to his shoulder. She does not stroke it; she simply rests her hand there. She tells herself she should go call the police, but doesn’t want to leave Richard alone. She waits for someone to call down to her. She glances up at the ascending rows of windows, the hanging laundry, the perfect square of sky bisected by one thin blue-white blade of a cloud, and begins to understand that no one knows yet. No one has seen or heard Richard fall. She does not move. She finds the window of the old woman, with its three ceramic statuettes (invisible from so far down). The old woman must be at home, she hardly ever goes out. Clarissa has an urge to shout up to her, as if she were some sort of family member; as if she should be informed. Clarissa puts off, at least for another minute or two, the inevitable next act. She remains with Richard, touching his shoulder. She feels (and is astonished at herself ) slightly embarrassed by what has happened. She wonders why she doesn’t weep. She is aware of the sound of her own breathing. She is aware of the slippers still on Richard’s feet, of the sky reflected in the growing puddle of blood. It ends here, then, on a pallet of concrete, under the clotheslines, amid shards of glass. She runs her hand, gently, down from his shoulder along the frail curve of his back. Guiltily, as if she is doing something forbidden, she leans over and rests her forehead against his spine while it is still, in some way, his; while he is still in some way Richard Worthington Brown. She can smell the stale flannel of the robe, the winey sharpness of his unbathed flesh. She would like to speak to him, but can’t. She simply rests her head, lightly, against his back.

• From The Hours (1998)

  As she continues down the hall, she wonders over the pleasure she felt—what had it been?—just a little more than an hour earlier. At this moment, at eleven-thirty on a warm June day, the hallway of her building feels like an entrance to the realm of the dead. The urn sits in its niche and the brown-glazed floor tiles silently return, in muddied form, the elderly ocher light of the sconces. No, not the realm of the dead, exactly; there is something worse than death, with its promise of release and slumber. There is dust rising, endless days, and a hallway that sits and sits, always full of the same brown light and the dank, slightly chemical smell that will do, until something more precise comes along, as the actual odor of age and loss, the end of hope. Richard, her lost lover, her truest friend, is disappearing into his illness, his insanity. Richard will not accompany her, as planned, into old age.

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

  It would have been difficult to name the expression on her pale and smudged face after childbirth. Finally she said, "Yes..." sobbed once-just once-very short and slurred, and turned to go. Frau Permaneder loved such visits. She never left the house, and watched with tireless zeal the homages that were urged to be rendered to her brother's mortal remains. Using her larynx voice, she read many times the newspaper articles in which, as at the time of the business anniversary, his merits were celebrated and the irreparable loss of his personality lamented. She was present in the living room for all the condolence visits that Gerda received in the drawing room; and they found no end, their number was legion. She held conferences with various people about the funeral, which had to be inexpressibly grand. she arranged farewell scenes. She had the clerk come up to bid his boss a final farewell. And then the storage workers had to come. They shuffled across the parquet floor on their colossal feet, turned the corners of their mouths down with tremendous sincerity, and gave off an odor of brandy, chewing tobacco, and manual labour. They watched the magnificent laying out, twirling their caps, at first wondering and then getting bored, until one had the courage to set off again, whereupon the whole crowd followed, slurping, at his heels... Frau Permaneder was delighted. She claimed that several had tears on their hard beards. That just wasn't true. Nothing like that had happened. But what if she saw it that way and if it made her happy? And the day of the burial drew near. The metal coffin was hermetically sealed and covered with flowers, the candles were burning on the candelabra, the house filled with people, and surrounded by the mourners, local and foreign, Pastor Pringsheim stood in upright majesty at the head of the coffin, making his expressive head resting on the broad ruff, like on a plate. A highly trained hired servant, a nimble cross between a steward and a steward, had taken on the external management of the ceremony. Top hat in hand, he ran down the main staircase on soft feet and called in a piercing whisper across the hall, which was just being flooded with tax officials in uniform and grain porters in blouses, breeches and top hats: "The rooms are full, but open there's still a little room in the corridor..." Then everything fell silent; Pastor Pringsheim began to speak, and his artful voice filled the whole house, resounding and modulating. But while he was there wringing his hands in front of his face next to the figure of Christ and spreading them out in blessing, the four-horse carriage pulled up in front of the house under the white winter sky, followed by the other carriages in a long line down the street to the river.

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

  Then Frau Permaneder threw herself on her knees by the bed, pressed her face into the quilt and cried loudly, surrendering unreservedly and without suppressing anything in herself to one of those refreshing outbursts of emotion, her happy ones Faced utterly wet, but strengthened, relieved, and perfectly balanced, she arose, and was at once able to think of the obituaries, which had to be prepared without delay and in great haste—an immense batch of well-printed obituaries ... Christian entered the scene. What happened to him was that he had received the news of the senator's fall at the club and left at once. Fearing some horrid sight, however, he had taken a long walk outside the gate so that no one could find him. Now he turned up anyway and found out in the hall that his brother had passed away. "It can't be possible," he said, and went up the stairs, lame and with wandering eyes. Then he stood between his sister and sister-in-law on his deathbed. He stood there, with his bald head, his sunken cheeks, his drooping mustache and his enormous humped nose, on crooked and lean legs, a little kinked, a little question mark-like, and his small, deep-set eyes looked into his brother's face, the so taciturn, cold, dismissive, and impeccable, so impervious to any human judgment... Thomas's lips were drawn down in an almost contemptuous expression. He, whom Christian had reproached for not crying when he died, was dead himself, he had simply died without saying a word, had withdrawn into silence, noble and intact, leaving the others pitilessly to shame, like so often in life! Had he acted well or badly by always showing only cold contempt for Christian's suffering, his "torment," the nodding man, the spirit bottle, the open window? This question was dropped, it had become meaningless, since death, with obstinate and unpredictable partiality, had honored and justified him, accepted and received him, made him venerable and commandingly given him the general, shy interest, while he despised Christian and only would go on teasing him with fifty antics and harassment no one had any respect for. Thomas Buddenbrook had never impressed his brother more than at this hour. Success is key. Only death gives us respect for our sufferings, and even the most pitiful sufferings become venerable through it. You were right, I'll bend, thought Christian, and with a quick, awkward movement he got down on one knee and kissed the cold hand on the quilt. Then he stepped back and began pacing the room, eyes wandering. Other visitors, the old Krögers, the Buddenbrook ladies from Breite Strasse, and old Herr Marcus, turned up. Poor Klothilde came, too, and stood by the bed, thin and ashen, and clasped her hands, which were clad in twine gloves, with an apathetic face. 'You mustn't think, Tony and Gerda,' she drawled and lamented endlessly, 'that I'm cold-hearted because I don't cry.

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

  When the previous generation had outgrown her, the good soul immediately found little Johann, whom they cherish and care for, to whom she could read Grimm fairy tales and tell the story of the uncle who had died of hiccups. But now little Johann was really done no longer small, he was a fifteen-year-old boy who, despite his tenderness, could no longer be of much use … and she had had a rather unpleasant relationship with his mother for a long time. She had never really considered this woman, who had joined the family much later than she, as belonging and of full value, and on the other hand, in her advanced years, with the arrogance of an old servant, she began to usurp exaggerated powers. She aroused offense by regarding her person as too important, by being guilty of this or that assault in the household... The situation became untenable, agitated performances took place, and although Frau Permaneder pleaded for her with the same eloquence with which she asked for the big houses and the furniture, She wept bitterly when the hour came when she had to bid little Johann farewell. He hugged her, then put his hands behind his back, leaning on one of hisleg, placing his other foot on tiptoe, and watched her walk away, with the same brooding and introverted gaze that his tawny eyes shaded with bluish had at the corpse of his grandmother, at the death of his father, at the dissolution of the large households and many a less external experience of a similar kind... In his view, the old Ida's farewell logically followed the other processes of crumbling, ending, closing, decomposition that he had witnessed. Such things no longer alienated him; oddly enough, it had never alienated him. Sometimes, when he raised his head with its curly light brown hair and lips that were always a little twisted and the fine wings of his nose opened sensitively, it was Whenever Mrs. Permaneder called on her sister-in-law, she pulled her nephew to her to tell him about the past and to tell of that future which Buddenbrooks, next to the grace of God, should have him, little Johann, to thank for. The more unpleasant the present presented itself, the less she could get enough of describing how elegant life was in the houses of her parents and grandparents and how Hanno's great-grandfather drove across the country in fours... One day she suffered a severe attack of stomach cramps as a result of the fact that Friederike, Henriette and Pfiffi Buddenbrook had unanimously claimed that Hagenstroms were the cream of society... There was sad news about Christian. The marriage did not seem to have affected his health in a favorable way. Uncanny delusions and obsessions had recurred in him to a greater extent, and at the instigation of his wife and a doctor he had now gone to an institution.

• From The Hours (1998)

  She is alive now, after her ex-husband has been carried off by liver cancer, after her daughter has been killed by a drunk driver. She is alive after Richard has jumped from a window onto a bed of broken glass. Clarissa holds the old woman’s hand. What else can she do? Clarissa says, “I wonder if Julia has remembered your tea.” “I’m sure she has, dear.” Clarissa glances over at the glass doors that lead to the modest garden. She and Laura Brown are reflected, imperfectly, in the black glass. Clarissa thinks of Richard on the windowsill; Richard letting go; not jumping, really, but sliding as if from a rock into water. What must it have been like, the moment he had irrevocably done it; the moment he was out of his dark apartment and released into air? What must it have been like to see the alley below, with its blue and brown garbage cans, its spray of amber glass, come rushing up? Was it—could it possibly have been—a pleasure of some kind to crumple onto the pavement and feel (did he momentarily feel?) the skull crack open, all its impulses, its little lights, spilled out? There can’t, Clarissa thinks, have been much pain. There would have been the idea of pain, its first shock, and then—whatever came next. “I’m going to go see,” she says to Laura. “I’ll be back in a minute.” “All right,” Laura says. Clarissa stands, a bit unsteadily, and goes into the kitchen. Sally and Julia have taken the food from the refrigerator and piled it on the counters. There are spirals of grilled chicken breast, flecked black, touched with brilliant yellow, impaled on wooden picks, arranged around a bowl of peanut sauce. There are miniature onion tarts. There are steamed shrimp, and glistening bright-red squares of rare tuna with dabs of wasabi. There are dark triangles of grilled eggplant, and round sand wiches on brown bread, and endive leaves touched at their stem ends with discrete smears of goat cheese and chopped walnuts. There are shallow bowls full of raw vegetables. And there is, in its earthenware dish, the crab casserole Clarissa made herself, for Richard, because it was his favorite. “My god,” Clarissa says. “Look at all this.” “We were expecting fifty people,” Sally says. They stand for a moment, the three of them, before the plates heaped with food. The food feels pristine, untouchable; it could be a display of relics. It seems, briefly, to Clarissa, that the food—that most perishable of entities—will remain here after she and the others have disappeared; after all of them, even Julia, have died.

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

  Gerda Buddenbrook's beautiful white face was all twisted in horror and disgust, and her close-set brown eyes, surrounded by bluish shadows, blinked, angry, disturbed, and disgusted. Recognizing Frau Permaneder, she quickly waved at her with outstretched arm and embraced her, hiding her head on her shoulder. "Gerda, Gerda, what's the matter!" called Frau Permaneder. 'What happened!... What does it mean!... Overthrown, they say? Unconscious?... How about him?... The good Lord will not want the worst... For the sake of all mercy, tell me..." But she didn't get an answer right away, only felt how Gerda's whole figure stretched in a shiver. And then she heard a whisper against her shoulder... 'How he looked,' she understood, 'when they brought him! During his whole life one was not allowed to see a filament of dust on him... It is a mockery and baseness that the last thing has to happen like this...!" A muffled sound reached them. The door to the dressing room had opened and Ida Jungmann was standing in her frame, wearing a white apron, holding a bowl in her hands. Her eyes were red. She saw Frau Permaneder and stepped back with bowed head to clear the way. Her chin trembled in wrinkles. The high floral window curtains swayed in the breeze as Tony walked into the bedroom, followed by her sister-in-law. The smell of carbolic, ether and other medicines wafted towards them. In the wide mahogany bed, under the red quilt, Thomas Buddenbrook lay undressed and in his embroidered nightgown on his back. His half-open eyes were broken and twisted, his lips slurred under his tousled mustache, and gurgling sounds escaped his throat now and then. The young Doctor Longneck bent over him, took a bloody bandage from his face and dipped a new one in a bowl that stood on the bedside table. Then he listened to the sick man's chest and felt his pulse... Little Johann was sitting on the linen pouf at the foot of the bed. twisted his nautical knot and listened to the lute his father was making with a brooding look on his face behind him. The soiled clothes were hanging over a chair somewhere. Frau Permaneder crouched down on the side of the bed, took her brother's hand, which was cold and heavy, and stared into his face... She began to understand that, whether God knew what he was doing or not, he did anyway still wanted "the worst." "Tom!" she wailed. "Do not you recognize me? how are you do you want to leave us You don't want to leave us?! Oh, it ca n't be...!" Nothing came that resembled a reply. She looked up at Doctor Longneck for help. He stood there, keeping his beautiful eyes downcast, and in his countenance, not without some smugness, expressed the will of the good Lord... Ida Jungmann came back in to help where help was needed.