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 A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Nonetheless, my father somehow got born and survived to serve his mother humbly and lovingly, washing the family’s sheets in the bathtub when he was still only a child and brushing out her blond hair every night. One night, soon after my grandmother died, I stole into my father’s study and found him standing behind my sister’s chair, brushing her hair and crying. Right now I’m looking at an ancient photograph of my sister and me. I’m three and she’s seven, both of us bundled up for winter and posed against a door under an ominously black Christmas wreath. She’s much taller than I. My sister is dressed in a fashionably cut camel’s-hair coat belled out above black leggings. She’s sporting a matching hat bordered in brown piping, the front brim flipped up and the whole thing placed rakishly far back on her head. She’s smiling a thin-lipped, obviously forced smile. Her eyes, so blue they’re bottomless and white, express the pain of an unhealed convalescent, as do the shadows, like bruises below her temples—bruises forceps might have left. Because my sister tormented me and I loved her but feared her, I turned away from her to imaginary playmates. There were three of them. Cottage Cheese, the girl, was older than I, sensible and bossy but my ally. She and I tolerated our good-natured younger sidekick, Georgie-Porgie, a dimwit we fussed over for his own good. We felt nothing of this benign condescension toward Tom-Thumb-Thumb, the hellion who roamed the woods beyond the barbed wire fence guarding the neighbor’s property, off limits to us and to him too, I’m sure, though he ignored this rule and all others. He was just a rustle of dried leaves, a panting of quick hot breath behind the honeysuckle, a blur of tanned leg and muddy knees or a distant hoot and holler—an irrepressible male freedom (all the freer because he was a boy and not a man). He needed no one, he’d listen to no reprimand. One time Cottage Cheese and I cornered him (we’d taken him by surprise as he was furtively pawing my father’s untouchable tools in the garage) and we lectured him at length, but his eyes, the whites flashing wonderfully clear and bright through the matted hair, never stopped darting back and forth looking for an escape route—and then he was off, leaving behind him only the resonance of the concrete vault and our voices calling Tom, calling, calling out to him, Tom, to behave, to be good, Tom, as good as we had to be. He never cared for me. Cottage Cheese and I, determined that naive Georgie-Porgie should not fall under Tom’s spell, made a great show of listing Tom’s faults—but privately I worried about Tom and at night I wondered where he was sleeping, was he dry, was he warm, hungry. I even envied his sovereignty, though the price of freedom—total solitude—seemed more than I could possibly pay.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  After that we had passed a great part of our journey, we came to a village where we lay all night, but harken, and I will tell you what mischiefe happened there: you shall understand there was a servant to whom his Master had committed the whole government of his house, and was Master of the lodging where we lay: this servant had married a Maiden of the same house, howbeit he was greatly in love with a harlot of the towne, and accustomed to resort unto her, wherewith his wife was so highly displeased and became so jealous, that she gathered together all her husbands substance, with his tales and books of account, and threw them into a light fire: she was not contented with this, but she tooke a cord and bound her child which she had by her husband, about her middle and cast her selfe headlong into a deepe pit. The Master taking in evill part the death of these twaine, tooke his servant which was the cause of this murther by his luxurie, and first after that he had put off all his apparell, he annointed his body with honey, and then bound him sure to a fig-tree, where in a rotten stocke a great number of Pismares had builded their neasts, the Pismares after they had felt the sweetnesse of the honey came upon his body, and by little and little (in continuance of time) devoured all his flesh, in such sort, that there remained on the tree but his bare bones: this was declared unto us by the inhabitants of the village there, who greatly sorrowed for the death of this servant: then we avoiding likewise from this dreadfull lodging incontinently departed away. THE THIRTY-SIXTH CHAPTER How Apuleius was cheapned by divers persons, and how they looked in his mouth to know his age.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  But the funerals of his younger son were scarce finished; when- the old man the father, even at the return. from. the. grave, with. weeping eyes and: his white hair befouled with ashes went. apace to the. justiee and worked with all his might for the destruction of his remaining son, accusing him of the incest that he had attempted; of the slaughter of: his brother, and how he threatened to slay his wife ; knowing naught of that wicked woman’s wiles, he besought the magistrates. with tears and: prayers, yea, even. embracing their knees, for this, son's death. Hereby with weeping and lamentation he inflamed' all the elders and the people as well to pity and: indignation, in so much: that: without: any delay of trial. or further. inquisition or the careful. pleading of defenders they cried all that he should be stoned to death, to the end that this publie crime : 483 LUCIUS APULEIUS Magistratus interim metu periculi proprii, ne de parvis indignationis elementis ad exitium disciplinae civitatisque seditio procederet, partim decuriones deprecari, partim populares compescere, ut rite et more maiorum iudicio reddito et utrimquesecus alleg- ationibus examinatis, civiliter sententia promeretur, nec ad instar barbaricae feritatis vel tyrannicae im- potentiae damnaretur aliquis inauditus, et in pace placida tam dirum saeculo proderetur exemplum. 7 Placuit salubre consilium et illico iussus praeco pro- nuntiat patres in curiam convenirent. Quibus pro- tenus dignitatis iure consueta loca residentibus rur- sum praeconis vocatu primus accusator incedit. Tune demum clamatus inducitur etiam reus et exemplo legis Atticae Martiique iudicii causae patronis de- nuntiat praeco neque principia dicere neque misera- tionem commovere. Haec ad istum modum gesta compluribus mutuo sermocinantibus cognovi: quibus autem verbis accusator urserit, quibus rebus diluerit reus, ac prorsus orationes altercationesque neque ipse absens apud praesepium scire neque ad vos quae ignoravi possum enuntiare, sed quae plane comperi ad istas litteras proferam. Simul enim finita est dicentium contentio, veritatem criminum fidemque probationibus certis instrui nec suspicioni- bus tantam coniecturam permitti placuit, atque 484 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK X might be publicly revenged ; but the justices, fearing lest a farther inconvenience might arise to them- selves by a particulat vengeance, and to the end there might fortune from a little beginning no sedi- tion amongst the people with public riot, prayed the decurions and the people of the city to proceed by examination of witnesses on both sides, like good citizens, and with order of justice according to the ancient custom ; for the giving of any hasty sentence or judgement without hearing of the contrary part, such as the barbarous and cruel tyrants accustom to use, would give an ill example in time of peace to their successors.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I remember letting myself into my flat and starting to say: Well, at least we shall now track them down—when the other letter began talking to me in a small matter-of-fact voice: DEAR DAD: How’s everything? I’m married. I’m going to have a baby. I guess he’s going to be a big one. I guess he’ll come right for Christmas. This is a hard letter to write. I’m going nuts because we don’t have enough to pay our debts and get out of here. Dick is promised a big job in Alaska in his very specialized corner of the mechanical field, that’s all I know about it but it’s really grand. Pardon me for withholding our home address but you may still be mad at me, and Dick must not know. This town is something. You can’t see the morons for the smog. Please do send us a check, Dad. We could manage with three or four hundred or even less, anything is welcome, you might sell my old things, because once we get there the dough will just start rolling in. Write, please. I have gone through much sadness and hardship. Yours expecting, DOLLY (MRS. RICHARD F. SCHILLER) 28I was again on the road, again at the wheel of the old blue sedan, again alone. Rita had still been dead to the world when I read that letter and fought the mountains of agony it raised within me. I had glanced at her as she smiled in her sleep and had kissed her on her moist brow, and had left her forever, with a note of tender adieu which I taped to her navel—otherwise she might not have found it. “Alone” did I say? Pas tout à fait. I had my little black chum with me, and as soon as I reached a secluded spot, I rehearsed Mr. Richard F. Schiller’s violent death. I had found a very old and very dirty gray sweater of mine in the back of the car, and this I hung up on a branch, in a speechless glade, which I had reached by a wood road from the now remote highway. The carrying out of the sentence was a little marred by what seemed to me a certain stiffness in the play of the trigger, and I wondered if I should get some oil for the mysterious thing but decided I had no time to spare. Back into the car went the old dead sweater, now with additional perforations, and having reloaded warm Chum, I continued my journey.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  of his body, tumbled at length out of the house; but when he was come to liberty abroad, yet could he not save himself by flight, for all the dogs of the street (which were fierce and many) joined them- selves to the greyhounds and mastiffs that had just come out of the house, to chase him like a great host: alas, what a pitiful sight it was when our poor Thrasyleon was thus environed and compassed with so many furious dogs that tore and rent him miser- ably! Then I, impatient of so great his misery, ran in amongst the press of the people, and aiding my comrade secretly with my words (for no more could I do) exhorted all the leaders of this chase in this manner: ‘O great extreme mischance, what a pre- cious and excellent beast do we lose!’ but my words did nothing prevail to help the poor wretch. For there came running out a tall man with a spear in his hand, that thrust him clean through, and afterwards many that stood by, released of their fear, drew out their swords, and so they killed him. But verily our brave captain Thrasyleon, the great honour of our band, when his life, that was worthy never to die, was utterly overcome, but not his fortitude, would not bewray the league between us, either by crying, howling, or any other means, but (being torn with dogs, and wounded with weapons) did still send forth a bellowing cry more like that of a beast than of a man: and taking his present fortune in good part, with courage and glory enough did finish his life with such a terror unto the assembly, that no person was so hardy (until it was morn, nay, until it was high day) as to touch him, though he were a beast stark dead: but at last there came a butcher more valiant than the rest, who (opening the paunch of the beast) slit off the 175 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  She wanted him to beg her to stay, to live with him, but then she remembered living with him would mean this godforsaken desert in the middle of nowhere. It would mean Rusty and a new baby and Miri. She and Miri would never be best friends again. She saw the writing on the wall. It was over between them. She ordered a Waldorf salad without dressing. —ON HER LAST NIGHT in town Natalie rolled over in the twin bed next to Miri’s, propped herself up on an elbow and asked, “Is it true about Mason?” “Is what true?” “That he had another girlfriend?” “Who told you that?” Natalie shrugged. “You can’t trust any of them. Not even after twenty years of marriage. Just ask my mother.” Miri lay on her back, trying to dismiss the pain spreading through her body. “I’m never going to let a boy break my heart,” Natalie said. “Not that friends can’t break your heart, too. And family. You think you can trust them, then you find out you were wrong. That’s all I’m going to say.” She turned away then, leaving Miri awake, tears rolling down her cheeks. —FERN DIDN’T WANT to leave. She wanted to be flower girl at the wedding. “We’re not having that kind of wedding,” Rusty told her. “What kind are you having?” Fern asked. “It will be a very quiet wedding in the rabbi’s study. You won’t be missing anything.” Still, Fern cried. “I want to be your sister,” she told Miri. “I like you better than Natalie.” “Don’t tell that to anyone else, okay?” Miri said. “You mean it’s a secret?” “Not so much a secret as something only the two of us know.” “I wish I could stay here and ride Trigger to school. I don’t want to go back to Mommy. She’s mean. She only cares about good manners.” “Good manners are important.” “Natalie doesn’t have good manners.” “She used to.” “But she doesn’t anymore.” “No, she doesn’t.” Miri went to the airport with them, to say goodbye. Fern wore her appliquéd jacket with the silver wings, a second set of wings still pinned to Roy Rabbit’s vest. Natalie wore dungarees, her new western boots and a fringed jacket she’d seen in a shopwindow on Fremont Street. All that was missing was a ten-gallon hat. “Mommy’s going to be surprised to see you wearing that,” Fern said. “That’s the idea,” Natalie told her. “She’s going to be mad.” “That’s the idea.” “Are you going to be mean forever?” Fern asked. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” Natalie said, laughing. Miri would have hugged her for old times’ sake, but Natalie kept her distance, turning once, halfway out the tarmac to the plane, to wave to her. “So long, cowgirl,” she called. “I’ll see you in my dreams.” “Not if I see you first,” Miri called back. Dr. O was accompanying the girls to Birmingham.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Not that it’s ever completely gone. It’s still there, buried deep, a part of you. The stench is gone from your nostrils now Unless someone leaves the kettle on to boil and forgets about it. The nightmares have tapered out. There are more pressing things to dream about, to worry over, to keep you awake at night. Aging parents, adolescent children, work, money, the state of the world. Life goes on, as our parents promised that winter. Life goes on if you’re one of the lucky ones. But we’re still part of a secret club, One we’d never willingly join, With members who have nothing in common except a time and a place. We’ll always be connected by that winter. Anyone who tells you different is lying. The final speaker is Gaby Wenders. She introduces the boy heroes, especially her hero, Mason McKittrick. Then her husband, Dr. Larsen, her children and grandchildren present a plaque to Mason. The oldest grandchild, maybe five, says to Mason, Thank you for our Gaby. There’s not a dry eye in the house. After the presentation to Mason it feels as if the program is over. People stand and begin to say goodbye to one another, when the doors swing open and Natalie makes her entrance, swooping in like a high-fashion gypsy, the “Queen of New Age,” as she’s known, her Santa Fe jewelry jangling on her wrists and around her neck. A buzz goes through the crowd and people take their seats again. After all, she’s Natalie Renso. She’s famous. You can see her on TV, at readings and book signings, in fashion magazines. Most people don’t know Renso is Osner spelled backward, the kind of code name children come up with in third grade. But it’s worked well for Natalie. She steps up to the podium, waits for the whispering to die down and begins. “It was the winter that changed our lives,” she says. “The winter we learned who we were, and what we were made of.” And that’s it. She doesn’t say a word about Ruby. Just that she’ll be happy to sign books—please write the name of the person you’d like her to sign for on a Post-it. Even Lee Patterson, daughter of the Secretary of War, lines up to get her signature. “My daughter would never forgive me if I didn’t bring her a signed book.” Miri does not get in line. She hangs back. “Did you really sleep with Warren Beatty?” someone asks Natalie. “Why not?” Natalie answers. “Everyone who had the chance did.” She laughs, and the crowd laughs with her. —CHRISTINA DOESN’T LIKE whatever’s going on between Miri and Mason. You’d have to be an idiot to miss it. The two of them making goo-goo eyes at each other all through lunch. Jack tells her to let it be, they’re adults, they’re not going to do anything stupid, anything that would mess up their lives.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Irene was a great cook, which was Rusty’s excuse for never having learned. Instead of encouraging her, Rusty said Irene shooed her out of the kitchen. Rusty was always harping that Miri should learn to cook, that Irene would have more patience with Miri than she’d had with her. Learning to cook from Irene would be a lot better than making lumpy and disgusting white sauce in the required cooking class at Hamilton Junior High. —THE LEG OF LAMB materialized as lamb stew that night. Tasty, with little potatoes, green beans, carrots and celery, seasoned with rosemary. Ben Sapphire joined Miri and Rusty at Irene’s table. He broke down several times, covering his eyes with his hand, blowing his nose with a handkerchief. “I can’t think of her inside that plane…my darling wife, my Estelle…” Irene patted his hand. “We took a place in Miami Beach for the season,” he told Rusty. “She was flying down early to get it ready. I was going to drive down with the luggage. She gets carsick—got carsick—never liked long drives.” He broke down again. “I’m so sorry,” Rusty said. “I spoke with her on the phone on Saturday. She ordered six Volupté compacts to take to Florida.” “The compacts,” he said, hitting his forehead with his hand. “I forgot about the compacts.” Again, Irene patted his hand. “Never mind about that.” “No, I want to pay.” “Please, Ben…” Irene shook her head. Miri stole a look at Rusty, who took her hand under the table and gave it a gentle squeeze. Rusty’s fingers were warm. Henry came home as they were finishing what was left of Rusty’s birthday cake. He was flushed with excitement, dropping a stack of papers on one end of the table, then handing each of them a copy of the Daily Post, with his story and byline on the front page. He had no idea who Ben Sapphire was but he passed a copy of the paper to him, too. Ben Sapphire took one look and turned gray. He excused himself from the table and Irene helped him to the bathroom. When she came back without Ben, she told Henry, “His wife, Estelle, was on that plane.” “How was I supposed to know?” Henry asked. “Sometimes you have to assume,” Irene said. Then she turned to Miri. “Darling, give me that paper.” But Miri held on to it. “She’s been through enough,” Irene said to Henry. “She doesn’t need the gruesome details.” “She was there, Mama,” Henry said. “She saw it happen.” “And that’s bad enough.” “You don’t think she’s going to read the paper tonight?” Henry said. “You don’t think she’ll want to read my story?” Miri wasn’t sure she wanted to read Henry’s story but she didn’t say so. She didn’t say anything. On the one hand, she wanted to forget it ever happened. On the other, she wanted to know who else was on the plane besides the dancer and Ben Sapphire’s wife, Estelle.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  By and by came one of these tyrants servants the most sturdiest of the rest to helpe his master, who at the first comming tooke up a stone and threw at the third brother, but by reason the stone ran along his arme it did not hurt him, which chanced otherwise then all mens expectation was: by and by the young man feigning that his arme was greatly wounded, spake these words unto the cruell bloud sucker: Now maist thou, thou wretch, triumph upon the destruction of all our family, now hast thou fed thy insatiable cruelty with the bloud of three brethren, now maist thou rejoyce at the fall of us Citizens, yet thinke not but that how farre thou dost remove and extend the bounds of thy land, thou shalt have some neighbor, but how greatly am I sorry in that I have lost mine arme wherewithall I minded to cut off thy head. When he had spoken these words, the furious theefe drew out his dagger, and running upon the young man thought verily to have slaine him, but it chanced otherwise: For the young man resisted him stoutly, and in buckling together by violence wrested the dagger out of his hand: which done, he killed the rich theefe with his owne weapon, and to the intent the young man would escape the hands of the servants which came running to assist their master, with the same dagger he cut his owne throat. These things were signified by the strange and dreadfull wondres which fortuned in the house of the good man, who after he had heard these sorrowfull tydings could in no wise weepe, so farre was he stroken with dolour, but presently taking his knife wherewith he cut his cheese and other meate before, he cut his owne throat likewise, in such sort that he fell upon the bord and imbraced the table with the streames of his blond, in most miserable manner. Hereby was my master the Gardener deprived of his hope, and paying for his dinner the watry teares of his eyes, mounted upon my backe and so we went homeward the same way as wee came. THE FORTY-THIRD CHAPTER How Apuleius was found by his shadow. As wee passed by the way wee met with a tall souldier (for so his habite and countenance declared) who with proud and arrogant words spake to my master in this sort: Quorsum vacuum ducis Asinum?

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

  The room smelled like I imagined death would—flannel blankets and Clorox, camouflaged in a potpourri of church-lady powder and perfumes. My father had tubes coming out of every opening that I’d allow myself to look at. His chapped lips parted but no audible words came out. He motioned with the hand nearest me to sit. His eyes were dull and quiet but they followed my every move. “Do you want more light?” I asked. He motioned me again to sit in the chair next to his bed. A large clear tear ran down his cheek. My father turned his hand over to the backside so the tube hit the bed and raised it up and down; he wanted my hand. I hesitated, and he did it again. Another tear. I put my hand on top of his and turned my head toward the door, unable to watch his final act of touching me. He curled his fingers toward the center. I didn’t move. The sound of him trying to find his voice scared me. “You don’t have to talk,” I said. “I’m sorry,” he said in a small voice. More tears fell, disappeared under the tube, and reemerged. “I know,” I said, “I forgive you, Daddy.” I was lying, but I knew he would believe me because he wanted to. He’d waited for it; everyone in the hall had been waiting for the lie, so they could feel better about themselves. I sat for as long as I could stand to have my hand in his. I leaned over and brushed his paper-thin cheek with my lips. “Good-bye.” THAT GOOD-BYE WASN’T THE END, OF COURSE. I STILL CARRY the weight of being a rape survivor, and of the demand that I forgive and forget to uphold the myth of the perfect Black Family. I carry the weight handed to me by the Black moral majority, who ignored my father’s crimes and who knows how many other men’s, who tried to buy off a terrified thirteen-year-old with a one-day trip to an amusement park. They were so desperate to project the image of the respectable, righteous, picture-perfect Black Family to the world that they were willing to let the women and girls in those pictures suffer. I never asked to be a model minority. I just wanted, for a few minutes, to believe I could be a model. To Get Out from Under ItStacey May FowlesI SAID THE WORD NO SIXTEEN TIMES. I don’t know that I truly remember exactly how many times I said no, especially given the circumstances—the passage of time blots out any kind of vivid, detailed memory, and the world fills you with doubt over the legitimacy of your own story.

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

  I need the accommodation because I said I need it. I do not do that thing because I have said that I do not do it. No one gets to rake over the details of my life and determine if they think what happened to me was bad enough for me to have earned my scars, my limitations, my superpowers. Broken people understand this better. One of my friends told me a few years ago that she didn’t have anyone close to her that had a healthy, functional relationship with their parents, because she couldn’t relate to people like that. It’s not a deliberate exclusion. People with cracked foundations will understand better why sometimes you do crazy shit to shore up your own. It’s not that I don’t want to love unharmed people; I just don’t understand them. The scales are all off, the proportions are wrong for when we talk about how something hurts. This is not a bad day at the office, this is not a breakup, this is not that time that someone really hurt your feelings. It is more like carrying something really heavy, forever. You do not get to put it down: you have to carry it, and so you carry it the way you need to, however it fits best. Once I was at a wedding, and a friend of my youth, a person I trust with my life to whom I have to tell things to make them real, wanted me to go dance with her. We were all superdrunk, and I didn’t want to, so she grabbed my hair, in a totally playful way. We were drunk and she pulled my hair and the next thing I knew I had her up against a wall with my forearm across her throat. She apologized. I apologized. Drunk people are fairly floppy so nobody got hurt. But I have never forgotten that moment: one second I was fine, and the next there was nothing, and then I had one of the people I love most up against a wall. I don’t drink like that at parties anymore. I am a happy person most of the time: not just content, not just getting by, but happy, and often so overflowing with joy that I look around myself and revel in my luck, in my work, in my love. I also have a lot of bad days, and a powerful liking for bourbon, and an intimacy problem. All of those things are true. This is what being a survivor looks like for me. Sometimes I see ghosts. The worst ghosts for me are not usually the flashbacks, although those can be pretty bad, but the ones who show me what I might have been if it never happened. It’s like suddenly feeling what it would be like to run on a leg that had never been broken, just for a second, and then it’s gone and the old bone-deep pain is with me again.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  the sun.” Wherefore I to him: “If thou bring back to mind what thou hast been with me and what I have been with thee, the present memory will still be grievous. From that life he who goeth before me did turn me, the other day, 10 when full was shown to you the sister of him” 11 (And I pointed to the sun). “This one through the deep night hath led me from the truly dead, in this solid flesh which follows him. Thence his comforts have brought me up, ascending and circling the mount, which makes you straight whom the world made crooked. So long he talks of making me his comrade, until I shall be there where Beatrice will be; there must I remain bereft of him. 12 Virgil is he who thus speaks to me (and I pointed to him) and this other is that shade for whom before in every scarp your realm did shake which now discharges him from itself.” 1. “O Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise” (Ps. li. 15). [All the offices begin with the invocation Domine labia mea aperies.] 2. The Thessalian, Erysichthon, cut down an oak in the sacred giove of Ceres, whereupon the goddess punished him by making him endure such hunger that he was reduced to gnawing his own flesh; of which, by that time, there was so little left that his hunger opened the yet more terrible prospect of death by starvation (Ovid. Met. viii). 3. During the siege of Jerusalem by Titus, the famine became so terrible, that a Jewess, named Mary, killed her child and devoured it (see Josephus, De Bello Jud. vi). 4. Longfellow quotes an interesting passage from a sermon of Brother Berthold (a Franciscan friar who lived at Regensburg in the 13th century), which proves, what is indeed implied in Dante’s words, that this conception was current at the time. 5. This is Dante’s friend, Forese Donati, the brother of Corso (see the following canto) and of Piccarda (see the following canto and Par. iii, especially note 4). Forese, who bore the nickname of Bicci Novello, died on July 28, 1296. For his relations with Dante, which throw considerable light on the somewhat unedifying but highly interesting and important period of our poet’s life that followed the death of Beatrice, also cf. Gardner, p. 14. 6. “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt. xxviii. 46, Mark xv. 34).—that desire—the desire to conform our will to the will of God. 7. “If you delayed repentance till the last moment, how is it that you are not still in the Antepurgatorio?” 8. In one of the sonnets referred to in note 10, Dante describes Forese’s neglect of his wife, Nella, but with a coarseness that is well-nigh incredible. The present passage may have been intended by the Poet to atone in a measure for that poem, and to offer the widow some consolation by representing Forese, in his new condition, as one of the tenderest of husbands. 9. Dante compares the shamelessness of the Florentine women with that of the women in Barbagia (a mountainous district in the south of Sardinia), who are said to have been descended either from the Vandals or the Saracens. We have no contemporary record of sermons or decrees relating to this subject. A law dealing with a kindred matter—the luxury of the women— is mentioned by Villani (ix) as having been passed in 1324. See Par. xv. 10. These verses afford a clear proof that the life from which Virgil rescued Dante was not merely one of philosophical or religious error, as has been contended, but of moral unworthiness. There is still extant a poetical correspondence between Dante and Forese (consisting of three sonnets by the former and two by the latter) on a level quite beneath anything else that we possess of Dante’s. The two friends rail at each other in a vein which may have been meant playfully, but is extremely stinging and anything but refined. 11. See Inf. xx. 12. See Inf. i.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Dark and hollow-eyed was each one, pallid of face, and so wasted away that the skin took form from the bones. I do not believe that Erysichthon became thus withered to the very skin by hunger, when greatest fear he had thereof. 2 I said in thought within me: “Behold the people that lost Jerusalem when Mary fed on her child.” 3 Their eye-sockets seemed gemless rings: he who reads “omo” in the face of man would clearly have recognized there the “m.” 4 Who, not knowing the reason, would believe that the scent of fruit and that of water had thus wrought, by begetting desire? Already I was in astonishment at what thus famishes them, because of the reason not yet manifest, of their leanness, and of their sad scurf, when lo, from the hollow of the head a shade 5 turned its eyes to me and fixedly did gaze; then cried aloud: “What grace is this to me?” Never had I recognized him by the face, but in his voice, was revealed to me, that which was blotted out in his countenance. This spark rekindled within me all my knowledge of the changed features, and I recognized the face of Forese. “Ah stare not,” he prayed, “at the dry leprosy which discolours my skin, nor at any default of flesh that I may have, but tell me sooth of thyself, and who those two spirits are that there make thy escort; abide thou not without speaking to me.” “Thy face,” answered I him, “which in death I wept for once, gives me now not less grief, even unto tears, seeing it so disfigured. Therefore tell me, in God’s name, what strips you so; make me not talk while I am marvelling, for ill can he speak who is full of other desire.” And he to me: “From the eternal counsel virtue descends into the water, and into the tree left behind, whereby I thus do waste away. All this people, who weeping sing, sanctify themselves again in hunger and thirst, for having followed appetite to excess. The scent which issues from the fruit, and from the spray that is diffused over the green, kindles within us a desire to eat and to drink. And not once only, while circling this road, is our pain renewed, I say pain and ought to say solace; for that desire leads us to the tree, which led glad Christ to say: ‘Eli’ when he made us free with his blood.” 6 And I to him: “Forese, from that day on which thou didst change the world for a better life, not five years have revolved till now. If power to sin more came to an end in thee ere the hour supervened of the holy sorrow which weds us anew to God, how art thou come up here?

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Howbeit, she did it more at the commandement of her Parents, then for any thing else: for she could in no wise be merry, nor receive any comfort, but tormented her selfe day and night before the Image of her husband which she made like unto Bacchus, and rendred unto him divine honours and services. In the meane season Thrasillus not able to refraine any longer, before Charites had asswaged her dolor, before her troubled mind had pacified her fury, even in the middle of all her griefes, while she tare her haire and rent her garments, demanded her in marriage, and so without shame, he detected the secrets and unspeakeable deceipts of his heart. But Charites detested and abhorred his demand, and as she had beene stroken with some clap of thunder, with some storme, or with the lightning of Jupiter, she presently fell downe to the ground all amazed. Howbeit when her spirits were revived and that she returned to her selfe, perceiving that Thrasillus was so importunate, she demanded respite to deliberate and to take advise on the matter. In the meane season, the shape of Lepolemus that was slaine so miserably, appeared to Charites saying, O my sweet wife (which no other person can say but I) I pray thee for the love which is betweene us two, if there be any memorie of me in thy heart, or remembrance of my pittifull death, marry with any other person, so that thou marry not with the traitour Thrasillus, have no conference with him, eate not with him, lie not with him, avoid the bloudie hand of mine enemie, couple not thy selfe with a paricide, for those wounds (the bloud whereof thy teares did wash away) were not the wounds of the teeth of the Boare, but the speare of Thrasillus, that deprived me from thee. Thus spake Lepolemus, unto his loving wife, and declared the residue of the damnable fact. Then Charites, awaking from sleepe, began to renew her dolour, to teare her garments, and to beate her armes with her comely hands, howbeit she revealed the vision which she saw to no manner of person, but dissimuling that she knew no part of the mischiefe, devised with her selfe how she might be revenged on the traitor, and finish her owne life to end and knit up all sorrow.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  The god beeing burned in this sort, and perceiving that promise and faith was broken, hee fled away without utterance of any word, from the eyes and hands of his most unhappy wife. But Psyches fortuned to catch him as hee was rising by the right thigh, and held him fast as hee flew above in the aire, until such time as constrained by wearinesse shee let goe and fell downe upon the ground. But Cupid followed her downe, and lighted upon the top of a Cypresse tree, and angerly spake unto her in this manner: O simple Psyches, consider with thy selfe how I, little regarding the commandement of my mother (who willed mee that thou shouldst bee married to a man of base and miserable condition) did come my selfe from heaven to love thee, and wounded myne owne body with my proper weapons, to have thee to my Spowse: And did I seeme a beast unto thee, that thou shouldst go about to cut off my head with a razor, who loved thee so well? Did not I alwayes give thee a charge? Did not I gently will thee to beware? But those cursed aides and Counsellors of thine shall be worthily rewarded for their pains. As for thee thou shalt be sufficiently punished by my absence. When hee had spoken these words he tooke his flight into the aire. Then Psyches fell flat on the ground, and as long as she could see her husband she cast her eyes after him into the aire, weeping and lamenting pitteously: but when hee was gone out of her sight shee threw her selfe into the next running river, for the great anguish and dolour that shee was in for the lack of her husband, howbeit the water would not suffer her to be drowned, but tooke pity upon her, in the honour of Cupid which accustomed to broyle and burne the river, and threw her upon the bank amongst the herbs. Then Pan the rusticall god sitting on the river side, embracing and [instructing] the goddesse Canna to tune her songs and pipes, by whom were feeding the young and tender Goats, after that he perceived Psyches in sorrowful case, not ignorant (I know not by what meanes) of her miserable estate, endeavored to pacific her in this sort: O faire maid, I am a rusticke and rude heardsman, howbeit by reason of my old age expert in many things, for as farre as I can learnt by conjecture (which according as wise men doe terme is called divination) I perceive by your uncertaine gate, your pale hew, your sobbing sighes, and your watery eyes, that you are greatly in love. Wherefore hearken to me, and goe not about to slay your selfe, nor weepe not at all, but rather adore and worship the great god Cupid, and winne him unto you by your gentle promise of service.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  She holds her knitting up to the window. “Goddamn it. I did it again.” She begins unraveling the last few rows, the yarn falling into a snarl around her feet. “Here,” my mother says, holding out a hand, “give me that.” She takes the ball of pale yellow yarn and slowly, patiently winds the kinked part back up. While they work, a nurse enters and reads a chart, takes a needle from a cart in the hall, and injects it into the tube leading into my mother’s arm. When the door snicks shut behind her, my aunt quits unraveling long enough to get a cigarette from her purse. “They better not catch me doing this,” she says, lighting up. She’s using an old pop can for an ashtray. The cigarette trembles slightly in her long fingers and her eyes find the ceiling, then the floor, then the window. She adjusts the belt on her suit, a soft green knit tunic over pants, with silver buttons and a patterned scarf at the neck. She’s sitting in an orange plastic chair. My mother is wearing a dark blue negligee with a bedjacket and thick cotton socks. She takes a puff from my aunt’s cigarette and exhales slowly, making professional smoke rings. “Now I’m corrupted,” she says dryly. “If any of them walked in right now, they’d have a fit,” my aunt replies uneasily. She’s worried about stern daughters, crabby nurses. “Do I give a good goddamn?” my mother asks peacefully. She’s staring at the ceiling. “I don’t think I do.” She’s drifting now, floating upward, her shot is taking effect. She gets a glimpse of something and then loses it, like a fish swimming in and out of view in the darkness under water. She struggles to the surface. “I hope you get a girl,” she says. My aunt is knitting again, the long needles moving against each other, tying knots, casting off, creating small rosettes. Wendell is ready to have a baby any day now. “Well, she’s carrying it low,” my aunt answers skeptically. The room is dimming, she turns her chair more toward the window. There is a long pause, with only the needles and the tedious breath, the sterile landscape of cancer country. “That doesn’t mean anything,” my mother finally replies. Her father bends over the bed to kiss her, as substantial as air; he’s a ghost, they won’t leave her alone. She moves slowly through the fluid and brings a thought to the surface. “We carried all of ours low, and look what we got.” They swim through her lake, gray-eyed sisters, thin-legged and mouthy. They fight and hold hands, trade shoes and dresses, marry beautiful tall men, and have daughters together, two dark-eyed cousins, thin-legged and mouthy. A fish splashes, a silver arc against the blue sky, its scales like sequins. She startles awake. “I hope you get a girl,” she says again. This is all she can think to say.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Apartment in Chicago You and your friends decide to get out of town, and you arrange a trip to Chicago. You left a broken phone behind, but this does not stop you from touching your pocket reflexively, wondering if she’s been trying to call you. Even through your grief, you appreciate the trip: you sleep on the couch of the sublet you rented together and only wake up because your friend Tony gently crab-claws your foot poking out from beneath a blanket. When you look around the room, all of your friends sleeping so close to each other, like kittens, and you want to curl into a pile with all of them. Still, you cry at meals, you cry in the streets. When you break off for small-group activities, you go with Ben and Bennett. You love them both, and mostly you love how they will not emote at you or ask you how you’re feeling. You go to the Art Institute of Chicago and spend a lot of time in two places: the Thorne Miniature Rooms and Ivan Albright’s That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door) . Both fill you with a queer pleasure; both make you cry. One makes you feel immortal, godlike: as if you are a time-traveling spirit, hunched up in the corners of nineteenth-century English drawing rooms and sixteenth-century French bedrooms and eighteenth-century American dining rooms, watching the lives of the mortals play out in miniature dioramas. The other makes you feel small, as if you are prostrate before death’s flickering veil. Small, and then even smaller, and soon you find yourself paddling in your own tears, again. You hear something splashing about in the pool a little way off, and you swim nearer to make out what it is. At first, you think it must be a walrus or hippopotamus, but then you remember how small you are now, and you soon find that it is only a mouse that has slipped in just like you. “Would it be of any use, now,” you think, “to speak to this mouse? Perhaps he’s a Cuban mouse, come over during the Ten Years’ War.” (For, with all your knowledge of history, you have no very clear notion how long ago anything has happened.) So, you begin: “¿Dónde está el gato malo?” which is the first complete Spanish sentence you can think of. The Mouse suddenly leaps out of the water, quivering with fright. “Oh, I beg your pardon!” you cry, afraid you have hurt the poor animal’s feelings. “I quite forgot you didn’t like cats, good or bad.” “Not like cats!” shouts the Mouse. “Would you like cats if you were me?” “Well, perhaps not,” you say soothingly. “Don’t be angry about it. And yet I wish you could meet my cat; I think you’d take a fancy to it if you could only see her. She is such a dear thing,” you go on, half to yourself, as you swim lazily about in the pool, “and she sits purring so nicely by the fire, licking her paws and washing her face—and she’s such a capital one for catching mi—oh, I beg your pardon!” you cry again, for the Mouse is swimming away from you as hard as it can and is making quite a commotion. You call softly after it, “Mouse, dear! Do come back, and we won’t talk about cats!” When the Mouse hears this, it turns around and swims slowly back to you: its face is quite pale (with passion, you think), and it says in a low, trembling voice, “Let us get to the shore, and then I’ll tell you my history, and you’ll understand why I am afraid of cats.” It is high time to go anyway, for the pool is getting crowded with the birds and animals that have fallen into it: there is a Duck and a Dodo (Amy Parker’s “trusting, extinguished bird”), a Lory and an Eaglet. And among them, every stranger who has ever seen you cry in public is doing the breaststroke. You turn from their pity and lead the way; the whole party swims to the shore. At the water’s edge, the creatures and the strangers disperse into the streets of Chicago. When you arrive home, there’s a message in your inbox: “I’ve made a mistake.”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Do you want a picture of a fawn? Will that help? Okay. Here’s a fawn. She is small and dappled and loose-legged. She hears a sound, freezes, and then bolts. She knows what to do. She knows there’s somewhere safer she can be. Go to this page. That night, she fucks you as you lie there mutely, praying for it to be over, praying she won’t notice you’re gone. You have voided your body so many times by now that it is force of habit, reflexive as a sigh; it reminds you of your first boyfriend who fucked you while watching porn—how he rutted and rutted and then every so often lifted the remote to rewind something you couldn’t see. (Once you turned your head over the lip of the bed and saw a tangle of upside-down limbs and your brain couldn’t make sense of them; you never looked again.) You would just lie there silently, watching his face move over you. It was like being unfolded beneath the yawn of the planetarium as a kid: the sped-up rotation of the earth, the movement of the stars over you, the constellations melting into and out of being as a distant, disembodied voice told some ancient story to help make sense of it all. You shudder and moan with precision. She turns off the lights. You watch the darkness until the darkness leaves you; or you leave it. To sleep, go to this page. To dream about the past, go to this page. To dream about the present, go to this page. To dream about the future, go to this page. The first time it happened—the first time she yelled at you so much you were crying within thirty seconds from waking, a record—she said, “The first ten minutes of the day, I’m not responsible for anything I say.” This struck you as poetic. You even wrote it down, sure you would find a place for it: in a book, maybe. Go to this page. It’s going to be all right. One day, your wife will gently adjust your arm if it touches her face at night, soothingly straightening it while kissing you. Sometimes you will wake up just enough to notice; other times, she’ll only tell you in the morning. It’s the kind of morning you could get used to. Go to this page. You shouldn’t be here, but it’s okay. It’s a dream. She can’t find you here. In a minute you’re going to wake up, and everything is going to seem like it’s the same, but it’s not. There’s a way out. Are you listening to me? You can’t forget when you wake up. You can’t— Go to this page. You wake up and the air is milky and bright. The room glows with a kind of effervescent contentment, despite the boxes and clothes and dishes. You think to yourself: this is the kind of morning you could get used to.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  In result of that weird interview, the numbness of my soul was for a moment resolved. And no wonder! I had actually seen the agent of fate. I had palpated the very flesh of fate—and its padded shoulder. A brilliant and monstrous mutation had suddenly taken place, and here was the instrument. Within the intricacies of the pattern (hurrying housewife, slippery pavement, a pest of a dog, steep grade, big car, baboon at its wheel), I could dimly distinguish my own vile contribution. Had I not been such a fool—or such an intuitive genius—to preserve that journal, fluids produced by vindictive anger and hot shame would not have blinded Charlotte in her dash to the mailbox. But even had they blinded her, still nothing might have happened, had not precise fate, that synchronizing phantom, mixed within its alembic the car and the dog and the sun and the shade and the wet and the weak and the strong and the stone. Adieu, Marlene! Fat fate’s formal handshake (as reproduced by Beale before leaving the room) brought me out of my torpor; and I wept. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury—I wept.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O I X Charles, after a note of warning, turns again to God, whom we so impiously neglect. Cunizza approaches; she describes the site of Romano whence she and the tyrant Ezzelin, her brother, sprang. She tells how her past sins no longer trouble her. She speaks of the fair fame on earth of the troubadour Folco, and laments that no such fame is now sought by her countrymen of Venetia; whose woes she predicts and whose crimes she denounces; and then seeming no longer to heed Dante drops again into her place in the cosmic dance. Folco now flashes brighter in Dante’s sight, and at his entreaty diverts his voice from its place in the universal song (which, like the universal dance, takes its note from the Seraphim) to minister to his special need. He indicates his birthplace of Marseilles. He tells of his amorous youth but shows how in heaven there is no repentance, because the sin is only seen or remembered as the occasion of the act of God by which the fallen one was uplifted again into his true element: and it is on this divine power and grace that the soul’s whole thought and love are centred. He points out to Dante the light of Rahab, speaks of this heaven as just within the range of the cone of the earth’s shadow, thereby indicating that the place of these souls in heaven is, in part, determined by the earthly sin that is now no longer in their minds; refers to Rahab’s help given to Joshua in conquering the Holy Land, and denounces the Pope for his indifference to its recovery. It is devil-planted Florence that corrupts the world, both shepherd and flock, by her florins. But vengeance shall not lag. WHEN THY CHARLES, 1 fair Clemence, had enlightened me, he told me of the frauds his seed was destined to encounter; but added: “Hold thy peace, and let the years revolve”; so that I can say naught, save that wailing well-deserved shall track your wrongs. And already the life of that sacred light had turned to the sun that filleth it, as to the good ample for all things. Ah! souls deceived, ah! creatures impious, who from such good wry-twist your hearts, squaring your temples unto vanity! And lo, another of those splendours drew him towards me, and signified his will to pleasure me, by brightening outwardly. Beatrice’s eyes, fixed on me as before, of dear assent to my desire assured me. “Nay!