Guilt

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 In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Mason Polina kept her job working in the kitchen at Janet, but Mason avoided her like bad food. The kid, too. He was done with all that. No more girlfriends. They wanted too much from you. They expected you to make them happy. Even when they said they wanted to make you happy. Maybe someday he’d feel ready to see Miri again but he couldn’t think when that might be. He’d fucked up big-time. He didn’t expect her to forgive him. The question was, could he forgive himself? Jack wouldn’t let it go. Begged him to come with him and Christina to Las Vegas. Mason finally said, “Don’t ask me again, Jack. I’m staying here, at Janet. I’ll be fine.” “At least come with us for the summer.” “I can’t. I’ve got a job. You know that. You’re the one who set me up with your old boss. He’s going to train me to be an electrician. Just like he trained you.” “He’d understand.” “No.” “Mason—you can’t live your life avoiding Miri.” “Don’t say that name around me. And yes I can. And I will.” “There’ll be other girls, believe me.” “Cut it out, Jack, because you don’t know.” “I know you’re seventeen.” “That doesn’t mean shit.” He hoped Jack wouldn’t cry. He looked like he might. So Mason gave him a bear hug. That way they didn’t have to look at each other. Jack patted his back for too long. “Hey, brother,” Mason said, to get Jack to let go. “I’ll write.” “Every week,” Jack said, sniffling. “I need you to promise.” “I promise.” “And I’ll call every two weeks,” Jack told him. “On Sunday nights.” Mason nodded. Then he asked what he’d been thinking all along. “What about 1-A, Jack?” “No word yet. I’ll see you for Christmas, okay?” “Yeah, sure, Christmas.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  My marriage to Brian probably ended on that day when I walked through the streets of Tijuana with my wisecracking father. My father was trying with all his might to be cheerful and helpful, but I was sunk deep into my own guilt. It was a dilemma: if I stuck by Brian and tried to live with him again, I’d go crazy, or at the very least give up most of my own identity. But if I left him alone with his madness and the ministrations of the doctors, I was abandoning him—just when he needed help the most. In a sense, I was a traitor. It had come down to a choice between me or him, and I chose me. My guilt about this haunts me still. Somewhere deep inside my head (with all those submerged memories of childhood) is some glorious image of the ideal woman, a kind of Jewish Griselda. She is Ruth and Esther and Jesus and Mary rolled into one. She always turns the other cheek. She is a vehicle, a vessel, with no needs or desires of her own. When her husband beats her, she understands him. When he is sick, she nurses him. When the children are sick, she nurses them. She cooks, keeps house, runs the store, keeps the books, listens to everyone’s problems, visits the cemetery, weeds the graves, plants the garden, scrubs the floors, and sits quietly on the upper balcony of the synagogue while the men recite prayers about the inferiority of women. She is capable of absolutely everything except self-preservation. And secretly, I am always ashamed of myself for not being her. A good woman would have given over her life to the care and feeding of her husband’s madness. I was not a good woman. I had too many other things to do. But if I was remiss with Brian I made up for it doubly with Charlie Fielding. For sheer masochism—good, healthy, “normal female masochism"—you simply cannot beat my relationship with Charlie (which closely followed the end of my marriage to Brian). Interesting how we always give the next guy all the overflow from the guy who went before. A psychological case of “sloppy seconds.” THIRTEENThe Conductor Is it an earthquake or simply a shock? Is it the good turtle soup or merely the mock? Is it a cocktail—this feeling of joy, Or is what I feel the real McCoy? Have I the right hunch or have I the wrong? Will it be Bach I shall hear or just a Cole Porter song? —Cole Porter, “At Long Last Love” (1938)

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “Oh I talk a good game, and I even think I believe it, but secretly, I’m like the girl in Story of O. I want to submit to some big brute. ‘Every woman adores a fascist,’ as Sylvia Plath says. I feel guilty for writing poems when I should be cooking. I feel guilty for everything. You don’t have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty. That’s Isadora Wing’s first principle of the war between the sexes. Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture. Do you know what Teddy Roosevelt said?” “No.” “Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.” “Teddy Roosevelt never said that.” “No, but I did.” “You’re just scared of him—that’s what you are.” “Who? Teddy Roosevelt?” “No—you idiot—Bennett. And you won’t admit it. You’re afraid he’ll leave you and you’ll fall apart. You don’t know that you can get along without him and you’re afraid to find out because then your whole potty theory will come tumbling down. You’ll have to stop thinking of yourself as weak and dependent and you hate that.” “You’ve never seen me when I’m ready to fall apart.” “Piffle.” “You should see. You’d run miles away.” “Why? Are you so unbearable?” “Bennett says so.” “Then why hasn’t he run? Actually that’s just bullshit to keep you in line. Look—I lived with Martine once when she fell apart. I’m sure you couldn’t be worse. You have to take a lot of shit from people to get the good bits too.” “Hey, that’s pretty good—can I have that on tape?” “How about videotape?” And we kissed for a long time. When we stopped Adrian said, “You know, for an intelligent woman, you’re an idiot.” “That’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me.” “What I mean to say is, you can have anything you want—only you don’t know it. You could have the world by the balls. You should come along with me and see how little you’ll miss Bennett. We’ll have an odyssey. I’ll discover Europe—you’ll discover yourself.” “Is that all? When do we start?” “Tomorrow or the day after, or Saturday. Whenever the Congress is over.” “And where do we go?” “That’s just the point. No plans. We just take off. It’ll be like The Grapes of Wroth. We’ll be migrants.” “The Grapes of Wrath.” “Wroth.” “Wrath, as in wrath of God.” “Wroth.” “You’re wrong, sweetie pie. You’re illiterate by your own admission. Steinbeck is an American writer—The Grapes of Wrath.” “Wroth.” “OK, you’re wrong, but let it go.” “I already have, love.” “You mean we’ll just take off without any plans?” “The plan is for you to find out how strong you are. The plan is for you to start believing you can stand on your own two feet—that ought to be plan enough for anyone.” “And what about Bennett?” “If he’s smart, he’ll just piss off with some other bird.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  For this reason, among others, I particularly enjoyed my Fridays, whereas my mother could never get accustomed to this interruption of our daily routine. Harried by her responsibilities in preparing the three Sabbath meals, she never made a success of the first one, actually the least important one. This particular day, it was the bread that was lacking when I sat down for breakfast, so she asked me to go and fetch it at the baker’s oven, which was in the Street of the Sparrows, a blind alley fairly far from our home. As I was not very hungry, this unexpected chore annoyed me and I grumbled, pretended it was already too late, and made up my mind to go off without breakfasting. With the vast selfishness of a child, I guessed quite rightly that this would upset my mother and punish her for her forgetfulness. Finally, she lost her temper and, running short of other arguments, called upon heaven as a witness to curse me. But I was stubborn, slung my school satchel over my shoulder, and left the house. When I reached the end of the street, I heard her calling me, so I turned back with some ill will, dragging my feet, to receive from her my two pennies and an unexpected piece of bread crust. She had certainly borrowed it from Joulie, and this gesture made my vague remorse weigh all the more heavily on my conscience. The day had been spoiled for me, by my empty stomach and my confused conscience. I reached the old iron gate of the school, of course, too early. Birdie’s head, with his humble expression, his heavy eyelids that were always lowered, scarcely rose above a compact group of school children, while the other hucksters managed to attract only a few customers. One of them, a new trader, was giving us the old blarney to build up his trade. I noticed Saul as he detached himself from Birdie’s group: he was my rival and had thus come to be my first comrade. Our teacher in the first grade used to make us sit in the classroom by order of merit, so that Saul and I occupied the first row almost all year round. Comrades in the front row, we soon became friends by force of habit, though there was some irony to this as Saul was the son of a rich merchant in the covered bazaar, a fact that was each day more noticeable to me.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Allendy was a superman today. I will never be able to describe our talk. There was so much intuition, so much emotion throughout. To the very last phrase he was so human, so true. I had come in a mood of confidence, of recklessness, thinking: I do not want Allendy to admire me unless he can do so when he knows me exactly as I am. My first effort at complete sincerity. I tell him first of all that I was ashamed of what I had said last time about his wife. He laughed and said he had forgotten all about it and asks, “Is there anything else which worries you?” “Nothing in particular, but I would like to ask you if my strong sensual obsession is a reaction against too much introspection? I have been reading Samuel Putnam, who writes that ‘the quickest way out of introspection is a worship of the body, which leads to sexual intensity.’ ” I cannot remember his exact answer, but I sense his connection of the word “obsession” with a frantic search for satisfaction. Why the effort? Why dissatisfaction? Here, I feel an imperative need to tell him my biggest secret: In the sexual act I do not always experience an orgasm. He had guessed this from the very first day. My talk on sex had been crude, bold, defiant. It did not harmonize with my personality. It was artificial. It betrayed an uncertainty. “But do you know what an orgasm is?” “Oh, very well, from the times I did experience it, and particularly from masturbation.” “When did you masturbate?” “Once, in the summer, in St. Jean de Luz. I was dissatisfied and had a strong sexual urge.” I am ashamed to admit that when I was alone for two days I masturbated four and five times a day, and also often in Switzerland, during our vacation, and in Nice. “Why only once? Every woman does it and very often.” “I believe it is wrong, morally and physically. I was terribly depressed and ashamed afterwards.” “That’s nonsense. Masturbation is not physically harmful. It is only the feeling of guilt we have about it that oppresses.” “I used to fear it would diminish my mental power, my health, and that I would disintegrate morally.” Here, I add other details, which he listens to silently, trying to coordinate them. I tell him things I have never entirely admitted to myself, and which I have not written in my journal, things I wanted to forget.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  That evening, there’ll be boiled chick-peas and as much bread as you want.” In a firmer tone, he then concluded: “I’ve decided we’re going to follow my plan.” When he announced such a decision, he would wait, in the silence that followed, for some sign of revolt which might enrage him and strengthen his determination. But generally no one even moved, and his beautiful plan would then peter out in bitter words about our indifference to his worries, his troubles, and his health. The younger children continued playing or doing their homework. As for us, the older ones, we either stared into space or appeared to bury ourselves in the books we were reading without being able to understand, for that moment, a single line, a single word. My eyes and body rigid, I was then literally all ears, and this sordid speech seemed to enter deep into my flesh. The book, before my open but blind eyes, ended by changing color. Sometimes, when his words were too pointed, I began to get angry, but then my mother would offer herself as a lightning rod and divert all the blame to herself. My father had long since come to regret having accepted the proposals of Monsieur Louzel, the principal of the Alliance School. The pleasures of vanity he derived from saying that his son went to the lycée did not compensate his sense of disappointment. My material success seemed too far away to permit him to hope for financial compensation for his loss. All his colleagues had put their eldest sons to work and my father was sorry he hadn’t taken me into his store. He would then have been able to lean on me and be assured of his family’s fate. It is impossible to deny that I was an outrageous luxury, considering our position. I was no longer dependent on my family as I had been, but I didn’t help my father provide for our large family budget. Now, though I had ceased to believe in my parents, I hadn’t yet shaken off the values of my community. I hadn’t yet realized that I might also refuse to be responsible for my brothers and sisters, for their state of malnutrition, their shabby clothes, the haste with which, one after another, they had to leave school. I needed other ways of breaking with the past and achieving freedom. It was difficult enough for me to find money for my food, the suit I bought at a discount from Uncle Aroun, and a little pocket money.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “He will?” “That’s what I’d do, anyway. Look—it’s clear that you and he are due for a bit of a reshuffle. You can’t go on whining at each other like this all your lives. People may be dying in Belfast and Bangladesh but that’s all the more reason why you ought to learn to have fun—life’s supposed to be fun at least some of the time. You and Bennett sound like a couple of fanatics: ‘Abandon all hope: the end is nigh.’ Don’t you do anything but worry? It’s such a bloody waste.” “He called you the worst name possible,” I said, laughing. “Did he?” “He called you a ‘part object.’ ” “Did he really? Well he’s a bloody ‘part object’ as well. The psychologizing bastard.” “You do your share of psychologizing too, sweetheart. Sometimes I think I should get away from you both. woman smothers in jargon. lover and husband held for questioning.” Adrian laughed and fondled my ass. No jargon about that. That was a whole object. An ass and a half, in fact. Never had I felt happier about my fat ass than when I was with Adrian. If only men knew! All women think they’re ugly, even pretty women. A man who understood this could fuck more women than Don Giovanni. They all think their cunts are ugly. They all find fault with their figures. They all think their asses are too big, their breasts too small, their thighs too fat, their ankles too thick. Even models and actresses, even the women you think are so beautiful that they have nothing to worry about do worry all the time. “I love your fat ass,” Adrian said. “All the food you had to gobble to get such a fat ass. Yum!” And he sank his teeth in. The cannibal. “The trouble with your marriage is,” he said to my ass, “that it’s all work. Don’t you ever have fun together?” “Sure we do…hey—that hurts.” “Like when?” He sat up. “Tell me about when it was fun.” I racked my brains. The fight in Paris. The car crash in Sicily. The fight in Paestum. The fight about which apartment to take. The fight about my quitting analysis. The fight about skiing. The fight about fighting. “We’ve had lots of fun. You don’t have to grill me.” “You’re a liar. All your analysis is really a waste if you still go on lying to yourself all the time.” “We have fun in bed.” “Only thanks to my not fucking you properly, I’ll bet.” “Adrian, I think you really want to break up my marriage. That’s your game, isn’t it? That’s your kick, that’s what you’re hooked on. I may be hooked on guilt. Bennett may be hooked on jargon. But you’re hooked on triangles. That’s your speciality. Who was Martine living with that made her so attractive to you? Who was Esther fucking? You’re a marriage ghoul, that’s what you are. You’re a vulture.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  A Representative Freak—that’s the paradox that lies at the heart of this novel. I say a “novel” because I wanted the alibi of fiction to give me the permission to change things around in order to make them more typical. In real life I had had many, many sexual experiences by the time I was sixteen, but I knew that my sort of compulsive and precocious sexuality was so atypical that few readers would be able to identify with it. In real life I was an intermittently gifted student, who had already written two full-length novels by age eighteen, even if they were amateurish and unpublishable; I was also fairly popular with the other boys at school, despite my odd personality. In creating the narrator-protagonist of A Boy’s Own Story , however, I wanted to play down all this precociousness and even my intense friendships. I was also quite conscious of working my way through my own version of all those coming-out stories I’d heard over the years, and to show their predominant features. I wanted to describe the first time. I wanted to show the terrible guilt. I wanted to represent the urge to seek professional help, first from a minister and later from a shrink. I wanted to explore the quandary of a simultaneous longing to be straight and a longing to have sex with men. The most controversial part of the book was the ending (which I won’t give away), since it showed the main character in an unsympathetic light. Those closing pages, however, mirrored the most shameful moment in my own young life. Over the years the conclusion has been variously interpreted as the painful, disillusioning beginning of adulthood or as the self-hating action of a boy deformed by a repressive and destructive era. I can distinctly remember that throughout the long composition of A Boy’s Own Story I kept wondering whether I would have the courage to show this reprehensible moment. How has the reception of gay fiction changed since 1982, the year that A Boy’s Own Story was first published in the States? There has been a tremendous explosion in gay and lesbian fiction.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Quilty rightly balks at his symbolic role: “I’m not responsible for the rapes of others. Absurd!” he tells Humbert, and his words are well taken, for in this scene Humbert is trying to make him totally responsible, and the poem which he has Quilty read aloud reinforces his effort, and again demonstrates how a Nabokov parody moves beyond the “obscure fun” of stylistic imitation to connect with the most serious region of the book. It begins as a parody of Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” but ends by undercutting all the confessing in which “remorseful” Humbert has just been engaged: “because of all you did / because of all I did not / you have to die.” Since Quilty has been described as “the American Maeterlinck,” it goes without saying that his ensuing death scene should be extravagantly “symbolic.” Because one is not easily rid of an “evil” self, Quilty, indomitable as Rasputin, is almost impossible to kill; but the idea of exorcism is rendered absurd by his comically prolonged death throes, which, in the spirit of Canto V of The Rape of the Lock, burlesque the gore and rhetoric of literary death scenes ranging from the Elizabethan drama to the worst of detective novels and action films. (“Chum,” Humbert’s revolver, parodies the “phallic” pistols of “Freudian” Westerns and the American Gun Mystique at large.) Quilty returns to the scene of the crime—a bed—and it is here that Humbert finally corners him. When Humbert fires his remaining bullets at close range, Quilty “lay back, and a big pink bubble with juvenile connotations formed on his lips, grew to the size of a toy balloon, and vanished.” The last details emphasize the mock-symbolic association with Lolita; the monstrous self that has devoured Lolita, bubble gum, childhood, and all, is “symbolically” dead, but as the bubble explodes, so does the Gothic Doppelgänger convention, with all its own “juvenile connotations” about identity, and we learn shortly that Humbert is still “all covered with Quilty.” Guilt is not to be exorcised so readily—McFate is McFate, to coin a Humbertism—and the ambiguities of human experience and identity are not to be reduced to mere “dualities.” Instead of the successful integration of a neatly divisible self, we are left with “Clare Obscure” and “quilted Quilty,” the patchwork self. Quilty refuses to die, just as the recaptured nose in Gogol’s extraordinary Double story of that name (1836) would not at first stick to its owner’s face. The reader who has expected the solemn moral-ethical absolutes of a Poe, Dostoevsky, Mann, or Conrad Doppelgänger fiction instead discovers himself adrift in a fantastic, comic cosmos more akin to Gogol’s. Having hoped that Humbert would master his “secret sharer,” we find instead that his quest for his “slippery self” figuratively resembles Major Kovaliov’s frantic chase after his own nose through the spectral streets of St. Petersburg, and that Humbert’s “quest” has its mock “ending” in a final confrontation that, like the end of “The Overcoat” (1842), is not a confrontation at all.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  How can I know what I think unless I see what I write? My writing is the submarine or spaceship which takes me to the unknown worlds within my head. And the adventure is endless and inexhaustible. If I learn to build the right vehicle, then I can discover even more territories. And each new poem is a new vehicle, designed to delve a little deeper (or fly a little higher) than the one before. My marriage to Brian probably ended on that day when I walked through the streets of Tijuana with my wisecracking father. My father was trying with all his might to be cheerful and helpful, but I was sunk deep into my own guilt. It was a dilemma: if I stuck by Brian and tried to live with him again, I’d go crazy, or at the very least give up most of my own identity. But if I left him alone with his madness and the ministrations of the doctors, I was abandoning him—just when he needed help the most. In a sense, I was a traitor. It had come down to a choice between me or him, and I chose me. My guilt about this haunts me still. Somewhere deep inside my head (with all those submerged memories of childhood) is some glorious image of the ideal woman, a kind of Jewish Griselda. She is Ruth and Esther and Jesus and Mary rolled into one. She always turns the other cheek. She is a vehicle, a vessel, with no needs or desires of her own. When her husband beats her, she understands him. When he is sick, she nurses him. When the children are sick, she nurses them. She cooks, keeps house, runs the store, keeps the books, listens to everyone’s problems, visits the cemetery, weeds the graves, plants the garden, scrubs the floors, and sits quietly on the upper balcony of the synagogue while the men recite prayers about the inferiority of women. She is capable of absolutely everything except self-preservation. And secretly, I am always ashamed of myself for not being her. A good woman would have given over her life to the care and feeding of her husband’s madness. I was not a good woman. I had too many other things to do. But if I was remiss with Brian I made up for it doubly with Charlie Fielding. For sheer masochism—good, healthy, “normal female masochism"—you simply cannot beat my relationship with Charlie (which closely followed the end of my marriage to Brian). Interesting how we always give the next guy all the overflow from the guy who went before. A psychological case of “sloppy seconds.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  My sister had friends she’d met at Miss Laughton’s School for Girls who came home to play with her some afternoons. They all belonged to a club my sister had started. She was the captain. Her success as a leader could be attributed to the methodical way she worked out her ideas: her approach lent an adult, step-by-step orderliness to projects that otherwise might have seemed wild and incomprehensible. One afternoon she ordered each of her team members to steal a belt from her father that night and bring it with her tomorrow. Of course every girl must be clever in stealing and hiding the belt; if caught, she must be even more resourceful in denying the real reason for filching it. The next afternoon the girls gathered in the hollow and presented their booty to my sister, who lashed each girl with her own father’s belt. In one case her zeal left welts, which led to parental questions and eventually exposure of the whole drama. My sister, at that time a tall, taut platinum blonde who didn’t like grown-ups, answered my mother’s furious questions with indignant yeses and noes, lowered eyes and a set jaw. She was afraid of my mother, the interrogation alarmed her, but not for a moment did she feel guilty or question what she had done. She was the queen of her tribe of girls. My sister resented the interest some of the girls took in me and banned me from the meetings held beside the empty swimming pool choked with dead leaves. When I disobeyed her and toddled smilingly into the assembly, she spanked my bare legs with a hairbrush. My father, resolved that his son should hold his own, pinioned my sister’s arms behind her and ordered me to switch her on the back of her legs with a stinging branch. But I knew that soon enough he would disappear again, my mother drive off, the maids look away; I dropped the branch, howled and clattered up the stairs to my room. I think I also knew that my father preferred my sister to me and that his interest in me was only abstract, dynastic. My sister was his true son. She could ride a horse and swim a mile and she was as capable of sustained rages as he. Still better, she was as blond as his mother. My grandmother had not wanted my father; as she told him, she’d pummeled her stomach with her fists every day while she was bearing him.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  9. This speaker has not been identified, though Benvenuto gives the names of some Florentines who hanged themselves about this time.10. In Pagan times the patron of Florence was Mars, but when the Florentines were converted to Christianity they built a church in the place of the temple that had been raised in his honour, and dedicated it to St. John the Baptist. The statue of Mars was first stowed away in a tower near the Arno, into which river it fell when the city was destroyed by Attila (whom Dante, following a common error of the time, confounds with Totila). It was subsequently re-erected on the Ponte Vecchio, though in a mutilated state; buy for this circumstance, so the superstition ran, the Florentines would never have succeeded in rebuilding the city. As it was, they attributed the unceasing strife within their walls to the offended dignity of the heathen God (see Par. xvi).C A N T O X I VDante cannot go on till he has collected the scattered leaves, and restored them to that wretched shrub in which the soul of his countryman is imprisoned. He is then led by Virgil, across the remainder of the wood, to the edge of the Third Round, or ring, of the Seventh Circle. It is a naked plain of burning Sand; the place appointed for the punishment of those who have done Violence against God, against Nature, and against Nature and Art. (Canto xi.) The Violent against God, the least numerous class, are lying supine upon the sand, and in greater torment than the rest. The Violent against Nature and Art are sitting all crouched up; and the Violent against Nature are moving about, in large troops, with a speed proportioned to their guilt. A slow eternal Shower of Fire is falling upon them all. Capaneus is amongst the supine, unsubdued by the flames, blaspheming with his old decisiveness and fury. After speaking with him, the Poets go on, between the burning sand and the wood of Self-murderers, and soon come to a crimson streamlet that gushes forth from the wood and crosses the sandy plain. Virgil here explains the origin of all the rivers and marshes of Hell. [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] THE LOVE of my native place constraining me, I gathered up the scattered leaves; and gave them back to him, who was already hoarse. Then we came to the limit, where the second round is separated from the third, and where is seen a fearful device of justice. To make the new things clear, I say we reached a plain which from its bed repels all plants. The dolorous wood is a garland to it round about, as to the wood the dismal fosse; here we stayed our steps close to its very edge, The ground was a sand, dry and thick, not different in its fashion from that which once was trodden by the feet of Cato.1

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I drop the scissors; they fall to the floor. I’m aghast, an Indian hopping around on one foot with horror, hooting a little war hoot of anguish: “Oh! Oh! Oh!” But she is transformed into a scientist, a doctor. She watches the blood pulse, pool in her palm, finally coagulate. “Neat,” she whispers with awe. By the time our mother returns, I’m exhausted by my tears of repentance. I’ve been sobbing on the bed, sobbing and sobbing with guilt and fear of punishment. When I hear the door click, I look up. “It was an accident!” I shout. “I hurt her, but it was an accident.” “Oh no, what now! What’s going on here?” Mother shouts, throwing her packages on the foot of the bed. My sister alone seems calm. She has bandaged her hand and pinned back her hair and donned a fresh nightgown. She’s sitting peacefully under a lamp, reading. She’s proud of her wound; it’s made her important. “My baby!” my mother shouts, rushing to my sister’s side. The wound is unbound and revealed. I can tell my mother is confused, since ordinarily I’m the one who’s tormented by my sister. I’m ordinarily the sweet soul, too good for this world, too kind for my own good, too gentle, a little lamb. To discover the wolf cub in lamb’s skin doesn’t suit my mother’s preconceptions, the story of our lives she’s telling herself. She sits on the edge of the bed, magisterial, coldly rational, suffering disappointment but resolved to appear fair. “Start at the beginning. Tell me everything that happened.” My sister and I compete, we try to outshout each other (“You did, I did not, Yes, you did”). Mother opens a bottle of bourbon and calls room service, ordering ice and seltzer water. At last our anger and my fear and my sister’s spite are spent. We subside into silence. It’s my turn to sleep on the floor; tonight my sister and mother will have the twin beds. Defeated, silent, embarrassed, all three of us take turns in the bathroom. Mother is sad. “If only you kids could behave. Just one night. Is it too much to ask? Why do you hate each other so much? Do you hate yourselves? Do you miss your daddy? I miss him. I don’t see how a fine man like him could have left me for that cheap—that common, that cheap woman.” As the bottle slowly empties, its brown liquid, like kerosene fueling a lamp, radiates, in words and more words, the intense heat of despair. The next morning Mother has decided that we all deserve a treat to pick up our defeated spirits, something cultural, something uplifting. My sister complains about her hand and refuses to leave the room. “Well, if you’re going to be such a baby, then I’ll just take your brother. He has an open mind, an adventurous mind.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  So soon as morning was come, and Aurora had lifted her rosy arm to drive her bright coursers through the shining heaven, and night tore me from peaceful sleep and gave me up to the day, my heart burned sore with remembrance of the murder which I had committed on the night before : and I rose and sat down on the bed with my legs across, and clasping my hands over my knees with fingers intertwined I wept bitterly. For I imagined with myself that I was brought before the judge in the judgement-place, and that he awarded sentence against me, and that the hangman was ready to lead me to the gallows. And further I imagined and said: “ Alas, what judge is he that is so gentle or benign that he will think I am unguilty of the slaughter and murder of these three men, and will absolve me, stained with the innocent blood of so many of the city? Thus forsooth the Assyrian Diophanes did firmly assure unto me, that my peregrination and voyage hither should be prosperous." But while I did thus again and again unfold my sorrows and greatly bewail my fortune, behold I heard a great noise and cry at the door ; in a moment the gates were flung open, and in came the magis- trates and officers, and all their retinue, that filled all the place. and commanded two sergeants to lay j LOI LUCIUS APULEIUS insistimus, statim civitas omnis in publicum ! effusa mira densitate nos insequitur, et quamquam capite in terram, immo ad ipsos inferos iam deiecto maestus incederem, obliquato tamen aspectu rem admirationis maximae conspicio ; nam inter tot milia populi circumstrepentis nemo prorsum, qui non risu dirumperetur, aderat. Tandem pererratis plateis omnibus et in modum eorum, quibus lustralibus piamentis minas portentorum hostiis circumforaneis expiant, circumductus angulatim forum eiusque tribunal astituor: iamque sublimo suggestu magis- tratibus residentibus, iam praecone publico silentium clamante, repente cuncti consona voce flagitant, propter coetus multitudinem, quae pressurae nimia densitate periclitaretur, iudicium: tantum theatro redderetur. Nec mora, cum passim populus pro- currens caveae consaeptum mira celeritate complevit : aditus etiam et tectum omne fartim stipaverant ; plerique columnis implexi, alii statuis dependuli, nonnulli per fenestras et lacunaria semiconspicui, miro tamen omnes studio visendi pericula salutis neglegebant. Tune me per proscaenium medium velut quandam victimam publica ministeria producunt et orchestrae mediae sistunt. Sie rursum praeconis amplo boatu citatus accusator quidam senior exsurgit, 1 MSS populum. This is Gruter's emendation. 102 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IIl

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We sat for a while without speaking. Adrian kept racing the motor but made no move to pull out, and I just sat there in silence being torn apart by my twin demons. Was I going to be just a housewife who wrote in her spare time? Was that my fate? Was I going to keep passing up the adventures that were offered to me? Was I going to go on living my life as a lie? Or was I going to make my fantasies and my life merge if only for once? “What if I change my mind?” I asked. “It’s too late. You’ve already ruined it. It will never be the same. I don’t know now whether I want to take you, quite honestly.” “You really are a hard man, aren’t you? One little moment of indecision and you give up on me. You expect me to give up everything—my life, my husband, my work—without a moment’s hesitation and just follow you across Europe in accordance with some half-baked Laingian idea of experience and adventure. If at least you loved me—” “Don’t bring love into it and muck everything up. That’s a copout if I ever heard one. What does love have to do with it?” “Everything.” “Bullshit. You say love—but you mean security. Well, there’s no such thing as security. Even if you go home to your safe little husband—there’s no telling that he won’t drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow or piss off with another bird or just plain stop loving you. Can you read the future? Can you predict fate? What makes you think your security is so secure? All that’s sure is that if you pass up this experience, you’ll never get another chance at it. Death’s definitive, as you said yesterday.” “I didn’t think you were listening.” “That’s how much you know.” He stared at the steering wheel. “Adrian, you’re right about everything except love. Love does matter. It matters that Bennett loves me and you don’t.” “And who do you love? Have you ever let yourself think about it? Or is it all a question of who you can exploit and manipulate? Is it all a question of who gives you more? Is it all a question, ultimately, of money?” “That’s crap.” “Is it now? Sometimes I think it’s just that you know I’m poor, that I want to write books and don’t give a damn about practicing medicine—unlike your rich American doctors.” “On the contrary, your poverty appeals to my reverse snobbery. I like your poverty. Besides, if you do as well as old Ronnie Laing, you won’t be poor. You’ll go far, my boy. Psychopaths always do.” “Now you sound like you’re quoting Bennett.” “We do agree that you’re a psychopath.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Until almost the end of Lolita, Humbert’s fullest expressions of “guilt” and “grief” are qualified, if not undercut completely, and these passages represent another series of traps in which Nabokov again parodies the reader’s expectations by having Humbert the penitent say what the reader wants to hear: “I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything.” Eagerly absorbing Humbert’s “confession,” the reader suddenly stumbles over the rare word “turpid,” and then is taken unawares by the silly catchall “and everything,” which renders absurd the whole cluster, if not the reader. It is easy to confess, but the moral vocabulary we employ so readily may go no deeper than Humbert’s parody of it. Humbert’s own moral vocabulary would seem to find an ideally expressive vehicle in the person of Clare Quilty. Throughout the narrative Humbert is literally and figuratively pursued by Quilty, who is by turns ludicrous and absurd, sinister and grotesque. For a while Humbert is certain that his “shadow” and nemesis is his Swiss cousin, Detective Trapp, and when Lolita agrees and says, “Perhaps he is Trapp,” she is summarizing Quilty’s role in the novel. Quilty is so ubiquitous because he formulates Humbert’s entrapment, his criminal passion, his sense of shame and self-hate. Yet Quilty embodies both “the truth and a caricature of it,” for he is at once a projection of Humbert’s guilt and a parody of the psychological Double; “Lo was playing a double game,” says Humbert punningly referring to Lolita’s tennis, the Doppelgänger parody, and the function of parody as game. The Double motif figures prominently throughout Nabokov, from the early thirties in Despair and Laughter in the Dark (where the Albinus-Axel Rex pairing rehearses the Humbert-Quilty doubling), to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and on through Bend Sinister, the story “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster,” Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire, which offers a monumental doubling (or, more properly, tripling). It is probably the most intricate and profound of all Doppelgänger novels, written at precisely the time when it seemed that the Double theme had been exhausted in modern literature, and this achievement was very likely made possible by Nabokov’s elaborate parody of the theme in Lolita, which renewed his sense of the artistic efficacy of another literary “thing which had once been fresh and bright but which was now worn to a thread” (Sebastian Knight, p. 91).

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  disrupting so many lives? Was it New Year’s Eve, when Rusty twirled in the finished basement with Tewky? If she had never invited her to the party, would it have happened? She could kick herself every time she thought of that night. Of Arthur reminding her that Tewky was that way and she had no business foisting him on Rusty Ammerman. Had it started between them already? No, she didn’t think so because that was the night, after all the guests had gone home, they’d made love to start the new year with a bang—to quote Arthur. And they’d laughed the next morning about their clothes, strewn around the floor of their bedroom. So how had this happened? How could she not have known? Wasn’t he just begging her to come to Las Vegas with him? If she’d said, Yes, of course, darling—whither thou goest—and all that, would they be leaving together to start a new chapter of their lives? Had she made a terrible mistake? Maybe. Would Steve be going off to Lehigh with Phil in September if she’d said yes to Las Vegas? Would Natalie get well in the dry desert air? She had to stop asking herself these questions. They only upset her and made everything worse. Ceil Rubin gave a luncheon in her honor. Her friends promised to visit her in Birmingham but she knew they wouldn’t. She promised to come back regularly to check on the house but she knew she wouldn’t. Twenty years, just like that. Twenty years of marriage to Arthur, three children, friends, a life— They toasted her. To starting over. They didn’t need to say what they were thinking. Corinne was the first of their crowd to be divorcing. She wouldn’t be the last, though no one would admit to being in an unhappy marriage. You’re lucky, Corinne. You have your own money. Her mother always told her never to turn up her nose at the family money. And she never had.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  “O Jacomo da Sant’ Andrea!” it cried,9 “what hast thou gained by making me thy screen? what blame have I of thy sinful life?” When the Master had stopped beside it, he said: “Who wast thou, who, through so many wounds, blowest forth with blood thy dolorous speech?” And he to us: “Ye spirits, who are come to see the ignominious mangling which has thus disjoined my leaves from me, O gather them to the foot of the dismal shrub! I was of the city that changed its first patron for the Baptist,10 on which account he with his art will always make it sorrowful; and were it not that at the passage of the Arno there yet remains some semblance of him, those citizens, who afterwards rebuilt it on the ashes left by Attila, would have laboured in vain. I made a gibbet for myself of my own dwelling.” 1. The river Cecina and the Marte, on whose banks stands the town of Corneto, indicate the northern and southern boundaries of the marshy coast district of the Maremma in Tuscany.2. In the third book of the Æneid, Virgil narrates how, on the islands of the Strophades, the Harpies defile the viands of the Trojans, who attack the hideous birds. One of these, Celæno (infelix vates). prophesies the misfortunes that will befall the Trojans and how they will endure the famine before attaining their goal.3. The speaker is Pier delle Vigne (ca. 1190-1249) minister of the Emperor Frederick II and Chancellor of the two Sicilies. In the latter capacity he rearranged all the laws of the kingdom. Till the year 1247 he enjoyed the utmost confidence of his master. But suddenly he fell into disgrace (the reason usually given being that he plotted with Pope Innocent IV against Frederick); he was blinded and imprisoned and eventually committed suicide. Pier’s Latin letters are of great interest and his Italian poems neither better nor worse than the rest of the poetry of the Sicilian school.4. See Æn. iii. The episode of Æneas and Polydorus evidently served Dante as a model for the present passage.5. When at the height of his power, Pier was often compared to his namesake, the Apostle Peter. This explains the reminiscence of Matthew xvi. 19 in these verses, the keys being, of course, the keys of punishment and mercy.6. The harlot is Envy.7. See Canto vi.8. Jacomo da Sant’ Andrea, of Padua, was notorious for the extraordinary way in which he wasted his own and other people’s substance, one of the favourite methods he employed being arson. He appears to have been put to death by Ezzelino da Romano in 1239. Lano, a Sienese, was another spendthrift (cf. Canto xxix, note 7), Having squandered his fortune, he courted death at a ford called Pieve del Toppo (near Arezzo), where the Sienese were defeated by the Amines in 1288.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I stared into my eyes, white-circled from having worn sunglasses for weeks. Why was it I could never decide what color my eyes were? Was that significant? Was that somehow at the root of my problem? Grayish blue with yellow flecks. Not quite blue, not quite gray. Slate blue, Brian used to say, and your hair is the color of wheat. “Wheaty hair,” he called it, stroking it. Brian had the brownest eyes I’d ever seen—eyes like a Byzantine saint in a mosaic. When he was cracking up he used to stare at his eyes in the mirror for hours. He would turn the light on and off like a child, trying to catch his pupils suddenly dilating. He spoke literally then of a looking-glass world, a world of antimatter into which he could pass. His eyes were the key to that world. He believed that his soul could be sucked out through his pupils like albumen being sucked from a pierced egg. I remembered how attracted I was to Brian’s craziness, how fascinated I was with his imagery. In those days I was not writing surrealist poems but rather conventional, descriptive poems with lots of overly clever wordplay. But later, when I began to delve deeper and allow my imagination freer rein, I often felt I was seeing the world through Brian’s eyes and that his madness was the source of my inspiration. I felt as if I had gone crazy with him and come back up. We had been that close. And if I felt guilty, it was because I was able to go down and climb up again, whereas he was trapped. As if I were Dante and he were Ugolino (one of his favorite characters from the Inferno) and I could return from hell and relate his story, write the poetry I had culled from his madness, while he was utterly overwhelmed by it. You suck everyone dry, I accused myself; you use everyone. Everyone uses everyone, I answered.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I splashed my face with tap water and gave myself a perfunctory sponge bath. The dirt streaked off my arms as it had when I was a child and played outdoors all day. I went to try the lock on the door to make sure it was secure. When someone coughed in the next room, I nearly hit the ceiling. Relax , I commanded myself. But I was dimly aware that being able to get up and wash was at least a sign of life. Real lunatics just lie there in their own piss and shit. Some comfort. I was really grasping at straws. You’re better off than someone , I said and had to laugh. Naked and somewhat encouraged by being a little cleaner, I stood before the flaking full length mirror. I had the oddest sunburn from our days of driving in the open car. My knees and thighs were red and peeling. My nose and cheeks were red. My shoulders and forearms were burnt to a crisp. But the rest of me was nearly white. A curious patchwork quilt. I stared into my eyes, white-circled from having worn sunglasses for weeks. Why was it I could never decide what color my eyes were? Was that significant? Was that somehow at the root of my problem? Grayish blue with yellow flecks. Not quite blue, not quite gray. Slate blue, Brian used to say, and your hair is the color of wheat. “Wheaty hair,” he called it, stroking it. Brian had the brownest eyes I’d ever seen—eyes like a Byzantine saint in a mosaic. When he was cracking up he used to stare at his eyes in the mirror for hours. He would turn the light on and off like a child, trying to catch his pupils suddenly dilating. He spoke literally then of a looking-glass world, a world of antimatter into which he could pass. His eyes were the key to that world. He believed that his soul could be sucked out through his pupils like albumen being sucked from a pierced egg. I remembered how attracted I was to Brian’s craziness, how fascinated I was with his imagery. In those days I was not writing surrealist poems but rather conventional, descriptive poems with lots of overly clever wordplay. But later, when I began to delve deeper and allow my imagination freer rein, I often felt I was seeing the world through Brian’s eyes and that his madness was the source of my inspiration. I felt as if I had gone crazy with him and come back up. We had been that close. And if I felt guilty, it was because I was able to go down and climb up again, whereas he was trapped.