Joy

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 Collected Essays (1998)

  It is true that it was they who had begun the struggle of which he was now the symbol and the leader; it is true that it had taken all of their insistence to overcome in him a grave reluctance to stand where he now stood. But it is also true, and it docs not happen often, that once he had accepted the place they had prepared for him, their struggle became absolutely in distinguishable fr om his own, and took over and controlled his life. He suffered with them and, thus, he helped them to 6 ++ OTHER ESSAYS suffer. The joy which filled this church, therefore, was the joy achieved by people who have ceased to delude themselves about an intolerable situation, who have found their prayers for a leader miraculously answered, and who now know that they can change their situation, if they will. And, surely, very few people had ever spoken to them as King spoke. King is a great speaker. The secret of his greatness does not lie in his voice or his presence or his manner, though it has something to do with all these; nor docs it lie in his verbal range or felicity, which are not striking; nor does he have any capacity for those stunning, demagogic flights of the imagination which bring an audience cheering to its feet. The secret lies, I think, in his intimate knowledge of the people he is addressing, be they black or white, and in the forthrightness with which he speaks of those things which hurt and baffle them. He docs not offer any easy comfort and this keeps his hearers absolutely tense. He allows them their self-respect indeed, he insists on it. "We know," he told them, "that there are many things wrong in the white world. But there arc many things wrong in the black world, too. We can't keep on blaming the white man. There arc many things we must do for ourselves." He suggested what some of these were: "I know none of you make enough money-but save some of it. And there arc some things we've got to face. I know the situation is responsible for a lot of it, but do you know that Negroes are 10 per cent of the population of St. Louis and arc responsible for 5 8 per cent of its crimes? We've got to face that. And we have to do something about our moral stan dards. And we've got to stop lying to the white man. Every time you let the white man think you think segregation is right, you arc co-operating with him in doing evil. "The next time," he said, "the white man asks you what you think of segregation, you tell him, Mr. Charlie, I think it's wrong and I wish you'd do something about it by nine o'clock tomorrow morning!"

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I stepped back, tugged off my shoes (shabby old suede laceups which were never unlaced, a lazy affectation which I believed to be overtly sexy), unbuttoned and flung off my white cotton shirt, and with a hint of suspense, undid my fly and yanked off my trousers. Phil’s eyes were mesmerised by mine, and seemed reluctant to go down on my nodding dick. Then he too suddenly got undressed, and stood away from the window, his head bowed under the sloping ceiling. His body looked fantastic, highly developed, everywhere convex, hard and innocent. His whiteness was broken only by the red blotch of an insect bite in the tender, creased skin at his waistband. I was much more gentle with him now, stroking, kissing and nibbling—smiling, too, and making small pleasurable noises. And he began to respond, imitating me at first, but then making it up himself. Several times, though, it simply came to a stop, we stood back for a moment, seeing each other as we most often had before, in the showers or the changing room, naked and restrained. Perhaps the fact that the restraints of the public space had been taken away made us feel unnatural, inept at using our freedom. The small bed was like being at school or university. It wouldn’t encourage changes of position, but was all right for any simple sex act. When Phil and I rolled about our legs or our shoulders were hanging over the edge, increasing the precariousness of the situation: there was a strangely constricting need to cling together. Then he was on the point of falling on to the floor, his stomach muscles ridged to hold himself horizontal as I hauled him back by the waist, his head lurched upwards and our skulls cracked together quite painfully. The next day I had a perceptible bruise. Things were not working out with the instinctive ease I’d imagined. But I felt it was important to get on with it, and after a while and some laughter to relax him (though it also brought back an inhibiting normality) I turned him over and started to nose around his bum. It was deeply beautiful, creamily smooth when slack and when he clenched his buttocks almost cubic with built muscle. There was still the dust of Trouble for Men on the hairs in his crack, which I oiled back with my tongue, and sniffed through the dry smell of the talc to his own rectal smell—a soft stench like stale flower-water. His asshole was a clean pale purple, and shone with my saliva.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  We were leaving fast, the engine was shouting, the wind tore over the windshield and whipped the hair about on top of my head. I wanted to be back where we'd come from, late in bed or strolling out for a pre-pre-lunch beer. We overtook lorries and family cars with luggage on the roof, new from the ferry. Here was all the rest of the world, and my old world too, the Brits still cautious on the blind side of the road, looming ahead and then for a few seconds alongside, the roped tarpaulins jabbering loose, the drivers anxiously alert to the flashy blast of the jeep. But I was a Continental by now, and looked on them with pity and dismay as they fell behind. There was a certain brown obscurity in the sky ahead, like rain falling out to sea. Matt was wearing bottle-green dark glasses and frowned as he drove. A few miles later it lifted and dissolved; and the further we went the more radiant and old-masterly the air became, so that the whole mad, worrying escapade began already to feel out of time, steeped in a dream-ether of its own. When we crossed into France, and Matt turned off and pulled over in a country road to check the map, my goose-flesh smoothed and the October sun was almost hot on my forearms. We went on the last four miles more stealthily, my left hand tucked for childish comfort under Matt's thigh. Then we dropped to a wide view of current-silvered sea, with several big ships standing off; and a sharp turn of the road presented us all at once with a straggle of houses, a massive, squat church with a spire, and the sign—St Ernest-aux-Sablonnières. We dawdled along the street, me slunk down in my seat with one of Matt's baseball caps not disguising me much, dreading to be seen or for us even to be noticed, and the jeep farting uproariously at each touch on the accelerator. There was a grocer's, a bar, a novelty shop, a few old stone houses and at either end new brick ones with steel security blinds and unmade gardens just as the builders might have left them. Between them you saw the sea, and other houses lower down, and when we turned and came back we took a narrow lane to the left and emerged on a sand-blown track that I knew was where we had to be. A string of modest villas, bungalows with lawns running down to the dunes. An air of mild neglect—scabbing stucco, rusted house names, woody buddleia breaking through the garden fences.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  To my slight surprise, it was almost dark inside the fog, but I soon hit the path, and the land was so familiar . . . I turned up my coat collar and found it misted with little drops. I was exhausted but hated the idea of going back to my room with my thoughts. The path steepened, and then suddenly the fog ended. I came up out of it into a different night of glittering air and a strong enough moon to throw long shadows in front of trees and bushes. I loped on up to the top with a shiver of exhilaration. The fog circled the hill, and lay thick away to the east—the Flats were submerged, beyond them only the leafless crowns of the tallest trees showed vaguely in its surface. To the south other hills rose out of the pale floe like inaccessible friends, who none the less shared the sense of occasion, the hour or two of local sublimity. I pictured the silent foreign streets I was going back to, under the same moonlight. It came to me that it must be tomorrow—no, later today—that Helene was to be married. Surely she couldn't sleep. I wandered along the ridge almost expecting to be able to see the city's towers. When I got to the bench I found I wasn't alone. It gave me a moment's gooseflesh, as if the person sitting there had abruptly materialised. I wondered if I'd been talking to myself aloud. He turned his head a fraction, but not so as to look right at me, and the moon glinted on round glasses. He was a black kid—by the generous extension I gave to that term year by year—perhaps in his early twenties; he was perched on the bench's back with his feet on the seat; I made out a woolly hat rolled down and a puffy waistcoat over other dark clothes. We stayed as we were for a while, sharing the unusual view and its mood of stillness and oblivion. "Amazing night, isn't it?" I said lightly, just for form. "Yeah," he said; and hopped down from the bench as though about to clear off, because I'd spoilt it for him. "Nippy." Was it? I'd drunk too much to notice—but, yes, our breath made smoke. He'd probably been up here for ages, too; thinking something through. It took me a while to realise he was holding out a hand towards me. "Feel that," he said indignantly. I clutched it, it was cold and felt chapped; held it for a queer moment longer, only now seeing the point, and he squeezed my fingers back. He let out a sigh and pulled himself towards me in a kind of dance-step, and then we were hugging—he smelt nice, some ordinary girl's fragrance. We kissed sulkily, with a minor clash of spectacles.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I see." She walked round the statue on its high plinth as if my ignorance made it more interesting or problematic. The nice thing about the man was his thoughtful, almost unhappy expression, as if he felt himself unsuited to the eminent perpetuity of statuedom. He might, have been a good doctor or a minor devotional poet. Edie imitated his posture, mocking it gently, and caught the eye of a young boy who came trotting past and stopped in surprise to see a man with a hat-box and a striking dark girl in black rights and tunic and slouch-cap, like a Stuart page-boy in mourning, standing stock-still; while to me it had an older resonance, the busy longueurs of photo-sessions when Edie was still at fashion-school, when we would go on to the common with a suitcase and umbrellas and sheets of tinfoil and one or two of her inventive friends and create our gleaming static happenings, which patient passers-by would stop and puzzle over. I was bursting with things to say to her; she was an indulgent listener, not like rivalrous old men friends who fought you for the conversational advantage. But I wanted to let the city enfold her first. As we walked on I would point out a church or house or a glimpse into a courtyard, but we hardly spoke. I felt the place was mine, I was proud of it, and of more or less knowing my way through it; and I knew the quality of Edie's different silences, from the violent to the serene, and that we were together in this one—as I hadn't been together with anyone since I came here. We were at a famously pretty point, with a view of the Belfry beyond a canal, leaves fluttering on to the water, a long quay to the left with three receding bridges stepping from the empty sunshine into the narrow lanes of the middle of town. "It is absolute bliss," Edie said. "You're so lucky, and so right to have come. I couldn't see why before, to be honest I thought it was quite potty, but you're absolutely right." I swallowed the blunt admission. "Voilà." "I must say it is rather peculiarly quiet." She looked at her watch. "I mean we've seen three people in the past twenty minutes, and now there's nobody in sight at all. That sort of might get to one." "Yes, things have been a fraction on the dull side since about 1510. But we do what we can to make our own entertainment." "So one rather gathered from your letter."

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The fifty-year trend of annual increases in the jail and prison population in the United States that began in the 1970s has ended. In the last five years, we have seen declines in the number of people jailed or imprisoned in America, although our nation still has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. In the last ten years, twenty states have banned life imprisonment without parole sentences for children, and nearly one thousand people who were condemned to die in prison for crimes they were accused of committing when they were children have been released. It is the great joy of my career these days that I frequently travel and have someone come up to me and say, “Hey man, I’m one of your guys! I was a juvenile lifer who was supposed to die in prison, but now I’m here with you.” We then usually embrace. The encounter changes my day and lifts my spirits in ways that are hard to measure. Many of the young people you’ll read about in this book have since been released. Some even work on my staff now. But there have been worrisome developments, too. In 2020, after several heartbreaking killings of unarmed Black people by police attracted international attention, there seemed to be a new appreciation of the racial bias that undermines the administration of justice in the United States. In the midst of a global pandemic, police violence sparked protests and an unprecedented focus on confronting racial injustice that compromises our nation’s legal system. Today, however, a bitter backlash has emerged and many states have retreated from efforts to overcome the problems created by racial bias. Some states have passed laws to restrict educators from teaching about our history of racial bigotry and discrimination. Books about Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have been banned by school boards. Programs and initiatives designed to improve racial and gender diversity have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. The politics of fear and anger has re-emerged, and narratives that fuel bigotry, violence, and hate seem to gain ever more prominence on social media and in the public sphere.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He rolled on to me with a fierce grin that faded into a stare, lips parted, holding his breath then sighing it out suddenly over my face with a hint of sausage-meat and hard-boiled egg. He was working his stiff cock against my thigh. I ran my hands over his lightly sweating back and down under the elastic to the damp cleft of his arse—he curved his spine and my middle finger just reached, and drew a gasp from him as it touched his tender muscle. An outlying root of the ancient hedgerow pressed harder and harder into my back as if to register a serious objection. I struggled out from under him and he took it as a turn in the sex-tussle till I said, "I'm just going outside for a minute." I peed into the bushes and then strolled a short way across the hillside. In the late dusk the blanched, feathery heath-grasses looked almost luminous against the darkness of the woods. I sat on a round tump, it might have been a tiny tumulus, and looked out at thin cloud and distant lights. I'd never been this far this late, hearing only the rumour of cars on the London road, the patter of leaves like rain that slackens and stops. Tonight was like being given the keys to a bridal suite: we had come up here with an unwitting blessing. My lover and I. I wrapped the word around me like a stole. The wonder of having a lover—I saw us for an exhilarating moment from outside, the amazing thing we had done. Other boys at school had girlfriends, of course, and left you in no doubt about what they did with them; but what tawdry affairs those were—you saw them hanging around the shops at Saturday lunchtime, in a stumbling embrace as if each had to drag the other along. And how confident and independent we were, how we'd struck home to the real thing. I looked back at the tent, dimly illuminated from within by a torch, and the shadow-play of Dawn on all fours inside, getting it ready for the night. I fell into an awful blank puzzlement at times about why it had to be him; and panic at the thought of hitch-hiking alone with him to Juan-les-Pins—so at his mercy, in those dusty roadside waits, the duty to keep up our spirits, my condescension and his touchiness. It might be very nice to be doing it with another boy, like Turlough or Hall; but they, of course, had shown no interest in seducing me. I saw myself deliberately breaking, no, twisting, my ankle, very badly, just outside Calais and having to come home.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Then a fat boatered man and a woman with a parasol were parading past a tent with the word STEWARD on it. ‘Ah, that’s the end of our film,’ said Staines, and put out the projector’s bulb. We were in virtual darkness for several seconds, and James squeezed my hand and I felt his charge of emotion. ‘It’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen,’ he said, in the way that one does to a host, but he meant it. ‘Quite a find, eh?’ Staines agreed, putting on the light. ‘I want to turn it into a little feature, with a commentary perhaps by you, Mr Brooke, if you would care to.’ ‘I’ve got some ideas about it,’ said James. ‘I’ve been to Genzano, of course,’ muttered Charles, who did not want to be left out. ‘They have this festival of flowers, and the main street is carpeted with … er … with flowers.’ ‘Very Firbankian,’ I put in my obvious bit. ‘You mean, on another day,’ said James, ‘if it only had been another day, we would have seen the flowers beneath his feet.’ Chatter about this went on, and I asked Staines surreptitiously about the Colin pictures. ‘Oh, I’d forgotten,’ he said, hand raised chidingly to brow. ‘Will I ever be able to find them?’ ‘Is it a frightful bore?’ I said courteously. ‘I just thought as I was here, and you had kindly said …’ ‘Oh, I know. But there’s no system, as you doubtless recall.’ ‘Actually I think I can remember roughly where they were.’ He allowed me to take out the huge print drawer that Phil (ouch!) and I had shuffled through weeks before. ‘You’re welcome to look ,’ said Staines, as if he held out little hope. But it was the right place. I recognised the Mayfair portraits, the louche studies of Bobby—Bobby who today was nowhere to be seen, banished doubtless under the good behaviour clause—and all the randomness of it was right to me, as that was how it had been before. But when I got to the bottom, and peeled back the last piece of protective tissue, I had to acknowledge that none of the pictures of Colin, those artfully lewd compositions, was there. I searched the drawers above and below as well, but with dwindling hope. Charles called out, ‘What’s he looking for?’ and when Staines replied, ‘I promised him some photographs of a boy called Colin, but I just don’t know where they are,’ I knew he was lying. ‘Colin?’ said Charles. ‘Oh, I don’t think I know that one.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Figuring out Alabama civil and criminal law while managing death penalty cases in several other states kept me very busy. The additional prison conditions litigation meant a lot of long-distance driving and extremely long hours. My weathered 1975 Honda Civic was struggling to keep up. The radio had stopped working consistently a year earlier; it would come to life only if I hit a pothole or stopped suddenly enough to violently shake the car and spark a connection. After making the three-hour drive back from Gadsden earlier in the day and heading straight to the office, it was once again approaching midnight as I left the office for home. I got in my car, and to my delight the radio came on as soon as I turned the ignition. In just over three years of law practice I had become one of those people for whom such small events could make a big difference in my joy quotient. On this late night, not only was my radio working but the station was also hosting a retrospective on the music of Sly and the Family Stone. I’d grown up listening to Sly and found myself rolling joyfully through the streets of Atlanta to tunes like “Dance to the Music,” “Everybody Is a Star,” and “Family Affair.” Our Midtown Atlanta apartment was on a dense residential street. Some nights I had to park halfway down the block or even around the corner to find a space. But tonight I was lucky: I parked my rattling Civic just steps from our new front door just as Sly was starting “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” It was late, and I needed to get to bed, but the moment was too good to let pass, so I remained in the car listening to the music. Each time a tune ended I told myself to go inside, but then another irresistible song would begin, and I would find myself unable to leave. I was singing along to “Stand!” the soaring Sly anthem with the great gospel-themed ending, when I saw a flashing police light approaching. I was parked a few doors up from our apartment, so I assumed that the officers would drive by in pursuit of some urgent mission. When they came to a stop twenty feet in front of me, I wondered what was going on. Our section of the street only ran one way. My parked car was facing in the proper direction; the police car had come down the street in the wrong direction. I noticed for the first time that it wasn’t an ordinary police cruiser but one of the special Atlanta SWAT cars.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Supreme Court announced its decision: Life imprisonment without parole sentences imposed on children convicted of non-homicide crimes is cruel and unusual punishment and constitutionally impermissible. My staff and I jumped up and down in celebration. Moments later we were inundated with a flood of calls from media, clients, families, and children’s rights advocates. It was the first time the Court had issued a categorical ban on a punishment other than the death penalty. Joe Sullivan was entitled to relief. Scores of people, including Antonio Nuñez and Ian Manuel, were entitled to reduced sentences that would give them a “meaningful opportunity for release.” Two years later, in June 2012, we won a constitutional ban on mandatory life-without-parole sentences imposed on children convicted of homicides. The Supreme Court had agreed to review Evan Miller’s case and the case of our client from Arkansas, Kuntrell Jackson. I argued both cases in March of that year and waited anxiously until we won a favorable ruling. The Court’s decision meant that no child accused of any crime could ever again be automatically sentenced to die in prison. Over two thousand condemned people sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for crimes when they were children were now potentially eligible for relief and reduced sentences. Some states changed their statutes to create more hopeful sentences for child offenders. Prosecutors in many places resisted retroactive application of the Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama, but everyone now had new hope, including Ashley Jones and Trina Garnett. We continued our work on issues involving children by pursuing more cases. I believe there should be a total ban on housing children under the age of eighteen with adults in jails or prisons. We filed cases seeking to stop the practice. I am also convinced that very young children should never be tried in adult court. They’re vulnerable to all sorts of problems that increase the risk of a wrongful conviction. No child of twelve, thirteen, or fourteen can defend him- or herself in the adult criminal justice system. Wrongful convictions and illegal trials involving young children are very common. A few years earlier, we won the release of Phillip Shaw, who was fourteen when he was improperly convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in Missouri. His jury was illegally selected, excluding African Americans. I argued two cases at the Mississippi Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the convictions and sentences of young children were illegal. Demarious Banyard was a thirteen-year-old who had been bullied into participating in a robbery that resulted in a fatal shooting in Jackson, Mississippi. He was given a mandatory death-in-prison sentence after his jury was illegally told that he had to prove his innocence beyond a reasonable doubt and the State introduced impermissible evidence. He was resentenced to a finite term of years and now has hope for release. Dante Evans was a fourteen-year-old child living in a FEMA trailer with his abusive father in Gulfport, Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Look for microexpressions of disappointment on their face. Use similar tests to probe for hidden anger and resentments, eliciting the responses that people cannot suppress so quickly. In general, people will want to see more of you, want to see less of you, or be rather indifferent. They may fluctuate among the three states, but they will tend to veer toward one. They will reveal this in how quickly they respond to your emails or texts, their body language on first seeing you, and the overall tone they take in your presence. The value in detecting possible hostility or negative feelings early on is that it increases your strategic options and room to maneuver. You can lay a trap for people, intentionally stirring their hostility and goading them into some aggressive action that will embarrass them in the long run. Or you can work doubly hard to neutralize their dislike of you and even win them over through a charm offensive. Or you can simply create distance—not hiring them, firing them, refusing to interact with them. In the end, you will make your path much smoother by avoiding surprise battles and acts of sabotage. On the other side of the coin, we generally have less of a need to hide positive emotions from others, but nonetheless we often do not like to emit obvious signs of joy and attraction, especially in work situations, or even in courtship. People often prefer to display a cool social front. So there is great value in being able to detect the signs that people are falling under your spell. According to research studies on facial cues by psychologists such as Paul Ekman, E. H. Hess, and others, people who feel positive emotions for you will display noticeable signs of relaxation in the facial muscles, particularly in the lines of the forehead and the area around the mouth; their lips will appear more fully exposed and the whole area around their eyes will widen. These are all involuntary expressions of comfort and openness. If the feelings are more intense, such as falling in love, blood rushes to the face, animating all of the features. As part of this excited state the pupils will dilate, an automatic response in which the eyes let in more light. It is a sure sign that a person is comfortable and likes what they are seeing. Along with the dilation the eyebrows will rise, making the eyes look even bigger. We do not usually pay attention to eye pupils because looking intently into another’s eyes has an overtly sexual connotation. We must train ourselves to glance quickly at the pupils when we notice any widening of the eyes. In developing your skills in this arena, you must learn to distinguish between the fake and the genuine smile.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  We leave the Dunkin’ Donuts heavier with what we know of each other. But what you didn’t know was that, in fact, I had worn a dress before—and would do so again. That a few weeks earlier, I had danced in an old tobacco barn wearing a wine-red dress as my friend, a lanky boy with a busted eye, dizzily watched. I had salvaged the dress from your closet, the one you bought for your thirty-fifth birthday but never wore. I swirled in the sheer fabric while Trevor, perched on a stack of tires, clapped between drags on a joint, our collarbones lit sharply by a pair of cell phones placed on the floor dusted with dead moths. In that barn, for the first time in months, we weren’t afraid of anybody—not even ourselves. You steer the Toyota home, me silent beside you. It seems the rain will return this evening and all night the town will be rinsed, the trees lining the freeways dripping in the metallic dark. Over dinner, I’ll pull in my chair and, taking off my hood, a sprig of hay caught there from the barn weeks before will stick out from my black hair. You will reach over, brush it off, and shake your head as you take in the son you decided to keep. The living room was miserable with laughter. On the TV the size of a microwave, a sitcom blared a tinny and fabricated glee no one believed in. No one but Trevor’s dad, or rather, not so much believed, but surrendered to, chuckling in the La-Z-Boy, the bottle of Southern Comfort like a cartoon crystal in his lap. Each time he raised it, the brown drained, till only the warped colors from the TV flashed through the empty glass. He had a thick face and close-cropped pomaded hair, even at this hour. He looked like Elvis on his last day alive. The carpet under his bare feet shiny as spilled oil from years of wear. We were behind the old man, sitting on a makeshift couch salvaged from a totaled Dodge Caravan, passing a liter of Sprite between us, giggling and texting a boy in Windsor we’d never meet. Even from here, we could smell him, strong with drink and cheap cigars, and pretended he wasn’t there. “Go ahead, laugh.” Trevor’s dad barely moved, but his voice rumbled. We could feel it through the seat. “Go ahead, laugh at your father. Y’all laugh like seals.” I searched the back of his head, ringed with the chalky TV light, but saw no movement. “We not laughing at you, man.” Trevor winced and put the phone in his pocket. His hands dropped to their sides as if someone had brushed them off his knees. He glared at the back of the chair. From where we sat, only a fragment of the man’s head was visible, a grab of hair and a portion of his cheek, white as sliced turkey.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I turned up my palms and shrugged helplessly. He held up one index finger. One? No. Wait, he indicated. He examined the ground. He pointed to something behind a tree and nodded with a smile. Then he picked up an imaginary thing with three fingers. What was it? It was round. I could tell by the way he lifted it with both hands to his face. Still holding it with three fingers, he drew it back as though he was—bowling! A bowling ball. I nodded emphatically. He found a second bowling ball on a branch over my head. This one he placed carefully on his right foot. He searched with his eyes for a third and found it. With a bowling ball in his right hand and another balanced on his foot, he slowly bent down to lift a third ball with his free hand. He wobbled. Could he keep the ball from falling off his foot? He did it! I held my breath as he began to juggle. I could see the heavy weight of the bowling balls, the strength required to send each one higher. His skill increased: the balls passed under one leg, behind his back, and over his shoulder. All three balls were sent high into the air ... they didn’t come back down. He paused and looked up at the sky, scratching his head in bewilderment. Suddenly he lurched forward and 268 Leslie Feinberg caught one in his left hand, then staggered to the right and caught another. The third one landed on his toe, sending him hopping behind a tree in mock agony. He peeked out from behind the tree and winked. It felt like such a relief to laugh—not in spite of my grief, but because of it. We laughed together. It was deep, belly laughter. The kind that brings you to tears. The kind that releases emotions thick as mud. Two men approached him from either side. He smiled at them and their arms turned in windmills of exchange. He indicated my presence. We all shook hands. Before he turned to go, he reached forward very slowly with his hand and touched a tear on my cheek. He touched his own eye with my tear. And then he walked away. I FELT LIKE THE FIRE left me no choice. How could I give up? Surrender was unimaginably more dangerous than struggling for survival. The typesetting industry didn’t pick up till early fall, but I found work catch as catch can. By September I signed a lease on a tenement apartment just above Canal Street. It was a pretty big one-bedroom railroad flat, but it was filthy. I didn’t have the energy to clean it when I moved in. I figured Td do it a little at a time. I bought an air mattress, a blanket, and a pillow. That’s what I really needed in the apartment. It was a safe place to sleep, that’s all.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  as the steady stream of deliveries arrived. Gradually my rooms began to assume shapes. Ruth hung her framed handkerchief embroidered with pansies on my kitchen wall and gave me the tie quilt she’d made with her grandmother for my bed. But I really knew Ruth and I were becoming close when she admitted how much she wanted help repainting her apartment. It was an absolute pleasure to see the joy on her face as I covered her walls with fresh colors. She excitedly cut shelf paper while the cupboards were still tacky with white enamel. I enjoyed the complex layers of life in the city and longed to explore those nooks and crannies with Ruth. But we never left our apartment building together because of what she called her geometric theory: two people like us in public are more than double the trouble. Instead we brought each other little gifts from out daily travels. I gave her Villa Lobos, she gave me Keith Jarrett; I brought her forsythia, she brought me impatiens. And after a while we exchanged our tears and our frustrations, as well. “Why, Ruth?” I stormed around her kitchen. “Why do heads turn when we walk down the street? Why ate we so hated?” Ruth stopped scrubbing the inside walls of her stove. “Oh, honey. We’ve been taught to hate people who are different. It’s been pumped into our brains. It keeps everybody fighting each other.” I slumped in a chair. “I used to want to change the world. Now I just want to survive it.” Ruth laughed. Her rubber gloves snapped as she pulled them off. “Well, don’t give up just yet, honey. Sometimes things don’t change for a long time and then they catch up so fast it makes your head spin.” I sighed. “When I was growing up, I believed I was gonna do something really important with my life, like explore the universe or cure diseases. I never thought P’d spend so much of my life fighting over which bathroom I could use.” Ruth nodded. “I’ve seen people risk their lives for the right to sit at a lunch counter. If you and I aren’t going to fight for the right to live, then the kids coming up will have to do it.” I leaned my head back against the back of the kitchen chair and laughed. “You are my pleasure, Ruth. You’re the last ice-cold Coca-Cola in the desert.” I flashed her a smile that clearly charmed her. I had forgotten I could do that. That evening we crawled out onto the fire escape and sat close to each other as the afternoon shifted to evening. ’d never held a body larger than mine before. The street below us was blocked off for a festival—tiny lanterns strung up between booths of food, couples dancing in the intersections to a live mariachi band.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I glinted at her as if detecting a trick. "You're not going to pretend you don't know where he is, it's too tedious." "I haven't any idea," she said sotto voce. "But you've run away together." She raised an eyebrow. "Or do you mean he's run away from you as well?" "We didn't run away together," she said after a moment. "He ran away, as you call it, and phoned me to tell me. I asked him to meet me at a friend's apartment, not to do anything stupid or get arrested. I borrowed our friend Patrick's car and went there. That was where you spent last night. At 3 o'clock this morning he rang again and said he couldn't come to meet me. He was—on the coast. I drove off to another rendezvous and waited there, for hours, but he didn't turn up. He wasn't trying to trick me, I think he just couldn't manage it." I had to stop myself grinning as I heard her tight-lipped itinerary of failure. "I thought he might have come here." "There's no one here," I said, more gently. "Then I don't know where he is," she threw off, and hit her fist against the top of her thigh and crumpled into tears. She'd taken on such power as my rival that it was perplexing, somehow shaming, to see her tremble and cry. But it was Marcel's moment. She turned away from me with a wail as someone utterly unfitted to comfort her, and hid her sobbing face in her young friend's arms. He patted her back and nestled his chin into her hair like a boy getting his first slow dance, anxious, radiant. I backed off, happy to be an adult, far from wanting to intrude. My thoughts were all on Luc and our meeting at the coast—I thought we could take up where we'd left off, I was catching my breath imagining it. What an unexpected sight the two of them were, hugging under the weedy stone giant, like a gorgonised reveller, and beyond them the brown and damson of the winter woods. After a minute or two in the car Marcel began to sing, without realising, it seemed, looking out of the window, gently nodding his head. It was "See Me Tonight", but done in a light boy-baritone that made the song freshly amorous. I came in on the second chorus—it was stuck in my brain and had only to be activated, as if by a hypnotist's codeword. We went on for a while in hesitant boisterous unison, both of us high on relief and altered prospects. There wasn't much to "See Me Tonight" and after a couple of high-spirited run-throughs we petered out. Marcel looked quite surprised that it had happened. "Do you know, um, 'Heartbreak Hotel'?" he said; and I started it off. We swooshed along the empty road, bawling, "I'm all so lonely, baby, so sad and lonely, baby" like schoolboys on a coach-trip.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Osro�s, moreover, desired peace at least as much as I: the Parthians were concerned only to reopen their trade routes between us and India. A few months after the great crisis I had the joy of seeing the line of caravans re-form on the banks of the Orontes; the oases were again the resort of merchants exchanging news in the glow of their evening fires, each morning repacking along with their goods for transportation to lands unknown a certain number of thoughts, words, and customs genuinely our own, which little by little would take possession of the globe more securely than can advancing legions. The circulation of gold and the passage of ideas (as subtle as that of vital air in the arteries) were beginning again within the world's great body; earth's pulse began to beat once more. The fever of rebellion subsided in its turn. In Egypt it had been so violent that they had been obliged to levy peasant militia at utmost speed while awaiting reinforcements. Immediately I sent my comrade Marcius Turbo to re-establish order there, a task which he accomplished with judicious firmness. But order in the streets was hardly enough for me; I desired to restore order in the public consciousness, if it were possible, or rather to make order rule there for the first time. A stay of a week in Pelusium was given over entirely to adjusting differences between those eternal incompatibles, Greeks and Jews. I saw nothing of what I should have wished to see: neither the banks of the Nile nor the Museum of Alexandria, nor the temple statues; I barely found time to devote a night to the agreeable debauches of Canopus. Six interminable days were passed in the steaming vat of a courtroom, protected from the heat without by long slatted blinds which slapped to and fro in the wind. At night enormous mosquitoes swarmed round the lamps. I tried to point out to the Greeks that they were not always the wisest of peoples, and to the Jews that they were by no means the most pure. The satiric songs with which these low-class Hellenes were wont to antagonize their adversaries were scarcely less stupid than the grotesque imprecations from the Jewries. These races who had lived side by side for centuries had never had the curiosity to get to know each other, nor the decency to accept each other. The exhausted litigants who did not give way till late into the night would find me on my bench at dawn, still engaged in sorting over the rubbish of false testimony; the stabbed corpses which they offered me as evidence for conviction were frequently those of invalids who had died in their beds and had been stolen from the embalmers. But each hour of calm was a victory gained, though precarious like all victories; each dispute arbitrated served as precedent and pledge for the future.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I sprang about in my own reckless way. In a sense we had nothing to do with each other, though I kept an eye on him and grinned with pleasure when his shy dark gaze held mine. Then I would whirl him round once or twice, and hold his handsome head and kiss him clumsily, bumping noses. I kept him at it for about an hour, never stopping as, under the DJ’s gurgling patter, the rhythms of one track, clean and fierce, cut across and then went under the rhythms of the next. It was a sport, where exhaustion was only a spur to more effort, the blood-opiates sang through the system, lap succeeded lap. On the floor there was competition, more athletic than sexual, and I would find myself challenged, magnetised by strangers, drawn into faster and faster action, though no words were said, we affected not even to look at each other. And some of the kids there could dance. Sometimes a ring would suddenly form around one or two of them, and we hung on each other’s shoulders to see them—their brief, fizzy routines of backward handsprings, jack-knife jumps and other crazy things. Boy after boy would follow, explode in action, stumble back into obscurity; and then the ring would dissolve, the crowd would repossess the floor. At last Phil rocked to a stop and gestured for drink. I gasped ‘Lager’ in his ear. Both of us were parched—and all wet outside, so that his hair, when I roughed it and sent him off, stood up, and the bristly back of his neck glistened as if it had been dressed. I lurched off the dance floor and into Stan. Stan was a colossal Guyanan bodybuilder, not only gigantically muscular but six feet six inches tall. ‘Love the arse on your chum,’ he said. ‘I’ve been watching him.’ ‘Heaven, isn’t it?’ ‘Yeah. Where d’you find that then?’ ‘I took him under my wing at the Corry.’ He craned to see where Phil had got to in the further spotlit half-dark. ‘Still go there then?’ ‘Daily. You should come back. We all miss seeing you.’ Stan smiled sweetly and said, ‘I bet you fucking do.’ His mouth, like the rest of him, was vast, so that when he laughed it seemed his whole head would open up like a canteen of cutlery. I had met him at the Corry during my first Oxford vac and fooled about with him rather unsatisfactorily in an alley off the Tottenham Court Road. I remember how struck I was by the contrast of his rocky physique and the beautiful, almost smothering softness of his lips. A term later he had left, for some north London gym more suited to his championship needs. But I would run into him from time to time in clubs and bars, and though we had nothing much in common I seemed to charm him somehow, so that despite his superhuman body he was slightly in awe of me.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  She had never accepted anything from me—not money from my paycheck at Dillman’s; not a share of my boot camp earnings. But she accepted my three hundred a month, and that’s how I knew she was desperate. I didn’t make a lot of money myself—probably a thousand dollars a month after taxes, though the Marines gave me a place to stay and food to eat, so that money went far. I also made extra money playing online poker. Poker was in my blood—I’d played with pennies and dimes with Papaw and my great-uncles as far back as I could remember—and the online poker craze at the time made it basically free money. I played ten hours a week on small-stakes tables, earning four hundred dollars a month. I had planned to save that money, but instead I gave it to Mamaw for her health insurance. Mamaw, naturally, worried that I had picked up a gambling habit and was playing cards in some mountain trailer with a bunch of card-sharking hillbillies, but I assured her that it was online and legitimate. “Well, you know I don’t understand the fucking Internet. Just don’t turn to booze and women. That’s always what happens to dipshits who get caught up in gambling.” Mamaw and I both loved the movie Terminator 2 . We probably watched it together five or six times. Mamaw saw Arnold Schwarzenegger as the embodiment of the American Dream: a strong, capable immigrant coming out on top. But I saw the movie as a sort of metaphor for my own life. Mamaw was my keeper, my protector, and, if need be, my own goddamned terminator. No matter what life threw at me, I’d be okay because she was there to protect me. Paying for her health insurance made me feel, for the first time in my life, like I was the protector. It gave me a sense of satisfaction that I’d never imagined—and how could I? I’d never had the money to help people before the Marines. When I came home, I was able to take Mom out to lunch, get ice cream for the kids, and buy nice Christmas presents for Lindsay. On one of my trips home, Mamaw and I took Lindsay’s two oldest kids on a trip to Hocking Hills State Park, a beautiful region of Appalachian Ohio, to meet up with Aunt Wee and Dan. I drove the whole way, I paid for gas, and I bought everyone dinner (admittedly at Wendy’s). I felt like such a man, a real grown-up. To laugh and joke with the people I loved most as they scarfed down the meal that I’d provided gave me a feeling of joy and accomplishment that words can’t possibly describe. For my entire life, I had oscillated between fear at my worst moments and a sense of safety and stability at my best. I was either being chased by the bad terminator or protected by the good one.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Six centuries earlier the great temple consecrated to the Olympian Zeus had been left abandoned almost as soon as the structure was started. My workmen took up the task and Athens again felt the joy of activity such as she had not known since the days of Pericles: I was completing what one of the Seleucids had aspired in vain to finish, and was making amends in kind for the depredations of our Sulla. To inspect the work I went daily in and out of a labyrinth of machines and intricate pulleys, of half-dressed columns and marble blocks haphazardly piled, gleaming white against the blue sky. There was something of the excitement of the naval shipyards; a mighty vessel had been salvaged and was being fitted out for the future. In the evenings the art of building gave way to that of music, which is architecture, too, though invisible. I am somewhat practiced in all the arts, but music is the only one to which I have steadily kept and in which I profess to some skill. At Rome I had to dissemble this taste, but could indulge it with discretion in Athens. The musicians used to gather in a court where a cypress grew, near a statue of Hermes. There were only six or seven of them, an orchestra of reeds and lyres; to these we sometimes added a professional with a cithara. My instrument was chiefly the long flute. We played ancient tunes, some almost forgotten, and newer works as well, composed for me. I liked the hard vigor of the Dorian airs, but certainly had no aversion to voluptuous or passionate melodies, or to the poignant, subtly broken rhythms which sober, fearful folk reject as intoxicating for the senses and the soul. Through the strings of his lyre I could see the profile of my young companion, gravely absorbed in his part in the group, his fingers moving with care along the taut cords. That perfect winter was rich in friendly intercourse: the opulent Atticus, whose bank was financing my constructions (though not without profit therefrom), invited me to his gardens in Kephissia where he lived surrounded by a court of lecturers and writers then in fashion; his son, young Herod, a subtle wit, proved indispensable at my Athenian suppers. He had certainly lost the timidity which once left him speechless before me, on the occasion of his embassy to the Sarmatian frontier on behalf of the youth of Athens to congratulate me on my accession; but his growing vanity now seemed to me no more than mildly ridiculous. Herod's rival in eloquence, and in wealth, was the rhetorician Polemo, glory of Laodicea, who beguiled me by his Oriental style, shimmering and full as the gold-bearing waves of Pactolus; this clever craftsman in words lived as he discoursed, with splendor.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Don't want to lose that." I thought to myself, "But that's where the queers go", imagining some nice distinction between what they did there and whatever we were going to do. I felt the minute of physical separation keenly, skirting the pond, Dawn walking the bike between us, the proficient idling of its wheels; I wanted things to start again, and then, as we stepped under the nighttime of the wood's edge, was quite afraid, too. This was the "dim woods" of poetry for real. I cannot see what flowers are at my feet. The forest's ferny floor. I'd threaded the paths there often by day, but now it was mazily different, the underbrush of August was thick and tangled across. Dawn had stopped to lodge his bike against a tree, and whispered loudly, "Hey, Manners. . . don't go too far." Perhaps I was trying to lead the way, as if I often did this. I came back towards him and we bumped into each other. I just couldn't see at first, and then began to make out tree-trunks and bushes against the relative brightness of the open common beyond. We hugged for a kind of confirmation, and I passed my hand shyly over his face (he kissed it!) and through his short curls. My mouth was open and sour with need when his lips nudged over it and his fat shocking tongue pressed in. When we came out of the wood I knew I was late, and must hurry down. The towering anvil of cloud had become a ruffled palm-tree of darkness against the other darkness of the sky. I longed to be alone, longed for it to happen again. Dawn sat astride his bike and leant on my shoulder to steady himself. It was a firm, slightly painful grip, through which all his weight and balance seemed to communicate themselves, as if we were an acrobatic act. Then he circled swiftly across the turf. I ran up to the trig-point and watched the rushing field of his front light and the red glow of his back light as he jolted and swung down the hillside and was suddenly out of view. Geoffrey and Mirabelle Turlough were great friends of my parents, though I was never quite sure why. Geoffrey was a wiry man with a depressing grey beard and no sense of fun, whilst Mirabelle could have represented fun in a pageant and was huge and outgoing, with short dark hair and glasses on a chain. He was in charge of the local planning office, but had been a fine amateur tennis-player just after the war: one could picture him doing months of practice serves. They had met at the Tennis Club where Mirabelle often umpired the ladies' matches.