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 Wild (2012)

  “We’re headed up there to do some fishing. We’d give you a ride, but we’re packed,” he said, pointing to the back of the truck, which was covered by a camper. “That’s okay. I like to walk.” “Well, we’re having Hawaiian screwdrivers tonight, so stop on by.” “Thanks,” I said, and watched them drive off. I hiked the rest of the afternoon thinking about Hawaiian screwdrivers. I didn’t know exactly what they were but they didn’t sound all that different from Snapple lemonade to me. When I reached the top of the road, the red pickup and the men’s camp came into view, perched above the westernmost of the Three Lakes. The PCT was just beyond it. I followed a scant trail east along the lake’s shore, finding a secluded spot among the boulders that were scattered around the lake. I set up my tent and ducked into the woods to squeeze out my sponge and put it in again. I walked down to the lake to filter water and wash my hands and face. I thought about diving in to bathe, but the water was ice-cold and I was already chilled in the mountain air. Before coming on the PCT, I’d imagined countless baths in lakes and rivers and streams, but in reality, only rarely did I plunge in. By the end of the day, I often ached with fatigue and shook with what felt like a fever but was only exhaustion and the chill of my drying sweat. The best I could do most days was splash my face and strip off my sweat-drenched T-shirt and shorts before swaddling myself in my fleece anorak and leggings for the night. I removed my boots and pulled the duct tape and 2nd Skin off my feet and soaked them in the icy water. When I rubbed them, another blackened toenail came off in my hand, the second I’d lost so far. The lake was calm and clear, rimmed by towering trees and leafy bushes among the boulders. I saw a bright green lizard in the mud; it froze in place for a moment before scampering away at lightning speed. The men’s camp was not far beyond me along the lakeshore, but they hadn’t yet detected my presence. Before going to see them, I brushed my teeth, put on lip balm, and pulled a comb through my hair. “There she is,” shouted the man who’d been in the passenger seat when I ambled up. “And just in time too.” He handed me a red plastic cup full of a yellow liquid that I could only assume was a Hawaiian screwdriver. It had ice cubes. It had vodka. It had pineapple juice. When I sipped it I thought I would faint. Not from the alcohol hitting me, but from the sheer fabulousness of the combination of liquid sugar and booze.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  ib bey vb. rejoice )10 0 27% 1*% 7; cf. Ar, es go round or about, beexcited to levity, etc.) 1 Pf HP 165%; גיל סחי‎ OM yer? + 4t. (p27 Kt x, Qr ba with retracted tone); גל‎ on 139+ 1% אָנִילֶה 6% ד גל‎ הָליִנְנ‎ vo + 5 t, ON 13° + 8%. MN 89%, MPD שי‎ 8% 2 6. יָנוּל‎ Pr'23™; 10 לי 4% +27 ילו‎ Is 49%+ > 2%.;---1. rejoice, a. abs. ~13° 51° 269%; || שמח‎ ae! 96" 9 Pr aa I Ch‏ 4 הס 16° זא ד ש b.c. 2149"‏ .1535168 שיש,שוש || Hb1”;‏ 167 בישועתך ;66% "65 Is‏ בירושלם ;?9 Pr 2% 247 Ts‏ באלהים ;010% 41° Is‏ 35° ש ביהוה ;217 13° Wo‏ Is‏ בקדוש ישראל ; "סָ8 ש בשם * ;3% Is 61 Hb‏ Ctx! Is 259 Jo 2%‏ 118% 31° ץ גיל ושמח “a‏ ;29% Zp 3”. Besides‏ על with‏ .0 .2% 10 גילי ושמחי כי נפש ;20107 247 persons the subj. is a> 13° Pr‏ Ch 16”‏ 1 ארץ ,16° ץ (נפש==) כבוד ,61% 18 35° ¥ Is 3. 2. tremble‏ ערבה 49% 19 '97 96% ש (Thes Ew Hi Che,‏ עבד || 27 + (cf. Ar. Jes)‏ אבל || but 69 Hu De Pe AV RV rejoice), Horo?‏ (Thes and most mod., but AV RV that rejoiced‏ Ew Gr Che.‏ חיל over it), possibly error for‏ Th. ביל‎ n.[m. | rejoicing —Jb3” + 6t., גול‎ Pr es a לי‎ W43*;—rejotcing 76 5 Pr23”; || שמחה‎ ו ץ‎ Is 6 Je 205 Jo ae 193 nny ש‎ 4% שמח אל גיל‎ glad unto rejotcing Ho g* Jb 3”. pee [גיל]‎ n.[m. | circle, age, מן הילדים אשר‎ p3>22 ofthe youths which are of your age Dn1™ (cf. Ar. Jus, Sam. גיל‎ = Heb. WI=yevea, Talm. נילו‎ j2 one born atthe same time, a contemporary). try, n.f. rejoicing Is 65%, {21) nd%3 Is 35° (nom. verbal. for Inf. abs. cf. De Di; estr. before 1 Ges §%-?; but rd. prob. (גִּילָה‎ : aby vead Is 9? for לא‎ ‘a7 by Krochm Che RS Di. taba n.pr.loc. city in mountains of Judah Jos לש‎ Sirgas (on V cf. Dr 28 15”.) adj.gent. 2 5 15%, 23%=1Chri™,‏ גילני1 (for MT 3980),‏ הג' where also rd.‏ v. sub 73.‏ גינת mea | (boil, boil up? cf. Aram. ג"ר‎ wave, NH id. foam; Ar. = quicklime, also heat in 162 mba chest from rage or hunger (Lane) ; admodum aestuans acc. to 111 כ /\11 א‎ *** ; but cf. infr.) : 1 בר‎ n.[m.] chalk, lime (perh. Aram. loan- word cf. Frii?; Aram. (also B Aram.) 4, ]- AY. p> is loan-wd.Fri'*)—3 ‘23ND Ny Is 27°. 1 [גיר]‎ n.m. 2 Ch 2% .צ‎ 13 sub .גור.1‎ Tuba 29 7° Kt, v. Wa. Tywra n.pr.m. a descendant of Judah through Caleb 1 Ch 2”. 4 ל גל גל‎ bbs. (=shear, shave, As. [galabu] 116%;‏ ב לב Aram. ads id., a3 razor; cf. JaNS 2 820° v.PS).‏ [ada] n.[m. ] barber (Ph.39]CIS*#”*)—‏ ך

• From Little Women (1868)

  Not a very splendid show, but there was a great deal of love done up in the few little bundles, and the tall vase of red roses, white chrysanthemums, and trailing vines, which stood in the middle, gave quite an elegant air to the table. "She's coming! Strike up, Beth! Open the door, Amy! Three cheers for Marmee!" cried Jo, prancing about while Meg went to conduct Mother to the seat of honor. Beth played her gayest march, Amy threw open the door, and Meg enacted escort with great dignity. Mrs. March was both surprised and touched, and smiled with her eyes full as she examined her presents and read the little notes which accompanied them. The slippers went on at once, a new handkerchief was slipped into her pocket, well scented with Amy's cologne, the rose was fastened in her bosom, and the nice gloves were pronounced a perfect fit. There was a good deal of laughing and kissing and explaining, in the simple, loving fashion which makes these home festivals so pleasant at the time, so sweet to remember long afterward, and then all fell to work. The morning charities and ceremonies took so much time that the rest of the day was devoted to preparations for the evening festivities. Being still too young to go often to the theater, and not rich enough to afford any great outlay for private performances, the girls put their wits to work, and necessity being the mother of invention, made whatever they needed. Very clever were some of their productions, pasteboard guitars, antique lamps made of old-fashioned butter boats covered with silver paper, gorgeous robes of old cotton, glittering with tin spangles from a pickle factory, and armor covered with the same useful diamond shaped bits left in sheets when the lids of preserve pots were cut out. The big chamber was the scene of many innocent revels. No gentleman were admitted, so Jo played male parts to her heart's content and took immense satisfaction in a pair of russet leather boots given her by a friend, who knew a lady who knew an actor. These boots, an old foil, and a slashed doublet once used by an artist for some picture, were Jo's chief treasures and appeared on all occasions. The smallness of the company made it necessary for the two principal actors to take several parts apiece, and they certainly deserved some credit for the hard work they did in learning three or four different parts, whisking in and out of various costumes, and managing the stage besides. It was excellent drill for their memories, a harmless amusement, and employed many hours which otherwise would have been idle, lonely, or spent in less profitable society. On Christmas night, a dozen girls piled onto the bed which was the dress circle, and sat before the blue and yellow chintz curtains in a most flattering state of expectancy.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  I was at the dentist yesterday, getting impressions taken of my teeth. She inserted a big, cold metal brace in my mouth and filled it with a strange, strangling gummy substance, and all of a sudden I looked around at all the contraptions and appliances and started to laugh, remembering what the prostitute said about hardware stores. I was laughing because I knew from then on, everything in my dentist’s office was going to look double-edged, that my dentist was going to as well, and that the whole world could, and did, in a way. Sex is terribly funny and terribly real and its manifestations are everywhere. I am who I am sexually because of who I was and all that has happened to me and all that has not. The fantasies of rough sex are just children’s fantasies acted out in great big grown-up ways. The real, sadistic, and terrifying nightmares of dreaming children, the real traumas of childhood days, are made flesh today in our adult bodies, to be lived out once again. If I wanted to get started in this world, there are lots of ways. Most cities have clubs, “dungeons,” parties, gay and straight, for women only, for mixed groups. I could take my pick. In San Francisco and a few other cities, I could go to school. I have a catalogue for a kind of adult extension school of S/M and related techniques in San Francisco called QSM: “Beg! Fetch! Heel!: Training Your Human Pet,” “The Civilized Art of Caning,” “Advanced Fisting.” The classes emphasize safety and observation rather than participation, and any exchange of bodily fluids is heavily discouraged. (In fact, sadomasochism is, medically speaking, very safe sex.) Here’s a class in “Interrogation,” another in “Branding for Beginners.” Every game has its rules, its arbitrary code words, tableaus, rituals, and symbols. I could take “Customizing Your Whipping.” There’s a four-part course called “Bondage Potpourri.” Or I could take “Knives,” which really needs no explanation except that it includes shopping tips. S/M is theater, but then, all sex is theater. For a moment as master or slave one lives in the body of another, one pretends something else to be true until it is, briefly, true. These primal dramas and symbols are innate in all sexuality; every sexual act contains them. Says a woman who practices masochism: “The most intense, special moments of dominance or of submission are things that probably could be described as staring into someone else’s eyes.”

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  At Norwalk City Hall there were a bunch of white tents set up outside and a fleet of blue Eyewitness News vans idling in the lot. We started getting cold feet—neither of us was in the mood to become a poster child for queers marrying in hostile territory just prior to Prop 8’s passage. We didn’t want to show up in tomorrow’s paper next to a frothing lunatic in cargo shorts waving a GOD HATES FAGS sign. Inside there was an epic line at the marriage counter, mostly fags and dykes of all ages, along with a slew of young straight couples, mostly Latino, who seemed bewildered by the nature of the day’s crowd. The older men in front of us told us they got married a few months ago, but when their marriage certificate arrived in the mail, they noticed the signatures had been botched by their officiant. They were now desperately hoping for a re-do, so that they could stay officially married no matter what happened at the polls. Contrary to what the Internet had promised, the chapel was all booked up, so all the couples in line were going to have to go elsewhere to get an official ceremony of some kind after finishing their paperwork. We struggled to understand how a contract with the so-called secular state could mandate some kind of spiritual ritual. People who already had officiants lined up to marry them later that day offered to make their ceremonies communal, to accommodate everyone who wanted to get married before midnight. The guys in front of us invited us to join their beach wedding in Malibu. We thanked them, but instead called 411 and asked for the name of a wedding chapel in West Hollywood—isn’t that where the queers are? I have a Hollywood Chapel on Santa Monica Boulevard, the voice said. The Hollywood Chapel turned out to be a hole in the wall at the end of the block where I lived for the loneliest three years of my life. Tacky maroon velvet curtains divided the waiting room from the chapel room; both spaces were decorated with cheap gothic candelabras, fake flowers, and a peach faux finish. A drag queen at the door did triple duty as a greeter, bouncer, and witness. Reader, we married there, with the assistance of Reverend Lorelei Starbuck. Reverend Starbuck suggested we discuss the vows with her beforehand; we said they didn’t really matter. She insisted. We let them stay standard, albeit stripped of pronouns. The ceremony was rushed, but as we said our vows, we were undone. We wept, besotted with our luck, then gratefully accepted two heart-shaped lollipops with THE HOLLYWOOD CHAPEL embossed on their wrappers, rushed to pick up the little guy at day care before closing, came home and ate chocolate pudding all together in sleeping bags on the porch, looking out over our mountain.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  After Iggy is released from the hospital post-toxin, we celebrate with one of our living room dance parties, just me and the three Irish guys, so called to honor the otherwise un-addressed genetic link each of them has to Irish stock. We play “Tightrope” by Janelle Monáe over and over again (after years of noise metal, Harry now also keeps abreast of the Top 40, so that he can discuss the finer points of the new Katy Perry, Daft Punk, or Lorde). Iggy’s big brother holds him by the armpits and spins him around in a wild circle while we scramble to make sure Iggy’s chubby legs don’t hit any windows or end tables. As one might expect for brothers seven years apart, they almost always play too rough for my liking. But he loves it! his brother says whenever I tell him to take the heavy faux-fur blanket off Iggy’s head for a moment, so we can be sure he hasn’t smothered. But for the most part, he’s right. Iggy loves it. Iggy loves playing with his brother and his brother loves playing with Iggy in ways I could never have dreamt. His brother especially loves dragging Iggy around his schoolyard, bragging about how soft his little brother’s head is to mostly preoccupied peers. Who wants to touch a really soft head? he yells, as if hawking wares. It stresses me out to watch them play, but it also makes me feel like I’ve finally done something unequivocally good. That I’ve finally done my stepson an unequivocal good. He’s mine, all mine, he says as he scoops Iggy up and runs off with him to another room. Don’t produce and don’t reproduce, my friend said. But really there is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production. No lack, only desiring machines. Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration. When all the mythologies have been set aside, we can see that, children or no children, the joke of evolution is that it is a teleology without a point, that we, like all animals, are a project that issues in nothing. But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don’t know. I know we’re still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSParts of this book appeared, in different forms, as a talk for Tendencies (a series in honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick held at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, cu-rated by Tim Trace Peterson); as a zine for A. L. Steiner’s 2012 Puppies and Babies installation (published by Otherwild); in the magazines jubilat, Tin House, and Flaunt; and in the anthology After Montaigne (University of Georgia Press, 2015). This book was supported throughout by a Literature grant from the Creative Capital Foundation, for which I remain grateful.

• From Another Country (1962)

  I’m looking for a new man. But I guess I came to the wrong store.” “You may have to wait for a fire sale,” said Vivaldo. Cass turned to Rufus and put her hand on his arm. “It’s nice to have you back,” she said. Her large brown eyes looked directly into his. “Are you all right? We’ve all missed you.” He shrank involuntarily from her touch and her tone. He wanted to thank her; he said, nodding and trying to smile, “I’m fine, Cass.” And then: “It’s kind of nice to be back.” She grinned. “Do you know what I realize every time I see you? That we’re very much alike.” She turned back to Vivaldo. “I don’t see your aging mistress anywhere. Are you looking for a new woman? If so, you too have come to the wrong store.” “I haven’t seen Jane for a hell of a long time,” said Vivaldo, “and it might be a good idea for us never to see each other again.” But he looked troubled. “Poor Vivaldo,” Cass said. After a moment they both laughed. “Come on in the back with me. Richard’s there. He’ll be very glad to see you.” “I didn’t know you people ever set foot in this joint. Can’t you bear domestic bliss any longer?” “We’re celebrating tonight. Richard just sold his novel.” “No!” “Yes. Yes. Isn’t that marvelous?” “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Vivaldo, looking a little dazed. “Come on,” Cass said. She took Rufus by the hand and, with Vivaldo ahead of them, they began pushing their way to the back. They stumbled down the steps into the back room. Richard sat alone at a table, smoking his pipe. “Richard,” Cass cried, “look what I brought back from the dead!” “You should have let them rot there,” Richard grinned. “Come on in, sit down. I’m glad to see you.” “I’m glad to see you,” said Vivaldo, and sat down. He and Richard grinned at each other. Then Richard looked at Rufus, briefly and sharply, and looked away. Perhaps Richard had never liked Rufus as much as the others had and now, perhaps, he was blaming him for Leona. The air in the back room was close, he was aware of his odor, he wished he had taken a shower at Vivaldo’s house. He sat down. “So!” said Vivaldo, “you sold it!” He threw back his head and gave a high, whinnying laugh. “You sold it. That’s just great, baby. How does it feel?” “I held off as long as I could,” Richard said. “I kept telling them that my good friend, Vivaldo, was going to come by and look it over for me. They said, ‘That Vivaldo? He’s a poet, man, he’s bohemian! He wouldn’t read a murder novel, not if it was written by God almighty.’

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  After making love I would lie with my head on Michael’s chest listening to the song of his heart. With our open balcony door letting tropical air waft over us, we’d hear the ripened grapefruit-sized avocados fall from their trees to the ground with the softest, most earthly and comforting thud. We did not tire of one another even though we were together around the clock. And we were asked every day, usually several times, if we were on our honeymoon. “No,” we’d answer, “we’re just very happy to be together.” It was a moment out of time. No Limori to interfere with us, no fellow group members requiring Michael’s spiritual guidance or support. No energy dramas going on. For an all-too-brief moment our relationship existed outside the prison yard it had grown in, and flourished in this glimpse of freedom. I still look back on that vacation as one of the highlights of my life thus far. It was, quite simply, heaven. A week after we returned to Vancouver from Hawaii, Michael mentioned that Limori was passing through town on her way to Arizona. She and her travelling entourage, Alice, Susan and Rosemarie, would be staying for one night at a hotel in Richmond and Limori had invited Michael and me to have lunch with her. During this visit, my eyes would be opened to Michael’s relationship with Limori more than ever before. When I look back, if there ever was a moment that was the beginning of the end for me in Limori’s cult, this was it. We met the four women in the restaurant of the hotel at our appointed time. The six of us sat at a long table and chatted; early on in the conversation Michael mentioned that he and I had just returned from Hawaii but Limori barely acknowledged that he’d spoken. She held court, as ever, and spoke only about the things that mattered to her: energetic changes that were taking place and the challenging work she’d been doing for God lately. This trip she was taking to Arizona was of paramount importance and they were on a tight time schedule to get to Tucson by a certain date because God had said they should. If they didn’t arrive by that date there would be disastrous consequences for the universe. After an hour or so of chatting over coffee we had lunch, and it was during this meal that I woke up to a glimpse of Michael that I was not comfortable with. Limori had a habit of staying at the same hotels over time, and using the same restaurants. Because of her charisma and attention-getting appearance and manner, she usually became well known at these favoured places and was very often treated like royalty. At this particular hotel, she was fond of the Rueben sandwich. When our waiter brought us lunch menus, Limori noticed that the Reuben was not listed, but, being Limori, she ordered it anyway.

• From Another Country (1962)

  They had just come up from the subway and it was perhaps this ascent from darkness to day which made the streets so dazzling. They were on Broadway at Seventy-second Street, walking uptown—for Cass and Richard had moved, they were climbing that well-known ladder, Cass said. The light seemed to fall with an increased hardness, examining and inciting the city with an unsparing violence, like the violence of love, and striking from the city’s grays and blacks a splendor as of steel on steel. In the windows of tall buildings flame wavered, alive, in ice. There was a high, driving wind which brightened the eyes and the faces of the people and forced their lips slightly apart, so that they all seemed to be carrying, to some immense encounter, the bright, fragile bubble of a lifetime of expectation. Bright boys in windbreakers, some of them with girls whose hair, whose fingertips, caught the light, looked into polished delicatessen windows, the windows of shops, paused at the entrances of movie theatres to look at the gleaming stills; and their voices, which shared the harsh quality of the light which covered them, seemed breaking on the air like glass splinters. Children, in great gangs and clouds, erupted out of side streets with the sound of roller skates and came roaring down on their elders like vengeance long prepared, or the arrow released from the bow. “I’ve never seen such a day,” he said to Ida, and it was true. Everything seemed to be swollen, thrusting and shifting and changing, about to burst into music or into flame or revelation. Ida said nothing. He felt, rather then saw her smile, and he was delighted all over again by her beauty. It was as though she were wearing it especially for him. She was more friendly with him today than she had ever been. He did not feel today, as he had felt for so long, that she was evading him, locking herself away from him, forcing him to remain a stranger in her life. Today she was gayer and more natural, as though she had at last decided to come out of mourning. There was in her aspect the flavor of something won, the atmosphere of hard decisions past. She had come up from the valley.

• From Wild (2012)

  I stopped to gaze at it. It was a miserable-looking mucky pond about the size of a tennis court, but there was water in it. I was laughing with joy as I staggered down the slope toward the little dirt beach that surrounded the reservoir. I’d hiked my first twenty-mile day. I unbuckled Monster and set it onto the ground and went to the muddy shore and squatted to put my hands in the water. It was gray and warm as blood. When I moved my hands, the muck from the bottom rose in weedy tendrils and streaked the water black. I got my purifier and pumped the questionable liquid into my bottle. My purifier had remained as difficult to use as it had been that first time I used it at Golden Oak Springs, but it was especially difficult in this water, so dense with sludge that it half jammed my filter. By the time I was done filling one bottle, my arms shook with fatigue. I went to my first aid kit and took out my iodine pills and dropped a couple into the water. I’d brought the pills for just this reason, reinforcement should I ever be compelled to drink water that was likely contaminated. Even Albert had thought the iodine pills a good idea back in Kennedy Meadows, when he’d been ruthlessly tossing things into the get-rid-of pile. Albert, who’d been felled by a waterborne illness the very next day. I had to wait thirty minutes for the iodine to do its work before it was safe to drink. I was desperately thirsty, but I distracted myself by filling my other bottle with water. When I was done, I laid out my tarp on the dirt beach, stood on top of it, and took off my clothes. The wind had mellowed with the fading light. In gentle wafts, it cooled the hot patches on my naked hips. It didn’t occur to me that anyone might come along the trail. I hadn’t seen a soul all day, and even if someone did come along, I was too catatonic with dehydration and exhaustion to care. I looked at my watch. Twenty-seven minutes had passed since I’d plopped the iodine pills into my water. Usually I was starving by evening, but the idea of eating was nothing to me now. Water was my only desire. I sat on my blue tarp and drank one bottle down and then the other. The warm water tasted like iron and mud and yet seldom have I ever consumed anything so amazing. I could feel it moving into me, though even once I’d had two 32-ounce bottles, I wasn’t entirely restored. I still wasn’t hungry. I felt like I had in those first days on the trail, when I’d been so astoundingly exhausted that all my body wanted was sleep. Now all my body wanted was water. I filled my bottles again, let the iodine purify them, and drank them both.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “All right. You can plug in the record player. That’s right. Look at the cover, and all those people playing in the country. Now. Listen. You’ll hear the thunder very quietly at first, building up and up and up. Then you’ll hear it go away, as it always does . . .” “Karen says the thunder always goes gradually away,” Jacob informed the gas fire sotto voce, as we listened to the first chords of the storm sequence in the Pastoral Symphony. At first, I acted as the commentator. “Here are the raindrops. Now—the first rumble of the thunder.” “Rumble!” Jacob echoed, but after a few moments he indicated imperiously that he wanted me to be quiet, and for once I did not insist on a “please.” He began to sway thoughtfully to the music, keeping perfect time. “Whoosh! There goes the lightning! Brroom! That’s the thunder!” and as the storm died out, he sank back with a histrionic sigh of relief. As the final notes of the symphony died away, Jacob demanded that we play the other side. “All right. This time you’ll hear a cuckoo and some people dancing.” By the end of the evening, I was as enthusiastic as Jacob. We had also got through the whole of the Elgar cello concerto, which was another hit. He immediately called the cello the “deep violin,” and when I introduced him later to the Dvorak concerto, he dubbed it the “new deep violin record.” His comments showed astonishing sensitivity. “Listen, Karen, the violins are asking a question,” or, “Oh dear, this is so sad. Somebody’s crying!” But mostly he just listened quietly. A little after nine, as we got up to go to his bedroom, he stood at the door and bowed solemnly. “Thank you, Karen,” he said formally, obviously imitating one of his parents’ dinner guests. “I enjoyed this evening very much indeed.” He almost clicked his bare heels together. “In fact, it was our best evening yet, don’t you agree?” I nodded. “So can we listen to your records next time I come to your room? Please?” “Of course. Next time we’ll hear something different.” “Something different and the thunderstorm again. Please.” He grinned and became a child again. “And now—o f to the lavatory!” he yelled, and then, forestalling me, “And don’t forget to pull the chain!” Is that all you are having for dinner? It’s quite ludicrous! You must eat more than that.” Jenifer was standing at the top of the stairs, poised as if for flight and clearly uneasy. It was against her principles to proffer unwanted advice to the young. We looked at my supper tray: a boiled egg, two slices of crispbread, and a tub of plain yogurt. It seemed more than enough to me.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Over a period of ten minutes I laboriously paid out the thread through my callus so that I could walk upstairs and out to the yard. A bird was out there, a robin, paused in the air, about three feet off the lawn—I touched its spread wings, though not hard enough to dislodge it from its pausal locus. I continued to unspool my callus-thread until I had reached the street. A woman was in a station wagon with her elbow on the door. I touched her shoulder with my hand, then reached into her blouse and went under her bra and felt her hot heavy ostrich egg of a breast. Her nipple was amazingly soft. Her hair was motionlessly wind-fluffed; the speedometer said thirty miles an hour. That soft unselfconscious nipple I touched (my very first after infancy, recall) was driving down the street at thirty miles an hour while I, caressing it at leisure, stood in place! When I had learned enough about the weight and highly advanced mobility of her entire Jamaica in my coarse and threaded hand (joggling it reminded me, to my surprise, of the variable heft of a Slinky toy as you let its arched length recoil back and forth from palm to palm), I went back to the sidewalk so that I wouldn’t be run over, and I yanked on the thread until it broke. I pulled it from the hole in my callus. The station wagon sighed promptly by—I saw a flash of the woman in profile, then the back of her car, her meaninglessly specific license plate, then her turn-signal light blinking, then she turned down Southland Street, gone. In the basement, my clothes took up with their spinning as if I were still standing at the washing machine looking in. Nobody in the cars that followed seemed to notice that I had just appeared next to a bushy spray of elm-stump suckers, out of nowhere. My second successful drop-phase ended there, circa August 1969: it, like the time-transformer experiment that helped me into Miss Dobzhansky’s shirt, was apparently induplicable, depending on exactly those particular clothes and towels,those calluses, and that specific new packet of needles from the Needle Man. Tethering oneself to a clothes-washer was in any case a somewhat awkward way of forcing time into remission; although as I thought that period over on the beach towel in the yard I remembered none of the awkwardness—only how leapingly happy I had been for the rest of the day because I knew then, after all my false starts and failed attempts, that there really was more than one way to trip the universal clutch.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I closed my eye and opened it again, and this time I looked only at my glasses, and it seemed to me then that the very best thing about sunbathing was that you could open your eyes at any time and see your own companionable glasses waiting for you there so close to your face, casting their sharp shadow: I could see with extreme clarity the thick opaque ground perimeter of the rimless lenses, and the side-pieces crossed at their kneelike earward ends, and the eyelash hair, whose curve enhanced my appreciation of the curvature of the prescription, and the dust that built up so gradually that I hadn’t noticed it, and the nose-pods that were filthy but whose filth was irrelevant because nobody else could see it, and the paired reflection of some branchy blueness in the faintly scratched surface—all this nineteenth-century precision that I wore on my face every day, and never had the opportunity to study because all I did was take the glasses off at night and fold them automatically and put them by my bed and put them on again in the morning. No matter how often I closed my eyes, my corrective lenses would be there in the sun when I opened them again, waiting to be praised and seen, and seen more exactly and clearly than if I were wearing another pair of glasses to look at them, because my nearsightedness shortened the minimum focal length, making things even two inches away fully contemplable. I saw my own glasses better than anyone who didn’t need glasses could ever see them. The word clarity struck me as very fine. My happiness had a clarity to it. My happiness was optical. My happiness was the direct result of my glasses. Should I do ten pushups to celebrate the innocent clarity of my happiness? Should I do ten pushups naked? I took off my bathing suit and did ten pushups naked, and each time I lowered myself trembling down to earth, and my down-hanging soft-serve nosed unprotestingly into the towel, I turned my head so that I could see my glasses waiting there for me to appreciate them. Possibly they seemed beautiful to me in part because they were hybrids, existing halfway between knower and known, between what I saw and how I saw. I felt as if I were looking at my own sense of sight, even at myself, when I looked at them.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  There are many recurring images in these collections of prime masturbatory material: the two-women-and-one-man fantasy, the two-men-and-one-woman fantasy, the woman-watching-two-men fantasy, the one-woman-and-a-dog fantasy. “Another fantasy has to do with bratwurst …” The books taken as a whole seem to represent a kind of oneupmanship of imagination, a beating-the-bush game. As a window on the American imagination—self-selected as they are—Friday’s fantasies are chock full of the American porn dream: endless sex, repetitive acts of taboo-breaking, huge erections, enormous orgasms, power over and submission under authority figures—in other words, all the American pioneer elements of youth and control, robust health and infinite desirability. They are cocky, knowing, explosively pubescent. It is as though the motto of the American sexual imagination were that old Avis chestnut: We Try Harder. Just as there are many things we want to dream about but don’t actually want to experience in life, there are things we do in sex with great enthusiasm which would make boring fantasies. (They still make good memories, though.) One remembers good sex in the broken way of dreams. Any effective fantasy has to capture that quality of suspension—of sex taking place in a separate, special environment outside the ordinary realm. Or in an ordinary realm made strange by the sudden presence of sex. I am particularly fond of one described by Norma Jean Almodovar, an ex-prostitute in Los Angeles who organizes for COYOTE. She had a client who was crazy about Julia Child, and willing to pay her hundreds of dollars to shop for a good whole chicken, put on an apron and, in Julia’s voice and manner, “cook” it for him. “ ‘Notice its pale pink flesh, tender but firm to the touch,’ ” Norma would say as she pretended to prepare the chicken and he wiggled in delight on a chair nearby. “ ‘Oh, look at that butter! Doesn’t that look good! Let’s stick our impeccably clean finger in there and get a taste of that sweet butter. Mmmm, isn’t that yummy! I just love to lick the juices off my fingers, don’t you?” Inevitably he would reach orgasm as she started to “baste” the cooking chicken. “I always wondered what he did with the chickens after each session.” Bon appétit!

• From Another Country (1962)

  Then he joined the line, and moved slowly toward the door. The hostesses stood there, smiling and saying good-bye. The sun was bright on their faces, and on the faces of the disembarking passengers; they seemed, as they turned and disappeared, to be stepping into a new and healing light. He held his newspapers under one arm, shifted his package from hand to hand, straightened his belt, trembling. The hostess with whom he had flirted was nearest the door. “Au revoir,” she said, with the bright and generous and mocking smile possessed by so many of his countrywomen. He suddenly realized that he would never see her again. It had not occurred to him, until this moment, that he could possibly have left behind him anything which he might, one day, long for and need, with all his heart. “Bon courage,” she said. He smiled and said, “Merci, mademoiselle. Au revoir!” And he wanted to say, Vous êtes très jolie, but it was too late, he had hit the light, the sun glared at him, and everything wavered in the heat. He started down the extraordinary steps. When he hit the ground, a voice above him said, “Bonjour, mon gar. Soyez le bienvenue.” He looked up. Eric leaned on the rail of the observation deck, grinning, wearing an open white shirt and khaki trousers. He looked very much at ease, at home, thinner than he had been, with his short hair spinning and flaming about his head. Yves looked up joyously, and waved, unable to say anything. Eric. And all his fear left him, he was certain, now, that everything would be all right. He whistled to himself as he followed the line which separated him from the Americans, into the examination hall. But he passed his examination with no trouble, and in a very short time; his passport was eventually stamped and handed back to him, with a grin and a small joke, the meaning but not the good nature of which escaped him. Then he was in a vaster hall, waiting for his luggage, with Eric above him, smiling down on him through glass. Then even his luggage belonged to him again, and he strode through the barriers, more high-hearted than he had ever been as a child, into that city which the people from heaven had made their home. Istanbul, Dec. 10, 1961 JAMES BALDWINJames Baldwin was born in 1924. He is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among the awards he received are a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant. He was made Commander of the Legion of Honor in 1986. He died in 1987. [image file=image_rsrc400.jpg] ALSO BY JAMES BALDWIN Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) Notes of a Native Son (1955) Giovanni’s Room (1956) Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961) Another Country (1962) The Fire Next Time (1963)

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “Briefly,” said Joyce from the bathroom. She was unbraiding her hair. “We were in a boat in the middle of this lake of sulfuric acid,” I happily began, “and you were wearing your flying blue brassiere …” Joyce has saved me, for the time being. I haven’t taken a stranger’s clothes off in weeks now. I’m trying to interest a publisher in my autobiography. But even if nobody wants to publish it, I could still have, say, a hundred copies made up. I’ll typeset them myself. I’ll get Copy Cop to bind them. I’ll design a jacket that uses the logo of some flush, big-name publisher like Random House. Yes, I’ll put that little stylized house on the bottom of the spine of my book. I’ll use a color copier to make the cover. It will look like a real book! And then, assuming I get my Fold-powers back, I’ll go to Waterstone’s or the Avenue Victor Hugo and Drop and put this book in people’s hands just as they think their fingers are closing on some other, real, book. They will read me. Word will spread. The Fermata, my Fermata, the keeper of all my secrets, will be a secret no longer. BOOKS BY NICHOLSON BAKER“It’s hard to find an analogue for Baker’s combination of intellectual playfulness and lyricism. The music of Erik Satie comes to mind. Also peanut butter and bacon sandwiches—something weird and wonderful about which you can only say, Try it. You’ll like it.’ ” —Philadelphia Inquirer THE FERMATA Outrageously arousing, acrobatically stylish, The Fermata is a graphic, but good-natured peep deep into the ethical interstices of time, testosterone, and the furtive male imagination. Fiction/0-679-75933-6 THE MEZZANINE Startlingly inventive and filled with offbeat wit, this wondrous novel turns a ride up the escalator of an office building into a dazzling meditation on our most familiar relationships with objects and people we usually take for granted. Fiction/0-679-72576-8 ROOM TEMPERATURE Nicholson Baker transforms a young father’s feeding-time reverie with a newborn baby into a dazzling catalog of the minutiae of domestic love. Fiction/0-679-73440-6 U AND I Baker constructs a splendid edifice that is at once a tribute to John Updike and a disarmingly, often hilariously frank self-examination—a work that lays bare both the pettiest and the most exalted transactions between writers and their readers. Nonfiction/Literature/0-679-73575-5 VOX Vox remaps the territory of sex—sex solitary and telephonic, lyrical and profane, comfortable and dangerous, It is an erotic classic that places Nicholson Baker firmly in the first rank of major American writers. Fiction/0-679-74211-5 [image file=image_rsrc1BK.jpg] VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order: 1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).

• From Wild (2012)

  One night I made camp in a grassy spot from which I could see the evidence of those fires: a hazy scrim of smoke blanketing the westward view. I sat in my chair for an hour, looking out across the land as the sun faded into the smoke. I’d seen a lot of breathtaking sunsets in my evenings on the PCT, but this one was more spectacular than any in a while, the light made indistinct, melting into a thousand shades of yellow, pink, orange, and purple over the waves of green land. I could’ve been reading Dubliners or falling off to sleep in the cocoon of my sleeping bag, but on this night the sky was too mesmerizing to leave. As I watched it, I realized I’d passed the midpoint of my hike. I’d been out on the trail for fifty-some days. If all went as planned, in another fifty days I’d be done with the PCT. Whatever was going to happen to me out here would have happened. “Oh remember the Red River Valley and the cowboy who loved you so true …,’ ” I sang, my voice trailing off, not knowing the rest of the words. Images of Kyle’s little face and hands came to me, reverberations of his flawless voice. I wondered if I would ever be a mother and what kind of “horrible situation” Kyle’s mother was in, where his father might be and where mine was. What is he doing right this minute? I’d thought occasionally throughout my life, but I was never able to imagine it. I didn’t know my own father’s life. He was there, but invisible, a shadow beast in the woods; a fire so far away it’s nothing but smoke. That was my father: the man who hadn’t fathered me. It amazed me every time. Again and again and again. Of all the wild things, his failure to love me the way he should have had always been the wildest thing of all. But on that night as I gazed out over the darkening land fifty-some nights out on the PCT, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to be amazed by him anymore. There were so many other amazing things in this world. They opened up inside of me like a river. Like I didn’t know I could take a breath and then I breathed. I laughed with the joy of it, and the next moment I was crying my first tears on the PCT. I cried and I cried and I cried. I wasn’t crying because I was happy. I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I wasn’t crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full. Of those fifty-some hard days on the trail and of the 9,760 days that had come before them too.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Everyone is watching down there intently, in a kind of happy panic. Someone asks if I want to feel the baby's head, and I don't, I don't know why. Then a minute later, I do. Here he comes. It feels big but I feel big enough. Then suddenly they tell me to stop pushing. I don't know why. Harry tells me that the doctor is stretching my perineum in circles around the baby's head, trying to keep the skin from tearing. Hold, they say, don't push, but "puff." Puff puff puff. Then they say I can push. I push. I feel him come out, all of him, all at once. I also feel the shit that had been bedeviling me all through pregnancy and labor come out too. My first feeling is that I could run a thousand miles, I feel amazing, total and complete relief, like everything that was wrong is now right. And then, suddenly, Iggy. Here he comes onto me, rising. He is perfect, he is right. I notice he has my mouth, incredible. He is my gentle friend. He is on me, screaming.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  When Iggy had the toxin and we lay with him in his hospital crib, I knew—in a flood of fear and panic—what I know now, in our blessed return to the land of health, which is that my time with him has been the happiest time of my life. Its happiness has been of a more palpable and undeniable and unmitigated quality than any I’ve ever known. For it isn’t just moments of happiness, which is all I thought we got. It’s a happiness that spreads. For this reason I am tempted to call it a lasting happiness, but I know I won’t take it with me when I go. At best, I hope to impart it to Iggy, to allow him to feel that he created it, which, in many ways, he has. Babies do not remember being held well—what they remember is the traumatic experience of not being held well enough. Some might read in this a recipe for the classic ungratefulness of children—after everything I’ve done for you, and so on. To me, at the moment anyway, it is a tremendous relief, an incitement to give Iggy no memory, save the sense, likely unconscious, of having once been gathered together, made to feel real. That is what my mother did for me. I’d almost forgotten. And now, I think I can say— I want you to know, you were thought of as possible—never as certain, but always as possible—not in any single moment, but over many months, even years, of trying, of waiting, of calling—when, in a love sometimes sure of itself, sometimes shaken by bewilderment and change, but always committed to the charge of ever-deepening understanding—two human animals, one of whom is blessedly neither male nor female, the other of whom is female (more or less), deeply, doggedly, wildly wanted you to be.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I had come to hate the long dull road which led to my house but which always seemed to be heading nowhere. Yet it was while I was toiling up this hill one day, weighed down with plastic bags of uninspiring groceries, that an idea came to me, and (again without realizing it) I turned another corner. I needed to cheer myself up, start a new project, and this time I should do something more positive. For three years I had steeped myself in the deadly hostility that had separated Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Why not study something that they held in common? The Abrahamic faiths worshiped the same God, for instance. Why not study the way they had all seen this God over the centuries? Why not write a history of God? 8. To Turn Again The decision to write A History of God seemed to come out of the blue, and it changed my life so radically that, if I were a traditional believer, I might be tempted to call it an inspiration. In Coleridge’s poem the ancient mariner, adrift on a desolate ocean and apparently eaten up with bitterness and despair, found himself watching the water snakes coiling, writhing, and gleaming around his becalmed ship. O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gusht from my heart, And I bless’d them unaware! Sure my kind Saint took pity on me, And I bless’d them unaware. Redeemed by a spontaneous ecstasy that took him out of himself and toward his fellow creatures, the mariner discovered that he could actually pray again. And immediately the albatross hanging around his neck like a millstone, the cause of all his misery, “fell off, and sank / Like lead into the sea.” The mariner attributes this impulse of love to the prompting of his patron saint, but Coleridge, who was, I believe, the first person to use the word “unconscious” in its modern, psychological sense, stresses that it came upon him “unaware.” The mariner did not know what he was doing but was saved by the hidden workings of his psyche, which knew instinctively what was best for him. My own experience was similar, but while the mariner was redeemed in an instant, as tends to happen in myths and fairy tales, it took me much longer to go through the process. I too was “unaware” of what was happening to me. There was no sudden road-to-Damascus illumination, and it was only in retrospect that I realized that the decision to write about God had been a defining moment. With no clear understanding of what I was about, I had taken the first step down a path that would lead me in a wholly unexpected direction.