Loneliness

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 Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding. Everything which once I thought I had understood crumbled, and I was left with a clean slate. My friends, on the other hand, entrenched themselves more solidly in the little ditch of understanding which they had dug for themselves. They died comfortably in their little bed of understanding, to become useful citizens of the world. I pitied them, and in short order I deserted them one by one, without the slightest regret. What was there then in this book which could mean so much to me and yet remain obscure? I come back to the word creative . I am sure that the whole mystery lies in the realization of the meaning of this word. When I think of the book now, and the way I approached it, I think of a man going through the rites of initiation. The disorientation and reorientation which comes with the initiation into any mystery is the most wonderful experience which it is possible to have. Everything which the brain has labored for a lifetime to assimilate, categorize and synthesize has to be taken apart and reordered. Moving day for the soul! And of course it’s not for a day, but for weeks and months that this goes on. You meet a friend on the street by chance, one whom you haven’t seen for several weeks, and he has become an absolute stranger to you. You give him a few signals from your new perch and if he doesn’t cotton you pass him up—for good . It’s exactly like mopping up a battlefield: all those who are hopelessly disabled and agonizing you dispatch with one swift blow of your club. You move on, to new fields of battle, to new triumphs or defeats. But you move! And as you move the world moves with you, with terrifying exactitude. You seek out new fields of operation, new specimens of the human race whom you patiently instruct and equip with the new symbols. You choose sometimes those whom you would never have looked at before. You try everybody and everything within range, provided they are ignorant of the revelation. It was in this fashion that I found myself sitting in the busheling room of my father’s establishment, reading aloud to the Jews who were working there. Reading to them from this new Bible in the way that Paul must have talked to the disciples.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I intended to ask her to marry me, but the story I had framed like a dope came out of my lips so naturally that I believed it myself, and so I said good-by and I walked off, and she stood there looking after me and I felt her eyes pierce me through and through, I heard her howling inside, but like an automaton I kept on walking and finally I turned the corner and that was the end of it. Good-by! Like that. Like in a coma. And I meant to say come to me! Come to me because I can’t live any more without you! I am so weak, so rocky, that I can scarcely climb down the El steps. Now I know what’s happened—I’ve crossed the boundary line! This Bible that I’ve been carrying around with me is to instruct me, initiate me into a new way of life. The world I knew is no more, it is dead, finished, cleaned up. And everything that I was is cleaned up with it. I am a carcass getting an injection of new life. I am bright and glittery, rabid with new discoveries, but in the center it is still leaden, still slag. I begin to weep—right there on the El stairs. I sob aloud, like a child. Now it dawns on me with full clarity: you are alone in the world! You are alone . . . alone . . . alone. It is bitter to be alone . . . bitter, bitter, bitter, bitter. There is no end to it, it is unfathomable, and it is the lot of every man on earth, but especially mine . . . especially mine. Again the metamorphosis. Again everything totters and careens. I am in the dream again, the painful, delirious, pleasurable, maddening dream of beyond the boundary. I am standing in the center of the vacant lot, but my home I do not see. I have no home. The dream was a mirage. There never was a house in the midst of the vacant lot. That’s why I was never able to enter it. My home is not in this world, nor in the next. I am a man without a home, without a friend, without a wife. I am a monster who belongs to a reality which does not exist yet. Ah, but it does exist, it will exist, I am sure of it. I walk now rapidly, head down, muttering to myself. I’ve forgotten about my rendezvous so completely that I never even noticed whether I walked past her or not. Probably I did. Probably I looked right at her and didn’t recognize her. Probably she didn’t recognize me either. I am mad, mad with pain, mad with anguish. I am desperate. But I am not lost. No, there is a reality to which I belong. It’s far away, very far away. I may walk from now till doomsday with head down and never find it.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  “Dwight,” my mother said, “you did tell him.” He said, “I don’t make the rules, Rosemary.” I started to argue, but my mother gave my shoulder a hard squeeze. When I glanced up at her she shook her head. Dwight couldn’t figure out how the rifle fit together, so I did it for him while he looked on. “That,” he said, “is the most stupidly constructed firearm I have ever seen, bar none.” A man with a clipboard came up to us. He was collecting entry fees. After Dwight paid him he started to move off, but my mother stopped him and held out some money. He looked at it, then down at his clipboard. “Wolff,” she said. “Rosemary Wolff.” Still studying his clipboard, he asked if she wanted to shoot. She said she did. He looked over at Dwight, who busied himself with the rifle. Then he dropped his eyes again and mumbled something about the rules. “This is an NRA club, isn’t it?” my mother asked. He nodded. “Well, I am a dues-paying member of the NRA, and that gives me the right to participate in the activities of other chapters when I’m away from my own.” She said all of this very pleasantly. Finally he took the money. “You’ll be the only woman shooting,” he said. She smiled. He wrote her name down. “Why not?” he said suddenly, uncertainly. “Why the heck not.” He gave her a number and wandered off to another group of shooters. Dwight’s number was called early. He fired his ten rounds in rapid succession, hardly pausing for breath, and got a rotten score. A couple of his shots hadn’t even hit the paper. When his score was announced he handed my mother the rifle. “Where’d you get this blunderbuss, anyway?” he asked me. My mother answered. “A friend of mine gave it to him.” “Some friend,” he said. “That thing is a menace. You ought to get rid of it. It shoots wild.” He added, “The bore is probably rusted out.” “The bore is perfect,” I said. My mother’s number should have been called after Dwight’s, but it wasn’t. One man after another went up to the line while she stood there watching. I got antsy and cold. After a long wait I walked over to the river and tried to skip rocks. A mist drifted over the water. My fingers grew numb but I kept at it until the sound of rifle fire stopped, leaving a silence in which I felt too much alone. When I came back my mother had finished her turn. She was standing around with some of the men. Others were putting their rifles in their cars, passing bottles back and forth, calling to each other as they drove away into the dusk. “You missed me!” she said when I came up. I asked her how she had done. “Dwight brought in a ringer,” one of the men said. “Did you win?” She nodded. “You won?

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He couldn’t tell at first exactly what it was, but something was not the same, they weren’t waving and they just seemed to be standing staring at Eddie Dugan and himself like they weren’t even there. It was as if they were ghosts like little Johnny Heanon or Billy Morris come back from the dead. And he couldn’t understand what was happening. Maybe, he thought, the banners, the ones the boy scouts and their fathers had put up, the ones telling the whole town who Eddie Dugan and he were, maybe, he thought, they had dropped off into the street and no one knew who they were and that’s why no one was waving. If the signs had been there, they’d have been flooding into the streets, stomping their feet and screaming and cheering the way they did for him and Eddie at the Little League games. They’d have been swelling into the streets, trying to shake their hands just like in the movies, when the boys had come home from the other wars and everyone went crazy throwing streamers of paper and confetti and hugging their sweethearts, sweeping them off their feet and kissing them for what seemed forever. If they really knew who they were, he thought, they’d be roaring and clapping and shouting. But they were quiet and all he heard whenever the band stopped playing was the soft purr of the American Legion’s big Cadillac as it moved slowly down the street. Even though it seemed very difficult acting like heroes, he and Eddie tried waving a couple of times, but after a while he realized that the staring faces weren’t going to change and he couldn’t help but feel like he was some kind of animal in a zoo or that he and Eddie were on display in some trophy case. And the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to get the hell out of the back seat of the Cadillac and go back home to his room where he knew it was safe and warm. The parade had hardly begun but already he felt trapped, just like in the hospital. The tall commander turned down Broadway now, past Sparky the barber’s place, then down to Massapequa Avenue, past the American Legion hall where the cannon they had played on as kids sat right across from the Long Island Railroad station. He thought of the times he and Bobby and Richie Castiglia used to sit on that thing with their plastic machine guns and army-navy store canteens full of lemonade; they’d sit and wait until a train pulled into the Massapequa station, and then they’d all scream “Ambush!” with Castiglia standing up bravely on the cannon barrel, riddling the train’s windows. He was beginning to feel very lonely. He kept looking over at Eddie. Why hadn’t they waved, he thought.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  While he was talking about fingerprints I might be taking stock of a coping or a cornice on a little red brick building just back of his black hat; I would get to thinking of the day the cornice had been installed, who might be the man who had designed it and why had he made it so ugly, so like every other lousy, rotten cornice which we had passed from the East Side up to Harlem and beyond Harlem, if we wanted to push on, beyond New York, beyond the Mississippi, beyond the Grand Canyon, beyond the Mojave Desert, everywhere in America where there are buildings for man and woman. It seemed absolutely crazy to me that each day of my life I had to sit and listen to other people’s stories, the banal tragedies of poverty and distress, of love and death, of yearning and disillusionment. If, as it happened, there came to me each day at least fifty men, each pouring out his tale of woe, and with each one I had to be silent and “receive,” it was only natural that at some point along the line I had to close my ears, had to harden my heart. The tiniest little morsel was sufficient for me; I could chew on it and digest it for days and weeks. Yet I was obliged to sit there and be inundated, to get out at night again and receive more, to sleep listening, to dream listening. They streamed in from all over the world, from every stratum of society, speaking a thousand different tongues, worshiping different gods, obeying different laws and customs. The tale of the poorest among them was a huge tome, and yet if each and every one were written out at length it might all be compressed to the size of the Ten Commandments, it might all be recorded on the back of a postage stamp, like the Lord’s Prayer. Each day I was so stretched that my hide seemed to cover the whole world; and when I was alone, when I was no longer obliged to listen, I shrank to the size of a pinpoint. The greatest delight, and it was a rare one, was to walk the streets alone . . . to walk the streets at night when no one was abroad and to reflect on the silence that surrounded me. Millions lying on their backs, dead to the world, their mouths wide open and nothing but snores emanating from them. Walking amidst the craziest architecture ever invented, wondering why and to what end, if every day from these wretched hovels or magnificent palaces there had to stream forth an army of men itching to unravel their tale of misery. In a year, reckoning it modestly, I received twenty-five thousand tales; in two years fifty thousand; in four years it would be a hundred thousand; in ten years I would be stark mad. Already I knew enough people to populate a good-sized town.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Some of the veterans he met were planning to stay at the Village of the Sun until they died. He could see there were a lot of reasons not to go back to the States again. A lot of the men would play cards all day long and some would drink heavily and have to be carried back into their rooms. They got pretty loud during the card games with their women hanging over their shoulders, big-busted Mexican women. It was something you would never see back home. Some of the others just stayed in their little rooms writing letters to people or reading the newspaper. It was a week before he got really restless, before he got tired of sitting around the Village. It was a Sunday and he asked Rahilio if he could go to church with him and his children. It was very quiet in the little Spanish chapel, the men sitting on one side and the women on the other. He listened to the small birds that flew above the altar during the Mass, chirping and singing. After church he told Rahilio he wanted to go into the city. * * * He was lonely and he wanted to move around. . . . He had come almost three thousand miles and now, finally, he was riding in a cab and maybe in one of the houses in the city he was going to find a woman like the women they had told him about, a woman who would love him and make his broken body come alive again, who would lie down next to the disfigurement and love it like there was not anything the matter with him at all. He cried inside for a woman, any woman, to lie close to him. In the hospital there were so many times when he had looked at the nurses and all the visitors and it would seem so crazy that the same government that provided a big check for the wounded men couldn’t provide someone warm, someone who cared for him. The cabdriver left him off at the Hilton Hotel. For a long time after that he had lunch there every day. After lunch he would wheel all over the city, taking cabs and pushing the chair as far as he could until his arms began to ache. There would always be people to help him up and down the big Mexican curbs. There were beautiful cathedrals and statues everywhere he looked, and the sky was clear most of the time. Finally one afternoon he went up to the guy who worked behind the desk at the Hilton and asked him where the biggest whorehouse in town was. The guy behind the desk wrote down the address for him and he wheeled out to the street and caught a cab. * * * The girl was very beautiful and the jukebox was playing as she pushed his chair into the small room.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He couldn’t tell at first exactly what it was, but something was not the same, they weren’t waving and they just seemed to be standing staring at Eddie Dugan and himself like they weren’t even there. It was as if they were ghosts like little Johnny Heanon or Billy Morris come back from the dead. And he couldn’t understand what was happening. Maybe, he thought, the banners, the ones the boy scouts and their fathers had put up, the ones telling the whole town who Eddie Dugan and he were, maybe, he thought, they had dropped off into the street and no one knew who they were and that’s why no one was waving. If the signs had been there, they’d have been flooding into the streets, stomping their feet and screaming and cheering the way they did for him and Eddie at the Little League games. They’d have been swelling into the streets, trying to shake their hands just like in the movies, when the boys had come home from the other wars and everyone went crazy throwing streamers of paper and confetti and hugging their sweethearts, sweeping them off their feet and kissing them for what seemed forever. If they really knew who they were, he thought, they’d be roaring and clapping and shouting. But they were quiet and all he heard whenever the band stopped playing was the soft purr of the American Legion’s big Cadillac as it moved slowly down the street. Even though it seemed very difficult acting like heroes, he and Eddie tried waving a couple of times, but after a while he realized that the staring faces weren’t going to change and he couldn’t help but feel like he was some kind of animal in a zoo or that he and Eddie were on display in some trophy case. And the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to get the hell out of the back seat of the Cadillac and go back home to his room where he knew it was safe and warm. The parade had hardly begun but already he felt trapped, just like in the hospital. The tall commander turned down Broadway now, past Sparky the barber’s place, then down to Massapequa Avenue, past the American Legion hall where the cannon they had played on as kids sat right across from the Long Island Railroad station. He thought of the times he and Bobby and Richie Castiglia used to sit on that thing with their plastic machine guns and army-navy store canteens full of lemonade; they’d sit and wait until a train pulled into the Massapequa station, and then they’d all scream “Ambush!” with Castiglia standing up bravely on the cannon barrel, riddling the train’s windows. He was beginning to feel very lonely. He kept looking over at Eddie. Why hadn’t they waved, he thought.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I wrote a poem once at my rolltop desk. It was called “Hurricanes/in the eye of the hurricane.” I wrote about the loneliness and the silence of my house, how being there was like a sudden pause in the middle of a wild swirling storm. A lot of times I couldn’t take it. I’d get into my car and drive as far and fast as I could. But after a while I learned to stay by myself for a long time. * * * The time since the war was passing so fast now and he wasn’t in the hospital anymore and they weren’t smiling down by his bedside and the priests weren’t there and he wasn’t in the streets speaking out against the men who had made all the terrible things that happened to him possible. They weren’t cheering and clapping or even putting the handcuffs on him anymore. He wasn’t in jail and in jail at least he knew there were other people around to talk to but now there was no one and all the cheering and all the clapping had stopped and now he was more alone than he had ever been in his life. What kind of miserable life was this, no friends, no legs, people staring at him wherever he went. The depression sometimes was awesome, like he was drowning in it, and no matter how hard he tried he wasn’t ever getting out. He had tried so hard for years to hold on. He had even sometimes invented things that weren’t true, made believe so the feelings would go away. But now he wasn’t making things up anymore, he was too tired to do that, in too much pain. Where were his legs that used to run? he thought. He wanted people around him. He wanted someone to call him on the phone. He wanted just one friend he could talk to about the real things, the painful truths about his miserable existence that would make most people walk away from him —“Sorry I gotta run now. I’m late already.” Other people always seemed able to laugh and joke about the whole thing, but they weren’t the one who was living in this angry numb corpse, they didn’t have to wake up each morning and feel the dead weight of these legs and strain the yellow urine into the ugly rubber bag, they didn’t have to put on the rubber gloves each morning over the bathroom bowl and dig into his rear end to clean the brown chunks of shit out. They lived very easy lives, why their lives were disgustingly easy compared to his and they acted sometimes like everything was equal and he was the same as them, but he knew they were lying and especially the women, when they lay with him and told him how much they loved his body, how it wasn’t any different than any other man’s, that they didn’t care if his dick was numb and dead and he couldn’t

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  They talked a little more; Steve said the quality of a text depended largely on the frame of reference you imposed on it. Connie disagreed. They made a few jokes and Connie went back to her cubicle. She sat quietly as her jaw woke up, and watched the coarsely sweatered back of an assistant move from side to side at her desk. Another assistant, a young, pretty woman who believed in what she was doing, distracted her by walking from one spot in the office to another, and Connie reflected that in a better state of mind she would be comforted by the slow, predictable sight of people engaged in meaningful activity. Now it induced ragged reverberations of her nitrous oxide experience, and she had an exhausting flashback of her haggard self carrying large chunks of her life, compressed into brightly colored packages that were marked “Constance the writer,” “Constance the social being,” “Constance as part of a couple”—all layering plain Constance alone in her apartment, waiting for Deana in the dark, under a blanket, arms wrapped around herself. She saw each marked package as a weight she carried back and forth, setting one down in a random spot so she could pick up another and stagger off in a new direction. She put her head down on her desk. On her way home from work she decided that she would go to Franklin’s party. “Why?” asked Deana. “After all this talk?” “Because I feel like I need to end a cycle or something. Maybe I can get drunk and sock Alice.” “You’re not serious, I hope.” “No. But I might stare her down.” “Well, I’m afraid I can’t go with you if it’s tomorrow. I have to have dinner with my mother at nine and after that I won’t be fit for human society.” — The party had apparently reached its peak an hour or two before she came. People looked as though they were bunched according to who grabbed whose arm on their way to the bathroom, and were leaning against walls, the women nodding their heads a lot. Some of them turned toward her and smiled with vague goodwill as she walked to the center of the room. She thought she recognized the lone couple dancing in a corner, eyes lowered in benign concentration as they shifted their weight from hip to hip and jogged their hands around their waists. She did recognize the man with hysterically bright blue eyes who was aggressively pacing around with a handful of greasy peanuts, and looked the other way. “Connie, yo!” Franklin appeared with his hair in his eyes and his pores flowering magnanimously. “You came!” They groped for each other’s hands and darted at each other’s cheeks with a lot of “mm!” sounds. “Where’s your girlfriend?”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Her life in New York had been erratic and unconnected. She had lived hand to mouth most of the time, working a series of menial jobs that made her feel isolated and unseen, yet strangely safe. She ate dinners of rice and beans or boxes of Chinese takeout food on the floor. She stayed up until seven or eight in the morning working on her manuscripts, and then slept all day. She went to Harlem to interview voodoo practitioners. She went to nightclubs and after-hours bars, standing on the periphery of scene after scene with Leisha or some other, less central girlfriend. She took long walks late at night, especially in winter, loving the sound of her own muted footfalls, the slush-clogged city noises, and the sight of the bundled, shuffling drunks staggering home, looking up in surprise to see a young woman walking alone at 4:00 a.m. The desolation and cruelty of the city winter horrified and fascinated her. She was astonished by the contrasting layers of existence sitting so closely atop one another, and the desperate survival of bag people and misfits wedged into the comfortless air pockets and crawl spaces between layers. During her first year in the city she gave spare change to anyone who asked her. Eventually she gave money only if she happened to have some in her hand when she was asked. Her relationships with men at that time were disturbing; she had conversation after conversation with Leisha, agonizing over why she always wound up with these terrible people. She remembered them all in an embarrassing blur: the pretty, delicate drug addict, the masochistic Chinese boy, the pretentious Italian journalist, the married professor, the pompous law student, the half-crazy club owner who almost strangled her one night with his belt. The guy she met and screwed in the rest room of some tiny East Village bar, the one who later involved her in an exhausting ménage à trois with his Italian girlfriend. Leisha had violently (and primly, Susan thought) disapproved of that one. Strangely enough, after fleeing what she contemptuously labeled “conventional” and “suburban” for anything “unconventional” she could safely lay her hands on, Leisha had performed an indignant and sudden about-face, calling the bohemia she’d adopted “pretentious” and “fake.” When Susan didn’t follow, Leisha had said things like “It’s just horribly painful to even be around you when you’re involved in this adolescent, self-destructive garbage.”

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I didn’t make any friends in Highlands North for the longest time. I had an easier time making friends in Eden Park, to be honest. In the suburbs, everyone lived behind walls. The white neighborhoods of Johannesburg were built on white fear—fear of black crime, fear of black uprisings and reprisals—and as a result virtually every house sits behind a six-foot wall, and on top of that wall is electric wire. Everyone lives in a plush, fancy maximum-security prison. There is no sitting on the front porch, no saying hi to the neighbors, no kids running back and forth between houses. I’d ride my bike around the neighborhood for hours without seeing a single kid. I’d hear them, though. They were all meeting up behind brick walls for playdates I wasn’t invited to. I’d hear people laughing and playing and I’d get off my bike and creep up and peek over the wall and see a bunch of white kids splashing around in someone’s swimming pool. I was like a Peeping Tom, but for friendship. It was only after a year or so that I figured out the key to making black friends in the suburbs: the children of domestics. Many domestic workers in South Africa, when they get pregnant they get fired. Or, if they’re lucky, the family they work for lets them stay on and they can have the baby, but then the baby goes to live with relatives in the homelands. Then the black mother raises the white children, seeing her own child only once a year at the holidays. But a handful of families would let their domestics keep their children with them, living in little maids’ quarters or flatlets in the backyard. For a long time, those kids were my only friends. [image file=image_rsrc2UD.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc2UE.jpg] COLORBLINDAt Sandringham I got to know this one kid, Teddy. Funny guy, charming as hell. My mom used to call him Bugs Bunny; he had a cheeky smile with two big teeth that stuck out the front of his mouth. Teddy and I got along like a house on fire, one of those friends where you start hanging out and from that day forward you’re never apart. We were both naughty as shit, too. With Teddy, I’d finally met someone who made me feel normal. I was the terror in my family. He was the terror in his family. When you put us together it was mayhem. Walking home from school we’d throw rocks through windows, just to see them shatter, and then we’d run away. We got detention together all the time. The teachers, the pupils, the principal, everyone at school knew: Teddy and Trevor, thick as thieves.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  WHEN I FIRST MOVED to Hurricane Street it was quiet. I wanted to get away not only from Helen but from everything that reminded me of the war. I was going to grow plants and cook my own food. I had a lot of dreams about how it was going to be. I even wanted to write a book. I bought an old rolltop desk and spent an afternoon with a couple of friends going to pick it up and moving it into the house. It was a beautiful little house a block from the ocean—more a small neat shack tucked into an alleyway. The windows were wooden hurricane slats, which gave the place the appearance of always being ready for a hurricane or a big storm. There was a shower that had been adjusted for me so I could fit the wheelchair in comfortably, and I loved being so close to the ocean. I went out one afternoon and bought a big waterbed, the first one I’d ever had. I never talked too much to my neighbors, except when I was emptying garbage or something. I used to sit at the window and stare at a dog that was always on the roof of the house in front of me. After the first couple of days I gave up cooking and started eating out at the Jack-in-the-Box hamburger stands. The food was awful, but it was better to be out in the car than stuck alone in the house all the time. Sometimes I’d have terrible nightmares about the war. I’d wake up scared in my room in the middle of the night. There was no one to hold on to, just myself there inside my frozen body. I remember watching flowers bloom outside my window and feeling good when the ants would come into the house. Well, at least I’ve got some company, I thought. I wrote a poem once at my rolltop desk. It was called “Hurricanes/in the eye of the hurricane.” I wrote about the loneliness and the silence of my house, how being there was like a sudden pause in the middle of a wild swirling storm. A lot of times I couldn’t take it. I’d get into my car and drive as far and fast as I could. But after a while I learned to stay by myself for a long time. * * * The time since the war was passing so fast now and he wasn’t in the hospital anymore and they weren’t smiling down by his bedside and the priests weren’t there and he wasn’t in the streets speaking out against the men who had made all the terrible things that happened to him possible. They weren’t cheering and clapping or even putting the handcuffs on him anymore.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  “She’s got a cunt, your sister, hasn’t she?” I was about to add something else when he broke into a terrific fit of laughter. That saved the situation, for the time being. But Maxie didn’t like the idea at all deep down. All day long it bothered him, though he never referred to our conversation again. No, he was very silent that day. The only form of revenge he could think of was to urge me to swim far beyond the safety zone in the hope of tiring me out and letting me drown. I could see so clearly what was in his mind that I was possessed with the strength of ten men. Damned if I would go drown myself just because his sister like all other women happened to have a cunt. It was at Far Rockaway where this took place. After we had dressed and eaten a meal I suddenly decided that I wanted to be alone and so, very abruptly, at the corner of a street, I shook hands and said good-by. And there I was! Almost instantaneously I felt alone in the world, alone as one feels only in moments of extreme anguish. I think I was picking my teeth absentmindedly when this wave of loneliness hit me full on, like a tornado. I stood there on the street corner and sort of felt myself all over to see if I had been hit by something. It was inexplicable, and at the same time it was very wonderful, very exhilarating, like a double tonic, I might say. When I say that I was at Far Rockaway I mean that I was standing at the end of the earth, at a place called Xanthos, if there be such a place, and surely there ought to be a word like this to express no place at all. If Rita had come along then I don’t think I would have recognized her. I had become an absolute stranger standing in the very midst of my own people. They looked crazy to me, my people, with their newly sunburned faces and their flannel trousers and their clockwork stockings. They had been bathing like myself because it was a pleasant, healthy recreation and now like myself they were full of sun and food and a little heavy with fatigue. Up until this loneliness hit me I too was a bit weary, but suddenly, standing there completely shut off from the world, I woke up with a start. I became so electrified that I didn’t dare move for fear I would charge like a bull or start to climb the wall of a building or else dance and scream. Suddenly I realized that all this was because I was really a brother to Dostoevski, that perhaps I was the only man in all America who knew what he meant in writing those books.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  When I was thirteen my dad moved to Cape Town, and we lost touch. We’d been losing touch for a while, for a couple of reasons. I was a teenager. I had a whole other world I was dealing with now. Videogames and computers meant more to me than spending time with my parents. Also, my mom had married Abel. He was incensed by the idea of my mom being in contact with her previous love, and she decided it was safer for everyone involved not to test his anger. I went from seeing my dad every Sunday to seeing him every other Sunday, maybe once a month, whenever my mom could sneak me over, same as she’d done back in Hillbrow. We’d gone from living under apartheid to living under another kind of tyranny, that of an abusive, alcoholic man. At the same time, Yeoville had started to suffer from white flight, neglect, general decline. Most of my dad’s German friends had left for Cape Town. If he wasn’t seeing me, he had no reason to stay, so he left. His leaving wasn’t anything traumatic, because it never registered that we might lose touch and never see each other again. In my mind it was just Dad’s moving to Cape Town for a bit. Whatever. Then he was gone. I stayed busy living my life, surviving high school, surviving my early twenties, becoming a comedian. My career took off quickly. I got a radio DJ gig and hosted a kids’ adventure reality show on television. I was headlining at clubs all over the country. But even as my life was moving forward, the questions about my dad were always there in the back of my mind, bubbling up to the surface now and then. “I wonder where he is. Does he think about me? Does he know what I’m doing? Is he proud of me?” When a parent is absent, you’re left in the lurch of not knowing, and it’s so easy to fill that space with negative thoughts. “They don’t care.” “They’re selfish.” My one saving grace was that my mom never spoke ill of him. She would always compliment him. “You’re good with your money. You get that from your dad.” “You have your dad’s smile.” “You’re clean and tidy like your father.” I never turned to bitterness, because she made sure I knew his absence was because of circumstance and not a lack of love. She always told me the story of her coming home from the hospital and my dad saying, “Where’s my kid? I want that kid in my life.” She’d say to me, “Don’t ever forget: He chose you.” And, ultimately, when I turned twenty-four, it was my mom who made me track him down.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  There is only one street, I must say—the continuation of the street on which I lived. I come finally to an iron bridge over the railroad yards. It is always nightfall when I reach the bridge, though it is only a short distance from the boundary line. Here I look down upon the webbed tracks, the freight stations, the tenders, the storage sheds, and as I gaze down upon this cluster of strange moving substances a process of metamorphosis takes place, just as in a dream . With the transformation and deformation I become aware that this is the old dream which I have dreamed so often. I have a wild fear that I shall wake up, and indeed I know that I will wake up shortly, just at the moment when in the midst of a great open space I am about to walk into the house which contains something of the greatest importance for me. Just as I go toward this house the lot on which I am standing begins to grow vague at the edges, to dissolve, to vanish. Space rolls in on me like a carpet and swallows me up, and with it of course the house which I never succeed in entering. There is absolutely no transition from this, the most pleasurable dream I know, to the heart of a book called Creative Evolution . In this book by Henri Bergson, which I came to as naturally as to the dream of the land beyond the boundary, I am again quite alone, again a foreigner, again a man of indeterminate age standing on an iron bridge observing a peculiar metamorphosis without and within. If this book had not fallen into my hands at the precise moment it did, perhaps I would have gone mad. It came at a moment when another huge world was crumbling on my hands. If I had never understood a thing which was written in this book, if I have preserved only the memory of one word, creative , it is quite sufficient. This word was my talisman. With it I was able to defy the whole world, and especially my friends. There are times when one must break with one’s friends in order to understand the meaning of friendship. It may seem strange to say so, but the discovery of this book was equivalent to the discovery of a weapon, an implement, wherewith I might lop off all the friends who surrounded me and who no longer meant anything to me. This book became my friend because it taught me that I had no need of friends. It gave me the courage to stand alone, and it enabled me to appreciate loneliness. I have never understood the book; at times I thought I was on the point of understanding, but I never really did understand. It was more important for me not to understand.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Her life in New York had been erratic and unconnected. She had lived hand to mouth most of the time, working a series of menial jobs that made her feel isolated and unseen, yet strangely safe. She ate dinners of rice and beans or boxes of Chinese takeout food on the floor. She stayed up until seven or eight in the morning working on her manuscripts, and then slept all day. She went to Harlem to interview voodoo practitioners. She went to nightclubs and after-hours bars, standing on the periphery of scene after scene with Leisha or some other, less central girlfriend. She took long walks late at night, especially in winter, loving the sound of her own muted footfalls, the slush-clogged city noises, and the sight of the bundled, shuffling drunks staggering home, looking up in surprise to see a young woman walking alone at 4:00 a.m. The desolation and cruelty of the city winter horrified and fascinated her. She was astonished by the contrasting layers of existence sitting so closely atop one another, and the desperate survival of bag people and misfits wedged into the comfortless air pockets and crawl spaces between layers. During her first year in the city she gave spare change to anyone who asked her. Eventually she gave money only if she happened to have some in her hand when she was asked. Her relationships with men at that time were disturbing; she had conversation after conversation with Leisha, agonizing over why she always wound up with these terrible people. She remembered them all in an embarrassing blur: the pretty, delicate drug addict, the masochistic Chinese boy, the pretentious Italian journalist, the married professor, the pompous law student, the half-crazy club owner who almost strangled her one night with his belt. The guy she met and screwed in the rest room of some tiny East Village bar, the one who later involved her in an exhausting ménage à trois with his Italian girlfriend. Leisha had violently (and primly, Susan thought) disapproved of that one. Strangely enough, after fleeing what she contemptuously labeled “conventional” and “suburban” for anything “unconventional” she could safely lay her hands on, Leisha had performed an indignant and sudden about-face, calling the bohemia she’d adopted “pretentious” and “fake.” When Susan didn’t follow, Leisha had said things like “It’s just horribly painful to even be around you when you’re involved in this adolescent, self-destructive garbage.”

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  At break, as the only mixed kid out of a thousand, I faced the same predicament I had on the playground at H. A. Jack: Where was I supposed to go? Even with so many different groups to choose from, I wasn’t a natural constituent of any particular one. I obviously wasn’t Indian or Chinese. The colored kids would shit on me all the time for being too black. So I wasn’t welcome there. As always, I was adept enough with white kids not to get bullied by them, but the white kids were always going shopping, going to the movies, going on trips—things that required money. We didn’t have any money, so I was out of the mix there, too. The group I felt the most affinity for was the poor black kids. I hung out with them and got along with them, but most of them took minibuses to school from way out in the townships, from Soweto, from Tembisa, from Alexandra. They rode to school as friends and went home as friends. They had their own groups. Weekends and school holidays, they were hanging out with one another and I couldn’t visit. Soweto was a forty-minute drive from my house. We didn’t have money for petrol. After school I was on my own. Weekends I was on my own. Ever the outsider, I created my own strange little world. I did it out of necessity. I needed a way to fit in. I also needed money, a way to buy the same snacks and do the things that the other kids were doing. Which is how I became the tuck-shop guy. Thanks to my long walk to school, I was late every single day. I’d have to stop off in the prefect’s office to write my name down for detention. I was the patron saint of detention. Already late, I’d run to join my morning classes—math, English, biology, whatever. The last period before break was assembly. The pupils would come together in the assembly hall, each grade seated row by row, and the teachers and the prefects would get up onstage and go over the business of what was happening in the school—announcements, awards, that sort of thing. The names of the kids with detention were announced at every assembly, and I was always one of them. Always. Every single day. It was a running joke. The prefect would say, “Detentions for today…” and I would stand up automatically. It was like the Oscars and I was Meryl Streep. There was one time I stood up and then the prefect named the five people and I wasn’t one of them. Everyone burst out laughing. Somebody yelled out, “Where’s Trevor?!” The prefect looked at the paper and shook his head. “Nope.” The entire hall erupted with cheers and applause. “Yay!!!!”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Listen, don’t you see what I mean when I say I’ve got to see you sometimes? I go nuts being all by myself all the time. Why do I go chasing around after cunt so much? Why do I play cards all night? Why do I hang out with those bums from the Point? I need to talk to someone, that’s what.” A little later at the bay, sitting out over the water, with a shot of rye in him and waiting for the sea food to be served up. . . . “Life’s not so bad if you can do what you want, eh Henry? If I make a little dough I’m going to take a trip around the world—and you’re coming along with me. Yes, though you don’t deserve it, I’m going to spend some real money on you one day. I want to see how you’d act if I gave you plenty of rope. I’m going to give you the money, see . . . . I won’t pretend to lend it to you. We’ll see what’ll happen to your fine ideas when you have some dough in your pocket. Listen, when I was talking about Plato the other day I meant to ask you something: I meant to ask you if you ever read that yarn of his about Atlantis. Did you? You did? Well, what do you think of it? Do you think it was just a yarn, or do you think there might have been a place like that once?” I didn’t dare to tell him that I suspected there were hundreds and thousands of continents whose existence past or future we hadn’t even begun to dream about, so I simply said I thought it quite possible indeed that such a place as Atlantis might once have been. “Well, it doesn’t matter much one way or the other, I suppose,” he went on, “but I’ll tell you what I think. I think there must have been a time like that once, a time when men were different. I can’t believe that they always were the pigs they are now and have been for the last few thousand years. I think it’s just possible that there was a time when men knew how to live, when they knew how to take it easy and to enjoy life. Do you know what drives me crazy? It’s looking at my old man. Ever since he’s retired he sits in front of the fire all day long and mopes. To sit there like a broken-down gorilla, that’s what he slaved for all his life. Well shit, if I thought that was going to happen to me I’d blow my brains out now. Look around you . . . look at the people we know. . . . do you know one that’s worth while? What’s all the fuss about, I’d like to know? We’ve got to live, they say. Why? that’s what I want to know.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She turned again and placed her back in a matching curve against Deana’s. When she was a child, her mother had said, “When boys get angry with each other, they just fight it out and it’s all over. But girls are dirty. They pretend to be your friend and go behind your back.” She remembered herself as the new girl in elementary school trying to belong with the bony-legged clusters of little girls snapping their gum and talking about things that she never discovered the significance of. She saw herself sitting alone in a high school cafeteria eating french fries and a Cap’n Crunch bar. She opened her eyes and could barely see the big-eared outline of the tiny ceramic Siamese cat that her aunt had given her when she was twelve. At the time she had thought that it and its brood of ceramic kittens were the height of taste and elegance, and even though its face had been broken in half and Krazy-glued back together, it still seemed faintly regal and glamorous. It had been one of the items that Alice had in mind when she looked at Connie’s dresser and said, “One of these days you’re going to wake up and look at all this stuff and say, ‘This doesn’t have anything to do with me,’ and throw it out.” But it does have something to do with me, thought Connie. — The next day she had to leave the office because of a sudden and painful toothache. She thought it might’ve been psychosomatically induced by the memory of the exposed-nerve episode with Alice in the theater, but the dentist assured her that it was not. “Nope, nope, nope. This is the real thing, all right. You’ve just got a lulu of a mouth, is all. Just one thing after another. But this isn’t a root canal. Just a deep, nasty filling.” He jabbed her tooth with an instrument and she gasped with pain. “I’m surprised that it hasn’t hurt you before. It’s practically into your navel.” He jabbed her again; she groaned and tried to close her mouth. “Don’t worry, though, we caught it in time.” He swiveled robustly in his chair and began to manipulate his precise, needle-nosed implements. Dr. Fangelli had very large forearms heavily strewn with hair; his hands seemed weirdly placed on his wrists, and his unevenly spaced fingers suggested undue activity in impossibly varied directions. He wasn’t a big man, but when he walked his arms and shoulders rolled like a tank tread, and he seemed to suddenly require a lot of space. “Okay, now, we’re going to inject you with a little—” His face zoomed at her, and she had the disturbing thought that its happy, porous proximity could unhinge her jaw with the projected, exuberant desire that she open wide. “What about the nitrous?” she asked.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She had attractive kitchen accessories in matching colors. She remembered Leisha visiting her tiny Manhattan studio and laughing at her, incredulous that after four months Susan’s utensils were still limited to two forks, a knife and a spoon. She went into Bobby’s bedroom and looked at herself in the long mirror, a plump woman wandering calmly toward middle age, standing with one arm wrapped around her waist and a drink in her hand. She had never thought she would be plump or calm. Ten years ago, even six years ago, she never gained weight, no matter how much she ate. Her sudden plumpness was such a novelty that she enjoyed it rather than fighting it, as did most women her age. “You’ve finally come into your real…look,” her mother said approvingly. “You’re not a skinny kid anymore.” This late maternal acceptance had pleased her to such an extent that she found it somewhat sad; just a few years earlier she would’ve rejected it as the words of a woman glad to see the last of an unreasonable reminder of youth and insouciance in the form of her unusually slender daughter. Her life in New York had been erratic and unconnected. She had lived hand to mouth most of the time, working a series of menial jobs that made her feel isolated and unseen, yet strangely safe. She ate dinners of rice and beans or boxes of Chinese takeout food on the floor. She stayed up until seven or eight in the morning working on her manuscripts, and then slept all day. She went to Harlem to interview voodoo practitioners. She went to nightclubs and after-hours bars, standing on the periphery of scene after scene with Leisha or some other, less central girlfriend. She took long walks late at night, especially in winter, loving the sound of her own muted footfalls, the slush-clogged city noises, and the sight of the bundled, shuffling drunks staggering home, looking up in surprise to see a young woman walking alone at 4:00 a.m. The desolation and cruelty of the city winter horrified and fascinated her. She was astonished by the contrasting layers of existence sitting so closely atop one another, and the desperate survival of bag people and misfits wedged into the comfortless air pockets and crawl spaces between layers. During her first year in the city she gave spare change to anyone who asked her. Eventually she gave money only if she happened to have some in her hand when she was asked. Her relationships with men at that time were disturbing; she had conversation after conversation with Leisha, agonizing over why she always wound up with these terrible people. She remembered them all in an embarrassing blur: the pretty, delicate drug addict, the masochistic Chinese boy, the pretentious Italian journalist, the married professor, the pompous law student, the half-crazy club owner who almost strangled her one night with his belt.