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 Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  She has enough outlaw in her to start, at one point, dating a biker in our acquaintance, and while I see her heart-shaped face at public lectures and bookstores, I also catch sight of her at a stoplight on the back of a Harley-Davidson, staring from the helmet’s visor like a road warrior. Over coffee, she worries that she doesn’t have the time to counsel me, what with her hellacious job and raising two kids alone while caring for an aged mother. But she takes my calls and listens to me whine. (Still does, seventeen years later.) When Dev has bronchitis and his codeine cough syrup looks tasty one night, it’s Patti who squirrels the bottle away in her glove box and drives by after work every evening to dispense his single teaspoon. But—shameful confession in this land of relentless, capped-tooth cheer—I’m lonely. Within weeks, Warren’s taken up with a smart blonde I call my girlfriend-in-law, which act stings a little, however long our dissolution has been in coming. Seeing them hold hands at school events shines a spotlight—in my mind—on me in my solo chair. Part of me is glad for him, glad for the note he writes calling our match a poor one. It’s the hand of friendship. (Ever after, we’ve shared parenting with conviction if not always ease, which is more than the divorced usually get—joint birthdays and graduations; phone conversations about school.) Not long after, I’m sleeping on a pallet on the floor when I hear a glass-blasting crash downstairs. I grab Dev’s aluminum bat and edge down all bug-eyed, reaching bottom in time to see our black cat devouring Dev’s pet frog, the flippered feet disappearing between the tom’s thin black lips. So determined had the cat been to eat the frog— he’d been studying it through the glass for weeks—that he must’ve gotten behind the aquarium with his shoulder and body-blocked it off the table. With my insides thumping from the adrenaline, I sit on the glass-spattered floor stroking the sleek tom a long while, figuring that’s the closest I’ll get to male company. The next day in a bookstore with Patti, I tell her woman does not live by bread alone. I have a sexual nature, I tell her. Who doesn’t? she says. But right now you’ll glom on to anybody who makes you happy in the sack. That’s how I wound up remarried to the coke addict. Just date for a while. I never really dated. Then you need to learn how. Try different kinds of guys. I thought I wasn’t schtuppable yet. If I start kissing a guy, he’ll start to look like Elvis. So we come up with a plan dubbed date-o-rama, whereby pals fix me up with a long string of guys, regardless of age or education level, income or looks. It’s neither boyfriend nor sport-fuck I’m after. In advance, I offer to pay my own way and warn all comers that I don’t so much as kiss.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Still, he hugged me—his huge form ripe with shaving lotion—hugged me right in front of his backward-ballcap-wearing roomies. Dev’s parting words: Love you. Don’t forget to mail those CDs. My passage involved three blue-ribbon hangovers and the genial loneliness of a South American novel and an image of Mother charg ing out of a liquor store in blinding sun holding a gallon of vodka aloft like a trophy. On the morning Mother’s yellow station wagon deposited me at a dorm and pulled away from the curb, I was seventeen, thin and malleable as coat hanger wire, and Mother was the silky shadow stitched to my feet that I nonetheless believed I could outrun. I didn’t cry when she pulled away, for there were cute hippie boys playing guitar cross-legged on the lawn, but my throat had a cold stone lodged in it. I was thirsty.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ἐρημία, ἡ, I. of places, a solitude, desert, wilderness, Hat. 3. 08, Aesch. Pr. 2, etc. 3 ἡ Σκυθῶν ἐρ. (proverb. from Hdt. A 1 sq.), Ar. Ach. 704; ἀφίκετ᾽ εἰς ép. Id. Lys. 787; ἕρπειν eis ἐρημίας to solitary places, Arist. H. A. 9. 3, 2, etc. II. as a state or condition, solitude, loneliness, ἐρημίαν ἄγειν, ἔχειν to keep alone, Eur. Med. 50, Bacch. 609; ἐρημίας τυχεῖν Id. El. 510; ἐν ἐρημίᾳ ἐλοιδοροῦντο Antipho 115. 19; of persons, isolation, destitution, Soph. O. C. 957, Lys. 151. 30, Isae. 35- 12, ete. ; δι᾿ ἐρημίαν from being left alone, Thuc. ΜΙ Ch) 3.075 ἐρημίας ἐπειλημμένοι Dem. 36. 2; εὑρετικὸν εἶναί φασι τὴν ἐρ. Menand. ᾿Ανδρ. 4. b. of places, desolation, Lat. vastitas, ἐρημίᾳ δοῦναί τι Eur. Tro. 26,95; ἀτριβὴς im ἐρημίας Thuc. 4. 8. 2. c. gen. want of, absence, φίλων Xen. Mem. 2. 2, 14; ἀρσένων, βροτῶν, ἀνδρῶν Eur. Hec. to17, Bacch. 875, Thuc. 6.102; λύχνων Ar. Av. 1484. etc.; δι’ ἐρημίας πολεμίων πορεύεσθαι without finding any enemy, Xen. Hell. 3. 4, 21; τὴν ἐρ. ὁρῶν τῶν κωλυσόντων seeing that there would be zone to hinder him, Dem. 54.10; even, ép. κακῶν freedom from evil, Eur. H. F. 1157. ἐρημιάς, άδος, ἡ, in Theocr. 27. 62, seems to be a solitary devotee. ἐρημικός, ή, OV, of or for solitude, living in a desert, LXX (Ps. του. 7). ἘΠΕ ἐρημίτης [1], ov, 6, of the desert, ὄνος Lxx (Job. 11. 12}. II. as Subst. az eremite, hermit, Eccl. ἐρημο- κόμηξ, ες, gen. ov, void of hair, Anth. P. 6. 294., 7. 383. ἐρημο- τλάλος [a], ov, chattering i in the desert, τέττιξ Anth. P. 7. 196. ἐρημό-νομος or -νόμος, ον, haunting the wilds, θεαί Ap. Rh. 4.1333; θῆρες Anth. P. 6. 184. ἐρημο- -πλάνος [a], ov, wandering alone, Orph. H. 38. 4 (vulg. ἐρημο- mAavay) ; noted as dBupap Babes by Demetr. Phal. 116. ἐρημο- ποιός, OV, making desolate, Suid. ἐρημό- -ToAts, t, gen. bos, reft of one’s city, Eur. Tro. 65%: ἐρῆμος, ov, but also fem. ἐρήμη Od. 3. 270, Soph. O .C. 1719, Ant. 739) Tr. 530, and in the Att. phrase δίκη ἐρήμη (v. infr. III) 5 Att. also ἔρημος, ov, Hdn. 7. μον. Ae. 33 (cf. ἑτοῖμος) : Comp. - ότερος, Thuc. 3.11, Lys., εἴς. ; Sup. -ότατος, Hdt. 9. 118, Xen. Desolate, lonely, igen solitary, 1. of places, és νῆσον “ἐρήμην Od. 3. 270; χῶρος Il. το. 520; freq. in Hdt., and Att.; τὰ ép. τῆς Λιβύης the desert parts .., Hdt. 3. 32, cf. Thuc. 2. 17; ἡ ἐρῆμος Ce χώρα) Hdt. 2. 32.» 3. 102, Si ἐρημία. I; also, ἡ ἐρήμη Ael. N. A. 7. 4 2. of persons or animals, τὰ δ᾽ ἐρῆμα φοβεῖται (i.e. the cattle), a 5.140; Ξέρξην ép. Φ ἐρι-βρεμής, és, -- ἐρίβρομος, Anth. P 577

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ζῶσις, ews, 7, (ζώννυμι) a girding on, cincture, σάκκων LXX (Isai. 22. 12), Eccl. II. the waist, Achm, Onir. 178. ζῶσμα, v. sub ζῶμα. ζωσμός, ὃ, -- δεσμός, Or. Sib. 3. 151. ζώστειον, τό, v. sub ζήτρειον. ζώστειρα, ν. sub ζωστήριος. ζωστύήρ, ἤρος, ὁ, (ζώννυμι) a girder, girdle, in Il. always a warrior’s belt or baldric, which passed round the loins and secured the bottom of the θώραξ (cf. μίτρη), being fastened with a clasp or hooks of gold, ὅθι ζωστῆ- pos ὀχῆες χρύσειοι σύνεχον 1]. 4. 132; and prob., to make it stronger, covered with metal plates, ΤΩΝ, παναίολος, 4. 135, 186; φοίνικι φαεινός 7. 305, cf. Hdt. 9. 74, Pind. Fr. 158, Soph. Aj. 1030 —in Od., the belt with which the swineherd girds up his frock, 14. 72, cf. Theocr. Flo Teka AH 10575 2. later, = ζώνη, a woman’s girdle, Paus. 1. 31, 1: —metaph. of the encircling sea, νῆσοι .., as. ¢. Αἰγαίου κύματος ἐντὸς ἔχει Anth. P. 9. 421. ΤΙ. anything that goes round like a girdle: 1. the stripe or band which marks a certain height in the ship (which may be illustrated by Eur. Cycl. 505 sq.), Heliod. 1. 1. 2.a kind of sea-weed, Theophr. H. P. 4. 6, 2, Plin. = ζώνη Il. 4, Plin. 26. 74. 1171. as Adj. -- ζωστήριος, Call. H. Ap. 85. ζωστύήριος, a, ov, of the (wornp or of Ζωστήρ (a place on the W. coast of Africa), ζωστήριος ᾿Απόλλων Euphor. ap. Ε. M. 414. 20, Paus. 1. 31, 1; (wornpia ᾿Αθηνᾷ, Id. 9.17,2; or ζωστεῖρα, Lex. Rhet. 261; cf. Meineke Euphor. p. 151, Steph. Byz. v. ζωστήρ, A.B. 261, Hesych. ζωστηρο- κλέπτης, ov, 6, one who steals belts, Lyc. 1320. ζώστης, ου, ὃ, (ζώννυμο) one who girds, Gloss. ζωστός, 7, oy, (ζώννυμι) girded, Plut. Alex. 32, Hesych. ζῶστρον, τό, a belt, girdle, Od. 6. 38. ζώτειον, τό, v. sub Chrpeov. ζωτικός, 7, dv, (Caw) fit for giving or maintaining life, ἐπιθυμία Plat. Tim. 91 B; δυνάμεις Tim. Locr. 100 D; τὸ ὑγρόν Arist. G. A. 2.1, 18, Oy By ΤῊΣ δ; [ἔαρ] ζωτικωτάτη ὥρα Theophr. ὍΣΟΥ ΤΆ: 2: 11. full of life, lively, Lat. vivax, Plat. Rep. 6το E; τὸ ὑφ᾽ αὑτῶν κινεῖσθαι ζωτικόν Arist. Phys. 8. 4, 7; ζωτικώτερα τῶν σπόγγων τὰ τήθυα Id. aA 2: δ. 41: τὰ ζωτικώτατα μέρη (of the body) Plut. 2. 120 Β :-- Adv., ζωτικῶς ἔχειν to be fond of life, Id. Cato Mi. 7o. 2. of works of Art, true to life, τὸ ζωτικὸν φαίνεσθαι πῶς ἐνεργάζῃ τοῖς ἀνδριᾶσιν ; how do you give that look of life to your statues? Xen. Mem. 3. το, 6; ζωτικώτατα γράφειν to paint to the very life, Plut. 2. 130 B, ubi v. Nei Vital, ζωύλλιον, τό, =sq., Tzetz. ζωύφιον [Ὁ], τό, Dim. of ζῷον, ζῴδιον, Ath. 210 C, Sext. Emp. ? ζωφορία, Ion. --ἴη, 7, the zodiac, Manetho 4. 510. ζωφόρος, ov, (φέρω) = (wopdpos, q. ν.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  It was evening when I arrived at Synanon with my mother and her friend Mary Ann. I was six years old and tired from the long bus ride. Having lived all my life in South Central Los Angeles, I found nothing familiar in the country environment in which I found myself. It seemed as though I’d left somewhere and arrived at a place that felt like nowhere. No one greeted us. After we retrieved our minimal luggage, we walked in silence along a gravel road devoid of cars, the small stones crunching beneath our shoes. A sheet of white clouds covered the sky, lending an austere, colorless look to the shed-like structures that hunkered down on the dusky land.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  “You think anyone here likes you? Who here likes Celena? No one! We hate you! Hate you!” Throughout my years in the commune I had nightmares about being attacked by a bear or wolf. I was trapped in a circle of children, all of them mouthless and holding hands. Only I was confronted by a wild animal. The other children either would not or could not help nor let me get free of the beast that crept ever closer with its sharp fangs. When I first came to the school my popularity among my peers burned brightly, bolstered by my second buddy Anna, who had taken Sophie’s place. Socially, Anna was at the top and anyone she deemed worthy of her company basked likewise in the warming rays of her alpha status. When Anna left a few months into my stay, my popularity dropped like a rapidly declining currency. Girls who’d previously included me began to turn their backs, teasing me mercilessly, imitating the way I walked on my toes. The shape of my head was mocked, the long narrow proportions of the back of my skull like the profile of Nefertiti. This inspired the nickname “Football Head.” I didn’t know how to handle such cruelty. One day I would react with tears, another with rage. There were times when I played nicely with a particular child for several days or weeks only to have him or her suddenly turn on me or join a small mob of children who would taunt me to the point of verbal savagery. I knew the game forbade physical contact, but outside of the game I frequently had physical fights with the other children. One of these fights led me to take up a new activity. Every week I looked forward to the show Little House on the Prairie . During that hour I soaked up the love that Ma and Pa had for their children, virtually living the frontier life. I’d go to the shared living room in my pajamas, ready for another riveting hour of Laura Ingalls’s life, her chores at home with Ma, lessons in the little school house, experience with the great outdoors and always at the heart of it, a moral lesson to learn that Pa would usually drive home in his calm and kind way. I was therefore severely disappointed when one evening a cop show with a car chase and people shooting at one another was on the TV instead of Little House . Most of the kids hadn’t come to the living room to settle in yet. Just three boys sat in front of the TV. I asked, “What happened to Little House ?” One of the boys, Ben, glanced up blandly at me. “We’re not watching that tonight. Everyone wants to watch Kojak .” “We always watch Little House .” I felt my frustration rising.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  It’s a bone I pin between my paws at night and work with my jaw teeth. I once read some science article claiming that 90 percent of what our brains gin out involves jockeying for position. Will I get that subway seat? That job? Does he like me as much as I like him? This mind-set works in a pack of lions inclined to tear deer meat out of your chops. But in my case, it pits me against others, keeps me inwardly growling. Cut off, it leaves me. Maybe this is the brain’s natural instinct, but so is my urge to boink the UPS dude, who —as I get lonelier—starts to look like Sean Connery, which is why the phrase Think twice about that proves useful.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  But—shameful confession in this land of relentless, capped-tooth cheer—I’m lonely. Within weeks, Warren’s taken up with a smart blonde I call my girlfriend-in-law, which act stings a little, however long our dissolution has been in coming. Seeing them hold hands at school events shines a spotlight—in my mind—on me in my solo chair. Part of me is glad for him, glad for the note he writes calling our match a poor one. It’s the hand of friendship. (Ever after, we’ve shared parenting with conviction if not always ease, which is more than the divorced usually get—joint birthdays and graduations; phone conversations about school.) Not long after, I’m sleeping on a pallet on the floor when I hear a glass-blasting crash downstairs. I grab Dev’s aluminum bat and edge down all bug-eyed, reaching bottom in time to see our black cat devouring Dev’s pet frog, the flippered feet disappearing between the tom’s thin black lips. So determined had the cat been to eat the frog—he’d been studying it through the glass for weeks—that he must’ve gotten behind the aquarium with his shoulder and body-blocked it off the table. With my insides thumping from the adrenaline, I sit on the glass-spattered floor stroking the sleek tom a long while, figuring that’s the closest I’ll get to male company. The next day in a bookstore with Patti, I tell her woman does not live by bread alone. I have a sexual nature, I tell her. Who doesn’t? she says. But right now you’ll glom on to anybody who makes you happy in the sack. That’s how I wound up remarried to the coke addict. Just date for a while. I never really dated. Then you need to learn how. Try different kinds of guys. I thought I wasn’t schtuppable yet. If I start kissing a guy, he’ll start to look like Elvis. So we come up with a plan dubbed date-o-rama, whereby pals fix me up with a long string of guys, regardless of age or education level, income or looks. It’s neither boyfriend nor sport-fuck I’m after. In advance, I offer to pay my own way and warn all comers that I don’t so much as kiss. This is my way of demystifying the whole gender, plus giving myself wardrobe opportunities—an excuse for witchy shoes and lip gloss. There comes a string of good eggs who never make boyfriends, all ages and shapes. If it moves, I’ll date it. At a faculty party, I agree to dinner with a surgeon who turns out—how?—to be in his mid-twenties. (Our sole point of commonality is that I’d babysat one of his undergrad frat brothers.) I date a local mogul twice that age and stay friends with his family for years. A comedian and a fireman, a legendary undercover narc, the occasional prof or publishing dude, an arbitrager. None of these do I so much as press lips to.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  The captain pushed the boy’s hand from his thigh. Gunner put his hand between his own legs. He leaned against the captain’s arm. There was a color polaroid of a woman one side of the wallet, one of a man on the other. Her hair was loose in a wind that had caused her the slightest squint. His was white, or very pale. The faces suggested age, or experience. But they were handsome, and strong. Perhaps it was the contrast to the pale hair—perhaps shadow and position—but the man’s eyes looked black. Gunner pushed his nose under the dark arm and nuzzled the hair. The captain stood. “I’m going on deck.” He reached for his pants. “Come on, Niger.” He shrugged into his shirt. He kicked at the dog, and his chain rang. Niger barked, then followed the captain to the door. He stopped once, frowned at the portal; then he saw Gunner. “On deck when you’re done.” Gunner sat on the bed, cross-legged. He ran his hand over the damp sheet. Let himself fall, to lay his cheek, roll his face and take the salty folds in his teeth. Elbow shaking, one hand worked in arcs. The other kneaded his belly. His lips kissed unvoiced exhortations. Closed lids and the loose hair shook with his fist. The cabin door closed. THE SCORPION’S LOG:I don’t know when I was born exact. Now I am captain of the Scorpion, a seventy-two foot diesel I have had six years—there was another Scorpion before that, went down on the Guatemalan coast. But I had money and friends in that port. I run gold, small arms, chink labor—they moaned and puked all over the forepeak hole, the engine room and the lazarette, fifty at a time, on this boat that is crowded with me, two children and a dog—and I have enough nets and fishing gear to run as a snapper boat on the North American coast. What I like most [The green, account-sized book is worn to the cardboard at the corners. The entries are scant and consist mainly of numbers—except this thickish, raddled section toward the middle. It is in the locker under the bunk, leaning against the wall.] is to read. That is my first enjoyment after the boat. At each port I try to get as many paperback books and magazines as possible. Spanish and English. I can read the French ones too, but slower. German I can only read enough for newspapers, speak enough for trade. But I have to tell something about what I am writing now first. We have been adrift two weeks. I tire of the children. They are nasty with me and each other. Gunner sleeps all day which is just as good. Kirsten reads as much as I do. I have all these pages in my log I don’t fill in anyway. This to pass time, then.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I step back till my knees hit the chair edge and I just fold myself shut as he disappears out the door. By this time one of us is perennially on the way out the door, pausing to hand our boy off like a football. More and more often, he’s our sole point of contact. Otherwise, we exist as a pair of profiles gliding past each other. If a laser had sliced each of us cartoonlike down the middle—half of each falling away—we may not have noticed the missing half for days. While I tell myself this is the normal way of careworn parents with handfuls of jobs between them, the distance feels like powerful magnets, once kissing, now turned to their opposing poles. It’s not just that we don’t eat out, don’t take vacations at all—together or apart, expense being cited—we barely speak beyond necessity. Only in bed do we sometimes fall on each other like starved beasts. Quitting drinking will reunite us. On New Year’s, we down our last champagne, and two days later, a wicked flu fells me like a chain-sawed oak. The

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  They stir us to think in fresh ways about what it means to be salt, light, and a city. They help us become a diverse church—a truly global church.15 Hospitality and Embracing the OtherMost in the Western world cannot imagine a scenario in which they might endanger their children or trust their family to the fate of strangers in order to avoid severe persecution, torture, and execution for their faith. But that is Sarah’s story. She, her husband (formerly a house church pastor in Iran), and their two sons were able to escape to Malaysia a couple of years ago before things came to such a grim impasse. Life in Malaysia has its own stresses. They face financial and political instability. They never know when the police might shake them down or when the local government might decide to ship them back home. Making ends meet from month to month when they can’t legally work is also a huge strain. But they are grateful to be alive and together. Malaysia is a major relay station on the refugee highway. Iranians are one group coming to Malaysia in large numbers. Many arrive to seek asylum with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR). This is a long, grueling process. They have to make an appointment to make their claim of asylum. Then they must go through a series of interviews where government, police, and military officers question them about their claims. The whole process, if it happens without any hitches, takes about three years. In the meantime they are stuck in a country in which they don’t speak any of the main languages and cannot legally find employment. Unscrupulous employers force these refugees to work long hours for meager wages. They know that they could lose their jobs at any time. For those with families, they have the added pressure of trying to continue their children’s education. One of the recurring themes among refugees is the increased stress brought on by isolation in the midst of so many difficulties. They have low levels of trust for other people, especially for those from their own country. This cuts them off from any support networks they can find. What they need is warmth, compassion, and welcome—the loving hospitality of strangers. Paul and Charis Wan are friends of ours who work with refugee groups in Malaysia. They have helped Sarah and her family find accommodation, employment, and friendship in Kuala Lumpur. The Wans try to help refugees and asylum seekers in tangible ways. But the best thing they offer is friendship, dignity, hospitality, and a listening ear. So many refugees are dealing with their trauma and stress in isolation. They need genuine friendship and emotional support. They need to know someone cares, even when support groups can’t fix all their problems. Refugee life is lonely and vulnerable. Their presence among us offers a perfect opportunity for us to love our neighbors.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  blond bob and the energy of a fire truck. She has enough outlaw in her to start, at one point, dating a biker in our acquaintance, and while I see her heart- shaped face at public lectures and bookstores, I also catch sight of her at a stoplight on the back of a Harley-Davidson, staring from the helmet’s visor like a road warrior. Over coffee, she worries that she doesn’t have the time to counsel me, what with her hellacious job and raising two kids alone while caring for an aged mother. But she takes my calls and listens to me whine. (Still does, seventeen years later.) When Dev has bronchitis and his codeine cough syrup looks tasty one night, it’s Patti who squirrels the bottle away in her glove box and drives by after work every evening to dispense his single teaspoon. But—shameful confession in this land of relentless, capped-tooth cheer—I’m lonely. Within weeks, Warren’s taken up with a smart blonde I call my girlfriend-in-law, which act stings a little, however long our dissolution has been in coming. Seeing them hold hands at school events shines a spotlight—in my mind—on me in my solo chair. Part of me is glad for him, glad for the note he writes calling our match a poor one. It’s the hand of friendship. (Ever after, we’ve shared parenting with conviction if not always ease, which is more than the divorced usually get—joint birthdays and graduations; phone conversations about school.) Not long after, I’m sleeping on a pallet on the floor when I hear a glass-blasting crash downstairs. I grab Dev’s aluminum bat and edge down all bug- eyed, reaching bottom in time to see our black cat devouring Dev’s pet frog, the flippered feet disappearing between the tom’s thin black lips. So determined had the cat been to eat the frog—he’d been studying it through the glass for weeks—that he must’ve gotten behind the aquarium with his shoulder and body-blocked it off the table. With my insides thumping from the adrenaline, I sit on the glass-spattered floor stroking the sleek tom a long while, figuring that’s the closest I’ll get to male company. The next day in a bookstore with Patti, I tell her woman does not live by bread alone. I have a sexual nature, I tell her. Who doesn’t? she says. But right now you’ll glom on to anybody who makes you happy in the sack. That’s how I wound up remarried to the coke addict. Just date for a while. I never really dated. Then you need to learn how. Try different kinds of guys. I thought I wasn’t schtuppable yet. If I start kissing a guy, he’ll start to look like Elvis. So we come up with a plan dubbed date-o-rama, whereby pals fix me up with a long string of guys, regardless of age or education level, income or looks. It’s neither boyfriend nor sport-fuck I’m after.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  He is … an effect of imperialism, economic, political and cultural” (1937:xv, xviii). But Park also noted that Stonequist’s book was, despite its subtitle (A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict) , less concerned with “a personality type, than with a social process, the process of acculturation” (xviii). Stonequist’s own definition of the “marginal man” is “the individual who through migration, education, marriage or some other influence leaves one social group or culture without making a satisfactory adjustment to another [and] finds himself on the margin of each but a member of neither … one who is poised in psychological uncertainty between two (or more) social worlds; reflecting in his soul the discords and harmonies, repulsions and attractions of these worlds, one of which is often ‘dominant’ over the other; within which membership is implicitly if not explicitly based upon birth or ancestry (race or nationality); and where exclusion removes the individual from a system of group relations” (2–3, 8). The examples cited involve both racial and cultural hybrids arising from the interaction of Europeans with Africans, Indians, and Asians. But there is still great emphasis on personality type rather than social process, as is indicated by the very term “marginal man.” A more recent study speaks not of “the marginal man” but of “marginality,” and that definition is now much, much better. Gino Germani distinguishes explicitly, first of all, “between marginality as a phenomenon at the level of personality (marginal personalities), and marginality as a social situation, the former being a psychological and cultural problem while the latter was usually considered the result of historic and structural conditions.” That eliminates a large amount of the individualism, psychologism, and romanticism of the original “marginal man” emphasis. Next, he defines marginality as “the lack of participation in those spheres which are considered to be within the radius of action and/or access of the individual or group. Marginality is imputed through a comparison between a de facto situation and a certain model: the role set which the individual or group should play according to given a priori principles” (9). Or again: “We may define marginality as the lack of participation of individuals and groups in those spheres in which, according to determined criteria, they might be expected to participate. By participation we mean the exercise of roles conceived of in the broadest sense” (49). In other words, marginality (or marginalization) is the lack of an expected social participation . Theoretically and quite correctly, therefore, one could imagine a marginalized king among kings just as well as a marginalized peasant among peasants or even beggar among beggars. Finally, Germani emphasizes that “many authors differentiate the phenomenon of poverty from that of marginality. They argue that though they are usually associated, they should be analytically differentiated since marginality can exist without poverty, or with less poverty than in participating sectors.

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  And that was the key to their fates. The central process of the transportation system in pre-Revolutionary America was the integration of the convict population into the general servant population by means of the contractors’ desire to profit by the sale of the convicts’ labor to private employers. Paid £5 a head by the government to get rid of the convicts, the contractors did everything they could to maximize the price they could sell them for. To overcome the convicts’ obvious disadvantages in the open labor market—their physical decrepitude, especially after long confinement, their presumed willfulness and determination to escape, and their familiarity with, if not habituation to, crime and general disorder—the contractors and the retail merchandisers of servants tried to merge the convicts with the free servants; tried to make the convicts lose their identities. It was simply good business. Some merchants hid the convicts’ backgrounds, until forced by the colonial governments to reveal them; some avoided whenever possible using the words “convict” and “felon,” and stressed as strongly as they could the convicts’ skills as artisans, farmhands, or sailors. Most American employers, on the other hand, tried to identify the convicts and to avoid buying them if they could; but in the end, the pull of the labor market, especially in certain districts of Virginia and Maryland, overcame their scruples, and they bought them (as cheaply as possible) along with other servants, trusting to luck that the convicts would prove to be manageable, hardworking, and respectful of the law. The convict experience in America was altogether different from what it later proved to be in Australia. The convicts in America were not confined to an outdoor prison beyond the possibility of return. In Australian terms, they were all working under the assignment system from the start, subject not to public but to private control, to employers who were dependent on them. Some convicts did experience harsh treatment by brutal masters who beat them and forced them into chains and iron collars when they tried to escape. But this was rare, and there was no possibility of returning them to government service for punishment. More painful to most than physical punishment was the acute loneliness and disorientation they experienced on remote dirt farms deep in the Chesapeake interior, and the humiliation of working long hours side by side with the most degraded white servants, occasionally with slaves.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  7 The Constant Lovers The myth they chose was the constant lovers. The theme was richness over time It is a difficult story, and the wise never choose it because it requires such long performance, and because there is nothing, by definition, between the acts... —Robert Hass, “Against Botticelli” It would’ve been a vintage personal ad. Scared, provincial girl desperate to escape family insanity seeks quietly witty, literate gorilla. Profound loneliness a must. Belief in poetry must supersede belief in capitalism. She: abrim with self-loathing, incapable of chilly silence. He: won’t yell, wag firearms, or leave. Were Warren laboring over this story, I’d no doubt appear drunkenly shrieking; spending every cent I could get my mitts on; alternately crowding his scholar’s home with revelers, then starting to vanish nights into a kind of recovery cult—none of this entirely untrue. I would’ve preferred that my ex vet this manuscript and correct the glaring flaws. Wisely, he balked—I’d have hated to see his version, too. How to write it without self deceit? I set out to forge a family, but it fell apart. Know any divorcée who ever stops weighing fault for a marriage’s implosion on some divine scales? There’s also a psychological phenomenon that messes with my ability to depict our nuptial collapse—the normally crisp film of my memory has, in this period, more mysterious blanks than the Nixon tapes. Maybe the agony of our demise was too harrowing for my head to hold on to, or my maternal psyche is shielding my son from the ugly bits. Or I was too shitfaced at the end. Whatever the case, those years only filter back through the self I had at the time, when I was most certainly—even by my yardstick then—a certain species of crazy. But inside that was a girl starving for stability and in love with a shy, brilliant man fleeing the aristocracy he was born to. Decades ago, I trained myself to mistrust that girl’s perceptions. No doubt she projected as many pixels onto the world’s screen as she took in. So while I trust the stories I recall in broad outline, their interpretation through my old self is suspect. Forget reporting the external events right, try judging them when you’re an alumna of custodial care. When I reach to grasp a solid truth from that time, smoke pours through my fingers. Yet driving east with all my belongings wedged into Warren’s small white car, I feel swept off my feet as any storybook maiden by her champion. It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and the holiday burger taken at a roadside diner is a feast. We move into a bleached-out neo-ghetto apartment, which we pack with books and our two rickety desks laden with separate typewriters. December, a potted fern going brown gets hung with cardboard angels we cover in foil. On their heads I glue faces torn out of newspaper or off postcards—the Three Stooges, a poet or two, movie stars.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Arriving here in this quiet place after the historic hubbub of what had just taken place at Worms must have been a dramatic shock, nor did Luther have the slightest idea how long he would need to remain here. He was not used to being utterly alone, nor to having a moment’s time on his hands. But now he seemed to have nothing else. What to do? The only one with whom he could converse at first was Berlepsch, so the days yawned before him and all he had by way of books was his Greek New Testament—it was the 1516 edition that Erasmus had translated—and his Hebrew Bible, both of which he had snatched from the wagon. For a man who lived and breathed books, this must have been a draconian limitation. Still, these were books of books, and he would make great use of them, as we shall see. He now had breathtaking vistas of the Thuringian forest in early May. On the clearest days, he could look northeast and see Mount Meissner rising thirty miles away in Hesse. In his letters to his friends Spalatin, Amsdorf, and Melanchthon—the only ones who knew of his location, besides the two men who had carried him here—he referred to himself during this time as being “in the realm of the birds” and “in the domain of the air.” He was as far removed from the world of students and preaching and controversy as ever before, impossibly high up in his glorious aerie in the sky. He once wrote that he could hear the birds “make melody from their perches, praising God day and night for all they were worth.”1 But he also referred to the Wartburg as his “Patmos,” the island where late in life the apostle John had been exiled by the Roman emperor for “the word of God and for the testimony of Jesus Christ.”2 John there produced what we today know as the book of Revelation, and Luther too would eventually produce a tremendous literary outpouring, the final part of which was his German translation of John’s book itself. For beginning that December, Luther took on the mighty task of translating the entirety of the New Testament into German. But that was still months away. In his first days at the Wartburg, before his pen would find its torrential voice, he simply wrote a few letters. The first—probably written four days into his residence—was to his dear friend Philip Melanchthon:* I have had much ado to get this letter off, so great is the fear that my whereabouts may somehow be revealed. Therefore you people, too, be careful. . . . With the exception of you and Amsdorf, it is not necessary that other people know anything else than that I am still alive.3

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  My head is made of rubber. My body’s made of blubber. When I step into the tubber It’s high tide. That night before supper, I ask Warren again when he plans to move back into our bed. He says, Once he’s on a regular schedule. He’s on a regular schedule. He’s up all night. I’m up all night. I can’t be up all night and work all day, he says. Classes are starting. I miss you, I say. I’m here every second, he says—every instant I’m not at work, I’m here. Here but not here, I say. At one point, at wits’ end about not sleeping, I call up Mrs. Whitbread, who’d after all raised six children. What did she recommend? It was so different in those days, darling, she says. When she speaks, I clutch the black receiver, for her voice conjures clipped lawns under maple trees, the easeful life of Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy—men in linen suits and women in billowy pastels, pitchers of lemonade on silver trays. I wasn’t entitled to any of that, of course, but the whiff of it lent me glancing courage. She says, Everybody had help. If one of them wouldn’t sleep, I’d let the nurse take the baby home till he got on a good schedule. Or, she says thoughtfully, I’d give them a little phenobarbital. Shortly before Mother takes off, she comes creaking up the stairs early one night with two bottles of beer and a frosted mug. They do not yet glow for I’ve been off the sauce for a year and am so besotted with Dev that drinking’s been forgotten. She pours the golden mixture down the side of the tilted glass, saying, This’ll help your milk let down. I say, I thought you were anti-booze. Even my religious cousin Delores, she says, drank beer when she was nursing. She actually had to pinch her nose to get it down. The fizzy sip tastes of roasted grain, tidy fields waving in wind. By the second or third sip, I remember the slosh of lake water against a boat Daddy had rented, how I sipped from a metal can of Lone Star while he picked through lures alongside me. Thus starts—for healing purposes, of course—my daily beer or two. Within weeks, I stop breastfeeding, partly because I know three or four or five beers could affect Dev’s milk supply. Warren’s at school, so he must miss these escalating beer guzzles. And that’s how—in some cosmic accounting of our family’s rampant dipsomania—Mother’s recovery dovetailed with the start of my own years’ long binge, for from that day forward, I drank in increasing amounts, as if our gene pool owed the universe at least one worthless drunk at a time.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  So this statement of faith that Luther and the others now presented at the diet was in essence a listing of those items they felt immutable and that differed from the Roman church’s teaching. This list included marriage of the clergy, rejection of the idea of the Mass as a sacrifice, the Lord’s Supper in both kinds to everyone, and the end of monastic communities. There were a few additional things, as well as a clear statement that the “Sacramentarians”—meaning those who did not believe in the Real Presence as Luther did—were not of the evangelical party. On April 4, they left Wittenberg. Luther, Jonas, and Melanchthon traveled first to Torgau, where the elector, Spalatin, Agricola, and others joined them. The journey then carried them through Grimma, Altenburg, Eisenberg, Jena, and Weimar. They stopped in Weimar for four days, where on Palm Sunday Luther preached. He preached there on the following two days as well, and then they proceeded to Coburg. They arrived on Easter Eve in time for Luther to preach there too. When Luther arrived at the high Coburg Castle—and was abandoned by all his friends, who continued on to the diet—he must have felt very much as though he were again at the Wartburg. And perhaps in homage to that previous season in his life, he once again disguised himself somewhat by sprouting the second of two beards separated by nine years. He wrote: The loftiest dwelling that towers over the castle is completely ours. Besides, to us have been entrusted the keys to every sort of conclave. More than thirty men, they say, are fed here. Twelve of them are the night watch, and two trumpeters are lookouts on the several towers. So what? Alas, I have nothing else to write about. Tonight, I hope, the warden or the marksman will come by and maybe I’ll pick up some news. We have finally arrived at our Sinai, dearest Philip, but we shall make a Zion out of this Sinai and construct here three huts:* one for the Psalter, one for the Prophets, and one for Aesop. . . . To be sure, the place is extremely pleasant and most suitable for study, except that your absence makes it a sad spot.7

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  If God hasn’t spoken, do nothing. Fulfill the contract you entered into at the box factory, amen. Make the containers you promised to tape and staple. Go quietly and shine. Wait. Those not impelled to act must remain in the cathedral. Don’t be lonely. I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger. But I have to go to a meeting and make the chairs circle perfect. He kisses his index finger and plants it in the middle of my forehead, and I swear it burns like it had eucalyptus on it. Like a coal from the archangel onto the mouth of Moses. The night sky edges across our windows, and I’m carried inside this tank of a car. James wanting to get drunk makes sense to me, and I like how nobody rebuked him after. But there were also no-bullshit acts like not letting him speak—crazily he’d wanted to testify about his sobriety. But Gerry took his car keys, and made him sit through the meeting. It’s my life outside these oddballs that scares me. David? I say, leaning forward. Yes, ma’am. He turns down the radio. Any chance you cadged that frosting? Gross, Gerry says. You’re not gonna eat that. David unzips his backpack, flips off the frosting lid, and hands it back, saying, I feel like I should wipe the edge on my T-shirt. You know, sanitize it. Taking the can, I dig in and run my finger around the edge, then stick it in my mouth just as Gerry’s hand reaches back, hovering for the handoff. 28Halfway Home…Everyone I met Wore part of my destiny like a carnival mask. “I’m Bartleby the Scrivener,” I told the Italian waiter. “Me, too,” he replied. —Charles Simic, “St. Thomas Aquinas” Rather than rejoice about the grant, I start to steel myself against the ceremony now rushing toward me like a jail on wheels. David and Jack convince me to join their Sunday study group at a shambling halfway house. The place sits on hospital grounds across from a methadone dispensary. A favorite joke of the residents is to use magic markers to manufacture a closed sign on the clinic, so eventually the panicked methadone addicts holler and pound the door. Walking into the house, I expect to find tattooed thugs and strippers and former felons, which I do. But most are working stiffs, plus a professor. There’s even a disbarred lawyer who’d once passed out in a snow bank and woke in a hospital with neither hand nor foot—the blackened appendages having been amputated—a fairly common injury among the homeless, it turns out. On my first afternoon there, David bends over a former hooker’s study guide for her high school equivalency exam, and I see the hooker later help a Boston banker handle his own toddler during a visit—the same unlikely, democratic exchange of skills as my Cambridge meeting.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  He touches it with a finger as if it might be hot, saying, How reliable is this? I mean, should you go to the doctor or something? Despite his slight remove, I think what a perfect dad he’ll make, tempered as he is by gentleness. He once quoted to me Henry James’s three rules: Be kind, be kind, be kind. I’ve observed him with his sister’s kids, patiently tossing the whiffle ball underhand. They climb into his lap for stories. But few men—no matter how tenderhearted—go so gaga over the unborn as an inseminated woman will. At night I read one baby book after another, and most spare weekend hours I spend pawing through garage sales for cast-off cribs and baby clothes. And so begins what I see as his slow fade from me. We talk less and less, and since we both grew up in houses schooled to letting people vaporize into their own internal deserts with alacrity, we each let the other get smaller. At Christmas, his father says he knew I was pregnant when I said no to wine, and many toasts are drunk to my health and the baby’s. My mother-in-law promises to ante up all the baby clothes and linens, and Mr. Whitbread says he’ll cover my half of the rent. But driving home, Warren’s silence fills the car. What is it? I say. Nothing, he says. It’s nothing. You’re looking at me so sternly, I say. And truly staring at him, I see in his green eyes that some metal doors seemed to have slid shut. Buckle your seat belt, he says. You need to start wearing a seat belt. The car continues down the snowy and narrowing road. I eat: french fries with gravy. Liver with greasy heaps of onions. Dried strawberries smudged with gorgonzola cheese, crackers slathered with fig jam. Stepping on the scale, I hear my doctor admonish that I’ll gain fifty pounds if I don’t slow down, but I couldn’t care less. How proud I feel shoving that giant globe of a belly through the subway turnstile. But the more heft I have, the more elusive Warren seems to become, the more transparent, retreating into a void I stare into, studying him while he reads, repeatedly poking my head into his office the weekends he works. Maybe he’s having an affair, Mother says. That’s how some guys react to fatherhood. Mother! I say. Warren’s not like that. Has he started drinking more? she asks, adding, His daddy could sure put it away. Not everybody’s a sot, I say. More than two drinks and Warren gets pukey. One night he leaves a message not to hold dinner, he won’t be home till ten. The car pulls into the garage, and he finds me sitting on the back steps. Where were you? I say, reaching for the stair railing to pull myself up, belly first. He unfolds from the hatchback, arms laden with books. School, he says. What school? I say.