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 The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  His grimy fingers grasped the box as though he were holding some slimy beast, and he hurled the whole mess out of the window, while I felt as though he were tearing open a wound in me. When he went on to my neighbor who was already speechless with fear, I tiptoed out of the dormitory, but my candy had already vanished when I reached the yard. I soon had to admit to myself that I regretted this trip. My loneliness, the lack of any affection, perhaps also the silence of the forest and the howling of the jackals, the unaccustomed food too — all these weighed on my mind. I hesitated to write to my family and remembered with bitterness how much I had insisted on leaving home. I tried to maintain my dignity by writing reasonable letters to my parents, but my unhappiness must have been quite obvious because, without much skill, they tried, in their replies, to encourage me to be more patient. When I understood that they had seen through my defenses, I lost all self-control and wrote to them about my despair at the mere thought of so many more days of camp ahead of me. Although I could easily imagine my life beyond this intervening barrier of dead time, and although I knew that there was something after it, a period in which time would regain its accustomed rhythm and flavor, this yet remained one of my first childish panics. Deprived of the protection of my parents and of their physical presence, I found myself, for the first time, cast alone on the world. Still, I remained sure of one thing: if I begged him without any pretense, my all-powerful father would come and help me. This last possibility set a limit to my despair and gave me enough assurance for me to refrain, for the time being, from falling back on it. After attending to the morning’s minor chores, after lunching and then resting for our siesta, we always went out to a big clearing in the heart of the wood. The place itself was very beautiful, if I can judge from details that occur to me even today. The forest guarded it jealously, drawn tight all around it with wonderful ancient oak trees that rose to mingle their branches in a vault above us. The light filtered through the leaves and was scattered in a greenish haze that shifted gradually to the tender pink of the heather and the purple of wild mint that grew all over the ground in this huge natural palace. But even today the tart scent of mint and the smell of honey and heather still make me feel sick at my stomach; the mere sight of little boats made of cork or of wooden canes such as we used to carve all day long, like invalids or prisoners in institutions, fills me with a sadness that cuts me off from the world.

• From Bluets (2009)

  How could there be, as “color knowledge” always remains contingent upon an individual perceiver? This didn’t stop a certain Horace Bénédict de Saussure, however, from inventing, in 1789, a device he called the “cyanometer,”with which he hoped to measure the blue of the sky. 106. When I first heard of the cyanometer, I imagined a complicated machine with dials, cranks, and knobs. But what de Saussure actually “invented” was a cardboard chart with 53 cut-out squares sitting alongside 53 numbered swatches, or “nuances,” as he called them, of blue: you simply hold the sheet up to the sky and match its color, to the best of your ability, to a swatch. As in Humboldt’s Travels (Ross, 1852): “We beheld with admiration the azure colour of the sky. Its intensity at the zenith appeared to correspond to 41° of the cyanometer.” This latter sentence brings me great pleasure, but really it takes us no further—either into knowledge, or into beauty. 107. Many people do not think the writing of Gertrude Stein “means” anything. Perhaps it does not. But when my students complain that they want to throw Tender Buttons across the room, I try to explain to them that in it Stein is dealing with a matter of pressing concern. Stein is worried about hurt colors , I tell them. “A spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing,” I read aloud, scanning the room for a face that also shows signs of being worried about hurt colors. “Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow bud and saucer.” “A cool red rose and a pink cut pink.” As if color could be further revealed by slitting . 108. Think, for example, of Leonard Cohen’s “famous blue raincoat,” whose principal attribute is that it is “torn at the shoulder.” Perhaps it is even the tear that makes it famous. The song features Cohen at his most lugubrious and opaque, which is saying a lot, but I have always loved its final line—“Sincerely, L. Cohen”—as it makes me feel less alone in composing almost everything I write as a letter. I would even go so far as to say that I do not know how to compose otherwise, which makes writing in a prism of solitude, as I am here, a somewhat novel and painful experiment. “When our companion fails us we transfer our love instantaneously to a worthy object,” wrote Thoreau during his bitter falling-out with Emerson, unwittingly offering a cogent explanation of how and why so many songwriters have personified blue as the one friend they can count on. It “loves me when I’m lonely / And thinks of me first,” sings Lucinda Williams. But really this is very strange—as if blue not only had a heart, but also a mind . 109. Over time my injured friend’s feet have become blue and smooth from disuse.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Most frustrating of all, I was completely excluded from their community. Both inside and outside the school, they continued to live as a group, sitting near one another in class, telling stories I couldn’t really follow; their tongues glided too rapidly over their words and I often failed to understand them at all. They all belonged to one and the same civilization which remained merely theoretical in my eyes as long as I myself had no share in it. At the school gates, they shook hands cordially and politely, and then began to exchange news about an unknown planet: “Did you hear Duke Ellington on Monte Carlo at eight-thirty?” I guessed that this had something to do with the radio, but I would have allowed myself to be killed rather than ask a question. Who was Duke Ellington? “Did you see the forty-cent Washington? Terrific!” This had some connection with postage stamps. “I’m backing Bagheera on Sunday.” Bagheera: yes, race-track talk. Generally, however, their chatter escaped me completely. Social distinctions are as profound as religious differences, and I was not a member of their class. They enjoyed means and luxuries that were far beyond me and of which I had not even heard. “I’ll phone you at four and you can tell me if our homework is tough.” They dictated whole assignments to each other over the phone and were able to work together while each remained at home. Even the phone, to me, was a princely luxury, and I admired the casual way they said: “I’ll call you.” I could never learn to use the phone. My excitement prevented me from hearing anything and, as I myself screamed and stammered into the receiver, no one could understand me. As for the refrigerator, white and cold and majestic as a medical mystery, I had a very special respect for it. I realized, quite truthfully, that to buy one of them we would have to sell all our furniture, and who, anyway, would want to buy our junk? So I managed to acquire a kind of practical wisdom. Unable to gain their elegance, their natural ease, their detachment born of excessive wealth, I pretended, at the cost of much self-torture, to be disinterested about the material things of the world. Because I could not afford cakes, I pretended not to like them; I pretended not to enjoy billiards, going to cafés, horse-racing, collecting stamps, dancing, dressing with care, chasing after girls. And, up to a point, I became really austere and modest in my appetites, even something of a moralist, for I was stern in my judgments of the conduct of others. In brief, I managed to acquire the reputation of being a serious boy. At this game, one can either diminish oneself or sublimate.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  “So you think we haven’t paid a high enough price already? The truth is that you are speaking for yourself and that you are terrified of being accused of fright. Besides, damn it, first of all they should want to have us. They don’t want our help because they don’t want to grant us our rights. Our dignity now requires that we all volunteer together; if they want us, they must take the lot of us.” Unfortunately, it was too late for anything but individual solutions. The French were now sure of victory and refused to make any postwar promises, so the traumatized Jewish masses withdrew to themselves again. But I could not hope for any peace without having first tried everything. Why has nothing ever been simple for me? I envied any young Frenchman who had just received his orders to join the army. If he delayed answering the call, the military police came and fetched him. My ex-comrades in the camps had a freer conscience. They felt that they paid their tribute to a war in which they did not believe and which would change nothing for them. I alone had no idea what to do because I was too free, with the too perfect freedom of a seed which seeks a place to settle. Freedom is one aspect of solitude, and my solitude was too painful for me to enjoy the full weight of my freedom. The rumor got around, however, that the Free French Forces were more liberal than the regular army which accepted only conscripts. When the Gaullists opened their first recruiting office in a tailor’s shop, I went there with Henry, who was sarcastic but always willing to follow me. A Free French lieutenant with a blue cap and red lapels awaited his clients behind a huge counter. He rose exuberantly: “So you want to fight?” “Yes,” I said. He pointed to an open register which was the only object on the counter and, indeed, in the shop. “Here, fill in your name, address, age...” It was still the first page, almost blank: I counted three names. The lieutenant followed my eyes. “It’s true, your compatriots don’t seem very enthusiastic,” he said cheerfully. Henry and I looked at each other. It would take too long and be too difficult to explain, and it might hurt his feelings. Why should they be enthusiastic? What had they to defend or to hope for? I did not answer. Jumping from column to column, I carefully wrote down my name, address, age, nationality, and profession. The last column was headed: “Reasons for which you are not already in the army.” I wrote: not subject to conscription. From the other side of the counter, the lieutenant read it upside down. “Please give details,” he said. “Why can’t you be conscripted? Are you a foreigner, or exempted, or rejected...” “Foreign,” I said. “Well, not exactly; native African Jew.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  One day, Bouli, a boy I had begun to like because he was intelligent and seemed not to be blind to certain distinctions, remarked to me, much to my humiliation and surprise: “Why do you dress in such an impossible way? You love to ridicule the affectations of the overfastidious and yet, at heart, you have all those of the negligent.” Fortunately, my thick African skin never allows me to blush. That day Bouli went down several grades in the esteem and friendship that I had begun to feel for him. I saw clearly that my cutting myself off entirely from my own original background did not necessarily allow me to enter any other group. Just as I sat on the fence between two civilizations, so would I now find myself between two classes; and I realized that, in trying to sit on several chairs, one generally lands on the floor. It was then that I discovered a terrible and marvelous secret which might perhaps make my loneliness bearable. To unburden myself of the weight of the world, I began to put everything on paper, and that is how I began to write and to experience the wonderful pleasure of mastering a whole life by recreating it. Of course, this power was as fatal as it was redeeming. To describe people, I had to be an outsider and I could no longer be a part of the world I contemplated. Just as one ceases to live while one watches a play, so did I cease to live and now merely wrote. For my loneliness, it was a balm, but my new loneliness became deeper too because I was more conscious of it and accepted it. In any gathering, I found myself with my back to the wall, an outsider in every respect, alien to the joys of the others as well as to their sorrows. This was a bitter experience, but I still had too much hope to be afraid of my lucid detachment. I was, in fact, arrogantly delighted by its novelty. Thus began my hand-to-hand struggle with language, if only because my pronunciation of the French r and of the nasals was wrong. Dimly, I felt that I would penetrate into the soul of this civilization by mastering its language. I wrote without pause and was never satisfied because I saw that I nearly always worked on the skin of things and failed to reach the flesh. I sometimes asked myself riddles: what is the right word for such and such a thing? It seemed to me that objects would remain foreign to me until I was able to name them correctly.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  What discouraged me most, however, was the impossibility of becoming really intimate with the men. They never quite considered me as one of them. They could not see why I stayed in the camp when all the other intellectuals and middle-class men managed, in the long run, to get themselves evacuated. When, of an evening, I would slip into one of their tents where they were still awake around a carefully camouflaged light, they would make room for me and often give me the place of honor, but they changed the topic of their conversation at once and became self-conscious. They avoided, for instance, all trivialities. I told them my father was an artisan, but they did not believe me. Those who did had more respect for me: a son of the people who has worked his way up is more to be admired than a middle-class boy. As for me, must I confess that I never really felt at ease among them? I wanted to love them, and I fear I managed only to be sorry for them. I reproached myself for this pity because I so much wanted to be one of them! In spite of myself, I watched myself and played a part. Perhaps, as is so natural to me, I exaggerate my guilt; had I been one of them, I could not have helped them. But what I did not see clearly at the time was that I was seeking in the camp and in the approbation of others only my own self-respect; after a few months, I was sure I had failed. It seemed clear to me that the men respected or distrusted me but that they would never adopt me.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  “Those two are trying to hide,” Cheri thought. “They’re deceiving someone somewhere. The whole world’s busy deceiving and being deceived. But I...” He did not finish the sentence, but a repugnance made him jump to his feet, an action that meant, “ But I am chaste.” A faint ray of light, flickering uncertainly over stagnant, hitherto unfeeling regions of his inmost being, was enough to suggest that chastity and loneliness are one and the same misfortune. As night advanced, he began to feel the cold. From his prolonged, aimless vigils, he had learned that, at night, tastes, smells, and temperatures vary according to the hour, and that midnight is warm in comparison with the hour which immediately precedes the dawn. “The winter will soon be on us,” he thought, as he lengthened his stride, “and none too soon, putting an end to this interminable summer. Next winter, I should like ... let me see ... next winter ...” His attempts at anticipation collapsed almost at once; and he came to a halt, head lowered, like a horse at the prospect of a long steep climb ahead. “Next winter, there’ll still be my wife, my mother, old gammer La Berche, Thingummy, What’s-his-name, and the rest of them. There’ll be the same old gang. ... And for me there’ll never again be ...” He paused once more, to watch a procession of low clouds advancing over the Bois, clouds of an indescribable pink, set upon by a gusty wind which buried its fingers in their misty tresses, twisting and dragging them across the lawns of heaven, to carry them off to the moon, Cheri gazed with eyes well used to the translucent magic of the night, which those who sleep regard as pitch-dark. The apparition of the large, flat, half-veiled moon among the scurrying vaporous clouds, which she seemed to be pursuing and tearing asunder, did not divert him from working out an arithmetical fantasy: he was computing — in years, months, hours, and days the amount of precious time that had been lost to him for ever. “Had I never let her go when I went to see her again that day before the war - then it would have meant three or four years to the good; hundreds and hundreds of days and nights gained and garnered for love,” He did not fight shy of so big a word.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  It was the first time in my life that I was going away so far and for so long from my family and the blind alley. At the collecting point, I found none of my classmates. We were alone in a crowd of Europeans who were waiting in the shade of the trees and joyously shouting remarks from group to group. The loneliness of my parents, silent and scared, moved me even more deeply than my own. I was seeing them, for the first time, uneasy and ashamed, with all their prestige left behind them in our blind alley. They spoke in muffled tones, probably ashamed of their dialect, which, to me, now seemed vulgar and out of place. As a precaution, we had been asked to turn up much too early and now we had to wait for quite a while. The last cool morning breeze vanished and a humid heat began to weigh on us while the flies buzzed ever more insistently. People who had to go in the sunlight ran from one patch of shade to the next. My father no longer uttered a word. I felt that he was exasperated by weariness, heat, the flies, and a sense of alienation. My mother’s face betrayed, by its softness, that she was on the verge of tears, and her lips were beginning to relax when, at long last, the signal for our departure came. We were then loaded in closed military trucks. I found myself cornered at the back of a truck, no longer able to see my parents for a last farewell. Later, I often experienced this strange feeling of being quite close to them and at the same time kept irremediably apart from them. Only then did the tears at last come to my eyes. The trip was very unpleasant. We had to stand for five hours, our fifty breaths flowing together as we almost stifled beneath the painted tarpaulin of the truck. In near-darkness we were brutally jostled against each other at every bump in the road, while the vibration of the truck made the soles of our feet tingle and made me sick at my stomach. I reached our destination in such a state of exhaustion that I fell asleep at once, barely glancing at the impersonal dormitory in which I had been assigned a bed. I was ten years old, as I’ve said, and an only son. I indeed had my sister Kalla, but in our families the son, especially an only son, is truly a privileged being. For a long while, I actually expected to hear God speak to me personally, and my heart often beat faster if I thought that I could distinguish a voice speaking in the rustling of tree leaves. Always encouraged and confirmed in my awareness of superiority, I was convinced that an extraordinary destiny awaited me.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I soon had to admit to myself that I regretted this trip. My loneliness, the lack of any affection, perhaps also the silence of the forest and the howling of the jackals, the unaccustomed food too — all these weighed on my mind. I hesitated to write to my family and remembered with bitterness how much I had insisted on leaving home. I tried to maintain my dignity by writing reasonable letters to my parents, but my unhappiness must have been quite obvious because, without much skill, they tried, in their replies, to encourage me to be more patient. When I understood that they had seen through my defenses, I lost all self-control and wrote to them about my despair at the mere thought of so many more days of camp ahead of me. Although I could easily imagine my life beyond this intervening barrier of dead time, and although I knew that there was something after it, a period in which time would regain its accustomed rhythm and flavor, this yet remained one of my first childish panics. Deprived of the protection of my parents and of their physical presence, I found myself, for the first time, cast alone on the world. Still, I remained sure of one thing: if I begged him without any pretense, my all-powerful father would come and help me. This last possibility set a limit to my despair and gave me enough assurance for me to refrain, for the time being, from falling back on it.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  He took a new copybook and, on its cover, wrote: “Argentina.” He listed first the indispensable things that still had to be done and divided the work between us. He was very busy when I left. It was late, and I could not hope to sleep after so long a nap. When I reached our Passage, seats and benches were being noisily moved. For all these beings with regular and unconscious lives each hour had its meaning. To avoid useless questions, I sought refuge on the terrace. The moon had risen high and it would have been easy to read. I leaned on the white railing. The scent of the night was forever marked with the sulfurous odor of bombs. Of the eight buildings in the Passage — four to the left and four to the right — three had been hit. The last one to the right was a spectacular ruin, cut in two as by a knife, with a piece of wall hanging from the third floor by its iron supports, motionless above sheer void. Fifteen yards from the ground, the tiles of an open kitchen reflected the blue light. Hard and perpendicular in the Passage, the moonlight flooded the smallest detail. Soon the last sounds died out; a dreaming baby screamed and went back to sleep. Complete silence. The chime of a Westminster clock broke it, and then the hoarse spasms of my father’s fit of coughing seemed to wrench the night air, drowning the elegant chimes, then becoming fainter as the music gained the upper hand, delicate as a thin spiral of smoke that a sudden wind had scattered for an instant. I tried to count the strokes, in spite of the blanks that the cough had blotted out: three... five... six... eight... ten, eleven. Eleven or twelve? How can I find out? The world is dead and I have no watch. For once, Henry planned efficiently and he soon had our passage booked. We were to sail in five days’ time. I used these days to do my share of the preparations and make a few calls. After much hesitation I went to see Poinsot. I had not seen him since the beginning of the German occupation, after the incident I have described. I did not find him at home. Because of a slight nervous depression, he had gone back to France for treatment. Why did this give me a certain strange pleasure? It was as though it excused Poinsot. Even such clear certainties, it seemed, could save nobody, and Poinsot’s piercing vision could also get blurred. There was also a touch of childish regret: he would not give me the last piece of advice for which I had perhaps unconsciously come.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  “And this youthful flesh of theirs certainly owes me a great debt. How many of them have me to thank for their good health, their good looks, the harmlessness of their sorrows! And then their eggnogs when they suffered from colds, and the habit of making love unselfishly and always refreshingly! Shall I now, merely to fill my bed, provide myself with an old gentleman of... of...” She hunted about and finished up with majestic forgetfulness of her own age, “An old gentleman of forty?” She rubbed her long shapely hands together and turned away in disgust. “ Pooh! Farewell to all that! It’s much prettier. Let’s go out and buy playing-cards, good wine, bridge-scorers, knitting-needles — all the paraphernalia to fill a gaping void, all that’s required to disguise that monster, an old woman.” In place of knitting-needles she bought a number of dresses, and negligees like the gossamer clouds of dawn. A Chinese pedicure came once a week, the manicurist twice, the masseuse every day. Lea was to be seen at plays, and before the theatre at restaurants where she never thought of going in Cheri’s time. She allowed young women and their friends — as well as Kuhn, her former tailor, now retired — to ask her to their box or to their table. But the young women treated her with a deference she did not appreciate; and when Kuhn, at their first supper together, called her ‘ my dear friend,’ she retorted: ‘Kuhn, I assure you it doesn’t suit you at all to be a customer.* She sought refuge with Patron, now a referee and boxing promoter. But Patron was married to a young person who ran a bar, a little creature as fierce and jealous as a terrier. To join the susceptible athlete, Lea went as far out as the Place d’Xtalie, at considerable risk to her dark sapphire-blue dress, heavy with gold embroidery, to her birds of paradise, her impressive jewels, and her new rich red-tinted coiffure. She had had enough after one sniff of the sweat, vinegar, and turpentine exuded by Patron’s ‘white hopes’, and she left, deciding never to venture again inside that long, low, gas-hissing hall. An unaccountable weariness followed her every attempt to get back into the bustling life of people with nothing to do. “What can be the matter with me?”

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  An old woman, out of breath, repeated her movements in the long pier-glass, and Lea wondered what she could have in common with that crazy creature. Cheri continued on his way towards the street. On the pavement he buttoned up his overcoat to hide his crumpled shirt. Lea let the curtain fall back into place; but already she had seen Cheri throw back his head, look up at the spring sky and the chestnut trees in flower, and fill his lungs with the fresh air, like a man escaping from prison. Cher i closed the iron gate of the little garden behind him and sniffed the night air: ‘Ah! it’s nice out here!’ In the same breath, he changed his mind: ‘No, it isn’t.’ The thickly planted chestnut trees weighed heavily upon the heat pent up beneath. A dome of rusted leaves vibrated above the nearest gas-lamp. The Avenue Henri-Martin, close-set with greenery, was stifling; only with the dawn would a breath of fresh air come up from the Bois de Boulogne. Bare-headed, Cheri turned back to look at the house, empty now but still lit up. He heard the clink of roughly handled glass, followed by the clear ring of Edmee’s voice, sharp with reproof. He saw his wife come to the window of the gallery on the first floor and lean out. The frosted beads on her evening dress lost their snowy whiteness, caught for a moment a greenish glint from the lamp, then flamed into yellow as she touched the gold lame curtains. ‘Is that you on the pavement, Fred?* ‘ Who else could it be? ’ ‘You didn’t take Filipesco home, then?’ ‘No, I didn’t; he’d hopped it already.’ ‘AH the same, I’d rather have liked ... Oh well, it doesn’t matter. Are you coming in now? ’ ‘Not just yet. Far too hot. I’ll just stretch my legs.’ ‘But... Oh well, just as you like.’ She broke off a moment, and must have been laughing, for he could see the quiver of her frost-spangled dress. ‘ All I can see of you from here is a white shirt-front and a white face cut out on black. Exactly like a poster for a night club. It looks devastating.’ ‘How you adore my mother’s expressions!’ he said reflectively. ‘You can tell everyone to go to bed. I’ve got my key.’ She waved a hand in his direction. He watched the lights go out one by one in all the windows. One particular light - a dull blue gleam - told Cheri that Edmee was going through her boudoir into their bedroom, which looked out on the garden at the back of the house. 139 “ The boudoir will soon come to be known as the study, and no mistake,” he thought.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  Charlotte Peloux held her tongue for a whole week, but Edmee never dared to ask her husband: * Did you get angry on my behalf? Was it me you were defending? Or was it that other woman, the one before me? * Life as a child and then as a girl had taught her patience, hope, silence; and given her a prisoner’s proficiency in handling these virtues as weapons. The fair Marie-Laure had never scolded her daughter: she had merely punished her. Never a hard word, never a tender one. Utter loneliness, then a boarding-school, then again loneliness in the holidays and frequent relegations to a bedroom. Finally, the threat of marriage — any marriage — from the moment that the eye of a too beautiful mother had discerned in the daughter the dawn of a rival beauty, shy, timid, looking a victim of tyranny, and all the more touching for that. In comparison with this inhuman gold-and-ivory mother, Charlotte Peloux and her spontaneous malice seemed a bed of roses. ‘Are you frightened of my respected parent?’ Cheri asked her one evening. Edmee smiled and pouted to show her indifference: ‘Frightened? No. You aren’t frightened when a door slams, though it may make you jump. It’s a snake creeping under it that’s frightening.’ ‘A terrific snake, Marie-Laure, isn’t she?’ ‘Terrific.’ He waited for confidences that did not come and put a brotherly arm round his wife’s slender shoulders: ‘We’re sort of orphans, you and I, aren’t we? * ‘Yes, -we’re orphans, and we’re so sweet!’ She clung to him. They were alone in the big sitting-room, for Madame Peloirx was upstairs concocting, as Cheri put it, her poisons for the following day. The night was cold and the window panes reflected the lamplight and furnishings like a pond. Edmee felt warm and protected, safe in the arms of this unknown man. She lifted her head and gave a cry of alarm. He was staring up at the chandelier above them with a look of desperation on his magnificent features, and two tears hung glistening between the lids of his half-closed eyes, 4 Cheri, Cheri, what’s the matter with you?’ On the spur of the moment she had called him by the too endearing nickname she had never meant to pronounce. He answered its appeal in bewilderment and turned his eyes down to look at her. 4 Cheri, oh God! I’m frightened. What’s wrong with you?’ He pushed her away a little, and held her facing him. £Oh! Oh! You poor child, you poor little thing! What are you frightened of? ’ He gazed at her with his eyes of velvet, wide-open, peaceful, inscrutable, all the more handsome for his tears. Edm£e was about to beg him not to speak, when he said, * How silly we are l It’s the idea that we’re orphans. It’s idiotic. It’s so true.’

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Long hours now spent waiting for the scans, waiting for the EEGs, sitting in frigid waiting rooms turning the pages of The Wall Street Journal and AARP The Magazine and Neurology Today and the alumnae magazines of the Columbia and Cornell medical schools. Sitting in frigid waiting rooms once again producing the insurance cards, once again explaining why, the provider’s preference notwithstanding, the Writers Guild-Industry Health Plan needs to be the primary and Medicare the secondary, not, despite my age—my age is now an issue in every waiting room—vice versa. Sitting in frigid waiting rooms once again filling out the New York–Presbyterian questionnaires. Sitting in frigid waiting rooms once again listing the medications and the symptoms and the descriptions and dates of previous hospitalizations: just make up the dates, just take a guess and stand by it, for some reason “1982” always comes to mind, well, fine, “1982” it is, “1982” will have to do, there can be no way to get the answer to this question right. Sitting in frigid waiting rooms trying to think of the name and telephone number of the person I want notified in case of emergency. Whole days now spent on this one question, this question with no possible answer: who do I want notified in case of emergency? I think it over. I do not want even to consider “in case of emergency.” Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else. I say that I continue to believe this even as I know that I do not. I mean, think back: what about that business with the folding metal chair in the rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street? What exactly was I afraid of there? What did I fear in that rehearsal room if not an “emergency”? Or what about walking home after an early dinner on Third Avenue and waking up in a pool of blood on my own bedroom floor? Might not waking up in a pool of blood on my own bedroom floor qualify as an “emergency”? All right. Accepted. “In case of emergency” could apply. Who to notify. I try harder. Still, no name comes to mind. I could give the name of my brother, but my brother lives three thousand miles from what might be defined in New York as an emergency. I could give Griffin’s name, but Griffin is shooting a picture. Griffin is on location. Griffin is sitting in the dining room of one or another Hilton Inn—a few too many people at the table, a little too much noise—and Griffin is not picking up his cell. I could give the name of whichever close friend in New York comes first to mind, but the close friend in New York who comes first to mind is actually, on reflection, not even in New York, out of town, out of the country, away, certainly unreachable in the best case, possibly unwilling in the worst.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  For all my scrappiness, what I had always wanted most was a dad. A real dad. A present dad, like my classmates’ dads, who came to after-school sports, glowed at parentteacher conferences, and rewarded good grades with hot fudge sundaes. Not only had I never met my biological father, I didn’t even know his name, never mind any details about his identity. My mother avoided the topic, and my very dramatic grandmother offered conflicting stories. Your father died in a plane crash. (He didn’t.) Your parents were married on a yacht. (They weren’t.) The wedding dress is in the attic. (It wasn’t.) Grandma was a fabulist known for regaling us with elaborate stories from her life, like the time she went to King George’s coronation in England with her then-husband, Sir Rodgers. (We think there were three husbands, but we’re not totally sure.) Accordingly, her explanations about my biological father’s absence were similarly grand, unverifiable, and ever changing. More than once, I listened to her yarn-spinning and thought, Really? Even as a child, I knew to take her stories about my mythical father with a hefty grain of salt. Perhaps she just wanted me to believe that fairy tales were possible (well, except for the one about the plane crash). But as far as I was concerned, there was no magic to be found—only the gaping hole of paternal absence. I never fact-checked these stories with my mother, because not talking about him was one of our unspoken rules. Like a lot of kids, I didn’t have to be explicitly told that this topic was off-limits. I could sense her pain and trauma around whatever had happened between them. The last thing I wanted was to add more hurt, risking distance between me and the only parent I had. So I resigned myself to waiting. When I was older, I’d figure out the truth on my own. Meanwhile, his searing absence seemed to grow hotter every year. More years without a father didn’t lessen the pain; in fact, my loneliness grew, especially when I compared myself to my friends’ families. My family was not a “normal” family. And that meant that I wasn’t “normal,” either. Then Ken arrived.

• From What We Lost in the Swamp: Poems (2023)

  Is this the extent of what rejection does to a person? Is hitting rock bottom when your heart gets broken by a ladybug? A ladybug who, during my walk, refused to hop on my thumb? Wouldn’t move, wouldn’t budge, wouldn’t waste those smooth, those spotted wings on me. Just crawled on her own, undeterred by my attempts to block her way, so completely unafraid to leave me lonely in the shade as if she knows I’ll be okay, as if she knows one day I’ll see that strength is born in moving forward. THE STONER SAFARIThe troops had gathered in the backyard, one of those August nights that’s never really night, when the moon is so plump, so ripe with light that everything it touches stays alive, bright & sleepless. We had a secret mission, a surprise place I wanted to show them, & so, we began our long descent. Jumped the fence, then crept through the silence of the overgrown forest, thick with thistle, the tall, itchy crabgrass slapping at our legs. R was nervous, but J, in his lime green safari hat, couldn’t stop laughing at poor A, her flip-flops stuck, swallowed by the quicksand-like mud. I wouldn’t let them give up. Guided by starlight, we scraped & scratched & laughed our way through a final patch of thorns, & then, we arrived: a wide-open space, as far as the eye could see—an oasis of sprawling golf course greens, drenched in dew & moon juice, with nothing left to do but run & scream at the top of our lungs. Press our lips to a couple of thin, smoking spliffs & pretend like the night would never end, like it wasn’t the cusp, the eve before the change, before we’d separate & A would move into the city & J would leave to finish school. & me, I’d pack up my whole life in a single suitcase, fly across the country to start all fresh & new, leaving baby brother R to man our childhood bedroom alone. I honestly can’t recall what happened next, but I like to think we started howling at the moon, wild & freeing fire-breathing only youth can do, before they forget. THE PLEAHere I am, standing at the edge of the great cliff, still waiting for the moment, for the skies to rip open, when the Universe will pour down from her heavenly house & pronounce me ready, unshroud her many mysteries of how, of what it means to be grown. O Majesty, please! Let me bow! Let me bend my knee so you, with your silver sword, can knight me Adult. I wish to know, to feel control, to understand the slipping sand beneath my feet. PORTRAIT OF A PAINTER PAINTINGWhat makes me a good writer is how I can describe the dive off a cliff a hundred different ways without ever having done it. How I can convince you a bolt of lightning shot up through my stomach,

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  I began, perhaps, to be lonely that summer and began, that summer, the flight which has brought me to this darkening window. And yet—when one begins to search for the crucial, the definitive moment, the moment which changed all others, one finds oneself pressing, in great pain, through a maze of false signals and abruptly locking doors. My flight may, indeed, have begun that summer—which does not tell me where to find the germ of the dilemma which resolved itself, that summer, into flight. Of course, it is somewhere before — " GIOVANNI'S ROOM me, locked in that reflection I am watching in the window as the night comes down outside. It is trapped in the room with me, always has been, and always will be, and it is yet more foreign to me than those foreign hills outside. We lived in Brooklyn then, as I say; we had also lived in San Francisco, where I was bom, and where my mother lies buried, and we lived for awhile in Seattle, and then in New York for me. New York is Manhattan. Later on, then, we moved from Brooklyn back to New York and by the time I came to France my father and his new wife had graduated to Connecticut. I had long been on my own by then, of course, and had been living in an apartment in the east sixties. We, in the days when I was growing up, were my father and his unmarried sister and my- seK. My mother had been carried to the grave- yard when I was five. I scarcely remember her at all, yet she figured in my nightmares, blind with worms, her hair as dry as metal and brittle as a twig, straining to press me against her body; that body so putrescent, so sickening soft, that it opened, as I clawed and cried, into a breach so enormous as to swallow me alive. But when my father or my aunt came rushing into my room to find out what had frightened me, I did not dare describe this dream, which seemed disloyal to my mother. I said that I had dreamed about a graveyard. They concluded that the death of my mother had had this unsettling effect on my imagination and perhaps they 18 James Baldwin thought that I was grieving for her. And I may have been, but if that is so, then I am grieving still.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  the young men next door with their loud midnight parties and fishy rings left in the bathtub no longer arouse them from midnight to mealtime no stops inbetween light breaking to pass through jumbled up windows and who was it who married the widow that Buzzie’s son messed with? To Welfare and insult from the slow shuffle from dayswork to shopping bags heavy with leftovers Rooming houses are old women waiting searching through their darkening windows the end or beginning of agony old women seen through half-ajar doors hoping they are not waiting but being an entrance to somewhere unknown and desired and not new. Bloodbirth That which is inside of me screaming beating about for exit or entry names the wind, wanting winds’ voice wanting winds’ power it is not my heart and I am trying to tell this without art or embellishment with bits of me flying out in all directions screams memories old pieces of flesh struck off like dry bark from a felled tree, bearing up or out holding or bring forth child or demon is this birth or exorcism or the beginning machinery of myself outlining recalling my father’s business—what I must be about—my own business minding. Shall I split or be cut down by a word’s complexion or the lack of it and from what direction will the opening be made to show the true face of me lying exposed and together my children your children their children bent on our conjugating business. Martha I Martha this is a catalog of days passing before you looked again. Someday you will browse and order them at will, or in your necessities. I have taken a house at the Jersey shore this summer. It is not my house. Today the lightning bugs came. On the first day you were dead. With each breath the skin of your face moved falling in like crumpled muslin. We scraped together the smashed image of flesh preparing a memory. No words. No words. On the eighth day you startled the doctors speaking from your deathplace to reassure us that you were trying. Martha these are replacement days should you ever need them given for those you once demanded and never found. May this trip be rewarding; no one can fault you again Martha for answering necessity too well and the gods who honor hard work will keep this second coming free from that lack of choice which hindered your first journey to this Tarot house. They said no hope no dreaming accept this case of flesh as evidence of life without fire and wrapped you in an electric blanket kept ten degrees below life. Fetal hands curled inward on the icy sheets your bed was so cold the bruises could not appear. On the second day I knew you were alive because the grey flesh of your face suffered. I love you and cannot feel you less than Martha I love you and cannot split this shaved head

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I began to wash and bathe carefully and brush my hair to regulation smoothness (only “cads” used pomatum, Milman said) and when I was asked to recite, I would pout and plead prettily that I did not want to, just in order to be pressed. Sex was awakening in me at this time but was still indeterminate, I imagine; for two motives ruled me for over six months: I was always wondering how I looked and watching to see if people liked me. I used to try to speak with the accent used by the “best people” and on coming into a room I prepared my entrance. Someone, I think it was Vernon’s sweetheart, Monica, said that I had an energetic profile, so I always sought to show my profile. In fact, for some six months, I was more a girl than a boy, with all a girl’s self-consciousness and manifold affectations and sentimentalities: I often used to think that no one cared for me really and I would weep over my unloved loneliness. Whenever later, as a writer, I wished to picture a young girl, I had only to go back to this period in my consciousness in order to attain the peculiar view-point of the girl. * * * LIFE IN AN ENGLISH GRAMMAR SCHOOL. Chapter II. If I tried my best, it would take a year to describe the life in that English Grammar School at R.... I had always been perfectly happy in every Irish school and especially in the Royal School at Armagh. Let me give one difference as briefly as possible. When I whispered in the class-room in Ireland, the master would frown at me and shake his head; ten minutes later I was talking again, and he’d hold up an admonitory finger: the third time he’d probably say, “Stop talking, Harris, don’t you see you’re disturbing your neighbour?” Half an hour later in despair he’d cry, “If you still talk, I’ll have to punish you.” Ten minutes afterwards: “You’re incorrigible, Harris, come up here” and I’d have to go and stand beside his desk for the rest of the morning, and even this light punishment did not happen more than twice a week, and as I came to be head of my class, it grew rarer. In England, the procedure was quite different. “That new boy there is talking; take 300 lines to write out and keep quiet.” “Please, Sir”, I’d pipe up—“Take 500 lines and keep quiet.” “But, Sir”—in remonstrance. “Take 1000 lines and if you answer again, I’ll send you to the Doctor”—which meant I’d get a caning or a long talking to. The English masters one and all ruled by punishment; consequently I was indoors writing out lines almost every day, and every half-holiday for the first year. Then my father, prompted by Vernon, complained to the Doctor that writing out lines was ruining my handwriting.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  1 wonder about the size of Giovanni's cell. I wonder if it is bigger than his room. I know that it is colder. I wonder if he is alone or with two or three others; if he is perhaps playing cards, or smoking, or talking, or writing a letter —to whom would he be writing a letter?—or walking up and down. I wonder if he knows that the approaching morning is the last morning of his life. (For the prisoner usually does not know; the lawyer knows and tells the family or friends but does not tell the prisoner. ) I wonder if he cares. Whether he knows or not, cares or not, he is certainly afraid. Whether he is with others or not, he is certainly alone. 1 try to see him, his back to me, standing at the window of his cell. From where he is perhaps he can only see the opposite wing of the prison; perhaps, by straining a little, just over the high wall, a GIOVANNI'S ROOM 151 patch of the street outside. I do not know if his hair has been cut, or is long— I should think it would have been cut. I wonder if he is shaven. And now a miUion details, proof and fruit of intimacy, flood my mind. I wonder, for example, if he feels the need to go to the bathroom, if he has been able to eat today, if he is sweating, or dry. I wonder if anyone has made love to him in prison. And then something shakes me, I feel shaken hard and dry, hke some dead thing in the desert, and I know that I am hop- ing that Giovanni is being sheltered in some- one's arms tonight. I wish that someone were here with me. I would make love to whoever was here all night long, I would labor with Gio- vanni all night long. Those days after Giovanni had lost his job, we dawdled; dawdled as doomed mountain climbers may be said to dawdle above the chasm, held only by a snapping rope. I did not write my father— I put it off from day to day. It would have been too definitive an act. I knew which he I would tell him and I knew the lie would work— only— I was not sure that it would be a lie. Day after day we lingered in that room and Giovanni began to work on it again. He had some weird idea that it would be nice to have a bookcase sunk in the wall and he chipped through the wall until he came to the brick and began pounding away at the brick. It was hard