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 Ice Storm (1994)

  Hood waited happily for his mistress. In her guest room. In those dark ages. Billy Jack was the most popular film of the year. Imperiously, Janey Williams had strode from the guest room to install her birth control device. Imperiously. With a subliminally pervasive trace of something like resentment. It was the bum note in the sweet song of this tryst, but Hood didn’t notice it. His thought was this: with all this innovation, with the simplicity of the birth control pill and the reliability of the IUD, why persist with that rubber stopper? Well, the delay had its pleasures. It conjured dirty and agreeable fantasies. The plaid flannel comforter on the bed in the guest room was mussed with the recent tangling of neighborhood kids. An amorous tangling, Hood thought, an adolescent hunting and groping. The sheer, white drapes in the guest room were limp as the bangs of a sad schoolgirl. The dresser drawers were empty but for a skittering mothball and an ancient box of disposable douche. Guest room furniture reminded Hood—as he opened and closed drawers—of the cutaway sets of television soundstages. It was ugly and impermanent stuff. The shag rug, for example, was mustard and forest green. It concealed remnants of cheese bits and bland, tasteless crackers. He might himself have been the culprit here. For there had been one prior encounter with Janey. On the bedside table a perfect bottle of perfect Finnish vodka glistened perfectly. He had been in this house a hundred and fifty times since the Williamses had moved in. A hundred and fifty times before he ever sought this refuge, the refuge of the guest room. He was grateful and ashamed both. He wished he had stayed at his end of the street. But he was helpless before the itch. This was one way he accounted for it. He had been lonely even in his wife’s arms, lonely in crowds, lonely at meetings, lonely throwing tennis balls for his dog, lonely playing Operation with his kids. He had been lonely during commuter conversations, lonely during late-night heart-to-hearts with old fraternity brothers. His dad, living alone up in New Hampshire, made Hood lonely. The severe landscapes of November made him lonely. Only Janey, for reasons Hood wasn’t likely to analyze, distracted him from this isolation. He was aware that this was a temporary situation, but he felt bound to look into it. There was more to it than that. In the mirror over the dresser he looked good for forty. Almost forty—next March. Wait a second. His skin was stretched over his paunch. As if someone had cellophaned a constrictive packaging over the youthful Benjamin Hood, soft even then. He was mottled and patchy. He needed a new coat of semigloss. His hair was going. He had worn it short all his life—he had never seen it, really—and now it was gone.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Finally, while almost everyone has adequate social skills, we are more likely to use them and reach out when we feel connected already, which isn’t particularly useful if you’re feeling lonely. So turn this on its head: to combat occasional waves of loneliness—a weekend with no plans, a particularly FOMO-inducing Instagram moment—use your feelings as a cue to take action. Whenever you feel lonesome, make social plans: email a friend to meet up for a movie next weekend or look at the schedule for that bocce-and-beer group you’ve been meaning to join. It won’t make company appear in the moment, but you’ll have created something social to look forward to. To sum it all up, making friends consists mostly of overcoming inertia—both others’ and our own. Assuming someone is friendly to begin with, repetition, disclosure, and taking the initiative hammer out a solid friendship that will stand the test of time. FORGET EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT BEING POPULAR Illinois, mid-1990s. Dr. Jennifer Parkhurst, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was standing in front of an audience most others wouldn’t dare to face. No, not angry mobsters or rowdy hooligans. Instead, it was a classroom full of middle schoolers. That day, classroom by classroom, Dr. Parkhurst and her graduate student Andrea Hopmeyer were reporting the results of their data collection for a study on popularity to their seventh- and eighth-grade subjects, checking in much as a congressional representative would do for her constituents. As Dr. Parkhurst stood in front of the class, braces flashed back at her. Faces studded with pimples betrayed raging hormones. A mix of awkwardness, angst, and aspirational sophistication emanated from the rows of Girbaud jeans and Reebok Pumps. Parkhurst thanked the whole class for their participation and began her report: “So this is what we found out. In your class, the most popular kids are kind, cooperative, and trustworthy, and they don’t start fights.” A murmur rippled through the classroom. A girl in a pink T-shirt raised her hand. “That’s not true!” she said. “Popular kids are not friendly and nice. They’re mean and stuck-up.” Emboldened, other hands shot up: “Popular kids do start fights!” “They’re not kind or cooperative.” “They’re mean!” Parkhurst was puzzled. “But what I just said was based on the answers you gave us,” she said. Pink T-shirt Girl crossed her arms. “Then everyone who took your survey must have lied.” “Yeah!” echoed the class. Parkhurst thought for a moment. To be sure, she asked, “Do you like these kids?” What roared back was definitive: “No! We can’t stand them.” The kids couldn’t have known it, but in that moment they upended decades of research methodology.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Yet if they took a moment to do the arithmetic of my work life versus their work life, as I have, they would perhaps understand and absolve, for they see the same people every day, their universe of clients and contacts and colleagues is relatively confined and stable, so that a new temp like me in their office is a novelty, a topic of conversation, a person to whom they can “give a leg up,” an outsider in whom they can confide hatreds and old wounds. I stick in their mind because they are pleased that they were able to put aside class differences and treat me as an equal. “Arno, hi!” And there I am, standing in front of Park Street Station, unable to reciprocate properly, feeling like a waiter asked to remember an order from a table he served months before. The name problem is compounded by the fact that there is apparently some vulnerability in my countenance that signals to lost people that I should be approached for directions. I have gotten good at sensing the lost now as they look over a crowdlet of potential help at a stop sign: they spot me, and though I’m wearing a tie like the other men, they seem to smell that I’m a temp and must therefore be permanently lonely and lowly, a sick caribou that the wolf singles out for attention; they know that they will feel at ease with me about admitting to being a stranger because I am going to welcome any human contact, any indication that I’m established and not transient. I go through periods when I am asked three times a day for directions. And these lost people are right—I do like being interrupted on the street, especially by women, but by men, too. I am poor at retaining street names, however, even streets that hold buildings in which I’ve worked in the past. For a while I deliberately studied maps of the business district in the evening, counting traffic lights and memorizing cross streets and helpful landmarks, so that I would live up to the expectations of unintimidating guidance that my face and features seem to create. (I find that the response is especially heavy if I am carrying some bulky item, like a bunch of flowers or a Wang VS backup disk.) As a result, I never know if the person coming toward me on the sidewalk and seeking eye contact is someone I worked with at Gillette or Kendall or Ropes & Gray or Polaroid or MassBank or Arthur Young, or whether he or she just needs to know how to get to Milk Street. During the periods when I have full Fold-powers, however, these difficulties are easily solved. As soon as I hear an “Arno, hi!”

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Jack Moellering, the Friedman apologist, was, as he spoke, fixed raptly on the slit up the side of Madeline’s harem pants. —Supply and demand ... less restriction, Moellering was saying. Less restriction. The laissez-faire stuff was really traveling around the room. Several feet away, by the mantel, Bobby Haskell, normally a guy who concentrated on paddle tennis to the exclusion of all other forms of conversation, was proposing that unions were a kind of labor monopoly, just an antitrust problem in the arena of labor. These Friedman arias swooped around one another like the diverging themes of a duet, until Hood began to experience the opera of economics as just that, an opera, an opera full of good stories: the chance of great or mean birth, the influx and egress of fortunes honest and swindled, the plunging and soaring of government statistics along the g- and f-clefs of official statistical graphs and indexes. Friedman’s beloved money supply, new housing starts, durable goods, factory inventories, auto sales, and, of course, Variety’s top-grossing films of the week—each had its thrill of victory, its agony of defeat. Hood heard the long, bickering synopsis of lives in recitative, the surge of fine melody in an investment success, and the elaboration of a reversal in the sudden downturn in the market. The paisley and earth colors in the room swam before his intoxicated eyes, but the music of his business, the investment business, was music to his ears. America rose and fell on the melody of New Canaan’s songs of the economy. Songs sung by a Jewish economist and mimicked by WASPs who would have thought twice before playing golf with the guy. Hood was capable of formulating one last coherent thought: they were all scattered like seeds, flying outward from the primal fist of Europe long ago. Hood circled the room alone, and no companion—not Elena, not Janey Williams, not George Clair or Dave Gorman (now slumped by himself on the modular sofa)—would salve his isolation. He was as alone as Elena, who couldn’t break a silence with a stranger, as alone as some fur trapper in the first light, in the wilderness of the new continent. Janey was gone anyway, vanished. And so was George Clair. He didn’t recognize any of these people. Outside, in the dim light of outdoor lamps, snow accumulated. In the corner of the room, for a split second, Hood thought he saw Buddy Hackett. More about television. From Sunrise Semester to Love, American Style, from Banacek to The New Price Is Right, television served as the structured time, the safe harbor for Wendy Hood.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Breakfast was served in the bedrooms; Clifford never appeared before lunch, and the dining-room was a little dreary. After coffee Michaelis, restless and ill-sitting soul, wondered what he should do. It was a fine November day ... fine for Wragby. He looked over the melancholy park. My God! What a place! He sent a servant to ask, could he be of any service to Lady Chatterley: he thought of driving into Sheffield. The answer came, would he care to go up to Lady Chatterley's sitting-room. Connie had a sitting-room on the third floor, the top floor of the central portion of the house. Clifford's rooms were on the ground floor, of course. Michaelis was flattered by being asked up to Lady Chatterley's own parlour. He followed blindly after the servant ... he never noticed things, or had contact with his surroundings. In her room he did glance vaguely round at the fine German reproductions of Renoir and Cézanne. "It's very pleasant up here," he said, with his queer smile, as if it hurt him to smile, showing his teeth. "You are wise to get to the top." "Yes, I think so," she said. Her room was the only gay, modern one in the house, the only spot in Wragby where her personality was at all revealed. Clifford had never seen it, and she asked very few people up. Now she and Michaelis sat on opposite sides of the fire and talked. She asked him about himself, his mother and father, his brothers ... other people were always something of a wonder to her, and when her sympathy was awakened she was quite devoid of class feeling. Michaelis talked frankly about himself, quite frankly, without affectation, simply revealing his bitter, indifferent, stray-dog's soul, then showing a gleam of revengeful pride in his success. "But why are you such a lonely bird?" Connie asked him; and again he looked at her, with his full, searching, hazel look. "Some birds _are_ that way," he replied. Then, with a touch of familiar irony; "but, look here, what about yourself? Aren't you by way of being a lonely bird yourself?" Connie, a little startled, thought about it for a few moments, and then she said: "Only in a way! Not altogether, like you!" "Am I altogether a lonely bird?" he asked, with his queer grin of a smile, as if he had toothache; it was so wry, and his eyes were so perfectly unchangingly melancholy, or stoical, or disillusioned, or afraid. "Why?" she said, a little breathless, as she looked at him. "You are, aren't you?" She felt a terrible appeal coming to her from him, that made her almost lose her balance. "Oh, you're quite right!" he said, turning his head away, and looking sideways, downwards, with that strange immobility of an old race that is hardly here in our present day. It was that that really made Connie lose her power to see him detached from herself.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "Well," he said, "I don't know. What's the use of my generalising? I only know my own case. I like women, but I don't desire them. I like talking to them; but talking to them, though it makes me intimate in one direction, sets me poles apart from them as far as kissing is concerned. So there you are! But don't take me as a general example, probably I'm just a special case: one of the men who like women, but don't love women, and even hate them if they force me into a pretence of love, or an entangled appearance." "But doesn't it make you sad?" "Why should it? Not a bit! I look at Charlie May, and the rest of the men who have affairs.... No, I don't envy them a bit! If fate sent me a woman I wanted, well and good. Since I don't know any woman I want, and never see one ... why, I presume I'm cold, and I really _like_ some women very much." "Do you like me?" "Very much! And you see there's no question of kissing between us, is there?" "None at all!" said Connie. "But oughtn't there to be?" "_Why_, in God's name? I like Clifford, but what would you say if I went and kissed him?" "But isn't there a difference?" "Where does it lie, as far as we're concerned? We're all intelligent human beings, and the male and female business is in abeyance. Just in abeyance. How would you like me to start acting up like a continental male at this moment, and parading the sex thing?" "I should hate it." "Well then! I tell you, if I'm really a male thing at all, I never run across the female of my species. And I don't miss her, I just _like_ women. Who's going to force me into loving, or pretending to love them, working up the sex game?" "No, I'm not. But isn't something wrong?" "You may feel it, I don't." "Yes, I feel something is wrong between men and women. A woman has no glamour for a man any more." "Has a man for a woman?" She pondered the other side of the question. "Not much," she said truthfully. "Then let's leave it all alone, and just be decent and simple, like proper human beings with one another. Be damned to the artificial sex-compulsion! I refuse it!" Connie knew he was right, really. Yet it left her feeling so forlorn, so forlorn and stray. Like a chip on a dreary pond, she felt. What was the point, of her or anything? It was her youth which rebelled. These men seemed so old and cold. Everything seemed old and cold. And Michaelis let one down so; he was no good. The men didn't want one; they just didn't really want a woman, even Michaelis didn't. And the bounders who pretended they did, and started working the sex game, they were worse than ever.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Till he'd gone and married that Bertha Coutts, as if to spite himself. Some people do marry to spite themselves, because they're disappointed of something. And no wonder it had been a failure.--For years he was gone, all the time of the war: and a lieutenant and all: quite the gentleman, really quite the gentleman!--Then to come back to Tevershall and go as a gamekeeper! Really, some people can't take their chances when they've got them! And talking broad Derbyshire again like the worst, when she, Ivy Bolton, knew he spoke like any gentleman, _really_. Well well! So her ladyship had fallen for him! Well,--her ladyship wasn't the first: there was something about him. But fancy! A Tevershall lad born and bred, and she her ladyship in Wragby Hall! My word, that was a slap back at the high-and-mighty Chatterleys! But he, the keeper, as the day grew, had realised: it's no good! It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them. With a sudden snap the bleeding desire that had drawn him after her broke. He had broken it, because it must be so. There must be a coming together on both sides. And if she wasn't coming to him, he wouldn't track her down. He mustn't. He must go away, till she came. He turned slowly, ponderingly, accepting again the isolation. He knew it was better so. She must come to him: it was no use his trailing after her. No use! Mrs. Bolton saw him disappear, saw his dog run after him. "Well well," she said. "He's the one man I never thought of; and the one man I might have thought of. He was nice to me when he was a lad, after I lost Ted. Well well! Whatever would _he_ say if he knew!" And she glanced triumphantly at the already sleeping Clifford, as she stepped softly from the room. CHAPTER XI Connie was sorting out one of the Wragby lumber rooms. There were several: the house was a warren, and the family never sold anything. Sir Geoffrey's father had liked pictures and Sir Geoffrey's mother had liked cinquecento furniture. Sir Geoffrey himself had liked old carved oak chests, vestry chests. So it went on through the generations. Clifford collected very modern pictures, at very moderate prices. So in the lumber room there were bad Sir Edwin Landseers and pathetic William Henry Hunt birds' nests: and other Academy stuff, enough to frighten the daughter of an R. A. She determined to look through it one day, and clear it all. And the grotesque furniture interested her.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  He also told me that it was very expensive to live in a hotel and recommended that I should live with a private family. We deferred consideration of the matter until Monday. Sjt.Mazmudar and I found the hotel to be a trying affair. It was also very expensive. There was, however, a Sindhi fellow-passenger from Malta who had become friends with Sjt Mazmudar, and as he was not a stranger to London, he offered to find rooms for us. We agreed,and on Monday, as soon as we got our baggage, we paid up our bills and went to the rooms rented for us by the Sindhi friend. I remember my hotel bill came to £ 3 an amount which shocked me. And I had practically starved in spite of this heavy bill! For I could relish nothing. When I did not like one thing, I asked for another, but had to pay for both just the same. The fact is that all this while I had depended on the provisions which I had brought with me from Bombay. I was very uneasy even in the new rooms. I would continually think of my home and country. My mother’s love always hunted me. At night the tears would stream down my cheeks, and home memories of all sorts made sleep out of the question. It was impossible to share my misery with anyone. And even if I could have done so, where was the use? I knew of nothing that would soothe me. Everything was strange-the people, their ways, and even their dwellings. I was a complete novice in the matter of English etiquette and continually had to be on my guard. There was the additional inconvenience of the vegetarian vow. Even the dishes that I could eat were tasteless and insipid. I thus found myself between Scylla and Charybdis. England I could not bear, but to return to India was not to be thought of. Now that I had come, I must finish the three years, said the inner voice. 16MY CHOICEDr. Mehta went on Monday to the Victoria Hotel expecting to find me there. He discovered that we had left, got our new address, and met me at our rooms. Through sheer folly I had managed to get ringworm on the boat. For washing and bathing we used to have sea-water, in which soap is not soluble. I, however, used soap, taking its use to be a sign of civilization, with the result that instead of cleaning the skin it made it greasy. This gave me ringworm. I showed it to Dr. Mehta, who told me to apply acetic acid. I remember how the burning acid made me cry. Dr. Mehta inspected my room and its appointments and shook his head in disapproval. ‘This place won’t do,’ he said. ‘We come to England not so much for the purpose of studies as for gaining experience of English life and customs.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  The best of life was intoxication. The promise of liberated sexuality, dangled before others of their age group, completely eluded Paul and his friends. They whacked off and got caught. They got stoned, and drank, and whacked off. They tortured freshmen, re-inflicting their frustration on these new kids, javelining them with cross-country ski poles. Then they stole five minutes to jerk off a second time. The Cult’s precise origin was unknown. It included women, too. Not only Carla the Bear, but Christina Whitman and her roommate, Debby Vartagnan. Debby had these episodes in which she would permit guys from Kittredge, whom she usually loved only in a platonic fashion, to lie with her on a Saturday night, in violation of major school rules, and to touch her unnaturally large breasts. Each victim would then be marked with a number of unmistakable welts on his neck. Paul hadn’t yet had his turn, but he had seen Hal Frost, another Cultist, come back from one of these encounters at first elated—he was going to be the first one to stain her blankets! to shower with her! to meet her parents!— and then ashamed. In the days afterward, Debby Vartagnan wouldn’t speak to Frost. Where was the free love in this? Where was the revolution? The size of the Cult was shifting, as was its group identity. Francis Chamberlain Davenport IV, Paul’s closest friend, was a founding member, as was Hal Frost. And there were Christina and Debby and Penny Belvedere and Johnny Wilde and Mike Russell and a host of secondary characters. Sometimes they all got along. Sometimes they could rest assured that the difficult moments of the day—the moment, for example, when each of them entered the dining hall unaccompanied and was subjected to its system of gazes and ratings—they had company. This company was worth the anxious apartness it also fostered in them. The Cult comforted, Paul Hood thought, as the train passed through Greenwich. The Cult was a tonic and a comfort. But one thing the Kittredge Cult could not do was instruct about love. They were all orphans this way, from broken homes. They knew shit about love. Paul had gone out, in St. Pete’s parlance, with Eileen Becker in fourth form, but late in the spring she began seeing, instead, his roommate, Stan Sinclair. A period followed in which Paul frequently disturbed them in his dorm room—the two of them pretending to be asleep, or Eileen clutching a rumpled frock around her. Hood struck back with a few crushes that didn’t last more than a week. He struck back by being alone. Then one night he persuaded Eileen into an empty reading room. In the sciences building. He had preyed upon her confused notions of fidelity. I can’t eat since you started up with Sinclair, he said. I’m all cut up inside.

• From Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women (Erotic Fiction) (2006)

  Now, the seven dwarfs were really seven handsome princes who had been placed under an evil spell by an angry witch. The spell, in addition to making the princes very small in stature, also caused each of them to be afflicted with a malady of sorts, so that one was plagued by continuous fits of sneezing, another by chronic sleepiness, another still by a sour disposition, and so on. Seeing no relief from their wretched situation, the princes left polite society to live quietly together in the woods, where eventually they came to be known by the characteristics they were given from the curse, so that they were called Sneezy, Sleepy, Grumpy, Happy, Dopey, Bashful and Doc. Such were the circumstances of the dwarfs when they made the acquaintance of Snow White later that evening. From their very first meeting, Snow White was charmed by the dwarfs and felt quite safe residing with them in their little bungalow in the woods. And as for the prince-dwarfs, they each fell deeply in love with Snow White. Nothing she did failed to please them, and they doted on her in every single thing that she wished. In no time at all they became the best of friends. Now it happened one evening that the prince-dwarfs overheard Snow White crying in her bed. Alarmed, they rushed to her side and begged her to tell them the cause of her distress. After much prodding, Snow White finally confessed her loneliness to the dwarfs, and told them of her deepest desire for a prince of her own to love. This declaration saddened the dwarfs greatly; but Doc suddenly announced that he knew a remedy for Snow White. “What is it?” she asked. Doc did not answer her question, asking her instead, “Do you trust your devoted dwarfs, Snow White?” “Of course!” she cried. “Lie down and close your eyes, then, and we shall see,” he continued. Snow White complied, and at length she felt the hands of all seven of the little men upon her body, lifting her nightdress and alighting on her bare skin. Snow White gasped and jumped up from the bed. Whatever she had expected, it was certainly not that! “Things are not always as they appear, dearest Snow White,” advised Doc. “But we can do little to help until you are able to trust us.” And with that he and his six companions left Snow White alone with her misery. The incident was quickly forgotten, and once again the friendship between the eight blossomed. But Snow White was still plagued in the evenings with an aching loneliness, and one night her sobs were once again heard by the dwarfs. They rushed to Snow White’s side with inquiries and entreaties. She again explained her melancholy wish for a prince of her own to love. And once again, Doc made the claim that he knew a cure. “Please, tell me!” cried Snow White. “Do you trust your faithful dwarfs?” he asked her.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Connie guessed, however, that her father had said something, and that something was in Clifford's mind. She knew that he didn't mind whether she were _demi-vierge_ or _demi-monde_, so long as he didn't absolutely know, and wasn't made to see. What the eye doesn't see and the mind doesn't know, doesn't exist. Connie and Clifford had now been nearly two years at Wragby, living their vague life of absorption in Clifford and his work. Their interests had never ceased to flow together over his work. They talked and wrestled in the throes of composition, and felt as if something were happening, really happening, really in the void. And thus far it was a life: in the void. For the rest it was non-existence. Wragby was there, the servants ... but spectral, not really existing. Connie went for walks in the park, and in the woods that joined the park, and enjoyed the solitude and the mystery, kicked the brown leaves of autumn, and picked the primroses of spring. But it was all a dream; or rather it was like the simulacrum of reality. The oak-leaves were to her like oak-leaves seen ruffling in a mirror, she herself was a figure somebody had read about, picking primroses that were only shadows or memories, or words. No substance to her or anything ... no touch, no contact! Only this life with Clifford, this endless spinning of webs of yarn, of the minutiae of consciousness, these stories Sir Malcolm said there was nothing in, and they wouldn't last. Why should there be anything in them, why should they last? Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Sufficient unto the moment is the _appearance_ of reality. Clifford had quite a number of friends, acquaintances really, and he invited them to Wragby. He invited all sorts of people, critics and writers, people who would help to praise his books. And they were flattered at being asked to Wragby, and they praised. Connie understood it all perfectly. But why not? This was one of the fleeting patterns in the mirror. What was wrong with it? She was hostess to these people ... mostly men. She was hostess also to Clifford's occasional aristocratic relations. Being a soft, ruddy, country-looking girl, inclined to freckles, with big blue eyes, and curling, brown hair, and a soft voice, and rather strong, female loins she was considered a little old-fashioned and "womanly." She was not a "little pilchard sort of fish," like a boy, with a boy's flat breast and little buttocks. She was too feminine to be quite smart. So the men, especially those no longer young, were very nice to her indeed. But, knowing what torture poor Clifford would feel at the slightest sign of flirting on her part, she gave them no encouragement at all. She was quiet and vague, she had no contact with them and intended to have none. Clifford was extraordinarily proud of himself.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "Well," he said, "I don't know. What's the use of my generalising? I only know my own case. I like women, but I don't desire them. I like talking to them; but talking to them, though it makes me intimate in one direction, sets me poles apart from them as far as kissing is concerned. So there you are! But don't take me as a general example, probably I'm just a special case: one of the men who like women, but don't love women, and even hate them if they force me into a pretence of love, or an entangled appearance." "But doesn't it make you sad?" "Why should it? Not a bit! I look at Charlie May, and the rest of the men who have affairs.... No, I don't envy them a bit! If fate sent me a woman I wanted, well and good. Since I don't know any woman I want, and never see one ... why, I presume I'm cold, and I really _like_ some women very much." "Do you like me?" "Very much! And you see there's no question of kissing between us, is there?" "None at all!" said Connie. "But oughtn't there to be?" "_Why_, in God's name? I like Clifford, but what would you say if I went and kissed him?" "But isn't there a difference?" "Where does it lie, as far as we're concerned? We're all intelligent human beings, and the male and female business is in abeyance. Just in abeyance. How would you like me to start acting up like a continental male at this moment, and parading the sex thing?" "I should hate it." "Well then! I tell you, if I'm really a male thing at all, I never run across the female of my species. And I don't miss her, I just _like_ women. Who's going to force me into loving, or pretending to love them, working up the sex game?" "No, I'm not. But isn't something wrong?" "You may feel it, I don't." "Yes, I feel something is wrong between men and women. A woman has no glamour for a man any more." "Has a man for a woman?" She pondered the other side of the question. "Not much," she said truthfully. "Then let's leave it all alone, and just be decent and simple, like proper human beings with one another. Be damned to the artificial sex-compulsion! I refuse it!" Connie knew he was right, really. Yet it left her feeling so forlorn, so forlorn and stray. Like a chip on a dreary pond, she felt. What was the point, of her or anything? It was her youth which rebelled. These men seemed so old and cold. Everything seemed old and cold. And Michaelis let one down so; he was no good. The men didn't want one; they just didn't really want a woman, even Michaelis didn't. And the bounders who pretended they did, and started working the sex game, they were worse than ever.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "But you wouldn't bother me," she pleaded. "I'd rather not go to the hut at all, if I am going to be in the way." He looked at her with his keen blue eyes. He seemed kindly, but distant. But at least he was sane, and wholesome, if even he looked thin and ill. A cough troubled him. "You have a cough," she said. "Nothing--a cold! The last pneumonia left me with a cough, but it's nothing." He kept distant from her, and would not come any nearer. She went fairly often to the hut, in the morning or in the afternoon, but he was never there. No doubt he avoided her on purpose. He wanted to keep his own privacy. He had made the hut tidy, put the little table and chair near the fireplace, left a little pile of kindling and small logs, and put the tools and traps away as far as possible, effacing himself. Outside, by the clearing, he had built a low little roof of boughs and straw, a shelter for the birds, and under it stood the five coops. And, one day when she came, she found two brown hens sitting alert and fierce in the coops, sitting on pheasants' eggs, and fluffed out so proud and deep in all the heat of the pondering female blood. This almost broke Connie's heart. She, herself, was so forlorn and unused, not a female at all, just a mere thing of terrors. Then all the five coops were occupied by hens, three brown and a gray and a black. All alike, they clustered themselves down on the eggs in the soft nestling ponderosity of the female urge, the female nature, fluffing out feathers. And with brilliant eyes they watched Connie, as she crouched before them, and they gave short sharp clucks of anger and alarm, but chiefly of female anger at being approached. Connie found corn in the corn-bin in the hut. She offered it to the hens in her hand. They would not eat it. Only one hen pecked at her hand with a fierce little jab, so Connie was frightened. But she was pining to give them something, the brooding mothers who neither fed themselves nor drank. She brought water in a little tin, and was delighted when one of the hens drank. Now she came every day to the hens, they were the only things in the world that warmed her heart. Clifford's protestations made her go cold from head to foot. Mrs. Bolton's voice made her go cold, and the sound of the business men who came. An occasional letter from Michaelis affected her with the same sense of chill. She felt she would surely die if it lasted much longer.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  I had dinner with a friend. The restaurant was the size of two large living rooms. The tables were jammed together, and to be seated, the waitress employed a kind of magic, pulling one table out and then wedging you in, like a child in a high chair. You had to summon her to use the toilet. When it was time to order, I flailed at her with my catastrophic French. She nodded and did not laugh. She gave no false manners. We had an incredible bottle of wine. I had steak. I had a baguette with bone marrow. I had liver. I had an espresso and a dessert that I can’t even name. Using all the French I could muster, I tried to tell the waitress the meal was magnificent. She cut me off in English, “The best you’ve ever had, right?” I rose to walk, and despite having inhaled half the menu I felt easy as a featherweight. The next day I got up early and walked through the city. I visited the Musée Rodin. I stopped in a bistro, and with all the fear of a boy approaching a beautiful girl at a party, I ordered two beers and then a burger. I walked to Le Jardin du Luxembourg. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. I took a seat. The garden was bursting with people, again in all their alien ways. At that moment a strange loneliness took hold. Perhaps it was that I had not spoken a single word of English that entire day. Perhaps it was that I had never sat in a public garden before, had not even known it to be something that I’d want to do. And all around me there were people who did this regularly.

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  On the horizon some summer clouds were standing mutely still, half-immersing their magnificent, mournful, prophet-like forms in the sea. The muscles of the clouds were pale as alabaster. A few sailboats and skiffs and several fishing boats had put out from the sandy beaches and were now moving about lazily upon the open sea. Except for the tiny figures in the boats, not a human form was to be seen. A subtle hush was over everything. As though a coquette had come telling her little secrets, a light breeze blew in from the sea, bringing to my ears a tiny sound like the invisible wing-beats of some lighthearted insects. The beach near me was made up almost altogether of low, docile rocks that tilted toward the sea. There were only two or three such jutting crags as this on which I was sitting. From the offing the waves began and came sliding in over the surface of the sea in the form of restless green swells. Groups of low rocks extended out into the sea, where their resistance to the waves sent splashes high into the air, like white hands begging for help. The rocks were dipping themselves in the sea's sensation of deep abundance and seemed to be dreaming of buoys broken loose from their moorings. But in a flash the swell had passed them by and come sliding toward the beach with unabated speed. As it drew near the beach something awakened and rose up within its green hood. The wave grew tall and, as far as the eye could reach, revealed the razor-keen blade of the sea's enormous ax, poised and ready to strike. Suddenly the dark-blue guillotine fell, sending up a white blood-splash. The body of the wave, seething and falling, pursued its severed head, and for a moment it reflected the pure blue of the sky, that same unearthly blue which is mirrored in the eyes of a person on the verge of death. . . . During the brief instant of the wave's attack, the groups of rocks, smooth and eroded, had concealed themselves in white froth, but now, gradually emerging from the sea, they glittered in the retreating remnants of the wave. From the top of the rock where I sat watching, I could see hermit-shells sidling crazily across the glittering rocks and crabs become motionless in the glare. All at once my feeling of solitude became mixed with memories of Omi. It was like this: My long-felt attraction toward the loneliness that filled Omi's life—loneliness born of the fact that life had enslaved him—had first made me want to possess the same quality; and now that I was experiencing, in this feeling of emptiness before the sea's repletion, a loneliness that outwardly resembled his, I wanted to savor it completely, through his very eyes.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Clifford left them alone, and she learnt to do the same: she just went by without looking at them, and they stared as if she were a walking wax figure. When he had to deal with them, Clifford was rather haughty and contemptuous; one could no longer afford to be friendly. In fact he was altogether rather supercilious and contemptuous of anyone not in his own class. He stood his ground, without any attempt at conciliation. And he was neither liked nor disliked by the people: he was just part of things, like the pit-bank and Wragby itself. But Clifford was really extremely shy and self-conscious now he was lamed. He hated seeing anyone except just the personal servants. For he had to sit in a wheeled chair or a sort of bath-chair. Nevertheless he was just as carefully dressed as ever, by his expensive tailors, and he wore the careful Bond Street neckties just as before, and from the top he looked just as smart and impressive as ever. He had never been one of the modern lady-like young men: rather bucolic even, with his ruddy face and broad shoulders. But his very quiet, hesitating voice, and his eyes, at the same time bold and frightened, assured and uncertain, revealed his nature. His manner was often offensively supercilious, and then again modest and self-effacing, almost tremulous. Connie and he were attached to one another, in the aloof modern way. He was much too hurt in himself, the great shock of his maiming, to be easy and flippant. He was a hurt thing. And as such Connie stuck to him passionately. But she could not help feeling how little connection he really had with people. The miners were, in a sense, his own men; but he saw them as objects rather than men, parts of the pit rather than parts of life, crude raw phenomena rather than human beings along with him. He was in some way afraid of them, he could not bear to have them look at him now he was lame. And their queer, crude life seemed as unnatural as that of hedgehogs. He was remotely interested; but like a man looking down a microscope, or up a telescope. He was not in touch. He was not in actual touch with anybody, save, traditionally, with Wragby, and, through the close bond of family defence, with Emma. Beyond this nothing really touched him. Connie felt that she herself didn't really, not really touch him; perhaps there was nothing to get at ultimately; just a negation of human contact.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  It occurred to me that I really was in someone else’s country and yet, in some necessary way, I was outside of their country. In America I was part of an equation—even if it wasn’t a part I relished. I was the one the police stopped on Twenty-third Street in the middle of a workday. I was the one driven to The Mecca. I was not just a father but the father of a black boy. I was not just a spouse but the husband of a black woman, a freighted symbol of black love. But sitting in that garden, for the first time I was an alien, I was a sailor—landless and disconnected. And I was sorry that I had never felt this particular loneliness before—that I had never felt myself so far outside of someone else’s dream. Now I felt the deeper weight of my generational chains—my body confined, by history and policy, to certain zones. Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice. I wished I had known more, and I wished I had known it sooner. I remember, that night, watching the teenagers gathering along the pathway near the Seine to do all their teenage things. And I remember thinking how much I would have loved for that to have been my life, how much I would have loved to have a past apart from the fear. I did not have that past in hand or memory. But I had you. We came back to Paris that summer, because your mother loved the city and because I loved the language, but above all because of you.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  I rubbed my face, feeling a little sleepy. Where to start … “Well, let’s see. My first experience with S/M was with Sue. And she had to hound me for months to tie her up and spank her. I insisted that she do it to me first, so I could be sure it was okay. Surprise, surprise, I found out I really like it, so I reciprocated, and we kept fooling around with it, but not doing anything heavy. I started suggesting we move into it a little further. That made her uneasy. When I bought her a leather paddle, she freaked out. For some reason, that was sick. We eventually broke up, ostensibly over class differences, and there was nobody to talk to. I think I tried once to explain it to this friend of mine, my best friend, in fact. We had known each other since college, when we both came out during the same semester. So I was trying to describe this new component of myself I had begun to unearth, and she freaked out, too. She said something like, ‘After the months I’ve worked at the rape crisis center, I can’t stand to listen to this,’ and ran like a bunny. The next time I called up a few of my other old friends, they treated me with what I thought was distaste. Sue was not telling people about our class differences, it seemed. So I gave up calling anybody I used to know.” “Sounds familiar,” Jessie said. “Where did you go from there?” “I spent about a month just going to my shop and coming straight home. Staring at TV. Then I got disgusted with myself and fed myself a couple of drinks and drove myself down to one of the men’s leather bars. I was lucky the first time—it was real crowded, and the bartender didn’t spot me, so I hung out all night, tucked behind the jukebox, taking everything in a mile a minute. The next time I went there, it wasn’t so busy, and they kicked me out. So I went down the block to the next bar. It was real hard. But I kept thinking, there must be other women like me somewhere, I can’t be the only one, and sooner or later they’ll show up here, too. Because there is no place else to go.” I paused to take a deep breath, but Jessie didn’t say a word. She was fascinated. I wondered how much of my story was her story.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Yet he was absolutely dependent on her, he needed her every moment. Big and strong as he was, he was helpless. He could wheel himself about in a wheeled chair, and he had a sort of bath-chair with a motor attachment, in which he could puff slowly round the park. But alone he was like a lost thing. He needed Connie to be there, to assure him he existed at all. Still he was ambitious. He had taken to writing stories; curious, very personal stories about people he had known. Clever, rather spiteful, and yet, in some mysterious way, meaningless. The observation was extraordinary and peculiar. But there was no touch, no actual contact. It was as if the whole thing took place in a vacuum. And since the field of life is largely an artificially-lighted stage today, the stories were curiously true to modern life, to the modern psychology, that is. Clifford was almost morbidly sensitive about these stories. He wanted everyone to think them good, of the best, ne plus ultra. They appeared in the most modern magazines, and were praised and blamed as usual. But to Clifford the blame was torture, like knives goading him. It was as if the whole of his being were in his stories. Connie helped him as much as she could. At first she was thrilled. He talked every thing over with her monotonously, insistently, persistently, and she had to respond with all her might. It was as if her whole soul and body and sex had to rouse up and pass into these stories of his. This thrilled her and absorbed her. Of physical life they lived very little. She had to superintend the house. But the housekeeper had served Sir Geoffrey for many years, and the dried-up, elderly, superlatively correct female ... you could hardly call her a parlourmaid, or even a woman ... who waited at table, had been in the house for forty years. Even the very housemaids were no longer young. It was awful! What could you do with such a place, but leave it alone! All these endless rooms that nobody used, all the Midlands routine, the mechanical cleanliness and the mechanical order! Clifford had insisted on a new cook, an experienced woman who had served him in his rooms in London. For the rest the place seemed run by mechanical anarchy. Everything went on in pretty good order, strict cleanliness, and strict punctuality; even pretty strict honesty. And yet, to Connie, it was a methodical anarchy. No warmth of feeling united it organically. The house seemed as dreary as a disused street.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Till he'd gone and married that Bertha Coutts, as if to spite himself. Some people do marry to spite themselves, because they're disappointed of something. And no wonder it had been a failure.--For years he was gone, all the time of the war: and a lieutenant and all: quite the gentleman, really quite the gentleman!--Then to come back to Tevershall and go as a gamekeeper! Really, some people can't take their chances when they've got them! And talking broad Derbyshire again like the worst, when she, Ivy Bolton, knew he spoke like any gentleman, _really_. Well well! So her ladyship had fallen for him! Well,--her ladyship wasn't the first: there was something about him. But fancy! A Tevershall lad born and bred, and she her ladyship in Wragby Hall! My word, that was a slap back at the high-and-mighty Chatterleys! But he, the keeper, as the day grew, had realised: it's no good! It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them. With a sudden snap the bleeding desire that had drawn him after her broke. He had broken it, because it must be so. There must be a coming together on both sides. And if she wasn't coming to him, he wouldn't track her down. He mustn't. He must go away, till she came. He turned slowly, ponderingly, accepting again the isolation. He knew it was better so. She must come to him: it was no use his trailing after her. No use! Mrs. Bolton saw him disappear, saw his dog run after him. "Well well," she said. "He's the one man I never thought of; and the one man I might have thought of. He was nice to me when he was a lad, after I lost Ted. Well well! Whatever would _he_ say if he knew!" And she glanced triumphantly at the already sleeping Clifford, as she stepped softly from the room. CHAPTER XI Connie was sorting out one of the Wragby lumber rooms. There were several: the house was a warren, and the family never sold anything. Sir Geoffrey's father had liked pictures and Sir Geoffrey's mother had liked cinquecento furniture. Sir Geoffrey himself had liked old carved oak chests, vestry chests. So it went on through the generations. Clifford collected very modern pictures, at very moderate prices. So in the lumber room there were bad Sir Edwin Landseers and pathetic William Henry Hunt birds' nests: and other Academy stuff, enough to frighten the daughter of an R. A. She determined to look through it one day, and clear it all. And the grotesque furniture interested her.