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 Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  How was it possible, when I sat down in the parlor at my prehistoric desk, to use this code language of rape and murder? I was alone in this great hemisphere of violence, but I was not alone as far as the human race was concerned. I was lonely amidst a world of things lit up by phosphorescent flashes of cruelty. I was delirious with an energy which could not be unleashed except in the service of death and futility. I could not begin with a full statement—it would have meant the strait-jacket or the electric chair. I was like a man who had been too long incarcerated in a dungeon—I had to feel my way slowly, falteringly, lest I stumble and be run over. I had to accustom myself gradually to the penalties which freedom involves. I had to grow a new epidermis which would protect me from this burning light in the sky. The ovarian world is the product of a life rhythm. The moment a child is born it becomes part of a world in which there is not only the life rhythm but the death rhythm. The frantic desire to live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life rhythm in us, but of the death rhythm. There is not only no need to keep alive at any price, but, if life is undesirable, it is absolutely wrong. This keeping oneself alive, out of a blind urge to defeat death, is in itself a means of sowing death. Everyone who has not fully accepted life, who is not incrementing life, is helping to fill the world with death. To make the simplest gesture with the hand can convey the utmost sense of life; a word spoken with the whole being can give life. Activity in itself means nothing: it is often a sign of death. By simple external pressure, by force of surroundings and example, by the very climate which activity engenders, one can become part of a monstrous death machine, such as America, for example. What does a dynamo know of life, of peace, of reality? What does any individual American dynamo know of the wisdom and energy, of the life abundant and eternal possessed by a ragged beggar sitting under a tree in the act of meditation? What is energy ? What is life ? One has only to read the stupid twaddle of the scientific and philosophic text-books to realize how less than nothing is the wisdom of these energetic Americans. Listen, they had me on the run, these crazy horse-power fiends; in order to break their insane rhythm, their death rhythm, I had to resort to a wave-length which, until I found the proper sustenance in my own bowels, would at least nullify the rhythm they had set up.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Black women’s intellectual pursuits produced a kind of cultural alienation in which “the educated Negro intellectual faced with a gap between herself, the world of intellectualism and the Negro community” could never fully go home again: “[T]he woman returns home from college and finds herself alienated from her home culture.” Despite what Stephanie Shaw has called the carefully cultivated “ethic of socially responsible individualism”33 instilled in Black women since their earliest days of educational access, by the middle of the twentieth century, Black women had to learn how to negotiate this access in the context of communities uncomfortable—not only with the elite access that education had provided but also with apparent gender performances that could not be culturally apprehended. Battles over the meaning and definition of the intellectual necessarily implicated an ongoing Black cultural project of constructing and reconstructing Black gender identity. Just as Pauline Hopkins had laid out the “duties” of the “true-race woman” in 1902, Ebony made clear the duties of Black women intellectuals in the 1960s: “[N]egro women intellectuals share two responsibilities: to really be an intellectual (although she may not eat well, have friends and be credited with loose screws) and to help shape a new definition of femininity.” Much as Mary Church Terrell’s college pals believed that taking the gentlemen’s course would make her “unwomanly,” nearly a century later, Black communities still worried about whether intellectual work would degrade the carefully crafted meanings of Black womanhood and femininity that the NACW School had fought so hard to inscribe within Black communities. Black women intellectuals like Pauli Murray and Toni Cade Bambara took on these battles for a new generation.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  One of them, who was in traction, turned the conversation one evening to girls, then more generally to sex, finally to men. I watched his erection grow under the sheet. My own pressed against my stomach like a ruler on a board, hour after hour through the slow routines of the hospital. After lights out, I hobbled over to his bed and sucked his cock, which was nearly black and looked like a horse’s, the same abundant foreskin. Finally I realized I’d never get well until I saw O’Reilly and settled things. One of my fraternity brothers, a guy with perfect teeth and the knack of appreciating everything, drove me and waited while I looked out at the snow filling O’Reilly’s garden and gathering like a rabbit muff over the folded hands of the gilt Kamakura Buddha. O’Reilly nodded simply, picked at a scab on his face, and said, “Yes, I agree, you’re right, our work isn’t going well. It’s best you find someone else.” And it was all over. His outrages against me, his unfulfilled promise to cure me—all the grievances I’d been hoarding were canceled like debts voided by a new government. He didn’t owe me anything, nor I him, and on the trip back I was lonely and bruised, and I envied my friend his broad shoulders, his steady hand on the wheel, his manliness, which was so pungent I could smell it, although I couldn’t make use of it. A few weeks later O’Reilly had a breakdown and was sent to the same hospital where his beloved Annie was already a patient. When I got well, I went to the union pool and stood under the showers. I’d become pale and scrawny after two months of being in the hospital. I met a man. He was in the shower across from me, tall, older, smooth-skinned, his face more olive than his body. I’d never seen him before. He smiled at me. His smile relaxed me, as though I’d just been restored to the human race. In the locker room the man smiled at me again, not in the usual furtive way (seductive, hostile, afraid) but just as though we were already friends. He had wonderful green eyes and an engaging smile, although one tooth was a delicate biscuit brown. His shoulders reflected the overhead light. When he turned I could see that his buttocks registered in sinewy detail every motion he made; they weren’t piled high like stiff mounds of whipped cream, the way teenage boys’ butts looked. No, his hips were narrow and fluent. No one else was around in the locker room, although two or three voices boomed from the pool. The smell of chlorine was giving me a headache. We started talking, and everything I said made him nod and smile. I thought he might be laughing at me. What puzzled me was why someone so handsome would show an interest in me.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  There were very few foreign movies, no amused stories in the press about the hijinks of the avant-garde. Everyone ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and people decided whether they were Democrats or Republicans. The three most heinous crimes known to man were Communism, heroin addiction, and homosexuality. Boys played sports, girls planned their trousseaus, parents and children alike read comic strips in the paper and shared a chuckle. Of course there were the motorcycle-riding, hell-raising, hooky-playing “hoods,” but our school didn’t have any of those. It felt, at least to me, like a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday, all stuffed in one oversized car and discussing the mileage they were getting and the next restroom stop they’d be making, a country where no one else was like me—or worse, where there was no question of talking about the self and its discontent, isolation, self-hatred, and burning ambition for sex and power. And yet here were these painters and potters and sculptors. Not just the odd, tormented weirdo I’d known before, the prissy teacher’s pet, the scrawny organ student sneaking into chapel to rehearse, the wimp lurking around after shop to make something pretty for his grandmother—no, here the freaks had banded together, they passed the communal wine cup in the movie’s flickering darkness, they snorted when the hero on the screen pledged to defend America and all it stands for. They seemed to have bought the right to eccentricity by working very hard. That was the American part. They’d wear layers and layers of sweaters, fleece-lined boots, hats and babushkas, mittens with the fingers missing, and they’d stamp their feet against the cold as they labored late into the night. The wind slipped in through rattling skylights and cold seeped up off stone floors; even at noon the sky never rivaled in brightness the humming neon tubes above them, while their vats of clay grew crystals and the nails they drove into boards seared cold into their naked fingers—but they worked on and on, staring at these big nightmare cakes they never finished icing. I didn’t have an appointment with Ivan or Paul. I was wearing nothing but khakis and a sports coat despite the freezing winter winds. I darted across Academy Row, skipping stylistic centuries as I left the fake gothic battlements of the boys’ school for the unadorned, 1930s modernism of the art school. No cars were moving down the road. Everything was silent. Rain had pockmarked the snow before last night’s freeze set in. In the studio building the radiators knocked slowly and constantly. In each cell someone was working. Here and there the odor of cigarettes or coffee scorched through the blanket smell of oil paint. An atmosphere prevailed of intellectual and manual labor, of frustrated but hopeful solitude—something serious, unrebukable. That was when I had my first look at Maria. I didn’t yet know who she was.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “It’s a lonely city,” the man said as they walked. “I’m lonely. Aren’t you lonely, too?” Rufus said nothing. “Maybe we can comfort each other for a night.” Rufus watched the traffic lights, the black, nearly deserted streets, the silent black buildings, the deep shadows of doorways. “Do you know what I mean?” “I’m not the boy you want, mister,” he said at last, and suddenly remembered having said exactly these words to Eric—long ago. “How do you mean, you’re not the boy I want?” And the man tried to laugh. “Shouldn’t I be the best judge of that?” Rufus said, “I don’t have a thing to give you. I don’t have nothing to give nobody. Don’t make me go through with this. Please.” They stopped on the silent Avenue, facing each other. The man’s eyes hardened and narrowed. “Didn’t you know what was going on—back there?” Rufus said, “I was hungry.” “What are you, anyway—just a cock teaser?” “I was hungry,” Rufus repeated; “I was hungry.” “Don’t you have any family—any friends?” Rufus looked down. He did not answer right away. Then, “I don’t want to die, mister. I don’t want to kill you. Let me go—to my friends.” “Do you know where to find them?” “I know where to find—one of them.” There was a silence. Rufus stared at the sidewalk and, very slowly, the tears filled his eyes and began trickling down his nose. The man took his arm. “Come on—come on to my place.” But now the moment, the possibility, had passed; both of them felt it. The man dropped his arm. “You’re a good-looking boy,” he said. Rufus moved away. “So long, mister. Thanks.” The man said nothing. Rufus watched him walk away. Then he, too, turned and began walking downtown. He thought of Eric for the first time in years, and wondered if he were prowling foreign streets tonight. He glimpsed, for the first time, the extent, the nature, of Eric’s loneliness, and the danger in which this placed him; and wished that he had been nicer to him. Eric had always been very nice to Rufus. He had had a pair of cufflinks made for Rufus, for Rufus’ birthday, with the money which was to have bought his wedding rings: and this gift, this confession, delivered him into Rufus’ hands. Rufus had despised him because he came from Alabama; perhaps he had allowed Eric to make love to him in order to despise him more completely. Eric had finally understood this, and had fled from Rufus, all the way to Paris. But his stormy blue eyes, his bright red hair, his halting drawl, all returned very painfully to Rufus now. Go ahead and tell me. You ain’t got to be afraid. And, as Eric hesitated, Rufus added—slyly, grinning, watching him: “You act like a little girl—or something.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  He smiled—I bet mine’s bigger than yours is—but remembered occasional nightmares in which this same vanished buddy pursued him through impenetrable forests, came at him with a knife on the edge of precipices, threatened to hurl him down steep stairs to the sea. In each of the nightmares he wanted revenge. Revenge for what? He sat down again at his worktable. The page on the typewriter stared up at him, full of hieroglyphics. He read it over. It meant nothing whatever. Nothing was happening on that page. He walked back to the window. It was daylight now, and there were people on the streets, the expected, daytime people. The tall girl, with the bobbed hair and spectacles, wearing a long, loose coat, walked swiftly down the street. The grocery store was open. The old Rumanian who ran it carried in the case of milk which had been deposited on the sidewalk. He thought again that he had better get some sleep. He was seeing Ida today, they were having lunch with Richard and Cass. It was eight o’clock. He stretched out on the bed and stared up at the cracks in the ceiling. He thought of Ida. He had seen her for the first time about seven years ago. She had been about fourteen. It was a holiday of some kind and Rufus had promised to take her out. And perhaps the reason he had asked Vivaldo to come with him was because Vivaldo had had to loan him the money. Because I can’t disappoint my sister, man. It had been a day rather like today, bright, cold, and hard. Rufus had been unusually silent and he, too, had been uncomfortable. He felt that he was forcing himself in where he did not belong. But Rufus had made the invitation and he had accepted; neither of them could get out of it now. They had reached the house around one o’clock in the afternoon. Mrs. Scott had opened the door. She was dressed as though she, too, were going out, in a dark gray dress a little too short for her. Her hair was short but had lately been treated with the curling iron. She kissed Rufus lightly on the cheek. “Hey, there,” she said, “how’s my bad boy?” “Hey, yourself,” said Rufus, grinning. There was an expression on his face which Vivaldo had never seen before. It was a kind of teasing flush of amusement and pleasure; as though his mother, standing there in her high heels, her gray dress, and with her hair all curled, had just done something extraordinarily winning. And this flush was repeated in his mother’s darker face as she smiled—gravely—back at him. She seemed to take him in from top to toe and to know exactly how he had been getting along with the world. “This here’s a friend of mine,” Rufus said, “Vivaldo.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  Cass glanced over at Rufus, saying, “Be good now; get some rest.” She smiled at him. He longed to do something to prolong that smile, that moment, but he did not smile back, only nodded his head. She turned to Jane and Vivaldo. “So long, kids. See you soon.” “Sure,” Jane said. “I’ll be over tomorrow,” said Vivaldo. “I’m expecting you,” Richard said, “don’t fail me. So long, Jane.” “So long.” “So long.” Everyone was gone except Jane and Rufus and Vivaldo. I wouldn’t mind being in jail but I’ve got to stay there so long.… The seats the others had occupied were like a chasm now between Rufus and the white boy and the white girl. “Let’s have another drink,” Vivaldo said. So long.… “Let me buy,” Jane said. “I sold a painting.” “Did you now? For a lot of money?” “Quite a lot of money. That’s probably why I was in such a stinking mood the last time you saw me—it wasn’t going well.” “You were in a stinking mood, all right.” Wouldn’t mind being in jail.… “What’re you having, Rufus?” “I’ll stick to Scotch, I guess.” But I’ve got to stay there.… “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t know what makes me such a bitch.” “You drink too much. Let’s just have one drink here. Then I’ll walk you home.” They both looked quickly at Rufus. So long.… “I’m going to the head,” Rufus said. “Order me a Scotch with water.” He walked out of the back room into the roaring bar. He stood at the door for a moment, watching the boys and girls, men and women, their wet mouths opening and closing, their faces damp and pale, their hands grim on the glass or the bottle or clutching a sleeve, an elbow, clutching the air. Small flames flared incessantly here and there and they moved through shifting layers of smoke. The cash register rang and rang. One enormous bouncer stood at the door, watching everything, and another moved about, clearing tables and rearranging chairs. Two boys, one Spanish-looking in a red shirt, one Danish-looking in brown, stood at the juke box, talking about Frank Sinatra. Rufus stared at a small blonde girl who was wearing a striped open blouse and a wide skirt with a big leather belt and a bright brass buckle. She wore low shoes and black knee socks. Her blouse was low enough for him to see the beginnings of her breasts; his eye followed the line down to the full nipples, which pushed aggressively forward; his hand encircled her waist, caressed the belly button and slowly forced the thighs apart. She was talking to another girl. She felt his eyes on her and looked his way. Their eyes met. He turned and walked into the head.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He walked out of the bar into the streets again, not knowing what to do but knowing he could not go home. He wished he had a friend, a male friend, with whom he could talk; and this made him realize that, with the dubious exception of Rufus, he had never had a friend in his life. He thought of calling Eric, but Eric had been away too long. He no longer knew anything about Eric’s life and tonight he did not want to know. So he walked. He passed the great livid scar of Forty-second Street, knowing that he could not endure sitting through a movie tonight; and on, down lonely Sixth Avenue, until he came to the Village. Again, he thought of calling Eric and again dismissed it. He walked eastward to the park; there were no singers there tonight, only shadows in the shadows of the trees; and a policeman coming into the park as he walked out of it. He walked along MacDougal Street. Here were the black-and-white couples, defiantly white, flamboyantly black; and the Italians watched them, hating them, hating, in fact, all the Villagers, who gave their streets a bad name. The Italians, after all merely wished to be accepted as decent Americans and probably could not be blamed for feeling that they might have had an easier time of it if they had not been afflicted with so many Jews and junkies and drunkards and queers and spades. Vivaldo peered into the bars and coffee houses, half-hoping to see a familiar and bearable face. But there were only the rat-faced boys, with beards, and the infantile, shapeless girls, with the long hair. “How’re you and your spade chick making it?” He turned, and it was Jane. She was drunk and with an uptown, seersucker type, who probably worked in advertising. He stared at her and she said, quickly, with a laugh, “Oh, now, don’t get mad, I was only teasing you. Don’t old girl friends have some rights?” And to the man beside her, she said, “This is an old friend of mine, Vivaldo Moore. And this is Dick Lincoln.” Vivaldo and Dick Lincoln acknowledged each other with brief, constrained nods. “How are you, Jane?” Vivaldo asked, politely; beginning to move, at the same time, in what he hoped was not their direction. But they, naturally, began to move with him. “Oh, I’m fine,” she said. “I seem to have made an incredible recovery—” “Have you been ill?” She looked at him. “Yes, as a matter of fact. Nerves. Due to a love affair that didn’t work out.” “Someone I know?” She laughed, breathily. “You bastard.” “It’s just that I’m terribly accustomed to your dramatics. But I’m glad that everything’s working out for you now.”

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She drove on and left the car at the stables, then walked round to the house, and when she got there she opened the door of the study and went in, feeling terribly lonely without her father. Sit- ting down in the old arm-chair that had survived him, she let her head rest where his head had rested; and her hands she laid on the arms of the chair where his hands, as she knew, had lain times without number. Closing her eyes, she tried to visualize his face, his kind face that had sometimes looked anxious; but the picture came slowly and faded at once, for the dead must often give place to the living. It was Angela Crossby’s face that persisted as Stephen sat in her father’s old chair. 4 In THE small panelled room that gave on to the herb-garden, Angela yawned as she stared through the window; then she sud. denly laughed out loud at her thoughts; then she suddenly frowned and spoke crossly to Tony. She could not get Stephen out of her mind, and this irritated while it amused her. Stephen was so large to be tongue-tied and frightened — a curious creature, not devoid of attraction. In a way — her own way — she was almost handsome; no, quite handsome; she had fine eyes and beautiful hair. And her body was supple like that of an athlete, narrow-hipped and wide shouldered, she should fence very well. Angela was anxious to see her fence; she must certainly try to arrange it somehow. Mrs. Antrim had conveyed a number of things, while actually saying extremely little; but Angela had no need of her hints, not 158 THE WELL OF LONELINESS now that she had come to know Stephen Gordon. And because she was idle, discontented and bored, and certainly not over- burdened with virtue, she must let her thoughts dwell unduly on this girl, while her curiosity kept pace with her thoughts. Tony stretched and whimpered, so Angela kissed him, then she sat down and wrote quite a short little letter: ‘ Do come over to lunch the day after to-morrow and advise me about the garden,’ ran the letter. And it ended — after one or two casual remarks about gardens — with: ‘ Tony says please come, Stephen |? .CHAPTER 28 I

• From Another Country (1962)

  “Rufus ain’t going to kill nobody but himself,” she said, “if he don’t find a friend to help him.” She paused, half-in, half-out of the cab. “You the only friend he’s got in the world, Vivaldo.” He gave her some money for the fare, looking at her with something, after all these months, explicit at last between them. They both loved Rufus. And they were both white. Now that it stared them so hideously in the face, each could see how desperately the other had been trying to avoid this confrontation. “You’ll go there now?” he asked. “You’ll go to my place?” “Yes. I’ll go. You go on back to Rufus. Maybe you can help him. He needs somebody to help him.” Vivaldo gave the driver his address and watched the taxi roll away. He turned and started back the way they had come. The way seemed longer, now that he was alone, and darker. His awareness of the policeman, prowling somewhere in the darkness near him, made, the silence ominous. He felt threatened. He felt totally estranged from the city in which he had been born; this city for which he sometimes felt a kind of stony affection because it was all he knew of home. Yet he had no home here—the hovel on Bank Street was not a home. He had always supposed that he would, one day, make a home here for himself. Now he began to wonder if anyone could ever put down roots in this rock; or, rather, he began to be aware of the shapes acquired by those who had. He began to wonder about his own shape. He had often thought of his loneliness, for example, as a condition which testified to his superiority. But people who were not superior were, nevertheless, extremely lonely—and unable to break out of their solitude precisely because they had no equipment with which to enter it. His own loneliness, magnified so many million times, made the night air colder. He remembered to what excesses, into what traps and nightmares, his loneliness had driven him; and he wondered where such a violent emptiness might drive an entire city. At the same time, as he came closer to Rufus’ building, he was trying very hard not to think about Rufus.

• From Every Woman's Battle: Discovering God's Plan for Sexual and Emotional Fulfillment (2003)

  Sadly, most believers do not understand who they really are, who God made them to be, the authority He intended them to possess, or how Christ can meet their innermost desires for acceptance, security, and significance. In his book Living Free in Christ, Neil T. Anderson summarizes who we are as a result of what Christ did for us and how we possess all power and authority simply as a result of our relationship with God. (Please see Figure 4.2, starting on Chapter 4.) THE THIRTY-DAY CHALLENGE When I speak I often challenge women to avoid any television, movies, books, magazines, or music that would influence their thinking about themselves or about men in a negative way for thirty days. Copy the scriptures from Figure 4.2, tape them onto your bathroom mirror, and repeat them aloud to yourself every morning for each of those thirty days. Repeat the exercise whenever you begin to feel insecure, lonely, or tempted to manipulate someone else into meeting your needs. Getting to know God more intimately means, in part, learning how He feels about you and understanding the provisions He has made in order to satisfy your innermost desires to feel loved, needed, and powerful (a righteous form of power, not a manipulative one). This is a great way to discover who you really are—not as the world tries to program you to be, but as your Maker designed you to be. Once you allow God to correct your beliefs about yourself, those beliefs will begin driving your decisions, your behaviors will follow directly behind, and you will have victory in this battle against sexual compromise. [image file=image_rsrc247.jpg] The world doesn’t fight fair. But we don’t live or fight our battles that way…. The tools of our trade aren’t for marketing or manipulation, but they are for demolishing that entire massively corrupt culture. We use our powerful God-tools for smashing warped philosophies, tearing down barriers erected against the truth of God, fitting every loose thought and emotion and impulse into the structure of life shaped by Christ. Our tools are ready at hand for clearing the ground of every obstruction and building lives of obedience into maturity. —2 Corinthians 10:3-5 (MSG) [image file=image_rsrc24A.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc24B.jpg] taking thoughts captive For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not weapons of the world…. We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. 2 CORINTHIANS 10:3-5 You are getting into a four-door car by yourself. It’s late at night and you are in a rough neighborhood. In order to feel safe, what is the first thing you are going to do when you get in the car? Right. Lock the doors.

• From Another Country (1962)

  And, of course, in Eric’s case, in Alabama, his increasing isolation and strangeness was held, even by himself, to be due to the extreme unpopularity of his racial attitudes—or, rather, as far as the world in which he moved was concerned, the lack of any responsible attitudes at all. The town in which Eric lived was celebrated and well-to-do, but it was not very big; as far as Eric was concerned, the South was not very big, certainly, as it turned out, not big enough for him; and he was the only son of very prominent people. So it was not long before his appearance anywhere caused heads to shake, lips to purse, tongues to stiffen or else, violently, venomously, to curl around his name. Which was also, however, his father’s name, and Eric, therefore, encountered, very often and very soon, the hideous obsequiousness of people who despised him but who did not dare to say so. They had long ago given up saying anything which they really felt, had given it up so long ago that they were now incapable of feeling anything which was not felt by a mob. Now, Eric stepped out of the shower, rubbing his body with the enormous, rough, white towel Yves had placed in the bathroom for him. Yves did not like showers, he preferred long, scalding baths, with newspapers, cigarettes, and whiskey on a chair next to the bathtub, and with Eric nearby to talk to, to shampoo his hair, and to scrub his back. The thought of the Oriental opulence which overtook Yves each time he bathed caused Eric to smile. He smiled, but he was troubled, too. And as he put on his bathrobe, his body tingled less from the effect of the towel and the toilet water than from his image, abruptly overwhelming, of Yves leaning back in the bathtub, whistling, the washrag in his hand, a peaceful, abstracted look on his face and his sex gleaming and bobbing in the soapy water like a limp, cylindrical fish; and from his memory, to which his image was somehow the gateway, of that moment, nearly fifteen years ago, when the blow had inexorably fallen and his shame and his battle and his exile had begun. He walked into the dining room and poured himself a drink. Then the bottle was empty and he dropped it in the waste basket. He lit a cigarette and sat down in a chair near the window, overlooking the sea. The sun was sinking and the sea was on fire.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Eric made himself another drink, with ice this time, for the ice was ready. He thought of reading Yves’ letter again, but he knew it by heart; and he was terrified of Yves’ arrival. He sat on the bed again, looking at the morning.… Mon plus cher. Je te previendra la jour de mon arrivée. Je prendrai l’avion. J’ai dit au revoir à ma mère. Elle a beaucoup pleurée. J’avoue que ça me faisait quelque chose. Bon. Paris est mortelle sans toi. Je t’adore mon petit et je t’aime. Comme j’ai envie de te serre très fort entre mes bras. Je t’embrasse. Toujours à toi. Ton YVES . Oh, yes. Somewhere, someone turned on a radio. The day was here. He finished his drink, took off his shoes, loosened his belt, and stretched out beside Vivaldo. He put his head on Vivaldo’s chest, and, in the shadow of that rock, he slept. Ida told the taxi driver, “Uptown, please, to Small’s Paradise ,” then turned, with a rueful smile, to Cass . “ Their night,” she said, indicating the vanished Eric and Vivaldo, “is just beginning. So is mine, only mine won’t be as much fun.” “I thought you were going home,” Cass said. “Well. I’m not. I’ve got some people to meet.” She looked thoughtfully at her fingernails, then looked over to Cass. “I couldn’t tell Vivaldo, so don’t you tell him, please. He just gets upset when he’s around—some of those musicians. I can’t blame him. I really can’t blame them, either; I know how they feel. But I don’t like for them to take it out on Vivaldo, he’s having a rough enough time as it is.” And, after a moment, she added, under her breath, “So am I.” Cass said nothing, for she was too astonished. So far from imagining herself and Ida to be friends, she had long ago decided that Ida disliked and distrusted her. But she did not sound that way now. She sounded lonely and troubled. “I wish you’d come up and have one drink with me up there,” Ida said. She kept twisting the ring on her little finger. Cass thought, at once, I’ll feel terribly out of place up there, and if you’re meeting someone, what’s the good of my coming along? But she sensed, somehow, that she could not say this, that Ida needed a woman to talk to, if only for a few minutes, even if the woman were white. “Okay,” she said, “but just one drink. I’ve got to hurry home to Richard.” As she said this, both she and Ida laughed. It was almost the first time they had ever laughed together; and this laughter revealed to Cass that Ida’s attitude toward her had been modified by Ida’s knowledge of her adultery.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He did not follow this, except in spirit. “You are all too serious here. Cold and ugly.” “How long have you been here?” “Two years.” He smiled at her again. “I was lucky, I work hard, I get along.” He paused. “Only, sometimes, it’s lonely. So I sing.” They both laughed. “It makes the time go,” he said. “Don’t you have any friends?” she asked. He shrugged. “Friends cost money. And I have no money and no time. I must send money home to my family.” “Oh, are you married?” He shrugged again, turning his profile to her again, not smiling. “No, I am not married.” Then he grinned. “That also costs money.” There was a silence. They turned into her block. “Yes,” she said, idly, “you’re right about that.” She pointed to the house. “Here we are.” The cab stopped. She fumbled in her handbag. He watched her. “You are married?” he asked at last. “Yes.” She smiled. “With two children.” “Boy or girl?” “Two boys.” “That is very good,” he said. She paid him. “Good-bye. I wish you well.” He smiled. It was a really friendly smile. “I also wish you well. You are very nice. Good night.” “Good night.” She opened the door and the light shone full on their faces for a moment. His face was very young and direct and hopeful, and caused her to blush a little. She slammed the cab door behind her, and walked into her house without looking back. She heard the cab drive away. The light was on in the living room, and Richard, fully dressed except for his shoes, lay on the sofa, asleep. He was usually in bed, or at work, when she came home. She stared at him for a moment. There was a half-glass of vodka on the table next to him, and a dead cigarette in the ashtray. He slept very silently and his face looked tormented and very young.

• From Another Country (1962)

  She slept. He felt that she was sleeping partly in order to avoid him. He fell back on his pillow, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling. She was in his bed but she was far from him; she was with him and yet she was not with him. In some deep, secret place she watched herself, she held herself in check, she fought him. He felt that she had decided, long ago, precisely where the limits were, how much she could afford to give, and he had not been able to make her give a penny more. She made love to him as though it were a technique of pacification, a means to some other end. However she might wish to delight him, she seemed principally to wish to exhaust him; and to remain, above all, herself on the banks of pleasure the while she labored mightly to drown him in the tide. His pleasure was enough for her, she seemed to say, his pleasure was hers. But he wanted her pleasure to be his, for them to drown in the tide together. He had slept, but badly, aware of Ida’s body next to his, and aware of a failure more subtle than any he had known before. And his mind was troubled with questions which he had not before permitted to enter but whose hour, now, had struck. He wondered who had been with her before him; how many, how often, how long; what he, or they before him, had meant to her; and he wondered if her lover, or lovers, had been white or black. What difference does it make? he asked himself. What difference does any of it make? One or more, white or black—she would tell him one of these days. They would learn everything about each other, they had time, she would tell him. Would she? Or would she merely accept his secrets as she accepted his body, happy to be the vehicle of his relief? While offering in return (for she knew the rules) revelations intended to pacify and also intended to frustrate him; to frustrate, that is, any attempt on his part to strike deeper into that incredible country in which, like the princess of fairy tales, sealed in a high tower and guarded by beasts, bewitched and exiled, she paced her secret round of secret days.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  This was why comments were always made about the group as a whole and therapists never addressed an individual patient. Though I liked some of the psychiatrists personally, especially Bob Gosling, who invited us to his home in London as well as to his country home, I concluded after a few months that this approach to group therapy was highly ineffective, noting that a great many patients voted with their feet: attendance was exceptionally poor. They had a rule that unless four members attended, the meeting would be canceled and, indeed, that was the case all too often. Later that year I attended a weeklong Tavistock group conference at Leeds, with one hundred others from the fields of education, psychology, and business. I remember clearly how it began: the attendees were instructed to divide themselves up into five groups using five designated rooms. At the ringing of the starting bell, the attendees charged into the rooms. Some members vied for leadership, some demanded that the doors be closed lest the group get too large, and some insisted on rules for procedure. The workshop continued with ongoing meetings of the small groups, each assigned a faculty adviser who reflected on group process, and large group meetings, attended by all faculty and attendees, so that a study could be made of mass group dynamics. Although Tavistock groups continue to be used as a training tool to help individuals learn about group dynamics and organizational behavior, the Tavistock approach in group psychotherapy has, to the best of my knowledge, mercifully faded away. I generally observed one or two small group meetings a week and attended lectures or conferences, but for the most part during that year, I was completely on my own, fully engaged writing my group therapy textbook. The Tavistock faculty found my approach to groups as distasteful as I found theirs. When I presented my research work on “therapeutic factors” based on my interviews with a large number of successful group therapy patients, the British staff scoffed at the typical American fixation on the “satisfied customer.” As the only American, I felt isolated and unsupported. A year later, when I met John Bowlby face-to-face, he told me that he had had similar experiences with the Tavistock staff, and at times had fantasized setting off a bomb in the audience. I felt so isolated, unappreciated, and uneasy in my skin that year that I decided to find a therapist for myself, as I’ve done at various difficult points throughout my life. There were a great many schools of therapy in the United Kingdom at that time. The well-known British psychiatrist R. D. Laing came immediately to mind. From his writing, he seemed to be an arresting and original thinker. He had recently established Kingsley Hall, a site where psychotic patients and their therapists lived together in a healing community. Moreover, he treated patients in an egalitarian manner, which was very different from the Tavistock approach.

• From Real Life (2020)

  Leurs parents ferment la marche, un homme d’une quarantaine d’années, séduisant – Wallace l’a vu sur l’appli, lui semble-t-il – et une femme au visage pincé, méchant, avec les cheveux bruns, les yeux verts, beaucoup de taches de rousseur, un teint de peau de banane fripée. Sur le niveau inférieur de l’estrade, un groupe s’installe : de jeunes étudiants blancs grassouillets avec des sweat-shirts noirs et des jeans miteux. L’équipement a l’air coûteux. Il y a deux ou trois Noirs, dispersés entre les tables, mais pas ensemble, séparés. L’une d’entre eux, une jeune femme aux longues tresses et à la peau si lisse et sombre qu’il en a le souffle coupé en la voyant, se tourne vers lui et sourit. Il y a un éclair de reconnaissance, une tension se desserre en lui. Elle est avec un groupe de filles blanches, toutes vêtues de robes bain de soleil à fleurs de couleurs vives. La fille noire est habillée en jaune. C’est la plus jolie de la bande, mais les autres lui coupent la parole, ne l’écoutent pas, s’adressant à un groupe de jeunes Blancs qui se tiennent en contrebas, en shorts en toile décontractés et sweat-shirts. L’un des garçons a posé le pied sur l’estrade sur laquelle se tiennent les filles, les doigts dans sa boucle de ceinture, et hoche agressivement la tête. La fille noire lisse sa robe, fait passer ses tresses derrière son épaule, et rit, bien qu’un léger ennui flotte sur son visage. Wallace a de la peine pour elle, mais aussi pour lui-même, car c’est sa vie depuis qu’il est arrivé ici : seul parmi des Blancs. Il transpire de nouveau. La sueur s’accumule sur son front. Le lac clapote doucement, son eau grise et turquoise l’apaise. De petits oiseaux marrons sautillent parmi les tables pliantes, picorant les miettes. Il pourrait s’asseoir à une table, peut-être, s’installer un petit moment. Ça pourrait être agréable, de simplement rester en ce lieu. Il pourrait proposer à Brigit de venir, passer une heure ou deux au bord du lac. La perspective de voir Brigit, qui est peut-être en chemin pour le labo, donc tout près, lui remonte le moral. Il se sent à la hauteur de cette tâche, lui envoie rapidement un texto avant de perdre son courage. Elle est tout près, répond-elle, elle peut passer un petit moment. On fait comme ça, dit-il, et il cherche des yeux une table pour deux. Finalement, ils prennent une table loin du groupe. C’est volontaire. La musique est toujours trop forte et assez médiocre, comme si le volume était censé compenser le manque de musicalité. Brigit porte des vêtements souples, et ses cheveux sont rassemblés en tresse lâche dans son dos. Ils partagent un sachet de pop-corns salés. Wallace boit de l’eau.

• From Real Life (2020)

  Caroline et Katie parlaient, mais seulement entre elles, pas à lui. Caroline a poussé un soupir et dit : « Et ça recommence. » Et Katie a remué doucement le vin dans son verre, et regardé par la vitre le patio où se tenait le barbecue proprement dit, observant un cinquième année qui nageait un crawl paresseux dans la piscine. Ils avaient langui là des heures, n’échangeant pas plus de quelques mots mais au lieu de prendre congé pour aller trouver ses amis, Wallace était resté planté là toute la soirée – même après que Caroline, ayant bu peut-être un peu trop de bières, s’était mise à le fusiller ouvertement du regard. Même après que Katie avait dit grossièrement à Vincent que la viande avait l’air mal cuite et qu’elle n’y goûterait pas. Il était resté à côté d’elles car il n’avait pas ressenti le besoin pressant de partir. Aujourd’hui, l’autre poste de travail de la paillasse de Wallace est vide. Ça ne serait pas arrivé, se dit-il, si Henrik était encore là. Henrik ferait des allers et retours entre son bureau et sa paillasse, mettant en branle une douzaine de tâches avant de se décider pour une. Henrik était un ancien footballeur au cou épais, qui avait étudié la chimie dans une petite fac du Minnesota où il était aussi receveur rapproché. C’était Henrik qui avait appris la dissection à Wallace : il lui avait appris qu’il faut la pratiquer dans la boîte de Petri, pas sur la lame, car ça vous laisse plus de temps et de latitude ; il lui avait appris à attendre que les vers s’immobilisent d’eux-mêmes ; qu’il fallait tout chronométrer juste comme il faut, de façon à pouvoir découper une masse de nématodes, sectionnant leurs têtes d’un coup, cinquante à la fois. Il lui avait enseigné l’angle parfait auquel incliner l’aiguille fine pour l’introduire dans leur lignée germinale, cette masse de cellules magnifiques, comme des œufs de poisson. Il avait appris plein de choses à Wallace, y compris à agencer les diapos en vue d’une présentation et à se calmer juste avant, en passant ses mains sous l’eau froide puis chaude. ( Monte la température, Wally, ça va chauffer. ) Parfois, Wallace voyait le visage d’Henrik quand il fermait les yeux, ou bien il entendait sa voix, une voix chaleureuse de Muppet, un peu comique, celle d’un homme qui resterait toujours un petit garçon, peut-être.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  But Uncle Louie is long dead, and now, with Herb gone as well, I experienced a staggering loneliness as I realized I no longer had a witness to that scene of so long ago. It now existed only in my mind, somewhere in the mysteries of my crackling neural circuits, and when I died it would vanish entirely. Of course, I’ve known these things in the abstract for decades, and emphasized them in books and lectures and many therapeutic hours, but I am feeling them now, feeling that when we perish, every one of our precious, joyful, unique memories vanishes with us. I’m also grieving Bob Berger, my dear friend of over sixty years, who died a few weeks after Herb. After a cardiac arrest, Bob was unconscious for several hours before being resuscitated, and during a brief interval of lucidity he called me on the phone. Jocular as ever, he rasped, “I bring you a message from the other side.” That was all he said: his condition quickly worsened. He slumped back into a coma and died two weeks later. Bob and I first met in Boston in my second year of medical school. Though we subsequently lived on different coasts, we remained lifelong friends, and kept in touch frequently by phone and visits. Fifty years after our first meeting, he asked me to help him write about his life as an adolescent when the Germans overran his native Hungary. He told me about passing as a Christian and participating in the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of Budapest. He related hair-raising stories, one after the other. For example, at the age of sixteen, he and a fellow Resistance fighter, on motorcycle, had followed lines of Jews who had been tied together and were being forced to walk through the woods to the Danube, where they were to be thrown into the river and drowned. There was no hope of saving any of the captives, but Bob and his friend drove by and threw grenades to kill the Nazi guards. Later, when Bob was away for a few days, trying, unsuccessfully, to find his mother, their landlord had turned his roommate, another close friend, over to the Nazis, who had dragged him into the street and pulled down his pants. When they saw he was circumcised, they shot him in the abdomen and left him to die, warning onlookers to offer no help, not even a drink of water. I heard such horrific tales, one after another—all for the first time—and at the end of the evening I said to him, “Bob, we’ve been so close. We’ve known each other for fifty years. Why have you never told me any of this before?” His answer stunned me: “Irv, you weren’t ready to hear it.” I didn’t protest. I knew he was right: I hadn’t been ready to hear it, and I must have conveyed that to him in a multitude of ways.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He walked out of the phone booth into the bar, which was a workingman’s bar, and there was a wrestling match on the TV screen. He ordered a double shot and leaned on the bar. He was surrounded by precisely those men he had known from his childhood, from his earliest youth. It was as though, hideously, after a long and fruitless voyage, he had come home, to find that he had become a stranger. They did not look at him—or did not seem to look at him; but, then, that was the style of these men; and if they usually saw less than was present, they also, often, saw more than one guessed. Two Negroes near him, in working clothes, seemed to have a bet on the outcome of the wrestling match, which they did not, however, appear to be watching very closely. They kept talking to each other in a rumbling, humorous monotone—a smile kept playing on both their faces—and every once in a while they ordered a new round of drinks, or exploded with laughter, or turned their attention again to the screen. All up and down the bar, men stood silently, usually singly, watching the TV screen, or watching nothing. There were booths beside the bar, near the back. An elderly Negro couple and a young Negro couple shared one booth, another booth held three aimless youths, drinking beer, in the very last booth an odd-looking man, who might have been a Persian, was feeling up a pasty-faced, string-haired girl. The Negro couples were in earnest conversation—the elderly Negro woman leaned forward with great vehemence; and the three youths were giggling and covertly watching the dark man and the pasty girl; and if this evening ended as all the others had, they would presently drive off to some haven and watch each other masturbate. The bartender was iron-haired and pablum-faced, with spectacles, and leaned on a barrel at one end of the bar, watching the screen. Vivaldo watched the screen, seeing two ancient, flabby men throwing each other around on a piece of canvas; from time to time a sensually grinning blonde advertised soap—but her grin was far less sensual than the wrestling match—and a strong-jawed neuter in a crew cut puffed rapaciously, with unnerving pleasure, on a cigarette. Then, back to the groaning wrestlers, who really should have been home in bed, possibly with each other.