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.

Page 39 of 63 · 20 per page

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  I’ve had a number of people tell me that people become addicted to pornography, to this dangerous substance like opium, which feels too good. There are people who become obsessed with certain images of pornography, of course, but I believe they have the images to begin with, are obsessed in the first place. They react to pornography (and TV movies-of-the-week and star athletes) because these things conveniently mirror their obsession, freeing them from the rigors of imagination. As for using pornography as a “blueprint” for violence, not only are such images hard to find, I think this belief supposes far more concentration on the part of impulsively violent people than reality should warrant. And how many murders have been inspired by religion? I recently saw an adult movie, something of a send-up of other movies, called Wild Goose Chase. In the midst of mild arousal, I found a scene poignant with reference to the world of fantasy and solitude. The actor is Joey Silvera, a good-looking man with blond hair and startling dark eyes. In this film he plays a detective; the detective has a torrid scene with his secretary, who then walks out on him. He holds his head in his hands. “I don’t need her,” he mumbles. “I got women. I got my own women!” He stands and crosses to a file cabinet. “I got plenty of women!” He pulls out a drawer and dumps it upside down, spilling porn magazines in a pile on the floor. He crawls over them, stroking the paper cunts, the breasts, the pictured thighs, moaning, kissing the immobile faces. Men, like women, are susceptible to a kind of oppression from sexually explicit material, the oppression of performance: Do I look like that? Do I perform like that? Does my lover feel that excited at my touch? Women I know say they feel uncomfortable watching their lover turn on to another woman’s image, even as they turn on to the image of the man in the same film. In fact, this can be marvelously liberating as a shared fantasy, to be “with” that woman, “with” that man, to be another woman, another man. But these dreamed and edited visions of other people’s sexuality, virtually the only sex done by other people any of us ever see, can leave us in our unedited lives lonely and confused. How to know, if we never talk? A greater freedom among us to tell the truth, about ourselves and our desires, would largely eliminate this.

• From Wild (2012)

  I’d planned to order with reserve, especially since I’d spent another fifty cents that afternoon doing laundry, going in together with Greg. But once we sat down I hadn’t been able to keep myself from matching Greg’s every move—ordering a rum and Coke along with dinner, saying yes to the garlic bread. I tried not to let on that I was adding up the bill in my head as we ate. Greg already knew how unprepared I’d been to hike the PCT. He didn’t need to know that there was yet another front on which I was an absolute fool. But a fool I was. After we got our bill, tacked on a tip, and split it down the middle, I had sixty-five cents. Back in my room after dinner, I opened The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California to read about the next section of the trail. My next stop was a place called Belden Town, where my resupply box with a twenty-dollar bill inside would be waiting. I could get through to Belden on sixty-five cents, couldn’t I? I’d be in the wilderness, after all, and I wouldn’t have anywhere to spend my money anyway, I reasoned, though still I felt anxious. I wrote Lisa a letter, asking her to purchase and send me a PCT guidebook for the Oregon section of the trail using the bit of money I’d left with her, and reordering the boxes she’d be mailing me for the rest of California. I went over the list again and again, making sure I had it all correct, lining up the miles with the dates and the places. When I turned off my light and lay on my creaky bed to sleep, I could hear Greg on the other side of the wall shifting around on his creaky bed too, his closeness as palpable as his distance. Hearing him there made me feel so lonely I would’ve howled with pain if I’d let myself. I didn’t know exactly why. I didn’t want anything from him and yet also I wanted everything. What would he do if I knocked on his door? What would I do if he let me in? I knew what I would do. I’d done it so many times. “I’m like a guy, sexually,” I’d told a therapist I’d seen a couple of times the year before—a man named Vince who volunteered at a community clinic in downtown Minneapolis where people like me could go to talk to people like him for ten bucks a pop. “What’s a guy like?” he’d asked.

• From Little Women (1868)

  "Truly, yes, to pray with. It would be pleasing to the saints if one used so fine a rosary as this, instead of wearing it as a vain bijou." "You seem to take a great deal of comfort in your prayers, Esther, and always come down looking quiet and satisfied. I wish I could." "If Mademoiselle was a Catholic, she would find true comfort, but as that is not to be, it would be well if you went apart each day to meditate and pray, as did the good mistress whom I served before Madame. She had a little chapel, and in it found solacement for much trouble." "Would it be right for me to do so too?" asked Amy, who in her loneliness felt the need of help of some sort, and found that she was apt to forget her little book, now that Beth was not there to remind her of it. "It would be excellent and charming, and I shall gladly arrange the little dressing room for you if you like it. Say nothing to Madame, but when she sleeps go you and sit alone a while to think good thoughts, and pray the dear God preserve your sister." Esther was truly pious, and quite sincere in her advice, for she had an affectionate heart, and felt much for the sisters in their anxiety. Amy liked the idea, and gave her leave to arrange the light closet next her room, hoping it would do her good. "I wish I knew where all these pretty things would go when Aunt March dies," she said, as she slowly replaced the shining rosary and shut the jewel cases one by one. "To you and your sisters. I know it, Madame confides in me. I witnessed her will, and it is to be so," whispered Esther smiling. "How nice! But I wish she'd let us have them now. Procrastination is not agreeable," observed Amy, taking a last look at the diamonds. "It is too soon yet for the young ladies to wear these things. The first one who is affianced will have the pearls, Madame has said it, and I have a fancy that the little turquoise ring will be given to you when you go, for Madame approves your good behavior and charming manners." "Do you think so? Oh, I'll be a lamb, if I can only have that lovely ring! It's ever so much prettier than Kitty Bryant's. I do like Aunt March after all." And Amy tried on the blue ring with a delighted face and a firm resolve to earn it. From that day she was a model of obedience, and the old lady complacently admired the success of her training. Esther fitted up the closet with a little table, placed a footstool before it, and over it a picture taken from one of the shut-up rooms.

• 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 Boys & Sex (2020)

  As a journalist, I don’t prescribe the circumstance in which young people ought to have sex: my job is only to describe the context and explore its impact so they can make educated choices, maybe disrupt the conventional script. For girls, I concluded that a hookup was likely to give them a feeling of being wanted or desired for an evening, an adrenaline rush, a war story to share with friends. It was less likely to result in good sex or help them develop the tools they would need for either good sex or emotional intimacy. After hearing from dozens of boys, I would say the same to them, with the additional qualifier that hookup culture presumes that they, unlike girls, lack even a basic capacity for love, that they neither can nor should acknowledge emotional vulnerability—not in others, not in themselves. Other cultures give boys more credit than that. In comparing Dutch and American families’ attitudes toward teen sexuality, for instance, sociologist Amy Schalet found that parents in the Netherlands considered boys to be both capable and desirous of emotional connection; US parents, by contrast, dismissed young men as “driven by hormones” and only interested in sex. Perhaps not surprisingly, although boys in both countries overwhelmingly said they wanted to combine love with lust, only the Dutch saw that as normal: American boys each thought his perspective was a personal quirk, unusual among his peers. Yet, a large-scale survey of high school students found our boys were as emotionally invested in their relationships as girls; perhaps having had less practice or support in sustaining intimacy, though, they were less confident in navigating them. The boys I met felt at least as isolated in their struggles over love as they were about sex and, if anything, were more hungry to discuss it. There was the twenty-year-old at a Big Ten university who had been dating the same girl for three years. His fraternity brothers as well as his father were pushing him to cut her loose so he could take advantage of the school’s infamous party scene. “My dad says, ‘I’m not paying fifty grand a year for you not to get laid,’” he told me. “Hearing that from him—it doesn’t make me second-guess what I’m doing exactly, but it hurts that he’s not fully behind me.” Or another guy, a college sophomore in Chicago who told me he hadn’t much enjoyed the three hookups he’d engaged in (and had ghosted all three partners afterward) but didn’t know how else to show his interest in a girl. “The thing is,” he said, “I could never ask a random girl on a date. That would just be weird.” So, I said, it would be more appropriate to get drunk, make out with someone you don’t really know on the dance floor and maybe have intercourse with her than to, say, ask someone you like from one of your classes to go to a movie? “Yeah,” he said sheepishly.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He was menaced in a way that they were not, and it was perhaps this sense, and the instinct which compels people to move away from the doomed, which accounted for the invincible distance, increasing with the years, which stretched between himself and his contemporaries. 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. The sun had been sinking on that far-off day, a Sunday, a hot day.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Leaving the religious life in those days was not like changing your job or moving house. Our novitiate had not simply provided us with new professional skills and left our deepest selves untouched. It was a conditioning. For about three years we were wholly isolated from the outside world, and also from the rest of the community. The door of the noviceship was kept permanently locked, and we spoke to the other nuns only on very special feast days. This meant that the noviceship became our whole world. No other existed for us, and the whims and moods of our mistress acquired monumental importance. When we were punished, it seemed a cosmic event; when we were lonely or miserable, there was no possibility of comfort. The atmosphere was frigid, and sometimes even frightening. At night in our long dormitory we often heard one another weeping, but knew that we must never ask what was wrong. We lived together in community, cheek by jowl, but were so lonely that we might as well have been living in solitary confinement. We became entirely dependent upon our superior’s every move, and accepted her worldview and her opinion of ourselves as gospel truth. I was so young that I could draw upon no experience to counter this regime. So the world receded, and the tiny dramas and cold values of noviceship life filled my entire horizon. This type of isolation is central to the rituals of initiation practiced in the ancient world and in many indigenous societies today. On reaching puberty, boys are taken away from their mothers, separated from their tribe, and subjected to a series of frightening ordeals that change them irrevocably. It is a process of death and resurrection: initiates die to their childhood and rise again to an entirely different life as mature human beings. They are often told that they are about to suffer a horrible death; they are forced to lie alone in a cave or a tomb; they are buried alive, experience intense physical pain (the boys are often circumcised or tattooed), and undergo terrifying rituals. The idea is that in these extreme circumstances, the young discover inner resources that will enable them to serve their people as fully functioning adults. The purpose of these rites of passage is thus to transform dependent children into responsible, self-reliant males who are ready to risk their lives as hunters and warriors and, if necessary, to die in order to protect their people.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Standard-issue hobo care package,” he said, turning to give me a can of cold Budweiser beer and a plastic grocery bag weighed down with a handful of items at its bottom. “But I’m not a hobo,” I echoed for the last time, with less fervor than I had before, afraid he’d finally believe me and take the standard-issue hobo care package away. “Thanks for the interview,” he said, and shut the trunk. “Stay safe out here.” “Yeah. You too,” I said. “You have a gun, I assume. At least I hope you do.” I shrugged, unwilling to commit either way. “ ’Cause, I know you’ve been south of here, but now you’re going north, which means you’re soon entering Bigfoot country.” “Bigfoot?” “Yeah. You know, Sasquatch? No lie. From here all the way up to the border and into Oregon you’re in the territory where most of the Bigfoot sightings in the world are reported.” He turned to the trees as if one might come barreling out at us. “A lot of folks believe in them. A lot of hobo folks—folks who are out here. Folks who know. I hear Bigfoot stories all the time.” “Well, I’m okay, I think. At least so far,” I said, and laughed, though my stomach did a little somersault. In the weeks preceding my hike on the PCT, when I’d decided not to be afraid of anything, I’d been thinking about bears and snakes and mountain lions and strange people I met along the way. I hadn’t pondered hairy humanoid bipedal beasts. “But you’re probably fine. I wouldn’t worry. Chances are, they’ll leave you alone. Especially if you have a gun.” “Right.” I nodded. “Good luck on your hike,” he said, getting into his car. “Good luck … finding hobos,” I said, and waved as he drove away. I stood there for a while, letting cars pass without even trying to get them to give me a ride. I felt more alone than anyone in the whole wide world. The sun beat down on me hot, even through my hat. I wondered where Stacy and Trina were. The man who’d picked them up was only going to take them about twelve miles east, to the junction of the next highway we needed to catch a ride on, which would take us north and then back west to Old Station, where we’d rejoin the PCT. We’d agreed to meet at that junction. I remotely regretted having encouraged them to leave me behind when that ride had come along. I jabbed my thumb at another car and realized only after it passed that it didn’t look so good that I was holding a can of beer. I pressed its cool aluminum against my hot forehead and suddenly had the urge to drink it. Why shouldn’t I? It would only get warm in my pack.

• From Another Country (1962)

  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. He was in a section of warehouses. Very few people lived down here. By day, trucks choked the streets, laborers stood on these ghostly platforms, moving great weights, and cursing. As he had once; for a long time, he had been one of them. He had been proud of his skill and his muscles and happy to be accepted as a man among men. Only—it was they who saw something in him which they could not accept, which made them uneasy. Every once in a while, a man, lighting his cigarette, would look at him quizzically, with a little smile. The smile masked an unwilling, defensive hostility. They said he was a “bright kid,” that he would “go places”; and they made it clear that they expected him to go, to which places did not matter—he did not belong to them. But at the bottom of his mind the question of Rufus nagged and stung. There had been a few colored boys in his high school but they had mainly stayed together, as far as he remembered. He had known boys who got a bang out of going out and beating up niggers. It scarcely seemed possible—it scarcely, even, seemed fair—that colored boys who were beaten up in high school could grow up into colored men who wanted to beat up everyone in sight, including, or perhaps especially, people who had never, one way or another, given them a thought. He watched the light in Rufus’ window, the only light on down here. Then he remembered something that had happened to him a long time ago, two years or three. It was when he had been spending a lot of time in Harlem, running after the whores up there. One night, as a light rain fell, he was walking uptown on Seventh Avenue.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  We did not meet very often, since we had such different lives and interests. Lindsey led a highly precarious life in London, doing odd typing and waitressing jobs while “resting” between plays. She had grown up tall, sexy, and glamorous and always made me feel an ugly duckling that had no hope of turning into a swan. But during the last year, I had seen quite a lot of her on television, because she had landed a part in a popular soap opera. Nanny and I had become quite addicted to it, and even Jane had watched the odd episode with us. “She’s been written out of Crossroads,” I explained, “and now she’s going to Canada to join a man she met on holiday in Cyprus last summer.” “A holiday romance? Is that wise?” Jane asked. “How long has she known him?” “Only a weekend,” I said. “I know—it’s crazy in a way. But as she says, she’s not the world’s greatest actress, and a new man in a new country seems better than going back to that hand-to-mouth existence in London again. And I think men are much more important to her than any career.” “A nice old-fashioned girl?” Jane smiled sardonically. It was a description that in one way seemed wildly inappropriate, since Lindsey was a sixties girl par excellence and had cast off the restraints of Catholicism with never a backward look. But on the other hand . . . “I think she really is, underneath all the modern trappings. You know: ‘Follow your man.’ ” “Even to Keswick,” Jane capped gloomily. “Well, I’m doing it. But not willingly, I have to tell you. Would you do this? You’ve just left one confining situation; would you give up your new freedom?” I had shrugged. My situation was so different from Jane’s. There was no prospect of my being enslaved to any man; men generally looked through me as though I did not exist. The problem simply did not arise. And yet, I asked myself as I got up to go back to the little room at the Harts’ where I spent the greater part of my life, how free was I? Were not Jane and Lindsey really more adventurous than I was? Would I ever love anything or anybody enough to leave it all behind? I had done that once, when I had entered the convent, and I wasn’t sure I had the courage to do it again.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “They’re all right. Cass sounded a little distraught, but she sends her love to both of you and hopes to see you soon. Are we going to hang around here, or what are we going to do?’ “Well, let’s have supper,” Ida said. Vivaldo and Eric looked at each other for the briefest of seconds. “You’ll have to count me out,” said Eric, quickly. “I’m bushed, I’ve had it, I’m going to go home and hit the sack.” “It’s so early,” Ida said. “Well, I just got off a boat and I’m still vibrating.” He stood up. “I’ll take a rain check on it.” “Well,” she looked at Vivaldo, humorously, “I’m sorry the lord and master isn’t in a better mood.” She moved herself out of the booth. “I’ve got to go to the little girl’s room. Wait for me upstairs.” “I’m sorry,” said Vivaldo, as they climbed the stairs into the street, “I’d really looked forward to sitting around and bullshitting with you tonight and all, but I guess you really better leave us alone. You understand, don’t you?” “Of course I understand,” said Eric. “I’ll give you a call next week sometime.” They stood on the sidewalk, watching the aimless mob. “It must feel very strange for you,” said Vivaldo, “to be back here. But I hope you won’t think we’re not friends any more, because we are. I care a lot about you, Eric. I just want you to know that, so you won’t think I’m putting you down gently, sort of, tonight. It’s just one of those things.” He stared outward, looking very weary. “Sometimes that girl gets me so I don’t know if I’m coming or going.” “I know a little bit about it,” Eric said. “No sweat.” He held out his hand; Vivaldo held it for a moment. “I’ll give you a call in a couple of days, all right? Say good-bye to Ida for me.” “All right, Eric. Be well.” Eric smiled. “Stay well.” He turned and started walking toward Sixth Avenue, but he did not really know where he was going. He felt Vivaldo’s eyes on his back; then Vivaldo was swallowed up in the press of people behind him. On the corner of Sixth Avenue, he watched and waited, the lights banged on and off. A truck came by; he looked up into the face of the truck driver, and felt an awful desire to join that man and ride in that truck wherever the truck was going. But he crossed the street and started walking toward his apartment. It was the safest place to be, it was the only place to be. Strange people—they seemed strange to him now, but, one day, again, he might be one of them—passed him with that ineffable, sidelong, desperate look; but he kept his eyes on the pavement. Not yet, not you. Not yet. Not yet.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Rufus walked to Vivaldo’s window. “So you been all up and down that street, too,” he said. “We’ve all been up the same streets. There aren’t a hell of a lot of streets. Only, we’ve been taught to lie so much, about so many things, that we hardly ever know where we are.” Rufus said nothing. He walked up and down. Vivaldo said, “Maybe you should stay here, Rufus, for a couple of days, until you decide what you want to do.” “I don’t want to bug you, Vivaldo.” Vivaldo picked up Rufus’ empty glass and paused in the archway which led into his kitchen. “You can lie here in the mornings and look at my ceiling. It’s full of cracks, it makes all kinds of pictures. Maybe it’ll tell you things it hasn’t told me. I’ll fix us another drink.” Again he felt that he was smothering. “Thanks, Vivaldo.” Vivaldo dragged his ice out and poured two drinks. He came back into the room. “Here. To all the things we don’t know.” They drank. “You had me worried,” said Vivaldo. “I’m glad you’re back.” “I’m glad to see you,” said Rufus. “Your sister left me a phone number to call in case I saw you. It’s the lady who lives next door to you. I guess maybe I should call her now.” “No,” said Rufus, after a moment, “it’s too late. I’ll go on up there in the morning.” And this thought, the thought of seeing his parents and his sister in the morning, checked and chilled him. He sat down again in the easy chair and leaned back with his hands over his eyes. “Rufus,” Leona had said—time and again—“ain’t nothing wrong in being colored.” Sometimes, when she said this, he simply looked at her coldly, from a great distance, as though he wondered what on earth she was trying to say. His look seemed to accuse her of ignorance and indifference. And, as she watched his face, her eyes became more despairing than ever but at the same time filled with some immense sexual secret which tormented her. He had put off going back to work until he began to be afraid to go to work. Sometimes, when she said that there was nothing wrong in being colored, he answered, “Not if you a hard-up white lady.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I had. Just. My sister had mentioned the group to me on one of her visits, and the name had cropped up occasionally in the conversation of my fellow students. But even though it was now 1969, I had no idea who the Beatles really were, no notion of their extraordinary impact on British society during the sixties, had never encountered Beatlemania, and had certainly never knowingly heard a note of their music. Jane and Mark tried to explain to me what the Beatles meant for their generation, but I took little in. I could see that they were slightly alarmed by my ignorance. Jane was looking at me thoughtfully, though I made her laugh when I asked, in some perplexity, why the band was named after those rather unpleasant black insects. On my other side, Mark was reciting the lyrics, which shocked me by their unabashed expression of naked need: “Love, love me do!” “I want to hold your hand!” “Please please me!” I could not even have admitted to myself that I had such needs, let alone shout my yearnings aloud in such wild abandonment. Yet the words touched some raw place within me, making me aware of my loneliness in this crowded room. All around me I noticed feet tapping, heads nodding, lips mouthing the words of the song, glances exchanged as though a phrase had a special private significance. The Beatles were a current that united everybody at the party, a thread that bound the room together. They were the spokesmen of their generation, but even though they must have been about my own age, they could not speak for me. I was present at the party, but only as an outsider. The ease and confidence with which the Beatles simply said what they wanted appalled me, and yet I longed to be able to do the same. Even today, more than thirty years later, when I have come to appreciate their real genius, I find their songs almost unbearably poignant. Those desires had been schooled out of me, and yet the painfully direct appeal of the lyrics made me realize that I wished that I had them. I felt my throat swell with unshed tears. “All you need is love.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But it has never been possible. At a very impressionable age, my body was schooled in quite other rhythms, and it has, for better or worse, taken the print. As I watched the dancers, I felt completely out of my element. I could see that this kind of dancing was unabashedly sexual. It reminded me of the ceremonial mating dances performed by Africans that I had seen occasionally in documentaries or news-reels. It was interesting, but had nothing to do with me. I tried to look nonchalant and at ease, but felt miserably that I must look as out of place as the queen, in her suburban, matronly clothes, carrying her ubiquitous handbag like a shield, as she stares with a glazed smile at the ritual dances performed in her honor during a tour of the Commonwealth. I had found, to my considerable sorrow, that even though I no longer belonged in the convent, I didn’t belong out here either. Looking back, I can see that during those first few months, I was experiencing something akin to the culture shock of those who, for one reason or another, have been forced to leave homes in Pakistan, Palestine, or Zimbabwe and migrate to a Western country. The violent upheavals of the twentieth century have made millions of people homeless in one traumatic uprooting after another. Exile is, of course, not simply a change of address. It is also a spiritual dislocation. Anthropologists and psychologists tell us that displaced people feel lost in a universe that has suddenly become alien. Once the fixed point of home is gone, there is a fundamental lack of orientation that makes everything seem relative and aimless. Cut off from the roots of their culture and identity, migrants and refugees can feel that they are somehow withering away and becoming insubstantial. Their world—inextricably linked with their unique place in the cosmos—has literally come to an end. Now I was sharing something of this twentieth-century experience. True, I had left my home in the convent of my own free will and was not languishing in a camp. But I did feel in exile from everything that made sense. Because I could take nothing for granted, and did not know how to interpret the sixties world that had come into being during my absence, I too felt that the world had no meaning. Because I had lost my fundamental orientation, I felt spiritually dizzy, lacking all sense of direction and not knowing where to turn. I could see the same kind of stunned bewilderment in the eyes of the old Bangladeshi lady who served in the corner shop near St. Anne’s where we bought newspapers and sweets. I saw it again in the eyes of Sister Mary Sylvia, a nun in my college.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I don’t think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people’s lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with in passing, dampens irony and cynicism. The interior of the Fold is, of course, the place of ultimate loneliness, and I like it there. But there are times when the wish for others’ voices, for friendliness returned, reaches unpleasant levels, and becomes a kind of immobilizing pain. That was how it felt as I finished packing up the box of sex machines. I used a “tape gun” to tape it back up, just like the pros at Mailboxes USA. A tape gun is a triggerless machine with a handle that enables you to dispense tape from thick rolls one-handed. It has a set of sharp metal teeth that cut the tape at will, like the row running along a box of plastic wrap that can hurt your finger if you rummage overhastily in a drawer, but its whole function stands in swords-into-plowshares opposition to the gun—it is meant to seal, to mend, to hold together, rather than to injure and rend. I bought it at an office-supply store as a reward after an awful week working for the Department of Social Services typing Social Security numbers in boxes that were not spaced to fit either of the type sizes of the typewriter. Now, in my moment of despair, taping up the carton of sex toys, I lifted this nicely balanced tape gun and held it to my temple, and investigated my wish to die—and in doing so I immediately realized how laughably far I was from actual suicide, and how good, happy, lucky, fundamentally, my life was. The idea of trying to commit suicide over a box of vibrating dildos with a tape gun held at my temple struck me as almost comic. It got me over the hump of Joyce-loneliness. I decided that what I really needed to do was go to the library and get out some more autobiographies and read them, so that I would have a better idea of how to write this one properly. Before I left, I cut open the carton that I had just sealed up with tape and took out one of the vibrating dildos (not the Pleasure Pallas, a medium-sized Japanese-made one in the shape of Athena holding an oddly flamed torch of wisdom in her hands, the torch being in fact a pliant clitoris-stimulating projection; but rather the Monasticon, which was a large twisting Capuchin monk holding a clit-nuzzling open manuscript), and put it in my briefcase. I brushed my teeth. Then I reconsidered, and put the hot-pink vibrating Butterfly in my briefcase as well. It would be a waste of life’s possibilities to send them dolefully back, I thought, just because I might never use them with Joyce. Much more sensible to distribute them free at the library.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Whenever Adam or Charlie visited Lamledra, Jenifer would turn the servants’ wing over to them. “Just make up all the beds,” she told me the first time. “I have no idea who is sleeping with whom.” Not only did Charlie have a number of different partners, but Adam and Mary were often otherwise engaged. This was the sexual revolution with a vengeance, and I was amazed by Jenifer’s lack of concern. Alan Ryan, Joanna’s former husband, was also a regular visitor, with his girlfriend, Katie. In addition, Jenifer and Herbert would invite their own friends. So it was a rather strange house party on that Cornish cliff, with distinguished Oxford academics living cheek by jowl with hippies and other members of the alternative society. But everybody coexisted amicably. On one evening, Herbert and Isaiah Berlin gave a spirited reading of Max Beerbohm’s “ ‘Savonarola’ Brown” in the drawing room, and had us weeping with laughter. In the hall, next door, the air was thick with marijuana, while the communards sat dreamily listening to Charlie’s guitar. I drifted between these two worlds. I had no desire to be with my contemporaries in the hall, though they would politely invite me in for a joint from time to time. I also, just as politely, declined. I did not need to cultivate exotic states of consciousness; I was able to engineer quite enough bad trips of my own, and my experience of drugs in the Warneford had given me a lifelong aversion to this type of recreation. But neither was I at home with the Oxbridge celebrities, though they too were reasonably welcoming on the few occasions when I plucked up the courage to join them. In any case, nobody took much notice of me. I was just the skivvy and, when not on duty, could wander around the house, left peacefully to my own devices. This suited me very well. I spent a lot of time on the terrace that Easter, not reading much but gazing out to sea. At night there was sometimes the extraordinary spectacle of the full moon casting a path of shining light on the ocean all the way to the horizon.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  She would say that she would probably just get something at a drive-through. “Well,” I would say, shaking her hand, “good luck with your bilingual research.” We would go into our rooms. I would take a shower and get in bed and fall asleep thinking about light-switches that go up and down without making a clicking sound. It would only be about eight-thirty, real time. The effort involved in trying to be likable, on top of the lack of sleep, would have completely wiped me out. Two hours later, the phone would ring. It would be Adele. “Did I wake you up?” I would say no. She would say, “The reason I’m calling is, you know what? I think you unintentionally made off with my washcloth.” I would pretend to think back. I would remember. “Right, of course. I was flustered.” Adele would say, “I believe that you had it on top of that pile of reading material.” “You’re right,” I would say. “Do you need it? I’ll bring it right over.” “Well,” she would explain, “I’m thinking of taking a bath, and a bath is just not a bath without a washcloth.” I would indicate that I agreed wholeheartedly with this statement. “The washcloth is one of the more versatile things you can bring with you to the bathtub,” I would say. I would tell her how much I liked it when I got soap in my eyes and I squeezed out the washcloth and scrubbed my eyes really hard with it, making the sting of the soap miraculously go away. Adele would tell me how as a child she had arranged her dolls at the foot of the tub and used wet washcloths as blankets, tucking them in. I would ask her whether she had raised her dolls bilingually. She would say that in fact she had developed several doll languages. We would share a few more thoughts on this rich and interesting subject. “Well,” she would finally say. “How do you want to work this?” I would tentatively ask. “I could just bring one over. You’ll hear a knock and I’ll just hand you one. I took a shower earlier, but I only used one.” “I took a shower earlier, too,” Adele would say. “But I can’t sleep now.” She would hesitate. “If you’re not decent, or you don’t want to go outside in the cold, I was thinking that there seems to be a door leading directly from your room to my room. I’ll keep the chain on my side hooked on, because I’m not … well … anyway, you could just hand it through the gap in my door.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 6I HAVE WRITTEN ALMOST ALL BUT THE BEGINNING CHUNK OF this autobiographical work not sunk in the Fold but moving forward in “real time” (a term that Rhody, my ex-girlfriend, hated, though, let me tell you, substitutes are hard to come by), over two weeks of evenings, sitting at my desk in my room, smelling the smell of burning dust given off by my high-intensity lamp. I thought when I began this recital that I would write every word of it in the Fold, but, like most of the extreme ideas that I find so exciting when I first have them, I have had to abandon it in the execution. Writing is solitary enough (especially the way I’m writing now, which is with a set of earbuds in, listening to music, and thus existing unaccompanied in the very middle of a vast artificial stereophonic space, like one of those tiny figures, each accompanied by its perfunctory shadow, in a Le Corbusier drawing of an urban landscape) without intensifying the sense of solitude by stopping time. Also, the radio stations don’t broadcast when the universe is stopped. And furthermore, writing takes a great deal of time. A paragraph can take an hour! I’ve already noted that I have spent close to two years in the Fold: which makes me really thirty-seven, not thirty-five, if you measure my age by my internal cellular time. Were I to add to that secret aging all the time I will ultimately spend writing this book, I might begin, would probably begin, to look noticeably older than my birth certificate says I am, and I have no interest in inverted remakes of Dorian Gray.

• From Wild (2012)

  He nodded. “Yep. Just me. I like it, but it gets lonely sometimes. My name’s Clyde, by the way.” He held out his hand. “I’m Cheryl,” I said, shaking it. “You want to come and have a cup of tea with me?” “Actually, thanks, but I’m waiting for a friend to get off work.” I glanced at the club’s door, as if Jonathan would emerge from it any moment. “Well, my truck’s right here, so we wouldn’t be going anywhere,” he said, gesturing to an old milk truck in the parking lot. “That’s where I live when I’m not in my tepee. I’ve been experimenting with being a hermit for years, but sometimes it’s nice to come to town and hear a band.” “I know what you mean,” I said. I liked him and his gentle way. He reminded me of a few of the men I knew in northern Minnesota. Guys who’d been friends with my mom and Eddie, searching and open-hearted, solidly outside the mainstream. I’d rarely seen any of them since my mom died. It felt now as if I’d never known them and I couldn’t know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I’d grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve. “Well, nice to meet you, Cheryl,” Clyde said. “I’m going to go put my kettle on for tea. You’re welcome to join me, like I say.” “Sure,” I said immediately. “I’ll take a cup of tea.” I’ve never seen a house inside a truck that failed to strike me as the coolest thing in the world and Clyde’s was no different. Orderly and efficient, elegant and artful, funky and utilitarian. There was a woodstove and a tiny kitchen, a row of candles and a string of Christmas lights that cast enchanting shadows around the room. A shelf lined with books wound around three sides of the truck, with a wide bed tucked against it. I kicked off my new sandals and lay across the bed, pulling books off the shelf as Clyde put the kettle on. There were books about being a monk and others about people who lived in caves; about people who lived in the Arctic and the Amazon forest and on an island off the coast of Washington State. “It’s chamomile that I grew myself,” Clyde said, pouring the hot water into a pot once it boiled. While it steeped, he lit a few of the candles and came over and sat next to me on the bed, where I lay belly-down and propped up on my elbows, paging through an illustrated book about Hindu gods and goddesses. “Do you believe in reincarnation?” I asked as we looked together at the intricate drawings, reading bits about them in the paragraph of text on each page. “I don’t,” he said. “I believe we’re here once and what we do matters. What do you believe?”

• From Another Country (1962)

  He crossed Sheridan Square and walked slowly along West Fourth Street. The bars were beginning to close. People stood before bar doors, trying vainly to get in, or simply delaying going home; and in spite of the cold there were loiterers under street lamps. He felt as removed from them, as he walked slowly along, as he might have felt from a fence, a farmhouse, a tree, seen from a train window: coming closer and closer, the details changing every instant as the eye picked them out; then pressing against the window with the urgency of a messenger or a child; then dropping away, diminishing, vanished, gone forever. That fence is falling down , he might have thought as the train rushed toward it, or That house needs paint , or The tree is dead . In an instant, gone in an instant—it was not his fence, his farmhouse, or his tree. As now, passing, he recognized faces, bodies, postures, and thought. That’s Ruth . Or There’s old Lennie. Son of a bitch is stoned again . It was very silent. He passed Cornelia Street. Eric had once lived there. He saw again the apartment, the lamplight in the corners, Eric under the light, books falling over everything, and the bed unmade. Eric——and he was on Sixth Avenue, traffic lights and the lights of taxis blazing around him. Two girls and two boys, white, stood on the opposite corner, waiting for the lights to change. Half a dozen men, in a heavy gleaming car, rolled by and shouted at them. Then there was someone at his shoulder, a young white boy in a vaguely military cap and a black leather jacket. He looked at Rufus with the greatest hostility, then started slowly down the Avenue away from him, waving his rump like a flag. He looked back, stopped beneath the marquee of a movie theater. The lights changed. Rufus and the two couples started toward each other, came abreast in the middle of the avenue, passed—only, one of the girls looked at him with a kind of pitying wonder in her eyes. All right, bitch . He started toward Eighth Street, for no reason; he was simply putting off his subway ride. Then he stood at the subway steps, looking down. For a wonder, especially at this hour, there was no one on the steps, the steps were empty. He wondered if the man in the booth would change his five-dollar bill. He started down.