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 56 of 63 · 20 per page

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  She was carrying yellow flowers! Not a nice colour. She turned down a lane from Tverskaya and then looked back. Well, you know Tverskaya! Thousands of people were walking along Tverskaya, but I can assure you that she saw me alone, and looked not really alarmed, but even as if in pain. And I was struck not so much by her beauty as by an extraordinary loneliness in her eyes, such as no one had ever seen before! Obeying this yellow sign, I also turned down the lane and followed her. We walked along the crooked, boring lane silently, I on one side, she on the other. And, imagine, there was not a soul in the lane. I was suffering, because it seemed to me that it was necessary to speak to her, and I worried that I wouldn’t utter a single word, and she would leave, and I’d never see her again. And, imagine, suddenly she began to speak: ‘ “Do you like my flowers?” ‘I remember clearly the sound of her voice; rather low, slightly husky, and, stupid as it is, it seemed that the echo resounded in the lane and bounced off the dirty yellow wall. I quickly crossed to her side and, coming up to her, answered: ‘ “No!” ‘She looked at me in surprise, and I suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, understood that all my life I had loved precisely this woman! Quite a thing, eh? Of course, you’ll say I’m mad?’ ‘I won’t say anything,’ Ivan exclaimed, and added: ‘I beg you, go on!’ And the guest continued. ‘Yes, she looked at me in surprise, and then, having looked, asked thus: ‘ “You generally don’t like flowers?” ‘It seemed to me there was hostility in her voice. I was walking beside her, trying to keep in step, and, to my surprise, did not feel the least constraint. ‘ “No, I like flowers, but not this kind,” I said. ‘ “Which, then?” ‘ “I like roses.” ‘Then I regretted having said it, because she smiled guiltily and threw the flowers into the gutter.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  "No... No more... No mas..." A heaving sea of air hammers in the purple brown dusk tainted with rotten metal smell of sewer gas... young worker faces vibrating out of focus in yellow halos of carbide lanterns... broken pipes exposed.... "They are rebuilding the City." Lee nodded absently.... "Yes... Always..." Either way is a bad move to The East Wing.. If I knew I'd be glad to tell you.... "No good... no bueno... hustling myself...." "No glot... C'lom Fliday" Tangier, 1959. APPENDIX The British Journal of Addiction Vol.53, n°2 LETTER FROM A MASTER ADDICT TO DANGEROUS DRUGS August 3 rd , 1956. Venice. Dear Doctor, Thanks for your letter. I enclose that article on the effects of various drugs I have used. I do not know if it suitable for your publication. I have no objection to my name being used. No difficulty with drinking. No desire to use any drug. General health excellent. Please give my regards to Mr------. I use his system of exercises daily with excellent results. I have been thinking of writing a book on narcotic drugs if I could find a suitable collaborator to handle the technical end. Yours, WILLIAM BURROUGHS The use of opium and opium derivatives leads to a state that defines limits and describes "addiction" – (The term is loosely used to indicate anything one is used to or wants. We speak of addiction to candy, coffee, tobacco, warm weather, television, detective stories, crossword puzzles). So misapplied the term loses any useful precision of meaning. The use of morphine leads to a metabolic dependence on morphine. Morphine becomes a biologic need like water and the user may die if he is suddenly deprived of it. The diabetic will die without insulin, but he is not addicted to insulin. His need for insulin was not brought about by the use of insulin. He needs insulin to maintain a normal metabolism. The addict needs morphine to maintain a morphine metabolism, and so avoid the excruciatingly painful return to a normal metabolism. I have used a number of "narcotic" drugs over a period of twenty years. Some of these drugs are addicting in the above sense. Most are not: Opiates . -- Over a period of twelve years I have used opium, smoked and taken orally (Injection in the skin causes abcesses. Injection in the vein is unpleasant and perharps dangerous), heroin injected in skin, vein, muscle, sniffed (when no needle was available), morphine, dilaudid, pantopon, eukodol, paracodine, dionine, codeine, demerol, methodone. They are all habit-forming in varying degree. Nor does it make much difference how the drug is administred, smoked, sniffed, injected, taken orally, inserted in rectal suppositories, the end result will be the same: addiction.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  said Austerlitz, something which to this day I still find incomprehensible. I knew from Vera that for many years now Terezin had been an ordinary town again. Despite this, it was almost a quarter of an hour before I saw the first human being on the other side of the square, a bent figure toiling very slowly forward and leaning on a stick, yet when I took my eye off it for a moment the figure had suddenly gone. Otherwise I met no one all morning in the straight, deserted streets of Terezin, except for a mentally disturbed man who crossed my path among the lime trees of the park with the fountain, telling I have no idea what tale in a kind of broken German while frantically waving his arms, before he too, still clutching the hundred-crown note I had given him, seemed to be swallowed up by the earth, as they say, even as he was running off. Although the sense of abandonment in this fortified town, laid out like Campanella’s ideal sun state to a strictly geometrical grid, was extraordinarily oppressive, yet more so was the forbidding aspect of the silent facades. Not a single curtain moved behind their blind windows, however often I glanced up at them. I could not imagine, said Austerlitz, who might inhabit these desolate buildings, or if anyone lived there at all, although on the other hand I had noticed that long rows of dustbins with large numbers on them in red paint were ranged against the walls of the back yards. me yp "s | TF a a San Gs “ What I found most uncanny of all, however, were the gates and doorways of Terezin, all of them, as I thought I sensed, obstructing access to a darkness never yet penetrated, a darkness in which I thought, said Austerlitz, there was no more movement at all apart from the whitewash peeling off the walls and the spiders spinning their threads, scuttling on crooked legs across the floorboards, or hanging expectantly in their webs.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Motel... broken neon arabesque... loneliness moans across the continent like fog horns over still oily water of tidal rivers.... Ball squeezed dry lemon rind pest rims the ass with a knife cut off a piece of hash for the water pipe- bubble bubble -- indicate what used to be me.. "The river is served, sir." Dead leaves fill the fountain and geraniums run wild with mint, spill a vending machine route across the lawn.... The aging playboy dons his 1920 autograph slicker, feeds his screaming wife down the garbagedisposal unit.... Hair, shit and blood spurt out 1963 on the wall.... "Yes sir, boys, the shit really hit the fan in '63," said the tiresome old prophet can bore the piss out of you in any space-time direction.... "Now I happen to remember because it was just two year before that a strain of human aftosa developed in a Bolivian lavatory got loose through the medium of a Chinchilla coat fixed an income tax case in Kansas City.... And a Liz claimed Immaculate Conception and give birth to a six-ounce spider monkey through the navel.... They say the croaker was party to that caper had the monkey on his back all the time..." I, William Seward, captain of this lushed up hashhead subway, will quell the Lock Ness monster with rotenone and cowboy the white whale. I will reduce Satan to Automatic Obedience, and sublimate subsidiary fiends. I will banish the candiru from your swimming pools.-- I will issue a bull on Immaculate Birth Control.... "The oftener a thing happens the more uniquely wonderful it is," said the pretentious young Nordic on the trapeze studying his Masonic home work. "The Jews don't believe in Christ, Clem.... All they want to do is doodle a Christian girl...." Adolescent angels sing on shithouse walls of the world. "Come and jack off..." "Gimpy push milk sugar shit..." Johnny Hung Lately 1952. (Decayed corseted tenor sings Deeve Danny in drag...) Mules don’t foal in this decent county and on hooded dead gibber in the ash pits... Violation Public Health Law 334. So where is the statuary and the percentage? Who can say? I don't have The Word.... Home in my douche bag... The King is loose with a flame thrower and the king killer, tortured in effigy of a thousand bums, slides down skid row to shit in the limestone ball court. Young Dillinger walked straight out of the house and never looked back.... "Don't ever look back, kid.... You turn into some old cow's salt lick." Police bullet in the alley... Broken wings of Icarus, screams of a burning boy inhaled by the old junky... eyes empty as a vast plain...

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  I held out my hand and copped the package, then I slipped a fifty- dollar bill into Nick's palm. He glanced at it and showed his gums in a toothless smile: "Thanks a lot.... This will put me in the clear..." I sat back letting my mind work without pushing it. Push your mind too hard, and it will fuck up like an overloaded switchboard, or turn on you with sabotage. And I had no margin for error. Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out. Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer. Like one of those thinking machines, you feed in your question, sit back, and wait.... I was looking for a name. My mind was sorting through names, discarding at once F.L.-- Fuzz Lover, B.W.-- Born Wrong, N.C.B.C.-- Nice Cat But Chicken; putting aside to reconsider, narrowing, sifting, feeling for the name, the answer. "Sometimes, you know, he'll keep me waiting three hours. Sometimes I make it right away like this." Nick had a deprecating little laugh that he used for punctuation. Sort of an apology for talking at all in the telepathizing world of the addict where only the quantity factor -- How much $? How much junk? -- requires verbal expression. He knew and I knew all about waiting. At all levels the drug trade operates without schedule. Nobody delivers on time except by accident. The addict runs on junk time. His body is his clock, and junk runs through it like an hourglass. Time has meaning for him only with reference to his need. Then he makes his abrupt intrusion into the time of others, and, like all Outsiders, all Petitioners, he must wait, unless he happens to mesh with non-junk time. "What can I say to him? He knows I'll wait," Nick laughed. I spent the night in the Ever Hard Baths -- (homosexuality is the best all-around cover story an agent can use) -- where a snarling Italian attendant creates such an unnerving atmosphere sweeping the dormitory with infra red see in the dark fieldglasses. ("All right in the North East corner! I see you!" switching on floodlights, sticking his head through trapdoors in the floor and wall of the private rooms, that many a queen has been carried out in a straitjacket.... ) I lay there in my open top cubicle room looking at the ceiling... listened to the grunts and squeals and snarls in the nightmare halflight of random, broken lust.... "Fuck off you!" "Put on two pairs of glasses and maybe you can see something!" Walked out in the precise morning and bought a paper....

• From The Girls (2016)

  I was only just starting to learn how to rig certain information with apology. How to mock myself before other people could. “What about you?” She made a fluttery motion with her fingers. “Oh,” she said, “you know. We’ve got some things going on. But a lot of people in one place”—she held up the bag—“means a lot of asses that need wiping. We’re low on money, at this exact moment, but that’ll turn, soon, I’m sure.” We. The girl was part of a we, and I envied her ease, her surety of where she was aimed after the parking lot. Those two other girls I’d seen with her in the park, whoever else she lived with. People who’d notice her absence and exclaim at her return. “You’re quiet,” Suzanne said after a moment. “Sorry.” I willed myself not to scratch my mosquito bites, though my skin was twisting with itchiness. I reeled for conversation, but all the possibilities that appeared were the things I couldn’t say. I should not tell her how often and idly I had thought of her since that day. I should not tell her I had no friends, that I was being shunted to boarding school, that perpetual municipality of unwanted children. That I was not even a blip to Peter. “It’s cool.” She waved her hand. “People are the way they are, you know? I could tell when I saw you,” she continued. “You’re a thoughtful person. On your own trip, all caught up in your mind.” I was not used to this kind of unmediated attention. Especially from a girl. Usually it was only a way of apologizing for being zeroed in on whatever boy was around. I let myself imagine I was a girl people saw as thoughtful. Suzanne shifted: I could tell this was a prelude to departure, but I couldn’t think of how to extend our exchange. “Well,” she said. “That’s me over there.” She nodded to a car parked in the shade. It was a Rolls-Royce, shrouded in dirt. When she saw my confusion, she smiled. “We’re borrowing it,” she said. As if that explained everything. I watched her walk away without trying to stop her. I didn’t want to be greedy: I should be happy I had gotten anything at all. 4My mother was dating again. First, a man who introduced himself as Vismaya and kept massaging my mother’s scalp with his clawed fingers. Who told me that my birthday, on the cusp of Aquarius and Pisces, meant my two phrases were “I believe” and “I know.” “Which is it?” Vismaya asked me. “Do you believe you know, or do you know you believe?” Next, a man who flew small silver planes and told me that my nipples were showing through my shirt. He said it plainly, as if this were helpful information. He made pastel portraits of Native Americans and wanted my mother to help open a museum of his work in Arizona.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  A week had passed, and no Telly. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I really didn’t have any friends. Didn’t fuck with bitches. I wanted to go out, but going out would only lead to something else—fucking—and I had promised Telly I wouldn’t do that to him, even though he was laid up somewhere with his wife. I threw myself on the bed, depressed as hell. This nigga had really gotten to me. Star Hamilton, sprung? Who would have thought such a thing? Another week passed, and still no word from Telly. I decided enough was enough. I didn’t give a damn about his wife. It was my turn, I thought as I dialed his number. My heart stopped when I heard the recording saying that his number had been disconnected. Now I was worrying. Telly had plenty of money to pay his cell bill. What the fuck is going on? I slipped on my Melissa sandals and headed out my door. If he wasn’t checkin’ for me, I damn sure was gonna check for him. I was going to find my dick. I pulled up on Parkdale, and wasn’t a soul in sight. His niggas and workers usually held court in front of the spot, but not today. I checked the other spot on Vance. Once again, no one was out. Pounding the steering wheel, I was mad as a mutha. I needed someone to talk to. Without Telly, I didn’t have a life. He had me sprung, and I didn’t want any other man besides him. But that didn’t cut off all my options. Brooklyn picked up on the first ring. Answered her door-bell on the second. I didn’t know what I was about to get myself into. Whatever it was, I blamed Telly. Where his tongue wouldn’t lick, another would. Her perfume was sweet when she embraced me. Her touch was soft, running through my hair. We didn’t speak. Didn’t have to. We both knew why I was there. She lowered the lights and blasted the music. Took my hand and led me to the couch. Massaged my temples even though I didn’t have a headache. Again, I closed my eyes, weakening under her touch. She stopped, and I opened them. Saw her standing in front of me, her pussy all in my face. “You all right, Star?” I watched as those words fell from her sexy little lips. “I’m cool,” I whispered, staring between her legs. “Good,” she said, pushing my body back and stripping me out of my clothes.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  As there were no other pictures of any kind in the manse, I leafed again and again though these few photographs, which came into my own possession only much later along with the Calvinist calendar, until the people looking out of them, the blacksmith in his leather apron, Elias’s father the sub-postmaster, the shepherd walking along the village street with his sheep, and most of all the girl sitting in a chair in the garden with her little dog on her lap, became as familiar to me as if I were living with them down at the bottom of the lake. At night, before I fell asleep in my cold room, I often felt as if I too had been submerged in that dark water, and like the poor souls of Vyrnwy must keep my eyes wide open to catch a faint glimmer of light far above me, and see the reflection, broken by ripples, of the stone tower standing in such fearsome isolation on the wooded bank. Sometimes I even imagined that I had seen one or other of the people from the photographs in the album walking down the road in Bala, or out in the fields, particularly around noon on hot summer days, when there was no one else about and the air flickered hazily. Elias said I was not to speak of such things, so instead I spent every free moment I could with Evan the cobbler, whose workshop was not far from the manse and who had a reputation for seeing ghosts. I also learned Welsh from Evan, picking it up very quickly, because I liked his stories much better than the endless psalms and biblical verses I had to learn by heart for Sunday school. Unlike Elias, who always connected illness and death with tribulations, just punishment, and guilt, Evan told tales of the dead who had been struck down by fate untimely, who knew they had been cheated of what was due to them and tried to return to life. If you had an eye for them they were to be seen quite often, said Evan. At first glance they seemed to be normal people, but when you looked more closely their faces would blur or flicker slightly at the edges. And they were usually a little shorter than they had been in life, for the experience of death, said Evan, diminishes us, just as a piece of linen shrinks when you first wash it. The dead almost always walked alone, but they did sometimes go around in small troops; they had been seen wearing brightly colored uniforms or wrapped in gray cloaks, marching up the hill above the town to the soft beat of a drum, and only a little taller than the walls round the fields through which they went. Evan told me the story of how his grandfather once had to step aside on the road from Frongastell to Pyrsau to let

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Watching me, Kianna got on all fours and crawled along the floor until she was between my legs. She inhaled Monster, taking long, slow, sloppy drags along the length of my shaft, making him swell to his full length and width. It was heavenly. I allowed her to suck it for about five minutes, all the while staring at her huge ass as her head bounced up and down on me. “You know what,” I began. “I need to hit that.” Loudly slurping her drool off my dick, she pulled Monster out of her mouth, then looked at me mischievously. “You wanna hit this?” “Yea, I think I wanna hit it. You gonna charge me more?” “No,” she answered, spinning on her knees and crawling to the middle of the floor. On all fours, she laid her head on the carpet and reached back, spreading her ample ass with both hands. Her perfectly round ass and open wet slit beckoned me to tap her. “You can have it. You don’t have to give me more money. You’re an ass man. So you probably want it like this.” “Oh, got-damn,” I sighed. “Hold up, baby. Keep it right there. Let . . . me . . . go get a condom . . .” • • • After doing the nasty, I took my new friend back to where I found her on Gilbert Avenue. “My car is parked over at Kroger. Would you drop me off there?” Kianna asked. “No problem,” I said as I drove up Gilbert the additional block and dropped her off at her car in the Kroger parking lot. Kianna got out of my car and then hesitated, leaning down and sticking her head back into the vehicle. “Save this number in your phone . . . 241–0813.” Pulling out the cell, I dutifully saved the number she recited. “What’s up?” I asked. “That’s my mama’s number. Call me sometime,” she said as I cocked my head and raised my left eyebrow. “Not to fuck . . . I mean . . . we can fuck . . . but on a . . . personal . . . tip . . . not . . . professional. Call me if you wanna kick it. Or if you just want to chill. I can cook dinner and we could watch movies. I get bored and lonely sometimes sitting at the house watching Mama all day.” “Oh . . . so . . . now . . . it’s like that!” I remarked sarcastically, grinning from ear to ear. “Yea . . . now . . . it’s like that!” Kianna replied, imitating me, smiling even broader. • • •

• From The Girls (2016)

  I tried to save up things to tell him, combing through my days for something to provoke a glint of interest. It didn’t occur to me, until I was an adult, that it was strange to know so much about him when he seemed to know nothing about me. To know that he loved Leonardo da Vinci because he invented solar power and was born poor. That he could identify the make of any car just by the sound of the engine and thought everyone should know the names of trees. He liked when I agreed that business school was a scam or nodded when he said that the teenager in town who’d painted his car with peace signs was a traitor. He’d mentioned once that I should learn classical guitar, though I had never heard him listen to any music except for those theatrical cowboy bands, tapping their emerald cowboy boots and singing about yellow roses. He felt that his height was the only thing that had prevented him from achieving success. “Robert Mitchum is short too,” he’d said to me once. “They make him stand on orange crates.” —As soon as I’d caught sight of the girls cutting their way through the park, my attention stayed pinned on them. The black-haired girl with her attendants, their laughter a rebuke to my aloneness. I was waiting for something without knowing what. And then it happened. Quick, but still I saw it: the girl with black hair pulled down the neckline of her dress for a brief second, exposing the red nipple of her bare breast. Right in the middle of a park swarming with people. Before I could fully believe it, the girl yanked her dress back up. They were all laughing, raunchy and careless; none of them even glanced up to see who might be watching. The girls moved into the alley alongside the restaurant, farther past the grill. Practiced and smooth. I didn’t look away. The older one lifted the lid of a dumpster. The redhead bent down and the black-haired girl used her knee as a step, hoisting herself over the edge. She was looking for something inside, but I couldn’t imagine what. I stood to throw away my napkins and stopped at the garbage can, watching. The black-haired girl was handing things from the dumpster to the others: a bag of bread, still in its packaging, an anemic-looking cabbage that they sniffed, then tossed back in. A seemingly well-established procedure—would they actually eat the food? When the black-haired girl emerged for the last time, climbing over the rim and slinging her weight onto the ground, she was holding something in her hands. It was a strange shape, the color of my own skin, and I edged closer. When I realized it was an uncooked chicken, sheened in plastic, I must have stared harder, since the black-haired girl turned and caught my glance. She smiled and my stomach dropped.

• From The Girls (2016)

  [image "Part Four" file=Image00005.jpg] S ASHA AND J ULIAN AND Z AV left early, and then I was alone. The house looked as it had always looked. Only the bed in the other room, the sheets scrabbled and smelling of sex, indicated anyone else had ever been here. I would wash the sheets in the machine in the garage. Fold and slot them on the closet shelves, sweep the room back to its previous blankness. —I walked along the cold sand that afternoon, stippled with broken bits of shell, the shifting holes where sand crabs burrowed. I liked the rush of wind in my ears. The wind drove people off—students from the junior college yelping while their boyfriends chased down the ripple of a blanket. Families finally giving up and heading toward their cars, toting folding chairs, the poky splay of a cheap kite, already broken. I was wearing two sweatshirts and the bulk made me feel protected, my movements slower. Every couple of feet, I’d come across the giant, ropy seaweed, tangled and thick as a fireman’s hose. The purging of an alien species, seemingly not of this world. It was kelp, someone had told me, bull kelp. Knowing its name didn’t make it any less strange. Sasha had barely said goodbye. Burrowing into Julian’s side, her face set like a preventative against my pity. She had already absented herself, I knew, gone to that other place in her mind where Julian was sweet and kind and life was fun, or if it wasn’t fun, it was interesting, and wasn’t that valuable, didn’t that mean something? I tried to smile at her, to speed her a message on an invisible thread. But it had never been me she wanted. —The fog had been denser in Carmel, descending over the campus of my boarding school like a blizzard. The spire of the chapel, the nearby sea. I had started school that September, just as I was supposed to. Carmel was an old-fashioned place, and my classmates seemed much younger than they were. My roommate with her collection of mohair sweaters arranged by color. The dormitory walls softened with tapestries, the after-curfew creeping. The Tuck Shop, run by seniors, which sold chips and soda and candy, and how all the girls acted like this was the height of sophistication and freedom, being allowed to eat in the Tuck Shop from nine to eleven thirty on weekends. For all their talk, their bluster and crates of records, my classmates seemed childish, even the ones from New York. Occasionally, when the fog obscured the spires of the chapel, some girls could no longer orient themselves and got lost. For the first few weeks, I watched the girls, shouting to one another across the quad, their backpacks turtled on their backs or slung from their hands. They seemed to move through glass, like the well-fed and well-loved scamps of detective series, who tied ribbons around their ponytails and wore gingham shirts on weekends.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “Real nice.” “We could all see a movie together.” I was pedaling now, for any kind of traction, a bulwark against the empty summer. May wasn’t so bad, I told myself, even though she wasn’t allowed to eat candy or popcorn because of her braces, and yes, I could imagine it, the three of us. “She thinks you’re trashy,” Connie said. She turned back to the window. I stared at the lace curtains I had helped Connie hem with glue when we were twelve. I had waited too long, my presence in the room an obvious error, and it was clear that there was nothing to do but leave, to say a tight-throated goodbye to Connie’s father downstairs—he gave me a distracted nod—and clatter my bike out into the street. —Had I ever felt alone like this before, the whole day to spend and no one to care? I could almost imagine the ache in my gut as pleasure. It was about keeping busy, I told myself, a frictionless burning of hours. I made a martini the way my father had taught me, sloshing the vermouth over my hand and ignoring the spill on the bar table. I’d always hated martini glasses—the stem and the funny shape seemed embarrassing, like the adults were trying too hard to be adults. I poured it in a juice cup instead, rimmed with gold, and forced myself to drink. Then I made another and drank that, too. It was fun to feel loose and amused with my own house, realizing, in a spill of hilarity, that the furniture had always been ugly, chairs as heavy and mannered as gargoyles. To notice the air was candied with silence, that the curtains were always drawn. I opened them and struggled to lift a window. It was hot outside—I imagined my father, snapping that I was letting the warm air in—but I left the window open anyway. My mother would be gone all day, the liquor aiding the shorthand of my loneliness. It was strange that I could feel differently so easily, that there was a sure way to soften the crud of my own sadness. I could drink until my problems seemed compact and pretty, something I could admire. I forced myself to like the taste, to breathe slowly when I felt nauseous. I burbled acrid vomit onto my blankets, then cleaned so there was just a tart, curdled spice in the air that I almost liked. I knocked over a lamp and put on dark eye makeup with inexpert but avid attention. Sat in front of my mother’s lighted mirror with its different settings: Office. Daylight. Dusk. Washes of colored light, my features spooking and bleaching as I clicked through the artificial day. I tried reading parts of books I’d liked when I was young. A spoiled girl gets banished underground, to a city ruled by goblins. The girl’s bared knees in her childish dress, the woodcuts of the dark forests.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  zoo where large animals from the African colonies had once been put on display, said Austerlitz, elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, dromedaries, and crocodiles, although most of the enclosures, decked out with pitiful remnants of natural objects—tree stumps, artificial rocks, and pools of water—were now empty and deserted. On these walks it was not unusual for us to hear one of the children whose adult companions still took them to the zoo calling out, in some exasperation: Mais il est ou? Pourquoi il se cache? Pourquoi il ne bouge pas? Est-ce qu’il est mort? I recollect that I myself saw a family of fallow deer gathered together by a manger of hay near the perimeter fence of a dusty enclosure where no grass grew, a living picture of mutual trust and harmony which also had about it an air of constant vigilance and alarm. Marie particularly asked me to take a photograph of this beautiful group, and as she did so, said Austerlitz, she said something which I have never forgotten, she said that captive animals and we ourselves, their human counterparts, view one another a travers une bréche d’incompréhension. Marie spent every second or third weekend, continued Austerlitz, his narrative taking another direction, with her parents or wider family, who owned several estates in the wooded country around Compiégne or further north in Picardy. At those times when she was not in Paris, which always cast me into an anxious mood, I regularly set off to explore the outlying districts of the city, taking the Métro out to Montreuil, Malakoff, Charenton, Bobigny, Bagnolet, Le Pré St. Germain, St. Denis, St. Mandé, or elsewhere, to walk through the empty Sunday streets taking hundreds of banlieu-photographs, as I called them, pictures which in their very emptiness, as I realized only later, reflected my orphaned frame of mind. It was on such a suburban expedition, one unusually oppressive Sunday in September when gray storm clouds were rolling over the sky from the southwest, that I went out to Maisons-Alfort and there discovered the museum of veterinary medicine, of which I had never heard before, in the extensive grounds of the Ecole Vétérinaire, itself founded two hundred years ago. An old Moroccan sat at the entrance, wearing a kind of burnoose, with a fez on his head. I still have the twenty-franc ticket he sold me in my wallet, said Austerlitz, and taking it out he handed it to me over the table of the bistro where we were sitting as if there were something very special about it. (754115 ry On ereaet saake | see * . CHEQUE Postaunx DATE : BRL VIE KER Om a VERSEMENT | CHEQUES Se daaatin Nacasien |_OfsiGnANON DES PROoUTs | YESSENENT hancares

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  As for myself, Austerlitz continued his story after a long pause, during my first stay in Paris, and indeed later in my life as well, I tried not to let anything distract me from my studies. In the week I went daily to the Bibliotheque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, and usually remained in my place there until evening, in silent solidarity with the many others immersed in their intellectual labors, losing myself in the small print of the footnotes to the works I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then in the footnotes to those books in their own turn, and so escaping from factual, scholarly accounts to the strangest of details, in a kind of continual regression expressed in the form of my own marginal remarks and glosses, which increasingly diverged into the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications. My neighbor was usually an elderly gentleman with carefully trimmed hair and sleeve protectors, who had been working for decades on an encyclopedia of church history, a project which had now reached the letter K, so that it was obvious he would never be able to complete it. Without the slightest hesitation, and never making any corrections, he filled in one after another of his index cards in tiny copperplate handwriting, subsequently setting them out in front of him in meticulous order. Some years later, said Austerlitz, when I was watching a short black and white film about the Bibliotheque Nationale and saw messages racing by pneumatic post from the reading rooms to the stacks, along what might be described as the library’s nervous system, it struck me that the scholars, together with the whole apparatus of the library, formed an immensely complex and constantly evolving creature which had to be fed with myriads of words, in order to bring forth myriads of words in its own turn. I think that this film, which I saw only once but which assumed ever more monstrous and fantastic dimensions in my imagination, was entitled Toute la mémoire du monde and was made by Alain Resnais. Even before then my mind often dwelt on the question of whether there in the reading room of the library, which was full of a quiet humming, rustling, and clearing of throats, I was on the Islands of the Blest or, on the contrary, in a penal colony, and that conundrum, said Austerlitz, was going round in my head again on a day which has lodged itself with particular tenacity in my memory, a day when I spent perhaps as much as an hour in the manuscripts and records department on the first floor, where I was temporarily working, looking out at the tall rows of windows on the opposite side of the building, which reflected the dark slates of the roof, at the narrow brick-red chimneys, the bright and icy blue sky, and the snow-white metal weathervane with the shape of a swallow cut out of it, soaring upwards and as blue as the azure of the sky itself. The reflections in the old glass panes were slightly irregular or undulating, and I remember, said Austerlitz, that

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  And as I never hesitated to laugh in his face it happened invariably that when this little word bobbed up Van Norden would pause just long enough for me to burst into a cackle and then, as if nothing had happened, he would resume his monologue, repeating the word more and more frequently and each time with a more caressing emphasis. It was the soul of him that women were trying to possess—that he made clear to me. He has explained it over and over again, but he comes back to it afresh each time like a paranoiac to his obsession. In a sense Van Norden is mad, of that I’m convinced. His one fear is to be left alone, and this fear is so deep and so persistent that even when he is on top of a woman, even when he has welded himself to her, he cannot escape the prison which he has created for himself. “I try all sorts of things,” he explains to me. “I even count sometimes, or I begin to think of a problem in philosophy, but it doesn’t work. It’s like I’m two people, and one of them is watching me all the time. I get so goddamned mad at myself that I could kill myself… and in a way, that’s what I do every time I have an orgasm. For one second like I obliterate myself. There’s not even one me then… there’s nothing… not even the cunt. It’s like receiving communion. Honest, I mean that. For a few seconds afterward I have a fine spiritual glow… and maybe it would continue that way indefinitely—how can you tell?—if it weren’t for the fact that there’s a woman beside you and then the douche bag and the water running… all those little details that make you desperately self-conscious, desperately lonely. And for that one moment of freedom you have to listen to all that love crap… it drives me nuts sometimes… I want to kick them out immediately… I do now and then. But that doesn’t keep them away. They like it, in fact. The less you notice them the more they chase after you. There’s something perverse about women… they’re all masochists at heart.” “But what is it you want of a woman, then?” I demand. He begins to mold his hands; his lower lip droops. He looks completely frustrated. When eventually he succeeds in stammering out a few broken phrases it’s with the conviction that behind his words lies an overwhelming futility. “I want to be able to surrender myself to a woman,” he blurts out. “I want her to take me out of myself. But to do that, she’s got to be better than I am; she’s got to have a mind, not just a cunt. She’s got to make me believe that I need her, that I can’t live without her. Find me a cunt like that, will you? If you could do that I’d give you my job.

• From The Girls (2016)

  sickroom, my mother disappeared into the rest of the house, talking on the phone to someone in a voice I didn’t recognize. A tray of Ritz crackers and chicken noodle soup gone cold, sallow meat breaching the scrim of fat. A starry emptiness that felt, even as a child, something like death. I didn’t wonder how my mother spent her days. How she must have sat in the empty kitchen, the table smelling of the domestic rot of the sponge, and waited for me to clatter in from school, for my father to come home. My father, who kissed her with a formality that embarrassed us all, who left beer bottles on the steps that trapped wasps and beat his bare chest in the morning to keep his lungs strong. He clung tight to the brute reality of his body, his thick ribbed socks showing above his shoes, flecked from the cedar sachets he kept in his drawers. The way he made a joke of checking his reflection in the hood of the car. I tried to save up things to tell him, combing through my days for something to provoke a glint of interest. It didn’t occur to me, until I was an adult, that it was strange to know so much about him when he seemed to know nothing about me. To know that he loved Leonardo da Vinci because he invented solar power and was born poor. That he could identify the make of any car just by the sound of the engine and thought everyone should know the names of trees. He liked when I agreed that business school was a scam or nodded when he said that the teenager in town who’d painted his car with peace signs was a traitor. He’d mentioned once that I should learn classical guitar, though I had never heard him listen to any music except for those theatrical cowboy bands, tapping their emerald cowboy boots and singing about yellow roses. He felt that his height was the only thing that had prevented him from achieving success. “Robert Mitchum is short too,” he’d said to me once. “They make him stand on orange crates.” — As soon as I’d caught sight of the girls cutting their way through the park, my attention stayed pinned on them. The black-haired girl with her attendants, their laughter a rebuke to my aloneness. I was waiting for something without knowing what. And then it happened. Quick, but still I saw it: the girl with black hair pulled down the neckline of her dress for a brief second, exposing the red nipple of her bare breast. Right in the

• From The Girls (2016)

  comforter on the mattress. The girlish effort of a scented candle by the bed. Not that I was doing much better. “We might get a place with a washing machine,” Sasha said, a new defiance in her tone as she invoked their meager domesticity. “Probably in a few months.” “And your parents are okay with you living with Julian?” “I can do what I want.” She shuffled her hands into the sleeves of Julian’s sweatshirt. “I’m eighteen.” That couldn’t be true. “Besides,” she said, “weren’t you my age when you were in that cult?” Her tone was blank, but I imagined a slant of accusation. Before I could say anything, Sasha got up from the table, listing toward the refrigerator. I watched her affected swagger, the easy way she removed one of the beers they’d brought. The cutout silvered mountains gleaming from the label. She met my gaze. “Want one?” she asked. This was a test, I understood. Either I could be the kind of adult to be ignored or pitied or I could be someone she could maybe talk to. I nodded and Sasha relaxed. “Think fast,” she said, tossing the bottle to me. — Night came on quick, as it did on the coast, with no mediation of buildings to temper the change. The sun was so low that we could look directly at it, watching it drift from sight. We each had had a few beers. The kitchen grew dark, but neither of us got up to turn on the lights. Everything had a blue shadow, soft and royal, the furniture simplifying into shapes. Sasha asked if we could make a fire in the fireplace. “It’s gas,” I said. “And it’s broken.” A lot of things in the house were broken or forgotten: the kitchen clock stopped, a closet doorknob coming off in my hand. The sparkly mess of flies I’d swept from the corners. It took sustained, constant living to ward off decay. Even my presence for the last few weeks hadn’t made much of a dent.

• From The Girls (2016)

  everywhere in that part of California. Ragged blips of prayer flags in the oak trees, vans eternally parked in fields, missing their tires. Older men in decorative shirts with common-law wives. But those were the expected sixties ghosts. Why would Sasha have any interest? I was glad when Sasha changed the music. A woman singing over gothy electronic piano, nothing I recognized at all. — That afternoon, I tried to take a nap. But I couldn’t sleep. I lay there, staring at the framed photo that hung over the bureau: a sand dune, rippling with mint grass. The ghoulish whorls of cobwebs in the corners. I shifted in the sheets, impatient. I was too aware of Sasha in the room next door. The music from her laptop hadn’t stopped all afternoon, and sometimes I could make out scraps of digital noise over the songs, beeps and chimes. What was she doing—playing games on her phone? Texting with Julian? I had a sudden ache for the obliging ways she must be tending to her loneliness. I knocked on her door, but the music was too loud. I tried again. Nothing. I was embarrassed by the exposure of effort, about to scurry back to my room, but Sasha appeared in the doorway. Her face still muted with sleep, her hair scraggled by the pillow—maybe she’d been trying to nap, too. “Do you want some tea?” I asked. It took her a moment to nod, like she’d forgotten who I was. — Sasha was quiet at the table. Studying her fingernails, sighing with cosmic boredom. I remembered this pose from my own adolescence—thrusting my jaw forward, staring out the car window like a wrongfully accused prisoner, all along desperately wishing that my mother would say something. Sasha was waiting for me to breach her reserve, to ask her questions, and I could feel her eyes on me while I poured the tea. It was nice to be watched, even suspiciously. I used the good cups and the buckwheat crackers I fanned along the saucers were only a little stale. I wanted to please her, I realized, setting the plate gently in front of her.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I would be responsible to God alone—if He existed!” It seems to me that Papini misses something by a hair’s breadth when he talks of the need to be alone. It is not difficult to be alone if you are poor and a failure. An artist is always alone—if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness . The artist, I call myself. So be it. A beautiful nap this afternoon that put velvet between my vertebrae. Generated enough ideas to last me three days. Chock-full of energy and nothing to do about it. Decide to go for a walk. In the street I change my mind. Decide to go to the movies. Can’t go to the movies—short a few sous. A walk then. At every movie house I stop and look at the billboards, then at the price list. Cheap enough, these opium joints, but I’m short just a few sous. If it weren’t so late I might go back and cash an empty bottle. By the time I get to the Rue Amélie I’ve forgotten all about the movies. The Rue Amélie is one of my favorite streets. It is one of those streets which by good fortune the municipality has forgotten to pave. Huge cobblestones spreading convexly from one side of the street to the other. Only one block long and narrow. The Hôtel Pretty is on this street. There is a little church, too, on the Rue Amélie. It looks as though it were made especially for the President of the Republic and his private family. It’s good occasionally to see a modest little church. Paris is full of pompous cathedrals. Pont Alexandre III. A great windswept space approaching the bridge. Gaunt, bare trees mathematically fixed in their iron grates; the gloom of the Invalides welling out of the dome and overflowing the dark streets adjacent to the Square. The morgue of poetry. They have him where they want him now, the great warrior, the last big man of Europe. He sleeps soundly in his granite bed. No fear of him turning over in his grave. The doors are well bolted, the lid is on tight. Sleep, Napoleon! It was not your ideas they wanted, it was only your corpse! The river is still swollen, muddy, streaked with lights. I don’t know what it is rushes up in me at the sight of this dark, swift-moving current, but a great exultation lifts me up, affirms the deep wish that is in me never to leave this land. I remember passing this way the other morning on my way to the American Express, knowing in advance that there would be no mail for me, no check, no cable, nothing, nothing. A wagon from the Galeries Lafayette was rumbling over the bridge. The rain had stopped and the sun breaking through the soapy clouds touched the glistening rubble of roofs with a cold fire.

• From The Girls (2016)

  I WOKE TO A WASH OF FOG pressed against the windows, the bedroom filled with snowy light. It took a moment to reoccupy the disappointing and familiar facts—I was staying in Dan’s house. It was his bureau in the corner, his glass-topped nightstand. His blanket, bordered in sateen ribbon, that I pulled over my own body. I remembered Julian and Sasha, the thin wall between us. I didn’t want to think of the previous night. Sasha’s mewlings. The slurred, obsessive muttering, “Fuck me fuck mefuckmefuckme,” repeated so many times it failed to mean anything. I stared at the monotony of ceiling. They’d been thoughtless, as all teenagers are, and the night didn’t mean anything beyond that. Still. The polite thing to do was to wait in my room until they had left for Humboldt. Let them clear off without having to perform any dutiful morning niceties. — As soon as I heard the car back out of the garage, I got out of bed. The house was mine again, and though I expected relief, there was some sadness, too. Sasha and Julian were aimed at another adventure. Clicking back into the momentum of the larger world. I’d recede in their minds— the middle-aged woman in a forgotten house—just a mental footnote getting smaller and smaller as their real life took over. I hadn’t realized until then how lonely I was. Or something less urgent than loneliness: an absence of eyes on me, maybe. Who would care if I ceased to exist? Those silly phrases I remembered Russell saying—cease to exist, he urged us, disappear the self. And all of us nodding like golden retrievers, the reality of our existence making us cavalier, eager to dismantle what seemed permanent. I started the kettle. Opened the window to let a slash of cold air circulate. I gathered what seemed to be a lot of empty beer bottles—had they drunk more while I slept? After taking out the trash, the tight heave of plastic and my own garbage, I caught myself staring at the poky blankets of ice plants along the driveway. The beach beyond. The fog had started to burn off, and I