Loneliness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From 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)

  You’re gonna be at boarding school, anyway.” The hum of my desperation was obvious. “Maybe we can go to the Flying A?” She bit her lip. “May says you’re not very nice to me.” May was the dentist’s daughter. She wore plaid pants with matching vests, like a junior accountant. “You said May was boring.” Connie was quiet. We used to feel sorry for May, who was rich but ridiculous, but I understood that now Connie was feeling sorry for me, watching me pant after Peter, who’d probably been planning to go to Portland for weeks. Months. “May’s nice,” Connie said. “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

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  No one to whom I can communicate even a fraction of my feelings. … The trouble with Irène is that she has a valise instead of a cunt. She wants fat letters to shove in her valise. Immense, avec des choses inouïes . Llona now, she had a cunt. I know because she sent us some hairs from down below. Llona—a wild ass snuffing pleasure out of the wind. On every high hill she played the harlot—and sometimes in telephone booths and toilets. She bought a bed for King Carol and a shaving mug with his initials on it. She lay in Tottenham Court Road with her dress pulled up and fingered herself. She used candles, Roman candles, and door knobs. Not a prick in the land big enough for her… not one . Men went inside her and curled up. She wanted extension pricks, self-exploding rockets, hot boiling oil made of wax and creosote. She would cut off your prick and keep it inside her forever, if you gave her permission. One cunt out of a million, Llona! A laboratory cunt and no litmus paper that could take her color. She was a liar, too, this Llona. She never bought a bed for her King Carol. She crowned him with a whisky bottle and her tongue was full of lice and tomorrows. Poor Carol, he could only curl up inside her and die. She drew a breath and he fell out—like a dead clam. Enormous, fat letters, avec des choses inouïes . A valise without straps. A hole without a key. She had a German mouth, French ears, Russian ass. Cunt international. When the flag waved it was red all the way back to the throat. You entered on the Boulevard Jules-Ferry and came out at the Porte de la Villette. You dropped your sweetbreads into the tumbrils—red tumbrils with two wheels, naturally. At the confluence of the Ourcq and Marne, where the water sluices through the dikes and lies like glass under the bridges. Llona is lying there now and the canal is full of glass and splinters; the mimosas weep, and there is a wet, foggy fart on the windowpanes. One cunt out of a million Llona! All cunt and a glass ass in which you can read the history of the Middle Ages. It is the caricature of a man which Moldorf first presents. Thyroid eyes. Michelin lips. Voice like pea soup. Under his vest he carries a little pear. However you look at him it is always the same panorama: netsuke snuffbox, ivory handle, chess piece, fan, temple motif. He has fermented so long now that he is amorphous. Yeast despoiled of its vitamins. Vase without a rubber plant. The females were sired twice in the ninth century, and again during the Renaissance. He was carried through the great dispersions under yellow bellies and white. Long before the Exodus a Tatar spat in his blood. His dilemma is that of the dwarf.

• From The Girls (2016)

  door on the empty apartment after a long day at work. How the rooms would be as he’d left them, undisturbed by another person’s living. And how there would be a moment, before he flicked on the light, when he might imagine a different life revealed within the darkness, something besides the lonely borders of the couch, the cushions still holding the shape of his own sleepy body. — A lot of young people ran away: you could do it back then just because you were bored. You didn’t even need a tragedy. Deciding to go back to the ranch wasn’t difficult. My other house wasn’t an option anymore, the ludicrous possibility of my mother dragging me to the police station. And what was there at my father’s? Tamar, the way she insisted on my youthful alliance. The chocolate pudding after dinner, cold from the refrigerator, like our daily allotment of pleasure. Maybe before the ranch, that life would have been enough. But the ranch proved that you could live at a rarer pitch. That you could push past these petty human frailties and into a greater love. I believed, in the way of adolescents, in the absolute correctness and superiority of my love. My own feelings forming the definition. Love of that kind was something my father and even Tamar could never understand, and of course I had to leave. — While I had been watching television all day in the stuffy, overheated dark of my father’s apartment, the ranch was going sour. Though I wasn’t aware to what degree until later. The problem was the record deal—it wasn’t going to happen, and that was not something Russell could accept. His hands were tied, Mitch told Russell; he could not force the record company to change their minds. Mitch was a successful musician, a talented guitar player, but he did not have that kind of power. This was true—my night with Mitch seems piteous for that reason, a groundless whir of wheels. But Russell didn’t believe Mitch, or it didn’t matter anymore. Mitch became the convenient host for a universal sickness. The pacing rants that increased in frequency and length, Russell

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  The light glares like burning sulfur and there is the sweet, sickish stench of a room which is never ventilated. In the corner stands the coal box, just as I left it. The fire is out. A silence so intense that it sounds like Niagara Falls in my ears. Alone, with a tremendous empty longing and dread. The whole room for my thoughts. Nothing but myself and what I think, what I fear. Could think the most fantastic thoughts, could dance, spit, grimace, curse, wail—nobody would ever know, nobody would ever hear. The thought of such absolute privacy is enough to drive me mad. It’s like a clean birth. Everything cut away. Separate, naked, alone. Bliss and agony simultaneously. Time on your hands. Each second weighing on you like a mountain. You drown in it. Deserts, seas, lakes, oceans. Time beating away like a meat ax. Nothingness. The world. The me and the not-me. Oomaharumooma . Everything has to have a name. Everything has to be learned, tested, experienced. Faites comme chez vous, chéri . The silence descends in volcanic chutes. Yonder, in the barren hills, rolling onward toward the great metallurgical regions, the locomotives are pulling their merchant products. Over steel and iron beds they roll, the ground sown with slag and cinders and purple ore. In the baggage car, kelps, fishplate, rolled iron, sleepers, wire rods, plates and sheets, laminated articles, hot rolled hoops, splints and mortar carriages, and Zorès ore. The wheels U-80 millimeters or over. Pass splendid specimens of Anglo-Norman architecture, pass pedestrians and pederasts, open hearth furnaces, basic Bessemer mills, dynamos and transformers, pig iron castings and steel ingots. The public at large, pedestrians and pederasts, goldfish and spun-glass palm trees, donkeys sobbing, all circulating freely through quincuncial alleys. At the Place du Brésil a lavender eye. Going back in a flash over the women I’ve known. It’s like a chain which I’ve forged out of my own misery. Each one bound to the other. A fear of living separate, of staying born. The door of the womb always on the latch. Dread and longing. Deep in the blood the pull of paradise. The beyond. Always the beyond. It must have all started with the navel. They cut the umbilical cord, give you a slap on the ass, and presto! you’re out in the world, adrift, a ship without a rudder. You look at the stars and then you look at your navel. You grow eyes everywhere—in the armpits, between the lips, in the roots of your hair, on the soles of your feet. What is distant becomes near, what is near becomes distant. Inner-outer, a constant flux, a shedding of skins, a turning inside out. You drift around like that for years and years, until you find yourself in the dead center, and there you slowly rot, slowly crumble to pieces, get dispersed again. Only your name remains.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  And I am as ugly as a Jew. Besides, who hates the Jews more than the Jew? Twilight hour. Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening and liquescent. The rails fall away into the canal at Jaurès. The long caterpillar with lacquered sides dips like a roller coaster. It is not Paris. It is not Coney Island. It is a crepuscular melange of all the cities of Europe and Central America. The railroad yards below me, the tracks black, webby, not ordered by the engineer but cataclysmic in design, like those gaunt fissures in the polar ice which the camera registers in degrees of black. Food is one of the things I enjoy tremendously. And in this beautiful Villa Borghese there is scarcely ever any evidence of food. It is positively appalling at times. I have asked Boris time and again to order bread for breakfast, but he always forgets. He goes out for breakfast, it seems. And when he comes back he is picking his teeth and there is a little egg hanging from his goatee. He eats in the restaurant out of consideration for me. He says it hurts to eat a big meal and have me watch him. I like Van Norden but I do not share his opinion of himself. I do not agree, for instance, that he is a philosopher, or a thinker. He is cunt-struck, that’s all. And he will never be a writer. Nor will Sylvester ever be a writer, though his name blaze in 50,000-candle-power red lights. The only writers about me for whom I have any respect, at present, are Carl and Boris. They are possessed. They glow inwardly with a white flame. They are mad and tone deaf. They are sufferers. Moldorf, on the other hand, who suffers too in his peculiar way, is not mad. Moldorf is word drunk. He has no veins or blood vessels, no heart or kidneys. He is a portable trunk filled with innumerable drawers and in the drawers are labels written out in white ink, brown ink, red ink, blue ink, vermilion, saffron, mauve, sienna, apricot, turquoise, onyx, Anjou, herring, Corona, verdigris, gorgonzola. … I have moved the typewriter into the next room where I can see myself in the mirror as I write. Tania is like Irène. She expects fat letters. But there is another Tania, a Tania like a big seed, who scatters pollen everywhere—or, let us say, a little bit of Tolstoy, a stable scene in which the fetus is dug up. Tania is a fever, too—les voies urinaires , Café de la Liberté, Place des Vosges, bright neckties on the Boulevard Montparnasse, dark bathrooms, Porto Sec, Abdullah cigarettes, the adagio sonata Pathétique , aural amplificators, anecdotal seances, burnt sienna breasts, heavy garters, what time is it, golden pheasants stuffed with chestnuts, taffeta fingers, vaporish twilights turning to ilex, acromegaly, cancer and delirium, warm veils, poker chips, carpets of blood and soft thighs.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Sometimes I snooped around under the arcades, watching the kids marching along with huge hunks of bread stuck in their dirty mugs. I was always hungry myself, since it was impossible for me to go to breakfast which was handed out at some ungodly hour of the morning, just when the bed was getting toasty. Huge bowls of blue coffee with chunks of white bread and no butter to go with it. For lunch, beans or lentils with bits of meat thrown in to make it look appetizing. Food fit for a chain gang, for rock breakers. Even the wine was lousy. Things were either diluted or bloated. There were calories, but no cuisine. M. l’Econome was responsible for it all. So they said. I don’t believe that, either. He was paid to keep our heads just above the water line. He didn’t ask if we were suffering from piles or carbuncles; he didn’t inquire if we had delicate palates or the intestines of wolves. Why should he? He was hired at so many grams the plate to produce so many kilowatts of energy. Everything in terms of horse power. It was all carefully reckoned in the fat ledgers which the pasty-faced clerks scribbled in morning, noon and night. Debit and credit, with a red line down the middle of the page. Roaming around the quadrangle with an empty belly most of the time I got to feel slightly mad. Like Charles the Silly, poor devil—only I had no Odette Champ-divers with whom to play stinkfinger. Half the time I had to grub cigarettes from the students, and during the lessons sometimes I munched a bit of dry bread with them. As the fire was always going out on me I soon used up my allotment of wood. It was the devil’s own time coaxing a little wood out of the ledger clerks. Finally I got so riled up about it that I would go out in the street and hunt for firewood, like an Arab. Astonishing how little firewood you could pick up in the streets of Dijon. However, these little foraging expeditions brought me into strange precincts. Got to know the little street named after a M. Philibert Papillon—a dead musician, I believe—where there was a cluster of whorehouses. It was always more cheerful hereabouts; there was the smell of cooking, and wash hanging out to dry. Once in a while I caught a glimpse of the poor half-wits who lounged about inside. They were better off than the poor devils in the center of town whom I used to bump into whenever I walked through a department store. I did that frequently in order to get warm. They were doing it for the same reason, I suppose. Looking for someone to buy them a coffee. They looked a little crazy, with the cold and the loneliness. The whole town looked a bit crazy when the blue of evening settled over it.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  It was as if I had gotten into a private little madhouse with no exit signs. Sometimes I snooped around under the arcades, watching the kids marching along with huge hunks of bread stuck in their dirty mugs. I was always hungry myself, since it was impossible for me to go to breakfast which was handed out at some ungodly hour of the morning, just when the bed was getting toasty. Huge bowls of blue coffee with chunks of white bread and no butter to go with it. For lunch, beans or lentils with bits of meat thrown in to make it look appetizing. Food fit for a chain gang, for rock breakers. Even the wine was lousy. Things were either diluted or bloated. There were calories, but no cuisine. M. l’Econome was responsible for it all. So they said. I don’t believe that, either. He was paid to keep our heads just above the water line. He didn’t ask if we were suffering from piles or carbuncles; he didn’t inquire if we had delicate palates or the intestines of wolves. Why should he? He was hired at so many grams the plate to produce so many kilowatts of energy. Everything in terms of horse power. It was all carefully reckoned in the fat ledgers which the pasty- faced clerks scribbled in morning, noon and night. Debit and credit, with a red line down the middle of the page. Roaming around the quadrangle with an empty belly most of the time I got to feel slightly mad. Like Charles the Silly, poor devil—only I had no Odette Champ-divers with whom to play stinkfinger. Half the time I had to grub cigarettes from the students, and during the lessons sometimes I munched a bit of dry bread with them. As the fire was always going out on me I soon used up my allotment of wood. It was the devil’s own time coaxing a little wood out of the ledger clerks. Finally I got so riled up about it that I would go out in the street and hunt for firewood, like an Arab. Astonishing how little firewood you could pick up in the streets of Dijon. However, these little foraging expeditions brought me into strange precincts. Got to know the little street named after a M. Philibert Papillon—a dead musician, I believe—where there was a cluster of whorehouses. It was always more cheerful hereabouts; there was the smell of cooking, and wash hanging out to dry. Once in a while I caught a glimpse of the poor half-wits who lounged about inside. They were better off than the poor devils in the center of town whom I used to bump into whenever I walked through a department store. I did that frequently in order to get warm. They were doing it for the same reason, I suppose. Looking for someone to buy them a coffee. They looked a little crazy, with the cold and the loneliness.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  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. I wouldn’t care then what happened to me: I wouldn’t need a job or friends or books or anything. If she could only make me believe that there was something more important on earth than myself. Jesus, I hate myself! But I hate these bastardly cunts even more—because they’re none of them any good. “You think I like myself,” he continues. “That shows how little you know about me. I know I’m a great guy. ... I wouldn’t have these problems if there weren’t something to me. But what eats me up is that I can’t express myself. People think I’m a cunt-chaser. That’s how shallow they are, these high brows who sit on the terrasse all day chewing the psychologic cud. ... That’s not so bad, eh—psychologic cud? Write it down for me. I’ll use it in my column next week. ... By the way, did you ever read Stekel? Is he any good? It looks like nothing but case histories to me. I wish to Christ I could get up enough nerve to visit an analyst... a good one, I mean. I don’t want to see these little shysters with goatees and frock coats, like your friend Boris. How do you manage to tolerate those guys? Don’t they bore you stiff? You talk to anybody, I notice. You don’t give a goddamn.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  For a long time I felt totally adrift. I missed Washington terribly. I had left behind a boyfriend, without whom I was desperately unhappy; he was blond, blue-eyed, funny, loved to dance, and we were seldom apart during the months before I left Washington. He was my introduction to independence from my family, and I believed, like most fifteen-year-olds, that our love would last forever. I also had left behind a life that had been filled with good friends, family closeness, great quantities of warmth and laughter, traditions I knew and loved, and a city that was home. More important, I had left behind a conservative military lifestyle that I had known for as long as I could remember. I had gone to nursery school, kindergarten, and most of elementary school on Air Force or Army bases; my junior and senior high schools in Maryland, while not actually on bases, were attended primarily by children from military, federal government, or diplomatic families. It was a small, warm, unthreatening, and cloistered world. California, or at least Pacific Palisades, seemed to me to be rather cold and flashy. I lost my moorings almost entirely, and despite ostensibly adjusting rapidly to a new school and acquiring new friends—both of which were made relatively easy by countless previous changes in schools that had, in turn, bred a hail-fellow-well-met sort of outgoingness—I was deeply unhappy. I spent much of my time in tears or writing letters to my boyfriend. I was furious with my father for having taken a job in California instead of staying in Washington, and I waited anxiously for telephone calls and letters from my friends. In Washington, I had been a school leader and captain of all of my teams; there had been next to no serious academic competition, and schoolwork had been dull, rote, and effortless. Palisades High School was something else entirely: the sports were different, I knew no one, and it took a very long time to reestablish myself as an athlete. More disturbing, the level of academic competition was fierce. I was behind in every subject that I had been taking, and it took forever to catch up; in fact, I don’t think I ever did. On the one hand, it was exhilarating to be around so many smart and competitive students; on the other hand, it was new, humiliating, and very discouraging. It was not easy to have to acknowledge my very real limitations in background and ability. Slowly, though, I began to adjust to my new high school, narrowed the academic gap a bit, and made new friends.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  When I returned the soup was dished out. All through the meal I thought of my toothbrush—it is getting old and the bristles get caught in my teeth. When I sit down to eat I always sit near the window. I am afraid to sit on the other side of the table—it is too close to the bed and the bed is crawling. I can see bloodstains on the gray sheets if I look that way, but I try not to look that way. I look out on the courtyard where they are rinsing the slop pails. The meal is never complete without music. As soon as the cheese is passed around Eugene jumps up and reaches for the guitar which hangs over the bed. It is always the same song. He says he has fifteen or sixteen songs in his repertoire, but I have never heard more than three. His favorite is Charmant poème d’amour . It is full of angoisse and tristesse . In the afternoon we go to the cinema which is cool and dark. Eugene sits at the piano in the big pit and I sit on a bench up front. The house is empty, but Eugene sings as if he had for audience all the crowned heads of Europe. The garden door is open and the odor of wet leaves sops in and the rain blends with Eugene’s angoisse and tristesse . At midnight, after the spectators have saturated the hall with perspiration and foul breaths, I return to sleep on a bench. The exit light, swimming in a halo of tobacco smoke, sheds a faint light on the lower corner of the asbestos curtain; I close my eyes every night on an artificial eye. … Standing in the courtyard with a glass eye; only half the world is intelligible. The stones are wet and mossy and in the crevices are black toads. A big door bars the entrance to the cellar; the steps are slippery and soiled with bat dung. The door bulges and sags, the hinges are falling off, but there is an enameled sign on it, in perfect condition, which says: “Be sure to close the door.” Why close the door? I can’t make it out. I look again at the sign but it is removed; in its place there is a pane of colored glass. I take out my artificial eye, spit on it and polish it with my handkerchief. A woman is sitting on a dais above an immense carven desk; she has a snake around her neck. The entire room is lined with books and strange fish swimming in colored globes; there are maps and charts on the wall, maps of Paris before the plague, maps of the antique world, of Knossos and Carthage, of Carthage before and after the salting.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Sometimes I lie in bed dreaming about the past and it’s so vivid to me that I have to shake myself in order to realize where I am. Especially when I have a woman beside me; a woman can set me off better than anything. That’s all I want of them—to forget myself. Sometimes I get so lost in my reveries that I can’t remember the name of the cunt or where I picked her up. That’s funny, eh? It’s good to have a fresh warm body beside you when you wake up in the morning. It gives you a clean feeling. You get spiritual like... until they start pulling that mushy crap about love et cetera. Why do all these cunts talk about love so much, can you tell me that? A good lay isn’t enough for them apparently... they want your soul too. ...” Now this word soul, which pops up frequently in Van Norden’s soliloquies, used to have a droll effect upon me at first. Whenever I heard the word soul from his lips I would get hysterical; somehow it seemed like a false coin, more particularly because it was usually accompanied by a gob of brown juice which left a trickle down the corner of his mouth. 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.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  The light glares like burning sulfur and there is the sweet, sickish stench of a room which is never ventilated. In the corner stands the coal box, just as I left it. The fire is out. A silence so intense that it sounds like Niagara Falls in my ears. Alone, with a tremendous empty longing and dread. The whole room for my thoughts. Nothing but myself and what I think, what I fear. Could think the most fantastic thoughts, could dance, spit, grimace, curse, wail—nobody would ever know, nobody would ever hear. The thought of such absolute privacy is enough to drive me mad. It’s like a clean birth. Everything cut away. Separate, naked, alone. Bliss and agony simultaneously. Time on your hands. Each second weighing on you like a mountain. You drown in it. Deserts, seas, lakes, oceans. Time beating away like a meat ax. Nothingness. The world. The me and the not-me. Oomaharumooma . Everything has to have a name. Everything has to be learned, tested, experienced. Faites comme chez vous, chéri . The silence descends in volcanic chutes. Yonder, in the barren hills, rolling onward toward the great metallurgical regions, the locomotives are pulling their merchant products. Over steel and iron beds they roll, the ground sown with slag and cinders and purple ore. In the baggage car, kelps, fishplate, rolled iron, sleepers, wire rods, plates and sheets, laminated articles, hot rolled hoops, splints and mortar carriages, and Zorès ore. The wheels U-80 millimeters or over. Pass splendid specimens of Anglo-Norman architecture, pass pedestrians and pederasts, open hearth furnaces, basic Bessemer mills, dynamos and transformers, pig iron castings and steel ingots. The public at large, pedestrians and pederasts, goldfish and spun-glass palm trees, donkeys sobbing, all circulating freely through quincuncial alleys. At the Place du Brésil a lavender eye. Going back in a flash over the women I’ve known. It’s like a chain which I’ve forged out of my own misery. Each one bound to the other. A fear of living separate, of staying born. The door of the womb always on the latch. Dread and longing. Deep in the blood the pull of paradise. The beyond. Always the beyond. It must have all started with the navel. They cut the umbilical cord, give you a slap on the ass, and presto! you’re out in the world, adrift, a ship without a rudder. You look at the stars and then you look at your navel. You grow eyes everywhere—in the armpits, between the lips, in the roots of your hair, on the soles of your feet. What is distant becomes near, what is near becomes distant. Inner-outer, a constant flux, a shedding of skins, a turning inside out. You drift around like that for years and years, until you find yourself in the dead center, and there you slowly rot, slowly crumble to pieces, get dispersed again. Only your name remains.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  When you get an erection you think you’re passionate.” “All right, maybe it’s not passion… but you can’t get passionate without having an erection, that’s true isn’t it?” All this about Bessie, and the other women whom he drags to his room day in and out, occupies my thoughts as we walk to the restaurant. I have adjusted myself so well to his monologues that without interrupting my own reveries I make whatever comment is required automatically, the moment I hear his voice die out. It is a duet, and like most duets moreover in that one listens attentively only for the signal which announces the advent of one’s own voice. As it is his night off, and as I have promised to keep him company, I have already dulled myself to his queries. I know that before the evening is over I shall be thoroughly exhausted; if I am lucky, that is, if I can worm a few francs out of him on some pretext or other, I will duck him the moment he goes to the toilet. But he knows my propensity for slipping away, and, instead of being insulted, he simply provides against the possibility by guarding his sous. If I ask him for money to buy cigarettes he insists on going with me to purchase them. He will not be left alone, not for a second. Even when he has succeeded in grabbing off a woman, even then he is terrified to be left alone with her. If it were possible he would have me sit in the room while he puts on the performance. It would be like asking me to wait while he took a shave. On his night off Van Norden generally manages to have at least fifty francs in his pocket, a circumstance which does not prevent him from making a touch whenever he encounters a prospect. “Hello,” he says, “give me twenty francs… I need it.” He has a way of looking panic-stricken at the same time. And if he meets with a rebuff he becomes insulting. “Well, you can buy a drink at least.” And when he gets his drink he says more graciously—“Listen give me five francs then… give me two francs” We go from bar to bar looking for a little excitement and always accumulating a few more francs. At the Coupole we stumble into a drunk from the newspaper. One of the upstairs guys. There’s just been an accident at the office, he informs us. One of the proofreaders fell down the elevator shaft. Not expected to live. At first Van Norden is shocked, deeply shocked. But when he learns that it was Peckover, the Englishman, he looks relieved. “The poor bastard,” he says, “he’s better off dead than alive. He just got his false teeth the other day too. …” The allusion to the false teeth moves the man upstairs to tears. He relates in a slobbery way a little incident connected with the accident.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  In the pleasant little lane near the Abattoir de Vaugirard (Abattoir Hippophagique), which is called the Rue des Périchaux, I had noticed here and there signs of blood. Just as Strindberg in his madness had recognized omens and portents in the very flagging of the Pension Orfila, so, as I wandered aimlessly through this muddy lane bespattered with blood, fragments of the past detached themselves and floated listlessly before my eyes, taunting me with the direst forebodings. I saw my own blood being spilled, the muddy road stained with it, as far back as I could remember, from the very beginning doubtless. One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard. My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort. Passing under the viaduct along the Rue Broca, one night after I had been informed that Mona was ill and starving, I suddenly recalled that it was here in the squalor and gloom of this sunken street, terrorized perhaps by a premonition of the future, that Mona clung to me and with a quivering voice begged me to promise that I would never leave her, never, no matter what happened. And, only a few days later, I stood on the platform of the Gare St.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Frank’s hands in the chiffon. My mother aware enough to turn out the lights, eager for the forgiving dark. — These were the fantasies I goaded: that by leaving the ranch for a while, I could provoke Suzanne’s sudden appearance, her demand that I return to her. The loneliness I could gorge myself on, like the saltines I ate by the sleeve, relishing the cut of sodium in my mouth. When I watched Bewitched, I had new irritation for Samantha. Her priggish nose, how she made a fool of her husband. The desperation of his doltish love turning him into the punch line. I paused one night to study the studio photo of my grandmother that hung in the hall, her shellacked cap of curls. She was pretty, awash in health. Only her eyes were sleepy, as if just woken from flowery dreams. The realization was bracing—we looked nothing alike. I smoked a little bit of grass out the window, then fingered myself to tiredness, reading a comic book or a magazine, it didn’t matter which. It was just the form of bodies, my brain let loose on them. I could look at an advertisement for a Dodge Charger, a smiling girl in a snow-white cowboy hat, and furiously project her into obscene positions. Her face slack and swollen, sucking and licking, her chin wet with saliva. I was supposed to understand the night with Mitch, be easy with things, but I had only my stiff and formal anger. That stupid gold record. I tried hard to mash up new meaning, like I’d missed some important sign, a weighted look Suzanne had given me behind Mitch’s back. His goatish face, dripping sweat onto me so I had to turn my head. — The next morning I’d been pleased to find the kitchen empty, my mother taking a shower. I tipped sugar in my coffee, then settled at the table with a sleeve of saltines. I liked to crumble a saltine in my mouth, then flood the starchy mess with coffee. I was so absorbed in this ritual that Frank’s sudden presence startled me. He scraped out the other chair, hitching it close as he sat down. I saw him take in the debris of saltines, inciting my vague shame. I was about to slither away, but he spoke before I could.

• From The Girls (2016)

  — That day in the park was the first time I saw Suzanne and the others. I’d ridden my bike there, aimed at the smoke streaming from the grill. No one spoke to me except the man pressing burgers into the grates with a bored, wet sizzle. The shadows of the oaks moved over my bare arms, my bike tipped in the grass. When an older boy in a cowboy hat ran into me, I purposefully slowed so he would bump into me again. The kind of flirting Connie might do, practiced as an army maneuver. “What’s wrong with you?” he muttered. I opened my mouth to apologize, but the boy was already walking off. Like he’d known he didn’t need to hear whatever I was going to say. The summer gaped before me—the scatter of days, the march of hours, my mother swanning around the house like a stranger. I had spoken to my father a few times on the phone. It had seemed painful for him, too. He’d asked me oddly formal questions, like a distant uncle who knew me only as a series of secondhand facts: Evie is fourteen, Evie is short. The silences between us would’ve been better if they were colored with sadness or regret, but it was worse—I could hear how happy he was to be gone. I sat on a bench alone, napkins spread across my knees, and ate my hamburger. It was the first meat I’d had in a long time. My mother, Jean, had stopped eating meat in the four months since the divorce. She’d stopped doing a lot of things. Gone was the mother who’d made sure I bought new underwear every season, the mother who’d rolled my white bobby socks as sweetly as eggs. Who’d sewn my dolls pajamas that matched mine, down to the exact pearly buttons. She was ready to attend to her own life with the eagerness of a schoolgirl at a difficult math problem. Any spare moment, she stretched. Going up on her toes to work her calves. She lit incense that came wrapped in aluminum foil and made my eyes water. She started drinking a new tea, made from some aromatic bark, and shuffled around the house sipping it, touching her throat absently as if recovering from a long illness. The ailment was vague, but the cure was specific. Her new friends suggested massage. They suggested the briny waters of sensory

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  But this year I would be excluded from the festivities within the community because I was no longer considered a member of the family. I wanted desperately to be part of the celebrations, but there was only one person who could make that happen, and I had no intention of asking her. Sister Catherine had done nothing to reach out to me since I left—not a letter or even a message through my mother. I was dead to her. I kept my sadness to myself, not willing to share it even with Sister Elizabeth Ann. There was nothing served by upsetting her, and the last thing I wanted was for her to get into a fight with Sister Catherine as she argued on my behalf. But when my mother arrived at St. Joseph’s House one evening carrying a small Christmas tree and an array of ornaments, I was grateful, convinced she sensed my loneliness on this first Christmas as an outcast. Together we decorated the tree, making small talk—she shared her favorite Christmas memories, and after we topped our miniature tree with a porcelain angel, we turned to making Christmas cookies. “I plan to attend Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve,” I said. “I just won’t sit in this house alone. I don’t care what Sister Catherine thinks.” My mother’s response was better than I imagined. “You do that, darling. I’ll support you.” There was an inner excitement in my decision—this was my first opportunity to get a peek at the family I’d been missing for the last six months. They’d all be there, crowded into the chapel, no one but Center members because the Mass was not open to the public. I picked my outfit carefully—a suitably long dark-grey herringbone wool dress and a black square of lace that served as a veil. There was no worldliness in my attire. Over it all, I wore a floor-length black wool coat. I could barely be distinguished from the Big Sisters in their habits. I lingered outside the chapel until the organ blared jubilantly, and Father, preceded by his entourage, solemnly exited the sacristy, walking slowly down the aisle toward the altar. As the community began to sing the most glorious of Christmas Gregorian chants, “Christe Redemptor Omnium,” I slipped furtively into the chapel, selecting my place in the farthest-back seat of the Big Sisters’ pew. I was hardly detectable; on the other hand, I had a wide-angle view of everyone. During the Mass, I scanned the chapel scene from my vantage point, taking note of each of my siblings. Surreptitiously, I checked out Brother Basil, whom I still missed immeasurably. Did he miss me? I wondered. I stared long and hard at Sister Catherine’s profile as she sat regally in her place of prominence in front of the altar, with an air of hauteur, much like a portrait of Marie Antoinette. Her attention was fixed, as though in a trance. She doesn’t even know I’m here.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  shirt and listened to his heart, it was beating just for me. Only I could hear the thud, only I could feel the jumping on my face. He said, “Sit still, stop squirming.” But all the time, he pushed me around on his lap, then suddenly he stood up and I slipped down to the floor. He ran to the bathroom. For months he stopped speaking to me again. I was hurt and for a time felt lonelier than ever. But then I forgot about him, and even the memory of his holding me precious melted into the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood. • • • I read more than ever, and wished my soul that I had been born a boy. Horatio Alger was the greatest writer in the world. His heroes were always good, always won and were always boys. I could have developed the first two virtues, but becoming a boy was sure to be difficult, if not impossible. The Sunday funnies influenced me, and although I admired the strong heroes who always conquered in the end, I identified with Tiny Tim. In the toilet, where I used to take the papers, it was tortuous to look for and exclude the unnecessary pages so that I could learn how he would finally outwit his latest adversary. I wept with relief every Sunday as he eluded the evil men and bounded back from each seeming defeat as sweet and gentle as ever. The Katzenjammer kids were fun because they made the adults look stupid. But they were a little too smart-alecky for my taste. When spring came to St. Louis, I took out my first library card, and since Bailey and I seemed to be growing apart, I spent most of my Saturdays at the library (no interruptions) breathing in the world of penniless shoeshine boys who, with goodness and perseverance, became rich, rich men, and gave baskets of goodies to the poor on holidays. The little princesses who were mistaken for maids, and the long-lost children mistaken for waifs, became more real to me than our house, our mother, our school or Mr. Freeman. During those months we saw our grandparents and the uncles (our only aunt had gone to California to build her fortune), but they usually asked the same question, “Have you been good children?” for which there was only one answer. Even Bailey wouldn't have dared to answer No.

• From The Girls (2016)

  — In the morning, I came into the kitchen and found my mother at the table, her bowl of tea already drained, sediment flecking the bottom. Her lips were tight, her eyes wounded. I walked past her without speaking, opening a bag of ground coffee, purple and heady, my mother’s replacement for the Sanka that my father liked. “What was that about?” She was trying to be calm, I could tell, but the words were rushed. I shook the grounds into the maker, turned on the burner. Keeping a Buddhist calm on my face as I went about my tasks, untroubled. This was my best weapon, and I could feel her getting agitated. “Well, now you’re quiet,” she said. “You were very rude to Frank last night.” I didn’t respond. “You want me to be unhappy?” She got to her feet. “I’m talking to you,” she said, reaching to snap the stove off. “Hey,” I said, but her face made me shut up. “Why can’t you let me have anything?” she said. “Just one little thing.” “He’s not going to leave her.” The intensity of my feeling startled me. “He’s never going to be with you.” “You don’t know anything about his life,” she said. “Not anything. You think you know so much.” “Oh yeah,” I said. “Gold. Right. Big success there. Just like Dad. I bet he asked you for money.” My mother flinched. “I try with you,” she said. “I’ve always tried, but you aren’t trying at all. Look at yourself. Doing nothing.” She shook her head, tightening her robe. “You’ll see. Life will come up on you so fast, and guess what, you’ll be stuck with the person you are. No ambition, no drive. You have a real chance at Catalina, but you have to try. You know what my mother was doing at your age?” “You never did anything!” Something tipped over inside me. “All you did was take care of Dad. And he left.” My face was burning. “I’m sorry I disappoint you. I’m sorry I’m so awful. I should pay people to tell me I’m