Longing

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 Little Women (1868)

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE LAZY LAURENCE Laurie went to Nice intending to stay a week, and remained a month. He was tired of wandering about alone, and Amy's familiar presence seemed to give a homelike charm to the foreign scenes in which she bore a part. He rather missed the 'petting' he used to receive, and enjoyed a taste of it again, for no attentions, however flattering, from strangers, were half so pleasant as the sisterly adoration of the girls at home. Amy never would pet him like the others, but she was very glad to see him now, and quite clung to him, feeling that he was the representative of the dear family for whom she longed more than she would confess. They naturally took comfort in each other's society and were much together, riding, walking, dancing, or dawdling, for at Nice no one can be very industrious during the gay season. But, while apparently amusing themselves in the most careless fashion, they were half-consciously making discoveries and forming opinions about each other. Amy rose daily in the estimation of her friend, but he sank in hers, and each felt the truth before a word was spoken. Amy tried to please, and succeeded, for she was grateful for the many pleasures he gave her, and repaid him with the little services to which womanly women know how to lend an indescribable charm. Laurie made no effort of any kind, but just let himself drift along as comfortably as possible, trying to forget, and feeling that all women owed him a kind word because one had been cold to him. It cost him no effort to be generous, and he would have given Amy all the trinkets in Nice if she would have taken them, but at the same time he felt that he could not change the opinion she was forming of him, and he rather dreaded the keen blue eyes that seemed to watch him with such half-sorrowful, half-scornful surprise. "All the rest have gone to Monaco for the day. I preferred to stay at home and write letters. They are done now, and I am going to Valrosa to sketch, will you come?" said Amy, as she joined Laurie one lovely day when he lounged in as usual, about noon. "Well, yes, but isn't it rather warm for such a long walk?" he answered slowly, for the shaded salon looked inviting after the glare without. "I'm going to have the little carriage, and Baptiste can drive, so you'll have nothing to do but hold your umbrella, and keep your gloves nice," returned Amy, with a sarcastic glance at the immaculate kids, which were a weak point with

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

  The editor of Leg Show magazine says: “I’d say the most common interest is in a small, well formed, high arched, straight toed, soft, unblemished female foot with a certain amount of odor.” Fetishism is infinite; by definition, there are no bounds, no places the experience of fetishism cannot (will not) go. The fetish can be anything, can mean anything. Fetishes are almost always harmless, not only in content but by nature. But they can cause tremendous anguish if they aren’t the shared fetishes of culture, like the female breast. Now that’s a fetish for you. One need only read a column of personal ads to know sex comes in a lot of shapes and sizes. In my little provincial city weekly I’ve found ads searching for people with amputations, for slaves of both genders and all sizes, for fellow lovers of lingerie, for a “white girl with overlapping toes,” for an albino. Sometimes I laugh, and then catch myself laughing. I never want to laugh at the desires of another; I’m sure a lot of people take what I consider trifling or silly to be terribly important, and vice versa. I’m told by women who do phone sex for a living that it’s very common for men to fantasize about being anally penetrated during intercourse, an urge they can’t confess to their lovers but have to tell someone. When you have an urge this strong, you will be restless until it’s filled. It bothered James Joyce that Nora left her clean laundry about so that others could see her underwear. “O, I wish that you kept all those things secret, secret, secret. I wish you had a great store of all kinds of underclothes, in all delicate shades, stored away in a great perfumed press … Are you offended because I said I loved to look at the brown stain that comes behind on your girlish white drawers?” What about encratism, the deliberate abstinence from sex for a period of time in order to build up sexual energy so strong it magnetically attracts others? What about celibacy? A rare practice, if I’ve ever heard of one, and often practiced not out of any spiritual goal but from a neurotically narrowed sexual identity. If all sexual desires were acceptable, would there be closet celibates, getting a thrill out of their deprivation? (Are there now?) The existence of what I might call the less commonly expressed sexual appetites is a double proof. That the intense sexual flavor of an act may not even include genitalia proves the textured complexity of our sexuality. At the same time, it proves what any thinking person knows: The acts of sex are about a lot more than the acts.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  And I wondered that I now loved Thee, and no phantasm for Thee. And yet did I not press on to enjoy my God; but was borne up to Thee by Thy beauty, and soon borne down from Thee by mine own weight, sinking with sorrow into these inferior things. This weight was carnal custom. Yet dwelt there with me a remembrance of Thee; nor did I any way doubt that there was One to whom I might cleave, but that I was not yet such as to cleave to Thee: for that the body which is corrupted presseth down the soul, and the earthly tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things. And most certain I was, that Thy invisible works from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even Thy eternal power and Godhead. For examining whence it was that I admired the beauty of bodies celestial or terrestrial; and what aided me in judging soundly on things mutable, and pronouncing, “This ought to be thus, this not”; examining, I say, whence it was that I so judged, seeing I did so judge, I had found the unchangeable and true Eternity of Truth above my changeable mind. And thus by degrees I passed from bodies to the soul, which through the bodily senses perceives; and thence to its inward faculty, to which the bodily senses represent things external, whitherto reach the faculties of beasts; and thence again to the reasoning faculty, to which what is received from the senses of the body is referred to be judged. Which finding itself also to be in me a thing variable, raised itself up to its own understanding, and drew away my thoughts from the power of habit, withdrawing itself from those troops of contradictory phantasms; that so it might find what that light was whereby it was bedewed, when, without all doubting, it cried out, “That the unchangeable was to be preferred to the changeable”; whence also it knew That Unchangeable, which, unless it had in some way known, it had had no sure ground to prefer it to the changeable. And thus with the flash of one trembling glance it arrived at THAT WHICH IS. And then I saw Thy invisible things understood by the things which are made. But I could not fix my gaze thereon; and my infirmity being struck back, I was thrown again on my wonted habits, carrying along with me only a loving memory thereof, and a longing for what I had, as it were, perceived the odour of, but was not yet able to feed on.

• From Little Women (1868)

  stonyhearted. She ought to have made an effort and tried to love him. It couldn't be very hard, many people would be proud and glad to have such a dear boy care for them. But Jo never would act like other girls, so there was nothing to do but be very kind and treat him like a brother. If all brothers were treated as well as Laurie was at this period, they would be a much happier race of beings than they are. Amy never lectured now. She asked his opinion on all subjects, she was interested in everything he did, made charming little presents for him, and sent him two letters a week, full of lively gossip, sisterly confidences, and captivating sketches of the lovely scenes about her. As few brothers are complimented by having their letters carried about in their sister's pockets, read and reread diligently, cried over when short, kissed when long, and treasured carefully, we will not hint that Amy did any of these fond and foolish things. But she certainly did grow a little pale and pensive that spring, lost much of her relish for society, and went out sketching alone a good deal. She never had much to show when she came home, but was studying nature, I dare say, while she sat for hours, with her hands folded, on the terrace at Valrosa, or absently sketched any fancy that occurred to her, a stalwart knight carved on a tomb, a young man asleep in the grass, with his hat over his eyes, or a curly haired girl in gorgeous array, promenading down a ballroom on the arm of a tall gentleman, both faces being left a blur according to the last fashion in art, which was safe but not altogether satisfactory. Her aunt thought that she regretted her answer to Fred, and finding denials useless and explanations impossible, Amy left her to think what she liked, taking care that Laurie should know that Fred had gone to Egypt. That was all, but he understood it, and looked relieved, as he said to himself, with a venerable air... "I was sure she would think better of it. Poor old fellow! I've been through it all, and I can sympathize." With that he heaved a great sigh, and then, as if he had discharged his duty to the past, put his feet up on the sofa and enjoyed Amy's letter luxuriously. While these changes were going on abroad, trouble had come at home. But the letter telling that Beth was failing never reached Amy, and when the next found her at Vevay, for the heat had driven them from Nice in May, and they had travelled slowly to Switzerland, by way of Genoa and the Italian lakes. She bore it very well, and quietly submitted to the family decree that she should not shorten her visit, for since it was too late to say goodbye to Beth, she had better

• From Little Women (1868)

  He doesn't like to hear me play." "Why not?" "I'll tell you some day. John is going home with you, as I can't." "No need of that. I am not a young lady, and it's only a step. Take care of yourself, won't you?" "Yes, but you will come again, I hope?" "If you promise to come and see us after you are well." "I will." "Good night, Laurie!" "Good night, Jo, good night!" When all the afternoon's adventures had been told, the family felt inclined to go visiting in a body, for each found something very attractive in the big house on the other side of the hedge. Mrs. March wanted to talk of her father with the old man who had not forgotten him, Meg longed to walk in the conservatory, Beth sighed for the grand piano, and Amy was eager to see the fine pictures and statues. "Mother, why didn't Mr. Laurence like to have Laurie play?" asked Jo, who was of an inquiring disposition. "I am not sure, but I think it was because his son, Laurie's father, married an Italian lady, a musician, which displeased the old man, who is very proud. The lady was good and lovely and accomplished, but he did not like her, and never saw his son after he married. They both died when Laurie was a little child, and then his grandfather took him home. I fancy the boy, who was born in Italy, is not very strong, and the old man is afraid of losing him, which makes him so careful. Laurie comes naturally by his love of music, for he is like his mother, and I dare say his grandfather fears that he may want to be a musician. At any rate, his skill reminds him of the woman he did not like, and so he 'glowered' as Jo said." "Dear me, how romantic!" exclaimed Meg. "How silly!" said Jo. "Let him be a musician if he wants to, and not plague his life out sending him to college, when he hates to go." "That's why he has such handsome black eyes and pretty manners, I suppose. Italians are always nice," said Meg, who was a little sentimental. "What do you know about his eyes and his manners? You never spoke to him, hardly," cried Jo, who was not sentimental. "I saw him at the party, and what you tell shows that he knows how to behave. That was a nice little speech about the medicine Mother sent him." "He meant the blanc mange, I suppose." "How stupid you are, child! He meant you, of course." "Did he?" And Jo opened her eyes as if it had never occurred to her before. "I never saw such a girl! You don't know a compliment when you get it," said Meg, with the air of a young lady who knew all about the matter.

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

  But Charlotte was not so far gone that she could not see that her situation was absurd. Something had to be done, and we had a project. Her uncle had just visited Paris for the first time and had been completely intoxicated by the experience. He had sent Charlotte a check for fifty pounds and told her to take herself there for a weekend. Charlotte wanted me to go with her. There was no reason why I should not go. I was living at the Harts’ rent-free and so was much better off than most graduate students. And yet every time we mentioned Paris I felt a strong internal veto, and I could see that Charlotte felt the same. It was partly due to a fear of spending a significant amount of money after all those years of holy poverty. But it was more than that. Paris represented life, sensuality, freedom, and fun. And that somehow made it impossible. I had no business in such a place, because I belonged to the shadows. In our very different ways, Charlotte and I both dwelt on the periphery. We were stuck there for the present. But that was just for now. One day, we told each other firmly, we would really do it. We would buy our tickets and make our reservations. But not yet. Not just yet. Jacob sat at my desk, his head clasped in his hands, rocking backward and forward. It was Wednesday night, Nanny’s night off, and so he was spending the evening with me. He always came to my room willingly enough, but it was hard work to keep him occupied until his bedtime. We would play cards or dominoes sometimes, but Jacob soon lost interest, and frankly I did not enjoy these games much either. We would listen to the radio or play word games, but I still had not found my special thing to do with him. Yet tonight was different. Jacob was clearly upset, and I couldn’t reach him. His dressing gown had come undone and his legs, in their striped pajamas, wound tightly around my chair. “What is it, Jacob?” I asked as persuasively as I could. “Look at me and tell me what’s wrong, or I can’t help you.” He turned his face away, as he always did when asked a direct question. It was one of the clear signs of his autism. He simply could not bear any attempt, however well intentioned, to penetrate his inner life. Chin pressed down hard on his chest, he muttered quietly to himself in the third person: “Karen wanted to know what was wrong, but Jacob absolutely refused to answer. The question was impossible.”

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

  I have at various times in my life felt seduced as much by the idea of heterosexual relations as by the experience of them. I want to surrender to heterosexuality’s potential, to all the gasping satisfaction in my mother’s romances, the large and small thrills of counterpoint. I gaze at classical European paintings, with their fine, pale women’s faces, their soft, longing bodies, the angular, upright men; I imagine their constraints and their unspoken desire, the stays of whalebone and social restraint. And the images shiver with erotic charge, with the intense and immense separation between the genders, the stir of intimacy a single touch from the other can bring. Sometimes it doesn’t matter that I know those gasping satisfactions are more fiction than reality, and that few male-female relationships really bridge the separation. Sometimes I am attracted to a man because of his sense of humor or intellect or charm; now and then, to my surprise, I am attracted to a man because he is so male. Then I watch women with men and men with women—I see myself interacting with a man, and all the little skips and the failed hopes, and I think: What’s the point? Men—and I mean all men here, I mean men—sometimes seem so different from me that any shade of eroticism disappears. They are shaped differently, their textures and aromas are different, their voices and thought patterns and vocabulary, all the colors, sounds, smells, and tastes are different, their very heads are different. I recognize nothing. Opposites don’t always attract. Opposite also means alien, without common ground. This sensation is not attraction and it isn’t aversion, either, but disconnectedness, as though “men” and “women” were two species that could never breed, could not conceive of breeding. They are bears, and I’m a tiger; men want one world, I want another. I have at various times in my life been seduced by homosexuality, by the very idea of it, to the same degree and with a similar sexual charge. I want its possibilities, its infinite variations on a theme. Women I recognize; they are the familiar, the known, different patterns cut from one fabric. One and one combined into more than two, additive rather than diminutive. The fantasy of homosexuality isn’t about being completed; it’s about being increased. And this is as much fiction as reality, too.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He felt that she had decided, long ago, precisely where the limits were, how much she could afford to give, and he had not been able to make her give a penny more. She made love to him as though it were a technique of pacification, a means to some other end. However she might wish to delight him, she seemed principally to wish to exhaust him; and to remain, above all, herself on the banks of pleasure the while she labored mightly to drown him in the tide. His pleasure was enough for her, she seemed to say, his pleasure was hers. But he wanted her pleasure to be his, for them to drown in the tide together. He had slept, but badly, aware of Ida’s body next to his, and aware of a failure more subtle than any he had known before. And his mind was troubled with questions which he had not before permitted to enter but whose hour, now, had struck. He wondered who had been with her before him; how many, how often, how long; what he, or they before him, had meant to her; and he wondered if her lover, or lovers, had been white or black. What difference does it make? he asked himself. What difference does any of it make? One or more, white or black—she would tell him one of these days. They would learn everything about each other, they had time, she would tell him. Would she? Or would she merely accept his secrets as she accepted his body, happy to be the vehicle of his relief? While offering in return (for she knew the rules) revelations intended to pacify and also intended to frustrate him; to frustrate, that is, any attempt on his part to strike deeper into that incredible country in which, like the princess of fairy tales, sealed in a high tower and guarded by beasts, bewitched and exiled, she paced her secret round of secret days. It was early in the morning, around seven, and there was no sound anywhere. The girl beside him stirred silently in her sleep and threw one hand up, as though she had been frightened. The scarlet eye on her little finger flashed. Her heavy hair was wild and tangled and the face she wore in sleep was not the face she wore when awake. She had taken off all her make-up, so that she had scarcely any eyebrows, and her unpainted lips were softer now, and defenseless.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Some of the men were buying drinks for some of the women—who wandered incessantly from the juke box to the bar —and they faced each other over smiles which were pitched, with an eerie precision, between longing and contempt. Black-and-white couples were together here—closer together now than they would be later, when they got home. These several histories were camouflaged in the jargon which, wave upon wave, rolled through the bar; were locked in a silence like the silence of glaciers. Only the juke box spoke, grinding out each evening, all evening long, syncopated, synthetic laments for love. Rufus’ eyes had trouble adjusting to the yellow light, the smoke, the movement. The place seemed terribly strange to him, as though he remembered it from a dream. He recognized faces, gestures, voices—from this same dream; and, as in a dream, no one looked his way, no one seemed to remember him. Just next to him, at a table, sat a girl he had balled once or twice, whose name was Belle. She was talking to her boy friend, Lorenzo. She brushed her long black hair out of her eyes and looked directly at him for a moment, but she did not seem to recognize him. A voice spoke at his ear: “Hey! Rufus! When did they let you out, man?” He turned to face a grinning chocolate face, topped by processed hair casually falling forward. He could not remember the name which went with the face. He could not remember what his connection with the face had been. He said, “Yeah, I’m straight, how you been making it?” “Oh, I’m scuffling, man, got to keep scuffling, you know”—eyes seeming to press forward like two malevolent insects, hair flying, lips and forehead wet. The voice dropped to a whisper. “I was kind of strung out there for awhile, but I’m straight now. I heard you got busted, man.” “Busted? No, I’ve just been making the uptown scene.” “Yeah? Well, crazy.” He jerked his head around to the door in response to a summons Rufus had not heard. “I got to split, my boy’s waiting for me. See you around, man.” Cold air swept into the bar for a moment, then steam and smoke settled again over everything. Then, while they stood there, not yet having been able to order anything to drink and undecided as to whether or not they would stay, Cass appeared out of the gloom and noise. She was very elegant, in black, her golden hair pulled carefully back and up. She held a drink and a cigarette in one hand and looked at once like the rather weary matron she actually was and the mischievous girl she once had been. “What are you doing here?” asked Vivaldo. “And all dressed up, too. What’s happening?” “I’m tired of my husband.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Ringley at first charged a pittance—$15 per year—but she soon had enough customers to cover her computer equipment and growing bandwidth costs, and to make a comfortable living. Once the site became a business, things went a little sour for Dennis. Not only was he out of the hosting role but JenniCam Inc. also demanded that he remove the archive of images he had painstakingly collected and made available to her millions of fans. Her real draw was the live action, and Dennis’s still freely available archive risked devaluing her newfound currency. His labour of love (or affection, at least) was subsumed by the very commercial demands it had created. Dennis lost a friend, but gained a place in technological history. Soon, many other businesses were plying the trade route that JenniCam had opened. “Cam girls” became a buzzword among adult-content entrepreneurs. As a product, live web shows could offer a level of realness that other media could not. Comedian George Burns famously said, “The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Porn producers big and small quickly came to a parallel conclusion about webcams. Ringley’s appeal was that she offered people an authentic experience that could come only from capturing a glimpse of real, unedited, unpackaged life. The adult world quickly learned how to package that raw, authentic experience and sell it at a premium to men who were bored with standard pre-recorded pictures and video. By the time JenniCam went dark, hundreds of other young women had gotten into the game, many as independent entrepreneurs. Often, rather than charging a membership fee, these girls used a lower-tech system of posting a “wish list” of items. Men who bought these items—ranging from books and videos to high-end electronics—could become the cam girl’s “special friend.” Cam girls turned intimacy (or the illusion thereof) into part of the pornographic product. Many sites charged anywhere from $2.99 to $6.99 per minute, and many clients spent $6,000 or more per month to interact with their chosen model. This phenomenon resulted from more than prurience. In Obscene Profits, Frederick Lane quotes one webcam entrepreneur saying, “They fall in love.” The immediacy, this hauntingly realistic emotional connection, was an aspect of webcam technology first exploited, developed and commercialized by pornographers that would later become a device used by millions who might otherwise never have viewed a salacious image. But first, the pornographic businesses would get bigger and uglier. Entrepreneurs like Jonathan Biderman set up cam-girl “portals” where customers could for a fee choose among dozens of feeds. His “Cam Whores” portal proved so popular among both male customers and women trying to get in the game that he had to open a second portal—“Cam Whore Wannabes”—for those who weren’t good looking enough to go on the main site.

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

  I catch myself talking about safe sex now and then, glibly, as though it had no psychic meaning. But for all the simplicity of latex, for all that protecting ourselves from sexually transmitted diseases is largely a matter of a few moments of forethought, there is a great price required. In the depth of sexual passion the skin of the other has the quality of treasure; the mundane secretions our bodies make are honey, manna, light. To be cut off from each other’s fluids is a terrible thing; our fluids are meant to mingle, we long for this mingling that is both so outrageous and so pure. Tongues loosen during orgasm, things get said that would never be said otherwise. The Navaho thought one couldn’t keep secrets, even the most important and magical ones, during intercourse. Certainly in a sexual relationship a moment arrives when you don’t want to stop, you don’t want to stop so much that your brain disengages and you would do anything to keep going—if you could do anything but this; all else disappears, the lover, the self, God; all other needs vanish, there are no other appetites or hungers left, everything is conquered and the land laid waste. Orgasm is psychedelic; you can’t describe it, but you-can still understand if you’ve been there before. Two people on LSD; one says, “The rug!” and the other nods vigorously—“Yeah! The rug!” They have a kind of perfect understanding—both see the rug with ecstatic eyes. But they have no understanding at all, because they see the rug with separate eyes. Of course, some of us get more intoxicated than others, some days seem more reckless. We can’t really explain how arousal feels, what an orgasm is, and the closer we get to one, the less value words have, the less we can use language at all. Reason doesn’t just leave us when we enter orgasm; orgasm is antithetical to reason—orgasm destroys reason and, conversely, a moment of reason can destroy an orgasm. A friend tells me that when he comes, he feels his penis enter his lover’s vagina on Tuesday and emerge on Wednesday, eternally, endlessly, over in a few seconds. He is submerged in the ocean of the moment. This is the most infantile state an adult can experience in an ordinary aspect of life, the moment when we are most outside the neurosis of self-consciousness, when we become only Mouth, Skin, Hunger, Cry, Smile. These are royal and holy seconds. The language of orgasm and the language of Nirvana use the same words. The fear that keeps us from intimacy with others is the same fear that keeps us from religious fever, and this fear is pacified in arousal—sexual arousal or devotional arousal. Arousal begins in the moment when desire overcomes fear, and from then on the course is happily, ecstatically, toward extinction. Naturally, this is a dangerous course; narrow roads usually are.

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

  In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes ironically describes our original state. There were once three sexes, he says: man, woman, and the Androgyne, male and female both. All were round and doubled, each with four hands, four feet, and two faces, and they were very strong—partly because their unusual shape enabled them to practice a wide variety of sexual acts. When these people attacked the gods, Zeus decided to humble them by cutting them in two, which made them ugly and ungainly, unbalanced. Zeus also turned their genitals to the front so they could reproduce, so they could be at least momentarily satisfied, “each desiring his other half.” Some men desire women and vice versa, some men desire men and some women desire women. It doesn’t matter. In every case, says Aristophanes, this painful, eternal search is love: “so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.” These days, we tend to think of androgynous as a synonym for sexless. The label is usually punitive, in spite of the fact that androgynous men and women are capable of stirring strange feelings of arousal in most people. The historical image of the hermaphrodite is of vibrant, almost burning sexuality, a person who has transcendent powers. Twentieth-century Americans, oh-so-postmodern, are still busily throwing off the cloak of gender segregation pressed on us these last few hundred years, and we move toward blending slowly and suspiciously. Most cultures hate the androgyne. Real hermaphrodites have historically been treated as monsters or criminals, unnatural corruptions. Man and woman, and most important, the cultural myths of men and women, are about filling and completing each other; the androgyne is already filled up. Androgyny in contemporary western culture, writes Jamake Highwater, is “an abomination so great that for centuries it could not even be discussed by decent people.” And Highwater isn’t referring just to the physical or biological state; he means the very idea of blending gender roles. For a time the idea that gender roles could change was obscene. But this is mostly idle talk. For all I can wonder what makes me a woman, the culture at large isn’t interested in metaphysics or myth. I would be offended if I were mistaken for a man; most men would be offended if they were mistaken for women. As far as the culture at large is concerned, I’m a woman because I have a vagina. If my vagina were removed, I would remain a woman because I had had a vagina and because I don’t have anything else. This morning I made a small purchase at a neighborhood store. The clerk watched me slip the bills she’d handed me into my thick wallet and then laboriously stuff the wallet into my small handbag, where it barely fits.

• From Another Country (1962)

  She took each of them by one arm and they stood together in the darkening window, staring out at the highway and the shining water. “What a great difference there is,” she said, “between dreaming of something and dealing with it!” Neither Vivaldo nor Ingram spoke. Cass turned to Ingram and, in a voice he had never heard her use before, wistful and desirous, she asked, “Are you working on something new, Mr. Ingram? I hope you are.” And his voice seemed, oddly, to respond to hers. They might have been calling each other across that breadth of water, seeking for each other as the darkness relentlessly fell. “Yes,” he said, “I am, it’s a new novel, it’s a love story.” “A love story!” she said. Then, “And where does it take place?” “Oh, here in the city. Now.” There was a silence. Vivaldo felt her small hand, under his elbow, tighten. “I’m looking forward to reading it,” she said, “very much.” “Not more,” he said, “than I am looking forward to finishing it and having it read, especially, if I may say so, by you.” She turned her face to Ingram, and he could not see her smile but he could feel it. “Thank you,” she said. She turned to the window again and she sighed. “I suppose I must get back to my physicists.” They watched the street lamps click on. “I’m going to have a drink,” Cass said. “Will anyone join me?” “Sure,” said Vivaldo. They walked to the bar. Richard, Ellis, and Loring were sitting on the sofa. Miss Wales and Mrs. Ellis were standing at the bar. Ida was not in the room. “Excuse me,” said Vivaldo. “I think somebody’s in there!” cried Miss Wales. He walked down the hall, but did not reach the bathroom. She was sitting in the bedroom, among all the coats and hats, perfectly still. “Ida—?” Her hands were folded in her lap and she was staring at the floor. “Ida, why are you mad at me? I didn’t mean anything.” She looked up at him. Her eyes were full of tears. “Why did you have to say what you said? Everything was fine and I was so happy until you said that. You think I’m nothing but a whore. That’s the only reason you want to see me.” The tears dripped down her face. “All you white bastards are the same.” “Ida, I swear that isn’t true. I swear that isn’t true.” He dropped to one knee beside the bed and tried to take her hands in his. She turned her face away. “Honey, I’m in love with you. I got scared and I got jealous, but I swear I didn’t mean what you thought I meant, I didn’t, I couldn’t, I love you. Ida, please believe me. I love you.”

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  ©2001 The Teaching Company. 68 2. H e n e e d s p o v e r t y — t h e a b i l i t y t o d o w i t h o u t — a s a w a y o f enduring his exile, as the key to turning exile into pilgrimage. 3. Francis, the first recorded stigmatic, received these marks of Christ’s wounds “on a bare rock between the Arno and the Tiber,” a line that points to Florence and Rome, two cities of great importance to Dante. F. F r a n c i s ’ s p r e a c h i n g t o t h e s u l t a n f o r e s h a d o w s w h a t D a n t e w i l l learn from his crusader ancestor in a later canto. V. B o n a v e n t u r e , t h e F r a n c i s c a n , t e l l s the story of the life of Saint Dominic, the founder of the Dominican order. A. T h i s s t o r y e m p h a s i z e s t h e n e e d f o r i n t e g r i t y a n d h o n e s t y i n C h u r c h leaders, as well as the need for correct doctrine. B. B o t h B o n a v e n t u r e a n d T h o m a s , l i k e t h e i r o r d e r s ’ f o u n d e r s F r a n c i s and Dominic, are interested in reforming the Church. VI. T h r o u g h B o n a v e n t u r e a n d T h o m a s , w e c a n s e e h o w C h u r c h r e f o r m i s viewed as a right relationship between the parts and the whole. A. C h u r c h r e f o r m i s r e l a t e d t o t h e s t r u c t u r e o f t h e c i r c l e s o f s a g e s , each of whom contributes a part to the whole. B. C h u r c h r e f o r m i s r e l a t e d t o t h e s t r u c t u r e o f t h e u n i v e r s e a s a whole, which turns out to be another example of the relationship between parts and the whole. C. C h u r c h r e f o r m i s a l s o r e l a t e d t o t h e u l t i m a t e e x a m p l e o f a r i g h t relationship between parts and the whole, the Trinity. D. Church reform must be both moral/experiential (Francis) and intellectual/doctrinal (Dominic). VII. A l t h o u g h o n e a r t h B o n a v e n t u r e c r i t i c i z e d t h e i d e a s o f t h e C a l a b r i a n abbot and apocalyptic writer Joachim of Fiore, he introduces Joachim here. VIII. The self-criticisms—of Dominicans by Aquinas, of Franciscans by Bonaventure—give Dante the pilgrim another lesson in the human need for humility.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  And after that, the rest of the day would itself take on a post-consumer-waste sort of tone, an after-the-grand-fact tone, as when, on Saturdays, the mail was delivered unusually early and I would drive home from an errand in the late afternoon looking forward to it in error, thinking, Well, this was certainly a dud day, but at least there’s still the mail to come, until I slumpingly remembered that the mail had already come—the usual bulk-rate packets saying “To Be Opened by Addressee Only” or “Sexually Oriented Material Inside” or “Over 70 Brand Spanking New Items!! We Command You to Order Today.” So I tried to draw an impermeable mental oval around myself with a kind of fantasidal foam, meaning to keep all sex-pixxxels, all prelewds, all floptical jillusions, outside its perimeter—much the way a lovely double-bass player I once knew in Santa Cruz practiced all one afternoon in her apartment in cutoffs with a big white circle of anti-bug foam sprayed on the carpeting around her so that sugar ants would not keep crawling up her tanned and defiantly unshaved legs and up the pin of her instrument and up the tripod of her music stand. She had been very nice, very nice—a nice person to know, with a pair of gorgeously autonomous Jamaicas. I had spent one afternoon lying beside her on the beach eating vanilla cookies with her, and at one point I impulsively put one round cookie on each full turquoise cup of her bikini top. She made a tolerant warning sound, lifting her head for a moment, and ate both the cookies; I then brushed a crumb lightly from a breast, saying simply, “A crumb.” But we had never had sex, she and I. And when I brushed away that crumb, I did it with such a light, shy touch that I’d felt only an inanimate bikini seam, and none of the insurgent nipple-crowned weight beneath. Such a tragic loss of a chance! (This was when I was in my junior year, a Foldless time for me.) But that of course was why I remembered her now with such longing, rather than remembering any of the women with whom I had had sex or the hundreds I had surreptitiously undressed. So I should feel thankful that I’d been so shy in brushing away her crumb, since I had her to think about and miss and want now—except that, I reminded myself, I was not supposed to be thinking in sexual directions at all. I tried to concentrate on the brain-muffling texture of the towel against my ear and cheek, and on its clean smell, and on how little I required female nudity in order to be happy with my life.

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

  Remember? We’d get in from our lectures too late to go to the first table sitting for lunch, and wait outside the refectory until the community finished their meal. Then we’d have to rush in and gulp down two full courses in ten minutes, to make sure that we were kneeling in our places in church to do our prayers on the dot of one forty-five.” I realized that the disease must have a deeper root cause than this, but this ridiculous arrangement could have focused Rebecca’s attention on food, making it a symbol of a deeper discontent. “Supper was no better,” I recalled. “I had to read to the community for fifteen minutes and bolt down my food in ten; you were up and down serving throughout the entire meal. They meant it kindly, I suppose. They wanted us to be free to go to compline with them after dinner.” Rebecca might joke about it, but the religious life had damaged her, as, in a different way, it had me. She took the car into the long drive, and through the avenue of cedars toward the fourteenth-century chapel. It all looked so peaceful: the sunlit lawns, the nineteenth-century school buildings, the old tower, the noviceship. We came to a halt before the front door. “How does it feel to be back?” Rebecca asked me. I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. But in fact, even after the disturbing revelations in the car, as soon as I stepped inside, something within me relaxed. In a strange way, it did feel like home. I could smell the polish, which we had made ourselves out of melted candle stubs. I could see the gleaming rust-and-gold tiles stretching ahead across the large courtyard near the front door, which I must have swept a hundred times. I looked at the huge crucifix on the wall. A bell clanged in the distance, a special signal to summon one of the nuns. Instinctively I counted the strokes: three clangs, then a pause, and then two further beats. Not my bell, then. But, I remembered, I didn’t have a bell anymore, because I didn’t belong. At the far end of the courtyard was the heavy enclosure door. If I opened it, I knew exactly what I would see: the cloister reaching far into the distance, the deep window embrasures, the double doors of the refectory, and at the corner, the pietà, a life-sized statue of Mary holding the dead Christ. But, of course, I was a secular, and the enclosure was barred to me now.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Vivaldo blushed and lit a cigarette. “I can’t be sure,” he said, “that one fine day, I won’t get all hung up on some boy—like that cat in Death In Venice. So you can’t be sure that there isn’t a woman waiting for you, just for you, somewhere up the road.” “Indeed,” said Eric, “I can’t be sure. And yet I must decide.” “What must you decide?” Eric lit a cigarette, drew one foot up, and hugged one knee. “I mean, I think you’ve got to be truthful about the life you have. Otherwise, there’s no possibility of achieving the life you want.” He paused. “Or think you want.” “Or,” said Vivaldo, after a moment, “the life you think you should want.” “The life you think you should want,” said Eric, “is always the life that looks safest.” He looked toward the window. The one light in the room, coming from behind Vivaldo, played on his face like firelight. “When I’m with Cass, it’s fun, you know, and sometimes it’s, well, really quite fantastic. And it makes me feel kind of restful and protected—and strong—there are some things which only a woman can give you,” He walked to the window, peering down through the slats in the Venetian blinds as though he were awaiting the moment when the men in their opposing camps would leave their tents and meet in the shadow of the trees. “And yet, in a way, it’s all a kind of superior calisthenics. It’s a great challenge, a great test, a great game. But I don’t really feel that—terror—and that anguish and that joy I’ve sometimes felt with—a few men. Not enough of myself is invested; it’s almost as though I’m doing something—for Cass.” He turned and looked at Vivaldo. “Does that make sense to you?” “I think it does,” said Vivaldo. “I think it does.” But he was thinking of some nights in bed with Jane, when she had become drunk enough to be insatiable; he was thinking of her breath and her slippery body, and the eerie impersonality of her cries. Once, he had had a terrible stomachache, but Jane had given him no rest, and finally, in order to avoid shoving his fist down her throat, he had thrown himself on her, hoping, desperately, to exhaust her so that he could get some sleep. And he knew that this was not what Eric was talking about. “Perhaps,” said Vivaldo, haltingly, thinking of the night on the roof with Harold, and Harold’s hands, “it’s something like the way I might feel if I went to bed with a man only because I—liked him—and he wanted me to.”

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

  But love in this context? I stared bemused at the dancers. These new acquaintances of mine had obviously never heard of the quickstep. Instead, they were leaping, twisting, gyrating together in pairs. Some even danced singly, and no one followed any predetermined pattern. They shot into the air, waved their arms, swung out legs at odd angles, doing what came naturally. But it was not natural for me. For a second I felt a pang of pure envy. I would love to be able to do that, I thought, and to be so wild, uninhibited, and free. These students were living fully and intensely, in a way that I could not. When Mark, kindly, asked me if I would like to dance, I shook my head. I could no more fling myself around like that than fly. For years I had been trained in absolute physical restraint. Nuns had to walk smoothly, at a moderate pace. Unless there was some dire emergency, they must never run. At first all this had been difficult. Most of us were young and it was hard to quench the impulse to run upstairs two steps at a time or to hurry to a class when late. But gradually I had learned to keep myself in check. I had, however, never fully mastered these rules of “religious modesty,” which were supposed to regulate a nun’s demeanor. I was—and am—clumsy and badly coordinated. I never quite achieved the noiseless, gliding carriage of some of my fellow novices, and I was always hopeless at “custody of the eyes,” the quaintly named monastic habit of keeping one’s gaze fixed on the ground. I like to know what is happening, and if I heard an unusual noise or somebody entering the room, I found it almost impossible not to check it out. I was often reprimanded for staring boldly at my superiors, instead of casting my eyes down humbly. I did not mean to be disrespectful, but I had been brought up to look people directly in the eye when I spoke to them. Yet for all these failings, some convent discipline had rubbed off on me, and to this day I have never been able to dance. I have often fantasized about being a disco girl, imagining an alternative Karen, able to leap about, let go, and disappear into the music. It must be a marvelous feeling. But it has never been possible. At a very impressionable age, my body was schooled in quite other rhythms, and it has, for better or worse, taken the print.

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

  And yet the very absence I felt so acutely was paradoxically a presence in my life. When you miss somebody very intensely, they are, in a sense, with you all the time. They often fill your mind and heart more than they do when they are physically present. That was the sort of contradiction that the Greek Fathers liked, but the ancient Greeks had known this too. The masked god Dionysus is everywhere and nowhere. He is always somewhere else. Yet at the same time he is manifest on earth in a bull, a lion, or a snake. He both reveals and conceals himself in the mask that is his symbol. The wide, staring eyes of the mask fascinate and attract, but the mask is empty. At the crucial moment of Euripides’ Bacchae, the supreme epiphany of Dionysus is not an apparition but a sudden disappearance. The god vanishes abruptly—yet a great silence descends upon the earth in which his presence is felt more strongly than ever before. If we try to hold on to our partial glimpses of the divine, we cut it down to our own size and close our minds. Like it or not, our human experience of anything or anybody is always incomplete: there is usually something that eludes us, some portion of experience that evades our grasp. We used to think that science would answer all our questions and solve all the mysteries, but the more we learn, the more mysterious our world becomes. Yet we do have glimpses of transcendence, even though no two experiences of the divine are the same. All the traditions insist that the sacred is not merely something “out there” but is also immanent in our world. Again, I had not taken my texts sufficiently seriously. I had often quoted the famous story from the Upanishads in which the sage Uddalaka makes his son Svetaketu aware of the omnipresence of the divine by telling him to dissolve a lump of salt in a beaker of water. In the morning, the lump has disappeared, but though the salt is now invisible, it pervades the entire beaker and can be tasted in every sip. “My dear child,” Uddalaka concludes, “it is true that you cannot see Brahman here, but it is equally true that it is here. This first essence—the whole universe has as its Self. That is the Real. That is the Self. That you are, Svetaketu.”7 Our task is to learn to see that sacred dimension in everything around us—including our fellow men and women.

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

  And so I did. I got used to a house where rose trees grew in the drawing room, where walls were covered in newspaper, and where the day began with a stentorian announcement of moonrise. When I returned from the library in the evening and climbed the stairs to my room, I learned to expect Jacob’s unfailing greeting. “The Royal—” he would shout from Nanny’s room, where he was watching television. “Arms!” I would yell back as a matter of course, checking in. Soon I felt at home in a house which seemed odd enough to absorb my own strangeness. It was good to have this focus, because Oxford had become a ghost city. Life as a graduate student was very different. True, I had not made many close friends during the last eighteen months, but the crowded, cheerful life of St. Anne’s had given an illusion of sociability. There had always been somebody to have coffee with after dinner, there were tea parties almost every day, and there was usually somebody around in the Junior Common Room. But when the Michaelmas term began in October 1970, Oxford, though crowded with students, seemed deserted. Nearly all my former classmates had scattered to begin new professional lives in publishing, teaching, the civil service, or business. Very few had stayed to do graduate work. The college was now full of a new generation of undergraduates, who were complete strangers. The dons were always reminding us that we were only birds of passage in Oxford. Soon our turn would be over and we would have to leave this artificially constructed existence for the unpredictable, challenging world outside. I never wanted to hear this. I had had my fill of leaving things, places, and people, and longed for some stability. Yet one day, I too would have to face the larger world, which lurked threateningly beyond the groves of academe: unknown, dangerous, and indifferent.