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 Bestiary (2020)

  We stopped on the sidewalk between an acupuncture clinic and a seafood store with a sign that said it was selling shrimp that you had to fish yourself from a kiddie pool. Ben nodded up at an apartment building that had been painted white and was now yellowing like teeth. She went up the stairs without looking at me, her hand skimming rust off the railing. Halfway up, she turned to look down at me. My grandmother, she said from above, is not really dead. Her grandmother, I’d later learn, was in Ningxia raising camels to scam tourists, charging a hundred dollars per ride. Her family sounded as slant-teethed as mine. I thought of all the stories I could tell her about my own grandmother, my ama who owned a severed head and could stitch a chicken’s head back on with a sewing machine. Ben would know how to tilt my words, listen to them at an angle. Her teeth came out only at night, like the stars, and her smile stung like a fistful of salt flung at your eyes. It took me two hours to walk home by myself. The city described itself differently in the dark, the streets liquefying beneath me. I got lost and circled my own house twice before recognizing my mother’s head in the kitchen window. My mother asked if I knew there were men in the world. Yes, I said, and went to bed before she could describe all my deaths. In the dark, I allowed myself to remember Ben’s face, her breath like a moth beating my cheek. I wanted to lick the back of her sun-mothered neck. In the dark, I could touch myself anywhere and pretend my hand was her hand. I could pretend my sounds were coming from outside, originating with the owls. The next morning, before I tucked my tail into my underwear, I let it rest in my hand like a hilt. It looked different to me, honed, whittled around its bone. Ben came to school early, leaning against the backstop to wait for me. She said hello in a dialect I didn’t know and I answered in English. I bent to drink from the water fountain in the dugout, swallowing slow so she’d have to watch me, water collecting in the fountain like a birdbath, my tongue flitting in and out of the stream. _

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Be my rock-brother and I’ll be your stone-wife. Remember that gumball machine outside the Ranch 99 where he skinned fish? Remember how you only wanted the green ones, the ones you said would taste like our planet, and when you got the red one, you cried? Your father fed it more quarters, but the next one was white, then yellow, then pink, then white again. The gumballs stained your palms like a crime scene, and still you asked for green. He went inside the store and exchanged half a day’s wage for more quarters, kept feeding the machine until you got your green, your planet to suck soft, to embalm in spit. This is the man I want you to remember, the one who committed himself to your hunger: his hands cradling quarters, your green mouth glowing go like a stoplight. Don’t tell me when to stop. Here’s the third story, the one you need to believe. There was a god sent to earth, looking for disciples. He walked the forest—not jungle—and told all the animals that he was starving. The snakes volunteered to steal him an egg. The birds left to hunt him a mouse. The fox skulked off to rob a neighboring chicken farm in Arkansas. Only the rabbit offered itself. It leapt straight into the starving man’s cooking fire, inviting teeth to its meat. To commemorate the rabbit, the god hung the rabbit’s bones in the sky. And that is the moon. That’s how we know all sources of light begin as sacrifice. Your father, born year of the rabbit, hated that story. He thought no god was owed flesh or fidelity. But he still expected both of me. The year we were married I asked him to get baptized. Ma says our tribe used to have as many deities as trees, and that having many gods only multiplies your losses, diversifies your debts. The moon was our priest that night. I filled a kiddie pool with water from a park fountain. He said he wanted to be baptized in his own spit. I said no man can fit inside his own mouth. Get in. On the third day, your brother removes the paper from the windows. You decide that being nocturnal is lonely, and when you check the mirror, your eyes aren’t glowing. When your brother rips away the paper, I see you in the light for the first time in days, and your skin is no closer to being bone. When you go outside to feed your yard-holes, I drag you home by your calf. You bite my hand but I stay holding you. You’ll need more than teeth to be free of me. _ The last time I talked to Ba in person was after my wedding. My belly was filling with your brother, but I wouldn’t know for another month.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There were cheers, then a brief delay, marked by shouts and shuffling and rustling, before the orchestra struck up with its introduction for the next act - a tinkling, Chinese melody, which made a boy in the line along from me stand up, and call out, ‘Ninkypoo!’ Then the curtain rose on a magician and a girl, and a black japanned cabinet - a cabinet not unlike the one that sat in Diana’s bedroom. When the magician snapped his fingers, there was a flash, and a crack, and a puff of purple smoke; and at that the boys put their fingers to their lips, and whistled.I had seen - or felt as if I had seen - a thousand such acts; and I watched this one now, with my cigarette gripped hard between my lips, growing steadily more sick and more uncertain. I remembered sitting in my box at the Canterbury Palace, with my fluttering heart and my gloves with the bows: it seemed a time immeasurably distant and quaint. But, as I had used to do then, I clutched the sticky velvet of my seat, and gazed at where, with a hint of drooping rope and dusty floorboard, the stage gave way to the wings, and I thought of Kitty. She was there, somewhere, just beyond the edge of the curtain, perhaps straightening her costume - whatever that was; perhaps chatting with Walter or Flora; perhaps staring, as Billy-Boy told her of me - perhaps smiling, perhaps weeping, perhaps saying only, mildly, ‘Fancy that!’ - and then forgetting me...I thought all this, and the magician performed his final trick. There was another flash, and more smoke: the smoke drifted as far as the gallery, and left the entire crowd coughing, but cheering through their coughs. The curtain fell, there was another delay while the number was changed, and then a quiver of blue, white and amber, as the limes-man changed the filter across his beam. I had finished my cigarette, and now reached for another. This time, the boys in my row all saw me do it, so I held the case to them, and they each took a fag: ‘Very generous.’ I thought of Diana. Suppose the opera had ended, and she was waiting for me, cursing, beating her programme against her thigh?Suppose she went back to Felicity Place, without me?But then there came music, and the creak of the curtain. I looked at the stage - and Walter was on it.He seemed very large - much larger than I remembered. Perhaps he had grown fatter; perhaps his costume was a little padded. His whiskers he had teased with a comb, to make them stand out rather comically. He wore tartan peg-top trousers and a green velvet jacket; and on his head was a smoking-cap, in his pocket a pipe.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  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. Just the idea of how clean this beach towel was, how fast it had spun for me in the laundromat’s washing machine a few days earlier so that I could lie on it now, was more than enough for me. I recalled John Lennon announcing to the world that he could get high just looking at a flower. I didn’t need big breasts, big jeroboams of titflesh, big hot fleshpots shaking in their self-serve tit-boosting black breastiers—no, I could get high just lying on a towel. Towels, though, were unfortunately not an entirely uncharged subject for me: they were closely associated with my second successful fermation, a year after I had employed the time-transformer in Miss Dobzhansky’s class—and perhaps I should describe that early episode for the record right now.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  They shall be my people and I will be their God, in faithfulness and in righteousness. (Zech. 8:3, 7–8) See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight—indeed, he is coming, says YHWH of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to YHWH in righteousness. . . . Then I will draw near to you for judgment. . . . (Mal. 3:1–3, 5 ) All this brings into sharp focus the theme I have described as the third great storm, the hurricane from the southeast—and the final type of “king” that people in Jesus’s day were eager to see. The people who were longing for God alone to be their king were clinging to the hope set out in scripture: the hope that, after all these years, Israel’s God would return to be with his people, to rescue them, to restore them, to condemn their oppressors, to take charge, to do justice, to sort things out, to rule over them like a good king should, but unlike any actual human king they had ever known. And, bearing in mind not only Ezekiel 34, but also a remarkable passage in Zechariah, it appears that the divine king might after all come in the form of a human king: Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off; and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth. As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit. (Zech.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Ever since she had been mowing her own lawn, she had lost touch with young Kevin. He seemed to have grown an inch or two. He had gone out for the high jump, and he had acquired a girlfriend named Sylvie, whom he said was “a really special person.” For a whole weekend and three cool late afternoons he and Marian worked together preparing the soil in the beds with bags of peat and then setting in the bulbs. The dirt was cool through Marian’s gloves. After shyly asking whether she would mind, Kevin brought over his radio. At first she was a little irritated by the sound, which disturbed her bucolic alpha-state—but over time several of the songs separated themselves from the others. In one, a woman sang something about Solitude standing in the doorway. She sang, “Her palm is split with a flower with a flame.” Marian kept time to this song, first with her troweling, and then with her chin. When she had heard it the second time, she asked Kevin (feeling a little shy herself), “Who does this song?” Kevin looked up. “Suzanne Vega.” “Ah,” said Marian. “I like it.” “Yeah, it’s pretty good,” said Kevin. He was impossible to read. He dropped another dark bulb in a hole and gently mounded soil around it. Marian glanced at him several times. He had a gray track-and-field T-shirt over a gray sweatshirt. When he pushed on the earth over one of her bulbs, she imagined the muscle in the side of his arm, as she had seen it when he had had his shirt off that day, long ago, at the beginning of summer, before she had learned to mow. And later, when the song came on again, he looked up at her and smiled and then went back to planting—and Marian noticed that his ears were quite red. She watered the bulbs in and forgot about them. The ground began to look cold—three long beds of very cold bulbs. As winter hit, Marian became caught up in a battle with a developer who wanted to build another mall outside of town. It was going to be enormous and in its own way wonderful—but there was already a shopping center with a discount chain in it that was working under chapter eleven, and the downtown would suffer, as it always did. She went out on several dates with a man she met at the mall meetings, and while she enjoyed talking to him (he was one of those men who have a passionate interest in some particular writer which at first seems sincere, and then finally ends up seeming almost arbitrary—in his case it was Rilke: he seemed to be getting things from Rilke that he could have gotten from any number of poets, while missing whatever it was that Rilke had uniquely), she nonetheless didn’t want to do anything more than kiss him cordially in her driveway.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had taken to scrubbing my hands very carefully, since meeting Kitty Butler; and if they were ever a little stained at the creases now, it was as much with paint and hot-black and blanc-de-perle, as with vinegar. Even so, there was the scent of oysters on them still, and a slender thread - it might have been the bristle from the back of a lobster, the whisker from a shrimp - beneath one of my nails. How would it be, I thought, to surrender my family, my home, all my oyster-girl’s ways?And how would it be to live at Kitty’s side, brim-full of a love so quick, and yet so secret, it made me shake? Chapter 3 [image "005" file=wate_9781101078198_oeb_005_r1.jpg] I wish, for sensation’s sake, I could say that my parents heard one word of Kitty’s proposal and forbade me, absolutely, to refer to it again; that when I pressed the matter, they cursed and shouted; that my mother wept, my father struck me; that I was obliged, in the end, to climb from a window at dawn, with my clothes in a rag at the end of a stick, and a streaming face, and a note pinned to my pillow saying Do not try to follow me ... But if I said these things, I would be lying. My parents were reasonable, not passionate, people. They loved me, and they feared for me; the idea of allowing their youngest daughter to travel in the care of an actress and a music-hall manager to the grimmest, wickedest city in England was, they knew, a mad one, that no sane parent should entertain for longer than a second. But because they loved me so, they could not bear to have me grieve.

• From Wild (2012)

  Without a word, he took a box of condoms from the Safeway bag and ripped it open. When he stood, he reached for my hand and pulled me up too. I let him lead me across the sand to the gathering of boulders that formed a cove and we circled back into it, to what passed for private on a public beach—a cranny among the dark rocks in the broad light of day. It wasn’t the kind of thing I was into, having sex outside. I’m sure there’s a woman on the planet who’d choose the outdoors over even the most slipshod and temporary quarters, but I haven’t met her, though I decided for this day that the protection of the rocks would suffice. After all, over the course of the past couple of months, I’d done everything else outside. We took each other’s clothes off and I reclined with my bare rump against a sloped boulder, wrapping my legs around Jonathan until he turned me over and I gripped the rock. Alongside the remnants of honey, there was the mineral scent of salt and sand and the reedy scent of moss and plankton. It wasn’t long before I forgot about being outside, before I couldn’t even remember the honey, or whether he’d asked me a single question or not. There wasn’t much to say as we made the long drive back to Ashland. I was so tired from sex and lack of sleep, from sand and sun and honey, that I could hardly speak anyway. We were quiet and peaceful together, blasting Neil Young all the way to the hostel, where, without ceremony, we ended our twenty-two-hour date. “Thanks for everything,” I said, kissing him. It was past dark already, nine o’clock on a Sunday night, the town quieter than it had been the night before, hunkered down and settled in, half the tourists gone home. “Your address,” he said, handing me a scrap of paper and a pen. I wrote down Lisa’s, feeling a mounting sense of something that wasn’t quite sorrow, wasn’t quite regret, and wasn’t quite longing, but was a mix of them all. It had been an indisputably good time, but now I felt empty. Like there was something I didn’t even know I wanted until I didn’t get it. I handed him the scrap of paper. “Don’t forget your purse,” he said, picking up my little red stove bag. “Bye,” I said, taking it from him and reaching for the door. “Not so fast,” he said, pulling me toward him. He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  To put it very simply, the Jews of Jesus’s day believed that their God had made the world and that he had remained in charge of it. They didn’t understand, any more than we do, why a world made by a good God would somehow go wrong, but clearly that had happened. The signs were all there: broken bodies, broken lives, broken systems, broken countries. The whole thing needed fixing, needed mending, needed to be put right. And the Jewish people believed that they, the family of Abraham, were part of the answer, part of the mending operation, part of the putting-right plan. CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE OF JEWISH HISTORY Babylonian Period: 597–539 BC 597Jerusalem taken by Nebuchadnezzar II587Jerusalem destroyed, people exiled to Babylon539Fall of BabylonPersian/Greek Period: 538–320 BC 538Return of (some) exiles; rebuilding of Temple begun (completed 516)450s/440sEzra and Nehemiah in Jerusalem336Alexander the Great comes to power332Alexander conquers Palestine323Alexander dies; empire dividedEgyptian Period: 320–200 BC Ptolemies of Egypt rule Palestine; local government by high priests Syrian Period: 200–63 bc 200Antiochus III defeats Egyptians175Antiochus IV Epiphanes enthroned171Menelaus (high priest) favors Antiochus; Jews revolt167Anitochus desecrates Temple, builds altar to Zeus Olympus166Judas Maccabeus (“Judah the Hammer”) leads revolutionary group164Judas cleanses Temple160Death of Judas160–63Quasi-independent rule of Maccabean (Hasmonean) dynastyRoman Period: 63 BC onward 63Pompey (Roman general) takes Jerusalem44Death of Julius Caesar; Roman civil wars37Herod established as “King of Judaea”31Octavian (Augustus) wins civil war, transforms Roman republic into an empire7–4 BC (?)Birth of Jesus of Nazareth4 BCDeath of Herod; civil unrest and “messianic” movements4 BCHerod’s kingdom divided: Antipas rules Galilee; Archelaus, JudaeaAD6 Archelaus deposed after protests; Judaea ruled by “prefects”AD14 Death of Augustus; accession of Tiberius26–36Pontius Pilate “prefect” of Judaea30 (33?)Crucifixion of Jesus of NazarethSo if, as the Jewish people believed, they were the key element in God’s global rescue-operation, it was doubly frustrating, doubly puzzling, and doubly challenging that the Jews’ own national life had itself been in such a mess for so long. By the time Jesus went about Galilee telling people that God was now in charge, it was close to six hundred years since Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Babylonians, the greatest superpower of the time. And though many of the Jews had come back from exile in Babylon and had even rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem, they knew things weren’t right yet. One pagan nation after another took charge, ruling the Middle East in its own way. In particular, the Jewish people believed that the Temple in Jerusalem was where their God was supposed to live. The Temple was the place on earth where “heaven” and “earth” actually met. They saw “heaven” as God’s space and “earth” as our space, the created order as we know it, and they believed that the Temple was the one spot on earth where the two overlapped. But the Temple seemed empty. God hadn’t come back.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  It was, it seemed, the appropriate place of prayer for a world in pain. Who Should Be King? But it was also, in Jesus’s day, a deeply puzzling place in its own right. This is where the story of God, the great hurricane that would sweep in from the third angle of the triangle, came into its own. Jesus’s contemporaries believed, because their ancient prophets had told them so, that their God had promised to live in their midst, in the Jerusalem Temple, which was the lineal descendant of Solomon’s Temple, which was itself the successor to the wilderness tabernacle constructed by Moses. But—again, as the prophets had said—Israel’s God had abandoned the Temple at the time of the exile to Babylon. Ezekiel saw it happen (chaps. 10–11). Ever afterwards, the same prophets had promised that he would one day return. He would come back to Mount Zion, to the holy city, to the Temple, to Jerusalem. “The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple” (Mal. 1). “The glory of YHWH will be revealed, and all people shall see it together” (Isa. 40:5). “Your sentinels lift up their voices, together they sing for joy; for in plain sight they see the return of YHWH to Zion” (52:8). On and on go the promises, resonating through the minds and hearts and prayers of Israelites, of the Jewish people, of the Jerusalemites, of the pilgrims. Of Jesus of Nazareth. The point is this. At exactly the time when Jesus was growing up, there was a movement—call it a political movement, a religious movement, or (as Josephus calls it) a “philosophy”—that said that it was time for God alone to be king . The people were waiting for the cyclone. They were praying for it. Did they know what it would mean? They knew what it wouldn’t mean. They were fed up with their own “kings”—the Hasmonean dynasty of the last hundred years, such as it was, and then Herod and his second-rate sons. They saw no prospect of any human leader arising from such quarters to do what had to be done, to fight the battle, to overthrow the pagans, to cleanse and restore the Temple, to establish the long-awaited rule of justice and peace. In between the long years of hope and the even longer years of crushing sorrow, this movement emerged saying that God, only God, could and would be king. God would come back and would rule his people. The Jewish historian Josephus tells us about some of the forms of this movement; there were undoubtedly many more. And even when the hope didn’t turn into action, it smoldered on in private dreams and prayers. Theocracy! Yes, that’s what they wanted—as long as it was the right God doing the ruling.

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

  It has been a great privilege to contribute to the debate in this way, but I miss my study and silence as others might miss a beloved person. I once reviewed a book about hermits, which showed that the more solitary a person becomes, the more he or she is drawn into public life. Crowds of people descended upon Saint Antony, the fourth-century ascetic who lived in the deserts of Egypt, demanding his help and advice. In our own day, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton had much the same experience. In a very minor way, this has happened to me, but I have to understand that after the revelation of September 11, I too cannot isolate myself from the problems of the world. There is, perhaps, something about the dynamic of a solitary lifestyle that propels an anchorite back to the world. I am still an outsider. In the United States, despite the warmth and generous appreciation that I enjoy there, I am a stranger and a foreigner. But when I go back to London I remain on the periphery, because my interest in religion and spirituality leaves most of my fellow countrymen cold. This feeling of being forever on the outside has been an important element in my journey, and yet despite this, I have, if only for a few months, come close to the center of things in a way that would have been inconceivable when I left my convent thirty-four years ago. In the words of the late Joseph Camp-bell, we have to “follow our bliss,” find something that wholly involves and enthralls us, even if it seems hopelessly unfashionable and unproductive, and throw ourselves into this, heart and soul. As the foundress of my religious order used to say: “Do what you are doing!” My “bliss” has been the study of theology. For other people it may be a career in law or politics, a marriage, a love affair, or the raising of children. But that bliss provides us with a clue: if we follow it to the end, it will take us to the heart of life.

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

  Catholics lived in their own self-imposed ghettos: we socialized together, went to separate schools, did not attend Protestant services, and were taught to hold ourselves aloof from the non-Catholic mainstream. As a result of this upbringing, I think that many of us have never felt entirely English, and continue to feel outsiders in British society. My head was filled with the imagery of Catholicism, with the lives and example of its saints and the soaring theater of its liturgy. I too wanted to be “sent,” to experience an ecstasy that lifted me to a different dimension, to go to another place and live more authentically than seemed possible in the world I knew. Like my peers who loitered menacingly in the El Sombrero Coffee Bar in Birmingham, I too could reject the values of contemporary society. The cloister seemed a radical and daring solution. So while my peers opted out in hippie communes, experimented with mind-altering drugs, or tried to change the world politically, I sought intensity and transformation in the life of a nun. Needless to say, the convent was not what I expected. I entered in 1962 as an ardent, idealistic, untidy, unrealistic, and immature teenager, and left seven years later, having suffered a mild breakdown, obscurely broken and damaged. This was nobody’s fault, even though I assumed that the failure was entirely my own doing. I had embarked on the religious life at a particularly inauspicious moment, since my superiors were involved in a painful period of change and were trying to decide what exactly it meant to be a nun in modern society. The Catholic Church also was seeking transformation in the postwar world. During my first few months in the convent, the Second Vatican Council convened in Rome. It had been summoned by Pope John XXIII to fling open the windows of the church and let the fresh air of modernity sweep through the musty corridors of the Vatican. One of the areas tackled by the council fathers was the religious life, which urgently needed reform. Many of the orders had got stuck in a traditional rut. Customs that had made perfect sense in the nineteenth century, when my own community had been founded, now seemed arbitrary and unnatural. Practices that had no intrinsic spiritual value but were cultural relics of the Victorian age had acquired sacred significance, and change was regarded as betrayal. The council urged the religious orders to go back to the original spirit of their founders, who had been men and women of insight and imagination, innovators and pioneers, not guardians of the status quo. Nuns and monks should also let the bracing spirit of change invade their cloisters; they should throw out the rubble that had accumulated over the years and craft a new lifestyle that was in tune with the times.

• From Another Country (1962)

  By and by they were at peace again, and then they lay there in silence, blue cigarette smoke circling around them in the sunny air, the kitten purring in the sunlight at their feet. Then the sound of Madame Belet in the kitchen told Eric it was time to make tracks. 2 Eight days later, Eric was in New York, with Yves’ last words still ringing in his ears, and his touch and his smell all over his body. And Yves’ eyes, like the searchlight of the Eiffel Tower or the sweep of a lighthouse light, lit up, at intervals, the grave darkness around him and afforded him, in the black distance, his only frame of reference and his only means of navigation. On the last day in Paris, at the last moment, they both suffered from terrible hangovers, having both been up all night, drinking, at a friend’s house; their faces were gray and damp; they stank with weariness. There was great shouting and confusion all around them, and the train breathed over them like some unimaginably malevolent beetle. They were almost too tired for sorrow, but not too tired for fear. It steamed out of them both, like the miasma rising from the Gare St. Lazare. In the deep black shadow of this shed, while their friends stood at a discreet distance from them; and the station attendant moved up and down the platform, shouting, “En voiture, s’il vous plaît! En voiture! En voiture!”; and the great hand of the great clock approached the zero hour; they stared into each other’s faces like comrades who have been through a war. “T’ne fait pas,” Eric murmured. “En voiture!” Eric moved up to stand in the crowded doorway of the train. There was nothing to say; there was too much to say. “I hate waiting,” he said. “I hate good-byes.” He suddenly felt that he was going to cry, and panic threatened to overtake him because of all these people watching. “We will see each other,” he said, “very soon. I promise you, Yves. I promise you. Tu me fait toujours confiance, j’espère?” And he tried to smile. Yves said nothing, but nodded, his eyes very bright, his mouth very vulnerable, his forehead very high, and full of trouble. People were screaming out of windows, were passing last minute items to each other through windows. Eric was the last person standing in the door. He had an awful feeling that he had forgotten something very important. He had paid for Yves’ hotel room, they had visited the American embassy and the French authorities, he had left Yves some money—what else? what else?

• 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.” I knew what the trouble was. When Nanny had brought him to my room, she had whispered that he had got it into his head that there was going to be a storm. “It was those dark clouds we had earlier.

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

  I was present at the party, but only as an outsider. The ease and confidence with which the Beatles simply said what they wanted appalled me, and yet I longed to be able to do the same. Even today, more than thirty years later, when I have come to appreciate their real genius, I find their songs almost unbearably poignant. Those desires had been schooled out of me, and yet the painfully direct appeal of the lyrics made me realize that I wished that I had them. I felt my throat swell with unshed tears. “All you need is love.” 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.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She gave me a wink: ‘Let’s call on Tony.’ I followed her to his little room, and sat and idly twisted in the chair behind his desk, while he stood with his arm about her waist. There was a bit of chat about Mr Sutherland and his spotted handkerchief; then, ‘What about that Kitty Butler, eh?’ said Tony. ‘Ain’t she a smasher? If she carries on tickling the crowd like she did tonight, I tell you, Uncle’ll be extending her contract till Christmas.’At that I stopped my twirling. ‘She’s the best turn I ever saw,’ I said, ‘here or anywhere! Tricky would be a fool to let her go: you tell him from me.’ Tony laughed, and said he would be sure to; but as he said it I saw him wink at Alice, then let his gaze dally, rather spoonily, over her lovely face.I looked away, and sighed, and said quite guilelessly: ‘Oh, I do wish that I might see Miss Butler again!’‘And so you shall,’ said Alice, ‘on Saturday.’ We had all planned to come to the Palace - Father, Mother, Davy, Fred, everyone - on Saturday night. I plucked at my glove.‘I know,’ I said. ‘But Saturday seems so very far away ...’Tony laughed again. ‘Well, Nance, and who said you had to wait so long? You can come tomorrow night if you like - and any other night you please, so far as I’m concerned. And if there ain’t a seat for you in the gallery, why, we’ll put you in a box at the side of the stage, and you can gaze at Miss Butler to your heart’s content from there!’He spoke, I’m sure, to impress my sister; but my heart gave a strange kind of twist at his words. I said, ‘Oh, Tony, do you really mean it?’‘Of course.’‘And really in a box?’‘Why not? Between you and me, the only customers we ever get for those seats are the Wood family and the Plushes.

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

  I was looking for the sort of transformation that others were seeking in rock ’n’ roll, an option that was closed to me. As a convent school girl, I was protected from the street culture and lived in a separate world from most of my fellow countrymen and -women. In the 1950s, most people in Britain still paid lip service to religion, but Catholicism was beyond the pale. Its extravagant statues with bleeding hearts and crowns of thorns, its Latinate ritual, its Irish priests, and its orientation to Rome made it highly un-British, and therefore suspect. Catholics lived in their own self-imposed ghettos: we socialized together, went to separate schools, did not attend Protestant services, and were taught to hold ourselves aloof from the non-Catholic mainstream. As a result of this upbringing, I think that many of us have never felt entirely English, and continue to feel outsiders in British society. My head was filled with the imagery of Catholicism, with the lives and example of its saints and the soaring theater of its liturgy. I too wanted to be “sent,” to experience an ecstasy that lifted me to a different dimension, to go to another place and live more authentically than seemed possible in the world I knew. Like my peers who loitered menacingly in the El Sombrero Coffee Bar in Birmingham, I too could reject the values of contemporary society. The cloister seemed a radical and daring solution. So while my peers opted out in hippie communes, experimented with mind-altering drugs, or tried to change the world politically, I sought intensity and transformation in the life of a nun. Needless to say, the convent was not what I expected. I entered in 1962 as an ardent, idealistic, untidy, unrealistic, and immature teenager, and left seven years later, having suffered a mild breakdown, obscurely broken and damaged. This was nobody’s fault, even though I assumed that the failure was entirely my own doing. I had embarked on the religious life at a particularly inauspicious moment, since my superiors were involved in a painful period of change and were trying to decide what exactly it meant to be a nun in modern society. The Catholic Church also was seeking transformation in the postwar world. During my first few months in the convent, the Second Vatican Council convened in Rome. It had been summoned by Pope John XXIII to fling open the windows of the church and let the fresh air of modernity sweep through the musty corridors of the Vatican.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  She seemed not to have a bookmark, and yet I noticed that she didn’t have to flip around to find her place. (I learned later that Rhody always automatically remembered her place in a book. She was not good with phone numbers, and even her Social Security number gave her trouble occasionally, but the page number of her current book would just come to her without effort as soon as she held it and saw the cover. Sometimes, she told me, the number would even occur to her at odd times during the day, and she would think, Two hundred fifty-four, what a mysterious and suggestive number! It would take her a second to realize that the number seemed unusually fine simply because it was where she was going to resume her reading. Nineteenth-century novels were all-important to her. It wasn’t a question of her liking them; they were a neurological necessity, like sleep. One Mrs. Humphry Ward, or a Reade, or a Trollope per week supplied her with some kind of critical co-enzyme, she said, that allowed her to organize social sense experience. It was nice if the novel was good, but even a very mediocre one would do; without a daily shot of Victorian fiction she couldn’t quite remember how to talk to people and to understand what they said. I miss her.) She lifted the teabag out of her cup with a spoon and bound its string tightly around the bag-and-spoon duo, squeezing most of the water that was left in the leaves out into the cup. I had never been exposed to this method of managing a used teabag before, and I was thrilled by it; and I don’t need much more than this to fall in love, after my fashion. I wanted very much to know what book she was reading. I pulled out my mechanical pencil, which, though it had lost its efficacy as a stand-alone Fold-probe some months earlier, still worked in concert with the special equation that I had adapted from a journal of mathematics. I wrote it on the placemat: the Strine Inequality. I had come across the germ of it in the Birkhoff Library at Harvard on a Sunday afternoon in a state of Tourette’s syndromish meditativeness that I knew by now often presaged a Fermata discovery.

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

  “Only a weekend,” I said. “I know—it’s crazy in a way. But as she says, she’s not the world’s greatest actress, and a new man in a new country seems better than going back to that hand-to-mouth existence in London again. And I think men are much more important to her than any career.” “A nice old-fashioned girl?” Jane smiled sardonically. It was a description that in one way seemed wildly inappropriate, since Lindsey was a sixties girl par excellence and had cast off the restraints of Catholicism with never a backward look. But on the other hand . . . “I think she really is, underneath all the modern trappings. You know: ‘Follow your man.’ ” “Even to Keswick,” Jane capped gloomily. “Well, I’m doing it. But not willingly, I have to tell you. Would you do this? You’ve just left one confining situation; would you give up your new freedom?” I had shrugged. My situation was so different from Jane’s. There was no prospect of my being enslaved to any man; men generally looked through me as though I did not exist. The problem simply did not arise. And yet, I asked myself as I got up to go back to the little room at the Harts’ where I spent the greater part of my life, how free was I? Were not Jane and Lindsey really more adventurous than I was? Would I ever love anything or anybody enough to leave it all behind? I had done that once, when I had entered the convent, and I wasn’t sure I had the courage to do it again. That Easter, as usual, I accompanied the Harts to Cornwall. They had an extraordinary house on the south coast, which had been built by Jenifer’s father for her mother as a wedding present. Because of the strong winds, the Cornish usually built behind the cliffs, but Lamledra, as this house was called, stood bravely on the seaward side. It was a massive pile, with a servants’ wing and an amazing baronial-style hall, which had probably been spectacular when Lady Williams had first set up house, but now it had succumbed to Hartlike chaos. From the terrace there was a spectacular view of the Dodman Point and, beyond the red slash of the fuchsia bushes, the startling blue of the Atlantic. In the sloping paddock in front of the house, which curved steeply toward the small beach below, horses from the local riding school grazed peacefully, silhouetted nobly against the sea.