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 The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  It haunted me and I must have acted Harishchandra to myself times without number. ‘Why should not all be truthful like Harishchandra?’ was the question I asked myself day and night. To follow truth and to go through all the ordeals Harishchandra went through was the one ideal it inspired in me. I literally believed in the story of Harishchandra. The thought of it all often made me weep. My commonsense tells me today that Harishchandra could not have been a historical character. Still both Harishchandra and Shravana are living realities for me, and I am sure I should be moved as before if I were to read those plays again today. 5CHILD MARRIAGEMuch as I wish that I had not to write this chapter, I know that I shall have to swallow many such bitter draughts in the course of this narrative. And I cannot do otherwise, if I claim to be a worshipper of Truth. It is my painful duty to have to record here my marriage at the age of thirteen. As I see the youngsters of the same age about me who are under my care, and think of my own marriage, I am inclined to pity myself and to congratulate them on having escaped my lot. I can see no moral argument in support of such a preposterously early marriage. Let the reader make no mistake. I was married, not betrothed. For in Kathiawad there are two distinct rites, betrothal and marriage. Betrothal is a preliminary promise on the part of the parents of the boy and the girl to join them in marriage, and it is not inviolable. The death of the boy entails no widowhood on the girl. It is an agreement purely between the parents, and the children have no concern with it. Often they are not even informed of it. It appears that I was betrothed thrice, though without my knowledge. I was told that two girls chosen for me had died in turn, and therefore I infer that I was betrothed three times. I have a faint recollection, however, that the third betrothal took place in my seventh year. But I do not recollect having been informed about it. In the present chapter I am talking about my marriage, of which I have the clearest recollection. It will be remembered that we were three brothers. The first was already married. The elders decided to marry my second brother, who was two or three years my senior,a cousin, possibly a year older, and me, all at the same time. In doing so there was no thought of our welfare, much less our wishes. It was purely a question of their own convenience and economy. Marriage among Hindus is no simple matter. The parents of the bride and the bridegroom often bring themselves to ruin over it. They waste their substance, they waste their time.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  He turned his slow, rather full eyes, that had been drowned in such fathomless disillusion, on Connie, and she trembled a little. He seemed so old ... endlessly old, built up of layers of disillusion, going down in him generation after generation, like geological strata; and at the same time he was forlorn like a child. An outcast, in a certain sense; but with the desperate bravery of his rat-like existence. "At least it's wonderful what you've done at your time of life," said Clifford contemplatively. "I'm thirty ... yes, I'm thirty!" said Michaelis, sharply and suddenly, with a curious laugh; hollow, triumphant, and bitter. "And are you alone?" asked Connie. "How do you mean? Do I live alone? I've got my servant. He's a Greek, so he says, and quite incompetent. But I keep him. And I'm going to marry. Oh, yes, I must marry." "It sounds like going to have your tonsils cut," laughed Connie. "Will it be an effort?" He looked at her admiringly. "Well, Lady Chatterley, somehow it will! I find ... excuse me ... I find I can't marry an Englishwoman, not even an Irishwoman...." "Try an American," said Clifford. "Oh, American!" he laughed a hollow laugh. "No, I've asked my man if he will find me a Turk or something ... something nearer to the Oriental." Connie really wondered at this queer, melancholy specimen of extraordinary success; it was said he had an income of fifty thousand dollars from America alone. Sometimes he was handsome: sometimes as he looked sideways, downwards, and the light fell on him, he had the silent, enduring beauty of a carved ivory Negro mask, with his rather full eyes, and the strong queerly-arched brows, the immobile, compressed mouth; that momentary but revealed immobility, an immobility, a timelessness which the Buddha aims at, and which Negroes express sometimes without ever aiming at it; something old, old, and acquiescent in the race! Aeons of acquiescence in race destiny, instead of our individual resistance. And then a swimming through, like rats in a dark river. Connie felt a sudden, strange leap of sympathy for him, a leap mingled with compassion, and tinged with repulsion, amounting almost to love. The outsider! The outsider! And they called him a bounder! How much more bounderish and assertive Clifford looked! How much stupider! Michaelis knew at once he had made an impression on her. He turned his full, hazel, slightly prominent eyes on her in a look of pure detachment. He was estimating her, and the extent of the impression he had made. With the English nothing could save him from being the eternal outsider, not even love. Yet women sometimes fell for him ... Englishwomen too. He knew just where he was with Clifford. They were two alien dogs which would have liked to snarl at one another, but which smiled instead, perforce. But with the woman he was not quite so sure.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Clifford said something to her about the Racine. She caught the sense after the words had gone. "Yes! Yes!" she said, looking up at him. "It _is_ splendid." Again he was frightened at the deep blue blaze of her eyes, and of her soft stillness, sitting there. She had never been so utterly soft and still. She fascinated him helplessly, as if some perfume about her intoxicated him. So he went on helplessly with his reading, and the throaty sound of the French was like the wind in the chimneys to her. Of the Racine she heard not one syllable. She was gone in her own soft rapture, like a forest soughing with the dim, glad moan of spring, moving into bud. She could feel in the same world with her the man, the nameless man, moving on beautiful feet, beautiful in the phallic mystery. And in herself, in all her veins, she felt him and his child. His child was in all her veins, like a twilight. "For hands she hath none, nor eyes, nor feet, nor golden Treasure of hair...." She was like a forest, like the dark interlacing of the oak-wood, humming inaudibly with myriad unfolding buds. Meanwhile the birds of desire were asleep in the vast interlaced intricacy of her body. But Clifford's voice went on, clapping and gurgling with unusual sounds. How extraordinary it was! How extraordinary he was, bent there over the book, queer and rapacious and civilised, with broad shoulders and no real legs! What a strange creature, with the sharp, cold inflexible will of some bird, and no warmth, no warmth at all! One of those creatures of the afterwards, that have no soul, but an extra-alert will, cold will. She shuddered a little, afraid of him. But then, the soft warm flame of life was stronger than he, and the real things were hidden from him. The reading finished. She was startled. She looked up, and was more startled still to see Clifford watching her with pale, uncanny eyes, like hate. "Thank you _so_ much! You do read Racine beautifully!" she said softly. "Almost as beautifully as you listen to him," he said cruelly. "What are you making?" he asked. "I'm making a child's dress, for Mrs. Flint's baby." He turned away. A child! A child! That was all her obsession. "After all," he said, in a declamatory voice, "one gets all one wants out of Racine. Emotions that are ordered and given shape are more important than disorderly emotions." She watched him with wide, vague, veiled eyes. "Yes, I'm sure they are," she said. "The modern world has only vulgarised emotion by letting it loose. What we need is classic control." "Yes," she said slowly, thinking of himself listening with vacant face to the emotional idiocy of the radio. "People pretend to have emotions, and they really feel nothing. I suppose that is being romantic." "Exactly!" he said.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Everybody waved. The car went off. Connie looked back and saw Clifford sitting at the top of the steps in his house-chair. After all, he was her husband: Wragby was her home: circumstance had done it. Mrs. Chambers held the gate and wished her ladyship a happy holiday. The car slipped out of the dark spinney that masked the park, on to the highroad where the colliers were trailing home. Hilda turned to the Crosshill Road, that was not a main road, but ran to Mansfield. Connie put on goggles. They ran beside the railway, which was in a cutting below them. Then they crossed the cutting on a bridge. "That's the lane to the cottage!" said Connie. Hilda glanced at it impatiently. "It's a frightful pity we can't go straight off!" she said. "We could have been in Pall Mall by nine o'clock." "I'm sorry for your sake," said Connie, from behind her goggles. They were soon at Mansfield, that once-romantic, now utterly disheartening colliery town. Hilda stopped at the hotel named in the motorcar book, and took a room. The whole thing was utterly uninteresting, and she was almost too angry to talk. However, Connie _had_ to tell her something of the man's history. "_He! He!_ What name do you call him by? You only say _he_," said Hilda. "I've never called him by any name: nor he me: which is curious, when you come to think of it. Unless we say Lady Jane and John Thomas. But his name is Oliver Mellors." "And how would you like to be Mrs. Oliver Mellors, instead of Lady Chatterley?" "I'd love it." There was nothing to be done with Connie. And anyhow, if the man had been a lieutenant in the army in India for four or five years, he must be more or less presentable. Apparently he had character. Hilda began to relent a little. "But you'll be through with him in a while," she said, "and then you'll be ashamed of having been connected with him. One _can't_ mix up with the working people." "But you are such a socialist! You're always on the side of the working classes." "I may be on their side in a political crisis, but being on their side makes me know how impossible it is to mix one's life with theirs. Not out of snobbery, but just because the whole rhythm is different." Hilda had lived among the real political intellectuals, so she was disastrously unanswerable. The nondescript evening in the hotel dragged out, and at last they had a nondescript dinner. Then Connie slipped a few things into a little silk bag, and combed her hair once more. "After all, Hilda," she said, "love can be wonderful; when you feel you _live_, and are in the very middle of creation." It was almost like bragging on her part. "I suppose every mosquito feels the same," said Hilda. "Do you think it does? How nice for it!"

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  It was here that I was first introduced to Acharya Ramadevji, and I could immediately see what a force and a power he must be. We had different viewpoints in several matters, nevertheless our acquaintance soon ripened into friendship. I had long discussions with Acharya Ramadevji and other professors about the necessity of introducing industrial training into the Gurukul. When the time came for going away it was a wrench to leave the place. I had heard much in praise of the Lakshman Jhula (a hanging bridge over the Ganges) some distance from Hrishikesh, and many friends pressed me not to leave Hardvar without having gone as far as the bridge. I wanted to do this pilgrimage on foot and so I did it in two stages. Many #sannyasis# called on me at Hrishikesh. One of them was particularly attracted towards me. The Phoenix party was there and their presence drew from the Swami many questions. We had discussions about religion and he realized that I felt deeply about matters of religion. He saw me bareheaded and shirtless as I had returned from my bath in the Ganges. He was pained to miss the shikha (tuft of hair) on my head and the sacred thread about my neck and said: ‘It pains me to see you, a believing Hindu, going without a sacred thread and the shikha. These are the two external symbols of Hinduism and every Hindu ought to wear them.’ Now there is a history as to how I came to dispense with both. When I was an urchin of ten, I envied the Brahman lads sporting bunches of keys tied to their sacred threads, and I wished I could do likewise. The practice of wearing the sacred thread was not then common among the vaishya families in Kathiawad. But a movement had just been started for making it obilgatory for the first three varnas. As a result several members of the Gandhi clan adopted the sacred thread. The Brahman who was teaching two or three of us boys Ram Raksha invested us with the thread, and although I had no occasion to possess a bunch of keys, I got one and began to sport it. Later, when the thread gave way, I do not remember whether I missed it very much. But I know that I did not go in for a fresh one. As I grew up several well-meaning attempts were made both in India and South Africa to re-invest me with the sacred thread, but with little success. If the shudras may not wear it, I argued, what right have the other varnas to do so? And I saw no adequate reason for adopting what was to me an unnecessary custom. I had no objection to the thread as such, but the reasons for wearing it were lacking. As a vaishnava I had naturally worn round my neck the kanthi, and the shikha was considered obligatory by leders.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  “I own the Ronin dealership on Van Ness Avenue. That’s a new brand of Japanese motorcycle, y’know. Very chill.” “Oh, yes. I know all about Japanese bikes.” Tyre was a Harley-Davidson loyalist and kept her own hog (“Actually I prefer to call it a sow”) in perfect running order, but she thought it was not exactly politic to mention that right now. If money was not an issue, perhaps they could proceed to the heart of the matter. Alex was examining he chandelier, the carpet, the cut-glass salt and pepper shakers, the pattern on the china. Was she a little bit flushed? “Well,” she finally said, “I guess I can tell you anything. I mean, nothing should shock you, right?” Tyre refused to help her out. She busied herself with the last of her flan. “Before I tell you the details of my fantasy, I have to explain the nature of my sexuality. I don’t find vanilla sex particularly effective. I have nothing against it any more than I have anything against chicken farmers or Halley’s comet, but they don’t get me off, either. There are a lot of rumors about you, and who knows if any of them are true, but I do know you have a reputation for being fair to the leatherwomen who come here. This is just about the only public space where we are welcome. A few of the flakier badgirls don’t like Simba because she’s barred them from the dungeon for being too stoned to hit what they aim at, and if you ask me it’s because they don’t like bein’ bossed around by a black woman, but the other thing she does is keep tourists and bluenoses out of the dungeons, and as long as she does that I don’t care about your rule that no rough stuff goes on any place else in the Calyx of Isis. It can’t be news to you that that isn’t a very popular rule with some of us. “But I figure your job is getting women laid, so even if you don’t particularly care for S/M you understand that it isn’t easy to find somebody compatible. Just cause your black hanky is on the left and hers is on the right don’t mean you are going to live happily ever after. I’ve had a lot of fun and a very hot relationship or two but none that lasted, and I’m kinda sick of that. Maybe romance and S/M don’t mix, but I want a woman of my own who will stick by my side, somebody who really needs and likes what I do.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  My room is part of a complex of state-owned buildings located on the fringe of the bombed-out part of town, appropriately nicknamed Europe. The inmates—uh, residents—are supposed to manage it. This clique of born-agains, real ones, dreary, pretend to do that, but I’ve never been to any of their meetings, and I throw away the little green notices they slip under my door without reading them. The whole building is full of crazies and fuckups. There isn’t much they can do to us. We don’t have a lot to lose. Once they turned off the water because people were trashing the fountain in the courtyard. A riot developed. Everybody started throwing all kinds of shit out their windows—newspapers, dishes, vegetable peels, old shoes. One guy pushed his bed out the window. The courtyard is still impassable. The management can’t decide who should pay for hauling the piles of junk away. But it was spontaneous, nothing you could count on. Oh, once a bunch of queens over on 4E got together and moved a guy out onto the street. He was stealing stuff, primarily other people’s dope. But another time on the floor just under that, somebody brought the wrong person home and got stabbed to death. Nobody went to check on him until the screaming stopped. When they doubled the rents, everybody paid. There’s no other place to go, really. Things are the same all over. I can cook in my room on a gas jet (uncapped illegally). It also provides all the heat since the furnace went ka-blooie. A tap was put into the water main through a hole in the wall by a former tenant who must have been a plumber. I found a Styrofoam box once that must be fifty years old, and I carved a lid for it out of plywood. When I can buy ice, that’s my refrigerator. I have hooks on one wall for my wok (one of my few treasures), a sharp knife, a spatula, a large spoon, and a cup. I keep my bowls and chopsticks on top of the cooler. I’m a pretty good scavenger, but I don’t bring stuff home if I don’t need it. There’s no room. The clinic is located in a middle-class residential neighborhood, the better to serve those suffering from patriarchal effluvia. Looks like tomorrow is garbage-collection day. Better keep an eye out for a tea kettle. I really want one. I think that whistle in the morning would cheer me up more than a hot cup of cha. And paper for the potty is always welcome. I try not to bring books home for that because I don’t have enough room to keep them, and I hate to tear them up. I had so many books in my room at school that I couldn’t hardly move. I don’t want to live like that again. Anyway, I know I never will, which is the same thing, isn’t it?

• From Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women (Erotic Fiction) (2006)

  Mr. Wolfe was Mr. Fox’s dearest friend and fiercest rival. Since childhood, whenever any single thing had captured the attention of one, it immediately became a matter of supreme interest to the other, also. It was no different when Mr. Fox first noticed Mrs. Fox. Throughout their courtship Mr. Wolfe had been scandalously flirtatious, taking every opportunity to tempt and tease Mrs. Fox with brazen overtures. He was often slipping a moist tongue into a seemingly polite kiss on her hand, or leaving a steamy breath lingering salaciously in her ear behind an otherwise civil remark. While these little forbidden intimacies were unwanted and to all appearances ignored by Mrs. Fox, they always left her slightly atremble. Of course, once the Foxes were married, the rivalry had ended. Mr. Wolfe had accepted his defeat good-naturedly, and he even married soon thereafter, so that the matter was quite forgotten by everyone. Everyone, that is, except Mrs. Fox. Now Mrs. Wolfe was as simple and sweet as Mrs. Fox was passionate and complex. In truth, she was a much more suitable match for Mr. Wolfe’s fiery, impulsive nature. And Mrs. Fox certainly did not wish to be married to Mr. Wolfe, even if her thoughts did occasionally wander in the direction of the darker, more volatile man, sometimes even developing into wild speculations about how he performed his husbandly duties in the bedchamber. It did not signify anything lacking in her own marriage, for there was nothing amiss in her husband’s treatment of her, and no single action of his with which she could find fault. On the contrary, Mr. Fox was as clever and skillful in the bedroom as he was in everything else. He knew exactly how to locate each and every nerve ending in Mrs. Fox’s anatomy and, more important, what to do with them when he found them. He never took his own satisfaction before making quite sure of hers. To come to the point, Mr. Fox was everything Mrs. Fox could wish for in a lover. Except, of course, that he was not Mr. Wolfe. And aside from all of this, Mrs. Wolfe had come to be as dear a friend as Mrs. Fox could have. She genuinely enjoyed the company of sweet Mrs. Wolfe, in spite of the secret hunger for any little tidbit of information about the Wolfes’ private life lurking within her. Mrs. Fox would simply compensate for this by boasting shamelessly about her own husband. She would go to great lengths to brag about the many admirable charms of Mr. Fox, all of which were absolutely true of course, but which nevertheless had lost some of their appeal simply because they were so readily available to her (unlike the forbidden charms of Mr. Wolfe). Mrs. Wolfe did not appear to notice this eccentricity in her friend, for she always seemed too absorbed by her own thoughts.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  But when he had done his slow, cautious beating of his bounds--it was nearly a five-mile walk--he was tired. He went to the top of the knoll and looked out. There was no sound save the noise, the faint shuffling noise from Stacks Gate colliery, that never ceased working: and there were hardly any lights, save the brilliant electric rows at the works. The world lay darkly and fumily sleeping. It was half-past two. But even in its sleep it was an uneasy, cruel world, stirring with the noise of a train or some great lorry on the road, and flashing with some rosy lightning-flash from the furnaces. It was a world of iron and coal, the cruelty of iron and the smoke of coal, and the endless, endless greed that drove it all. Only greed, greed stirring in its sleep. It was cold, and he was coughing. A fine cold draught blew over the knoll. He thought of the woman. Now he would have given all he had or ever might have to hold her warm in his arms, both of them wrapped in one blanket, and sleep. All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity. He went to the hut, and wrapped himself in the blanket and lay on the floor to sleep. But he could not, he was cold. And besides, he felt cruelly his own unfinished nature. He felt his own unfinished condition of aloneness cruelly. He wanted her, to touch her, to hold her fast against him in one moment of completeness and sleep. He got up again and went out, towards the park gates this time: then slowly along the path towards the house. It was nearly four o'clock, still clear and cold, but no sign of dawn. He was so used to the dark, he could see well. Slowly, slowly the great house drew him, as a magnet. He wanted to be near her. It was not desire, not that. It was the cruel sense of unfinished aloneness, that needed a silent woman folded in his arms. Perhaps he could find her. Perhaps he could even call her out to him: or find some way in to her. For the need was imperious. He slowly, silently climbed the incline to the hall. Then he came round the great trees at the top of the knoll, on to the drive, which made a grand sweep round a lozenge of grass in front of the entrance. He could already see the two magnificent beeches which stood in this big level lozenge in front of the house, detaching themselves darkly in the dark air.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  She stroked me with oil. Warm oil. Her touch was firm and possessive, and left me feeling both valued and valuable. She rubbed the lubricant into my skin from the neck down, kneeling and placing my feet one by one on her thigh to massage them. Then I felt cold metal swing against my belly. She passed a chain through the ring of my collar, between my legs, up my back, and padlocked it to itself after running it under and over the back of the collar. “Nice,” I heard her murmur. “It gleams against your skin. You make a fetching slave.” I moved a little to feel the pull of the chain against my cunt. It was snug, providing just the right amount of friction. The oil made my thighs slip unexpectedly past each other, giving me a feeling of sensuous insecurity. “You like?” she asked me, using a sleazy, Tijuana pimp’s accent. I did not respond. “I like. Too bad you can’t see yourself. You’ll just have to use your imagination. In fact, that’s all you’re going to have for the next little while—your imagination. Because I’m leaving.“ I was dismayed. I twisted my head, but the blindfold prevented me from catching any glimpse of her. And my ears were not reliable. I could not tell if her voice came from behind me, to my side, or in front of me. “Think about all those nice playthings you saw hanging in my closet. And imagine how alluring you are in chains, blindfolded, with your arms above your head.” The palm of her hand barely brushed my nipples. “You have beautiful breasts anyway, but now—well…” I heard footsteps. “Try not to dwell on all the dreadful things I’m going to do to you when I get back,” she called. “If I get back,” she added thoughtfully, as she closed the door. The minute she left, I lost all track of time. I seemed to be there, alone, for hours. The music was still going, but I wasn’t familiar with how tape decks worked or with the music. Maybe the same tape had played through several times. My arms were not stretched so tight as to be uncomfortable, and the rug and electric heater kept me from getting chilled. But still, I fidgeted. Where was she? Was she taking a bath? Watching TV? I couldn’t hear anything from the rest of the house. I squirmed impatiently. What if she had decided to leave and go back to the dance? Maybe she was asleep on the couch. My frustration was invaded by an overwhelming sensory memory. I could hear her say, “Tilt your head back.” And I was overcome by the perfume of her sex, felt her rub her pussy into my face. “Remember me,” she had said. “This is me, my essence.”

• From Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women (Erotic Fiction) (2006)

  To the prince’s dismay, he returned to find the queen completely changed. Her skin seemed unnaturally taut, as if it had been stretched too tightly over her frame. Her eyes looked like those of a hawk, large and bulging. Her breasts were hard and unnatural looking and she was painfully thin. He realized instantly what she had done. But he loved her still and so, with less effort than it would take to pick up a small bird, he lifted the queen onto his horse and rode with her to his cottage. But on this occasion, no roses were in bloom and the cottage seemed cheerless and damp. Upon entering the dwelling, the queen felt remorseful and wretched. She rushed up the stairs to the bedchamber in the hopes that the pleasure she had found there before would bring her comfort, but alas, upon peering into the unenchanted mirror, she gasped in horror. Her appearance was like something inhuman! She fell on the bed full of regret and weeping. She could not stay another minute in the cottage with the prince. And so it was for three long months that the prince remained alone and unhappy, the queen remained a queen who was not expired, and Snow White remained in her glass coffin. Then one day, while the queen was in her bedchamber, she came upon the roses she had taken from the prince’s cottage. To her amazement, they were completely intact and as fresh as the day she had picked them. She lifted them to her face, and their enchanted scent caused her to remember the time spent in the cottage with the prince. Suddenly she realized what she had given up and how unhappy she had been ever since. I must undo this deed, she thought. With swift determination she grabbed the bed warmer from her bed and hurled it with all her might into the mirror, shattering it into a thousand pieces. Next, she called for two messengers; the first of which she sent into the woods where Snow White slept in her coffin and the other she sent to her beloved servant. Then she waited. The queen waited in her bedchamber for hours, but for her they passed like minutes. As the sun slowly made its way across the afternoon sky, she was thinking about her visits to the cottage, so charming with its countless vines of tiny, enchanted roses. Even when the light grew steadily dimmer through her window, her face glowed and flushed as she recalled the images in the bedroom mirror. When at last the shadows began to cast about for their evening positions, the queen’s whole being ached for the soft and loving touch of her servant. She fancied that she could feel a slight loosening of her flesh, and a sudden terror seized her; but she was awakened from her alarm by the sound of a footstep in the doorway and there, she beheld, her servant-prince!

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  No! said Connie to herself. I'd rather be at Wragby, where I can go about and be still, and not stare at anything or do any performing of any sort. This tourist performance of enjoying oneself is too hopelessly humiliating: it's such a failure. She wanted to go back to Wragby, even to Clifford, even to poor crippled Clifford. He wasn't such a fool as this swarming holidaying lot, anyhow. But in her inner consciousness she was keeping touch with the other man. She mustn't let her connection with him go: oh, she mustn't let it go, or she was lost, lost utterly in this world of riff-raffy expensive people and joy-hogs. Oh, the joy-hogs! Oh "enjoying oneself!" Another modern form of sickness. They left the car in Mestre, in garage, and took the regular steamer over to Venice. It was a lovely summer afternoon, the shallow lagoon rippled, the full sunshine made Venice, turning its back to them across the water, look dim. At the station quay they changed to a gondola, giving the man the address. He was a regular gondolier in a white-and-blue blouse, not very good-looking, not at all impressive. "Yes! The Villa Esmeralda! Yes! I know it! I have been the gondolier for a gentleman there. But a fair distance out!" He seemed a rather childish, impetuous fellow. He rowed with a certain exaggerated impetuosity, through the dark side-canals with the horrible, slimy green walls, the canals that go through the poorer quarters, where the washing hangs high up on ropes, and there is a slight, or strong odour of sewage. But at last he came to one of the open canals with pavement on either side, and looping bridges, that run straight, at right angles to the Grand Canal. The two women sat under the little awning, the man was perched above, behind them. "Are the signorine staying long at the Villa Esmeralda?" he asked, rowing easy, and wiping his perspiring face with a white-and-blue handkerchief. "Some twenty days: we are both married ladies," said Hilda, in her curious hushed voice, that made her Italian sound so foreign. "Ah! Twenty days!" said the man. There was a pause. After which he asked: "Do the signore want a gondolier for the twenty days or so that they will stay at the Villa Esmeralda? Or by the day, or by the week?" Connie and Hilda considered. In Venice, it is always preferable to have one's own gondola, as it is preferable to have one's own car on land. "What is there at the Villa? what boats?" "There is a motor-launch, also a gondola. But--" The _but_ meant: they won't be your property. "How much do you charge?" It was about thirty shillings a day, or ten pounds a week. "Is that the regular price?" asked Hilda. "Less, Signora. The regular price--" The sisters considered. "Well," said Hilda, "come tomorrow morning, and we will arrange it. What is your name?"

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  In Moorland I could explore the histories and traditions. Out on the Yard, I could see these traditions in effect. And with journalism, I could directly ask people about the two—or about anything else I might wonder. So much of my life was defined by not knowing. Why did I live in a world where teenage boys stood in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven pulling out? Why was it normal for my father, like all the parents I knew, to reach for his belt? And why was life so different out there, in that other world past the asteroids? What did the people whose images were once beamed into my living room have that I did not? The girl with the long dreads who changed me, whom I so wanted to love, she loved a boy about whom I think every day and about whom I expect to think every day for the rest of my life. I think sometimes that he was an invention, and in some ways he is, because when the young are killed, they are haloed by all that was possible, all that was plundered. But I know that I had love for this boy, Prince Jones, which is to say that I would smile whenever I saw him, for I felt the warmth when I was around him and was slightly sad when the time came to trade dap and for one of us to go. The thing to understand about Prince Jones is that he exhibited the whole of his given name. He was handsome. He was tall and brown, built thin and powerful like a wide receiver. He was the son of a prominent doctor. He was born-again, a state I did not share but respected. He was kind. Generosity radiated off of him, and he seemed to have a facility with everyone and everything. This can never be true, but there are people who pull the illusion off without effort, and Prince was one of them. I can only say what I saw, what I felt. There are people whom we do not fully know, and yet they live in a warm place within us, and when they are plundered, when they lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place becomes a wound. —

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  She turned and looked at him. "We came off together that time," he said. She did not answer. "It's good when it's like that. Most folks lives their lives through and they never know it," he said, speaking rather dreamily. She looked into his brooding face. "Do they?" she said. "Are you glad?" He looked back into her eyes. "Glad," he said. "Ay, but never mind." He did not want her to talk. And he bent over her and kissed her, and she felt, so he must kiss her for ever. At last she sat up. "Don't people often come off together?" she asked with naive curiosity. "A good many of them never. You can see by the raw look of them." He spoke unwittingly, regretting he had begun. "Have you come off like that with other women?" He looked at her amused. "I don't know," he said, "I don't know." And she knew he would never tell her anything he didn't want to tell her. She watched his face, and the passion for him moved in her bowels. She resisted it as far as she could, for it was the loss of herself to herself. He put on his waistcoat and his coat, and pushed a way through to the path again. The last level rays of the sun touched the wood. "I won't come with you," he said; "better not." She looked at him wistfully before she turned. His dog was waiting so anxiously for him to go, and he seemed to have nothing whatever to say. Nothing left. Connie went slowly home, realising the depth of the other thing in her. Another self was alive in her, burning molten and soft in her womb and bowels, and with this self she adored him. She adored him till her knees were weak as she walked. In her womb and bowels she was flowing and alive now and vulnerable, and helpless in adoration of him as the most naive woman.--It feels like a child, she said to herself; it feels like a child in me.--And so it did, as if her womb, that had always been shut, had opened and filled with new life, almost a burden, yet lovely. "If I had a child!" she thought to herself; "if I had him inside me as a child!"--and her limbs turned molten at the thought, and she realised the immense difference between having a child to oneself, and having a child to a man whom one's bowels yearned towards. The former seemed in a sense ordinary: but to have a child to a man whom one adored in one's bowels and one's womb, it made her feel she was very different from her old self, and as if she was sinking deep, deep to the centre of all womanhood and the sleep of creation.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  No, no, it should not be. She saw the image of him, naked white with tanned face and hands, looking down and addressing his erect penis as if it were another being, the odd grin flickering on his face. And she heard his voice again: Tha's got the nicest woman's arse of anybody! And she felt his hand warmly and softly closing over her tail again, over her secret places, like a benediction. And the warmth ran through her womb, and the little flames flickered in her knees, and she said: Oh no! I mustn't go back on it! I must not go back on him. I must stick to him and to what I had of him, through everything. I had no warm, flamy life till he gave it to me. And I won't go back on it. She did a rash thing. She sent a letter to Ivy Bolton, enclosing a note to the keeper, and asking Mrs. Bolton to give it to him. And she wrote to him: "I am very much distressed to hear of all the trouble your wife is making for you, but don't mind it, it is only a sort of hysteria. It will all blow over as suddenly as it came. But I'm awfully sorry about it, and I do hope you are not minding very much. After all, it isn't worth it. She is only a hysterical woman who wants to hurt you. I shall be home in ten days time, and I do hope everything will be all right." A few days later came a letter from Clifford. He was evidently upset. "I am delighted to hear you are prepared to leave Venice on the sixteenth. But if you are enjoying it, don't hurry home. We miss you, Wragby misses you. But it is essential that you should get your full amount of sunshine, sunshine and pyjamas, as the advertisements of the Lido say. So please do stay on a little longer, if it is cheering you up and preparing you for our sufficiently awful winter. Even today, it rains. "I am assiduously, admirably looked after by Mrs. Bolton. She is a queer specimen. The more I live, the more I realise what strange creatures human beings are. Some of them might just as well have a hundred legs, like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. The human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow men seem actually non-existent. One doubts if they exist to any startling degree even in oneself. "The scandal of the keeper continues and gets bigger like a snowball. Mrs. Bolton keeps me informed. She reminds me of a fish which, though dumb, seems to be breathing silent gossip through its gills, while ever it lives. All goes through the sieve of her gills, and nothing surprises her. It is as if the events of other people's lives were the necessary oxygen of her own.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  But when he had done his slow, cautious beating of his bounds--it was nearly a five-mile walk--he was tired. He went to the top of the knoll and looked out. There was no sound save the noise, the faint shuffling noise from Stacks Gate colliery, that never ceased working: and there were hardly any lights, save the brilliant electric rows at the works. The world lay darkly and fumily sleeping. It was half-past two. But even in its sleep it was an uneasy, cruel world, stirring with the noise of a train or some great lorry on the road, and flashing with some rosy lightning-flash from the furnaces. It was a world of iron and coal, the cruelty of iron and the smoke of coal, and the endless, endless greed that drove it all. Only greed, greed stirring in its sleep. It was cold, and he was coughing. A fine cold draught blew over the knoll. He thought of the woman. Now he would have given all he had or ever might have to hold her warm in his arms, both of them wrapped in one blanket, and sleep. All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity. He went to the hut, and wrapped himself in the blanket and lay on the floor to sleep. But he could not, he was cold. And besides, he felt cruelly his own unfinished nature. He felt his own unfinished condition of aloneness cruelly. He wanted her, to touch her, to hold her fast against him in one moment of completeness and sleep. He got up again and went out, towards the park gates this time: then slowly along the path towards the house. It was nearly four o'clock, still clear and cold, but no sign of dawn. He was so used to the dark, he could see well. Slowly, slowly the great house drew him, as a magnet. He wanted to be near her. It was not desire, not that. It was the cruel sense of unfinished aloneness, that needed a silent woman folded in his arms. Perhaps he could find her. Perhaps he could even call her out to him: or find some way in to her. For the need was imperious. He slowly, silently climbed the incline to the hall. Then he came round the great trees at the top of the knoll, on to the drive, which made a grand sweep round a lozenge of grass in front of the entrance. He could already see the two magnificent beeches which stood in this big level lozenge in front of the house, detaching themselves darkly in the dark air.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  There was the house, low and long and obscure, with one light burning downstairs, in Sir Clifford's room. But which room she was in, the woman who held the other end of the frail thread which drew him so mercilessly, that he did not know. He went a little nearer, gun in hand, and stood motionless on the drive, watching the house. Perhaps even now he could find her, come at her in some way. The house was not impregnable: he was as clever as burglars are. Why not come to her? He stood motionless, waiting, while the dawn faintly and imperceptibly paled behind him. He saw the light in the house go out. But he did not see Mrs. Bolton come to the window and draw back the old curtain of dark-blue silk, and stand herself in the dark room, looking out on the half-dark of the approaching day, looking for the longed-for dawn, waiting, waiting for Clifford to be really re-assured that it was daybreak. For when he was sure of daybreak, he would sleep almost at once. She stood blind with sleep at the window, waiting. And as she stood, she started, and almost cried out. For there was a man out there on the drive, a black figure in the twilight. She woke up greyly, and watched, but without making a sound to disturb Sir Clifford. The daylight began to rustle into the world, and the dark figure seemed to go smaller and more defined. She made out the gun and gaiters and baggy jacket--it would be Oliver Mellors, the keeper. Yes, for there was the dog nosing around like a shadow, and waiting for him! And what did the man want? Did he want to rouse the house? What was he standing there for, transfixed, looking up at the house like a love-sick male dog outside the house where the bitch is! Goodness! The knowledge went through Mrs. Bolton like a shot. He was Lady Chatterley's lover! He! He! To think of it! Why, she, Ivy Bolton, had once been a tiny bit in love with him herself! When he was a lad of sixteen and she a woman of twenty-six. It was when she was studying, and he had helped her a lot with the anatomy and things she had had to learn. He'd been a clever boy, had a scholarship from Sheffield Grammar School, and learned French and things: and then after all had become an overhead blacksmith shoeing horses, because he was fond of horses, he said: but really because he was frightened to go out and face the world, only he'd never admit it. But he'd been a nice lad, a nice lad, had helped her a lot, so clever at making things clear to you. He was quite as clever as Sir Clifford: and always one for the women. More with women than men, they said.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Yet it was spring, and the bluebells were coming in the wood, and the leaf-buds on the hazels were opening like the spatter of green rain. How terrible it was that it should be spring, and everything cold-hearted, cold-hearted. Only the hens, fluffed so wonderfully on the eggs, were warm with their hot, brooding female bodies! Connie felt herself living on the brink of fainting all the time. Then, one day, a lovely sunny day with great tufts of primroses under the hazels, and many violets dotting the paths, she came in the afternoon to the coops and there was one tiny, tiny perky chicken tinily prancing round in front of a coop, and the mother hen clucking in terror. The slim little chick was greyish-brown with dark markings, and it was the most alive little spark of a creature in seven kingdoms at that moment. Connie crouched to watch in a sort of ecstacy. Life, life! Pure, sparky, fearless new life! New life! So tiny and so utterly without fear! Even when it scampered a little scramblingly into the coop again, and disappeared under the hen's feathers in answer to the mother hen's wild alarm-cries, it was not really frightened, it took it as a game, the game of living. For in a moment a tiny sharp head was poking through the gold-brown feathers of the hen, and eyeing the Cosmos. Connie was fascinated. And at the same time, never had she felt so acutely the agony of her own female forlornness. It was becoming unbearable. She had only one desire now, to go to the clearing in the wood. The rest was a kind of painful dream. But sometimes she was kept all day at Wragby, by her duties as hostess. And then she felt as if she too were going blank, just blank and insane. One evening, guests or no guests, she escaped after tea. It was late, and she fled across the park like one who fears to be called back. The sun was setting rosy as she entered the wood, but she pressed on among the flowers. The light would last long overhead. She arrived at the clearing flushed and semi-conscious. The keeper was there, in his shirtsleeves, just closing up the coops for the night, so the little occupants would be safe. But still one little trio was pattering about on tiny feet, alert drab mites, under the straw shelter, refusing to be called in by the anxious mother. "I had to come and see the chickens!" she said, panting, glancing shyly at the keeper, almost unaware of him. "Are there any more?" "Thurty-six so far!" he said. "Not bad!" He too took a curious pleasure in watching the young things come out. Connie crouched in front of the last coop. The three chicks had run in. But still their cheeky heads came poking sharply through the yellow feathers, then withdrawing, then only one beady little head eyeing forth from the vast mother-body.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Quoth the lady, 'I beseech you thereof for God's sake, and should he deny, prithee scruple not to tell him that it was I who told you this and complained to you thereof.' Then, having made her confession and gotten her penance, recalling the friar's exhortations to works of almsgiving, she stealthily filled his hand with money, praying him to say masses for the souls of her dead kinsfolk; after which she rose from his feet and taking leave of him, returned home. Not long after up came the gentleman, according to his wont, and after they had talked awhile of one thing and another, the friar, drawing his friend aside, very civilly rebuked him of the manner in which, as he believed, he pursued and spied upon the lady aforesaid, according to that which she had given him to understand. The other marvelled, as well he might, having never set eyes upon her and being used very rarely to pass before her house, and would have excused himself; but the friar suffered him not to speak, saying, 'Now make no show of wonderment nor waste words in denying it, for it will avail thee nothing; I learnt not these matters from the neighbours; nay, she herself told them to me, complaining sore of thee. And besides that such toys beseem not a man of thine age, I may tell thee this much of her, that if ever I saw a woman averse to these follies, it is she; wherefore, for thine own credit and her comfort, I prithee desist therefrom and let her be in peace.' The gentleman, quicker of wit than the friar, was not slow to apprehend the lady's device and feigning to be somewhat abashed, promised to meddle no more with her thenceforward; then, taking leave of the friar, he betook himself to the house of the lady, who still abode await at a little window, so she might see him, should he pass that way. When she saw him come, she showed herself so rejoiced and so gracious to him, that he might very well understand that he had gathered the truth from the friar's words, and thenceforward, under colour of other business, he began with the utmost precaution to pass continually through the street, to his own pleasure and to the exceeding delight and solace of the lady. After awhile, perceiving that she pleased him even as he pleased her and wishful to inflame him yet more and to certify him of the love she bore him, she betook herself again, choosing her time and place, to the holy friar and seating herself at his feet in the church, fell a-weeping. The friar, seeing this, asked her affectionately what was to do with her anew.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  She heard the curious satisfaction in his voice. She went upstairs to her bedroom. There she heard the loud-speaker begin to bellow, in an idiotically velveteen-genteel sort of voice, something about a series of street-cries, the very cream of genteel affectation imitating old criers. She pulled on her old violet-coloured mackintosh, and slipped out of the house at the side door. The drizzle of rain was like a veil over the world, mysterious, hushed, not cold. She got very warm as she hurried across the park. She had to open her light waterproof. The wood was silent, still and secret in the evening drizzle of rain, full of the mystery of eggs and half-open buds, half-unsheathed flowers. In the dimness of it all trees glistened naked and dark as if they had unclothed themselves, and the green things on earth seemed to hum with greenness. There was still no one at the clearing. The chicks had nearly all gone under the mother hens, only one or two lost adventurous ones still dibbed about in the dryness under the straw roof-shelter. And they were doubtful of themselves. So! He still had not been. He was staying away on purpose. Or perhaps something was wrong. Perhaps she could go to the cottage and see. But she was born to wait. She opened the hut with her key. It was all tidy, the corn put in the bin, the blankets folded on the shelf, the straw neat in a corner; a new bundle of straw. The hurricane lamp hung on a nail. The table and chair had been put back where she had lain. She sat down on a stool in the doorway. How still everything was! The fine rain blew very softly, filmily, but the wind made no noise. Nothing made any sound. The trees stood like powerful beings, dim, twilit, silent and alive. How alive everything was! Night was drawing near again; she would have to go. He was avoiding her. But suddenly he came striding into the clearing, in his black oilskin jacket like a chauffeur, shining with wet. He glanced quickly at the hut, half-saluted, then veered aside and went on to the coops. There he crouched in silence, looking carefully at everything, then carefully shutting the hens and chicks up safe against the night. At last he came slowly towards her. She still sat on her stool. He stood before her under the porch. "You come then," he said, using the intonation of the dialect. "Yes," she said, looking up at him. "You're late!" "Ay!" he replied, looking away into the wood. She rose slowly, drawing aside her stool. "Did you want to come in?" she asked. He looked down at her shrewdly. "Won't folks be thinkin' somethink, you comin' here every night?" he said. "Why?" She looked up at him, at a loss. "I said I'd come. Nobody knows." "They soon will, though," he replied. "An' what then?" She was at a loss for an answer.