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.

Page 114 of 170 · 20 per page

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —Soy bueno en algunas cosas, ¿no? Inclina mi barbilla hacia atrás y se sumerge en mi cuello, su boca caliente besa y muerde. Escalofríos se extienden por mis brazos, y jadeo. —Cole… Bien, sí. No eres completamente terrible en todo. Siempre ha sido capaz de hacerme sonreír, y es bueno besando. Solo desearía que lo hiciera más en casa. No me ha estado tocando mucho últimamente. Y ahora saldrá de nuevo esta noche. Giro la cabeza, lo beso y tengo hambre de la conexión, pero luego me aparto rápidamente, empujándolo con una sonrisa. —No aquí —lo regaño. Me giro y quito un par de botellas de cerveza de la barra, tirándolas. —Lo siento mucho, ¿sabes? —me dice a la oreja—. No quise que nos echaran de allí y nos pusieran en esta situación con mi padre. Asiento, bastante segura que lo dice en serio. Es buena persona, y lo he visto en su mejor momento. En este momento, está en una mala racha, pero estuvo a mi lado cuando nadie más lo estuvo, así que quiero creer que se enderezará. Miro a Jay, recordando cómo Cole fue mi único amigo después de romper con ese imbécil. Todos los demás se pusieron de parte de Jay. —Entonces, ¿mi padre es amable contigo? —pregunta, alejándose y soltándome. —Por supuesto. ¿Por qué no lo sería? Se encoge de hombros. —Solo estoy asegurándome. Antes solía ser un imbécil. Engañaba mucho a mi madre, y por eso no nos llevamos bien. —Hace una pausa y luego agrega—: Solo para explicar la tensión que probablemente sientas entre nosotros. ¿Engañar? ¿Por qué no me dijo esto antes? Jesús. Sin embargo, Pike no parece ser de esa forma. No me parece tan superficial. Pero las personas crecen y cambian. Quizás fue un hombre diferente hace veinte años. Pero espera… —Pensé que dijiste que tus padres se separaron cuando tenías dos —le pregunto. Si era tan joven, ¿cómo lo recordaría? —Sí. —Empieza a caminar hacia el final de la barra—. Solo sé lo que me dijo ella. Al parecer no era bonito, así que no le creas ninguna mierda. Le gusta presionar a las mujeres, lo que probablemente sea la razón por la que todavía está soltero. Bueno, su padre sí parecía confundido hoy cuando trató de decirme que me quedara en casa, y me planté en mi sitio. Creo que está acostumbrado a que la gente siga sus órdenes. La última declaración de Cole suena como verdadera. —Vamos a ir al Cue —me dice Cole, abriendo la partición y caminando hacia el otro lado de la barra—. Te veré en casa. —No llegues tarde —murmuro. Su turno no comienza hasta las diez de la mañana, pero quiero verlo cuando llegue a casa. No hemos tenido mucho tiempo juntos hoy.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  This was a spirituality of “urgent longing,” “interior sweetness” that set the heart “aglow,” “infusion of comfort,” and “perfervid love.”81 Rolle heard heavenly music, inaudible to the outward ear, which released a flood of pleasurable feeling that he identified with the love of God. He had no time for theologians, who were “bogged down in their interminable questionings”;82 motivated solely by “vanity,” these people should be called “Fool” rather than “Doctor.”83 Rolle regularly insulted anybody who uttered the slightest criticism of his eccentric way of life with a stridency that jars with his lush descriptions of God’s love. This emphasis on sensation was strangely parallel to the tendency of the late scholastic theologians, who were increasingly skeptical about the mind’s ability to transcend sense data.84 This new “mysticism” translated the traditionally symbolic discourse of interiority into a literal exploration of observable, quantifiable psychological states, which had become an end in themselves.85 Rolle made a great impression on his contemporaries, but many of them were disturbed by this emotional piety, which contravened cardinal principles about the nature of religious experience. As we have seen, contemplatives were supposed to rise above their feelings in order to explore the deeper regions of the psyche. Rolle refused to have a spiritual director who could have instructed him in the special techniques and carefully cultivated attitudes that would enable him to transcend his normal modes of perception. The traditions all insist that a mystic must integrate his spirituality healthily with the demands of ordinary life. Zen practitioners insist that meditation makes them more alert and responsive to their surroundings. But in his writings Rolle alternates between excitable, almost manic exultation and crushing depression. He developed a stammer and found that a job that would once have taken him thirty minutes now took a whole morning. His younger contemporary Catherine of Siena once fell into the fire in an ecstatic swoon while cooking a meal. This unbalanced behavior would become increasingly admired in certain circles. Like Rolle, Catherine refused to submit to spiritual direction that could have helped her to negotiate this perilous psychic hinterland. Elevated feelings were never supposed to be the end of the spiritual quest: Buddhists insist that after achieving enlightenment, a man or woman must return to the marketplace and there practice compassion for all living beings. This was also true of Christian monks and nuns, who had to serve their communities; even anchorites often acted as counselors for the local laity, who came to them with secular as well as spiritual problems. But Rolle vehemently refused to engage with his fellows, and his contemplation did not lead to kindly consideration and kenotic respect for others—the test of authentic religious experience in all the major faiths. But as the rift between spirituality and theology developed, a flood of pleasurable and consoling emotion would be seen by more and more people as a sign of God’s favor.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Because the Socratic dialogue was experienced as an initiation (myesis), Plato used the language of the Mysteries to describe its effect on people. Socrates once said that, like his mother, he was a midwife whose task was to help his interlocutor engender a new self.42 Like any good initiation, a successful dialogue should lead to ekstasis: by learning to inhabit each other’s point of view, the conversationalists were taken beyond themselves. Anybody who entered into dialogue with Socrates had to be willing to change; he had to have faith (pistis) that Socrates would guide him through the initial vertigo of aporia in such a way that he found pleasure in it. At the end of this intellectual ritual, if he had responded honestly and generously, the initiate would have become a philosopher, somebody who realized that he lacked wisdom, longed for it, but knew that he was not what he ought to be. Like a mystes, he had become “a stranger to himself.” This relentless search for wisdom made a philosopher atopos, “unclassifiable.” That was why Socrates was not like other people; he did not care about money or advancement and was not even concerned about his own security. In the Symposium, Plato made Socrates describe his quest for wisdom as a love affair that grasped the seeker’s entire being until he achieved an ekstasis that was an ascent, stage by stage, to a higher state of being. If the philosopher surrendered himself to an “unstinting love of wisdom,” he would acquire joyous knowledge of a beauty that went beyond finite beings because it was being itself: “It always is and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes.”43 It was not confined to one idea or one kind of knowledge. It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself, it is always one in form; and all the other beautiful things share in that in such a way that when these others come to be or pass away, this does not become the least bit smaller or greater nor suffer any change.44 It was “absolute, pure, unmixed, unique, eternal”45—like Brahman, Nirvana, or God. Wisdom transformed the philosopher so that he himself enjoyed a measure of divinity. “The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.”46

• From The Case for God (2009)

  A small circle of exiled priests began to construct an answer, reinterpreting old symbols and stories to build an entirely new spirituality. Scholars call this priestly layer of the Bible “P”: its most important sources were the Holiness Code (a miscellaneous collection of seventh-century laws) 52 and the Tabernacle Document, the centerpiece of P’s narrative, which described the tent that the Israelites had built in the wilderness to house the divine presence. 53 With these and other ancient oral traditions, P compiled the two legal books of Leviticus and Numbers, which reversed the aggressive theology of the Deuteronomists by creating a series of rituals based on the experience of exile and estrangement. P also added material to the JED narrative, so that it became a story of one tragic migration after another: the expulsion from Eden, the wanderings of Cain, the dispersal of humanity after the rebellion at Babel, the departure of Abraham from Mesopotamia, the tribes’ flight to Egypt, and the forty years in the wilderness. In P’s revised chronicle, the climax of the Exodus was no longer the bestowal of the Torah but the gift of the divine presence in the “Tent of Meeting.” God had brought his people into the Sinai desert precisely in order “to dwell (shakan) , myself, in their midst.” 54 The verb shakan had originally meant “to lead the life of a nomadic tent-dweller;” God would now “tent” with his wandering people wherever in the world they happened to be. 55 Instead of ending the story with Joshua’s brutal conquest, P left the Israelites on the border of the Promised Land. 56 Israel was not a people because the Israelites lived in a particular country, but because they lived in the presence of a God who accompanied them wherever they happened to be. Their present exile was simply the latest instance of the tragic uprooting that had given Israel special insight into the nature of the divine. P made a startling legal innovation. The exiles would create a sense of the divine presence by living as if they were priests serving in the Jerusalem temple. Hitherto the laity had never been expected to observe the ceremonial laws, purity regulations, and dietary rules of the temple personnel. 57 But now the exiles had become a nation of priests and must live as if God were dwelling in their midst, thus ritually creating an invisible, symbolic temple. There was a profound link between exile and holiness. God had told the Israelites that he was kaddosh (“holy”), a word that literally meant “separate,” “other;” God was radically different from ordinary, mundane reality. Now the exiles must become kaddosh too. 58 The legislation crafted by P was based on the principle of sacred segregation. In Leviticus, Yahweh issued detailed directions about sacrifice, diet, and social, sexual, and cultic life to differentiate the exiles from their Babylonian captors. By replicating the condition of otherness, the exiles would symbolically relocate to the realm of holiness where God was.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  We know him more intimately than any other thinker of late antiquity because of his Confessions, a memoir that revealed his fascination with the working of the human mind that is also evident in his treatise On the Trinity. Augustine fully understood the implications of the new creation doctrine that had rendered God unknowable. In one of the most famous passages of The Confessions, he made it clear that the study of the natural world could not give us information about God: Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! Behold, you were within and I was without [foris]; and there I sought you, plunging unformed as I was into the fair things that you have formed and made. You were with me, and I was not with you. I was kept from you by the things that would not have been, were they not in you. 49 God was “within” but Augustine could not find him because he was “outside himself” (foris). As long as he confined his quest to the external world, he remained trapped in the fragile mutability that so disturbed him. 50 When he questioned the physical world about God, the earth, the sea, the sky, and the heavenly bodies all replied, “I am not he, but it is he that made me.” 51 But when he asked, “What, then, do I love in loving my God?” 52 Augustine knew that, like the Upanishadic sages, he could only answer, “neti... neti”: No physical beauty, no temporal glory, no radiancy of light that commends itself to these eyes of mine; no sweet melody of songs tuned to every mode, no soft scent of flowers or of ointments or of perfumes, no manna, no honey, no limbs that can conceive corporal embrace. 53 But God was all these things “to my inner man. There it is that a light shines on my soul that no place can contain, a sound is uttered no time can take away, a fragrance cast that no breath of wind can disperse, a savour given forth that eating cannot blunt. ... This is what I love in loving my God.” 54 Scripture told us that we had been made in God’s image and it was therefore possible to find an eikon within ourselves that, like any Platonic image, yearned toward its archetype. If we looked within, we would discover a triad in our minds in the faculties of memory (memoria), understanding (intellectus), and will or love (voluntas) that gave us an insight into the triune life of God.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  and univocity on a set of ontologically disparate sexual functions and elements. In an almost Rousseauian move, Foucault constructs the binary of an artificial cultural law that reduces and distorts what we might well understand as a natural heterogeneity. Herculine h/erself refers to h/er sexuality as “this incessant struggle of nature against reason” (103). A cursory examination of these disparate “elements,” however, suggests their thorough medicalization as “functions,” “sensations,” even “drives.” Hence, the heterogeneity to which Foucault appeals is itself constituted by the very medical discourse that he positions as the repressive juridical law. But what is this heterogeneity that Foucault seems to prize, and what purpose does it serve? If Foucault contends that sexual nonidentity is promoted in homosexual contexts, he would seem to identify heterosexual contexts as precisely those in which identity is constituted. We know already that he understands the category of sex and of identity generally to be the effect and instrument of a regulatory sexual regime, but it is less clear whether that regulation is reproductive or heterosexual, or something else. Does that regulation of sexuality produce male and female identities within a symmetrical binary relation? If homosexuality produces sexual nonidentity, when homosexuality itself no longer relies on identities being like one another; indeed, homosexuality could no longer be described as such. But if homosexuality is meant to designate the place of an unnameable libidinal heterogeneity, perhaps we can ask whether this is, instead, a love that either cannot or dare not speak its name? In other words, Foucault, who gave only one interview on homosexuality and has always resisted the confessional moment in his own work, nevertheless presents Herculine’s confession to us in an unabashedly didactic mode. Is this a displaced confession that presumes a continuity or parallel between his life and hers? On the cover of the French edition, he remarks that Plutarch understood illustrious persons to constitute parallel lives which in some sense travel infinite lines that eventually meet in eternity. He remarks that there are some lives that veer off the track of infinity and threaten to disappear into an obscurity that can never be recovered—lives that do not follow the “straight” path, as it were, into an eternal community of greatness, but deviate and threaten to become fully irrecoverable. “That would be the inverse of Plutarch,” he writes, “lives at parallel points that nothing can bring back together” (my translation). Here the textual reference is most clearly to the separation of Herculine, the adopted male name (though with a curiously feminine ending), and Alexina, the name that designated Herculine in the female mode. But it is also a reference to Herculine and Sara, h/er lover, who are quite literally separated and whose paths quite obviously diverge. But perhaps Herculine is in some sense also parallel to Foucault, parallel precisely in the sense in which divergent lifelines, which are in no sense “straight,” might well be.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The Jews in the Islamic empire, who were so excited by falsafah that they developed a philosophical movement of their own, had a similar experience. Writing for the most part in Arabic, they introduced a metaphysical dimension into Judaism. From the beginning, they were concerned about the contrast between the remote God of the philosophers and the highly personalized God of the Bible. One of the first Jewish faylasufs, Saadia ibn Joseph (882–942), for example, found the idea of creation ex nihilo fraught with philosophical difficulties. In the main, however, Jewish philosophers tended to be less radical than the Muslims, did not concern themselves with science, confined their attention to religious matters, and concluded in the main that reason’s chief use was to help the philosopher give a more systematic explanation of religious truth. Maimonides (1134–1204), the greatest of the Jewish rationalists, believed that falsafah was unsuitable for the laity, but it could wean Jews from their more facile ideas of God. Maimonides developed an apophatic spirituality that denied any positive attributes to God, arguing that we could not even say that God was good or existed. A person who relied on this kind of affirmation would make God incredible, he warned in his Guide to the Perplexed, and “unconsciously loses his belief in God.”26 But again, for most Jews the God of the philosophers was too abstract, unable to offer any consolation in times of persecution and suffering. Increasingly they turned to the mystical spirituality of the Kabbalah, which was developed in Spain during the late thirteenth century. Some of the pioneers of this spirituality—Abraham Abulafia, Moses de Leon, Isaac de Latif, and Joseph Gikatilla—had been involved in falsafah but found its attenuated God empty of religious content.27 Yet they used philosophic motifs, such as divine emanation, to describe the process whereby the utterly unknowable Godhead, which they called En Sof (“Without End”), had emerged from its lonely inaccessibility and made itself known to humanity. Like Sufism, Kabbalah was an unashamedly mythical and imaginative spirituality. Until the modern period, it would inform the piety of many Jews and, as we shall see, would even become a mass movement.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  For the ruin of the enemy and the security of our life, Thou hast put upon those who feared Thee a sign, the sign of Thy holy cross, O eternal God, to whom I am betrothed from the womb, whom my soul has loved with all its might, to whom I have dedicated, from my youth up till now, my flesh and my soul. Oh! send to me an angel of light, to lead me to the place of refreshment, where is the water of peace, in the bosom of the holy fathers. Thou who hast broken the flaming sword, and bringest back to Paradise the man who is crucified with Thee and flees to Thy mercy. Remember me also in Thy kingdom!... Forgive me what in word, deed, or thought, I have done amiss! Blameless and without spot may my soul be received into Thy hands, as a burnt-offering before Thee!"1960

• From The Case for God (2009)

  A fixed and final denial of God on metaphysical grounds was for Derrida as culpable as any dogmatic religious “theology” (his term for a grand récit). Derrida himself, a secularized Jew, said that though he might pass for an atheist, he prayed all the time, had a messianic hope for a better world, and inclined to the view that, since no absolute certainty is within our grasp, we should for the sake of peace hesitate to make declarative statements of either belief or unbelief. Some orthodox believers and most fundamentalists will be repelled by this unabashed relativism, but there are aspects of Derrida’s thought that recall earlier theological attitudes. His theory of deconstruction, which denies the possibility of finding a single, secure meaning in any text, is positively rabbinical. He has also been called a “negative” theologian and was greatly interested in Eckhart. What he called différance is neither a word nor a concept but a quasi-transcendental possibility—a “difference” or “otherness”—that lies within a word or idea such as “God.” For Eckhart, this différance was the God beyond God, a new but unknowable metaphysical ground that was inseparable from the human self. But for Derrida, différance was only quasi-transcendental; it is a potential, something that we cannot see but that makes us aware that we may have to qualify or even unsay anything we say or deny of God. In his later work, Derrida seemed haunted by the potential and lure of an open future. He affirmed what he calls the “undeconstructible,” which is not another absolute, because it does not exist, and yet we weep and pray for it. As he explained in his lecture “The Force of Law” (1989), justice is an undeconstructible “something” that is never fully realized in the actual circumstances of daily life but that informs all legal speculation. Justice is not what exists; it is what we desire. It calls us; it seems sometimes within our grasp but ultimately eludes us. And yet we go on trying to incarnate it in our legal systems. Derrida later went on to discuss other “undeconstuctibles”: gift, forgiveness, and friendship. He loved to talk of the “democracy to come”: we yearn for democracy but we never fully achieve it; it remains an incessant hope for the future. And in the same way, “God,” a term often used in the past to set a limit to human thought and endeavor, becomes for the postmodern philosopher the desire beyond desire, a memory and a promise that is, by its very nature, indefinable. Some postmodern thinkers have applied these ideas to theology. Significantly, they are usually philosophers rather than theologians. Reversing the trend begun by such philosophes as Diderot, d’Holbach, and Freud, their interest heralds a change in the intellectual atmosphere of academe.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  74 These philosophers did not believe that they could solve these problems: indeed, their emphasis on God’s absolute power militated against it. 75 But, unwittingly, they had prepared the ground for the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when pioneering geniuses would investigate the mathematical implications of many of the questions raised in the late scholastic period secundum imaginationem. 76 The abstruse speculations of philosophers like Scotus and Ockham led to a rift between theology and spirituality that persists to the present day. 77 During the thirteenth century, some people found the new scholastic theology so dry and off-putting that they began to think that they could reach God only by discarding the intellect altogether. Instead of seeing love and knowledge as complementary, or even fused, in the traditional way, people began to see them as mutually exclusive. Until the fourteenth century, most of the great mystics were also important theologians. The theology of the Cappadocians, Denys, Augustine, Thomas, and Bonaventure was inseparable from their spiritual contemplation (theoria) of the divine. But none of the great mystics of the late medieval and early modern periods— Johannes Tauler (1300–61), Henry Suso (c. 1295–1366), Jan van Ruysbroek (1293–1381), Richard Rolle (c. 1290–1348), Julian of Norwich (1343—c. 1416), Margery Kempe (b. 1364), Jean de Gerson (1363— 1429), Catherine of Siena (1347–80), Teresa of Avila (1515–82) and John of the Cross (1542–91)—made any significant contribution to theology. 78 During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in a complete reversal of former practice, we find people cultivating a privatized type of prayer that was devoted almost exclusively to the achievement of intense emotional states, which they imagined were an “experience” of God. The new spirituality was sometimes aggressively solitary instead of communal, and showed little or no concern for other people. 79 For the English hermit and poet Richard Rolle prayer was sensation. “I cannot tell you how surprised I was, the first time I felt my heart begin to warm,” he declared disarmingly at the beginning of The Fire of Love: It was real warmth too, not imaginary, and it felt as if it were actually on fire. I was astonished at the way the heat surged up, and how this new sensation brought great and unexpected comfort. I had to keep feeling my breast to make sure there was no physical reason for it. But once I realised that it came entirely from within, that this fire had no cause, material or sinful but was the gift of my Maker, I was absolutely delighted, and wanted my love to be even greater. 80 This was a spirituality of “urgent longing,” “interior sweetness” that set the heart “aglow,” “infusion of comfort,” and “perfervid love.” 81 Rolle heard heavenly music, inaudible to the outward ear, which released a flood of pleasurable feeling that he identified with the love of God.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  No estoy aquí para hablar de ella de todos modos. —Tú no sabes nada —digo. —Aw, ¿están enamorados? Mi corazón late dos veces más fuerte, y mi rostro cae, una imagen parpadea en mi mente de ella de pie junto a la piscina hace tres noches, pidiéndome que le contara a Cole y luego que la llevara a la cama, a nuestra cama. Mi estómago se hunde. La extraño tanto. —Oh, Dios mío, la amas —dice Lindsay, mirándome a la cara y luciendo como si estuviera a punto de reír. Pero antes que pueda decirme algo más, me enderezo. —¿Dónde está? —Se fue —dice, apoyándose en la puerta y tomando un sorbo de su bebida—. Por las próximas ocho semanas. —¿Qué? —Bueno, tal vez si estuvieras prestando más atención a tu hijo que a su pedazo de basura desechada, sabrías que fue a MEPS 12 hace más de una semana para sus exámenes físicos y otras pruebas —me dice, muy complacida de restregarme en la cara todo lo que no sé—. Se alistó en la Marina, Pike. Parece que estaba desesperado por la orientación que claramente no consigue de ti. Se embarcó esta mañana. Mis cejas caen en picada. —¿Qué? —grito esta vez. ¿La Marina? No solo te unes a la Marina. Lleva meses enlistarse. Yo debería saberlo. Casi lo hice cuando tenía su edad. Como si sintiera mis preguntas, continúa. —Lo ha estado planeando por un tiempo. Está perdido, quiere una dirección —dice como si recitara su lista de compras—. Tenía miedo de contarle a alguien, porque tiene la costumbre de no seguir con las cosas. Quería sorprendernos cuando estuviera seguro. Después que fue a MEPS, hizo su prueba, obtuvo su examen físico y estaba comprometido. Sin embargo, iba a decírtelo, pero supongo que nunca tuvo la oportunidad. Mis pulmones están vacíos, y agacho la cabeza. 12 Military Entrance Processing Station: es donde llegan las solicitudes para el servicio militar y completar el proceso de enlistamiento.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Observo su camiseta negra y su bronceado, como si hubiera tenido un verano completo trabajando afuera, y mi corazón da un vuelco al ver esos penetrantes y cálidos ojos avellana y sus grandes manos que me levantaron y cargaron media docena de veces. Se ve más alto, pero por supuesto sé que no ha crecido. Danni salta de su banco. —Yo solo… iré a ver a mi abuela —dice y silenciosamente camina por mi lado, a su departamento. Pike está entre la puerta y el escritorio, con sus manos hechos puños a un costado y pareciendo que va a moverse al frente pero no lo hace. Camino al escritorio y bajo el papel. —¿Qué? —pregunto. Pero de nuevo, él sigue ahí como si estuviera en un trance. La parte de atrás de mi cuello comienza a sudar, y me estoy poniendo nerviosa. ¿Por qué está parado ahí, mirándome? —¿Qué quieres? —presiono en tono cortante. Abre su boca, pero luego la cierra y traga. —Pike, Jesús… —El día que te fuiste —suelta, y me detengo. Espero, escuchando mientras una mirada de temor cruza sus ojos. —La casa estaba tan vacía —continúa—. Como un silencio que nunca antes había estado ahí. No podía escuchar tus pasos arriba o tu secadora o anticipar tu entrada a la habitación. Ya no estabas. Todo se había… —baja la mirada—, ido. Tengo un nudo en mi garganta y siento las lágrimas amenazantes, pero tenso mi mandíbula, rehusándome a dejarlas ir. —Pero todavía podía sentirte —susurra—. Todavía estabas en todas partes. El contenedor de galletas en el refrigerador, el protector de salpicaduras que elegiste, la manera en que colocaste mis fotografías en el lugar incorrecto después que sacudiste mi librero. —Sonríe—. Pero no podía reorganizarlas, porque tú fuiste la última en tocarlas, y quería todo de la forma en que lo dejaste. Mi barbilla tiembla, y cruzo los brazos sobre mi pecho para esconder mis puños. Se detiene y luego continúa. —Nada volvería a ser de la forma en que era antes que llegaras a mi casa. No quería que lo fuera. —Sacude la cabeza—. Iba a trabajar, regresaba a casa, y me quedaba ahí cada noche y cada fin de semana, porque ahí es donde estábamos juntos. Era donde aún podía sentirte. —Se acerca. Bajando su voz—. Ahí era donde podía enredarme en ti, y aferrarme hasta el último hilo en esa casa que demostraba que fuiste mía solo por un momento. Su tono se vuelve denso, y veo sus ojos llenarse de lágrimas. —Ralamente pensé que estaba haciendo lo que era mejor —dice, frunciendo el entrecejo—. Pensé que estaba aprovechándome de ti, porque eres joven y hermosa y tan alegre y llena de esperanza a pesar de todo por lo que has pasado. Tú hiciste que sintiera que el mundo fuera un lugar grande de nuevo. Mi respiración tiembla, y no sé qué hacer. Odio que esté aquí. Odio amar que esté aquí. Lo odio.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Toward the end of the stretch of more-or-less activity, back now on the Boulevard, before it sprints a short distance farther, diminishing in fluorescent splendor and turning into softlawned apartment units with pastel lights (where starlets live lone-somely wondering will they make it, finding no substitute for stardom in the carefully rationed joints of maryjane for manufactured dreams)—there (before the softlawned swimming-pooled apartment houses) is a coffeehouse primarily for teenage queers and those who want them: Inside (stained-glass windows like in a church), a dike (a squareshouldered butch lesbian, stocked up on bees—with poised pencil and pad) writes lovepoems to the femmetype teenage fairies.... After two in the morning, they wait in line to come in. On the side streets off the Boulevard, that world’s bars make turn-down business on weekends—even when their patrons keep moving from bar to bar, making it sometimes in one hectic night through more than a dozen of those bars—some catering to the hustlers (and one, near the U.S.O., to the hustling servicemen), some to mixed groups, others to the more effeminate or “arty” chorus-boy fairies; some to those with pretensions of Elegance, others to the goodlooking, masculine movie “actors”—whether ever in a movie or not... A private “club” in the hills up a twisting dirt road, where men dance with men, women with women.... And there are, too, the “leather bars”: black-jacketed mesh inside, moving pictures of youngmen wrestling realistically, murals of motorcyclists at a race, their faces sexually aroused; motorcycles parked in menacing rows outside.... After the first inadvertent times, I avoided those last bars. And when the bars close, the crowds invade the Boulevard; those still without a partner stand as if looking into the gaudy-shirted shopwindows—or idle in the outside lobby of Vic Tanny’s gym—or outside the sandwich stand toward Highland, which attracts, mainly, young hustlers and the scores hunting them.... Or go to one of the all-night coffeehouses: especially, then to Coffee Andy’s, which throughout the day is more or less a straight restaurant, but, after 2:00, becomes a meeting and exhibition place for the nightworld. Or, in the late weekend evenings, a portion of this world will move to one of many parties, usually planned in an instant in a bar or at Coffee Andy’s, and usually lasting until Monday, when the previous-day’s faces will have changed, possibly completely replaced: in which some chosen house will turn into a closed-in world: servicemen picked off the streets or as they wait for the bus outside the U.S.O., masculine fairies, queens, scores, dikes, straight but often frigid girls, straight but curious men, malehustlers, nymphos.... Bedrooms suddenly locked, opening to expel one person, quickly replaced by another—or sometimes by two, three.... Lights suddenly turned out, bodies anonymously sprawled on the carpeted floors.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  I NEVER BELIEVED IN Santa Claus. None of us kids did. Mom and Dad refused to let us. They couldn’t afford expensive presents, and they didn’t want us to think we weren’t as good as other kids who, on Christmas morning, found all sorts of fancy toys under the tree that were supposedly left by Santa Claus. So they told us all about how other kids were deceived by their parents, how the toys the grown-ups claimed were made by little elves wearing bell caps in their workshop at the North Pole actually had labels on them saying MADE IN JAPAN. “Try not to look down on those other children,” Mom said. “It’s not their fault that they’ve been brainwashed into believing silly myths.” We celebrated Christmas, but usually about a week after December 25, when you could find perfectly good bows and wrapping paper that people had thrown away and Christmas trees discarded on the roadside that still had most of their needles and even some silver tinsel hanging on them. Mom and Dad would give us a bag of marbles or a doll or a slingshot that had been marked way down in an after-Christmas sale. Dad lost his job at the gypsum mine after getting in an argument with the foreman, and when Christmas came that year, we had no money at all. On Christmas Eve, Dad took each of us kids out into the desert night one by one. I had a blanket wrapped around me, and when it was my turn, I offered to share it with Dad, but he said no thanks. The cold never bothered him. I was five that year and I sat next to Dad and we looked up at the sky. Dad loved to talk about the stars. He explained to us how they rotated through the night sky as the earth turned. He taught us to identify the constellations and how to navigate by the North Star. Those shining stars, he liked to point out, were one of the special treats for people like us who lived out in the wilderness. Rich city folks, he’d say, lived in fancy apartments, but their air was so polluted they couldn’t even see the stars. We’d have to be out of our minds to want to trade places with any of them. “Pick out your favorite star,” Dad said that night. He told me I could have it for keeps. He said it was my Christmas present.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘Oh powerful god, who holds dominion in the freezing land of Thrace - who holds the outcome of all wars, in all countries and kingdoms, in your hands - oh lord of all the fortunes of war - accept my sacrifice and hear my plea. If my youth deserves your sympathy, and if my strength is sufficient to serve you as one of your followers, I entreat you to have pity on my pain. You suffered the same anguish, the same hot flame of desire, when you took as your paramour the fair, young and fresh Venus. You possessed her at your will. Of course there was the occasion when lame Vulcan caught you in his net, just as you were lying with his wife, but let that pass. For the sake of all the pain you suffered, have pity upon my agonies. I am young and ignorant, as you know, but I believe that I am wounded by love more sorely than any other man in the wide world. Emily, the cause of all my woe, does not care whether I sink or swim. I know well enough that I must win her in the tournament before she will have mercy on me; I know well, too, that I will need your help and grace before I assay my strength. So assist me, lord, in the battle tomorrow. For the sake of the fire that once burned you, and for the sake of the fire that now burns me, ordain that the victory tomorrow will be mine. Let my portion be the labour, so that yours may be the glory. I will honour your sacred temple before any other place on earth. I will strive for your delight in all the arts and crafts of war. I will hang my banners, and all the arms of my company, above this hallowed altar. Here, too, I will light an everlasting flame where I will worship to the day of my death. And I make this vow to you. I will cut off my hair and beard, that have never yet felt the blade or razor, and offer them as a sacrifice to your might. I will be your true servant for the rest of my life. Now, great god, have pity on my sorrow. Grant me the victory. I ask no more.’

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘Let me tell you about my fourth husband. He was an old dog. He had a mistress, anyway. I was still young and full of life. I was a bit wanton, I admit, but I was strong and stubborn with it. I was as pert as a magpie. If anyone played the harp, I was up on my feet dancing. When I had drunk a glass of sweet white wine, I could sing like a nightingale in spring. Do you know the story of Metellius, who beat his wife to death because she liked her liquor? He would not have stopped me, even if I had been his wife. No one can keep me away from it. Once I have had a few, of course, I start thinking about you-know-what. Love is on my mind. Just as surely as cold weather makes hail or snow, so a greedy mouth makes for a greedy tail. A drunken woman is not going to be able to protect her virtue, is she? Every lecher knows that. ‘Jesus, when I think about my youth, I can’t help but laugh. All that fun. All that sex. The memories cheer me even now. I was on top of the world in those days. I was hot. Of course age poisons everything. It has taken my beauty. It has robbed me of strength. Well, let them go. Farewell to both of them. Let the devil take them. Now that the flour has gone, I have got to sell the bran. That’s the sum of it. But I’m trying to keep up my spirits. Can’t you tell? ‘What was I saying about my fourth husband? Oh yes. I was furious when I imagined him in the arms of another woman. But I got my own back. My God. I made a cross for him out of the same wood. That’s all I can say. I did not prostitute myself. Certainly not. But I was so friendly to other men, so approachable, that I made him fry in his own fat. He simmered with anger and jealousy. I was his purgatory on earth. He suffered so much that his soul must have gone straight to heaven. When the shoe pinched, he cried out loudly enough. But no one, except God and my husband, knows how bitterly I tormented him. He died when I came back from my pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Now he lies buried before the main altar. I can’t say that his tomb is as sumptuous as that of a king or emperor, but it will serve. It would have been a waste of money to build anything grand. Well goodbye, old man. May God give you rest in your coffin. Sweet dreams.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘If I wanted to compete with you in dirty stories,’ he eventually said to the Miller, ‘I could tell you one about your profession. I could get my own back. But I don’t want to do that. I am old. I don’t want to soil my mouth with any filth about a cuckolded miller. My grass time is done. Now I eat only winter hay. My white hairs tell my age, I know. And my heart is frail, too. It has gone to mould, like the fruit of the medlar that is ripe only when it is rotten. It is laid in rubbish or in straw, and there it sits until it falls apart like an open arse. That is what old men do. We are rotten before we are ripe. Of course we will still cut a caper, while there is a piper playing; we are always tickled by desire. It is our fate, like the leek, to have a white head and a green tail. Our strength may have gone, but the longing is still there. When we cannot do it, we talk about it. In the white ashes there still smoulders the fire, stirred by four burning embers. They are, in order, boasting, lying, rage and envy. These are the live coals of old age. Our limbs may not be supple, and our members may not rise to the occasion. But the need will surely never go away. It has been many years since I came weeping into the world, but I still have all the yearnings of a young man. The tap of my life began to run far back, further than I remember, and the years have flowed on. Death turned the tap, of course. I am flowing towards him. The vessel of my life is almost empty. There are only a few drops left. Well, I could carry on about the folly and the wickedness of times long gone. I still have a tongue in my head. But there is nothing left for old age but dotage.’ Harry Bailey, our Host, had been listening to all this. And now he spoke out peremptorily to the Reeve. ‘Do you really want to give us a sermon?’ he asked him. ‘Are you a priest? I don’t think so. The devil that turns a reeve into a preacher might just as well turn a cobbler into a sailor, or a dairyman into a doctor. Can you please just tell your story? We are already at Deptford and it is half past seven in the morning. We will soon be at Greenwich, that school for scoundrels. I know. I used to live there. So the time has come, old Reeve. Fire away.’

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  So the world whirled on, day by day and year by year, until on one May morning everything changed. On that spring morning Emily left her bed - Emily, the sister of the queen, lovelier than the lily on its stalk of green, fresher than the new flowers of May, prettier than the rose whose hue is not so fair as hers - I say that Emily left her bed before dawn and was prepared for the day before the sun ever rose. The month of May will brook no sluggishness at night. The season stirs every noble heart and awakes the spirit with the words, ‘Arise. And do homage to spring.’ So Emily paid her obeisance to the season of rebirth. She dressed in yellow and in green. Her blonde hair, waist length, was braided in tresses behind her back. At the rising of the sun she strolled through the garden of the castle, gathering red and white and particoloured flowers to make an intricate garland for her head. She was singing like an angel as she picked the lilac and the violet. Yet beside this garden, separated by the garden wall, was the dark tower where Palamon and Arcite were confined. It was the principal dungeon of the castle, as thick and strong as any prison in the world. So, with Emily singing and the two knights languishing, heaven and hell were close together. Bright was the sun, and the air most clear, when Palamon had risen from his pallet bed. By permission of his gaoler this woeful prisoner had the use of an upper cell, from which he could see the city of Athens. He could also see the garden beneath him, clad in the green vesture of spring, where radiant Emily was still walking. Palamon, however, had not yet seen her. He was pacing to and fro, measuring the strict confines of his chamber and lamenting his fate. ‘Alas,’ he whispered to himself, ‘I wish that I had never been born!’ But then just by chance he happened to look through the thick iron bars covering his window. He cast a glance upon Emily sauntering below. Then immediately he turned pale and cried out, ‘Ah!’, as if some barb had caught at his heart. At the sound of his cry Arcite started up from sleep and asked what had upset him. ‘Cousin,’ he said, ‘you have gone as pale as the dead. What troubles you now? You look so ill suddenly. Why did you cry out? Who has offended you? For God’s sake do not rail so much against our imprisonment. We must have patience. This is our fate. We have no choice in the matter. We are subject to the bad aspects of Saturn, in the turning of the spheres, and cannot escape our destiny. What is the saying? “He must need swim that is borne up to the chin.” So stood the heavens on the day that we were born. We must endure.’

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I liked having the future ahead of me. People say that youth is wasted on the young, and I agree in so many respects that it was wasted on me, but in one way I had appreciated it. I always had a sense of my privilege with time. Part of my casualness with the question of having children was that I sensed how lucky I was that I could one day have the choice if I wanted. I liked that that day was very far off. The distance felt luxurious. I had secretly judged women who regretted never having children and were now no longer of the age at which they could have them. I judged them, perhaps, because I feared becoming one of them. But now at thirty-eight, my time was beginning to run out. I still didn’t want a child. I didn’t know what I would do with a child if I had one. But I missed having that open space before me in which to decide. And if the ass-cheeks woman had been paying attention to me, I knew she would have judged me as I had judged others my age. She might have also judged me for being unmarried. When Jamie and I first met, I told him that marriage was an archaic declaration of ownership and it wasn’t for me. He said “good,” because it wasn’t his thing either. But four years into the relationship I wanted desperately for Jamie to ask me to marry him, if only because he wouldn’t. I’d never been a jewelry person, but something inside me longed for that ring. Outwardly I shit-talked blood diamonds, while quietly I studied other women’s rings, learning the names of the various diamond cuts: cushion, emerald, princess. I swore that married women used their left hands more than their right when they spoke, gestured, or wiped a stray hair out of their eyes, just to rub it in. They seemed to be saying, Look, someone wants me this much. I have safely made it to the other shore. But what would I have even done as a married person? What would I have done with Jamie in my space or me in his? Choosing Jamie to love for so many years was perhaps more of a symbol of my own fear of intimacy than it was of his. He was intoxicating when we first met: a geologist, 6'2", handsome in an L.L.Bean travel vest sort of way, golden brown and unshaven, with sandy-brown hair, ten years my senior. He made me feel like a special little pea. Through his work in the desert with the university, he had received a grant from the American Geological Fund to make documentaries on the national parks.

• From City of Night (1963)

  We went to a cafeteria. As we sat there, he told me he was a student at a college, he lived with his parents. On weekends he worked at the library.... Throughout his conversation, there were subtle references to the homosexual scene, which I didnt acknowledge.... Afterwards, for about an hour, talking easily, we walked along the river. “I’d like to go to bed with you,” he said bluntly. “We could rent a room somewhere.” Remembering Pete with a sense of utter helplessness, and surprising myself because of the gentleness with which I answered this youngman, I said: “Youve got me all wrong.” In the following days (on this unfloating island with that life that never sleeps—in this city that seems to generate its energy from all the small, sleepy towns of America, sapped by this huge lodestone: the fugitives lured here by an emotional insomnia: gathered into like or complementary groups: in this dazzling disdainfully heaven-piercing city), in those following days, I discovered Third Avenue, the East 50s, in the early morning, where figures camped flagrantly in the streets in a parody stagline; the languid “Hi” floating into the dark, the feigned unconcern of the subsequent shrug when you dont stop.... And there was Howard Thomson’s restaurant on 8th Street in the near-dawn hours. They gathered then for the one last opportunity before the rising sun expelled them, bringing the Sunday families out for breakfast I discovered the bars: on the west side, the east side, in the Village; one in Queens—appropriately—where males danced with males, holding each other intimately, male leading, male following—and it was in that bar that I first saw flagrantly painted men congregate and where a queen boy-girl camped openly with a cop.... But because most of those bars attracted large numbers of youngmen who went there to meet others like themselves for a mutual, nightlong, unpaid, sexsharing—or for the prospect of an “affair”—the bars made me nervous, then; and, largely, I avoided them. The restlessness welled insatiable inside me . I discovered the jungle of Central Park—between the 60s and 70s, on the west side. In the afternoons, Sundays especially, a parade of hunters prowled that area—or they would sit or lie on the grass waiting for that day’s contact. Even in the brilliant white blaze of newyork sun, it was possible to make it, right there, in the tree-secluded areas. At night they sat along the benches, in the fringes of the park. Or they strolled with their leashed dogs along the walks.... The more courageous ones penetrated the park, around the lake, near a little hill: hoods, hobos, hustlers, homosexuals. Hunting. Young teenage gangs lurk threatening among the trees. Occasionally the cops come by, almost timidly, in pairs, flashing their lights; and the rustling of bushes precedes the quick scurrying of feet along the paths.