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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  A little fair-haired girl had appeared on the balcony beside him, and now gripped the rail and put her feet upon the bars. I said, ‘Where does the lady live - the sister they’ve gone to?’ and he pulled at his ear and looked thoughtful.‘Now, I did know, but have forgotten it ... I believe it was Bristol; or it may have been Bath...’‘Not London, then?’‘Oh no, certainly not London. Now, was it Brighton ... ?’I turned away from him, to gaze back up at Mrs Milne’s house - at the window of my old room, and at the balcony where I had liked, in summer-time, to sit. When I looked at the man again, he had his little girl in his arms, and the wind had caught her golden hair and made it flap about his cheeks: and I remembered them both, then, as the father and daughter that I had seen clapping their hands to the sound of a mandolin, on that balmy June evening, in the week I met Diana. They had lost their home and been given a new one. They had been visited by that charity-visitor with the romantic-sounding name.Florence! I did not know that I had remembered her. I had not thought of her at all, for a year and more.If only I might meet her, now! She found houses for the poor; she might find a house for me. She had been kind to me once - wouldn’t she be kind, if I appealed to her, a second time? I thought of her comely face, and her curling hair. I had lost Diana, I had lost Zena; and now I had lost Mrs Milne and Grace. In all of London she was the closest thing I had, at that moment, to a friend - and it was a friend just then that, above all else, I longed for.On the balcony above me, the man had turned away. Now I called him back: ‘Hey, mister!’ I walked closer to the wall of the tenement, and gazed up at him: he and his daughter leaned from the balcony rail - she looked like an angel on the ceiling of a church. I said, ‘You won’t know me; but I lived here once, with Mrs Milne. I am looking for a girl, who called on you when you moved in. She worked for the people that found you your flat.’He frowned. ‘A girl, you say?’‘A girl with curly hair. A plain-faced girl called Florence. Don’t you know who I mean? Don’t you have the name of the charity she worked for? It was run by a lady - a very clever-looking lady. The lady played the mandolin.’He had continued to frown, and to scratch at his head; but at this last detail he brightened. ‘That one,’ he said; ‘yes, I remember her.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  The first blank lamps had begun to stiffen the damp paper background of Alexandria. The sea-wall with its lines of cafés swallowed in the spray glowed with a smudged and trembling phosphorescence. The wind blew dead south. Mareotis crouched among the reeds, stiff as a crouching sphinx. He was looking, he said, for the key to his watch — the beautiful gold pocket-watch which had been made in Munich. I thought afterwards that behind the urgency of his expression he masked the symbolic meaning that this watch had for him: signifying the unbound time which flowed through his body and mine, marked off for so many years now by this historic timepiece. Munich, Zagreb, the Carpathians.… The watch had belonged to his father. A tall Jew, dressed in furs, riding in a sledge. He had crossed into Poland lying in his mother’s arms, knowing only that the jewels she wore in that snowlit landscape were icy cold to the touch. The watch had ticked softly against his father’s body as well as his own — like time fermenting in them. It was wound by a small key in the shape of an ankh which he kept attached to a strip of black ribbon on his key-ring. ‘Today is Saturday’ he said hoarsely ‘in Alexandria.’ He spoke as if a different sort of time obtained here, and he was not wrong. ‘If I don’t find the key it will stop.’ In the last gleams of the wet dusk he tenderly drew the watch from its silk-lined waistcoat pocket. ‘I have until Monday evening. It will stop.’ Without the key it was useless to open the delicate golden leaf and expose the palpitating viscera of time itself stirring. ‘I have been over the ground three times. I must have dropped it between the café and the hospital.’ I would gladly have helped him, but night was falling fast; and after we had walked a short distance examining the interstices of the stones we were forced to give up the search. ‘Surely’ I said ‘you can have another key cut for it?’ He answered impatiently; ‘Yes. Of course. But you don’t understand. It belonged to this watch. It was part of it.’

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  As I opened the door of my room I could still see the imprint of Justine’s foot in the wet sand. Melissa was reading, and looking up at me she said with characteristic calm foreknowledge: ‘Something has happened — what is it?’ I could not tell her since I did not myself know. I took her face in my hands and examined it silently, with a care and attention, with a sadness and hunger I don’t ever remember feeling before. She said: ‘It is not me you are seeing, it is someone else.’ But in truth I was seeing Melissa for the first time. In some paradoxical way it was Justine who was now permitting me to see Melissa as she really was — and to recognize my love for her. Melissa smilingly reached for a cigarette and said: ‘You are falling in love with Justine’ and I answered as sincerely, as honestly, as painfully as I could: ‘No Melissa, it is worse than that’— though I could not for the life of me have explained how or why. When I thought of Justine I thought of some great freehand composition, a cartoon of a woman representing someone released from bondage in the male. ‘Where the carrion is’ she once quoted proudly from Boehme, speaking of her native city, ‘there the eagles will gather.’ Truly she looked and seemed an eagle at this moment. But Melissa was a sad painting from a winter landscape contained by dark sky; a window-box with a few flowering geraniums lying forgotten on the windowsill of a cement-factory.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  A thousand faces whose reverberating expressions I do not understand (‘We are all racing under sealed handicaps’ says a character in Pursewarden’s book), and out of them all there is one only I am burning to see, the black stern face of Justine. I must learn to see even myself in a new context, after reading those cold cruel words of Balthazar. How does a man look when he is ‘in love’? (The words in English should be uttered in a low bleating tone.) Peccavi! Imbecile! There I stand in my only decent suit, whose kneecaps are bagged and shiny with age, gazing fondly and short-sightedly around me for a glimpse of the woman who.… What does it matter? I do not need a Keats to photograph me. I do not suppose I am uglier than anyone else or less pleasant; and certainly my vanity is of a very general order — for how have I never stopped to ask myself for a second why Justine should turn aside to bestow her favours on me? What could I give her that she could not get elsewhere? Does she want my bookish talk and amateurish love-making — she with the whole bargain-basement of male Alexandria in her grasp? ‘A decoy!’ I find this very wounding to understand, to swallow, yet it has all the authority of curt fact. Moreover, it explains several things which have been for me up to now inexplicable — such as the legacy Pursewarden left me. It was his guilt, I think, for what he knew Justine was doing to Melissa: in ‘loving’ me. While she, for her part, was simply protecting him against the possible power of Nessim (how gentle and calm he looks in the candle-light). He once said with a small sigh ‘Nothing is easier to arrange in our city than a death or a disappearance.’

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  The thought crossed Clea’s mind: ‘The most dangerous thing in the world is a love founded on pity.’ But she dismissed it and allowed herself to see once more the image of this gentle, wise, undissimulating man breasting the torrent of Justine’s misfortunes and damming them up. Am I unjust in crediting her with another desire which such a solution would satisfy? (Namely, to be rid of Justine, free from the demands she made upon her heart and mind. She had stopped painting altogether.) The kindness of Nessim — the tall dark figure which drifted unresponsively around the corridors of society — needed some such task; how could a knight of the order born acquit himself if there were no castles and no desponding maidens weaving in them? Their preoccupations matched in everything — save the demand for love. ‘But the money is nothing’ she said; and here indeed she was speaking of what she knew to be precisely true of Nessim. He himself did not really care about the immense fortune which was his. But here one should add that he had already made a gesture which had touched and overwhelmed Justine. They met more than once, formally, like business partners, in the lounge of the Cecil Hotel to discuss the matter of this marriage with the detachment of Alexandrian brokers planning a cotton merger. This is the way of the city. We are mental people, and wordly, and have always made a clear distinction between the passional life and the life of the family. These distinctions are part of the whole complex of Mediterranean life, ancient and touchingly prosaic. ‘And lest an inequality of fortune should make your decision difficult’ said Nessim, flushing and lowering his head, ‘I propose to make you a birthday present which will enable you to think of yourself as a wholly independent person — simply as a woman, Justine. This hateful stuff which creeps into everyone’s thoughts in the city, poisoning everything! Let us be free of it before deciding anything.’ He passed across the table a slim green cheque with the words ‘Three Thousand Pounds’ written on it. She stared at it for a long time with surprise but did not touch it. ‘It has not offended you’ he said hastily at last, stammering in his anxiety. ‘No’ she said. ‘It is like everything you do. Only what can I do about not loving you?’ ‘You must, of course, never try to.’ ‘Then what sort of life could we make?’ Nessim looked at her with hot shy eyes and then lowered his glance to the table, as if under a cruel rebuke. ‘Tell me’ she said after a silence. ‘Please tell me. I cannot use your fortune and your position and give you nothing in exchange, Nessim.’ ‘If you would care to try’ he said gently, ‘we need not delude each other. Life isn’t very long. One owes it to oneself to try and find a means to happiness.’

• From Wild (2012)

  Just behind that longing was the urge to call Paul. He was my ex-husband now, but he was still my best friend. As much as I’d pulled away from him in the years after my mother’s death, I’d also leaned hard into him. In the midst of my mostly silent agonizing over our marriage, we’d had good times, been, in oddly real ways, a happy couple. The vented metal box in the corner turned itself on again and I went to stand before it, letting the frigid air blow against my bare legs. I was dressed in the clothes I’d been wearing since I’d left Portland the night before, every last thing brand-new. It was my hiking outfit and in it I felt a bit foreign, like someone I hadn’t yet become. Wool socks beneath a pair of leather hiking boots with metal fasts. Navy blue shorts with important-looking pockets that closed with Velcro tabs. Underwear made of a special quick-dry fabric and a plain white T-shirt over a sports bra. They were among the many things I’d spent the winter and spring saving up my money to buy, working as many shifts as I could get at the restaurant where I waited tables. When I’d purchased them, they hadn’t felt foreign to me. In spite of my recent forays into edgy urban life, I was easily someone who could be described as outdoorsy. I had, after all, spent my teen years roughing it in the Minnesota northwoods. My family vacations had always involved some form of camping, and so had the trips I’d taken with Paul or alone or with friends. I’d slept in the back of my truck, camped out in parks and national forests more times than I could count. But now, here, having only these clothes at hand, I felt suddenly like a fraud. In the six months since I’d decided to hike the PCT, I’d had at least a dozen conversations in which I explained why this trip was a good idea and how well suited I was to the challenge. But now, alone in my room at White’s Motel, I knew there was no denying the fact that I was on shaky ground. “Perhaps you should try a shorter trip first,” Paul had suggested when I told him about my plan during one of our should-we-stay-together-or-get-divorced discussions several months before. “Why?” I’d asked with irritation. “Don’t you think I can hack it?” “It isn’t that,” he said. “It’s only that you’ve never gone backpacking, as far as I know.” “I’ve gone backpacking!” I’d said indignantly, though he was right: I hadn’t. In spite of all the things I’d done that struck me as related to backpacking, I’d never actually walked into the wilderness with a backpack on and spent the night. Not even once.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Being strong is associated with being hard, not being a leaky, needy baby . That split between the masculine and the feminine presented itself very early in our lives. As a young woman I recognized that when a man comes inside your body, it is potentially a way to console his sorrow, to hold his tears. Love was as intense as war, sex was as emotional as loss, and death was always in the air. Ben met his wife, Karen, when he was a soldier. “She used to wait for me at the bus station in Ramat Gan, and as I got off the bus we would hug each other, sometimes standing there hugging for thirty minutes, in the heat, unable to let go. Then we would go to my parents’ house, where my mother cooked a big lunch. We ate and then got right into bed. I was always so tired that I don’t know how I functioned. I remember waking up the next day, feeling Karen’s familiar body, hiding with her under the blankets, and feeling happy. She was my sanctuary. When I came home, I needed her.” Ben’s unit was praised for being an effective counterterrorism unit. They performed undercover operations in urban Arab territories and often disguised themselves by dressing up as locals. They gathered intelligence information and performed high-risk operations like hostage rescue, kidnapping, and targeted killing. The group was called Mista’arvim in Hebrew, a name that derived from the Arabic “Musta’arabi” (those who live among the Arabs), referring to Arabic-speaking Jews who were “like Arabs,” or culturally Arabic but not Muslims. Ben is not a big guy, and because of his green eyes, long blond hair, and delicate features, he was often chosen to be the one disguised as a woman when they walked into the Arab markets. Sitting in my office, he tells me about the new Netflix television show called Fauda. “Do you know what fauda means?” he asks. When I shake my head he explains, “That was the code word for being exposed. We shouted, ‘ Fauda, ’ which in Arabic means ‘a mess,’ to let others know that we needed to run, that we had been discovered. The guy who wrote the show and plays the lead role was a fighter in our unit,” he says, “and so much of it is based on real things that happened. I started watching it and found myself thinking, ‘What the fuck? This is insane.’” “And what is it that you watch and think is insane?” I ask. “I’ll tell you the truth,” Ben says. “It’s that word that you used in our first session: omnipotent. I asked you then what it meant, and you said, ‘It means someone who thinks they can do anything, who thinks they have endless power like a superhero, with no limitations.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  My complexion, to be sure, was perfectly smooth and clear, and my teeth were very white; but these - in our family, at least - were counted unremarkable, for since we all passed our days in a miasma of simmering brine, we were all as bleached and blemishless as cuttlefish. No, girls like Alice were meant to dance upon a gilded stage, skirted in satin, hailed by cupids; and girls like me were made to sit in the gallery, dark and anonymous, and watch them. Or so, anyway, I thought then. The routine I have described - the routine of prising and bearding and cooking and serving, and Saturday-night visits to the music hall - is the one that I remember most from my girlhood ; but it was, of course, only a winter one. From May to August, when British natives must be left to spawn, the dredging smacks pull down their sails or put to sea in search of other quarry; and oyster-parlours all over England are obliged, in consequence, to change their menus or close their doors. The business that my father did between autumn and spring, though excellent enough, was not so good that he could afford to shut his shop throughout the summer and take a holiday; but, like many Whitstable families whose fortunes depended upon the sea and its bounty, there was a noticeable easing of our labours in the warmer months, a kind of shifting into a slower, looser, gayer key. The restaurant grew less busy. We served crab and plaice and turbot and herrings, rather than oysters, and the filleting was kinder work than the endless scrubbing and shelling of the winter months. We kept our windows raised, and the kitchen door thrown open; we were neither boiled alive by the steam of the cooking-pots, nor numbed and frozen by barrels of oyster-ice, as we were in winter, but gently cooled by the breezes, and soothed by the sound of fluttering canvas and ringing pulleys that drifted into our kitchen from Whitstable Bay. The summer in which I turned eighteen was a warm one, and grew warmer as the weeks advanced. For days at a time Father left the shop for Mother to run, and set up a cockle-and-whelk stall on the beach. Alice and I were free to visit the Canterbury Palace every night if we cared to; but just as no one that July wanted to eat fried fish and lobster soup in our stuffy Parlour, so the very thought of passing an hour or two in gloves and bonnet, beneath the flaring gasoliers of Tricky Reeves’s airless music hall, made us gasp and droop and prickle.

• From Less (2017)

  Less looks over at the man. Is it the pills that make him so flushed and grotesque? What else do they sell here for middle-aged men? Is there a pill for when the image of a trumpet vine comes into your head? Will it erase it? Erase the voice saying, You should kiss me like it’s good-bye ? Erase the tuxedo jacket, or at least the face above it? Erase the whole nine years? Robert would say, The work will fix you. The work, the habit, the words, will fix you. Nothing else can be depended on, and Less has known genius, what genius can do. But what if you are not a genius? What will the work do then? “What’s the new title?” Less asks. The Head passes the program to Arturo. Less consoles himself that tomorrow he will board a plane to Italy. The language is getting to him. The lingering taste of mescal is getting to him. The tragicomic business of being alive is getting to him. Arturo studies the program for a moment, then looks up gravely: “Una Noche con Arthur Less.” Less Italian

• From Less (2017)

  Less of course had other, more serious lovers in the years he saw Freddy. There was the history professor at UC–Davis who would drive two hours to take Less to the theater. Bald, red bearded, sparkling eyes and wit; it was a pleasure, for a while, to be a grown-up with another grown-up, to share a phase of life—early forties—and laugh about their fear of fifty. At the theater, Less looked over and saw Howard’s profile lit by the stage and thought: Here is a good companion, here is a good choice. Could he have loved Howard? Very possibly. But the sex was awkward, too specific (“Pinch that, okay, now touch there; no, higher; no, higher; no, HIGHER!”) and felt like an audition for a chorus line. Howard was nice, however, and he could cook; he brought ingredients over and made sauerkraut soup so spicy, it made Less a little high. He held Less’s hand a lot and smiled at him. So Less waited it out for six months, to see if the sex would change, but it didn’t, and he never said anything about it, so I suppose he knew it wasn’t love, after all. There were more; many, many more. There was the Chinese banker who played the violin and made fun noises in bed but who kissed like he’d only seen it in movies. There was the Colombian bartender whose charm was undeniable but whose English was impossible (“I want to wait on your hand and on your foot”); Less’s Spanish was even worse. There was the Long Island architect who slept in flannel pajamas and a cap, as in a silent movie. There was the florist who insisted on sex outdoors, leading to a doctor’s visit during which Less had to ask for both an STD test and a remedy for poison oak. There were the nerds who assumed Less followed every news item about the tech industry but who felt no obligation to follow literature. There were the politicians sizing him up as for a suit fitting. There were the actors trying him on the red carpet. There were the photographers getting him in the right lighting. They might have done, many of them. So many people will do. But once you’ve actually been in love, you can’t live with “will do”; it’s worse than living with yourself. No surprise that again and again, Less returned to dreamy, simple, lusty, bookish, harmless, youthful Freddy.

• From Less (2017)

  “I’m so surprised she couldn’t hold her liquor,” Lewis says, turning to him with his enormous sunglasses; they make him look like a nocturnal primate. They are seated together in a small bus; a freak heat wave has made the world outside shimmer like a wok. The rest of the passengers lean wearily against the windows. “I thought actors were made from steel.” “Please to all!” says their guide into his microphone; this is Mohammed, their Moroccan guide, in a red polo shirt and jeans. “Here we pass through the Atlas Mountains. They are, we say, like snake. Tonight we arrive at [ name garbled by microphone ], where we spend the night. Tomorrow is the valley of palms.” “I thought tomorrow was the desert,” comes a British accent Less recognizes, from the night before, as that of the technology genius who retired at forty and now runs a nightclub in Shanghai. “Oh yes, I promise the desert!” Mohammed is short, with long curly hair, probably in his forties. His smile is quick, but his English is slow. “I am sorry for the unpleasant surprise of the heat.” From the back, a female voice, Korean: the violinist. “Can they turn up the air?” Some words in Arabic, and the vents begin to blast warm air into the bus. “My friend said it was at top.” Mohammed smiles. “But we now know it was not at top.” The air does nothing to cool them. Beside them, on the road out of Marrakech, are groups of schoolchildren making their way home for lunch; they hold shirts or books over their faces to shield themselves from the merciless sun. Miles of adobe walls and, now and then, the oasis of a coffee shop where men stare at the bus as they pass. Here is a pizza joint. And here an uncompleted gas station: AFRIQUA. Someone has tied a donkey to a telephone pole in the middle of nowhere and left it there. The driver turns on music: the somehow-enchanting drone of Gnawa. Lewis seems to have fallen asleep; in those glasses, Less cannot tell. Tahiti. “I’ve always wanted to go to Tahiti,” Freddy told him once, at an afternoon rooftop gathering of his young friends. A few other, older men peppered the crowd, eyeing each other like fellow predators; Less did not know how to signal that in this crowd of gazelles, he was a vegetarian. My last boyfriend, he wanted to tell them, is now in his sixties. Did any of them, like him, prefer middle-aged men? He never found out; they avoided him as if magnetically repulsed. Eventually, at these parties, Freddy would float over with a weary expression, and they would spend the last hours just the two of them, chatting. And this time—perhaps it was the tequila and sunset—Freddy had brought up Tahiti. “That sounds nice,” Less said. “But to me it seems so resorty. Like you’d never meet the locals. I want to go to India.”

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  And as for human characters, whether real or invented, there are no such animals. Each psyche is really an ant-hill of opposing pre-dispositions. Personality as something with fixed attributes is an illusion — but a necessary illusion if we are to love! As for the something that remains constant … the shy kiss of Melissa is predictable, for example (amateurish as an early form of printing), or the frowns of Justine, which cast a shadow over those blazing dark eyes — orbits of the Sphinx at noon. ‘In the end’ says Pursewarden ‘everything will be found to be true of everybody. Saint and Villain are co-sharers.’ He is right. I am making every attempt to be matter-of-fact.… [image file=image_rsrc1AY.jpg] In the last letter which reached me from Balthazar he wrote: ‘I think of you often and not without a certain grim humour. You have retired to your island, with, as you think, all the data about us and our lives. No doubt you are bringing us to judgement on paper in the manner of writers. I wish I could see the result. It must fall very far short of truth: I mean such truths as I could tell you about us all — even perhaps about yourself. Or the truths Clea could tell you (she is in Paris on a visit and has stopped writing to me recently). I picture you, wise one, poring over Moeurs, the diaries of Justine, Nessim, etc., imagining that the truth is to be found in them. Wrong! Wrong! A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love. Do you know whom Justine really loved? You believed it was yourself, did you not? Confess!’ My only answer was to send him the huge bundle of paper which had grown up so stiffly under my slow pen and to which I had loosely given her name as a title — though Cahiers would have done just as well. Months passed after this — a blessed silence indeed, for it suggested that my critic had been satisfied, silenced. I cannot say that I forgot the city, but I let the memory of it sleep. Yet of course, it was always there, as it always will be, hanging in the mind like the mirage which travellers so often see. Pursewarden has described the phenomenon in the following words:

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Outside the tent the bustle of the day went on: children ran shrieking; stall-holders called and argued; flags and pamphlets fluttered in the May breezes. She took a breath. She said: ‘Nan, come back to me.’Come back to me ... One part of me reached out to her at once, leapt to her like a pin to a magnet; I believe the very same part of me would leap to her again - would go on leaping to her, if she went on asking me, for ever.Then another part of me remembered, and remembers still.‘Come back to you?’ I said. ‘With you, still Walter’s wife?’‘All that means nothing,’ she said quickly. ‘There’s nothing - like that - between him and me now. If we were only a little careful ...’‘Careful!’ I said: the word had made me flinch. ‘Careful! Careful! That’s all I ever had from you. We were so careful, we might as well have been dead!’ I shook myself free of her. ‘I have a new girl now, who’s not ashamed to be my sweetheart.’But Kitty came close, and seized my arm again. ‘That girl with the baby?’ she said, nodding back into the tent. ‘You don’t love her, I can see it in your face. Not as you loved me. Don’t you remember how it was? You were mine, before anyone’s; you belong with me. You don’t belong with her and her sort, talking all this foolish political stuff. Look at your clothes, how plain and cheap they are! Look at these people all about us: you left Whitstable to get away from people such as this!’I gazed at her for a second in a kind of stupor; then I did as she urged me, and glanced about the tent - at Annie and Miss Raymond; at Ralph, who was still blinking and blushing into Mrs Costello’s face; at Nora and Ruth, who stood beside the platform with some other girls I recognised from the Boy in the Boat. In a chair at the far side of the tent - I had not noticed her before - sat Zena, her arm looped through that of her broad-shouldered sweetheart; close to them stood a couple of Ralph’s union friends — they nodded when they saw me looking, and raised a glass. And in the midst of them all, sat Florence. Her head was still bent to where Cyril clutched at it: he had tugged her hair down to her shoulder, and she had raised her hands to pull his fingers free.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I turned away from him, to gaze back up at Mrs Milne’s house - at the window of my old room, and at the balcony where I had liked, in summer-time, to sit. When I looked at the man again, he had his little girl in his arms, and the wind had caught her golden hair and made it flap about his cheeks: and I remembered them both, then, as the father and daughter that I had seen clapping their hands to the sound of a mandolin, on that balmy June evening, in the week I met Diana. They had lost their home and been given a new one. They had been visited by that charity-visitor with the romantic-sounding name. Florence! I did not know that I had remembered her. I had not thought of her at all, for a year and more. If only I might meet her, now! She found houses for the poor; she might find a house for me. She had been kind to me once - wouldn’t she be kind, if I appealed to her, a second time? I thought of her comely face, and her curling hair. I had lost Diana, I had lost Zena; and now I had lost Mrs Milne and Grace. In all of London she was the closest thing I had, at that moment, to a friend - and it was a friend just then that, above all else, I longed for. On the balcony above me, the man had turned away. Now I called him back: ‘Hey, mister!’ I walked closer to the wall of the tenement, and gazed up at him: he and his daughter leaned from the balcony rail - she looked like an angel on the ceiling of a church. I said, ‘You won’t know me; but I lived here once, with Mrs Milne. I am looking for a girl, who called on you when you moved in. She worked for the people that found you your flat.’ He frowned. ‘A girl, you say?’ ‘A girl with curly hair. A plain-faced girl called Florence. Don’t you know who I mean? Don’t you have the name of the charity she worked for? It was run by a lady - a very clever-looking lady. The lady played the mandolin.’ He had continued to frown, and to scratch at his head; but at this last detail he brightened. ‘That one,’ he said; ‘yes, I remember her. And that gal what helped her, that was your chum, was it?’ I said it was. Then: ‘And the charity? Do you remember them, and where their rooms are?’ ‘Where their rooms are, let me see ... I did go there wunst; but I don’t know as I can quite recall the partic’lar number. I do know as it was a place rather close to the Angel, Islington.’ ‘Near Sam Collins’s?’

• From Wild (2012)

  “Okay, I made mine. Now it’s your turn,” he said. I stared at a star, but my mind only went from one thing to the next. “How early are you taking off tomorrow?” I asked. “At first light.” “Me too,” I said. I didn’t want to say goodbye to him the next morning. Trina, Stacy, and I had decided to hike and camp together the next couple of days, but Brent hiked faster than us, which meant he’d go on alone. “So did you make your wish?” he asked. “I’m still thinking.” “It’s a good time to make one,” he said. “It’s our last night in the Sierra Nevada.” “Goodbye, Range of Light,” I said to the sky. “You could wish for a horse,” Brent said. “Then you wouldn’t have to worry about your feet.” I looked at him in the dark. It was true—the PCT was open to both hikers and pack animals, though I hadn’t yet encountered any horseback riders on the trail. “I used to have a horse,” I said, turning my gaze back to the sky. “I had two, actually.” “Well then, you’re lucky,” he said. “Not everyone gets a horse.” We were silent together for several moments. I made my wish. PART FOUR WILDWhen I had no roof I made Audacity my roof. ROBERT PINSKY, “Samurai Song” Never never never give up. WINSTON CHURCHILL 11 THE LOU OUT OF LOUI was standing by the side of the highway just outside the town of Chester, trying to hitch a ride, when a man driving a silver Chrysler LeBaron pulled over and got out. Over the past fifty-some hours, I’d hiked fifty miles with Stacy and Trina and the dog, from Belden Town to a place called Stover Camp, but we’d split up ten minutes before when a couple in a Honda Civic had stopped, announcing that they only had room for two of us. “You go,” we’d each said to the other; “no, you go”—until I insisted and Stacy and Trina got in, Odin lumbering behind them to sit wherever he could, while I assured them I’d be fine. And I would be fine, I thought, as the man who drove the Chrysler LeBaron made his way toward me on the gravel shoulder of the road, though I felt a sick flutter in my gut as I attempted to discern, in the flash of a second, what his intentions were. He looked like a nice enough guy, a few years older than me. He was a nice guy, I decided, when I glanced at the bumper of his car. On it, there was a green sticker that said IMAGINE WHIRLED PEAS. Has there ever been a serial killer who imagined whirled peas?

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  I became romantically involved with one of the people who left the 0 with me. After ten years of repressing feelings and intimacy, as we did in our cult, it was intoxicating to allow myself to be emotionally close to someone, particularly someone who understood what I had gone through. I knew it was not a relationship that could last, but we did give each other a great deal of support in the process of recovery. Redefinition and reintegration of self. I began to redefine myself at this point. I had to take stock and try to figure out my direction in many different areas of my life. I continued to learn about cults. This learning meshed with my precult interests, which were heading toward social psychology, so I think this was a natural direction for me. Writing. I began to write soon after I got out, and eventually completed a manuscript about my experience. I got three things from this: (1) Writing about my involvement required a close review and analysis of exactly how I had been manipulated, so I relived the whole experience, which, while difficult, helped me understand and integrate it; (2) By the end of writing the book, I felt I could say I was a writer, which was most important in rebuilding a sense of identity that I could call my own; (3) It helped a great deal with the shame I was feeling. I decided early on to come out about my cult experience because I felt that the shame was part of the reason cultic abuse has remained a significantly hidden issue. I was able to more or less turn this around and, in a sense, be proud and regard my experience as socially useful. I refused to be ashamed of it. In that regard, becoming a cult-awareness activist was particularly important to me. Interests. Because I'd been in the cult for so long, it was difficult to know what I truly wanted to do. Our ex-member group came up with the idea of "toe. dipping." We simply had to try things, but we could just dip our toes in. We didn't have to launch ourselves into a full-time commitment, which obviously was quite frightening to us. So we dipped our toes into this orthat interest. We'd visit a group or try a class. We discovered that as we kept dipping our toes in some particular area, it became clear that each of us kept coming back to certain interests. It took a long time, but eventually we found that our interests emerged in a kind of organic way. For me, those interests were a combination of writing and the study of social psychology. Identity. The whole issue of identity was, of course, most important. Who am I? What am I going to do with my life? This dislocation comes with all the years lost to the cult. How will I deal with having been through this trauma?

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  But I missed Rowdy. I kept looking at the door. For the last ten years, he’d always come over to the house to have a pumpkin-pie eating contest with me. I missed him. So I drew a cartoon of Rowdy and me like we used to be: [image "An illustration of two superheroes, with R and A respectively on their chests, fist bumping." file=image_rsrc4SH.jpg] Then I put on my coat and shoes, walked over to Rowdy’s house, and knocked on the door. Rowdy’s dad, drunk as usual, opened the door. “Junior,” he said. “What do you want?” “Is Rowdy home?” “Nope.” “Oh, well, I drew this for him. Can you give it to him?” Rowdy’s dad took the cartoon and stared at it for a while. Then he smirked. “You’re kind of gay, aren’t you?” he asked. Yeah, that was the guy who was raising Rowdy. Jesus, no wonder my best friend was always so angry. “Can you just give it to him?” I asked. “Yeah, I’ll give it to him. Even if it’s a little gay.” I wanted to cuss at him. I wanted to tell him that I thought I was being courageous, and that I was trying to fix my broken friendship with Rowdy, and that I missed him, and if that was gay, then okay, I was the gayest dude in the world. But I didn’t say any of that. “Okay, thank you,” I said instead. “And Happy Thanksgiving.” Rowdy’s dad closed the door on me. I walked away. But I stopped at the end of the driveway and looked back. I could see Rowdy in the window of his upstairs bedroom. He was holding my cartoon. He was watching me walk away. And I could see the sadness in his face. I just knew he missed me, too. I waved at him. He gave me the finger. “Hey, Rowdy!” I shouted. “Thanks a lot!” He stepped away from the window. And I felt sad for a moment. But then I realized that Rowdy may have flipped me off, but he hadn’t torn up my cartoon. As much as he hated me, he probably should have ripped it to pieces. That would have hurt my feelings more than just about anything I can think of. But Rowdy still respected my cartoons. And so maybe he still respected me a little bit. Hunger Pains [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] Our history teacher, Mr. Sheridan, was trying to teach us something about the Civil War. But he was so boring and monotonous that he was only teaching us how to sleep with our eyes open. I had to get out of there, so I raised my hand. “What is it, Arnold?” the teacher asked. “I have to go the bathroom.” “Hold it.” “I can’t.” I put on my best If-I-Don’t-Go-Now-I’m-Going-To-Explode face. “Do you really have to?” the teacher asked. I didn’t have to go at first, but then I realized that yes, I did have to go.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I’m not sure where the soldiers came from, but hundreds suddenly started walking toward us. All of them were wearing their olive uniforms, as were we, but theirs looked dusty, and each soldier was holding a short Galil gun. As more and more of them came, we felt the intensity of sex and aggression, the yearning of so many young men at once. We felt powerful but we knew it was a false power. As women, we were objects of desire, but it wasn’t us they desired; we were only a channel through which they expressed their longings. They were yearning for something else: for tenderness, for sanity, for touch, for a taste of the excitement of adolescence. Our goal was to create the illusion that for a moment we could give them all of that. We brought with us a glimpse of home and awakened everything they longed for. While we were used to the impact we had on those young men, their uniforms couldn’t hide the boys we recognized inside them. For us, they were men, soldiers, but also our high school friends. We knew that they had many moments when they wanted to cry but had to hide it, sometimes even from themselves. They needed to play the roles they were assigned, to be the men they were raised to be. I stood on that stage, the lights in my eyes. I couldn’t see their faces, only a field of olive. There was a moment of silence before I smiled and said, “Golani, we are really happy to be here tonight.” And I started to sing “Naarat Rock” (“A Rock and Roll Girl”), by Yitzhak Laor and Matti Caspi. When I got to the lines about how the girl had sex with the drummer, I looked back and smiled at the drummer. He wasn’t playing the song faster than usual but when it ended I couldn’t breathe. The dynamic between the masculine and the feminine is that the feminine often becomes the container for men’s vulnerabilities. They work as a system, and while that dynamic helps one side “get rid” of his neediness and place it in the other, it often leaves him with no real access to his feelings, and with denial of his fear, helplessness, guilt, and shame. We can see that dynamic in men’s relationship to tears, which is often complex. In our culture the split between femininity and masculinity is represented in the split between hardness and fluidity. Heterosexual culture often overvalues solidness, which is associated with erection, masculinity, independence, and activity, while it devalues fluidness, which is associated with femininity, vulnerability, passivity, and even contamination. Being strong is associated with being hard, not being a leaky, needy baby.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She laughed, and looked away; and I guessed that she was only partly joking, for in all the months that we had spent together, we had not been separated for so much as a night. I felt that old queer tightness in my breast, and quickly kissed her. She raised her hands to hold my face; but again she turned her gaze away. ‘You must go,’ she said, ‘if it makes you sad like this. I shall manage.’ ‘I shall hate it too,’ I said. My tears had dried; it was I, now, who was doing the consoling. ‘And anyway, I shan’t be able to go until we close at Hoxton - and that is weeks away.’ She nodded, and looked thoughtful. It was weeks away, for Cinderella was not due to finish until Easter; in the middle of February, however, I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly at liberty. There was a fire at the Britannia. There were always fires in theatres in those days - halls were regularly being burned to the ground, then built up again, better than before, and no one thought anything of it; and the fire at the Brit had been small enough, and no one got injured. But the theatre had had to be evacuated, and there had been problems with the exits; afterwards an inspector came, looked at the building, and said a new escape door must be added. He closed the theatre while the work was done: tickets were returned, apologies pasted up; and for a whole half-week we found ourselves on holiday. Urged on by Kitty - for she had grown suddenly gallant about letting me go - I took my chance. I wrote to Mother and told her that, if I was still welcome, I should be home the following day - that was Sunday - and would stay till Wednesday night. Then I went shopping, to buy presents for the family: there was something thrilling after all, I found, about the idea of returning to Whitstable after so long, with a parcel of gifts from London ... Even so, it was hard to part from Kitty. ‘You will be all right?’ I said to her. ‘You won’t be lonely here?’ ‘I shall be horribly lonely. I expect you will come back and find me dead from loneliness!’ ‘Why don’t you come with me? We might catch a later train -’ ‘No, Nan; you should see your family without me.’ ‘I shall think about you every minute.’ ‘And I shall think of you ...’ ‘Oh, Kitty ...’ She had been tapping at her tooth with the pearl of her necklace; when I put my mouth upon hers I felt it, cold and smooth and hard, between our lips. She let me kiss her, then moved her head so that our cheeks touched; then she put her arms about my waist and held me to her rather fiercely - quite as if she loved me more than anything.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  When you were growing up, for instance, far beyond providing you shelter, meals, and clothing, your parents likely stoked your opportunities to share positivity-laced moments with them and others. At first it was simply through tickles and grins, and later it was through setting up playdates and creating family rituals around mealtime, bedtime, weekends, and holidays. Many schools, colleges, and universities strive to provide similar structural support. Through icebreakers and other experiential activities, both within and outside classrooms, through sporting and artistic events, these places create entire webs of people, institutional practices, and rituals that may have provided additional external support for the positivity resonance that nourished you through your youth. Jeremy, whose story I told in chapter 8 , likened all this structural support to an external navigation system . As he put it, “Your path up through college is kind of decided for you and then it is like the navigation system turns off and you have to pilot yourself and that’s when it gets scary.” Being released into the so-called real world, absent the scaffolding to support ready connection, can leave recent graduates wondering why their life suddenly seems less sparkly, their days more life-draining than life-giving. Adapting to this stark change can be like learning to cook for yourself. After decades of having your every meal prepared by parents, and then by dining hall staff, you needed to learn to put the right balance of micronutrients on your plate each day. While the effects getting the balance wrong may not have shown up for months, or even years, you’ve felt those effects nonetheless, in terms of unhealthy changes in weight or health. Think of love as another key micronutrient. How long will it take before you learn to put the right amount of it in your daily diet? It can take years, even decades, for people to learn this vital life lesson: That in the “real world” you are responsible for feeding yourself your own recommended daily value of love. It easily took me two decades to internalize this message, and I still struggle at times to truly live by it. My natural tendencies toward introversion, combined with my socialized tendencies toward workaholism, set me on a life trajectory that was hardly sustainable. By my early forties, my relationships and health began to suffer. I’ve since learned to plan my day and week around love and other opportunities to feel good. I also stay open to those impromptu chances to forge meaningful connections with the people at work and in my community, and even with complete strangers when I’m away from home. Two decades is a long time. I even had the benefit of seeing the facts about positivity stack up on my desk.