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 150 of 170 · 20 per page

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

  Peter and Paul are lost out of sight in the lurid fires of the Neronian persecution which seemed to consume Christianity itself. We know nothing certain of that satanic spectacle from authentic sources beyond the information of heathen historians.227 A few years afterwards followed the destruction of Jerusalem, which must have made an overpowering impression and broken the last ties which bound Jewish Christianity to the old theocracy. The event is indeed brought before us in the prophecy of Christ as recorded in the Gospels, but for the terrible fulfilment we are dependent on the account of an unbelieving Jew, which, as the testimony of an enemy, is all the more impressive. The remaining thirty years of the first century are involved in mysterious darkness, illuminated only by the writings of John. This is a period of church history about which we know least and would like to know most. This period is the favorite field for ecclesiastical fables and critical conjectures. How thankfully would the historian hail the discovery of any new authentic documents between the martyrdom of Peter and Paul and the death of John, and again between the death of John and the age of Justin Martyr and Irenaeus.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., remembered shoeboxes full of money in his father’s closet. He later testified that Hubbard habitually kept “great chunks of cash” within easy reach, “so that if there was any problem he could just take off right out the window.” “Making money, I think, to Hubbard was paramount,” Hana Eltringham later speculated. “He wasn’t that interested in it for himself. He did have perks, he did have his cars, his motorbikes, his books, his good food, and things like that, and eventually he had his villas and he had his estates and so on, but the money that he wanted predominantly was for power.” For all his wealth, Hubbard spent much of his time in his cabin alone, auditing himself on the E-Meter and developing his spiritual technology. He may have been grandiose and delusional, but the endless stream of policy letters and training routines that poured from his typewriter hour after hour, day after day, attests to his obsession with the notion of creating a step-by-step pathway to universal salvation. If it was all a con, why would he bother? Hubbard and Mary Sue slept in separate staterooms. In the opinion of members of their household staff and others, by the time they boarded ship, Hubbard had lost interest in Mary Sue sexually. Yvonne Gillham had managed to get herself posted on another ship, out of range of Hubbard’s longing and Mary Sue’s wrath. For the most part, the Commodore left his female crew members alone. One exception was a tall, slender woman from Oregon. She approached Hana Eltringham with a big smile on her face and confessed that she was having an affair with Hubbard. Soon after that, Hubbard busted the woman down to deckhand and assigned Eltringham to audit her. The woman would weep through the session. Eltringham would dutifully pass along the auditing files to Hubbard for review. “I could hear him chortling,” she recalled. The situation was much less restrained belowdecks. The Sea Org members were young and vigorous; sexual escapades were routine, and marriages quite fluid. Hubbard seemed to be oblivious, but Mary Sue was increasingly scandalized. When she learned that a crew member, who was nineteen or twenty, had slept with a fifteen-year-old girl on the ship, she got a dagger out of her cabin and held it against his throat and told him he had to be off the ship in two hours or else. In 1971, on New Year’s Eve, there was a drunken orgy of historic proportions. “Maybe a hundred Sea Org members were having sex everywhere from the topside boatdecks to the lowest holds of the ship,” one of the participants recalled. Mary Sue had had enough. With two attractive teenage daughters of her own on the ship, she started cracking down on premarital sex. Hubbard observed that 1972 was a leap year, and said that any woman on the ship could propose to any man, leading to a sudden rash of weddings.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Then he hummed a snatch of "Madame Angot," which operetta was then in fashion, the only words which caught my ears being— "'Il est, dit-on, le favori,' and these were marked purposely. "Teleny, who had heard them as well as I had, shrugged his shoulders, and muttered something between his teeth. "'A carriage is waiting for me at the back door,' said he, slipping his arm under mine. 'Still, if you prefer walking——' "'Very much so, for it has been so stiflingly hot in the theatre.' "'Yes, very hot,' added he, repeating my words, and evidently thinking of something else. Then all at once, as if struck by a sudden thought, 'Are you superstitious?' said he. "'Superstitious?' I was rather struck by the quaintness of his question. 'Well—yes, rather, I believe.' "'I am very much so. I suppose it is my nature, for you see the Gipsy element is strong in me. They say that educated people are not superstitious. Well, first I have had a wretched education; and then I think that if we really knew the mysteries of nature, we could probably explain all those strange coincidences that are ever happening.' Then, stopping abruptly, 'Do you believe in the transmission of thought, of feelings, of sensations?' "'Well, I really do not know—I——' "'You must believe,' added he, authoritatively. 'You see we have had the same vision at once. The first thing you saw was the Alhambra, blazing in the fiery light of the sun, was it not?' "'It was,' said I, astonished. "'And you thought you would like to feel that powerful withering love that shatters both the body and the soul? You do not answer. Then afterwards came Egypt, Antinöus and Adrian. You were the Emperor, I was the slave.' "Then, musingly, he added, almost to himself: 'Who knows, perhaps I shall die for you one day!' And his features assumed that sweet resigned look which is seen on the demi-god's statues. "I looked at him bewildered. "'Oh! you think I am mad, but I am not, I am only stating facts. You did not feel that you were Adrian, simply because you are not accustomed to such visions; doubtless all this will be clearer to you some day; as for me, there is, you must know, Asiatic blood in my veins, and——' "But he did not finish his phrase, and we walked on for a while in silence, then: "'Did you not see me turn round during the gavotte, and look for you? I began to feel you just then, but I could not find you out; you remember, don't you?' "'Yes, I did see you look towards my side, and——' "'And you were jealous!' "'Yes,' said I, almost inaudibly. "He pressed my arms strongly against his body for all answer, then after a pause, he added hurriedly, and in a whisper: "'You must know that I do not care for a single girl in this world, I never did. I could never love a woman.'

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  He didn’t come right away. He probably wouldn’t have come at all if he hadn’t seen me at the hospital a few weeks later. I’d gone to sign some of the financial paperwork for my bill. Insurance crap. I only saw him briefly—a few seconds, tops. He was with Dr. Akela. They had been walking down the hall together, their identical white coats differentiating them from the other humans milling around the nurses’ station—two demi-gods in a sea of humans. I froze when I saw him, felt a feeling only drugs can give you. He was headed for the elevator, same as me. Oh great, this is going to suck. If there were people in the elevator I could scoot to the back and hide. I waited hopefully, but when the doors slid open the only people inside were on the poster advertisement for erectile dysfunction. We should do this more often, the slogan said. A handsome, athletic couple in their late forties, woman looking coy. I jumped in and hit the lobby button with my fist. Close! It did. Thankfully, it did, but before the doors sealed shut Isaac appeared in the gap. For a second it looked like he was going to hold a hand between the doors, force them to open. He drew back instead, the shock sketched around his eyes. He hadn’t been expecting to see me today. We should do this more often, I thought. It all happened in a dizzy three seconds. The time it takes for you to blink, blink and blink. But I didn’t blink, and neither did he. We locked into a three second staring contest. We couldn’t have said any more in those three seconds. When you spend extraordinary amounts of time pushing someone away, their reaction to your apology tends to be slow. I imagined so, anyway. That’s how I wrote it in my stories. He came a week later. Since then I’d put away the red vase, gone back to craving white. I was at the mailbox when his car pulled into my driveway. I felt. You feel. When had that started happening again? I waited with the stack of junk mail clutched in my hands. He stepped out of his car and walked to me. “Hey,” he said. “Hi.” “I’m headed to the hospital, but I wanted to see you first.” I took it. I missed him. You miss Nick, You know Nick. You don’t know this man. I pushed that away.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The man accompanied her to the carriage. The light of the lamp fell full and glaringly upon an infinitely young, soft and dreamy face which I had never before seen, and played in his long, blond curls. She held out her hand which he kissed with deep respect, then she signaled to me, and immediately the carriage flew along the leafy wall which follows the river like a long green screen. * * * * * The bell at the garden-gate rings. It is a familiar face. The man from the Cascine. “Whom shall I announce?” I ask him in French. He timidly shakes his head. “Do you, perhaps, understand some German?” he asks shyly. “Yes. Your name, please.” “Oh! I haven’t any yet,” he replies, embarrassed—“Tell your mistress the German painter from the Cascine is here and would like—but there she is herself.” Wanda had stepped out on the balcony, and nodded toward the stranger. “Gregor, show the gentleman in!” she called to me. I showed the painter the stairs. “Thanks, I’ll find her now, thanks, thanks very much.” He ran up the steps. I remained standing below, and looked with deep pity on the poor German. Venus in Furs has caught his soul in the red snares of hair. He will paint her, and go mad. * * * * * It is a sunny winter’s day. Something that looks like gold trembles on the leaves of the clusters of trees down below in the green level of the meadow. The camelias at the foot of the gallery are glorious in their abundant buds. Wanda is sitting in the loggia; she is drawing. The German painter stands opposite her with his hands folded as in adoration, and looks at her. No, he rather looks at her face, and is entirely absorbed in it, enraptured. But she does not see him, neither does she see me, who with the spade in my hand am turning over the flower-bed, solely that I may see her and feel her nearness, which produces an effect on me like poetry, like music. * * * * * The painter has gone. It is a hazardous thing to do, but I risk it. I go up to the gallery, quite close, and ask Wanda “Do you love the painter, mistress?” She looks at me without getting angry, shakes her head, and finally even smiles. “I feel sorry for him,” she replies, “but I do not love him.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I had lost nothing and yet I felt lonely, forlorn, nay almost bereaved. I tried to fathom my morbid state, and all I could find out was that my feelings were akin to those of being home-sick or mother-sick, with this simple difference, that the exile knows what his cravings are, but I did not. It was something indefinite like the Sehnsucht of which the Germans speak so much, and which they really feel so little. "The image of Teleny haunted me, the name of Réné was ever on my lips. I kept repeating it over and over for dozens of times. What a sweet name it was! At its sound my heart was beating faster. My blood seemed to have become warmer and thicker. I got up slowly. I loitered over my dress. I stared at myself within the looking-glass, and I saw Teleny in it instead of myself; and behind him arose our blended shadows, as I had seen them on the pavement the evening before. "Presently the servant tapped at the door; this recalled me to self-consciousness. I saw myself in the glass, and found myself hideous, and for the first time in my life I wished myself good-looking—nay, entrancingly handsome. "The servant who had knocked at the door informed me that my mother was in the breakfastroom, and had sent to see if I were unwell. The name of my mother recalled my dream to my mind, and for the first time I almost preferred not meeting her." "Still, you were then on good terms with your mother, were you not?" "Certainly. Whatever faults she might have had, no one could have been more affectionate; and though she was said to be somewhat light and fond of pleasure, she had never neglected me." "She struck me, indeed, as a talented person, when I knew her." "Quite so; in other circumstances she might have proved even a superior woman. Very orderly and practical in all her household arrangements, she always found plenty of time for everything. If her life was not according to what we generally call 'the principles of morality,' or rather, Christian hypocrisy, the fault was my father's, not hers, as I shall perhaps tell you some other time. "As I entered the breakfast-room, my mother was struck with the change in my appearance, and she asked me if I was feeling unwell. "'I must have a little fever,' I replied; 'besides, the weather is so sultry and oppressive.' "'Oppressive?' quoth she, smiling. "'Is it not?' "'No; on the contrary, it is quite bracing. See, the barometer has risen considerably.' "'Well, then, it must have been your concert that upset my nerves.' "'My concert!' said my mother, smiling, and handing me some coffee. "It was useless for me to try to taste it, the very sight of it turned me sick. "My mother looked at me rather anxiously.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  He is sitting; a loner in an airport chair, watching the passers-by with apprehension on his face. It’s a fine mental picture. Nick sees me as soon as I step out from my hiding place. When I walk toward him, he quickly stands. He embraces me without hesitation and with so much familiarity, my heart does a lurch. Maybe this is the spark. He knows me. He knows what to say, what not to say. He speaks the language of my face, and waits for my expression to dictate his tone. That’s what time does. It gives you space to learn each other. I soften into his embrace. It’s no use fighting something like this. “Brenna.” He breathes my name into my hair. I want to say his name, to return it, but my words are clotted in my throat. “You ready?” he asks. “Do you have a bag?” I shake my head. “I have nothing.” He takes my hand and leads me to the parking garage. He has a rental car. I fold into the front seat and stare at him. He is the only person I can stare at like this and not feel completely awkward. The entire ride home I wait for him to ask me about it. Anything. Something. Anything. Why isn’t he asking? It’s unfair of me to expect it. Nick has never pried. He waits, and he knows that with me you can wait forever. But now I’m accustomed to something new. Funny how that can happen. Now I’m mentally begging him to ask me something. Anything. I feel the change in myself as the wheels of the car spray up water on the highway. When did that move in? I don’t even know. In a house in the snow, probably. Where a surgeon sliced me open emotionally, and a musician brought me more color than I could handle. It’s summertime in Washington. More’s the pity. When we reach my house there are reporters outside. They look sleepy until they see the car turn into the driveway. I wonder how long they have been camped here. I flew into Seattle under my real name to avoid this. Grabbing, scrambling, straightening hair, I look away from them and point Isaac toward the garage on one side of my circular driveway. Nick. I point Nick toward the garage. I rub my forehead. Since I don’t have keys, we will have to go through the garage to get in the house. I tell him the code for the garage door, and he hops out and punches it in. They can’t climb my driveway, but I hear them at the bottom, calling out my name. Senna! Senna Richards! Did you know Dr. Elgin was behind your kidnapping? Senna, tell us what it was like to—? Senna, have you seen Isaac Asterholder since—? Senna, did you think you were going to die? Then the garage closes, muting their cacophony. Boom! Boom! Boom! Goes my heart…

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  “I have to go.” “Sure,” I said. I didn’t move until I heard the screen door slam. I wasn’t upset that my words had run her off. She didn’t like to be found out. But she’d be back. [image file=image23.jpg] Nick’s Book She didn’t come back. I tried to tell myself that I didn’t care. There were plenty of women. Plenty. There were women everywhere I looked. They all had skin and bones, and I’m sure some of them even had silver streaks in their hair. And if they didn’t have a silver streak in their hair I’m sure I could convince them to put it there. But there is something about the process of convincing yourself that you don’t care that just confirms even more that you do. Every time I passed the window in my kitchen I found myself looking up to see if she was standing in the rain, judging the weeds poking out of the driveway. I looked at those weeds so much that eventually I went out there in the rain and pulled them up one by one. It took me all afternoon and I got a nasty head cold. I was cleaning up my driveway for a woman. I wanted to go look for her, but she’d told me little to nothing about herself. I could hold the five things she’d said in the palm of my hand, and still find plenty of room. Her name was Brenna. She came from the desert. She liked to be on top. She ate bread by pulling off little pieces and placing them in the center of her tongue. I had asked her questions, and she had skillfully turned them back on me. I had been eager to give her answers—too eager—and in the process I’d forgotten to collect answers from her. She had played me like a narcissistic trombone. Tooting, tooting, tooting my own horn. She must have been thinking what a fool I was the entire time. Toot, toot. I went back to the park, hoping to run into her again. But something told me that day in the park was a fluke. It wasn’t her day to be there, and it wasn’t mine. We met because we needed to, and I’d gone and screwed it up by telling her she had a mud vein. I thought she knew. God. If I had another chance with her, I’d never talk again. I’d just listen. I wanted to know her.

• From The Girls (2016)

  letters with smiling creatures on the flap. Making sludgy coffee I drank with grave affect. Finding a certain desired song playing on the radio, like a medium scanning for news of the dead. My mother said I looked like my grandmother, but this seemed suspicious, a wishful lie meant to give false hope. I knew my grandmother’s story, repeated like a reflexive prayer. Harriet the date farmer’s daughter, plucked from the sunburned obscurity of Indio and brought to Los Angeles. Her soft jaw and damp eyes. Small teeth, straight and slightly pointed, like a strange and beautiful cat. Coddled by the studio system, fed whipped milk and eggs, or broiled liver and five carrots, the same dinner my grandmother ate every night of my childhood. The family holing up in the sprawling ranch in Petaluma after she retired, my grandmother growing show roses from Luther Burbank cuttings and keeping horses. When my grandmother died, we were like our own country in those hills, living off her money, though I could bicycle into town. It was more of a psychological distance—as an adult, I would wonder at our isolation. My mother tiptoed around my father, and so did I—his sideways glances at us, his encouragements to eat more protein, to read Dickens or breathe more deeply. He ate raw eggs and salted steaks and kept a plate of beef tartare in the refrigerator, spooning out bites five or six times a day. “Your outer body reflects your inner self,” he said, and did his gymnastics on a Japanese mat by the pool, fifty push-ups while I sat on his back. It was a form of magic, being lifted into the air, cross-legged. The oat grass, the smell of the cooling earth. When a coyote would come down from the hills and fight with the dog —the nasty, quick hiss that thrilled me—my father would shoot the coyote dead. Everything seemed that simple. The horses I copied from a pencil drawing book, shading in their graphite manes. Tracing a picture of a bobcat carrying away a vole in its jaws, the sharp tooth of nature. Later I’d see how the fear had been there all along. The flurry I felt when our mother left me alone with the nanny, Carson, who smelled damp and sat in the wrong chair. How they told me I was having fun all the time, and there was no way to explain that I wasn’t. And even moments of happiness were followed by some letdown—my father’s laugh, then the scramble to keep up with him as he strode far ahead of me. My mother’s hands on my feverish forehead, then the desperate aloneness of my

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I awoke, however, several times, and always to see the pianist before me. "On the morrow likewise, when I came to myself, his name was ringing in my ears, my lips were muttering it, and my first thoughts reverted to him. I saw him—in my mind's eye—standing there on the stage, bowing before the public, his burning glances rivetted on mine. "I lay for some time in my bed, drowsily contemplating that sweet vision, so vague and indefinite, trying to recall his features which had got mixed up with those of the several statues of Antinöus which I had seen. "Analyzing my feelings, I was now conscious that a new sensation had come over me—a vague feeling of uneasiness and unrest. There was an emptiness in me, still I could not understand if the void was in my heart or in my head. I had lost nothing and yet I felt lonely, forlorn, nay almost bereaved. I tried to fathom my morbid state, and all I could find out was that my feelings were akin to those of being home-sick or mother-sick, with this simple difference, that the exile knows what his cravings are, but I did not. It was something indefinite like the Sehnsucht of which the Germans speak so much, and which they really feel so little. "The image of Teleny haunted me, the name of Réné was ever on my lips. I kept repeating it over and over for dozens of times. What a sweet name it was! At its sound my heart was beating faster. My blood seemed to have become warmer and thicker. I got up slowly. I loitered over my dress. I stared at myself within the looking-glass, and I saw Teleny in it instead of myself; and behind him arose our blended shadows, as I had seen them on the pavement the evening before. "Presently the servant tapped at the door; this recalled me to self-consciousness. I saw myself in the glass, and found myself hideous, and for the first time in my life I wished myself good-looking—nay, entrancingly handsome. "The servant who had knocked at the door informed me that my mother was in the breakfastroom, and had sent to see if I were unwell. The name of my mother recalled my dream to my mind, and for the first time I almost preferred not meeting her." "Still, you were then on good terms with your mother, were you not?" "Certainly. Whatever faults she might have had, no one could have been more affectionate; and though she was said to be somewhat light and fond of pleasure, she had never neglected me."

• From Between Us

  With exposure to another culture, emotional lives presumably change in many different ways: we may learn to feel and perceive emotions differently, and to act and interact differently with others. There are many new steps immigrants or sojourners learn, and it is not so clear which are the most essential for dancing with the majority. What is clear is that most immigrants do not learn all these new dance steps in their lifetime, but at the same time even a relatively brief exposure to another culture affects the way we do emotions. Learning Emotions It may have taken my Sephardic Jewish ancestors a full century to get attuned to the emotions of the rest of Amsterdam because for the longest time they were completely segregated: They had their own schools, their own governing board, their own jurisdiction, their own social and cultural events, and they married among themselves. They seldom interacted with majority others, and if they did, it was primarily to do business, a very narrow context for doing emotions. In the late ’70s, social psychologist Yasuko Minoura followed more than seventy Japanese-born school-aged children whose parents’ jobs took them temporarily to the United States. She interviewed them extensively, and found most emotional learning took place in children whose social lives had become American. The children who were comfortable articulating their own strengths (“pride”), made their wishes clear (i.e., made clear what made them “happy”), and took their own decisions (i.e., they pursued what made them “happy”) had spent more time in the United States, had the largest number of American friends, and also were more proficient in English—all suggesting that they were more immersed in U.S. culture. At the time of Minoura’s research, some scholars believed that moving cultures any time after early socialization would leave one poorly attuned to the emotional ways of another culture. Early socialization practices were thought to be responsible for putting emotion practices in place once and for all. Minoura’s observations confirmed that the feelings of some of the Japanese parents did not change much upon their move, but it was different for their schoolgoing, mingling children. The “emotions” of these Japanese-born youth continued to align to their new social and cultural environments. Several of our own studies converged with Minoura’s findings. The larger the proportion of life that immigrant minorities spent in their majority (versus minority) culture, the higher their emotional fit. This means you are never too old to learn, but that the same exposure to a culture may not have the same effect on your emotions. I spent about a quarter of my life (or fifteen years) in the United States.

• From Between Us

  This chapter suggests an entirely different way of thinking about emotion concepts—one much closer to the OURS model of emotions. Emotion concepts are sets of cultural episodes that we have experienced, directly or by observation, supplemented with the cultural lore of an emotion category. And to the extent that people’s emotion lexicons and experiences differ across cultures, so will the emotional experiences that they distinguish. This is not a radically constructionist view: cultures cannot invent people’s emotions from the ground up. This is because all our emotions are situated within relationships between people, who themselves are confined by the bodies that make them up. Human relationships and human bodies have a lot in common across cultures, but they also allow for much variation. If emotion concepts are sets of cultural episodes, which by definition vary across cultures, groups, and individuals, then this also has implications for the original “face recognition” studies, paradigmatic of the field when I started my research on emotion. Remember, the claim at the time was that people around the world match a number of facial configurations with particular emotion concepts, such as anger, disgust, and joy. But how would this claim be affected when the translations of anger, disgust, and joy in other languages are only partially overlapping—when emotion lexicons poorly map onto each other? Something may be similar in those emotional faces—after all, they were associated with translation equivalents—but that something may not be an invariant emotion. In fact, this is what the newest research suggests. If emotions do not refer to mental states, but rather to stories in the world, then our emotions differ because the worlds in which we live differ. That we can talk about emotions across cultures is owing to the fact that some things are stable: people in all cultures have emotions about other people they care about, challenges of their social position, the success of their group, and about what they consider to be good, beautiful, and moral. Chapter 7 . . . . . . . . . LEARNING THE WALTZ WHEN I FIRST MOVED TO THE UNITED STATES, I PREPARED myself for the hurdles of learning a new language, establishing myself in a new economy, and becoming familiar with new people and new customs. It is much harder to realize that a move will challenge the very assumptions we have held since childhood about how to do emotions. Like partners in a dance, your emotions and those of others complement and steer each other to form the interaction. And shared cultural knowledge, in the form of language and practices, orchestrates the ways in which different individuals do emotions together. It is like dancing the tango at the rhythm of tango music, together with a partner who knows their dance steps, as you know yours. The dance emerges from everyone knowing their moves, and from the moves being in sync with the music.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  After a short but severe shower we went out together to the meadow and the statue of Venus. All about us the earth steamed; mists rose up toward heaven like clouds of incense; a shattered rainbow still hovered in the air. The trees were still shedding drops, but sparrows and finches were already hopping from twig to twig. They are twittering gaily, as if very much pleased at something. Everything is filled with a fresh fragrance. We cannot cross the meadow for it is still wet. In the sunlight it looks like a small pool, and the goddess of love seems to rise from the undulations of its mirror-like surface. About her head a swarm of gnats is dancing, which, illuminated by the sun, seem to hover above her like an aureole. Wanda is enjoying the lovely scene. As all the benches along the walk are still wet, she supports herself on my arm to rest a while. A soft weariness permeates her whole being, her eyes are half closed; I feel the touch of her breath on my cheek. How I managed to get up courage enough I really don’t know, but I took hold of her hand, asking, “Could you love me?” “Why not,” she replied, letting her calm, clear look rest upon me, but not for long. A moment later I am kneeling before her, pressing my burning face against the fragrant muslin of her gown. “But Severin—this isn’t right,” she cried. But I take hold of her little foot, and press my lips upon it. “You are getting worse and worse!” she cried. She tore herself free, and fled rapidly toward the house, the while her adorable slipper remained in my hand. Is it an omen? * * * * * All day long I didn’t dare to go near her. Toward evening as I was sitting in my arbor her gay red head peered suddenly through the greenery of her balcony. “Why don’t you come up?” he called down impatiently. I ran upstairs, and at the top lost courage again. I knocked very lightly. She didn’t say come-in, but opened the door herself, and stood on the threshold. “Where is my slipper?” “It is—I have—I want,” I stammered. “Get it, and then we will have tea together, and chat.” When I returned, she was engaged in making tea. I ceremoniously placed the slipper on the table, and stood in the corner like a child awaiting punishment. I noticed that her brows were slightly contracted, and there was an expression of hardness and dominance about her lips which delighted me. All of a sudden she broke out laughing. “So—you are really in love—with me?” “Yes, and I suffer more from it than you can imagine?” “You suffer?” she laughed again.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  He shakes his head. “I thought it was just of two very depressed people on the beach.” I smile. “We are like the first two people,” I say. “Adam and Eve?” He’s already so full of disbelief I don’t even want to tell him the rest. I shrug. “Sure.” “Go on,” he says. “God put them in the garden and told them not to eat the forbidden fruit, remember?” Now it’s Isaac’s turn to shrug. “Yeah, I guess. Sunday school one-o- one.” “Once they were tempted and ate the fruit they were on their own, exiled from God’s provision and his protection in the place he created for them.” When Isaac doesn’t say anything, I go on. “They leave perfection and have to fend for themselves—hunt, garden, experience cold and death and childbirth.” I flush after the last word leaves my mouth. It was dumb of me to mention childbirth considering Daphne and their unborn baby. But Isaac doesn’t skip a beat. “So you’re saying,” he says, crinkling his eyebrows together, “that so long as we stay here—in the place our kidnapper provided for us—we will be safe and he will keep the heat and food coming?” “It’s just a wild guess, Isaac. I don’t really know.” “So what’s the forbidden fruit?” I tap my finger on the tabletop. “The keypad, maybe…” “This is sick,” he says. “And if one painting means that much, what else is hidden in here?” I don’t want to think about it. “I’ll make dinner tonight,” I say. I look out the window as I peel potatoes over the sink. And then I look down at the peelings, all piled up and gross looking. We should eat those. We will probably be starving soon, wishing we had a sliver of potato skin. I scoop up shreds and hold them in my palm, not sure what to do with them. I counted the potatoes before I chose four of the smallest ones out of the fifty-pound bag. Seventy potatoes. How long could we stretch that? And the flour, and rice and oatmeal? It seemed like a lot, but we had no idea how long we’d be imprisoned here. Imprisoned. Here. I eat the skins. At least they won’t go to waste that way. God. I am grimacing and gagging on my potato skin when I drop the potato I’m holding into the sink and press the heel of my hand to my forehead. I have to focus. Stay positive. I can’t let myself sink into that dark place. My therapist tried to teach me techniques to cope with emotional overload. Why hadn’t I listened? I remember something about a garden … walking through it and touching flowers. Was that what she’d said?

• From Going Clear (2013)

  As soon as she saw who it was, her shoulders slumped, and she walked toward him. Rathbun talked to Miscavige and said that he would get a couple of hotel rooms in Boston and bring Annie back in the morning, but Miscavige was unwilling to risk it. He told Rathbun that he had already arranged for John Travolta’s jet to pick them up a few hours later. Annie and Jim Logan were finally divorced on August 26, 1993. He never saw her again. (She died in 2011 of lung cancer, at the age of fifty- five.) BY HIS ACTIONS, Miscavige showed his instinctive understanding of how to cater to the sense of entitlement that comes with great stardom. It was not just a matter of disposing of awkward personal problems, such as clinging spouses; there were also the endless demands for nourishment of an ego that is always aware of the fragility of success; the longing for privacy that is constantly at war with the demand for recognition; the need to be fortified against ordinariness and feelings of mortality; and the sense that the quality of the material world that surrounds you reflects upon your own value, and therefore everything must be made perfect. These were qualities Miscavige demanded for himself as well. He surrounded Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman with an approving and completely deferential environment, as spotless and odorless as a fairy tale. A special bungalow was prepared for their stay at Gold Base, along with a private rose garden. When the couple longed to play tennis, a court was rehabilitated, at significant expense. Miscavige heard about the couple’s fantasy of running through a field of wildflowers together, so he had Sea Org members plant a section of the desert; when that failed to meet his expectations, the meadow was plowed up and sodded with grass. Miscavige assigned them a personal chef, Sinar Parman, who had cooked for Hubbard, and had a high-end gym constructed that was mainly for the use of Cruise and himself. When a flood triggered a mudslide that despoiled the couple’s romantic bungalow, Miscavige held the entire base responsible, and ordered everyone to work sixteen-hour days until everything was restored to its previous pristine condition. In July 1990, Cruise’s involvement with the church became public in an article in the tabloid Star. (Cruise himself didn’t admit his affiliation until two years later, in an interview with Barbara Walters.) The fact that the information was leaked, probably from a source within the church, was at once a great embarrassment for Miscavige and a relief, because Cruise’s name was now finally linked irrevocably in the public mind with Scientology.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Now, twist like a worm, scream, whine! You will find no mercy in me!” Finally she seemed tired. She tossed the whip aside, stretched out on the ottoman, and rang. The negresses entered. “Untie him!” As they loosened the rope, I fell to the floor like a lump of wood. The black women grinned, showing their white teeth. “Untie the rope around his feet.” They did it, but I was unable to rise. “Come over here, Gregor.” I approached the beautiful woman. Never did she seem more seductive to me than to-day in spite of all her cruelty and contempt. “One step further,” Wanda commanded. “Now kneel down, and kiss my foot.” She extended her foot beyond the hem of white satin, and I, the supersensual fool, pressed my lips upon it. “Now, you won’t lay eyes on me for an entire month, Gregor,” she said seriously. “I want to become a stranger to you, so you will more easily adjust yourself to our new relationship. In the meantime you will work in the garden, and await my orders. Now, off with you, slave!” * * * * * A month has passed with monotonous regularity, heavy work, and a melancholy hunger, hunger for her, who is inflicting all these torments on me. I am under the gardener’s orders; I help him lop the trees and prune the hedges, transplant flowers, turn over the flower beds, sweep the gravel paths; I share his coarse food and his hard cot; I rise and go to bed with the chickens. Now and then I hear that our mistress is amusing herself, surrounded by admirers. Once I heard her gay laughter even down here in the garden. I seem awfully stupid to myself. Was it the result of my present life, or was I so before? The month is drawing to a close—the day after to-morrow. What will she do with me now, or has she forgotten me, and left me to trim hedges and bind bouquets till my dying day? A written order. “The slave Gregor is herewith ordered to my personal service. Wanda Dunajew.” With a beating heart I draw aside the damask curtain on the following morning, and enter the bed-room of my divinity. It is still filled with a pleasant half darkness. “Is it you, Gregor?” she asks, while I kneel before the fire-place, building a fire. I tremble at the sound of the beloved voice. I cannot see her herself; she is invisible behind the curtains of the four-poster bed. “Yes, my mistress,” I reply. “How late is it?” “Past nine o’clock.” “Breakfast.” I hasten to get it, and then kneel down with the tray beside her bed. “Here is breakfast, my mistress.” Wanda draws back the curtains, and curiously enough at the first glance when I see her among the pillows with loosened flowing hair, she seems an absolute stranger, a beautiful woman, but the beloved soft lines are gone.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  He hands me four large white pills. “It’ll just dim it, Senna.” “Okay,” I whisper, letting him drop them in my hand. He hands me a cup of water and I drop all four pills into my mouth. “Isaac,” I say. “Please rest.” He kisses my forehead. “Hush.” When I wake up the room is warm. I’ve noticed that the highlight of most of my days here are waking up and going to sleep. It’s what I remember most about The Caging of Senna and Isaac : wake up; go to sleep; wake up; go to sleep. There is little in between to make a difference; we wander … we eat … but mostly we sleep. And if we’re lucky it’s warm when we wake. Now there is a new sensation—pain. I look around the room. Isaac is asleep on the floor a few feet away. He has a single blanket covering him. It’s not even long enough to cover his feet. I want to give him my blanket, but I don’t know how to stand up. I groan and lean back against the pillows. The painkillers have worn off. I am hungry again. I wonder if he’s eaten, if he’s okay. When did this happen? When did my thoughts shift to Isaac’s needs? I stare at the ceiling. That’s the way it happened with Nick. It started out with him loving me, him being obsessed with me; then, all of a sudden … osmosis. The minute I started freely loving Nick he left me. Three times a day Isaac makes a trip down to the well to get food and restock our wood. We use a bucket to relieve ourselves, and it’s his job to empty that too. He goes carefully. I can hear his steps creaking across the floorboards until he reaches the landing, and then the clomp, clomp, clomp on the stairs. I lose his sound once he’s down the well, but he’s never there for more than five minutes, except when he’s doing laundry or throwing our trash over the side of the cliff. Laundry consists of filling the bathtub with snow and soap and swishing the clothes around until you think they’re clean. We never had a shortage of soap, there are stacks of white bars, wrapped in a filmy white paper on the bottom shelf of the pantry. They smell like butter, and on more than one occasion when I was bent over with hunger I thought about eating them. Isaac takes the smaller of the two flashlights—the one I found when I fucked up my leg. He leaves me the big one. He leaves it right next to my bed and tells me not to use it. But as soon as I hear his socked feet on the stairs, my fingers reach down to find the switch that turns it on.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Audre: Yes. I remember reading in the children’s room of the library, I couldn’t have been past the second or third grade, but I remember the book. It was illustrated by Arthur Rackham, a book of poems. These were old books; the library in Harlem used to get the oldest books, in the worst condition. Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners” — I will never forget that poem. Adrienne: Where the traveler rides up to the door of the empty house? Audre: That’s right. He knocks at the door and nobody answers. “ ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.” That poem imprinted itself on me. And finally, he’s beating down the door and nobody answers, and he has a feeling that there really is somebody in there. Then he turns his horse and says, “ ‘Tell them I came, and nobody answered. That I kept my word.’ ” I used to recite that poem to myself all the time. It was one of my favorites. And if you’d asked me, “What is it about?” I don’t think I could have told you. But this was the first reason for my own writing, my need to say things I couldn’t say otherwise when I couldn’t find other poems to serve. Adrienne: You had to make your own. Audre: There were so many complex emotions for which poems did not exist. I had to find a secret way to express my feelings. I used to memorize my poems. I would say them out; I didn’t use to write them down. I had this long fund of poetry in my head. And I remember trying when I was in high school not to think in poems. I saw the way other people thought, and it was an amazement to me — step by step, not in bubbles up from chaos that you had to anchor with words … I really do believe I learned this from my mother. Adrienne: Learned what from your mother?

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  I am hungry for Black women who will not turn away from me even if they do not agree with what I say. We are, after all, talking about different combinations of the same borrowed sounds. Sometimes exploring our differences feels like marching out to war. I hurl myself with trepidation into the orbit of every Black woman I want to reach, advancing with the best of what I have to offer held out at arms length before me — myself. Does it feel different to her? At the same time as I am terrified, expecting betrayal, rejection, the condemnations of laughter, is she feeling judged by me? Most of the Black women I know think I cry too much, or that I’m too public about it. I’ve been told that crying makes me seem soft and therefore of little consequence. As if our softness has to be the price we pay out for power, rather than simply the one that’s paid most easily and most often. I fight nightmare images inside my own self, see them, own them, know they did not destroy me before and will not destroy me now if I speak them out, admit how they have scarred me, that my mother taught me to survive at the same time as she taught me to fear my own Blackness. “Don’t trust white people because they mean us no good and don’t trust anyone darker than you because their hearts are as Black as their faces.” (And where did that leave me, the darkest one?) It is painful even now to write it down. How many messages like that come down to all of us, and in how many different voices, how many different ways? And how can we expunge these messages from our consciousness without first recognizing what it was they were saying, and how destructive they were ? IV What does it take to be tough? Learned cruelty? Now there is bound to be a voice saying that Black women have always helped one another, haven’t we? And that is the paradox of our inner conflict. We have a strong and ancient tradition of bonding and mutual support, and the memorized threads of that tradition exist within each of us, in opposition to the anger and suspicion engendered by self-hate. When the world moved against me with a disapproving frown / It was sister put the ground back under my feet . * Hearing those words sung has always provoked the most profound and poignant sense of loss within me for something I wanted to feel and could not because it had never happened for me. There are some Black women for whom it has.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  S. Taylor, New York Times , October 26, 1983, p. A19. 6. A. Lewis, New York Times , November 3, 1983 and A. Cockburn, Village Voice , November 8, 1983, p. 10. 7. S. Mydans, New York Times , January 15, 1984, p. 9. 8. Christian Science Monitor , November 7, 1983. 9. A. Schlesinger, Jr., Wall Street Journal , October 26, 1983. 10. C. Sunshine, ed., Grenada — The Peaceful Revolution (E.P.I.C.A., Washington, D.C., 1982) . 11. C. Sunshine, The Guardian , December 28, 1983. 12. E. Ray and B. Schaap, “U.S. Crushes Caribbean Jewel,” Covert Action Bulletin # 20 , Winter 1984, p. 11. 13. Ibid., p. 13. 14. Ibid., p. 5. 15. S. Taylor, New York Times , November 6, 1983, p. 20. 16. Ibid. 17. Washington Post , November 21, 1983. 18. CBS Evening News, December 18, 1983. 19. The London Guardian , November 4, 1983. 20. Grenada — The Peaceful Revolution , p. 87. 21. Carriacou — In the Mainstream of the Revolution (Fedon Publishers, St. Georges, Grenada, 1982), pp. 54–57. 22. Slogan of the Grenadian Revolution * I spent a week in Grenada in late December, 1983, barely two months after the U.S. invasion of the Black Caribbean island my parents left some sixty years earlier. It was my second visit in five years. This is an interim essay, a report written as the rest of Sister Outsider was already being typeset. Notes from a Trip to Russia * S INCE I’VE RETURNED from Russia a few weeks ago, I’ve been dreaming a lot. At first I dreamt about Moscow every night. Sometimes my lover and I had returned there; sometimes I would be in warmer, familiar places I had visited; sometimes in different, unfamiliar cities, cold, white, strange. In one dream, I was making love to a woman behind a stack of clothing in Gumm’s Department Store in Moscow. She was ill, and we went upstairs, where I said to a matron, “We have to get her to the hospital.” The matron said, “All right, you take her over there and tell them that she needs a kidney scan and a brain scan …” And I said, “No, they’re not going to do that for me.” And she looked at me very strangely and she said, “Of course they will.” And I realized I was in Russia, and medicine and doctor bills and all the rest of that are free. My dreams don’t come every night anymore, but it seems as if they’ve gotten deeper and deeper so that I awake not really knowing any of the content of them but only knowing that I’ve just dreamt about Russia again. For a while, in my dreams, Russia became a mythic representation of that socialism which does not yet exist anywhere I have been.