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

  The Church of God was his home, and that Church knows no boundaries of nationality and language. The world was his parish. Having left the papacy, he still remained a Catholic in the best sense of that word, and prayed and labored for the unity of all believers. Like his friend Melanchthon, he deeply deplored the divisions of Protestantism. To heal them he was willing to cross ten oceans. Thus he wrote, in reply to Archbishop Cranmer, who had invited him (March 20, 1552), with Melanchthon and Bullinger, to a meeting in Lambeth Palace for the purpose of drawing up a consensus creed for the Reformed Churches.1222 After expressing his zeal for the Church universal, he continues (Oct. 14, 1552):— "I wish, indeed, it could be brought about that men of learning and authority from the different churches should meet somewhere, and after thoroughly discussing the different articles of faith, should, by a unanimous decision, deliver down to posterity some certain rule of doctrine. But amongst the chief evils of the age must be reckoned the marked division between the different churches, insomuch that human society can hardly be said to be established among us, much less a holy communion of the members of Christ, which, though all profess it, few indeed really observe with sincerity. But if the clergy are more lukewarm than they should be, the fault lies chiefly with their sovereigns, who are either so involved in their secular affairs, as to neglect altogether the welfare of the Church, and indeed religion itself, or so well content to see their own countries at peace as to care little about others; and thus the members being divided, the body of the Church lies lacerated. "As to myself, if I should be thought of any use, I would not, if need be, object to cross ten seas for such a purpose. If the assisting of England were alone concerned, that would be motive enough with me. Much more, therefore, am I of opinion, that I ought to grudge no labor or trouble, seeing that the object in view is an agreement among the learned, to be drawn up by the weight of their authority according to Scripture, in order to unite Churches seated far apart. But my insignificance makes me hope that I may be spared. I shall have discharged my part by offering up my prayers for what may have been done by others. Melanchthon is so far off that it takes some time to exchange letters. Bullinger has, perhaps, already answered you. I only wish that I had the power, as I have the inclination, to serve the cause."1223

• From The Art of Memoir

  redolent of chemical coolant—would slosh out onto my bare feet. Getting doused by that splash of freezing condensation was like a physical baptism miraculously dousing me in that single, living instant. It’s as if memory’s eye suddenly flipped open. Like many such scenes, it comes to me in florid present tense. I look down and see the giant bamboo-bottom flip-flops I’d bought in California, with their black velvet straps, getting drenched with cold water. And I am in that car again. I can see the derby hat Mother wore—a pimp hat, she called it. She’d bought me one, too, in Houston. And she wears a copper bracelet that turns her wrist green because somebody told her it helps with arthritis in her hand. And another sense memory comes: I smell peaches, which we bought by the bushel in Arkansas. Also vodka from the screwdrivers Mother drank all the way down. I rest inside those sense memories, and a phrase comes to me— peaches galore. Mother says we have peaches galore, and I say, Wasn’t that some burlesque dancer’s name? And Mother says, That was Pussy Galore. Her saying the word pussy is almost as wince- inducing as watching the savagery with which she devours a peach. And I remember feeling cooped up with her—a luxury in some ways, since her attention was hard to come by. But I also recall longing to run away. Those conflicting desires held the emotional fuel in that chapter. And the memories start flying at me like bats swooping out of the past—my reading aloud to her an early English version of One Hundred Years of Solitude. That novel makes it in, and the phrase about Pussy Galore; the derby hats do a cameo. But the copper bracelet and the air conditioner vanish. And that beautiful Iowa corn, the sheer order and wealth of it—those rich farms with large white houses—that’s the kind of American scene I longed to enter. It opposes my squalid hometown and Mother’s own Dust Bowl childhood. The cornfield is an apt symbol for what I aspired to, at the time. Folks from normal childhoods might fear the tidy repetition of the rows. To me, they looked like an order that lent comfort. So I used the image to begin the chapter.

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

  "Alas! it was but too true, the last drops of that shattering fluid were still oozing from me. My mother was standing by my bedside, in flesh and blood. Mine, then, had not been a dream! "But, where was my sister, or the girl I had enjoyed? Moreover, was this stiff rod I was holding in my hand, mine or Teleny's? "Surely I was alone and in my bed. Then what did my mother want with me? And how did that loathsome poodle, standing there on its hind legs leering at me, get into my room? "I finally came to my senses, and saw that the poodle was only my shirt, which I had thrown on a chair, before going to bed. Being now thoroughly awake, my mother made me understand that hearing me groan and shriek, she had come in to see if I were unwell. Of course I hastened to assure her that I was in perfect health, and had only been the prey of a frightful nightmare. She thereupon put her fresh hand upon my hot forehead. The soothing touch of her soft hand cooled the fire burning within my brain, and allayed the fever raging in my blood. "When I was quietened, she made me drink a bumper of sugared water flavoured with essence of orange-flowers, and then left me. I once more dropped off to sleep. 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.

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

  "When was it that you met Teleny again?" "Not for some time afterwards. The fact is that although I continued to feel irresistibly attracted towards him, drawn as it were by an impelling power the strength of which I could at times hardly withstand, still I continued to avoid him. "Whenever he played in public I always went to hear him—or rather, to look at him; and I only lived during those short moments when he was on the stage. My glasses would then be rivetted upon him; my eyes gloated upon his heavenly figure, so full of youth, life, and manhood. "The longing that I felt to press my mouth on his beautiful mouth and parted lips was so intense that it always made my penis water. "At times the space between us seemed to lessen and dwindle in such a way that I felt as though I could breathe his warm and scented breath—nay, I actually seemed to feel the contact of his body against my own. "The sensation produced by the mere thought that his skin was touching mine excited my nervous system in such a way that the intensity of this barren pleasure produced at first a pleasant numbness over my whole body, which being prolonged, soon turned into a dull pain. "He himself always appeared to feel my presence in the theatre, for his eyes invariably looked for me until they pierced the densest crowd to find me out. I knew, however, that he could not really see me in the corner where I was ensconced, either in the pit, the gallery, or at the bottom of some box. Still, go whithersoever I would, his glances were always directed towards me. Ah, those eyes! as unfathomable as the dim water of a well. Even now, as I remember them after these many years, my heart beats, and I feel my head grow giddy thinking of them. If you had seen those eyes, you would know what that burning languor which poets are always writing about really is. "Of one thing I was justly proud. Since that famous evening of the charity concert, he played—if not in a more theoretically correct way—far more brilliantly and more sensationally than he had ever done before. "His whole heart now poured itself out in those voluptuous Hungarian melodies, and all those whose blood was not frozen with envy and age were entranced by that music. "His name, therefore, began to atract large audiences, and although musical critics were divided in their opinions, the papers always had long articles about him." "And—being so much in love with him—you had the fortitude to suffer, and yet to resist the temptation of seeing him." "I was young and inexperienced, therefore moral; for what is morality but prejudice?" "Prejudice?"

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Even today, I close my eyes and wish for all the world that Paula had an enormous, bevel-pointed organ stirring within me. As yet, I haven’t confided to Paula that I fantasize that her elongated clitoris is Anjou’s animal maleness, since I feel she might be disturbed, thinking I would prefer an animal to herself, which is quite absurd. And yet the association persists, and I like it. [Letter] LisaAlthough I am married, most of my fantasies are about lesbians, and I continue to have occasional lesbian experiences. When my lesbian friend is making love to me, masturbating me, I climax to the thought of her having intercourse with me using a dildo. I suppose I began having fantasies about the age of sixteen. Then, my fantasies were of going to bed with a man, having intercourse, but not having a climax. Now, when I am with my husband, my fantasies are often of animals. I imagine that he and I are lying on the bed, when a dog comes into the room and begins to lick me. I then masturbate the dog, get onto my knees, and the dog mounts me. I like to imagine that the dog ejaculates into me. I imagine that my husband mounts the dog as it mounts me. My other fantasy is of a donkey. I imagine that my husband has sold me to an Arab, and that I am in the desert. My slave master brings his friend to watch me, their new entertainment. I am told I must entertain the animal, the donkey. I follow this through from beginning to end: the animal is led in and I masturbate and suck it. When the donkey is excited, it mounts me from behind. I like to take all of its tool and it ejaculates into me. But my fantasies with my lesbian friend are the most exciting; it is then that the man’s tool, her dildo, becomes real and totally satisfies me. [Letter] ZiziMy name is Zizi. I am French and militant in the “Mouvement de Libération de la Femme” [Women’s Lib]. As far as my establishment in time is concerned, I’m twenty-three years old. I think that female sexuality is too hidden by taboos and inhibitions, that is why I don’t hesitate to express some of my so-called fantasies. (In spite of my poor English, your curiosity of searching in that area excites me, I must admit.)

• From Going Clear (2013)

  In that respect, science fiction and theology have much in common. Some of the most closely guarded secrets of Scientology were originally published in other guises in Hubbard’s science fiction. Certainly, the same mind that roamed so freely through imaginary universes might be inclined to look at the everyday world and suspect that there was something more behind the surface reality. The broad canvas of science fiction allowed Hubbard to think in large-scale terms about the human condition. He was bold. He was fanciful. He could easily invent an elaborate, plausible universe. But it is one thing to make that universe believable, and another to believe it. That is the difference between art and religion. HUBBARD NOW LIVED two lives: one on the farm in Port Orchard, surrounded by his parents and Polly and the kids; the other in New York, where he rented an apartment on the Upper West Side. The city rewarded him with the recognition he craved. He enjoyed frequent lunches at the Knickerbocker Hotel with his colleagues in the American Fiction Guild, where he could swap tales and schmooze with editors. He also became a member of the prestigious Explorers Club, which added credibility to his frequently told stories of adventure. “ In his late twenties, Hubbard was a tall, well-built man with bright red hair, a pale complexion, and a long-nosed face that gave him the look of a reincarnated Pan,” a fellow science-fiction writer, L. Sprague de Camp, later recalled. “He arranged in his New York apartment a curtained inclosure the size of a telephone booth, lit by a blue light bulb, in which he could work fast without distraction.” The fact that Hubbard was a continent away from his wife offered him the opportunity to court other women, which he did so openly that he became an object of wonder among his writer colleagues. Ron blamed Polly for his philandering. “ Because of her coldness physically, the falsity of her pretensions, I believed myself a near eunuch,” he wrote in a private memoir (which the church disputes) some years later. “When I found I was attractive to other women, I had many affairs. But my failure to please Polly made me always pay so much attention to my momentary mate that I derived small pleasure myself. This was an anxiety neurosis which cut down my natural powers.” One of those momentary mates was named Helen. “ I loved her and she me,” Hubbard recorded. “The affair would have lasted had not Polly found out.” Polly had discovered two letters to different women that Hubbard left in the mailbox when he was back in Port Orchard; she took the letters, read them, then vengefully switched the envelopes, and put them back in the mail. For a while, Ron and Polly didn’t speak. They were apparently reconciled in 1940, when the two of them cruised to Alaska on their thirty-foot ketch, the Magician , which they called Maggie .

• From My People (2022)

  Her best friend then is still coming and has a daughter, fourteen, who is Mrs. Nash’s oldest daughter’s best friend. They both spend a lot of time horseback riding. At a get-together at her rented house one night—she and her husband, Robert, an architect, are building here—Mrs. Nash’s cousin and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Harold Johnson, told how they had fallen in love with the Vineyard. Now that they are retiring, they plan to maintain here all year round. Mr. Johnson drives a taxi, dabbles in other businesses, and serves as president of the local Alcoholics Anonymous and also of the Martha’s Vineyard NAACP, which has about seventy-five members, mostly white. “We don’t have any real issues here,” he said. “Mostly we raise scholarship money for the local children.” During the winter, he said, there are about thirty-five to forty black families here. Most of them, he said, are elderly and include the Portuguese as well. Still, in addition to the Chop area, there are other places on the island where blacks do not own property. The town circle, for instance, at one time had a restrictive covenant prohibiting anyone from owning property there other than members of the Town Meeting, a fundamentalist religious group. No one seems to know what has happened to the covenant, but it is apparent that the tradition has not been broken. Bruce Lewellyn, a New York businessman, who along with a Puerto Rican and Jewish partner, owns a multimillion-dollar chain of eleven supermarkets in Manhattan and the Bronx, owns a house that overlooks the Oak Bluffs beach. While his family—which includes his wife, Jackie, whom he met here, their two children, his cousin, United States Customs Court Judge James L. Watson, and his family—have come here out of tradition, he said, the houses for blacks have become available mostly as the result of the exodus of whites to the more remote parts of the island. But property values, at one time low, seem to be rising. Ten years ago, the Edleys (she acts in a soap opera now and he is an official of the Ford Foundation) joined with five other couples from Philadelphia, where they were living then, and purchased their twelve-bedroom house for $8,000. This year, after a decade in which each couple contributed $25 a month, the six couples finally paid for it. They could sell it now, they say, for twice that. But they don’t want to. One reason is that altogether they have fourteen children. One of their neighbors is Senator Edward W. Brooke, Republican of Massachusetts, whose spacious lot includes a tennis court. But despite their professional and economic attainments, the gap between them and their white counterparts vividly exists. “For thirty years we’ve [blacks and whites] been living side by side up here,” said one of the black professionals, “and there is hope—but only for a continuing peaceful coexistence.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  He was one of those clean, featureless men who can move for decades on the periphery of a pool game buying his fair share of beers without ever uttering a full sentence. Blue had bought Lecia and me each a doll, curly-headed, near as tall as ourselves. Lecia’s was blond, mine black-headed. Under the sedan’s dome light, mine stared from its box on the wide back seat with an indifference bold enough to edge over into insult. A copper wire garroted her head in place. Her wrists and feet were likewise strapped down. Highway lights started streaking over the cellophane mask above her perfect features. She gazed out sullen. Her cold blue eyes announced that she wanted some other girl, not me. Well, I wanted my very own mother, and I’d have told her so, too, if the thought didn’t put a lump in my throat. Instead I told her—out loud, I guess—“People in hell want ice water.” Daddy said, “Say what?” And I told him I’d kill for a glass of ice water. Surely Daddy said more to me in the car. But any other words were wiped clean from my head. He sounded real country talking to Blue while we drove. “Now you take old Raymond there…” he was saying to Blue. But it came out, “Nah yew tike ol Ryemon thar…” And slow, like he was addressing a deaf man. In the house, Daddy slipped his jean jacket over a kitchen stool. We were fixing to eat, he said. Lecia unstacked the white mela-mine picnic plates on the plywood bar. They looked crude as Flintstone plates after our Colorado china. Each had three plastic compartments so you could keep your butter beans out of your greens, and the greens’ pot liquor from sogging up your cornbread. Daddy stood at the stove working with a long wooden spoon inside a pot of something muddy. He dribbled water from the silver kettle into the pot, and I heard it loosen up. In a few minutes you could smell garlic and pork back, and then came the steamy idea of sheer celery slices in a mess of red beans and rice. “This here’ll be even better tomorrow,” he said. He’d also made a wheel of cornbread in an iron skillet, the bottom-crust burnt first in hot lard on the stovetop the way I liked. Lecia cut hers off and flipped it across the butter dish at me. There was a dish of raw green onions we ate between bites. And I nearly finished the whole cereal bowl of collards, spoon after slotted spoonful. “Pokey, you know what I’d do to them greens?” Daddy said. He didn’t even wait for me to say what, just doctored them with vinegary sprinkles from a jar of yellow Tabasco peppers. He kept looking up to tell Lecia he loved her with all his heart, but mine was the plate he fussed over.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  The turntable plays “Parigi mi cara.” The vanilla bean in the tube is reddish black and wrinkled up like the snaky root of something, or a bird’s long claw. When I look past it, I see Mother’s face wearing that thousand-yard stare out the back door. Her jaw is jutting out and held tight to keep her East Coast lockjaw accent going. The back door she’s staring through opens on a wet black night. You can smell banana from the tree she planted outside last summer (a plantain tree, really), and the thick sweet of honeysuckle. The cape jasmine bush has, for no reason at all, burst out these white waxy blooms. It’s winter and the bush shouldn’t be blooming at all. Mother says the smell reminds her of the gardenia corsage she wore on her wrist that night she went to see Callas. She pulled up to the big fountain in a taxi behind a long black car with silver bud vases on the insides, next to the windows. At this point, I pipe up that I’ve never seen a fountain, other than the water-drinking kind in school. And this whaps Mother loose from the memory for a second. She looks at me full in the face and asks is my childhood that deprived. Then Lecia says that I’m full of shit, that I’ve seen the fountain at the bank (the one high school kids are always putting soap bubbles in), and the other fountain at the Houston museum, not to mention umpteen-zillion fountains in books on Florentine architecture that Mother has dragged me through. Lecia says I’m just interrupting to hear myself talk and should shut up. And I say it’s Lecia who’s interrupting. Mother finally sighs her stop-bickering sigh. For a minute she looks out the screen door at that big rectangle of semitropical night. We get quiet and watch her watching. Then the music surges a little, like a wave rising up, and she fades away from us, back into her Manhattan taxi outside the Metropolitan again. She reminds us about the limo up ahead of her, and says that out of that limo comes a white satin high heel and the drapy tail end of a white sequined evening gown slipping under the hem of a coat that looked to her like sheared beaver dyed the color of cream. Then on top of that shoe and gown pours none other than Marlene Dietrich. (If Daddy had been present, he would have reminded us at length at this point that Dietrich had kissed him full on the mouth during a USO show. Hence my middle name: Marlene.) For a minute her eyes lock on Mother’s through the glass before the autograph hounds swooped around.

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

  legal struggle and comforting hope of Judaism, repeat themselves in every individual believer; for man is made for Christ, and "his heart is restless, till it rests in Christ."52 § 9. Judaism. Literature. I. Sources. 1. The Canonical Books of the O. and N. Testaments. 2. The Jewish Apocrypha. Best edition by Otto Frid. Fritzsche: Libri Apocryphi Veteris Testamenti Graece. Lips. 1871. German Commentary by Fritzsche and Grimm, Leipz. 1851–’60 (in the "Exeget. Handbuch zum A. T."); English Com. by Dr. E. C. Bissell, N. York, 1880 (vol. xxv. in Schaff’s ed. of Lange’s Bible-Work). 3. Josephus (a Jewish scholar, priest, and historian, patronized by Vespasian and Titus, b. A.D. 37, d. about 103): Antiquitates Judaicae (jArcaiologiva jIoudaikhv), in 20 books, written first (but not preserved) in Aramaic, and then reproduced in Greek, A.D. 94, beginning with the creation and coming down to the outbreak of the rebellion against the Romans, A.D. 66, important for the post-exilian period. Bellum Judaicum (peri; tou' jIoudai>vkou' polevmou), in 7 books, written about 75, from his own personal observation (as Jewish general in Galilee, then as Roman captive, and Roman agent), and coming down to the destruction of Jerusalem, A.D. 70. Contra. Apionem, a defence of the Jewish nation against the calumnies of the grammarian Apion. His Vita or Autobiography was written after A.D. 100.—Editions of Josephus by Hudson, Oxon. 1720, 2 vols. fol.; Havercamp, Amst. 1726, 2 fol.; Oberthür, Lips. 1785, 3 vols.; Richter, Lips. 1827, 6 vols.; Dindorf, Par. 1849, 2 vols.; Imm. Bekker, Lips. 1855, 6 vols. The editions of Havercamp and Dindorf are the best. English translations by Whiston and Traill, often edited, in London, New York, Philadelphia. German translations by Hedio, Ott, Cotta, Demme. 4. Philo of Alexandria (d. after A.D. 40) represents the learned and philosophical (Platonic) Judaism. Best ed. by Mangey, Lond. 1742, 2 fol., and Richter, Lips. 1828, 2 vols. English translation by C. D. Yonge, London, 1854, 4 vols. (in Bohn’s "Ecclesiastical Library"). 5. The Talmud (T'l]mWd i.e. Doctrine) represents the traditional, post-exilian, and anti-Christian Judaism. It consists of the Mishna (!iv]n:h ,, deutevrwsi" Repetition of the Law), from the end of the second century, and the Gemara (gÒm;r;a i.e. Perfect Doctrine, from gÉm'r to bring to an end). The latter exists in two forms, the Palestinian Gemara, completed at Tiberias about A.D. 350, and the Babylonian Gemara of the sixth century. Best eds. of the Talmud by Bomberg, Ven. 1520 sqq. 12 vols. fol., and Sittenfeld, Berlin, 1862–’68, 12 vols. fol. Latin version of the Mishna by G. Surenhusius, Amst. 1698–1703, 6 vols. fol.; German by J. J. Rabe, Onolzbach, 1760–’63. 6. Monumental Sources: of Egypt (see the works of Champollion, Young, Rosellini, Wilkinson, Birch, Mariette, Lepsius, Bunsen, Ebers, Brugsch, etc.); of Babylon and Assyria (see Botta, Layard, George Smith, Sayce, Schrader, etc.). 7. Greek and Roman authors: Polybius (d. b.c. 125), Diodorus Siculus (contemporary of Caesar), Strabo ((d. A.D. 24), Tacitus (d. about 117), Suetonius(d. about 130), Justinus (d. after A.D. 160).

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  …I am a divorcee and live alone, but am not ever lonely, even though I do not go out and about much. My “fantasy” lover is always with me day and night, and I find her very exciting. She is a “masculine”-looking woman dressed in “drag” (men’s dress). She is very sweet and she takes me out every Saturday and Sunday evening. She works in the Ambulance Services as a driver [senior]. When we go to bed she is very gentle and understanding and a great lover—much better than a man. I would never exchange her for a man. Every time we have sex it is more exciting than the last time, and we manage to make love often (about twelve times per night—when I feel hot). Each action short, fast, but satisfying. Of course, this is just a fantasy or daydream, but the woman exists; however, not in my life (lucky devil who has her). I have only seen her in passing. I have been holding the “torch” for her for nearly six years now. …there’s this giant centipede or prawn, or a cross between the two, crawling into me headfirst, my legs being really wide apart to accommodate him. As he crawls into me, his thousands of fuzzy legs fall off onto the sheets around me. He tickles and excites me as he undulates and wiggles from side to side getting further and further in, and he becomes drenched with my nectar, which he licks up and is strengthened by. He goes on up and up. This all takes hours as he is ten thousand feet long, but I like every inch of it. The next morning, happily exhausted, I begin the ritual of carefully gathering up the thousands of orange fuzzy legs that surround me, and take them in a wicker basket to the kitchen. There I dump them into my blue enamel jammaking pot, and add sugar, orange peel, lemon, nutmeg, banana peel scrapings, and a bit of hash when available (very optional). At the hardball, or so-called crack stage of cooling, I pour the orange mass into penis-shaped molds (can be bought in your nearest sex shop), and allow them to cool and harden. To be sucked later when desired, but I usually give mine away to my friends, as the penis-shaped mold itself is far more satisfying and I share him with no one. You’d be surprised how many of my friends drop by for their sucks. As you can tell, these aren’t things I really think about while fucking. They’re not even masturbatory fantasies, just the kind of idle daydreams I have after a bath, while I’m lying down for an hour or so, half asleep, half awake, waiting until it’s time to get dressed and go out for the evening.

• From The Art of Memoir

  So he can devote a chapter to butterfly hunting, while his father being shot in exile occupies less than a moment, and the two events in no way seem off balance in the writer’s account books. Of course, it’s his father who taught him to stalk through the fields with a net, so in some way the folded, papery insects are paternal heirlooms, short-lived flying flowers—sacred icons from the divine patriarch known for his cutlass and boxed dueling pistols. The whole Russian revolution that ruined his family in every sense is mere background music to Nabokov’s refinement. It will take a keen eye and keener taste and the keenest of philosophical minds to rescue his lost beloveds from the ravages of time, and it’s his inability to control time externally—to resurrect them—that serves as his inner enemy. In a great memoir, some aspect of the writer’s struggle for self often serves as the book’s organizing principle, and the narrator’s battle to become whole rages over the book’s trajectory. So being an aficionado of beauty and philosophy makes Nabokov’s parents “alive” for him in the book. In this way, developing his aesthetic sensibility becomes a life-or-death matter, not a peacock’s vain preening. Part of his singular skill—manifested in his voice—is translating philosophical ideas into physical or carnal metaphors; in this way he is not unlike Babel and Batuman. He’ll somehow smoosh ideas into unforgettable images. Instead of saying, as I might, dully enough, “The whole universe is small compared to a single memory,” Nabokov injects feeling into the idea—and makes it syntactically memorable as hell—by conjuring his own wonder with an image we’ll find wonderful ourselves. How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words! Like any master writer, he’s found the “trick” of doing what he most excels at: structuring the voice so that his talent sits in the foreground.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Jean Genet I It would appear that love is dead. Or very likely in a bad way. As to those practitioners of romantic love who linger on, the two most solicitous, Genet and Nabokov, are of suspicious orthodoxy. Lolita is as much a matter of kidnap, rape, and coercion as the terrible passion of a lost enamored soul who has followed his culture’s blandishment of a child-wife to its literal conclusion. For the rest, hostility between the sexes has handily outdistanced romance in interest, a development due less to the inherent faults of the romantic myth (a sentimental idealism and traditionally, a rather inhibited sexuality) than it is to the animus toward women which their gains in this century have provoked from jealous patriarchal sentiment. The mistress or beloved is dethroned, even defamed; she has become a villain, a nuisance, or a deserving victim. As we all know, it has been open season even on mothers for some two decades. Those who continue to display a romantic enthusiasm for the amorous, tend like Humbert Humbert or Genet, to be members of the “sexual minorities.” There is a sense in which the homosexual is our current “nigger” of love, his1 sexual life a bigger social risk and surrounded by a more hostile environment, at any moment liable to pounce in ridicule or condemnation, than ever threatened Mailer’s bullying “White Negro.” In a great many places homosexual acts are still crimes under law, whereas Mailer’s heroes, eager to offend society, must push on all the way to murder. In nearly any bar Divine could stand at bay and hear “herself” judged: She smiled all around, and each one answered only by turning away, but that was a way of answering. The whole cafe thought that the smile of (for the colonel: the invert; for the shopkeepers: the fairy; for the banker and the waiters: the fag; for the gigolos: that one; etc.) was despicable. Divine did not press the point. From a tiny black satin purse she took a few coins which she laid noiselessly on the marble table. The cafe disappeared, and Divine was metamorphosed into one of those monsters that are painted on walls-chimeras or griffins—for a customer, in spite of himself, murmured a magic word as he thought of her: “Homoseckshual.”2 In pariah state there is some magic still, and the myth of romantic love has always prospered on the social hostility directed at star-crossed lovers, adulterers, or those who transgress the boundaries of caste and class. Its clandestine and forbidden character alone tends to grant homosexual love the glamour waning in literary accounts of heterosexuality, lost together with their guarded inhibitions and, regrettably, their tenderness.

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

  An hour full of torments. Finally there was a rustling in the bushes to one side, and they returned. 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. I love no one. I used to love you, as ardently, as passionately, as deeply as it was possible for me to love, but now I don’t love even you any more; my heart is a void, dead, and this makes me sad.” “Wanda!” I exclaimed, deeply moved.

• From The Art of Memoir

  and then he’ll twist out of present reality, reeling the point of view inside his own head, where we “hear” through the warp of his psyche. His interior is the home place for the reader, the helicopter pickup point. Whenever we wander off into some awful jungle scene, we do so alongside that richly observant speaker. It’s Herr’s desire for a solidity inside—for some truth—and his inability to get a firm grasp on that truth that keeps him fumbling around like a blind man. Now a practicing Buddhist in a fairly rigorous (as I understand it) Tibetan mode, Herr recently told me by phone that before Vietnam he hadn’t known we’re not just responsible for all we do, but for all we see, too. This frees us from blaming or judging anybody. (In this, it echoes my Catholic notion of original sin—we’re all the same!) “Great bodhisattvas get sick and die from taking on the suffering of others. They pray to be reborn in hell.” (Hell being the first place Jesus went after the cross.) Reading Michael Herr puts you in touch not just with the brutality we humans are capable of, but with some nobility that persists and persists and is made glorious by refusing defeat in horror’s presence. It’s not sweet and noble to die for one’s country, but anyone who insists on leaning into the light in the face of so much darkness enacts perhaps the hardest-won of fortitudes. A friend of mine recently diagnosed with one of the scarier cancers spoke of the unexpected comfort reading Dispatches gave him. On the phone, Herr was so touched. “Doesn’t get any better than that. I always tell people, ‘Don’t worry, it has a happy ending.’” II. How He Does It (Note: Again, the lapidary work here—intended for the practitioner— may bore the general reader.) If you bring a jeweler’s loupe to Michael Herr’s first chapter, analyzing it line by line the way poets do with a gloss or exegesis of an otherwise mysterious work, you can isolate that memoir’s key machinery. That’s what I get my grad students to do for any stylistic

• From My People (2022)

  Here was the point where, in my mind, Brown and West and Short Streets, and 115th Street as well, all entertained children playing hopscotch or climbing a mulberry tree. I knew I was trying to unravel a fusion of my childhood and the reality of the moment in which I stood. I knew also that though my awareness of the world around me had increased with the years, I still held the memories and impressions of the five-year-old I had been. A Trip to LevertonThe New Yorker APRIL 24, 1965 The sliding doors that led into my bedroom were difficult to open. One spring morning while I was at home in Georgia on a break from school, I was awakened by someone trying to open them, and when I called out, my grandmother answered. I was sleeping late, having the night before been with some friends from the local colleges who belonged to a student organization called the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights. They had worked late into the night preparing a manifesto, which they hoped would be printed in the next day’s papers, stating the grievances, philosophy, intentions, and demands of the student movement. I had been in school in Michigan, a thousand miles away, when this phase of the social protest began with a sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I had kept up with the news of it because it was the first widely publicized movement by Negroes who were all of my generation. Soon after, however, I had become much more involved. My mother had called to tell me that first one, then another of my friends had been arrested and was in jail, refusing bond, for nonviolent protests. They were all students in one or another of the five small liberal arts colleges in the Atlanta University Center. I felt useless on my anonymous and detached campus. I remembered high school, especially two sisters from whom I was so inseparable that most people thought we were all three sisters. Together we attended every football game our team played. When we were not together, we kept in touch by phone, and what we talked about was of no special consequence to anyone but ourselves. We were taught that we were children of middle-class Americans, and although our parents were proud to be Negroes, the fact that we were Negroes was emphasized at school mainly during annual Negro History Week. Montgomery and Little Rock made some impression, though a brief one. But now, just one year after high school, the moment was theirs, with all its historic implications. The realities of the day transcended their comfortable surroundings, and I was not a part of their physical suffering. Our spring vacations did not coincide, and while I was home I tried to lend them support—mostly moral—wherever and whenever I could. And if my being with them late into the night didn’t really help the movement, it nevertheless gave me a sense of participation.

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

  Really the beautiful woman up there doesn’t interest me very much, for I am in love with someone else, and terribly unhappy at that; far more unhappy than the Knight of Toggenburg or the Chevalier in Manon l’Escault, because the object of my adoration is of stone. In the garden, in the tiny wilderness, there is a graceful little meadow on which a couple of deer graze peacefully. On this meadow is a stone statue of Venus, the original of which, I believe, is in Florence. This Venus is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in all my life. That, however, does not signify much, for I have seen few beautiful women, or rather few women at all. In love too, I am a dilettante who never got beyond the preparation, the first act. But why talk in superlatives, as if something that is beautiful could be surpassed? It is sufficient to say that this Venus is beautiful. I love her passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile. I literally adore her. I often lie reading under the leafy covering of a young birch when the sun broods over the forest. Often I visit that cold, cruel mistress of mine by night and lie on my knees before her, with the face pressed against the cold pedestal on which her feet rest, and my prayers go up to her. The rising moon, which just now is waning, produces an indescribable effect. It seems to hover among the trees and submerges the meadow in its gleam of silver. The goddess stands as if transfigured, and seems to bathe in the soft moonlight. Once when I was returning from my devotions by one of the walks leading to the house, I suddenly saw a woman’s figure, white as stone, under the illumination of the moon and separated from me merely by a screen of trees. It seemed as if the beautiful woman of marble had taken pity on me, become alive, and followed me. I was seized by a nameless fear, my heart threatened to burst, and instead— Well, I am a dilettante. As always, I broke down at the second stanza; rather, on the contrary, I did not break down, but ran away as fast as my legs would carry me. * * * * * What an accident! Through a Jew, dealing in photographs I secured a picture of my ideal. It is a small reproduction of Titian’s “Venus with the Mirror.” What a woman! I want to write a poem, but instead, I take the reproduction, and write on it: Venus in Furs.

• From The Art of Memoir

  The book is a mesmerizing meditation on the nature of beauty, time, and loss, played out against backdrops of fairy-dusted interiors. And it’s a cry of longing for his lost parents and of joy for his wife and son. Nabokov unabashedly identifies with imperial Russia’s lush allure as the rich lived it in the early 1900s—enchanted rooms he steers us through page after page. He gives us philosophy and moments of transcendence. He leaps and drags us in his wake across the century, and we follow him without envy at his privilege. We’re just glad to get past the velvet rope. Nothing in his existence is banal. He is never bored or irritated. His parents are never less than glorious dolls, incapable of doing anything petty or commonplace. Both “shone like the sun.” His mother wears white and shades of rose, bestowing on him sugary advice, i.e., love with all your soul and leave the rest to fate. His father, resplendent in Horse Guard uniform, “with that smooth golden swell of cuirass burning upon his chest and back,” is the luminous king in a myth. Nabokov gets away with this by making us fall in love with his aristocratic mindscape. Of all his talents, it’s Nabokov’s flair for carnality—by which, again, I mean physicality, not sexuality—that first lures me in. He can light on a physical object and—by filtering it through his perceptual machine—transform it into a relic that shoots off poetic associations like sparks. His whole childhood seems devoted to ingesting as much beauty from memory as he can wolf down—thus forging the lost empire into art before it turns to ash in his memory. He makes these objects signify in metaphorical ways that merge them with the book’s themes: he must, as an expression of love for the lost, become sophisticated enough in taste to travel back and forth through time at will, to find the underlying patterns that order what’s otherwise been obliterated. The whole effort is a salvage operation with life-or-death stakes, and the “plot”—so far as one exists—organizes itself around his making a sensibility fine enough to save the “perceptual Eden” he claims he was born into. In another writer’s hands, to focus on a single object at length reads as off-point or decorative. But for Nabokov, every object

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

  "I suffered. My thoughts, night and day, were with him. My brain was always aglow; my blood was over-heated; my body ever shivering with excitement. I daily read all the newspapers to see what they said about him; and whenever his name met my eyes the paper shook in my trembling hands. If my mother or anybody else mentioned his name I blushed and then grew pale. "I remember what a shock of pleasure, not unmingled with jealousy, I felt, when for the first time I saw his likeness in a window amongst those of other celebrities. I went and bought it at once, not simply to treasure and doat upon it, but also that other people might not look at it." "What! you were so very jealous?" "Foolishly so. Unseen and at a distance I used to follow him about, after every concert he played. "Usually he was alone. Once, however, I saw him enter a cab waiting at the back door of the theatre. It had seemed to me as if someone else was within the vehicle—a woman, if I had not been mistaken. I hailed another cab, and followed them. Their carriage stopped at Teleny's house. I at once bade my Jehu do the same. "I saw Teleny alight. As he did so, he offered his hand to a lady, thickly veiled, who tripped out of the carriage and darted into the open doorway. The cab then went off. "I bade my driver wait there the whole night. At dawn the carriage of the evening before came and stopped. My driver looked up. A few minutes afterwards the door was again opened. The lady hurried out, was handed into her carriage by her lover. I followed her, and stopped where she alighted. "A few days afterwards I knew whom she was." "And who was she?" "A lady of an unblemished reputation with whom Teleny had played some duets. "In the cab, that night, my mind was so intently fixed upon Teleny that my inward self seemed to disintegrate itself from my body and to follow like his own shadow the man I loved. I unconsciously threw myself into a kind of trance and I had a most vivid hallucination, which, strange as it might appear, coincided with all that my friend did and felt. "For instance, as soon as the door was shut behind them, the lady caught Teleny in her arms, and gave him a long kiss. Their entrance would have lasted several seconds more, had Teleny not lost his breath. "You smile; yes, I suppose you yourself are aware how easily people lose their breath in kissing, when the lips do not feel that blissful intoxicating lust in all its intensity. She would have given him another kiss, but Teleny whispered to her: 'Let us go up to my room; there we shall be far safer than here.' "Soon they were in his apartment.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  While a pope might say one thing, however, less educated listeners could hear something entirely different. Drawing on Cluniac ideas, Urban would always call the expedition a pilgrimage—except that these pilgrims would be heavily armed knights, and this “act of love” would result in the deaths of thousands of innocent people. Urban almost certainly quoted Jesus’s words, telling his disciples to take up their cross, and he probably told the Crusaders to sew crosses on the back of their clothes and travel to the land where Jesus had lived and died. The vogue for pilgrimage had already raised the profile of Jerusalem in Europe. In 1033, the millennium of Jesus’s death, Raoul Graber reported that, convinced that the end time was nigh, an “innumerable multitude” had marched to Jerusalem to fight the “miserable Antichrist.”41 Thirty years later seven thousand pilgrims had left Europe for the Holy Land to force the Antichrist to declare himself so that God could establish a better world. In 1095 many of the knights would have seen the Crusade in this populist, apocalyptic light. They would also have viewed Urban’s call to help the Eastern Christians as a vendetta for their kinsmen and felt as bound to fight for Christ’s patrimony in the Holy Land as they would to recover the fief of their feudal lord. One early medieval historian of the Crusades makes a priest ask his listeners: “If an outsider were to strike any of your kin down, would you not avenge your blood relative? How much more ought you to avenge your God, your father, your brother, whom you see reproached, banished from his estates, crucified, whom you hear calling for aid.”42 Pious ideas would certainly have been fused with more earthly objectives. Many would take up their cross to acquire wealth overseas, and fiefs for their descendants, as well as fame and prestige.