Longing

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The bud-stage of breast development appears early (10.7 years) in the sequence of somatic changes accompanying pubescence. And the next maturational item available is the first appearance of pigmented pubic hair (11.2 years). My little cup brims with tiddles. A shipwreck. An atoll. Alone with a drowned passenger’s shivering child. Darling, this is only a game! How marvelous were my fancied adventures as I sat on a hard park bench pretending to be immersed in a trembling book. Around the quiet scholar, nymphets played freely, as if he were a familiar statue or part of an old tree’s shadow and sheen. Once a perfect little beauty in a tartan frock, with a clatter put her heavily armed foot near me upon the bench to dip her slim bare arms into me and tighten the strap of her roller skate, and I dissolved in the sun, with my book for fig leaf, as her auburn ringlets fell all over her skinned knee, and the shadow of leaves I shared pulsated and melted on her radiant limb next to my chameleonic cheek. Another time a red-haired school girl hung over me in the métro, and a revelation of axillary russet I obtained remained in my blood for weeks. I could list a great number of these one-sided diminutive romances. Some of them ended in a rich flavor of hell. It happened for instance that from my balcony I would notice a lighted window across the street and what looked like a nymphet in the act of undressing before a co-operative mirror. Thus isolated, thus removed, the vision acquired an especially keen charm that made me race with all speed toward my lone gratification. But abruptly, fiendishly, the tender pattern of nudity I had adored would be transformed into the disgusting lamp-lit bare arm of a man in his underclothes reading his paper by the open window in the hot, damp, hopeless summer night. Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up. 6 A propos: I have often wondered what became of those nymphets later? In this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future? I had possessed her—and she never knew it. All right. But would it not tell sometime later? Had I not somehow tampered with her fate by involving her image in my voluptas? Oh, it was, and remains, a source of great and terrible wonder.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Several times that reading urged our eyes to meet, and changed the colour of our races; but one moment alone it was that overcame us. When we read how the fond smile was kissed by such a lover, he, who shall never be divided from me, kissed my mouth all trembling: the book, and he who wrote it, was a Galeotto.12 that day we read in it no farther.” Whilst the one spirit thus spake, the other wept so, that I fainted with pity, as if I had been dying; and fell, as a dead body falls.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  And he to me: “Thus soon hath led me to drink the sweet wormwood of the torments, my Nella by her flood of tears; by her prayers devout and by sighs she hath brought me from the borders where they wait, and set me free from the other circles. So much more precious and beloved of God is my dear widow, whom I loved so well, as she is the more lonely in good works;8 for the Barbagia of Sardinia is far more modest in its women than the Barbagia where I left her. O sweet brother, what wouldst thou have me say? Already in my vision is a time to come to which this hour shall not be very old, when the brazen-faced women of Florence shall be forbidden from the pulpit to go abroad showing their breasts with the paps.9 What Barbary, what Saracen women ever lived, to whom either spiritual or other discipline were necessary, to make them go covered? But if the shameless creatures were assured of what swift heaven is preparing for them, already would they have their mouths open to howl: for if prevision here beguile me not, they shall be sorrowing ere he shall clothe his cheeks with down, who now is soothed with lullaby. Pray, brother, look that thou hide thee no longer from me; thou seest that not only I, but all this people are gazing where thou veilest the sun.” Wherefore I to him: “If thou bring back to mind what thou hast been with me and what I have been with thee, the present memory will still be grievous. From that life he who goeth before me did turn me, the other day,10 when full was shown to you the sister of him”11 (And I pointed to the sun). “This one through the deep night hath led me from the truly dead, in this solid flesh which follows him. Thence his comforts have brought me up, ascending and circling the mount, which makes you straight whom the world made crooked. So long he talks of making me his comrade, until I shall be there where Beatrice will be; there must I remain bereft of him.12 Virgil is he who thus speaks to me (and I pointed to him) and this other is that shade for whom before in every scarp your realm did shake which now discharges him from itself.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Every afternoon I’d stumble home exhausted to my room, but once there my real work would begin, which was to imagine Helen in my arms, Helen beside me laughing, Helen looking up at me through the lace suspended from the orange-blossom chaplet, Helen with other boys, kissing them, unzipping her shorts and stepping out of them, pushing her hair back out of her serious, avid eyes. She was a puppet I could place in one playlet after another, but once I’d invoked her she became independent, tortured me, smiled right through me at another boy, her approaching lover. Her exertions with other men fascinated me, and the longer I suffered, the more outrageous were the humiliations I had other men inflict on her. I became ill with mononucleosis, ironically the “kissing disease” that afflicted so many teenagers in those days. I was kept out of school for several months. Most of the time I slept, feverish and content: exempted. Just to cross the room required all my energy. Whether or not to drink another glass of ginger ale could absorb my attention for an hour. That my grief had been superseded by illness relieved me; I was no longer willfully self-destructive. I was simply ill. Love was forbidden—my doctor had told me I mustn’t kiss anyone. Tommy called me from time to time but I felt he and I had nothing in common now—after all, he was just a boy, whereas I’d become a very old man. SIX The more isolated I became, the more incapable I thought I was of resisting my homosexual fate. I blamed my sister and my mother—my sister for eroding my confidence (as though homosexuality were a form of shyness) and my mother for babying me (homosexuality as prolonged infancy). At the same time I recognized that my mother was my best and truest friend, that she alone fretted over my health, listened to my term papers, waited up for my return, attempted to understand my enthusiasms. In my immense world-weariness I decided to become a Buddhist. My mother had for years encouraged my sister and me to find a church of our own, one that answered our real needs. True to type, my sister in her burrowing if vexed drive toward normality had become a Presbyterian. The local church had the most affable, crew-cut minister (former football coach) and the most prestigious congregation (semi-believers in a heaven of jocks, a hell of brains and a purgatory of friendless stay-at-homes). I interpreted my mother’s mandate in a different way. I spent day after day at the library reading through Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East as one might try on clothes—but isn’t Hinduism just a bit busy? Confucianism? Too sensible, no flair.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Just before they got in the car, Zora took off her coat and turned her back to Levi. ‘Seriously, do you think I should wear this – I mean, does it look OK?’ Her dress was a bad colour and it had no back and it was the wrong material for her lumpy body and it was too short. Normally, Levi would have bluntly told his sister all of this, and Zoor would have been upset and angry, but at least she would have gone back in and changed, and, as a consequence, arrived at the party looking a hell of a lot better than she did now. But tonight Levi had other things on his mind. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. Fifteen minutes later they dropped Levi off in Kennedy Square and continued on to the party. There was nowhere to park. They had to leave the car several blocks from the party itself. Zora had specifically worn the shoes she was wearing because she had not  on beauty and being wrong anticipated any walking. To make progress she had to grip her brother around his waist, take little pigeon-steps and lean far back on her heels. For a long time Jerome restrained himself from commentary, but at the fourth pit stop he could keep silent no longer. ‘I don’t get you. Aren’t you meant to be a feminist? Why would you cripple yourself like this?’ ‘I like these shoes, OK? They actually make me feel powerful.’ Finally they reached the house. Zora had never been so happy to see a set of porch steps. Steps were easy, and with joy she placed the ball of her foot on each wide wooden slat. A girl they did not know answered the door. At once they saw that it was a better party than either had been expecting. Some of the younger grads and even a few faculty members were there. People were already boisterously drunk. Pretty much everybody Zora considered vital for her social success this coming year was present. She had the guilty thought that she would do better at this party without Jerome hanging at her heels in his slacks with the T-shirt tucked in too tightly. ‘Victoria’s here,’ he said as they left their coats in the pile. Zora looked down the hall and spotted her, simultaneously overdressed and half naked. ‘Oh, whatever ,’ said Zora, but then a thought came to her. ‘But Jay . . . If, I mean, if you want to go . . . I’d understand, I could get a taxi back.’ ‘No, it’s fine. Of course it’s fine.’ Jerome went over to a punch bowl and scooped them a drink each. ‘To lost love,’ he said sadly, taking a sip. ‘One glass. Did you see Jamie Anderson? He’s dancing .’ ‘I like Jamie Anderson.’

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  In the shower room I’d linger as long as possible and watch the water turn wintry chalk into summer marble. Imprisoned under all our layers of long underwear, thick socks, shirts, vests, jackets, coats and hoods were these tropical bodies; the steam and hot water brought color back into the pallor, found the nacreous hollow in a hip, detected the subtly raised triceps, rinsed a sharp clavicle in a softening flood, swirled dull brown hair into a smooth black cap and pulled evening gloves of light over raw hands and skinny, blue-veined forearms. Just as each shell held to the ears roars with a different ocean timbre, each of these bodies spoke to me with a different music, though all sounded to me unlike my own and only with the greatest effort could I remember I was longing after my own sex. Indeed, each of these beings seemed to possess his very own sex: the Italian with the hairy butt, thick legs and jaw darkened by a four- if not yet five-o’clock shadow; or take the blond darling of the football team with the permanent blush in his full cheeks, the distrustful smile of someone hard of hearing and the smooth, fleshy body and incipient beer belly resplendent with quivering health, feminine on a Rubens scale were it not for the way he moved—pigeon-toed athlete’s walk and lordly rocking tilt from side to side, something stiff in the back and shoulders and floppy in the hands and arms, loose ribbons around the rigid maypole. I’ve heard that some boys’ boarding schools are continuous orgies, that jealous rivals explode in fistfights over the favors of stunning first-form fags, that arrogant head prefects move favorites into their suites and exile cast-offs without even a nod toward adult authority—but Eton was not like that at all. Half the students were day boys who had cars, families and girl friends and came back every Monday with stories of wild heterosexual weekends. Each boarding student had his own room and the halls were periodically patrolled after lights-out. On Saturday night the students from our sister school were bused over for movies or dancing and under the gaze of chaperones romances sprang up between boys and girls even if they were seldom consummated.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  It is a poem I know already by heart. Angel, Grace Austin, Floyd Beale, Jack Beale, Mary Buck, Daniel Byron, Marguerite Campbell, Alice Carmine, Ros e Chatfield, Phyllis Clarke, Gordon Cowan, John Cowan, Marion Duncan, Walter Falter, Ted Fantasia, Stella Flashman, Irving Fox, George Glave, Mabel Goodale, Donald Green, Lucinda Hamilton, Mary Rose Haze, Dolores Honeck, Rosaline Knight, Kenneth McCoo, Virginia McCrystal, Vivian McFate, Aubrey Miranda, Anthony Miranda, Viola Rosato, Emil Schlenker, Lena Scott, Donald Sheridan, Agnes Sherva, Oleg Smith, Hazel Talbot, Edgar Talbot, Edwin Wain, Lull Williams, Ralph Windmuller, Louise A poem, a poem, forsooth! So strange and sweet was it to discover this “Haze, Dolores” (she!) in its special bower of names, with its bodyguard of roses—a fairy princess between her two maids of honor. I am trying to analyze the spine-thrill of delight it gives me, this name among all those others. What is it that excites me almost to tears (hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed)? What is it? The tender anonymity of this name with its formal veil (“Dolores”) and that abstract transposition of first name and surname, which is like a pair of new pale gloves or a mask? Is “mask” the keyword? Is it because there is always delight in the semitranslucent mystery, the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh and the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone? Or is it because I can imagine so well the rest of the colorful classroom around my dolorous and hazy darling: Grace and her ripe pimples; Ginny and her lagging leg; Gordon, the haggard masturbator; Duncan, the foul-smelling clown; nail-biting Agnes; Viola, of the blackheads and the bouncing bust; pretty Rosaline; dark Mary Rose; adorable Stella, who has let strangers touch her; Ralph, who bullies and steals; Irving, for whom I am sorry. And there she is there, lost in the middle, gnawing a pencil, detested by teachers, all the boys’ eyes on her hair and neck, my Lolita. Friday . I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and permanently eliminated, along with everybody else for miles around. Lolita whimpers in my arms. A free man, I enjoy her among the ruins. Her surprise, my explanations, demonstrations, ullulations. Idle and idiotic fancies! A brave Humbert would have played with her most disgustingly (yesterday, for instance, when she was again in my room to show me her drawings, school-artware); he might have bribed her—and got away with it. A simpler and more practical fellow would have soberly stuck to various commercial substitutes—if you know where to go, I don’t. Despite my manly looks, I am horribly timid. My romantic soul gets all clammy and shivery at the thought of running into some awful indecent unpleasantness.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O I IAt Jerusalem day is setting and night rising, and in Purgatory day rising and night setting; and as the Poets, pondering on their course, are delaying their journey against their will, they see glowing red in the east a light swiftly approaching them; which Virgil soon recognizes as Charon’s angelic counterpart, who with stroke of wing guides a light bark with its charge of happy souls to the mountain of purification. As they land the souls chant the psalm of the Exodus, and with the sign of the cross their angelic guard departs, to renew his mission. The risen sun now shoots full daylight into the sky, obliterating Capricorn from the zenith; the new-come folk inquire the way and Virgil answers that he and his companion are strangers like themselves, whereon the shades observe that Dante breathes and is still in the first life, and in their eagerness almost forget the cleansing for which they have come to the mount. One especially, the musician Casella, presses forward with a look of such affection that the Poet opens his arms to embrace him, but he only clasps an empty shade. Dante must now explain the mystery of his own presence in that place while still in the flesh, and Casella in his turn must explain the delay of many months between his death and his admission into the boat of the redeemed that gathers its happy charge at the mouth of Tiber. Dante’s heart and senses are still aching from the anguish of Hell; and the loveliness of earth, sea and sky has re-awakened his perception of the healing power of beauty. So a great longing comes over him once more to hear the sweet singer’s voice that has so often soothed him and banished all his cares. Does that power of song which on earth seems akin to the spirit world, survive the great change? Casella’s answer is to sing, in tones the sweetness whereof can never die, a song that Dante himself had written to the praise of Wisdom; whereon Virgil and all the other souls gather eagerly around, till rebuked for this premature indulgence and repose by the stern Cato, who bids them to press forward the cleansing work of the mountain. Whereon they scud along the plain like startled doves. [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] ALREADY HAD the sun reached the horizon, whose meridian circle covers Jerusalem with its highest point, and night which opposite to him revolves, from Ganges forth was issuing with the Scales, that fall from her hand when she prevails; so that fair Aurora’s white and rubby cheeks, there where I was, through too great age were turning orange.1 We were alongside the ocean yet, like folk who ponder o’er their road, who in heart do go and in body stay; and lo, as on the approach of morn, through the dense mists Mars burns red, low in the West o’er the ocean-floor;

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] THE WORLD was wont to think in its peril that the fair Cyprian rayed down mad love, rolled in the third epicycle; wherefore not only to her did they do honour of sacrifice and votive cry, those ancient folk in the ancient error, but Dione did they honour, and Cupid, the one as her mother, the other as her son, and told how he had sat in Dido’s lap;1 and from her from whom I take my start, they took the name of the star which courts the sun, now from the nape, now from the brow. I had no sense of rising into her, but my Lady gave me full faith that I was there, because I saw her grow more beautiful. And as we see a spark within a flame, and as a voice within a voice may be distinguished, if one stayeth firm, and the other cometh and goeth; so in that light itself I perceived other torches moving in a circle more and less swift, after the measure, I suppose, of their eternal vision. From a chill cloud there ne’er descended blasts, or visible or no, so rapidly as not to seem hindered and lagging2 to whoso should have seen those lights divine advance towards us, quitting the circling that hath its first beginning in the exalted Seraphim. And within those who most in front appeared, Hosannah sounded in such wise that never since have I been free from longing to re-hear it. Then one drew himself more nigh to us, and alone began: “All we are ready at thy will, that thou mayst have thy joy of us. We roll with those celestial Princes in one circle and in one circling and in one thirst, to whom thou from the world didst sometime say: Ye who by understanding give the third heaven motion, and so full of love are we that, to pleasure thee, a space of quiet shall be no less sweet to us.”3 When mine eyes had been raised in reverence to my Lady, and she had satisfied them with herself and given them assurance, they turned them back to the light which so largely had made proffer of itself, and, “Say who ye be,” was my word, with great affection stamped. Ah! how I saw it wax in quantity and kind at the new joy which, when I spoke, was added to its joys! Thus changed, it4 said to me: “The world held me below but little space; had it been more much ill shall be that had not been. My joy holdeth me concealed from thee, raying around me, and hideth me like to a creature swathed in its own silk.5 Much didst thou love me, and thou hadst good cause; for had I stayed below I had shown thee a further growth of love than the mere leaves. That left bank which is bathed by Rhone after it hath mingled with Sorgue, me for its timely lord awaited;

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “Speak for yourself,” he declared, leaping on top of her in a sudden paroxysm of passion. “Out, out of my damned twat!” she yelled, pushing him away and shielding her much-vaunted virginity with a silver-foil sun reflector. “I take it you want me to reflect on what I’m doing,” he quipped. “Jesus Christ,” she said crossly, “men are only interested in women in spurts.” At the time, we all thought this was the funniest piece of prose ever written. There was a continuation of this dialogue, too—something about a traffic observation helicopter with two radio announcers appearing on the roof and the whole scene turning into an orgy—but this has not survived. The fragment, however, does convey something of the mood of that period in our lives. Beneath the wise-ass cynicism and pseudosophistication was the soupiest romanticism since Edward Fitzgerald impersonated Omar Khayyam. Pia and I both wanted someone to sing in the wilderness with, and we knew that John Stock and Ron Perkoff were not exactly what we had in mind. — We were both bookworms, and when life disappointed us we turned to literature—or at least to the movie version. We saw ourselves as heroines and couldn’t understand what had become of all the heroes. They were in books. They were in movies. They were conspicuously absent from our lives. History and Literature Subjectively Considered at Sixteen I Dorian Gray had locks of gold. Rhett Butler was dashing and handsome and bold…. Julien Sorel knew all about passion. Count Vronsky was charming in the Russian fashion. I’d say that there’s a handful to whom I’d gladly grovel— And everyone of them is—quite busy in a novel. II Before Juliet was sixteen, she’d reconciled two feuding houses. And Nana had done all the Paris bars with drunks and tramps and souses. Helen’s face, they say, launched a good many ships. Salome had only to shed her seven slips. Esther’s beauty saved her people. Mary’s feat is praised from every steeple. Louis’ shepherdess wife caused a nation to riot. But here I am, past sixteen, and the world’s fairly quiet. The meter was bumpy, but the message was plain. We would have gladly groveled if only we could have found men worth groveling to. — The boys we met in college were, in a way, worse. At least John and Ron were good-natured creeps who adored us. They didn’t have minds like G.B.S. and bodies like Michelangelo’s David, but they were devoted to us, and regarded us as creatures of glittering wit and sophistication. But in college the war between the sexes began in earnest and our minds and bodies drifted farther and farther apart.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  A very plain, sweet, quiet girl – a girl from our church. Amelia. She couldn’t throw anybody off balance – she’ll be a companion. And that’s a good thing, I think. Michael’s just not strong enough for anything else . . .’ She broke off here and turned to look through the window at the backyard. ‘They’re going to have the wedding here, in Wellington. They’ll come at Christmas to look for the right place. You’ll excuse me for a moment. I must check on your lovely pie.’ Kiki watched Carlene leave the room, unsteadily, leaning on things as she went. Alone, Kiki put her hands between her knees and pressed in on them. The news that some girl was about to start out on the road she herself had walked thirty years earlier gave her a vertiginous feeling. A clearing opened in her mind, and in it she tried to restage one of her earliest memories of Howard – the night they first met and first slept together. But it could not be conjured so easily; for at least the past ten years the memory had presented itself to her like a stiff tin toy left out in the rain – so rusty, a museum piece, not her toy at all any more. Even the kids knew it too well. Upon the Indian rug on the floor of Kiki’s Brooklyn walk-up, with all the windows open, with Howard’s big grey feet halfway out the door resting on the fire escape. A hundred and two degrees in the New York smog. ‘Halleluiah’ by Leonard Cohen playing on her dime-store record player, that song Howard liked to call ‘a hymn deconstructing a hymn’. Long ago Kiki had submitted to this musical part of the memory. But it was surely not true –  On Beauty ‘Hallelujah’ had been another time, years later. But it was hard to resist the poetry of the possibility, and so she had allowed ‘Halleluiah’ to fall into family myth. Thinking back, this had been a mistake. A tiny one, to be sure, but symptomatic of profound flaws. Why did she always concede what was left of the past to Howard’s edited versions of it? For example, she should probably say something when, at dinner parties, Howard claimed to despise all prose fiction. She should stop him when he argued that American cinema was just so much idealized trash. But , she should say, but! Christmas  he gave me Gatsby, a first edition. We saw Taxi Driver in a filthy dive in Times Square – he loved it .

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O I VIn the eagerness of his attention to Manfred’s tale, Dante takes no note of the passing time, and thereby furnishes a practical refutation of the Platonic doctrine of the plurality of souls; for if the soul that presides over bearing were one, and the soul that notes the passage of time another, then the completest absorption of the former could not so involve the latter as to prevent it from exercising its own special function. It is three and a half hours from sunrise when the souls point out the narrow cleft by which the pilgrims are to ascend the mountain; after which they take their leave of them. It is only the wings of longing and hope that enable Dante to overcome the impediments of the ascent, and bring him through the cleft to the open slope of the mountain, which he breasts at Virgil’s direction though it lies at an angle of more than forty-five degrees. In answer to his weary plea for a pause, Virgil urges him to gain a terrace that circles the mount a little above them. There they rest, and, looking east, survey their ascent, after the complacent fashion of mountain-climbers; but Dante is amazed to find that the sun is north of the equator and strikes on his left shoulder. Virgil explains that this is because they are in the southern hemisphere, at the antipodes of Jerusalem. Were the sun in Gemini instead of Aries, he would be further to the north yet. Dante rehearses and expands the lesson Virgil has taught him, and then (having meanwhile apparently turned west, facing the slope) makes inquiry as to the height of the mountain. Virgil, without making any direct answer, cheers his weary companion by assuring him that as they mount higher, the ascent becomes ever less arduous, till mounting up becomes as spontaneous as the movement of a ship dropping down stream; and then comes rest. Whereat a voice suddenly rising from behind a great stone lying south of them, intimates to Dante that he will probably experience a keen desire for rest before that consummation-Whereon the Poets move to the shady or southern side of the rock where they see souls whose repentance had been deferred to the moment of death, stretched in attitudes of indolence. And in particular Belacqua, an old friend of Dante’s, sits hugging his knees like Sloth’s own brother. It is he who had given Dante his mocking warning, and who now in the same vein taunts him with his readiness to reproach others for their sloth the moment after he himself had implored Virgil to wait for him; and also with his slowness to understand the astronomical phenomena of the southern heavens. A smile of relief and amusement lightens Dante’s face as he finds his friend among the saved, and still his old self. Cannot even the spirit life check his nimble wit or stir his sluggish members? But Belacqua answers sadly that unless aided by the prayer of some soul in grace, he must live as long excluded from purgation as he had lived in the self-exclusion of impenitence upon earth. It is now noonday in Furgatory; night reigns from Ganges to Morocco; and Virgil urges his charge to continue the ascent.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We’ll rearrange the one you’ve got.” “That shine on your face should come from him, not from your skin.” “You’ve come a long way, baby.” “How to score with every male in the zodiac.” “The stars and sensual you.” “To a man they say Cutty Sark.” “A diamond is forever.” “If you’re concerned about douching...” “Length and coolness come together.” “How I solved my intimate odor problem.” “Lady be cool.” “Every woman alive loves Chanel No. 5.” “What makes a shy girl get intimate?” “Femme, we named it after you.” What all the ads and all the whoreoscopes seemed to imply was that if only you were narcissistic enough, if only you took proper care of your smells, your hair, your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits, your crotch, your stars, your scars, and your choice of Scotch in bars—you would meet a beautiful, powerful, potent, and rich man who would satisfy every longing, fill every hole, make your heart skip a beat (or stand still), make you misty, and fly you to the moon (preferably on gossamer wings), where you would live totally satisfied forever. And the crazy part of it was that even if you were clever, even if you spent your adolescence reading John Donne and Shaw, even if you studied history or zoology or physics and hoped to spend your life pursuing some difficult and challenging career—you still had a mind full of all the soupy longings that every high-school girl was awash in. It didn’t matter, you see, whether you had an IQ of 170 or an IQ of 70, you were brainwashed all the same. Only the surface trappings were different. Only the talk was a little more sophisticated. Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love, to be swept off your feet, to be filled up by a giant prick spouting sperm, soapsuds, silks and satins, and of course, money. Nobody bothered to tell you what marriage was really about. You weren’t even provided, like European girls, with a philosophy of cynicism and practicality. You expected not to desire any other men after marriage. And you expected your husband not to desire any other women. Then the desires came and you were thrown into a panic of self-hatred. What an evil woman you were! How could you keep being infatuated with strange men? How could you study their bulging trousers like that? How could you sit at a meeting imagining how every man in the room would screw? How could you sit on a train fucking total strangers with your eyes? How could you do that to your husband? Did anyone ever tell you that maybe it had nothing whatever to do with your husband?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  For the true, ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never get to know the man very well. I had noticed, for example, how all my infatuations dissolved as soon as I really became friends with a man, became sympathetic to his problems, listened to him kvetch about his wife, or ex-wives, his mother, his children. After that I would like him, perhaps even love him—but without passion. And it was passion that I wanted. I had also learned that a sure way to exorcise an infatuation was to write about someone, to observe his tics and twitches, to anatomize his personality in type. After that he was an insect on a pin, a newspaper clipping laminated in plastic. I might enjoy his company, even admire him at moments, but he no longer had the power to make me wake up trembling in the middle of the night. I no longer dreamed about him. He had a face. So another condition for the zipless fuck was brevity. And anonymity made it even better. During the time I lived in Heidelberg I commuted to Frankfurt four times a week to see my analyst. The ride took an hour each way and trains became an important part of my fantasy life. I kept meeting beautiful men on the train, men who scarcely spoke English, men whose clichés and banalities were hidden by my ignorance of French, or Italian, or even German. Much as I hate to admit it, there are some beautiful men in Germany. One scenario of the zipless fuck was perhaps inspired by an Italian movie I saw years ago. As time went by, I embellished it to suit my head. It used to play over and over again as I shuttled back and forth from Heidelberg to Frankfurt, from Frankfurt to Heidelberg: A grimy European train compartment (Second Class). The seats are leatherette and hard. There is a sliding door to the corridor outside. Olive trees rush by the window. Two Sicilian peasant women sit together on one side with a child between them. They appear to be mother and grandmother and granddaughter. Both women vie with each other to stuff the little girl’s mouth with food. Across the way (in the window seat) is a pretty young widow in a heavy black veil and tight black dress which reveals her voluptuous figure. She is sweating profusely and her eyes are puffy. The middle seat is empty. The corridor seat is occupied by an enormously fat woman with a mustache. Her huge haunches cause her to occupy almost half of the vacant center seat. She is reading a pulp romance in which the characters are photographed models and the dialogue appears in little puffs of smoke above their heads.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  This picture is definitely rated X. We had been in this state for at least the past year. Every decision was referred to the shrink, or the shrinking process. Should we move into a bigger apartment? “Better see what’s going on first.” (Bennett’s euphemism for: back to the couch.) Should we have a baby? “Better work things through first.” Should we join a new tennis club? “Better see what’s going on first.” Should we get a divorce? “Better work through the unconscious meaning of divorce first.” Because the fact was that we’d reached that crucial time in a marriage (five years and the sheets you got as wedding presents have just about worn thin) when it’s time to decide whether to buy new sheets, have a baby perhaps, and live with each other’s lunacy ever after—or else give up the ghost of the marriage (throw out the sheets) and start playing musical beds all over again. The decision was, of course, further complicated by analysis—the basic assumption of analysis being (and never mind all the evidence to the contrary) that you’re getting better all the time. The refrain goes something like this: “Oh-I-was-self-destructive-when-I-married-you-baby-but-I’m-so-much-more-healthy-now-ow-ow-ow.” (Implying that you might just choose someone better, sweeter, handsomer, smarter, and maybe even luckier in the stock market.) To which he might reply: “Oh-I-hated-all-women-when-I-fell-for-you-baby-but-I’m-so-much-more-healthy-now-ow-ow-ow.” (Implying that he might just find someone sweeter, prettier, smarter, a better cook, and maybe even due to inherit piles of bread from her father.) “Wise up Bennett, old boy,” I’d say—(whenever I suspected him of thinking those thoughts), “you’d probably marry someone even more phallic, castrating, and narcissistic than I am.” (First technique of being a shrink’s wife is knowing how to hurl all their jargon back at them, at carefully chosen moments.) But I was having those thoughts myself and if Bennett knew, he didn’t let on. Something seemed very wrong in our marriage. Our lives ran parallel like railroad tracks. Bennett spent the day at his office, his hospital, his analyst, and then evenings at his office again, usually until nine or ten. I taught a couple of days a week and wrote the rest of the time. My teaching schedule was light, the writing was exhausting, and by the time Bennett came home, I was ready to go out and break loose. I had had plenty of solitude, plenty of long hours alone with my typewriter and my fantasies. And I seemed to meet men everywhere. The world seemed crammed with available, interesting men in a way it never had been before I was married. What was it about marriage anyway? Even if you loved your husband, there came that inevitable year when fucking him turned as bland as Velveeta cheese: filling, fattening even, but no thrill to the taste buds, no bittersweet edge, no danger. And you longed for an overripe Camembert, a rare goat cheese: luscious, creamy, cloven-hoofed.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  A sprawling Oriental city with new buildings springing up beside ruined- looking old ones. What you remember are Coca-Cola signs next to mosques, Shell stations advertising gas in Arabic, ladies in veils riding in the backseats of curtained Chevrolets and Mercedes-Benzes, droning Arabic music in the background, flies everywhere, and women in miniskirts and teased blond hair promenading down Hamra Street where all the movie marquees advertise American movies and the bookstores are full of Penguins, Livres de Poche, American paperbacks, and the latest porno novels from Copenhagen and California. It seems that East and West have met, but instead of producing some splendid new combination, they’ve both gone to the dogs. The whole family was waiting for me at Randy’s apartment—all except my parents, who were in Japan but were expected any day. Despite her numerous pregnancies, Randy continued to act as if she were the first woman in history to have a uterus. Chloe was moping around waiting for letters from Abel (they had been going steady since she was fourteen). Lalah had dysentery and made sure that everyone heard all the details of every attack—including the color and consistency of the shit. The children were wild from all the visitors and attention and kept galloping around the terraces cursing at the maid in Arabic (which caused her to pack her bags and resign at least once a day). And Pierre—who looks like Kahlil Gibran in his own self-flattering self-portraits —wandered around the vast marble-floored apartment in his silk bathrobe and made lewd jokes about the old Middle Eastern custom by which the man who marries the oldest sister is entitled to all the younger ones too. When he wasn’t regaling us with old Middle Eastern customs, he was reading us translations of his poetry (all Arabs write poetry, it seems) which sounded very vanity press to me: My love is like a sheaf of wheat bursting into flower. Her eyes are topazes in space... “The trouble is,” I said to Pierre over syrupy Arabic coffee, “sheaves of wheat don’t usually burst into flower.” “Poetic license,” he said solemnly. “Let’s go to the beach!” I’d suggest, but everyone was too tired, too hot, too lethargic. It was obvious I’d never get them to Baalbek or the Cedars either. Damascus, Cairo—forget it. Israel was right across the border but we would have to fly via Cyprus and that seemed unthinkable after the last flight. Then there would be the problem of getting back into Lebanon again. All I did was lounge around Randy’s apartment with the rest of them and wait for letters from Charlie—which rarely came. Instead I kept hearing from all those other clowns: the married Florentine who liked me to whisper dirty words, the American professor who claimed I had changed his life, one of the mail clerks at American Express who had convinced himself I was an heiress. It was Charlie I wanted, or no one. And Charlie wanted Sally.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Maybe I resisted consummating any of these flirtations because I knew that the man I really wanted would continue to elude me and I would only wind up disappointed. But who was the man I really wanted? All I knew was that I had been desperately searching for him from the age of sixteen on. When I was sixteen and called myself a Fabian socialist, when I was sixteen and refused to pet with boys who liked Ike, when I was sixteen and cried into the Rubaiyat, when I was sixteen and cried into the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay—I used to dream of a perfect man whose mind and body were equally fuckable. He had a face like Paul Newman and a voice like Dylan Thomas. He had a body like Michelangelo’s David (“with those rippling little marble muscles,” as I used to tell my best friend, Pia Wittkin, whose favorite male statue was Discobolus; we were both avid students of art history). He had a mind like George Bernard Shaw (or, at least, what my sixteen-year-old mind conceived of as George Bernard Shaw’s mind). He loved Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto and Frank Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” above all other mortal music. He shared my passion for unicorn tapestries, Beat the Devil, the Cloisters, Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, witchcraft, and chocolate mousse. He shared my contempt for Senator Joe McCarthy, Elvis Presley, and my philistine parents. I never met him. At sixteen, my not meeting him seemed unbearable. Later I learned to take the cash and let the credit go, nor heed the rumble of a distant drum. The contrast between my fantasies (Paul Newman, Laurence Olivier, Humphrey Bogart, Michelangelo’s David) and the pimply faced adolescent boys I knew was laughable. Only I cried. And so did Pia. We commiserated in her parents’ gloomy apartment on Riverside Drive. “I imagine him as being very—you know—sort of a cross between Laurence Olivier in Hamlet and Humphrey Bogart in Beat the Devil—with very savage white teeth, and an absolutely fantastic body—sort of like the Discobolus.” She indicated her own rather well-upholstered belly. “What are you wearing?” I asked. “I see it as a sort of—you know—medieval wedding. I have this pointed white hat with a chiffon veil floating from it—and a red velvet dress—maybe wine—and very pointed shoes.” She drew the shoes for me with her black-inked Rapidograph pen. Then she drew the whole outfit—an empire-waisted gown with a very low neck and long tight sleeves. It was being modeled by a gorgeous creature whose cleavage swelled up out of the gown voluptuously.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Is it because there is always delight in the semitranslucent mystery, the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh and the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone? Or is it because I can imagine so well the rest of the colorful classroom around my dolorous and hazy darling: Grace and her ripe pimples; Ginny and her lagging leg; Gordon, the haggard masturbator; Duncan, the foul-smelling clown; nail-biting Agnes; Viola, of the blackheads and the bouncing bust; pretty Rosaline; dark Mary Rose; adorable Stella, who has let strangers touch her; Ralph, who bullies and steals; Irving, for whom I am sorry. And there she is there, lost in the middle, gnawing a pencil, detested by teachers, all the boys’ eyes on her hair and neck, my Lolita. Friday. I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and permanently eliminated, along with everybody else for miles around. Lolita whimpers in my arms. A free man, I enjoy her among the ruins. Her surprise, my explanations, demonstrations, ullulations. Idle and idiotic fancies! A brave Humbert would have played with her most disgustingly (yesterday, for instance, when she was again in my room to show me her drawings, school-artware); he might have bribed her—and got away with it. A simpler and more practical fellow would have soberly stuck to various commercial substitutes—if you know where to go, I don’t. Despite my manly looks, I am horribly timid. My romantic soul gets all clammy and shivery at the thought of running into some awful indecent unpleasantness. Those ribald sea monsters. “Mais allez-y, allez-y!” Annabel skipping on one foot to get into her shorts, I seasick with rage, trying to screen her. Same date, later, quite late. I have turned on the light to take down a dream. It had an evident antecedent. Haze at dinner had benevolently proclaimed that since the weather bureau promised a sunny weekend we would go to the lake Sunday after church. As I lay in bed, erotically musing before trying to go to sleep, I thought of a final scheme how to profit by the picnic to come. I was aware that mother Haze hated my darling for her being sweet on me. So I planned my lake day with a view to satisfying the mother. To her alone would I talk; but at some appropriate moment I would say I had left my wrist watch or my sunglasses in that glade yonder—and plunge with my nymphet into the wood. Reality at this juncture withdrew, and the Quest for the Glasses turned into a quiet little orgy with a singularly knowing, cheerful, corrupt and compliant Lolita behaving as reason knew she could not possibly behave. At 3 A.M.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  A kind of pounding in my gut which I had nicknamed my “hunger- thump.” It was as if my stomach thought of itself as a heart. And no matter how I filled it—with men, with books, with food, with gingerbread cookies shaped like men and poems shaped like men and men shaped like poems—it refused to be still. Unfillable—that’s what I was. Nymphomania of the brain. Starvation of the heart. What was this pounding thing inside of me? A drum? Or a whole percussion section? Was it all air in a stretched skin? Was it an auditory hallucination? Was it maybe a frog? Wasn’t he thumping about a prince? Wasn’t he thinking he was a prince? Was I doomed to be hungry for life? At the end of the paper about artists, we all applauded from our rickety gold-backed chairs and politely stood and yawned. “I must have a copy of that paper,” I said to Bennett. “You don’t need it,” he said. “It’s the story of your life.” I may have neglected to report another aspect of the paper on artists (whose author, as I recall, was a certain Dr. Koenigsberger). This concerned the love life of the artist, particularly the tendency of artists to latch on (with considerable ferocity) to quite unsuitable “love objects” and idealize them wildly like the idealized parents they thought they never had. This unsuitable “love object” was mostly a projection on the part of the artist-lover. In fact, the object of passion was often quite ordinary in the eyes of others. But to the artist-lover, the beloved became mother, father, muse, the epitome of perfection. Sometimes the epitome of bitchy perfection or evil perfection, but always a deity of sorts, always omnipotent. What was the creative purpose of these infatuations, Dr. Koenigsberger wanted to know. We bent our heads forward in eager anticipation. By recreating the quality of the Oedipal infatuation, the artist could recreate his “family romance” and thus recreate his idealized childhood world. The numerous and often rapidly changing infatuations of artists were designed to keep the illusion alive. A new, strong sexual infatuation was the closest approximation one had in adult life to the passion of the small child for the parent of the opposite sex. Bennett grinned throughout this part of the paper. I sulked. Dante and Beatrice. Scott and Zelda. Humbert and Lolita. Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre. King Kong and Faye Wray. Yeats and Maud Gonne. Shakespeare and the Dark Lady. Shakespeare and Mr. W.H. Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. Sylvia Plath and the Grim Reaper. Keats and Fanny Brawne. Byron and Augusta. Dodgson and Alice. D. H. Lawrence and Frieda. Aschenbach and Tadzio. Robert Graves and the White Goddess. Schumann and Clara. Chopin and George Sand. Auden and Kallmann. Hopkins and the Holy Ghost. Borges and his mother. Me and Adrian?

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Choo put a glass of water down over this photo and sat back on the bed. The damp ring spread out across the paper. He smoked his joint and said nothing. Levi got the feeling that Choo wasn’t used to entertaining. ‘You got any music?’ asked Levi. Choo did not.  On Beauty ‘OK if I . . . ?’ said Levi, and took from his knapsack a little white speaker set which he plugged into the wall by his feet, and then connected to his iPod. The song he had just been listening to in the street filled the room. Choo came forward on his hands and knees to admire the thing. ‘Jesus! It’s so loud and so tiny!’ Levi got down on the floor too and showed him how to pick songs or albums. Choo offered his guest some of his joint. ‘No, man – I don’t smoke. I’m asthmatic and shit.’ They sat together on the floor and listened to Fear of a Black Planet all the way through. Choo, though very stoned, knew it well and repeated all the words, and tried to describe to Levi the effect first hearing a bootleg of this album had had on him. ‘ Then we knew ,’ he said eagerly, bending his bony fingers back on the floor. ‘That’s when we knew, we understood! We were not the only ghetto . I was only thirteen but suddenly I understood: America has ghettos! And Haiti is the ghetto of America!’ ‘Yeah . . . that’s deep, bro,’ said Levi, nodding largely. He felt stoned just breathing in this room. ‘Oh, man , YES!’ cried Choo when the next song began. He did this whenever the songs changed. He didn’t nod his head like Levi; he did this strange shaking of his torso – like he was hanging on one of those elastic straps that vibrate and make you thin. Every time he did it Levi cracked up all over the place. ‘I wish I could play you some of our music, Haitian music,’ said Choo mournfully, as the album ended and Levi used his thumb to flick through other possibilities. ‘You would like it. It would move you. It’s political music, like reggae – you understand? I could tell you things about my country. They would make you weep. The music makes you weep.’ ‘Scene,’ said Levi. He wanted – but did not feel sufficiently confident – to speak of the book he’d been reading. Now Levi brought his little music machine close to his face, looking for a particular track whose name he had slightly mistaken, making it impossible to find in the alphabetical lists. ‘And I know you don’t live near here, Levi,’ added Choo. ‘Are  on beauty and being wrong