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 My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  —cleared countertops, everything blank and dim. My mother was not the type to use alphabet magnets on the fridge to hold up my kindergarten finger paintings or first attempts at writing out words. She kept the walls of the house mostly clear. It was as though anything visually interesting was too much aggravation on my mother’s eyes. Maybe that’s why she ran out of the Guggenheim that one time she came to visit me in the city. Only the master bedroom, my mother’s room, had any clutter in it—glass bottles of perfume and ashtrays, unused exercise equipment, piles of pastel and beige-colored clothing. The bed was a king, low to the ground, and whenever I slept in it, I felt very far away from the world, like I was in a spaceship or on the moon. I missed that bed. The stiff blankness of my mother’s eggshell sheets. I sucked down the rest of coffee number one and put the empty cup in my Big Brown Bag from Bloomingdale’s. Reva parked the car in the driveway next to a rusting burgundy minivan and an old yellow Volvo station wagon. “Come meet my relatives,” she said. “And then I’ll show you where you can lie down for a bit.” She led me up the shoveled pathway to the house. She was talking again. “Since her passing, I’ve just been so exhausted all the time. I haven’t been sleeping well with all these strange dreams. Creepy. Not really nightmares. Just weird. Totally bizarre.” “Everybody thinks their dreams are weird, Reva,” I said. “I’m overwhelmed, I guess. It’s been hard, but also sort of beautiful in this sad and peaceful way. You know what she said before she died? She said, ‘Don’t worry so much trying to be everybody’s favorite. Just go have fun.’ That really hit me, ‘everybody’s favorite.’ Because it’s true. I do feel the pressure to be like that. Do you think I’m like that? I guess I just never felt good enough. This is probably healthy for me, to have to face life now, you know, on my own. My dad and I aren’t really close. I’ll just introduce you to my relatives real quick,” she said, opening the front door. The interior of the house was as I’d predicted—cushy, lime green carpeting, yellow glass chandelier, gold patterned wallpaper, and low stucco ceilings. The heat was blasting, and the air carried a smell of food and coffee and bleach. Reva led me into a sitting room with windows looking out onto the snow-covered front yard. A huge television was on mute, and a row of bald men wearing glasses sat on a long paisley sofa covered in glossy clear plastic. As Reva stomped snow off her boots on the mat, three fat women in black dresses and curlers in their hair came out from the kitchen with trays of donuts and Danishes. “This is my friend, the one I had to go pick up,” she said to the women.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Once the man comes up from under he’s no longer the man you desired.” “What the hell are you talking about?” “My theory of the zipless fuck,” I said. And I explained it as best I could. “You mean I disappoint you?” he asked, putting his arms around me and pulling me down until my head was in his lap. I smelled the gamy smell of his dirty trousers. “Let’s get out of the car,” I said. We walked over to a tree and sat down under it. I lay with my head on his lap. Aimlessly, I began fiddling with his fly. I half unzipped it and took his soft penis in my hand. “It’s little,” he said. I looked up at him, his green-gold eyes, the blond hair over his forehead, the laugh lines in the corners of his mouth, his sunburned cheeks. He was still beautiful to me. I longed for him with a yearning that was no less painful for being part nostalgia. We kissed for a long time, his tongue making dizzying circles in my mouth. No matter how long we went on kissing his penis stayed soft. He laughed his sunny laugh and I laughed too. I knew he’d always hold back on me. I knew I’d never really possess him, and that was part of what made him so beautiful. I would write about him, talk about him, remember him, but never have him. The unattainable man. We drove toward Paris. I insisted I wanted to go home, but Adrian tried to prevail on me to stay. He was afraid of losing my loyalty now. He sensed I was drifting away. He knew I was already filing him in my notebook for future reference. As we approached the outskirts of Paris, we began seeing graffiti scrawled under the highway bridges. One of them read: FEMMES! LIBERONS-NOUS! THIRTEEN The Conductor Is it an earthquake or simply a shock? Is it the good turtle soup or merely the mock? Is it a cocktail—this feeling of joy , Or is what I feel the real McCoy? Have I the right hunch or have I the wrong? Will it be Bach I shall hear or just a Cole Porter song? —Cole Porter, “At Long Last Love” (1938) C harlie Fielding (“Charles” when he signed his name) was tall and stoop-shouldered and looked like the Wandering Jew. His nose was enormously long and hooked and had flaring nostrils, and his small down-turned mouth always wore a sour expression, somewhere between contempt and melancholy. His skin was sallow and unhealthy-looking, and had been ravaged by acne which still troubled him from time to time.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘I guess. It’s for Claire’s class.’ Kiki, who had assumed this already, said nothing. ‘So, is that cool?’ ‘I don’t know what you’re asking me. The car’s cool, sure.’ ‘I mean, you haven’t said anything,’ said Zora, directing her comment to the television screen. ‘I wouldn’t even take this class, but it really . . . shit like that counts when it comes to grad school – she’s a name , and it’s stupid, but it makes a difference.’ ‘I don’t have a problem, Zoor. You’re the one making it a problem. It sounds great. Good for you.’ They were speaking to each other with tinkling officiousness, like two administrators filling out a form together. ‘I guess I just don’t want to feel bad about it.’  On Beauty ‘Nobody’s asking you to feel bad. Have you had your first class?’ Zora skewered a bit of toast on her fork, brought it to her mouth but spoke first. ‘We had an initial session – just setting out parameters. Some people read stuff out. It was a pretty mixed bag. Lot of Plath wannabees. I’m not too worried.’ ‘Right.’ Kiki looked over her shoulder to the garden, and, thinking again about water and leaves and the ways they complicate each other, a memory of the summer rose suddenly to the surface of her mind. ‘Didn’t that . . . remember that boy – the handsome one, at the Mozart – didn’t he do stuff at the Bus Stop?’ Zora chewed tightly on her toast and spoke only from the very corner of her mouth. ‘Maybe – I don’t really remember.’ ‘He had such a great face.’ Zora lifted up the remote and changed over to the local public access channel. Noam Chomsky was sitting at a desk. He spoke directly to camera, his large expressive hands making swelling circular movements in front of him. ‘You don’t notice that kind of thing.’ ‘ Mom .’ ‘Well, it’s interesting. You don’t. You’re very high-minded. That’s an admirable quality.’ Zora turned up Noam and leaned towards the screen, ear first. ‘I guess I’m just looking for something a little more . . . cerebral.’ ‘When I was your age I used to follow boys down the street ’cos they looked cute from the back. I liked to watch them shimmy and shake.’ Zora looked at her mother with wonder. ‘I’m trying to eat? ’ A sound of a door opening. Kiki stood up. Her heart, having inexplicably relocated to her right thigh, beat harshly and threatened to unbalance her. She took a step towards the back hallway. ‘Was that Levi’s door?’ ‘I saw that guy, as it happens . . . weirdly . . . last week in the street. His name’s Carl or something.’ ‘You did? How was he? Levi – is that you? ’  the anatomy lesson

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Michael took it from him. ‘All we can assume,’ said Monty, as Michael drew a single piece of folded notepaper from it, ‘is that your mother’s illness had already gone some way towards affecting her mind. That was found in her side table. What do you make of it?’ Over her fiance´’s shoulder, Amelia craned to read what was written there and, when she did, let out a little gasp. ‘Well, first, there’s no way this is legally binding,’ said Michael at once. ‘It’s written in pencil!’ Amelia blurted out. ‘Nobody thinks it’s legally binding,’ said Monty, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘That’s hardly the point. The point is: what does it mean?’ ‘She would never have written this,’ said Michael solidly. ‘Who says this is her handwriting? I don’t think it is.’ ‘What does it say ?’ said Victoria and began to cry again, as she had been doing almost hourly for four days. ‘ To whom it may concern ,’ began Amelia, wide-eyed as a child and employing a babyish whisper. ‘ Upon my death I leave my Jean Hyp – Hyp – I can never say that name! – painting of Maıˆtresse Er – Erzu . . .’ ‘We know which bloody painting it is!’ snapped Michael. ‘Sorry, Dad,’ he added.  On Beauty ‘. . . to Mrs Kiki Belsey !’ announced Amelia as if these were the most remarkable words she’d ever been called upon to say out loud. ‘And it’s signed by Mrs Kipps!’ ‘She didn’t write that,’ said Michael again. ‘No way. She never would do something like that. Sorry. No way. That woman obviously had some power over Mum that we weren’t aware of – she must have had her eye on that painting for a while – we know she’d been in the house. No, sorry, this is completely out of order,’ concluded Michael, although his argument had neatly double-backed on itself. ‘She bedevilled Mrs Kipps’s mind!’ yelped Amelia, whose innocent imagination was infected by some of the more gaudy episodes in the Bible. ‘Shut up, Ammy,’ muttered Michael. He turned the note over as if its blank side might offer a clue to its provenance. ‘This is a family matter, Amelia,’ said Monty severely. ‘And you are not yet family. It would be preferable if you kept your comments to yourself.’ Amelia held on to the cross at her throat and lowered her eyes. Victoria rose up from her armchair and snatched the paper from her brother. ‘This is Mum’s handwriting.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “Maybe it doesn’t solve anything,” I said, “but I want it. I want to feel whole.” “But you felt you were part of Brian and that didn’t work either.” “Brian was crazy.” “Everyone’s a little crazy when you get inside their head,” Adrian said. “It’s only a matter of degree.” “I guess…” “Look—why don’t you just stop looking for love and try to live your own life?” “Because what sort of a life do I have if I don’t have love?” “You have your work, your writing, your teaching, your friends….” Drab, drab, drab, I thought. “All my writing is an attempt to get love, anyway. I know it’s crazy. I know it’s doomed to disappointment. But there it is: I want everyone to love me.” “You lose,” Adrian said. “I know, but my knowing doesn’t change anything. Why doesn’t my knowing ever change anything?” Adrian didn’t answer. I suppose I wasn’t asking him anyway, but just throwing out the question to the blue twilit mountains (we were driving through the Goddard Pass with the top of the Triumph down). “In the mornings,” Adrian finally said, “I never can remember your name.” So that was my answer. It went through me like a knife. And there I was lying awake every night next to him trembling and saying my own name over and over to myself to try to remember who I was. — “The trouble with existentialism is” (I said this as we were driving down the autostrada) “that you can’t stop thinking about the future. Actions do have consequences.” “I can stop thinking about the future,” Adrian said. “How?” He shrugged. “Dunno. I just can. I feel glorious today, for example.” “Why do I feel so lousy when you feel so glorious?” “Because you’re bloody Jewish,” he laughed. “The Chosen People. You may be mediocre at other things, but at suffering you’re always superb.” “Bastard.” “Why? Just because I tell you the truth? Look—you want love, you want intensity, you want feeling, you want closeness—and what do you settle for? Suffering. At least your suffering is intense…. The patient loves her disease. She doesn’t want to be cured.” —

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Since Pia usually started, she was the one who had the privilege of sketching the outlines of the character we would all have to tolerate: Dorian Fairchester Faddington IV was a promiscuous poetaster of whom even his best friends declared that he “went from bed to verse.” Though he was sexually omnivorous and on occasion preferred camels, like nine out of ten doctors, ordinarily his taste ran to women. Hermione Fingerforth was a woman—or so she liked to assume—and whenever she ran into Dorian it was not long before their lips met in a succession of interesting poses. “The skin is the largest organ of the body,” she once nonchalantly remarked to him as they were sunbathing in the nude together on the terrace of her penthouse in Flatbush. “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.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  She struggles to scream and in the struggle wakes herself up. She is surprised to find herself in Paris rather than her parents’ house. He still lies beside her as if dead. She looks at his sleeping face, the long mouth with its curled-up corners, the sketchy eyebrows like Chinese calligraphy, and she thinks that next year this time they will not be together or else they will have a baby who does not look like her. “Merry Christmas,” he says, opening his eyes. They make love hopefully. It is freezing and last night’s rain has made the streets glassy. They dress and go out for a walk. He holds her tightly, but anyway she keeps slipping. He admonishes her to “take small steps.” “As if my feet were bound,” she says. He doesn’t laugh. They walk along the Ile St. Louis and admire the architecture. They point out quaint stone carvings on the second stories of townhouses. They stop to watch three old men who are catching little wriggling fishes in the gray and swollen Seine. They eat two dozen oysters in an Alsatian restaurant and then have onion tarts and get drunk on wine. They walk the glassy streets again, holding on to each other for dear life. She wonders where she could go if she left him. The home she dreamed of last night comes back to her in snatches. She knows she can’t go there. She has nowhere to go. Nowhere. She holds him tightly. “I love you,” she says. When it gets darker they stop for bûche de Noël and coffee in a little restaurant facing Notre Dame from the Left Bank. Is he thinking of leaving her? She never knows what he’s thinking. They pretend it was a happy, carefree day. He never fails to hold her tightly around the waist as they cross the icy streets together. “Take small steps,” he keeps saying. “You’re going to break your neck and take me along with you.” “What would I do without you?” she says. He clears his throat nervously, but says nothing. The film would end there, on the note of his cough, perhaps. But I remember the events that followed: the car breaking down, and having to take the train back to Heidelberg; the four French soldiers who shared our second-class couchette compartment and belched and farted all the way back to Germany, almost as if they were powering the train; the precipitous drop from the highest couchette (which I occupied) to the floor. A sudden bout of diarrhea caused me to negotiate this drop no less than six times that night (and once I stepped right into the groin of the French soldier in the bottom couchette, who was extremely gracious about it, considering). And then the return to Heidelberg with Christmas over and having to face being in the army all over again.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I sat bolt upright. “What’s wrong?” “Disgusting bug.” “Where?” “Your shoulder.” He looked sideways across his chest for it and grabbed it by one leg. He dangled it, watching it tread the air like a swimmer treading water. “Don’t kill it!” I pleaded. “I thought you were scared of it.” “I am, but I don’t want to see you kill it.” I shrank back. “How about this?” he said, pulling off one of its legs. “Oh God— don’t! I hate it when people do that.” Adrian went on plucking off the legs like daisy petals. “She loves me, she loves me not…” he said. “I hate that,” I said. “Please don’t.” “I thought you hated bugs. ” “I don’t like them crawling on me—but I can’t stand to see them killed either. And it makes me sick to see you mutilate it like that. I can’t watch,” and I got up and ran back to the swimming hole. “I don’t understand you!” Adrian shouted after me. “Why are you so bloody sensitive?” I ducked under the water. — We didn’t speak again until after lunch. “You’ve ruined it,” Adrian said, “with your fretting and worrying and hypersensitivity.” “OK, then drop me off in Paris and I’ll fly home from there.” “With pleasure.” “I could have told you that you’d get sick of me if I ever displayed any human feelings. What kind of plastic woman do you want, anyway?” “Don’t be daft. I just want you to grow up.” “As defined by you.” “As defined by both of us.” “Aren’t you democratic,” I said sarcastically. We began packing the car, banging tent poles and gear. It took about twenty minutes, during which we didn’t exchange a word. Finally we got in the car. “I suppose it doesn’t mean anything to you that I cared enough about you to shake up my whole life for you.” “You didn’t do it for me,” he said. “I was just the excuse.” “I never would have been able to do it without feeling as strongly about you as I did.” And then with a shudder that went through my whole body, I remembered my longing for him in Vienna. The weakness in the knees. The churning guts. The racing heart. The shortness of breath. All the things he stirred in me which had made me follow him. I longed for him as he was when I first met him. The man he had become was disappointing. “The man under the bed can never be the man over the bed,” I said. “They’re mutually exclusive.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I used to stare and stare at that beautiful profile wondering what in the world was happening in his head and why I couldn’t seem to fathom it. “I want to get inside your head,” I said, “and I can’t. It’s driving me crazy.” “But why do you want to get inside my head? What do you think that will solve?” “It’s just that I want to really feel close to someone, united with someone, whole for once. I want to really love someone.” “What makes you think love solves anything?” “Maybe it doesn’t solve anything,” I said, “but I want it. I want to feel whole.” “But you felt you were part of Brian and that didn’t work either.” “Brian was crazy.” “Everyone’s a little crazy when you get inside their head,” Adrian said. “It’s only a matter of degree.” “I guess...” “Look—why don’t you just stop looking for love and try to live your own life?” “Because what sort of a life do I have if I don’t have love?” “You have your work, your writing, your teaching, your friends....” Drab, drab, drab, I thought. “All my writing is an attempt to get love, anyway. I know it’s crazy. I know it’s doomed to disappointment. But there it is: I want everyone to love me.” “You lose,” Adrian said. “I know, but my knowing doesn’t change anything. Why doesn’t my knowing ever change anything?” Adrian didn’t answer. I suppose I wasn’t asking him anyway, but just throwing out the question to the blue twilit mountains (we were driving through the Goddard Pass with the top of the Triumph down). “In the mornings,” Adrian finally said, “I never can remember your name.” So that was my answer. It went through me like a knife. And there I was lying awake every night next to him trembling and saying my own name over and over to myself to try to remember who I was. — “The trouble with existentialism is” (I said this as we were driving down the autostrada) “that you can’t stop thinking about the future. Actions do have consequences.” “I can stop thinking about the future,” Adrian said. “How?” He shrugged. “Dunno. I just can. I feel glorious today, for example.” “Why do I feel so lousy when you feel so glorious?” “Because you’re bloody Jewish,” he laughed. “The Chosen People. You may be mediocre at other things, but at suffering you’re always superb.” “Bastard.” “Why? Just because I tell you the truth? Look—you want love, you want intensity, you want feeling, you want closeness—and what do you settle for? Suffering. At least your suffering is intense.... The patient loves her disease. She doesn’t want to be cured.” — The trouble with me was that I always wanted to be the greatest in everything. The greatest lover. The greatest hungerer.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Monday. Rainy morning. “Ces matins gris si doux …” My white pajamas have a lilac design on the back. I am like one of those inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting in the middle of a luminous web and giving little jerks to this or that strand. My web is spread all over the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like a wily wizard. Is Lo in her room? Gently I tug on the silk. She is not. Just heard the toilet paper cylinder make its staccato sound as it is turned; and no footfalls has my outflung filament traced from the bathroom back to her room. Is she still brushing her teeth (the only sanitary act Lo performs with real zest)? No. The bathroom door has just slammed, so one has to feel elsewhere about the house for the beautiful warm-colored prey. Let us have a strand of silk descend the stairs. I satisfy myself by this means that she is not in the kitchen—not banging the refrigerator door or screeching at her detested mamma (who, I suppose, is enjoying her third, cooing and subduedly mirthful, telephone conversation of the morning). Well, let us grope and hope. Ray-like, I glide in thought to the parlor and find the radio silent (and mamma still talking to Mrs. Chatfield or Mrs. Hamilton, very softly, flushed, smiling, cupping the telephone with her free hand, denying by implication that she denies those amusing rumors, rumor, roomer, whispering intimately, as she never does, the clear-cut lady, in face to face talk). So my nymphet is not in the house at all! Gone! What I thought was a prismatic weave turns out to be but an old gray cobweb, the house is empty, is dead. And then comes Lolita’s soft sweet chuckle through my half-open door “Don’t tell Mother but I’ve eaten all your bacon.” Gone when I scuttle out of my room. Lolita, where are you? My breakfast tray, lovingly prepared by my landlady, leers at me toothlessly, ready to be taken in. Lola, Lolita! Tuesday. Clouds again interfered with that picnic on that unattainable lake. Is it Fate scheming? Yesterday I tried on before the mirror a new pair of bathing trunks.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Pia never married. I married twice—but still the search went on. Any one of my many shrinks could tell you that I was looking for my father. Wasn’t everyone? The explanation didn’t quite content me. Not that it seemed wrong; it just seemed too simple. Perhaps the search was really a kind of ritual in which the process was more important than the end. Perhaps it was a kind of quest. Perhaps there was no man at all, but just a mirage conjured by our longing and emptiness. When you go to sleep hungry, you dream of eating. When you go to sleep with a full bladder, you dream of getting up to pee. When you go to sleep horny, you dream of getting laid. Maybe the impossible man was nothing more than a specter made of our own yearning. Maybe he was like the fearless intruder, the phantom rapist women expect to find under their beds or in their closets. Or maybe he was really death, the last lover. In one poem, I imagined him as the man under the bed. The man under the bed The man who has been there for years waiting The man who waits for my floating bare foot The man who is silent as dustballs riding the darkness The man whose breath is the breathing of small white butterflies The man whose breathing I hear when I pick up the phone The man in the mirror whose breath blackens silver The boneman in closets who rattles the mothballs The man at the end of the end of the line I met him tonight I always meet him He stands in the amber air of a bar When the shrimp curl like beckoning fingers & ride through the air on their toothpick skewers When the ice cracks & I am about to fall through he arranges his face around its hollows he opens his pupilless eyes at me For years he has waited to drag me down & now he tells me he has only waited to take me home We waltz through the street like death & the maiden We float through the wall of the wall of my room If he’s my dream he will fold back into my body His breath writes letters of mist on the glass of my cheeks I wrap myself around him like the darkness I breathe into his mouth & make him real SEVENA Nervous Cough What we remember lacks the hard edge of fact. To help us along we create little fictions, highly subtle and individual scenarios which clarify and shape our experience. The remembered event becomes a fiction, a structure made to accommodate certain feelings. This is obvious to me. If it weren’t for these structures, art would be too personal for the artist to create, much less for the audience to grasp. Even film, the most literal of all the arts, is edited. —Jerzy Kosinski

• From On Beauty (2005)

  She’s got a will of iron.’ They had this discussion, in different variants, several times a week. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ contributed Howard, and with exactly the morose intonation of his father. ‘She’ll probably sell this house from under us an’ all.’  on beauty and being wrong ‘I really hope so, Howard,’ said Zora. ‘She totally deserves it.’ ‘Zora, haven’t you got to get to work?’ asked Howard. ‘None of you knows anything,’ said Levi, hopping to swap feet. ‘She’s gonna sell that picture, but she won’t keep the money. I was round there yesterday, talked to her about it. The money’s going to the Haitian Support Group. She just doesn’t want Kipps to have it.’ ‘You were round there . . . Kennedy Square?’ queried Howard. ‘Nice try,’ said Levi, because they had all been instructed not to give Howard any details as to Kiki’s exact location. Levi put both feet on the floor and evened up the legs of his jeans. ‘How do I look?’ he asked. Murdoch, fresh from a short-legged scramble through the long grass, came scuffling into the kitchen. He was overwhelmed by attention from all sides: Zora ran over to pick him up; Levi played with his ears; Howard offered him a bowl of food. Kiki had wanted desperately to take him, but her apartment was not dog-friendly. And now the remaining Belseys being nice to Murdoch was, in some way, for Kiki; there was the unspoken, irrational hope that, although not with them in this room, she could somehow sense the care they were lavishing upon her beloved little dog, and that these good vibes would . . . it was ridiculous. It was a way of missing her. ‘Levi, I can give you a lift into town if you like, if you can wait a minute,’ said Howard. ‘Zoor – aren’t you late?’ Zora didn’t move. ‘ I’m dressed, Howard,’ she said, pointing to her summer wait-ress’s uniform of black skirt and white shirt. ‘It’s your big day. And you’re the one with no pants on.’ This much was true. Howard picked Murdoch up – although the dog had barely tasted the meat put in front of him – and took him upstairs to the bedroom. Here Howard stood before his closet and considered how smart he could possibly look given the humidity. In the closet, from which all the real clothes – all the colourful silk and cashmere and satin – had been removed, a solitary suit hung, swinging above a jumble of jeans and shirts and shorts. He reached  On Beauty out for the suit. He put it back.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I wiped my face and my fingers. She smiled at the cadeau. She exulted. She wanted to call Dick. I said I would have to leave in a moment, did not want to see him at all, at all. We tried to think of some subject of conversation. For some reason, I kept seeing—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, “pinging” pebbles at an empty can. I almost said—trying to find some casual remark—“I wonder sometimes what has become of the little McCoo girl, did she ever get better?”—but stopped in time lest she rejoin: “I wonder sometimes what has become of the little Haze girl …” Finally, I reverted to money matters. That sum, I said, represented more or less the net rent from her mother’s house; she said: “Had it not been sold years ago?” No (I admit I had told her this in order to sever all connections with R.); a lawyer would send a full account of the financial situation later; it was rosy; some of the small securities her mother had owned had gone up and up. Yes, I was quite sure I had to go. I had to go, and find him, and destroy him. Since I would not have survived the touch of her lips, I kept retreating in a mincing dance, at every step she and her belly made toward me. She and the dog saw me off. I was surprised (this a rhetorical figure, I was not) that the sight of the old car in which she had ridden as a child and a nymphet, left her so very indifferent. All she remarked was it was getting sort of purplish about the gills. I said it was hers, I could go by bus. She said don’t be silly, they would fly to Jupiter and buy a car there. I said I would buy this one from her for five hundred dollars. “At this rate we’ll be millionnaires next,” she said to the ecstatic dog. Carmencita, lui demandais-je … “One last word,” I said in my horrible careful English, “are you quite, quite sure that—well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but—well—some day, any day, you will not come to live with me? I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope” (to that effect). “No,” she said smiling, “no.” “It would have made all the difference,” said Humbert Humbert. Then I pulled out my automatic—I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me to do it. “Good by-aye!” she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this. I mean, such is the formal agreement with the so-called authorities.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  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. (At the time, Pia herself was overweight but flat-chested.) “I see the whole thing as taking place in the Cloisters,” she went on. “I’m sure you could rent the Cloisters if you knew the right people.” “Where would you live?”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  How was the hike? Did you have a marvelous time at the camp?” “Uh-huh.” “Sorry to leave?” “Un-un.” “Talk, Lo—don’t grunt. Tell me something.” “What thing, Dad?” (she let the word expand with ironic deliberation). “Any old thing.” “Okay, if I call you that?” (eyes slit at the road). “Quite.” “It’s a sketch, you know. When did you fall for my mummy?” “Some day, Lo, you will understand many emotions and situations, such as for example the harmony, the beauty of spiritual relationship.” “Bah!” said the cynical nymphet. Shallow lull in the dialogue, filled with some landscape. “Look, Lo, at all those cows on that hillside.” “I think I’ll vomit if I look at a cow again.” “You know, I missed you terribly, Lo.” “I did not. Fact I’ve been revoltingly unfaithful to you, but it does not matter one bit, because you’ve stopped caring for me, anyway. You drive much faster than my mummy, mister.” I slowed down from a blind seventy to a purblind fifty. “Why do you think I have ceased caring for you, Lo?” “Well, you haven’t kissed me yet, have you?” Inly dying, inly moaning, I glimpsed a reasonably wide shoulder of road ahead, and bumped and wobbled into the weeds. Remember she is only a child, remember she is only— Hardly had the car come to a standstill than Lolita positively flowed into my arms.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  And he who sets himself to search farther, has lost all sense of difference between the one style and the other”; and, as if satisfied, he was silent. As birds that winter along the Nile sometimes make of themselves an aerial squadron, then fly in greater haste and go in file; so all the people that were there, facing round, quickened their pace, fleet through leanness and desire. And as one who is weary of running lets his comrades go by, and walks until the panting of his chest be eased; so Forese let the holy flock pass by, and came on behind with me, saying: “When shall it be that I see thee again?” “I know not,” answered I him, “how long I may live, yet my return will not be so soon but that I be not before with my desire at the bank: for the place where I was put to live, is day by day more stripped of good, and seems doomed to woeful ruin.” “Now go,” said he, “for him10 who is most in fault I see dragged at the tail of a beast, towards the vale where sin is never cleansed. Faster goes the beast at every step, increasing ever till it dashes him, and leaves his body hideously disfigured. Yon wheels (and he lifted his eyes up to the heavens) have not long to revolve ere that shall be clear to thee which my words may no further declare. Now remain thou behind, for time is precious in this realm, so that I lose too much coming with thee thus at equal pace.” As a horseman sometimes comes forth at a gallop from a troop that is riding, and goes to win the honour of the first encounter, so parted he from us with greater strides; and I was left by the way with the two who were such great marshals of the world. And when he had advanced so far ahead of us, that mine eyes made such pursuit of him, as my mind did of his words, the laden and green boughs of another tree11 appeared to me, and not very far away, for I was but then come round thither. I saw people beneath it lifting up their hands, and crying out something towards the foliage, like spoilt and greedy children, who beg, and he of whom they beg, answers not, but to make their longing full keen, holds what they desire on high, and hides it not. Then they departed as though undeceived; and now we came to the great tree which mocks so many prayers and tears. “Pass onward without drawing nigh to it; higher up is a tree which was eaten of by Eve, and this plant was raised from it.” Thus amid the branches some one spake; wherefore Virgil and Statius and I, close together, went forward by the side which rises.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  183 The novel is about Shimamura’s attraction to two women he meets in snow country. One is a young woman he sees on the train on his way there, and the other is a geisha he meets at the resort. He avoids any kind of commitment to either one; he in fact retreats when he feels himself on the verge of a real relationship with the geisha. The two women to whom he is attracted are quite different from each other. The woman on the train—Yoko—stays disembodied for Shimamura as a distant ideal. The scene in which he sees her on the train is perhaps the most famous in the novel. He sees her re À ection in a window inside the train, but he also sees the landscape moving behind her image in the window, so the effect is like a montage in ¿ lm. At one point a light from outside shines directly through her eye in the image in the window, making her eye into a star; throughout, Shimamura will associate her with cold, distance, and stars. She suggests cleanliness and freshness. It is perhaps possible that he is interested in her because of her remoteness and inaccessibility—which would be very much in character for him. The geisha—Komako—is associated with red (not white, as Yoko is), and her physicality is insisted upon. She and Shimamura become lovers almost immediately: although as a geisha she is not required to have sex with him, she chooses to, seeming to have fallen in love with him. We can understand his attraction to Yoko—he is a connoisseur who likes his pleasures at a distance—but we are less certain of what appeals to him about Komako. It may be her ambiguity. When Shimamura ¿ rst meets her, she is neither an independent young woman nor a geisha but something in between, which might appeal to him. Her colors are red and white, but the white is the white of geisha powder, not snow or stars. She, like Shimamura himself, is hard to de¿ ne, to pin down. She is deeply associated with silkworms. The progression from larvae to worms to moths moves from red to white too, and Komako lives in an attic previously used for raising silkworms. When she is young, Shimamura associates her with red translucence; when she is a full geisha, he associates her with the white-powdered wings of the moths laying eggs. A tour that Shimamura takes into the backlands is related to this silkworm lore: Chijimi silk must be spun, woven, ¿ nished, and bleached in the glare of sunlit snow by girls between the ages of 12 and 24—the same ambiguous place where Shimamura ¿ nds Komako when he ¿ rst visits snow country.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Anything you can get from eating or not eating. She actually had my mother convinced that unless I had a freshly squeezed glass of orange juice every day, I would get scurvy, and she was constantly regaling me with stories about the British navy and limes. Limey. You are what you eat. I remembered a diet column in a medical journal of Bennett’s. It seemed that Miss X had been on a strict diet of 600 calories a day for weeks and weeks and was still unable to lose weight. At first her puzzled doctor thought she was cheating, so he had her make careful lists of everything she ate. She didn’t seem to be cheating. “Are you sure you have listed absolutely every mouthful you ate?” he asked. “Mouthful?” she asked. “Yes,” the doctor said sternly. “I didn’t realize that had calories,” she said. Well, the upshot, of course (with pun intended) was that she was a prostitute swallowing at least ten to fifteen mouthfuls of ejaculate a day and the calories in just one good-sized spurt were enough to get her thrown out of Weight Watchers forever. What was the calorie count? I can’t remember. But ten to fifteen ejaculations turned out to be the equivalent of a seven-course meal at the Tour d’Argent, though of course, they paid you to eat instead of you paying them. Poor people starving from lack of protein all over the world. If only they knew! The cure for starvation for India and the cure for the overpopulation—both in one big swallow! One swallow doesn’t make a summer, but it makes a pretty damn good nightcap. Was it possible that I was really making myself laugh? “Ho ho ho,” I said to my naked self. And then, on the momentum gained from that little burst of false humor, I dug into my suitcase and pulled out my notebooks and worksheets and poems. “I am going to figure out how I got here,” I said to myself. How had I wound up naked and roasted like a half-done chicken, in a seedy dump in Paris? And where the hell was I going next? I sat down on the bed, spread all my notebooks and poems around me, and started flipping through a fat spiral binder which went back almost four years. There was no particular system. Journal jottings, shopping lists, lists of letters to be answered, drafts of irate letters never sent, pasted-in newspaper clippings, ideas for stories, first drafts of poems—everything jumbled together, chaotic, almost illegible. The entries were written in felt-tipped pens of all colors. But again, there was no system of color-coding. Shocking pink, Kelly green, and Mediterranean blue seemed to be the preferred colors, but there was also quite a lot of black and orange and purple. There was scarcely any somber blue-black ink at all. And never pencil.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Right. Nothing to you whatever. But if, after reading my “confession,” you decided, in your dark romantic European way, that I am attractive enough for you to take advantage of my letter and make a pass at me, then you would be a criminal—worse than a kidnaper who rapes a child. You see, chéri. If you decided to stay, if I found you at home (which I know I won’t—and that’s why I am able to go on like this), the fact of your remaining would only mean one thing: that you want me as much as I do you: as a lifelong mate; and that you are ready to link up your life with mine forever and ever and be a father to my little girl. Let me rave and ramble on for a teeny while more, my dearest, since I know this letter has been by now torn by you, and its pieces (illegible) in the vortex of the toilet. My dearest, mon très, très cher, what a world of love I have built up for you during this miraculous June! I know how reserved you are, how “British.” Your old-world reticence, your sense of decorum may be shocked by the boldness of an American girl! You who conceal your strongest feelings must think me a shameless little idiot for throwing open my poor bruised heart like this. In years gone by, many disappointments came my way. Mr. Haze was a splendid person, a sterling soul, but he happened to be twenty years my senior, and—well, let us not gossip about the past. My dearest, your curiosity must be well satisfied if you have ignored my request and read this letter to the bitter end. Never mind. Destroy it and go. Do not forget to leave the key on the desk in your room. And some scrap of address so that I could refund the twelve dollars I owe you till the end of the month. Good-bye, dear one. Pray for me—if you ever pray. C.H. What I present here is what I remember of the letter, and what I remember of the letter I remember verbatim (including that awful French). It was at least twice longer. I have left out a lyrical passage which I more or less skipped at the time, concerning Lolita’s brother who died at 2 when she was 4, and how much I would have liked him. Let me see what else can I say? Yes. There is just a chance that “the vortex of the toilet” (where the letter did go) is my own matter-of-fact contribution. She probably begged me to make a special fire to consume it. My first movement was one of repulsion and retreat. My second was like a friend’s calm hand falling upon my shoulder and bidding me take my time. I did. I came out of my daze and found myself still in Lo’s room.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I ordered more coffee and watched the passing parade. All those innocents abroad! A couple was kissing on the street corner and I watched them, thinking of Adrian. They were gazing into each other’s eyes as if the secret of life were to be found there. What do lovers see in each other’s eyes anyway? Each other? I thought of my crazy notion that Adrian was my mental double and how wrong it had turned out to be. That was what I had originally wanted. A man to complete me. Papageno to my Papagena. But perhaps that was the most delusional of all my delusions. People don’t complete us. We complete ourselves. If we haven’t the power to complete ourselves, the search for love becomes a search for self-annihilation; and then we try to convince ourselves that self-annihilation is love. I knew I wouldn’t run after Adrian to Hampstead. I knew I wouldn’t screw up my life for the sake of a great self-destructive passion. There was a part of me that wanted to and another part of me that despised Isadora for not being the kind of woman who gives her all for love. But there was no use pretending. I was not that sort of woman. I hadn’t the taste for total self-annihilation. I would never be a romantic heroine maybe, but I would stay alive. And that was all that mattered at the moment. I would go home and write about Adrian instead. I would keep him by giving him up. It was true I missed him desperately at times. I watched that couple kiss and I could almost feel Adrian’s tongue in my mouth. And I had all the other corny symptoms too: I kept thinking I saw his car across the street and maybe later I would even run over to inspect the license plates. I thought for an instant that I saw the back of his head in the café and then I found myself peering suddenly into some stranger’s face. I kept remembering, at odd moments, his smell, his laugh, his jokes…. But it would pass in time. It always did, unfortunately. The bruise on the heart which at first feels incredibly tender to the slightest touch eventually turns all the shades of the rainbow and stops aching. We forget about it. We even forget we have hearts until the next time. And then when it happens again we wonder how we ever could have forgotten. We think: “this one is stronger, this one is better…” because, in fact, we cannot fully remember the time before.