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 transformation improved her looks. Her smile that had been such a contrived thing, thenceforth became the radiance of utter adoration—a radiance having something soft and moist about it, in which, with wonder, I recognized a resemblance to the lovely, inane, lost look that Lo had when gloating over a new kind of concoction at the soda fountain or mutely admiring my expensive, always tailor-fresh clothes. Deeply fascinated, I would watch Charlotte while she swapped parental woes with some other lady and made that national grimace of feminine resignation (eyes rolling up, mouth drooping sideways) which, in an infantile form, I had seen Lo making herself. We had highballs before turning in, and with their help, I would manage to evoke the child while caressing the mother. This was the white stomach within which my nymphet had been a little curved fish in 1934. This carefully dyed hair, so sterile to my sense of smell and touch, acquired at certain lamplit moments in the poster bed the tinge, if not the texture, of Lolita’s curls. I kept telling myself, as I wielded my brand-new large-as-life wife, that biologically this was the nearest I could get to Lolita; that at Lolita’s age, Lotte had been as desirable a schoolgirl as her daughter was, and as Lolita’s daughter would be some day. I had my wife unearth from under a collection of shoes (Mr. Haze had a passion for them, it appears) a thirty-year-old album, so that I might see how Lotte had looked as a child; and even though the light was wrong and the dresses graceless, I was able to make out a dim first version of Lolita’s outline, legs, cheekbones, bobbed nose. Lottelita, Lolitchen. So I tom-peeped across the hedges of years, into wan little windows. And when, by means of pitifully ardent, naïvely lascivious caresses, she of the noble nipple and massive thigh prepared me for the performance of my nightly duty, it was still a nymphet’s scent that in despair I tried to pick up, as I bayed through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  One lusty lady who had juice and joy and love and talent too? Where could we turn for guidance? Colette, under her Gallic Afro? Sappho, about whom almost nothing is known? “I famish/and I pine,” she says in my handy desk translation. And so did we! Almost all the women we admired most were spinsters or suicides. Was that where it all led? So the search for the impossible man went on. 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.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  So he hates Christmas too. Because he is not a Christian.’ ‘Well, none of us is that,’ replied Kiki firmly, not wishing to mislead. ‘But Howard’s just pretty determined about it. He won’t have it in the house. It used to upset the kids, but they’re used to it now, and we make up for it in other ways. But, no, not an eggnog, not a bauble shall cross our threshold!’ ‘But you make him sound like Scrooge!’ ‘No . . . He’s not at all stingy . Actually he’s incredibly generous. We eat ourselves into a stupor on the day, and he spoils the kids with a crazy amount of gifts come the New Year – but he just won’t do Christmas. I think we’re going to stay with friends in London – it depends if the kids agree. A couple we’ve known a long time. We went there two years ago – it was lovely. They’re Jewish, so there’s no issue. That’s just the way Howard likes it: no rituals, no superstitions, no traditions and no images of Santa Claus. It sounds strange, I guess, but we’re used to it.’ ‘I don’t believe you – you’re having fun with me.’ ‘It’s true! Actually, when you think about it, it’s a pretty Christian policy. Thou shalt worship no graven images; thou shalt have no other God but me – ’ ‘I see,’ said Carlene, dismayed by the levity with which Kiki was approaching the subject. ‘But who is his God?’ Kiki was limbering up to answer this difficult question, when she was distracted by the noise and colour of a group of Africans one  On Beauty block along. Taking up half the sidewalk selling their rip-offs, and among them, surely among them – But, as she called his name, a cross-stream rabble of shoppers blocked her sight line, and by the time they’d passed the mirage had vanished. ‘Isn’t that weird? I always think I see Levi. Never the other two. It’s that uniform – cap, hood, jeans. All those boys are wearing exactly the same thing as Levi. It’s like this goddamn army . I see boys who look like him just about everywhere I go.’ ‘I don’t care what the doctors say,’ said Carlene, leaning on Kiki as they walked the short flight of steps to an eighteenth-century townhouse, hollowed out to accommodate goods and their buyers and sellers; ‘the eyes and the heart are directly connected.’ In this place they found a cane that was a reasonable approximation of the one in Carlene’s mind. Also some monogrammed handkerchiefs, and then the most dreadful cravat. Carlene was satisfied. Kiki suggested they take these gifts to the in-store wrapping service.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Dimples are caused by the adherence of the skin to the deeper tissues. Greeks repulse a heavy guerilla assault—and, ah, at last, a little figure in white, and Dr. Braddock in black, but whatever spectral shoulder was brushing against his ample form—nothing of myself could I make out. I went to find Rita who introduced me with her vin triste smile to a pocket-sized wizened truculently tight old man saying this was— what was the name again, son?—a former schoolmate of hers. He tried to retain her, and in the slight scuffle that followed I hurt my thumb against his hard head. In the silent painted park where I walked her and aired her a little, she sobbed and said I would soon, soon leave her as everybody had, and I sang her a wistful French ballad, and strung together some fugitive rhymes to amuse her: The place was called Enchanted Hunters. Query: What Indian dyes, Diana, did thy dell endorse to make of Picture Lake a very blood bath of trees before the blue hotel? She said: “Why blue when it is white, why blue for heaven’s sake?” and started to cry again, and I marched her to the car, and we drove on to New York, and soon she was reasonably happy again high up in the haze on the little terrace of our flat. I notice I have somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Cantrip, and our passing through Briceland again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of swimming colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection. 27 My letterbox in the entrance hall belonged to the type that allows one to glimpse something of its contents through a glassed slit. Several times already, a trick of harlequin light that fell through the glass upon an alien handwriting had twisted it into a semblance of Lolita’s script causing me almost to collapse as I leant against an adjacent urn, almost my own. Whenever that happened—whenever her lovely, loopy, childish scrawl was horribly transformed into the dull hand of one of my few correspondents—I used to recollect, with anguished amusement, the times in my trustful, pre-dolorian past when I would be misled by a jewel-bright window opposite wherein my lurking eye, the ever alert periscope of my shameful vice, would make out from afar a half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of combing her Alice-in- Wonderland hair.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  June 15, 1925: Odd—though perfectly natural—how going away disconnects one from life. Everything has gone on at such a pace. Sandy painting his pictures, & clearly more or less living with the effusive Otto—and this puts me in a strange position. The paintings themselves I do not understand, & have been thinking about over this week, when I’ve seen him often. Their colours are unnatural, & their subjects are peculiarly distorted; but above all they are large. It is not a largeness I can claim to like, or even believe in. Their largeness is the largeness of Sandy’s own gestures, of his drinking, of his fantastical filthy talk—it is not the largeness of large pictures. He has an extraordinary study of Otto, naked to the waist, seen from somewhere right down on the ground, so that he towers up above, his chin turned heroically, all the features exaggerated almost into brutality. It’s larger than life-size. It’s ridiculous, I can’t help myself feeling. But I know that that might be because Otto is himself ridiculous. S. is so absorbed in him, so greedily goes on about him, that I feel his thoughts are not really with me any more. His manner is wilder than ever, but beneath it all there is restraint & even boredom between us. About Africa, about everything that has happened to me, he shows no curiosity. I fear he even finds me a dull dog. June 18, 1925: On Friday I had a meeting with Sir Arthur Cavill—early evening at the Reform, whisky-and-soda, talk about nothing in particular. He appeared almost embarrassed to touch on the purely routine matters we were supposed to discuss. I liked him—austere, detached at first, fastidiously bachelorly—& was not surprised when keen feelings flashed under the surface of his conversation. At the end, after many formalities, he talked briefly about Meroe, & the first time he had seen the pyramids there. It was as if both of us, lightly warmed with drink, suddenly felt our spirits freed. For a moment we were very far away from Pall Mall, & though little was said we shared an exalted almost tender glance. June 23, 1925: Last night a bizarre encounter. I was at Sandy’s studio in the afternoon when without a word he & Otto tore off their clothes & clambered on to the roof. I sat around reading about Lawrence of Arabia and Queen Marie of Rumania in the Times Literary Supplement until I had mustered the insouciance to join them. They are brown as what—Corsicans?—all over, but of course I need not have felt ashamed. Otto seemed to respect me more when he saw how sunburned I was. ‘We must go to the Tropics,’ he said to Sandy, ‘and run around like the darkies.’

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I hoped that we would be able to do it by way of the movies. I began with: "The question of love seems to occupy you a great deal, too." I don)t doubt that it occupies you ) too ) was what he seemed to be thinking, but he only said, mildly, "Yes." Then, before I could put it another way, "You may find it a bit hard to talk to me. I really do not see much point in talking about my past work. And I cannot talk about work I haven't done yet." I mentioned his great preoccupation with egotism, so many 24-0 NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME of his people being centered on themselves, necessarily, and disastrously: Vogler in The Magician, Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries, the ballerina in Summer Interlude. "I am very fo nd of Summer Intedude," he said. "It is my fa vorite movie. "I don't mean," he added, "that it's my best. I don't know which movie is my best." Summer Interlude was made in 1950. It is probably not Bergman's best movie-! would give that place to the movie which has been shown in the States as The Naked Night-but it is certainly among the most moving. Its strength lies in its portrait of the ballerina, uncannily precise and truthful, and in its perception of the nature of first love, which first seems to open the universe to us and then seems to lock us out of it. It is one of the group of films-including The Waiting Women, Smiles of a Summer Night, and Brink of LijC-which have a woman, or women, at their center and in which the men, generally, are rather shadowy. But all the Bergman themes are in it: his preoccupation with time and the inevi tability of death, the comedy of human entanglements, the nature of illusion, the nature of egotism, the price of art. These themes also run through the movies which have at their center a man: The Nalud Night (which should really be called The Clown's Evening), Wild Strawberries, Ibe Face, Ibe Sev enth Seal. In only one of these movies-The Face-is the male fe male relation affirmed from the male point of view; as being, that is, a source of strength fo r the man. In the movies con cerned with women, the male-female relation succeeds only through the passion, wit, or patience of the woman and de pends on how astutely she is able to manipulate the male con ceit. The Naked Night is the most blackly ambivalent of Bergman's films-and surely one of the most brutally erotic movies ever made-but it is essentially a study of the mascu line helplessness before the fe male force.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  From this point of view the Negro problem is nearly inaccessible. It is not only written about so widely; it is written about so badly. It is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about. ("You taught me language," says Caliban to Prospera, "and my profit on't is I know how to curse.") Consider: the tremendous social activity that this problem generates imposes on whites and �egroes alike the necessity of looking forward, of working to bring about a better day. This is fine, it keeps the waters troubled; it is all, indeed, that has made possible the �cgro's progress. Nevertheless, social affairs are not generally speaking the writer's prime concern, whether they ought to be or not; it is absolutely necessary that he establish between himself and these affairs a distance which will allow, at least, for clarity, so that before he can look forward in any meaningful sense, he must first be allowed to take a long look back. In the context of the �egro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly. I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my crea tions, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; 8 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use-I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine-I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme--otherwise I would have no place in any scheme. What was the most difficult was the fact that I was fi>rced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide fr om himself as the price of his public progress; that I hated and feared white people. This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt. In effect, I hated and feared the world.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But there is not much point, on the other hand, in dismissing it as simply my fault, or my illusion. I had identified myself with him long before we met: in a sense by no means meta physical, his example had helped me to survive. He was black, he was young, he had come out of the Mississippi nightmare and the Chic ago slums, and he was a writer. He proved it could be done-proved it to me, and gave me an arm against all those others who assured me it could not be done. And I think I had expected Richard, on the day we met, somehow, mir aculou sly, to under stand this, and to rejoice in it. Perhaps that sounds foolish, but I cannot honestly say, not even now, that I really think it is foolish . Richard Wright had a tremen dous effect on countless nu mbers of people whom he never met, multitudes whom he now will never meet. This means that his responsibilities and his hazards were great. I don't think that Richard ever thought of me as one of his respon sibilities -bien au contraire! -but he certainly seemed, often enough, to wonder just what he had done to deserve me. Our reconciliation, anyway, never took place. This was a great loss for me. But many of our losses have a compensating gain. In my efforts to get through to Richard, I was forced to begin to wonder exactly why he held himself so rigidly against me. I could not believe-especially if one grants my reading of our relationship -that it could be due only to my criticism of his work. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that one really needs those few people who take oneself and one's work seriously enough to be unimp ressed by the public hullabaloo surro unding the former or the un critical solemnity which menaces the latter from the instant that, for whatever reason, it finds itself in vogue. No, it had to be more than that-the more especially as his 260 NOBODY KNOW S MY NA ME attitude toward me had not, it turned out, been evolved for my particular benefit.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  To begin with, though the traditional Christian accusation that the Jews killed Christ is neither ques tioned nor doubted, the term "Jew" actually operates in this initial context to include all infidels of white skin who have failed to accept the Savior. No real distinction is made: the preacher begins by accusing the Jews of having refused the light and proceeds fr om there to a catalog of their subsequent sins and the sufferings visited on them by a wrathful God. Though the notion of the suffering is based on the image of the wandering, exiled Jew, the context changes imperceptibly, to become a fairly obvious reminder of the trials of the Negro, while the sins recounted are the sins of the American republic. At this point, the Negro identifies himself almost wholly with the Jew. The more devout Negro considers that he is a Jew, in bondage to a hard taskmaster and waiting for a Moses to lead him out of Egypt. The hymns, the texts, and the most favored legends of the devout Negro are all Old Testament and therefore Jewish in origin: the flight from Egypt, the He brew children in the fiery furnace, the terrible jubilee songs of deliverance: Lord, wasn't that hard trials, great tribulations, Pm bound to leave this land! The covenant God made in the beginning with Abraham and which was to extend to his chil dren and to his children's children forever is a covenant made with these latter-day exiles also: as Israel was chosen, so are they. The birth and death of Jesus, which adds a non-Judaic element, also implements this identification. It is the covenant made with Abraham again, renewed, signed with his blood. ("Before Abraham was, I am.") Here the figure of Jesus op erates as the intercessor, the bridge from earth to heaven; it was Jesus who made it possible, who made salvation fr ee to all, "to the Jew first and afterwards the Gentile." The images of the suffering Christ and the suffering Jew are wedded with the image of the suffering slave, and they arc one: the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light. But if the Negro has bought his salvation with pain and the s o NOTES OF A NATIVE SON ::\few Testament is used to prove, as it were, the validity of the transformation, it is the Old Testament which is clung to and most fr equently preached from, which provides the emotional fire and anatomizes the path of bondage; and which promises \'engeance and assures the chosen of their place in Zion.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  In Paris, the African Negro's status, con spicuous and subtly inconvenient, is that of a colonial; and he leads here the intangibly precarious life of someone abruptly and recently uprooted. His bitterness is unlike that of his American kinsman in that it is not so treacherously likely to be turned against himself. He has, not so very many miles away, a homeland to which his relationship, no less than his responsibility, is overwhelmingly clear: His country must be given-or it must seize-its fr eedom. This bitter ambition is shared by his fellow colonials, with whom he has a common language, and whom he has no wish whatever to avoid; with out whose sustenance, indeed, he would be almost altogether lost in Paris. They live in groups together, in the same neigh borhoods, in student hotels and under conditions which can not fail to impress the American as almost unendurable. Yet what the American is seeing is not simply the poverty of the student but the enormous gap between the European and American standards of living. All of the students in the Latin Quarter live in ageless, sinister-looking hotels; they are all forced continually to choose between cigarettes and cheese at lunch. It is true that the poverty and anger which the American Negro sees must be related to Europe and not to America. ENCOUNTER ON THE SEINE Yet, as he wishes for a moment that he were home again, where at least the terrain is familiar, there begins to race within him, like the despised beat of the tom-tom, echoes of a past which he has not yet been able to utilize, intimations of a responsibility which he has not yet been able to face. He be gins to conjecture how much he has gained and lost during his long sojourn in the American republic. The African before him has endured privation, injustice, medieval cruelty; but the African has not yet endured the utter alienation of himself fr om his people and his past. His mother did not sing "Some times I Feel Like a Motherless Child," and he has not, all his life long, ached for acceptance in a culture which pronounced straight hair and white skin the only acceptable beauty. They face each other, the Negro and the African, over a gulf of three hundred years-an alienation too vast to be con quered in an evening's good-will, too heavy and too double edged ever to be trapped in speech. This alienation causes the Negro to recognize that he is a hybrid. Not a physical hybrid merely: in every aspect of his living he betrays the memory of the auction block and the impact of the happy ending. In white Americans he finds reflected-repeated, as it were, in a higher key-his tensions, his terrors, his tenderness.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It had never been in our interest to overthrow it. It had been necessary to make the machinery work fo r our benefit and the possibility of its doing so had been, so to speak, built in. We could, therefore, in a way, be considered the connecting link between Africa and the West, the most real and certainly the most shocking of all African contributions to Western cul tural life. The articulation of this reality, however, was another matter. But it was clear that our relation to the mysterious continent of Africa would not be clarified until we had fo und some means of saying, to ourselves and to the world, more about the mysterious American continent than had ever been said before. M. Lasebikan, from Nigeria, spoke that afternoon on the tonal structure of Youriba poetry, a language spoken by five million people in his country. Lasebikan was a very winning and unassuming personality, dressed in a most arresting cos tume. What looked like a white lace poncho covered him fr om head to f(>nt; beneath this he was wearing a very subdued but very ornately figured silk robe, which looked Chinese, and he wore a red velvet toque, a sign, someone told me, that he was a Mohammedan. The Youriba language, he told us, had only become a writ ten language in the middle of the last century and this had been done by missionaries. His face expressed some sorrow at this point, due, it developed, to the fa ct that this had not already been accomplished by the Youriba people. However and his f.x e brightened again-he lived in the hope that one day an excavation would bring to light a great literature writ ten by the Youriba people. In the meantime, with great good nature, he resigned himself to sharing with us that literature which already existed. I doubt that I learned much about the tonal structure of Youriba poetry, but I fo und myself fa sci nated by the sensibility which had produced it. M. Lasebikan spoke first in Youriba and then in English. It was perhJps because he so clearly loved his subject that he not only suc ceeded in conveying the poetry of this extremely strange ian- PRINCES AND POWERS 149 guage, he also conveyed something of the style of life out of which it came. The poems quoted ranged from the devotional to a poem which described the pounding of yams. And one somehow felt the loneliness and the yearning of the first and the peaceful, rhythmic domesticity of the second. There was a poem about the memory of a battle, a poem about a fa ithless fr iend, and a poem celebrating the variety to be fo und in life, which conceived of this variety in rather startling terms: "Some would have been great caters, but they haven't got the fo od; some, great drinkers, but they haven't got the wine."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It was the first time the name had ever been spoken as this child's name, for Omoro's people felt that each human being should be the first to know who he was." Now, nothing like this has ever happened to me, or to any OTH ER ESS AYS American black I know, and, yet, something like this surely happened somehow, somewhere, for the tenacity with which a black man, or woman, can insist on not being called "out of their name" has something of this tone. And even way up here in the 2oth century, Muha mmad Ali will not be the only one to respond to the moment that the father lif ted his baby up with his face to the heavens, and said softly, "B ehold -the only thing greater than yourself." We know that Kunta will be kidnapped, and brought to America, and yet, we have become so engrossed in his lif e in the village, and so fond of him, that the moment comes as a terrible shock. We, too, would like to kill his abductors. We are in his skin, and in his darkness, and, presently, we are shackled with him, in his terror, rage, and pain, his stink, and the stink of others, on the ship which brings him here. It can be said that we know the rest of the story-how it turned out, so to speak, but frankly, I don't think that we do know the rest of the story. It hasn't turned out yet, which is the rage and pain and danger of this country. Alex Haley's taking us back through time to the village of his ancestors is an act of faith and courage, but this book is also an act of love, and it is this which makes it haunting. The density of the African social setting eventually gives way to the shrill incoherence of the American one. Haley makes no comment on this contrast, there being indeed none to make, apart from that made by the remarkable people we meet on these shores, who, born here, arc yet striving, as the song puts it, "to make it my home." The American setting is as familiar as the back of one's hand.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Hence we conclude that the ultimate happiness of a separate substance does not consist in the knowledge whereby it knows God by its own substance: since its desire still leads it on to the substance of God. It also clearly follows from this that ultimate happiness is to be sought nowhere else but in an operation of the intellect: since no desire leads us so high as the desire of knowing the truth. For all our desires, whether of pleasure or of anything else that man wants, can be satisfied with other things: whereas the aforesaid desire rests not until it has reached God, the supreme cause and maker of all. Hence Wisdom rightly says (Ecclus. 24:7): I dwell in the highest places, and my throne is in a pillar of a cloud: and it is said (Prov. 9:3) that Wisdom by her maids inviteth to the tower. They should blush, then, who seek man’s happiness in the lowest things, whereas it is placed on such a height. CHAPTER LI HOW GOD MAY BE SEEN IN HIS ESSENCESINCE then it is impossible for a natural desire to be void;—and it would be were it impossible to arrive at understanding the divine substance; for all minds desire this naturally:—we must conclude that it is possible for the divine substance to be seen by means of the intellect; both by separate intellectual substances, and by our souls. It is sufficiently clear from what has been said, what manner of vision this is. For we have proved that the divine substance cannot be seen by the intellect in any created species. Wherefore if God’s essence be seen at all, it must be that the intellect sees it in the divine essence itself: so that in that vision the divine essence is both the object and the medium of vision. Since, however, the intellect is unable to understand any particular substance, unless it be actuated by some species informing it, that is the image of the thing understood; someone might deem it impossible for a created intellect to see the very substance of God in the divine essence as an intelligible species, inasmuch as the divine essence is self-subsistent, and we have proved in the First Book that God cannot be the form of anything.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  EJJery good-bye ain )t gone: human history reverberates with violent upheaval, uprooting, arrival and departure, hello and good-bye. Yet, I am not certain that anyone ever leaves home. When "home" drops below the horizon, it rises in one's breast and acquires the overwhelming power of menaced love. In my early years in Paris, I met and became friends with an elderly man who had left Germany in something like 1933 to become a hunted refugee because he had refused, in any way whatever, to be a part of the criminal Nazi state. I ad mired this man very much, and his pain was very vivid to me. God knows one couldn't quarrel with his reasons for leaving Germany, and yet his repudiated homeland was present in everything he said and did. The French landscape, which he loved as I did, could console, could even nearly reconcile: but it could not replace the landscape he carried in his heart. In the early fifties his mother was dying and wanted to sec her son one last time, and I took my friend to the railroad station. I never, never forgot that moment. I wondered if that was going to happen to me. I wanted to go home, I wanted to sec my mother and my brothers and my sisters and my friends-but the novel wasn't finished (it seemed, indeed, that it would neJJer be finished), and that was the only trophy I could carry home. All my lo ve was in it, and the reason for my journey. I suspect, though I certainly cannot prove it, that every lif e moves full circle-toward revelation: You begin to sec, and even rejoice to sec, what you always saw. You can even tell anguish to sit down, and shut up, you're busy right now and anguish, as you should certainly know by now, ain't to go nowhere. It might go around the corner, on a particularly EVERY GOOD- BYE AIN 'T GONE 779 bright day, and there are those days: but anguish has your number, knows, to paraphrase the song, where you live. It's a difficult relationship, but mysteriously indispensable. It teaches you. So. I could talk about the European panic, which takes so monotonous a f(>rm: but what is happening in Europe, now, to blacks, and to other, unprecedented niggers, has been hap pening for a very long time. Once I began to recover from my delirium, it was the first thing in Europe that I clearly saw: so it would be dishonest to pretend that this crisis, a global crisis, has anything to do with my motives or my movement now.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I lay back on my bed and thought about the many lives of Charles Nantwich—the schoolboy discovering black beauty, the frivolous undergraduate beagling, drinking and ragging, the dreaming District Commissioner in the Nuba Hills, the old man who had forgotten the functions and protocol of the telephone. When I suggested an evening in Limehouse to Phil he was less than enthusiastic. ‘Why don’t you go?’ he said. ‘I am going.’ ‘Oh, right. I think I’ll stay in, though.’ He looked worried by the idea. ‘I’d have to get back here to be on duty—so I couldn’t drink or anything.’ We were in his little attic room at the hotel again, and he licked me and fiddled with my nipples as though to make me forget that this fractional disobedience was taking place. ‘I probably won’t be there very long.’ I said. Although we had been together a lot in the previous week I had privately told him nothing about the Nantwich affair. ‘I’ve just got to talk to some old man about something—I don’t imagine there’ll be much to it.’ Phil stayed silent. It would soon be time for him to go to work, and I felt him already preparing to abstract himself. Tonight this distancing gave me a little qualm, and as he sat up to get dressed I pushed him back roughly and fucked him hard and fast, his asshole still tacky with spunk and grease from our slower, longer lovemaking just before. As he cleaned up afterwards and looked out his laundered clothes there was still a reserve in his manner, nothing so strong as resentment, but the first suggestion of an independence which it was only dignified that I should allow. All the same I felt unhappy. While he sat on the end of the bed with his back turned to me and pulled on his socks, I looked baffledly at his compact physique. Then he was sitting very still and I caught his eye in the gloomy recess of the dressing-table mirror. ‘Man, I really do love you,’ he said, both as if it were a discovery and to reassure me and chide me for being silly just because he didn’t want to go on a journey to Limehouse (a journey whose only conceivable interest for him would have been that of being with me). To show goodwill he came back upstairs a few minutes after leaving and quite startled me as I stood naked looking out at the stars. He had brought me, under cover of Room Service, a tray with a smoked salmon sandwich and a glass of Drambuie—things which hardly went together, but which had touchingly been chosen for their luxuriousness.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This is not a bitter statement. It comes, to tell the truth, out of love, for I am thinking of the children. I watch-here, for example-French and Algerian children trying to become friends with each other, reacting to, but not 77 8 OTHER ESSAYS yet understanding, the terrors of their parents, and very far indeed fr om having any notion of the terrors of the state. They have no way of knowing that the state is menaced and shaken to the degree, precisely, that they, themselves, the pre sumed victims, or at least, the wards of the state, make man ifest their identity-which is not what it might be, either for better or for worse, if they were still in Algeria. They cannot possibly know that they, ex-slave and ex-master, cannot be used as their fathers were used-that all identities, in short, arc in question, arc about to be made new. EJJery good-bye ain)t gone: human history reverberates with violent upheaval, uprooting, arrival and departure, hello and good-bye. Yet, I am not certain that anyone ever leaves home. When "home" drops below the horizon, it rises in one's breast and acquires the overwhelming power of menaced love . In my early years in Paris, I met and became friends with an elderly man who had left Germany in something like 1 933 to become a hunted refugee because he had refused, in any way whatever, to be a part of the criminal Nazi state . I ad mired this man very much, and his pain was very vivid to me. God knows one couldn't quarrel with his reasons for leaving Germany, and yet his repudiated homeland was present in everything he said and did. The French landscape, which he loved as I did, could console, could even nearly reconcile: but it could not replace the landscape he carried in his heart. In the early fifties his mother was dying and wanted to sec her son one last time, and I took my fr iend to the railroad station. I never, never forgot that moment. I wondered if that was going to happen to me. I wanted to go home, I wanted to sec my mother and my brothers and my sisters and my fr iends-but the novel wasn't finished (it seemed, indeed, that it would neJJer be finished), and that was the only trophy I could carry home.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Bergman's authority seemed, then, to come from the fact that he was reconciled to this arduous, delicate, and disciplined self exposure. Bergman and his father had not got on well when Ber gman was young. "But how do you get along now?" I had asked him. "Oh, now," he said, "we get on very well. I go to see him often." I told him that I envied him. He smiled and said, "Oh, it is always like that-when such a battle is over, fathers and sons can be friends." I did not say that such a recon ciliation had probably a great deal to do with one's attitude toward one's past, and the uses to which one could put it. But I now began to feel, as I saw my hotel glaring up out of the Stockholm gloom, that what was lacking in my movie was the American despair, the search, in our country for authority. The blue-jeaned boys on the Stockholm streets were really imit ations, so far; but the streets of my native city were filled with youn gsters searching des perately fi>r the limits which would tell them who they were, and create for them a challenge to which they could rise. What would a Bergman make of the American confus ion? How would he handle a love story occurring in New York? 12. Alas, Poor Richard I. EIGH T MEN UNLESS a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institutio n, his death must always seem unt imely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success. But the man behind the label knows defeat far more intim ately than he knows triump h. He can never be ab solutely certain that he has achieved his intention. This tension and au thori ty -the authority of the frequently defeated-are in the writer's work, and cause one to feel that, at the moment of his death, he was approaching his greatest achievements. I should think that guilt plays some part in this react ion, as well as a certain unadmitted relief. Guilt, because of our failur e in a relatio nship, because it is extremely difficult to deal with writers as people. Writers are said to be extremely egotistical and demanding, and they are indeed, but that docs not distinguish them from anyone else.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  As they talked about plans for their children, all the seemingly small parts of a child’s world that they had missed came tumbling out—swimming lessons, time to ride a bike, free play after school. All of the pleasures that had been absent from their past were apparently long remembered and were endowed with new importance. Recalling their many moves, they wanted to raise their children in one stable home in one neighborhood. Mostly they wanted their children to have protected years, which as loving parents they could relive with them and through them and enjoy vicariously. Children were also welcome because, despite their own experiences, the women and men felt that children would strengthen the marital bond. Women who missed their fathers while growing up treasured watching their husbands care for and interact with their children. Their yearning for the “dad I never had” was vanquished in part by seeing the smiles on their children’s faces as Daddy walked through the door and by the squeals of laughter that accompanied games of horsy or piggyback. For women, the decision to have a child was also mixed because it brought up again the issue of whether or not they could trust their husbands to be there. In fact, a fifth of the children were born out of wedlock, and none of the women in this group was in a stable or even a good relationship during the pregnancy. Most of these single mothers are having a very difficult time. Only a few have found stable partners and they are not working in jobs that pay well. After one or more abortions, they had decided to bring the child to term. Most had wanted a baby since early adolescence to offset their loneliness. These women spoke about their children with great love, and the ones I saw were well cared for at great sacrifice by mothers who had only a little help from their families. For the women who had children within a marriage, several obsessed about whether they should take their husband’s name because in the case of divorce, they reasoned, he might be more likely to provide support for a child that bore his name. The decision of some women to quit work full-time was also colored by their fear of relying on the continued presence of their husband to provide for the family. They also struggled with how many children to have. Most opted for one or two. A few had three. Every part of their lives—in love, marriage, and parenthood—evoked new promises and old disappointments.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  It is obvious that in the real world human mate choice occurs in a complex environment of individuals who vary not just in physical attributes but in personality and character. The bottom line is that the evolution of our ability to socially interact with each other in increasingly complex ways has affected the criteria that are involved in mate choice. With the origin of culture, material culture, language, and complex social relationships, a new dimension to the aesthetics of human attraction has come into being and greatly expanded—social personality. All the qualities that go into that—humor, kindness, empathy, thoughtfulness, honesty, loyalty, curiosity, self-expression, and so on—are now part of what attracts us to each other. In fact, it’s likely that such traits evolved precisely because they proved to be attractive and helped reinforce the social stability of sexual relationships. Falling in love has become more and more elaborate, not to mention emotionally intense, enjoyable, and potentially heartbreaking, because it is the result of a coevolutionary process—millions of years of aesthetic, mutual mate choice. Even though they do have social personalities, I do not think that gorillas and chimpanzees can fall in love as we do, because these species have not gone through this coevolutionary process. The evolutionary psychology concept of mating value suggests that we should be able to look at a picture of a potential mate and swipe left or right and make evolutionarily informed decisions accordingly. While this might be fun for a while, it usually fails as a long-term strategy because mating value cannot be defined on any objective scale based on superficial features. True “mating value” emerges only during the course of getting to know each other and falling in love, and it actually takes time to fall in love. For today’s young urban dwellers, time is limited and sexual choices are nearly infinite. However, for most of the last few million years of human evolution, humans lived in very small populations with few sexual choices and all the time in the world. Human mate choice evolved to function in the latter context, not the former. The real reason why there is an apparent paucity of morphological ornaments in human males is that female mate choice in human evolution has focused largely on social rather than physical traits. It makes sense that females, who until relatively recently on the evolutionary timescale were the ones charged exclusively with the care of their children, should care more about qualities that indicate the potential for relationship endurance. In the long run, women have evolved to want mates who will be good partners to them and good parents to their children. However, that does not mean that it doesn’t take some shopping around to find that mate. —

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I took to the prison library with more duck-like promptness. It was a bizarre collection, made up almost entirely of gifts. Ordinary well-wishers and a number of voluntary bodies gave miscellaneous fiction and popular encyclopaedic works on technology and natural history; an outgoing governor had presented a collection of literary texts, some deriving from his own schooldays but also including French classical drama and the complete works of Wither in twenty-three volumes; and the Times Literary Supplement had charitably for some years sent to the prison all those books it felt no interest in reviewing, a body of work ranging from bacteriology to handbooks on historic trams. I picked on something which must have come from the ex-governor’s bequest: a schools edition of Pope, with notes by A. M. Niven, MA—one of those frustrating near-palindromes with which life is strewn. It had seen active service, and words such as ‘zeugma’ filled the margins in a round, childish script. I had not read Pope since I was a child myself, but I had a sudden keen yearning for his order and lucidity, which was connected in my mind with a vision of eighteenth-century England, and rides cut through woodland, and Polesden and all my literate country origins. The book contained the ‘Epistle to a Lady’ and various other shorter poems; of the longer works it gave only ‘The Rape of the Lock’ complete, and I fastened on this poem, and on Mr Niven’s account of how it had been designed to laugh two families out of a feud, as the flashings and gleams of a civilised world, where animosities were melted down and cast again as glittering artefacts. I determined to learn it all by heart, and put away twenty lines a day. The discipline, and the brilliance of the work itself, were a kind of invisible enrichment to me—though, lest I should feel like an actor learning a great part with no prospect of a performance, I had Bill hear my lines each time I mastered a new canto; and he seemed to enjoy it. Tempting though it was to retire into this inner world, there were always visits to look forward to—and to regret, for their cruel brevity and for the new firmness with which, afterwards, the door was shut, the walls of the cell confined one. The visitors carried their horror of the place about them and for a while after they had gone left one with an anguished vacancy of a kind I had never known before. All one’s little accommodations were laid bare. My first visit was from Taha—a ‘box-visit’, a reunion conducted through glass. I was wildly shaken to see him, so that I could not think of much to say.