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 Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  If marriage is meant to show people what the oneness of God is like, what happens when everybody is one in the presence of God?14 If marriage is a picture of something else, what would happen to marriage if we found ourselves living in the midst of that something else? Is sex in its greatest, purest, most joyful and honest expression a glimpse of forever? Are these brief moments of abandon and oneness and ecstasy just a couple of seconds or minutes of how things will be forever? Is sex a picture of heaven? In First Corinthians 12, Paul claimed to have seen a vision of heaven, and the phrase he used to describe it in Greek is translated “unwordable words.” He wrote that he saw things man is “not permitted to tell.” Maybe that’s why the scriptures are so ambivalent about whether a person is married. About whether a person is having sex. Maybe Jesus knew what is coming and knew that whatever we experience here will pale compared with what awaits everyone. Do you long for that? Because that’s the center of Jesus’s message. An invitation. To trust that it’s true, to trust that it’s real, to trust that God is actually going to make all things new. My Father’s House In the first century, generally a young woman would be married in her early teens, often at thirteen or fourteen. It would become known that she was now “of age,” and her father would entertain offers from the fathers of young men who were interested in marrying her. If the fathers agreed on the terms of the marriage, there would be a celebration to honor the couple and announce their engagement. At this celebration, the groom would offer the young girl a cup of wine to drink.15 But she doesn’t have to drink it. She can reject the cup. She can say no to his offer of marriage. Even though everything has already been arranged, she can still say no. It’s up to her. Can you imagine the pressure on the young fella? Here is everybody you love the most, friends and parents and relatives, gathered in a room, watching to see if she will accept the cup. If she says yes, the groom gives a sort of prepared speech about their future together. Because if she takes the cup and drinks from it, that only means that they are engaged. They aren’t married yet. Something still has to happen. Or to be more precise, something has to be built.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  Some women only know how to relate to men by making a series of transactions. They want to be wanted, and the man wants, well, the man wants what lots of men want. So they trade. Essentially they strike a deal with men, time and time again. I have what you want, and you have what I want, so let’s make a deal. I need this, you need that. Some women learn at an early age how to negotiate. They need to be loved, to be validated, to be worth something, and they discover that by giving a little of themselves to a boy, they get what they need in return. It’s a cycle, a pattern that can stay with them their entire lives. Sex becomes a search. A search for something they’re missing. A quest for the unconditional embrace. And so they go from relationship to relationship, looking for what they already have. This search is about that need. But sex is not the search for something that’s missing. It’s the expression of something that’s been found. It’s designed to be the overflow, the culmination of something that a man and a woman have found in each other. It’s a celebration of this living, breathing thing that’s happening between the two of them. Do You Realize? You don’t need a man by your side to validate you as a woman. You already are loved and valued. You’re good enough exactly as you are. Do you believe this? Because it’s true. You have limitless worth and value. If you embrace this truth, it will affect every area of life, especially your relationship with men. You are worth dying for. Your worth does not come from your body, your mind, your work, what you produce, what you put out, how much money you make. Your worth does not come from whether or not you have a man. Your worth does not come from whether or not men notice you. You have inestimable worth that comes from your creator. You will continue to be tempted in a thousand different ways not to believe this. The temptation will be to go searching for your worth and validity from places other than your creator. Especially from men. But you don’t have to give yourself away to earn a man’s love. You’re better than that. You’re already loved. When you give too much of yourself away too quickly, when you show too much skin, you’re not being true to yourself.15 When you dress to show us everything, then in some sense we have all shared in it, or at least been exposed to it. There is a mystery to you, infinite depth and endless complexity.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  And so from an early age we have this awareness of the state of disconnection we were born into, and we have a longing to reconnect. Scholars believe that the word sex is related to the Latin word secare, which means “to sever, to amputate, or to disconnect from the whole.” This is where we get words like sect, section, dissect, bisect.4 Our sexuality, then, has two dimensions. First, our sexuality is our awareness of how profoundly we’re severed and cut off and disconnected. Second, our sexuality is all of the ways we go about trying to reconnect. Last year I was swimming in the ocean with one of my boys on my back in the midst of a pod of dolphins. They were swimming around us and under us and making their noises, which are incredibly loud and piercing, when one of them shot up into the air above us and did a flip. Right over our heads. When we describe moments like these, the words we use are rarely about distance. The words we use are about nearness and connection, sometimes even intimacy. Your friends just got back from hiking, and they say, “We felt like we could just reach out and touch the mountain.” I just spent an afternoon with a doctor who donates significant amounts of time working with people who have AIDS and can’t afford proper treatment. He loves it. He talked with great passion about the joy it brings him. He’s a successful, educated, wealthy man who loves to spend his time with poor, uneducated people who are from a totally different world than he is. He was telling me how his work brings him a sense of connection, an awareness of the simple truth that we aren’t all that different from each other. These moments move us because they have a sexual dimension. They help us become reconnected. They go against our fallen nature, which is to be cut off. This is why music is so powerful. Have you ever noticed that when you ask people why a particular song or concert moved them so much, they often resort to ambiguous explanations? You rarely receive a response such as, “Well, the prolific use of polyrhythms offset with the arpeggiated succession of relative minors touched my heart.”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  give her the attention and validation she was not getting from her husband. Because of this reversal, when the boy becomes a man, he feels a great emptiness inside that he constantly needs to fill. He cannot exactly verbalize what he wants or what he missed, hence the vagueness of his fantasy. He will spend his life searching for this elusive figure and never settle on a flesh-and-blood female. It’s always the next one who will be perfect. If he falls for the narcissistic type, he will repeat the problem he experienced with his mother, falling for a woman who cannot give him what he wants. His own anima is a bit dreamy, introspective, and moody, which is the behavior he will tend to exhibit when in love. Men of this type must recognize the nature of their pattern. What they really need is to find and interact with a real woman, accept her inevitable flaws, and give more of themselves. They often prefer to chase their fantasy, because in such a scenario they are in control and have the freedom to leave when reality sets in. To break the pattern, such men will have to give up some of this control. When it comes to their need for a muse, they must learn to find such inspiration from within, to bring out more of the anima within themselves. They are too alienated from their own feminine spirit and need to loosen up their own thought processes. Not needing this wildness from their fantasy woman, they will better relate to the actual women in their life. The Lovable Rebel: For the woman who is drawn to this type, the man who intrigues her has a noticeable disdain for authority. He is a nonconformist. Unlike the Devilish Romantic, this man will often be young and not so successful. He will also tend to be outside her usual circle of acquaintances. To have a relationship with him would be ever so slightly taboo—certainly her father would not approve, and perhaps not her friends or colleagues. If a relationship does ensue, however, she will see a totally different side to him. He can’t hold down a good job, not because he’s a rebel but because he’s lazy and ineffectual. Despite the tattoos and shaved head, he’s quite conventional, controlling, and domineering. The relationship will break apart, but the fantasy will remain. The woman with this projection often had a strong, patriarchal father who was distant and strict. The father represents order, rules, and conventions. He was often quite critical of his daughter—she was never good or pretty or smart enough. She internalized this critical voice and hears it in her head all the time. As a girl she dreamed of rebelling and asserting herself against the father’s control, but too often she was reduced to obeying and playing the deferential daughter. Her desire to rebel was repressed and went into her animus, which is quite angry and resentful. Instead of

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  This is the difference between willing a movement and being the movement. On returning to my local YMCA from a trip abroad, I was startled to see that in front of virtually every work-out station there was a brand-new flat-screen TV! It’s as though these individuals had temporarily parked their bodies, only to pick them up like the dry cleaning, after they had been exercised by the machines. In this regard, there is a distinction made in the German language between the word Körper , meaning a physical body, and Leib , which translates to English as the “lived (or living) body.” The term Leib reveals a much deeper generative meaning compared with the purely physical/anatomical Körper (not unlike “corpse”). As a society, we have largely abandoned our living, sensing, knowing bodies in the search for rationality and stories about ourselves. Much of what we do in our lives is based on this preoccupation. We certainly wouldn’t have computers or airplanes, cell phones or video games—not to mention even bicycles or clocks—without the vast power of our rational minds. However, like Narcissus, who fell in love with his reflection in a pond, we have become enamored by our own thoughts, self-importance and idealized self-images. Have we fallen in love with a pale reflection of ourselves? In gazing adoringly at his reflection, Narcissus lost his place in nature. Without access to the sentient body, nature becomes something out there to be controlled and dominated. Disembodied, we are not a part of nature, graciously finding our humble place within its embrace. After Darwin, Freud was one of the first thinkers in modern (psychological) times to insist that we are part of nature, that nature—in the form of instincts and drives—lies within us. “The mind may have forgotten,” Freud says, “but the body has not— thankfully .” The explosion of people now attending yoga and dance classes, or receiving bodywork, are clues of our attempts at reviving a deep, unmet yearning. Could it be we are finally trying to “re-member” and listen to the unspoken voice of our bodies? Ripped from the enlivening womb of interior experience, we then see the body as a thing, as an objective biochemical assemblage. However, in his lovely essay “What Is Life?” the eminent physicist Erwin Schrodinger concluded that life cannot be explained through reduction to its chemical elements. The human organism is not like a watch that can be made to function by putting together the components, springs, gears, stems and so on. Paradoxically, while not violating the laws of physics, life, he says, goes beyond them.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  We talked. We talked about God and ethics and history and school; his marriage; the sexual assault in my freshman year that I couldn’t excise from my brain. He gave me permission to swear in front of him, which I did, profusely. “Fuck that fucking fuck,” I’d yell, new to profanities. “That asshole. That shitty asshole.” Joel watched me meditatively from his office chair, rocking against its hinges. Once, I sat down on the floor, and he joined me there, our knees touching. “Sometimes you just need a change of perspective,” he told me. Eventually, he insisted on meeting outside work. He gave me his cell number, and when I called he met me wherever I asked him to go. I felt a strange rush of pleasure at this development. We’d moved past the default scenes and settings of ministry. He met with parishioners during office hours, with the door standing open. But he met with me at diners at two in the morning, and I saw his face in the reflection of darkened windows. I drove to his house and waited for him to get dressed so we could go out. If his wife wasn’t home, he’d change in front of his open door as I looked and didn’t look, and then we’d drive to local restaurants and he’d buy me potstickers or grilled cheese sandwiches and I’d try not to cry too loudly. Once, I fell asleep in the booth, and he waited for me to wake up. My mother didn’t like that I called Joel by his first name. “It’s inappropriate,” she said. “He should be ‘Pastor Jones.’” What I couldn’t explain to her—what I barely understood myself—was that Joel wasn’t just my pastor. The boundaries that should have been up between us—minister/congregant, adult/teenager—had completely dissolved. We were friends. We were real, honest-to-goodness friends, and I did not have a lot of those. Joel rarely mentioned my age, but when he did I could see the gulf of time between us, and I hated it. His words were a mantra that I repeated in my head. It’s going to be okay. It’s not your fault. You’re not a bad person. God loves you. God loves you even though you’re not perfect. I love you. And I wanted him. On top of all of this, I wanted him. I knew he was married, but it didn’t seem to matter. He told me that his wife couldn’t get pregnant, and they’d stopped having sex altogether. Maybe that was what I sensed in him: something caged, unfulfilled. He radiated desire. I wanted to kiss him, I wanted him to hold me, I wanted to associate sex with something besides fear and guilt. I wanted my life to be shaken up, to go from being who I was to someone renewed.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  These days, we are our own matchmakers. No longer obligated to marry who we must, we set out with a new ideal of what we want, and we want plenty. Our desiderata still include everything the traditional family was meant to provide—security, children, property, respectability—but now we also want our Joe to love us, to desire us, to be interested in us. We should be confidants, best friends, and passionate lovers. Modern marriage promises us that there is one person out there with whom all this is possible if we can just find her. So tenaciously do we hold to the idea that marriage is for everything that the disenchanted opt for divorce or affairs not because they question the institution, but because they think they chose the wrong person with whom to reach this nirvana. Next time they’ll choose better. The focus is always on the object of our love, not on our capacity to love. Hence the psychologist Erich Fromm makes the point that we think it’s easy to love, but hard to find the right person. Once we’ve found “the one,” we will need no one else. The exclusiveness we seek in monogamy has roots in our earliest experience of intimacy with our primary caretakers. The feminist psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow writes, “This primary tendency, I shall be loved always, everywhere, in every way, my whole body, my whole being—without any criticism, without the slightest effort on my part—is the final aim of all erotic striving.” In our adult love we seek to recapture the primordial oneness we felt with Mom. The baby knows no separateness. Once upon a time, there was one person whose only role was to be there for us. In the ecstatic communion between mother and child, there is no gap. To the newborn the mother is everything, all at once, inseparable, unbounded: her skin, her breast, her voice, her smile, it is all for him. As a pink-bottomed baby, we were full and fulfilled, and somewhere deep inside we’ve never forgotten that Eden. Those of us who didn’t know this idyllic state—those with mothers who were unavailable, inconsistent, absent, or selfish—are often even more determined to find the perfect partner. The question remains: isn’t the oneness we strive to restore itself a fantasy? For the child, Mom is the be-all and end-all, but the mother has always known other people. She even has a jealous lover, the father. As it turns out, Mom was never totally faithful—not even once upon a time.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  For Paul, however, as important as it was to affirm this, it did not resolve the question of his political identity. Conclusion: Letting the Cat Out of the Bag The question therefore becomes, once again, why Paul’s earthly identity as someone who obviously was “carnal y” Ioudaios did not remain his only identity. In other words, why did the early Christian apostle eventual y welcome or acknowledge and continue to explore another possible identity for himself in excess of his ancestral one? Obviously not everyone who, like Paul, was Ioudaios did this. But, for some reason, Paul did, claiming for himself in addition a “heavenly citizenship” whose most notable effect would be to render Paul’s earthly (ancestral) identity neither irrelevant nor nugatory but decidedly displaced from center stage. I would argue—very schematical y—that the main reason why Paul’s ancestral identity did not remain the only self he knew had everything to do with Paul’s “subaltern” social status. Finding himself also “in Christ” was appealing because it provided a way out of some of the constraints and deprivations that otherwise evidently had marked his al too earthly flesh. These constraints and deprivations, just to be clear, had nothing to do with being Ioudaios. But, like that ancestral identity, those constraints and deprivations also were a function of Paul’s earthly flesh. By contrast, the experience of “Christ” was understood by Paul to take him out of the regime of the flesh into another possible mode of existence, which Paul described as having a “heavenly” nature, not least of al because it entailed, for Paul, an experience of “spirit” ( pneuma; see, e.g., Gal 3:2). The problem now becomes what exactly Paul’s subaltern “flesh” had known together with its evident “Jewishness.” Once more, this problem has nothing specifical y to do with “Jewishness” as such since for Paul the possession of this kind of “flesh” was effectively synonymous with his own existence as a human being on the face of the earth. But evidently that flesh did not describe or circumscribe for Paul the only kind of life that also a human body of this kind could and ought to be able to know. 36

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  “Sweet squid! The mistakes that I have made number in the thousands, I think. I have spent many days meditating, fasting, abstaining from alcohol, and am now realizing how profoundly I failed you. The truth is, you are my past and my future. I miss you. I wish I could suckle your tentacles and kiss your cool mantle, and that we could travel like we used to. I’m so sorry about the bear. The bear is beautiful and very special in her own right but she is nothing like you. She is still here in the castle but when I pass by her I have a strong desire to turn and run in the opposite direction. It is only you I want, my little cabbage. Not that I want to eat you, ha-ha! I just want you nestled in my stomach for all eternity. Please come back to me. Come back to me and I will pledge myself to you as I knew I should have many months ago. I have been a fool, but please, help me be a fool no longer. Marry me. And when we die our bodies will be scattered in the heavens as twin constellations, the queen and the squid, and no one will have known happiness like ours. I love you, I love you, my sweet darling, I love you. Faithfully and Truly, Your Queen.” After receiving this last letter, the squid began to construct a reply. She spent many hours writing and discarding drafts of letters; some took longer than others. She lamented the use of her ink for such an exhausting and pointless purpose. Eventually, she penned words that satisfied her. She sent her letter off by messenger and then made her way to a local farmer. There, she exchanged coin for a horse and a waterproof bladder that could be suspended from the saddle. The squid slurped into the skin and bade farewell to the town where she had suffered so. When the letter arrived, the queen opened it with trembling hands. “My queen,” the letter said, “your words are very pretty. And yet they cannot obscure the simple fact that I have seen your zoo.” Here is a story I learned from a bear: There was a queen, and she was lonely again. Dream House as Thanks, ObamaRight before the breakup, Barack Obama visits Iowa City. He comes to talk about student debt, and you are a student and you have so many kinds of debt, so you go. Your heart feels like a picked-off scab hot with infection. You get there late and are shuffled into an overflow room, where his speech will be viewable on a screen. You’re mad at yourself for being late, sad to be shunted off into another room. It feels, like so many things these days, a sign.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  Is this argument between you and me, or between you and me and whoever you are going to tell about it? Is this quirky habit of mine something I let you see because I know you love me no matter what, or is this something you will entertain our friends with at a party? How safe are you? There’s the profound, mystical sexual union that happens under the chuppah, with God hovering over the couple, blessing them. And then there are the endless conversations and gestures and glances and discussions as two souls let their lives become enmeshed in one another. We live in a world that constantly tries to pull sex out from under the chuppah. A culture that shows it, films it, examines it, comments on it, analyzes it, and then wonders why everyone has lost interest. When you take sex out from under the chuppah, all you are left with is mechanics. Go to any supermarket, stand in the checkout lane, and count how many of the women’s magazines have the word technique somewhere on the cover. Or the phrase “seven easy steps” or the word instructions. There’s nothing wrong with technique and mechanics and instructions, but that’s rarely the real issue. The real issue is something else. The reason people are still watching and discussing and referring to Alfred Hitchcock films is because they’re smart and haunting and well done, but most of all because they’re scary. But when you watch one, you realize that they’re scary in a completely different way than movies that today we would call scary or haunting or creepy are. Hitchcock’s genius is that he doesn’t show you much at all. He suggests horror and evil without divulging its exact nature, which causes our minds to race ahead and fill in the blanks with what it could be. Our minds are infinitely creative. Given a few well-placed, tactful suggestions, our imaginations kick in and we’re scared. What many modern movies do is show it all, the blood and gore and violence—it all gets shown, we see it, and we may be scared, but it’s only for a moment. These movies rarely stay with us because they didn’t tap into anything deeper than just the experience of that moment. Whatever mystery there was, they killed it because they showed everything. And what’s true about things that are scary is true about sex. When sex is taken out from under the chuppah, when it’s isolated from its God-intended context, it loses its mystery. Is God hovering over a couple, making their union holy and sacred? Some marriage counselors, when they meet with a couple whose marriage is in trouble, immediately take the couple back to when they first met and fell for each other. Counselors and therapists do this because they know that there is some reason why this couple is together. Part of their healing will be rediscovering that initial impulse.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Veronica was married to a sawyer who worked at a mill near Everett and came home only on the weekends. She had two fat little girls who wandered the wreckage of the house in their underpants, whining for their mother’s attention and eating potato chips from economy packs almost as big as they were. Veronica was crazy about Chuck. If he wasn’t in the mood, she would try to get him in the mood by walking around in short-shorts and high heels, or by sitting in his lap and sticking her tongue in his ear. We hung around the house all afternoon, playing cards and reading Veronica’s detective magazines. Now and then I tried to play games with the little girls, but they were too morose to pretend or imagine anything. At three o’clock I walked back up to Concrete High to catch my bus home. * * * CHUCK AND THE others knew a lot of women like Veronica, and girls on their way to being like Veronica. When they found a new one they shared her. They tried to fix me up with some of them, but I always backed out. I didn’t know what these girls expected; I did know I was sure to disappoint them. Their availability unmanned me. And I didn’t want it to be like that, squalid and public, with a stranger. I wanted it to be with the girl I loved. This was not going to happen, because the girl I loved never knew I loved her. I kept my feelings secret because I believed she would find them laughable, even insulting. Her name was Rhea Clark. Rhea moved to Concrete from North Carolina halfway through her junior year, when I was a freshman. She had flaxen hair that hung to her waist, calm brown eyes, golden skin that glowed like a jar of honey. Her mouth was full, almost loose. She wore tight skirts that showed the flex and roll of her hips as she walked, clinging pastel sweaters whose sleeves she pushed up to her elbows, revealing a heartbreaking slice of creamy inner arm. Just after Rhea came to Concrete I asked her to dance with me during a mixer in the gym. She nodded and followed me out onto the floor. It was a slow dance. When I turned to face her she moved into my arms as no other girl had ever done, frankly and fully. She melted against me and stayed against me, pliant to my least motion, her legs against mine, her cheek against mine, her fingers brushing the back of my neck. I understood that she didn’t know who I was, that all of this was a new girl’s mistake. But I felt justified in taking advantage of it. I thought we were meeting rightly, true self to true self, free of the accidents of age. After a while she said, “Y’all don’t know how to party.” Her voice was throaty and deep.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The last house—the most perfect—is owned by a beautiful young couple, both redheads, whose children come to the door clutching their mother’s skirt while she stirs a bowl of batter. It is like a fairy tale. Chickens peck in the yard; a beautiful, lanky dog sleeps on the porch. The house is heated by a wood stove. You know the place is impractical—too far from town—but you love it so much your heart aches. It is here—standing under a canopy of trees, watching your girlfriend talk to the husband—that you first admit the fantasy to yourself: that one day the V structure of your relationship will collapse into a heap, and the three of you will be together.9 You put Val on a plane, and then the two of you drive back to Iowa. As farmland scrolls past you, you find yourself imagining a whole new life, a perfect intersection of hedonism and wholesomeness: canning and pickling, writing in front of a fireplace, the three of you tangled in a bed. Fighting with your kids’ guidance counselor. Explaining to your children that other families may not look like yours, but that doesn’t mean something is wrong. Most kids would give anything to have three moms. You catch yourself mourning already. You look over at her. “Let’s take one more road trip together,” she says. [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 9. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type T92.1, The triangle plot and its solutions.Dream House as EroticaIn the late spring, you surprise yourself by asking her to cover your mouth as you come. She does, pressing a firm palm against your crescendoing howl, and it’s as if the sound is being pushed back into your body so that it might suffuse your every molecule. When you are ebbing, and try to inhale but can’t, she lets go, and you can feel the lingering tingle of unlanguage. After this, you ask her to talk to you in a low, raspy stream while she fucks you, and she does: switching effortlessly between English and French, muttering about her cock and how it’s filling you up, pushing her hand over your face and grabbing the architecture of your jaw to turn it this way and that. She shaves her cunt smooth, and it glows like the inside of a conch shell. She loves wearing a harness; you suck her off that way and she comes like it’s real, bucking and lifting off the mattress. You don’t know what is more of a miracle: her body, or her love of your body. She haunts your erotic imagination. You are both perpetually wet. You fuck, it seems, everywhere: beds and tables and floors; over the phone. When you are physically next to each other, she loves to marvel over your differences: how her skin is pale as skim milk and yours, olive; how her nipples are pink and yours are brown. “Everything is darker on you,” she says. You would let her swallow you whole, if she could.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Almost two years had passed since I’d shucked them and stored them away. In all that time no one had said a word about them. They’d been forgotten by everyone but me, and I’d kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to remind Dwight to give me the job again. We climbed up into the attic and worked our way down to where I’d put the boxes. It was cramped and musty. From below I could hear faint voices singing. Dwight led the way, probing the darkness with a flashlight. When he found the boxes he stopped and held the beam on them. Mold covered the cardboard sides and rose from the tops of the boxes like dough swelling out of a breadpan. Its surface, dark and solid-looking, gullied and creased like cauliflower, glistened in the light. Dwight played the beam over the boxes, then turned it on the basin where the beaver, also forgotten these two years past, had been left to cure. Only a pulp remained. This too was covered with mold, but a different kind than the one that had gotten the chestnuts. This mold was white and transparent, a network of gossamer filaments that had flowered to a height of two feet or so above the basin. It was like cotton candy but more loosely spun. And as Dwight played the light over it I saw something strange. The mold had no features, of course, but its outline somehow suggested the shape of the beaver it had consumed: a vague cloud-picture of a beaver crouching in the air. If Dwight noticed it he didn’t say anything. I followed him back downstairs and into the living room. My mother had gone to bed, but everyone else was still watching TV. Dwight picked up his saxaphone again and played silently along with the Champagne Orchestra. The tree blinked. Our faces darkened and flared, darkened and flared. By the time I started my first year at Concrete High School, I had over eighty dollars squirreled away in the ammunition box. Some of it had been given to me by customers on my paper route, as tips for good service; the rest I’d stolen from other customers. Eighty dollars seemed a lot of money, more than enough for my purpose, which was to run away to Alaska. I planned to travel alone under an assumed name. Later on, when I had my feet on the ground, I would send for my mother. It was not hard to imagine our reunion in my cabin: her grateful tears and cries of admiration at the pelt-covered walls, the racks of guns, the tame wolves dozing before the fire. Our Scout troop went to Seattle every November for The Gathering of the Tribes. In the morning we competed with other troops. In the afternoon all the Scouts converged on Glenvale, an amusement park reserved that day for our use.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  She read my nameplate and looked me up and down, and I could see her face grow smooth and serene as she decided that she had been mistaken, that it couldn’t possibly be me. She returned my smile and gave me her name. I saw from the list that she had two boys in the Order. Already she was searching for them, glancing around her and peering into the noisy hall. She picked up her nameplate, gave her arm to the boy at the door, and passed into the banquet. My brother sent me a story he had written called “A Hank o’ Hair, A Piece of Bone.” It was about an American imprisoned in Italy for murdering a prostitute. His father was rich, but the young man refused to ask him for help. He was alienated from his father and from everyone else. He was so alienated that he wouldn’t even say he was sorry for killing the girl. He was sorry—he’d been drunk at the time—but such was his contempt for society that he would do nothing to court its mercy. The story was filled with closely observed details of prison life, such as automatic toilets flushing every few minutes and inmates banging on their bars with tin cups. I thought it was great. I couldn’t get over Geoffrey’s audacity in writing it. I sent him one of mine, a story about two wolves fighting to the death in the Yukon, but I knew his was better and contemplated submitting it to my English teacher as if it were my own. In the end I decided not to. I knew I’d never get away with it. Geoffrey wrote again to say he had liked my story and wanted me to send more. His letter was affectionate and full of news. This was his last year at Princeton. He hoped to move to Europe when he graduated, to work on a novel. There was also the possibility of a teaching job in Turkey. Princeton had been good to him, he said, and I ought to give it some serious consideration when the time came to choose my own college. Geoffrey also sent word of my father. He and his wife were separated. He had moved to California and found work at Convair Astronautics, the first real job he had had in years. In fact, Geoffrey said, they’d all been having a bumpy time of it for quite a while now. He would tell me more when he saw me, which he hoped to do before he left the country. It had been too long, he said. Geoffrey wanted to see me. That was plain. I had been wanting to see him for years, but before now, even when I hatched plans to join up with him, I never knew whether he felt the same way. In most respects we were strangers. But it mattered to me that he was my brother, and it seemed to matter to him.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Perpetual Motion Machine There’s this game I played during gym class when I was eight, when they sent me to the outfield during baseball. I would stand so far from everyone else that the balls my classmates hit could never reach me, and our gym teacher didn’t seem to notice that I was sitting open-legged in the tall grass. The teacher, Ms. Lily, was short and stocky and had a cropped haircut, and one of the kids in my class called her a lesbian. I had no idea what that meant; I’m not sure he did, either. It was 1994. Ms. Lily wore baggy athletic pants with patches of neon greens and purples in abstract, eye-searing patterns. (When I learned the story of Joseph and his coat of many colors in Sunday school, all I could think of was Ms. Lily’s outfit.) The synthetic fabric hissed when she walked; you could always hear her coming. I have a clear memory of her trying to explain body isolation to us—she drew a line down the center of herself, starting at the top of her head. When she reached her crotch, kids giggled. From there, she showed us our left sides and our right sides, how to move each independently and then in tandem. She spun her arms like a carnival ride. Fitness! , she’d say, touching her right hand to her left foot, then her left hand to her right foot. You only have one body! You have to take care of it! Maybe she was a lesbian. Sitting in the grass during those baseball games, I’d rip up all of the weeds within my reach, leaving my hands smelling like dirt and wild onions. I broke dandelion stems and marveled at their sticky white milk. The game is this: You take the dandelion and rub it hard beneath your chin—in my case, right over the narrow white scar I earned falling in the tub when I was a toddler—so hard the florets begin to disintegrate. If your chin turns yellow, it means you’re in love. At eight I was reed-thin, anxious. I was too tightly wound to be dreamy, most of the time, but sitting in the grass gave me a kind of peace. Every class I took that dandelion’s severed head and worked it against my chin until it was a hot, wet ball, like a bud that hadn’t yet opened. The trick, or maybe it’s the punch line, is that the yellow always comes off on your skin. The dandelion yields every time. It has no wiles, no secrets, no sense of self-preservation. And so it goes that, even as children, we understand something we cannot articulate: The diagnosis never changes. We will always be hungry, will always want. Our bodies and minds will always crave something, even if we don’t recognize it. And in the same way the dandelion’s destruction tells us about ourselves, so does our own destruction: our bodies are ecosystems, and they shed and replace and repair until we die. And when we die, our bodies feed the hungry earth, our cells becoming part of other cells, and in the world of the living, where we used to be, people kiss and hold hands and fall in love and fuck and laugh and cry and hurt others and nurse broken hearts and start wars and pull sleeping children out of car seats and shout at each other. If you could harness that energy—that constant, roving hunger—you could do wonders with it. You could push the earth inch by inch through the cosmos until it collided heart-first with the sun.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  And as his voicemail message played, a small-girl, jealous part of me wondered—if that was what he’d really wanted—why he hadn’t chosen me. I’d been there. We’d been so close. He could have done it, and I would have, happily. “Call me,” I said, trying to steady my voice. “Please. I need to talk to you.” I took a train home and drove to the parish house. It was dark, but I knocked on the door anyway. When Joel didn’t answer, I went home and emailed him again . “Please,” I said. “Please don’t shut me out. Or if you’re going to, just tell me, tell me so that I’m not dangling in this in-between place. You stood by me when my world was falling down around me. Please let me do the same for you.” He responded a few hours later. “Carmen, I’m okay but things are confusing. I have to go, the library is closing. Joel.” That was the last I ever heard from him. By the time I got around to dating people I was a little desperate, a little horny, and a lot confused. I had figured out exactly nothing. I came of age, then, in the Dream House, wisdom practically smothering me in my sleep. Everything tasted like an almost epiphany.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  I hadn’t always gotten along with my own brother, and we hadn’t even seen each other in four years, but I still missed him and began to imagine how much better he would treat me. I also missed my father. My mother never complained to me about him, but sometimes Dwight would make sarcastic comments about Daddy Warbucks and Lord High-and-Mighty. He meant to impugn my father for being rich and living far away and having nothing to do with me, but all these qualities, even the last, perhaps especially the last, made my father fascinating. He had the advantage always enjoyed by the inconstant parent, of not being there to be found imperfect. I could see him as I wanted to see him. I could give him sterling qualities and imagine good reasons, even romantic reasons, why he had taken no interest, why he had never written to me, why he seemed to have forgotten I existed. I made excuses for him long after I should have known better. Then, when I did know better, I resolved to put the fact of his desertion from my mind. I visited him on my way to Vietnam, and then again when I got back, and we became friends. He was no monster—he’d had troubles of his own. Anyway, only crybabies groused about their parents. This way of thinking worked pretty well until my first child was born. He came three weeks early, when I was away from home. The first time I saw him, in the hospital nursery, a nurse was trying to take a blood sample from him. She couldn’t find a vein. She kept jabbing him, and every time the needle went in I felt it myself. My impatience made her so clumsy that another nurse had to take over. When I finally got my hands on him I felt as if I had snatched him from a pack of wolves, and as I held him something hard broke in me, and I knew that I was more alive than I had been before. But at the same time I felt a shadow, a coldness at the edges. It made me uneasy, so I ignored it. I didn’t understand what it was until it came upon me again that night, so sharply I wanted to cry out. It was about my father, ten years dead by then. It was grief and rage, mostly rage, and for days I shook with it when I wasn’t shaking with joy for my son, and for the new life I had been given. But that was still to come. As a boy, I found no fault in my father. I made him out of dreams and memories. One of these memories was of sitting in the kitchen of my stepmother’s beautiful old house in Connecticut, where I had come for a visit, and watching him unload a box full of fireworks onto the table.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Other people have gone through this, I began, finding it difficult to speak. Other people have felt it, they bear it and they get through it, they aren’t trapped in it forever. These feelings, I said lamely, all of them, they will get easier, they’ll stop being the only thing you feel, they’ll fade and make room for other feelings. And then, in time, you’ll look at them from far away, almost entirely without pain, as if they were felt by somebody else, or felt in a dream. That’s what it’s like, I said, thinking I had struck on something, it’s precisely like waking from a dream, and like a self in a dream the self that feels this will be incomprehensible to you, and the intensity you feel now will be like a puzzle you can’t solve, a puzzle it finally isn’t worth your while to solve. I was speaking of myself, of course, of my own experience with love, with overwhelming love that had made me at times such a stranger to myself. But I could see this failing even as I spoke, I could see him recoiling from me, looking at me with an expression first of surprise and then of dismay, and then of something like revulsion. I don’t want to feel it less, he said, I don’t want it to stop, I don’t want it to seem like it wasn’t real. It would all be for nothing if that happened, he said, I don’t want it to be a dream, I want it to be real, all of it. And who else could I love, he asked, his voice softening, we grew up together, in the same country, with the same language, we became adults together; who could I meet wherever I go next who could know me like that, who could love me as much as he could love me, who could I love as much? What life could I want except for that life, he said, reminding me of the question I had asked so long before, he hadn’t forgotten it, his whole recitation had been an answer, what other life than that could I bear?

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Good, he said again, whispering with his forehead still pressed to my temple, as I lay there recovering, though the worst thing about that particular pain is that you recover so slowly; the pain welled instead of ebbing, settling in my groin and the pit of my stomach and the backs of my thighs. When his weight shifted next to me I almost protested, I almost said chakaite, wait, I had even taken the breath to say it. But he hushed me, making a soothing sound to keep me in my place as he shifted his frame over mine, sliding himself over until he was resting on top of me. It helped, the weight of him, it pressed me down and pressed down the pain I still felt, that ache about which there is nothing erotic, or not for me. I know there are men who like it, who go to great lengths to find others who will hurt them in exactly this way, though I’ve never been able to fathom the pleasure they take from it. But then there’s no fathoming pleasure, the forms it takes or their sources, nothing we can imagine is beyond it; however far beyond the pale of our own desires, for someone it is the intensest desire, the key to the latch of the self, or the promised key, a key that perhaps never turns. It’s what I love most about the websites I visit, that you can call out for anything you desire, however aberrant or unlikely, and nearly always there comes an answer; it’s a large world, we’re never as solitary as we think, as unique or unprecedented, what we feel has always already been felt, again and again, without beginning or end.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  I could feel it in my chest. “Them old boys back in Norville could flat party,” she said, “and that’s no lie.” I couldn’t speak. I just held her and moved her and breathed in her hair. I had her for three minutes and then I lost her forever. Older boys, boys I didn’t have the courage to cut in on, danced with her the rest of the night. A week or so later she took up with Lloyd Sly, a basketball player with a hot car. When we passed in the hall she didn’t even recognize me. I wrote her long, grandiloquent letters which I then destroyed. I thought of the different ways that fate might put her in my power, so I could show her who I really was and make her love me. Most of these possibilities involved death or severe maiming for Lloyd Sly. And when, as sometimes happened, a girl my own age showed some interest in me, I treated her swinishly. I walked her home from a dance or a game, made out with her on her front steps, then cut her dead the next day. I only ever wanted what I couldn’t have. CHUCK AND THE others had better luck getting me drunk. Though liquor disagreed with me they were patient, and willing to experiment, and time was on their side. They finally broke through during a basketball game, the last game of the season. It had rained earlier and the air was steamy. The windows of the school were open, and from our gully outside we could hear the cheerleaders warming up the people in the stands while the players did their lay-up drills. Who’s the team they hate to meet? Con-crete! Con-crete! Who’s the team they just can’t beat? Con-crete! Con-crete! Huff was passing around a can of Hawaiian Punch cut with vodka. Gorilla blood, he called it. I thought it would probably make me sick but I took a swig anyway. It stayed down. In fact I liked it, it tasted exactly like Hawaiian Punch. I took another swig. I WAS UP on the school roof with Chuck. He was looking at me and nodding meditatively. “Wolff,” he said. “Jack Wolff.” “Yo.” “Wolff, your teeth are too big.” “I know they are. I know they are.” “Wolf-man.” “Yo, Chuckles.” He held up his hands. They were bleeding. “Don’t hit trees, Jack. Okay?” I said I wouldn’t. “Don’t hit trees.” I WAS LYING on my back with Huff kneeling on me, slapping my cheeks. He said, “Speak to me, dicklick,” and I said, “Hi, Huff.” Everybody laughed. Huff’s pompadour had come unstuck and was hanging in long strands over his face. I smiled and said, “Hi, Huff.” I WAS WALKING along a branch. I was way out on it, over the far lip of the gully where the cement bank began. They were all looking up at me and yelling. They were fools, my balance was perfect.