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 From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The fascination with fate and individual autonomy retained its purchase across the centuries of ancient Christianity, in formal philosophical literature as well as fiction. The Philocalia was redacted around the time that Heliodorus wrote his Ethiopian Tale, with its strong affirmation of high pagan fatalism. In the same period, a Christian in Syria took up the same issues in fictional form in the unwieldy mélange known as the Clementine Recognitions. The Recognitions are a Christian family romance interspersed with a harsh dose of doctrinal lecturing; Bardaisan’s Book of the Laws of Countries has been shamelessly raided for its attacks on the doctrine of astral determinism. In the background to the narrative is a family travesty that had separated the main character, Clement, from his parents and brothers. His mother had, once upon a time, received a foreboding vision and fled from Rome with her twin sons; they vanished; the father set off in search of them; he disappeared; the third son, Clement, was left alone in the world. Clement heard the gospel from Peter himself and became a Christian. Through a series of spectacular coincidences, the long-lost members of Clement’s family were gathered around the apostle and, gradually, they recognized one another. The pattern of separation, endurance, and reunion is familiar; an enigmatic divine Providence has been neatly substituted for the mixture of destiny and fate that steered the course of the Greek romance. The author of the Recognitions has grasped the deep structure of the romance and managed, by recalibrating a minimum of core assumptions, to create a narrative that presents a wholly new vision of the relationship between the individual, society, and the order of the cosmos. Inevitably this realignment laid new expectations on the body and its sexual capacities.77

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  And men are often like that together—I don’t mean … gay men particularly, but the sense I have that men don’t really want women around much. I think most men are happiest in a male world, with gangs and best friends and all that.’ ‘I believe I’ve always conducted myself with dignity,’ said Charles. I let a properly respectful pause be felt. ‘I suppose what I’m trying to say is that you were very lucky in being able to turn your caprices into a career.’ I was slow to realise how carefully Charles would measure everything I said against his wish that I should write his life. My slight nervousness, frivolousness, trying to be clever, perhaps put him off. ‘There was this absolute adoration of black people,’ Charles said, ‘you could say blind adoration, but it was all-seeing … I don’t know. I think it was more of a sort of love affair for me than for most of the others. I’ve always had to be among them, you know, negroes, and I’ve always gone straight for them.’ He put down his cup. ‘I’ve been jolly lucky with them, too. All my true friends were black,’ he added in a desolate imperfect. ‘Oh, I tangled with a few cads and sharpers, bar-room heartbreakers—’ he broke off actorishly. ‘But all your true friends …’ He was bound to slight me just a shade in replying: ‘Unwavering loyalty, you knew you would die for each other you were such pals.’ ‘I hope you see me as a true friend, Charles,’ I said with half-pretended hurt. ‘And I know people—white people—who are immensely loyal to you. Old Bill Hawkins or whatever he’s called; and all these servants who fight over you.’ ‘I do command loyalty,’ Charles assented. ‘In Lewis’s case perhaps too much loyalty.’ He sighed and chuckled. ‘Did I tell you about when he locked me in my dressing-room while he fought it out with Graham?’ ‘Oh, I was there, if you remember.’ ‘My dear child, I’d entirely forgotten. And all that sort of black magic stuff? Most unacceptable, I think, in a gentleman’s companion. He thought I’d betrayed him—but he’d been troublesome for a long time, and when he’d flogged off half of my beautiful Georgian cutlery I could no longer turn a blind eye. He’s inside again, now, I hear. He does these very artistic, kind of symbolic burglaries—with effigies of the people, and little arrangements of things.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  And the pool is a busy place. Except for certain mournful periods—early afternoons, Sunday evenings—there is a crowd: friends are racing, practised divers arch into the water making barely a splash, the agile avoid the slow, groups sit in a dripping line on the edge, feet flicking the water, cocks shrunken by the cold sticking up comically in their trunks. Miles of serious swimming are wound up in those twenty-five yards each day, and though some dally between lengths, of most you see only the heave of breaststrokers’ backs, the misted goggles and gasping, half-averted mouths of crawlers, the incessant cleaving movements of their arms, and the bubbling wakes of their feet. I went to swim most days, sometimes after exercises on the mats in the gym or a shortish turn in the weights room. It was a bizarre occupation, numbing and yet satisfying. I swam fast, alternating crawl and breaststroke, with a length of butterfly every ten. My mind would count its daily fifty lengths as automatically as a photocopier; and at the same time it would wander. Absorbed in thought I barely noticed the half-hour—one unfaltering span of pure physical exercise—elapse. This evening I thought of Arthur a lot, running real and projected conversations through my mind as I tumble-turned from length into length through the cool, gloomy water. A week had gone by since we’d met, a week spent in bed, or trailing naked from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen; sleeping at irregular times, getting drunk, watching movies on the video. I was engrossed in him. He was still strange to me, though, and much less predictable than I was. Perhaps he felt stifled in the flat. After hours of languid vacancy he would spring up and run from room to room, tapping door-frames and chair-backs as he went. Sometimes he ploughed through the stations on the hi-fi till he found some music to dance to, and would swarm around wearing nothing but my school straw hat, or a towel which he flirted about or shook like a fetish. I wasn’t allowed to join in these dances: like the little circuits through the flat they had a secret, child’s logic of their own, and to come near was to risk being kicked or jabbed by his swinging limbs. Then he would give up and fall recklessly on top of me on the sofa, panting in my face, kissing me, full of clumsy humour and longing.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I knew there had been a good deal of boredom and pretence, he hadn't perhaps been interesting to me in himself, and yet I also knew he was the motor of my grandest feelings and most darting thoughts, the ground bass to those first intense improvisations. At moments I felt lonely with him; at others, never so excitedly at peace. And what had there been since then? Nothing quite the same. Everything in some way melancholy, frantic or foredoomed. The first person I was in love with was called Mark Lyle. I was ten, and a day-boy at a pious little prep-school I could walk to on the edge of town. Mark Lyle was perhaps three years older—too old to be a friend to kids like me but equally too young to be acknowledged by my sixteen-year-old brother and his set. He occupied a fascinating limbo, his voice had broken, in my eyes he was a man already, but clearly not a man in the full, self-important way that Charlie was. When he left my school, his parents couldn't afford to send him on to Stonewell, and in my imagination he became a kind of outlaw figure, whom one might expect to find living under canvas in a dell of the common. In fact his father was an epileptic who had lost his job, but to me it seemed that some dark, perhaps ancestral secret had exerted its pull. Ancestry was much in my mind at the time; I was at work on my first book, "The Manners Family of Kent", fed with boastful anecdotes by my great-aunt Tina and rather more disillusioned sidelights from my Uncle Wilfred, sometimes quite hard to understand; I described how the glory of a family grew, until it was crowned with genuis like my father's, who sang on the wireless and was certain of a knighthood. Seen in this perspective Mark Lyle's family clearly suffered from some critical defect. It even seemed possible that Mark Lyle was a drop-out, something of which there was a lot of talk at the time. One or two of the older boys heard from him after he'd moved to the comprehensive, and bragged discreetly about the contact. Occasionally I would see him myself in the town and watch him with the considerate pretence of indifference that one accords to the truly famous.

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

  CYPRIAN. (ubi sup.) The kingdom of God may stand for Christ Himself, whom we day by day wish to come, and for whose advent we pray that it may be quickly manifested to us. As He is our resurrection, because in Him we rise again, so may He be called the kingdom of God, because we are to reign in Him. Rightly we ask for God’s kingdom, that is, for the heavenly, because there is a kingdom of this earth beside. He, however, who has renounced the world, is superior to its honours and to its kingdom; and hence he who dedicates himself to God and to Christ, longs not for the kingdom of earth, but for the kingdom of Heaven. AUGUSTINE. (De Don. Pers. 2.) When they pray, Let thy kingdom come, what else do they pray for who are already holy, but that they may persevere in that holiness they now have given unto them? For no otherwise will the kingdom of God come, than as it is certain it will come to those that persevere unto the end. Thy will be done in earth as it is in Heaven. AUGUSTINE. (Serm. in Mont. ii. 6.) In that kingdom of blessedness the happy life will be made perfect in the Saints as it now is in the heavenly Angels; and therefore after the petition, Thy kingdom come, follows, Thy will he done as in heaven, so in earth. That is, as by the Angels who are in Heaven Thy will is done so as that they have fruition of Thee, no error clouding their knowledge, no pain marring their blessedness; so may it be done by Thy Saints who are on earth, and who, as to their bodies, are made of earth. So that, Thy will be done, is rightly understood as, ‘Thy commands be obeyed;’ as in heaven, so in earth, that is, as by Angels, so by men; not that they do what God would have them do, but they do because He would have them do it; that is, they do after His will. CHRYSOSTOM. See how excellently this follows; having taught us to desire heavenly things by that which He said, Thy kingdom come, before we come to Heaven He bids us make this earth into Heaven, in that saying, Thy will he done as in heaven, so in earth. JEROME. Let them be put to shame by this text who falsely affirm that there are daily falls (ruinas) in Heavenb.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I was slow to realise how carefully Charles would measure everything I said against his wish that I should write his life. My slight nervousness, frivolousness, trying to be clever, perhaps put him off. ‘There was this absolute adoration of black people,’ Charles said, ‘you could say blind adoration, but it was all-seeing … I don’t know. I think it was more of a sort of love affair for me than for most of the others. I’ve always had to be among them, you know, negroes, and I’ve always gone straight for them.’ He put down his cup. ‘I’ve been jolly lucky with them, too. All my true friends were black,’ he added in a desolate imperfect. ‘Oh, I tangled with a few cads and sharpers, bar-room heartbreakers—’ he broke off actorishly. ‘But all your true friends …’ He was bound to slight me just a shade in replying: ‘Unwavering loyalty, you knew you would die for each other you were such pals.’ ‘I hope you see me as a true friend, Charles,’ I said with half-pretended hurt. ‘And I know people—white people—who are immensely loyal to you. Old Bill Hawkins or whatever he’s called; and all these servants who fight over you.’ ‘I do command loyalty,’ Charles assented. ‘In Lewis’s case perhaps too much loyalty.’ He sighed and chuckled. ‘Did I tell you about when he locked me in my dressing-room while he fought it out with Graham?’ ‘Oh, I was there, if you remember.’ ‘My dear child, I’d entirely forgotten. And all that sort of black magic stuff? Most unacceptable, I think, in a gentleman’s companion. He thought I’d betrayed him—but he’d been troublesome for a long time, and when he’d flogged off half of my beautiful Georgian cutlery I could no longer turn a blind eye. He’s inside again, now, I hear. He does these very artistic, kind of symbolic burglaries—with effigies of the people, and little arrangements of things. So there’s never any doubt about who did it.’ Charles chuckled and sighed again. ‘He had a way with him, though.’ ‘How did you take him on in the first place?’ I was not surprised when he hummed ‘Oh …’ and wandered into his stratospheric vagueness, broken only by heavy, widely spaced, sibilant breaths: it was like the end of some visionary anthem by Stockhausen. The little gilt carriage clock whirred and chimed five. ‘One quite interesting episode,’ he said, ‘which I think would make a telling bit of the book, was about Makepeace. Did you read that in the diary?’ ‘I don’t think I did.’ ‘It was a little romance of mine, back in London. I was most frightfully smitten with a young Trinidadian barman at the Trocadero, who went under the charming name of Makepeace. The Troc was a very big, rather vulgar restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue, with masses of mauve marble—long since gone now, of course.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  By the mid-1980s, nearly 20 percent of the people in jails and prisons in the United States had served in the military. While the rate declined in the 1990s as the shadows cast by the Vietnam War began to recede, it has picked up again as a result of the military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Herbert’s care at the veterans hospital in New York City slowly allowed him to recover. He eventually met a nurse there, a woman from Dothan, Alabama, whose compassionate care made him feel comfortable and hopeful for the first time, perhaps, in his entire life. When she was around, he felt alive and believed things would be all right. She had saved his life. When she moved back home to Alabama, Herbert followed. He tried to date her and even told her he wanted to marry her. At first she resisted because she knew that Herbert was still suffering the effects of his time in combat, but ultimately she gave in. They had a brief intimate relationship, and Herbert had never been happier. He became intensely protective of his girlfriend. But she began to see his desperate and relentless focus on her as something closer to obsessive need than love. She tried to end the relationship. After months of unsuccessfully trying to create distance from Herbert, she finally insisted that he stay away. Instead, Herbert moved even closer to her home in Dothan, which elevated her anxieties. It got to the point where she refused to allow him to see her, talk to her, or get anywhere near her. Herbert was convinced that she was just confused and would eventually come back to him. He was deluded by obsession; his logic and reasoning became corrupted, irrational, and increasingly dangerous. Herbert was not unintelligent—in fact, he was quite smart, with a particular aptitude for electronics and mechanics. And he had a big heart. But he was still recovering from the trauma of the war as well as some serious traumas that preceded his military experience. His mother had died when he was just three years old, and he had struggled with drugs and alcohol before he decided to enlist. The horrors of war had added a new level of distress to an already damaged psyche. He came up with an idea to win back his girlfriend. He decided that if she felt threatened, she would come to him for protection. He concocted a tragically misguided plan: He would construct a small bomb and place it on her front porch. He would detonate the bomb and then run to her aid to save her and then they would live happily ever after. It was the kind of reckless use of explosives that wouldn’t have been sensible in a combat zone, much less in a poor black neighborhood in Dothan, Alabama.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  There is a story there, though I’ll likely never hear it. Mamaw dreamed of turning that passion into a career as a children’s attorney —serving as a voice for those who lacked one. She never pursued that dream, possibly because she didn’t know what becoming an attorney took. Mamaw never spent a day in high school. She’d given birth to and buried a child before she could legally drive a car. Even if she’d known what was required, her new lifestyle offered little encouragement or opportunity for an aspiring law student with three children and a husband. Despite the setbacks, both of my grandparents had an almost religious faith in hard work and the American Dream. Neither was under any illusions that wealth or privilege didn’t matter in America. On politics, for example, Mamaw had one opinion—“They’re all a bunch of crooks”—but Papaw became a committed Democrat. He had no problem with Armco, but he and everyone like him hated the coal companies in Kentucky thanks to a long history of labor strife. So, to Papaw and Mamaw, not all rich people were bad, but all bad people were rich. Papaw was a Democrat because that party protected the working people. This attitude carried over to Mamaw: All politicians might be crooks, but if there were any exceptions, they were undoubtedly members of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. Still, Mamaw and Papaw believed that hard work mattered more. They knew that life was a struggle, and though the odds were a bit longer for people like them, that fact didn’t excuse failure. “Never be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them,” my grandma often told me. “You can do anything you want to.” Their community shared this faith, and in the 1950s that faith appeared well founded. Within two generations, the transplanted hillbillies had largely caught up to the native population in terms of income and poverty level. Yet their financial success masked their cultural unease, and if my grandparents caught up economically, I wonder if they ever truly assimilated. They always had one foot in the new life and one foot in the old one. They slowly acquired a small number of friends but remained strongly rooted in their Kentucky homeland. They hated domesticated animals and had little use for “critters” that weren’t for eating, yet they eventually relented to the children’s demands for dogs and cats. Their children, though, were different. My mom’s generation was the first to grow up in the industrial Midwest, far from the deep twangs and one-room schools of the hills. They attended modern high schools with thousands of other students.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  As we slowed towards stops I looked around at the other passengers, wary slumpers and strap-hangers who never met each other’s eyes for more than a fraction of a second. Half-heartedly playing the game James and I used to play I tried to select which person in the carriage I would least object to having sex with. Occasionally the choice could be made difficult by the presence of too many scrumptious schoolboys or too many dusty-handed navvies. Normally, as now, the problem was to choose between that businessman, regular and suited but with a moody something about him, and the too-tall youth in the doorway giving off a tinny, high-hat patter from his headphones, and looking flightily around through a haze of Trouble for Men. It was James’s theory that everyone had about them some wrinkle at least of lovability, some peculiar and attractive thing—a theory which gained poignancy from the problems in applying it. Consoling and yet absurd, how the sexual imagination took such easy possession of the ungiving world. I was certainly not alone in this carriage in sliding my thoughts between the legs of other passengers. Desires, brutal or tender, silent but evolved, were in the shiftless air, and hung about each jaded traveller, whose life was not as good as it might have been. I remembered for some reason a little public lavatory in Winchester, a urinal and a couple of cubicles visited by bandy-legged old men going to the market and at night by ghostly fantasists who left their traces. It was up an alley where the College turned one of its high stone corners against the town—not a place for boys, for scholars, though I went there once or twice with an almost scholarly curiosity. The cistern filled for ever, the floor was slippery, there was no toilet paper, and between the cubicles a number of holes had been diligently bored, large enough only to spy through. Talentless drawings covered the walls, and wishful assignations, and also, misspelt in laborious capitals, long unparagraphed accounts of sexual acts—‘they had her together … 12 inches … at the bus station’. In between these were fantastic rendezvous, often vague to allow for disappointment, but able sometimes to touch you with their suggestion of a shadowy world in which town and gown pried on each other. I had read: ‘College boy, blond, big cock, in here Friday—meet me next Friday, 9 pm.’ Then: ‘Tuesday?’ Then: ‘Next Friday November 10’ … I had thought almost it could have been me, until I just made out, bleared and over-written, the date ‘1964’: a decade of dark November Fridays, generations of College blonds, had already passed since those anonymous words were written.

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

  Children of Divorce Having ChildrenAS I GLANCED out the window, I caught a glimpse of Maya in her bright purple sweater happily playing with another child. Karen followed my glance and smiled. “We decided to have a child right away because I’m not getting any younger. I was thirty-four when we married and happily it only took a year for me to get pregnant. She’s been a delight from the beginning. Gavin’s a wonderful father. He does a lot more than most men I see. He comes home and plays with her several evenings a week. I get a break and he loves it. It’s been very important for me to have a child.” “You mean important in some very special way?” “Yes, I do. It was like having a child gave me another chance—for me and for Maya. I have a lot of expectations for her and you might say they are based on what I didn’t have. I want her very much to have a childhood that was not like mine.” “Like how?” “What I want for her is not to be worried about her mom the way that I worried my whole life about mine. I don’t want her to take care of me. I want to take care of her. I want to give her all the love and security that I never had. I want for her to have everything I never had. I want her to play. I want her to have time to spend with her friends in school without worrying about what’s happening at home. I want her, unlike me, to think of things she enjoys for herself. When she grows up, I want her to think back on her childhood and to know what it was like to be a happy child.” As I listened to Karen, tears welled in my eyes. I looked at this caregiver child as she talked passionately about her own daughter. “You’ve really put your heart into mothering.” “Yes, as a matter of fact, it’s linked to one of the biggest decisions of my life. I decided after she was born to leave my job and to work part-time. I want to take care of her myself. I want to be home with my daughter. I’m not sure for how long, but definitely until she gets into elementary school. My career means a lot to me, but I felt I had to make a choice. The truth is, and I had to face it, that if I wanted to stay and play the game at the top, I would have had only six weeks leave after Maya was born and then I would have had to go back to work full-time. So I bit the bullet and got off the ladder. I’m working half-time.” “Will you be able to get back where you left off? I know how important that program was and how you built it yourself.”

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  After every piece I scrub, I stretch to relieve the strain in my back that comes from leaning over the tub. I’ll wash everything except the clothes we have on. After wringing them out, I carry the damp bunch and hang them everywhere in the house: on doorknobs, hooks, and the backs of the couches and chairs. Then I open the back door and un-jam all the windows to let the air circulate. EACH DAY FOR the next two weeks, the kids and I walk with a packed lunch to the park or the Middle Country Public Library. The kids moan about the sweltering forty-minute trek and are relieved when we’re finally situated at the library, which mercifully blasts with air-conditioning. They don’t know that I spent the two-mile trek watching for Doug’s brown Chevrolet or any possible hint that Camille’s about to return. At a library table we play Mad Libs and muse through the Highlights magazines together. When the kids are quietly wrapped in their storybooks, I find myself living with my favorite characters in the worlds of Judy Blume novels. I don’t care that I’ve already read Deenie , Forever , and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Camille frowned upon me reading Forever —“It’s not for kids your age,” she said—but then, Camille’s not here . . . and I’m not a kid my age. Anyway, as I’ve told Camille, I’m not concerned with the sex. I love the story because of the romance. I also go through every biography they have on Amelia Earhart, my heroine. Amelia was brave and courageous. She didn’t let others limit her dreams and she never took no for an answer. Amelia Earhart made her own rules. And unlike Cookie, she wasn’t interested in being dependent on a man. In fact, after Amelia broke off her first engagement, she waited until she was thirty-three to marry George Putnam, who actually had to propose to her six times before she finally agreed. Her husband was jokingly referred to as “Mr. Earhart,” and on the morning of their wedding, Amelia had a friend deliver him a note that read: I want you to understand that I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. How thrilling! So fearless! When I’m searching for a solution or scared at night, I’ve begun to ask myself: What would Amelia do? The answer always makes me feel braver. BY THE END of July, we’ve settled into a routine I’m confident with, but my worries about getting food never end. With only me present to search for food, my resolution to eat more isn’t so successful. Since we don’t have enough food to go around, I often skip meals. When I start to feel weak and jittery, I take a swig of vinegar.

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

  On the contrary, Jerome (Ep. liii ad Paulin.) urges him to acquire learning in the monastic state, saying: “Let us learn on earth those things the knowledge of which will remain in heaven,” and further on: “Whatever you seek to know, I will endeavor to know with you.” I answer that As stated above [3825](A[2]), religion may be ordained to the active and to the contemplative life. Now chief among the works of the active life are those which are directly ordained to the salvation of souls, such as preaching and the like. Accordingly the study of letters is becoming to the religious life in three ways. First, as regards that which is proper to the contemplative life, to which the study of letters helps in a twofold manner. In one way by helping directly to contemplate, namely by enlightening the intellect. For the contemplative life of which we are now speaking is directed chiefly to the consideration of divine things, as stated above (Q[180], A[4]), to which consideration man is directed by study; for which reason it is said in praise of the righteous (Ps. 1:2) that “he shall meditate day and night” on the law of the Lord, and (Ecclus. 39:1): “The wise man will seek out the wisdom of all the ancients, and will be occupied in the prophets.” In another way the study of letters is a help to the contemplative life indirectly, by removing the obstacles to contemplation, namely the errors which in the contemplation of divine things frequently beset those who are ignorant of the scriptures. Thus we read in the Conferences of the Fathers (Coll. x, 3) that the Abbot Serapion through simplicity fell into the error of the Anthropomorphites, who thought that God had a human shape. Hence Gregory says (Moral. vi) that “some through seeking in contemplation more than they are able to grasp, fall away into perverse doctrines, and by failing to be the humble disciples of truth become the masters of error.” Hence it is written (Eccles. 2:3): “I thought in my heart to withdraw my flesh from wine, that I might turn my mind to wisdom and might avoid folly.” Secondly, the study of letters is necessary in those religious orders that are founded for preaching and other like works; wherefore the Apostle (Titus 1:9), speaking of bishops to whose office these acts belong, says: “Embracing that faithful word which is according to doctrine, that he may be able to exhort in sound doctrine and to convince the gainsayers.” Nor does it matter that the apostles were sent to preach without having studied letters, because, as Jerome says (Ep. liii ad Paulin.), “whatever others acquire by exercise and daily meditation in God’s law, was taught them by the Holy Ghost.”

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  The smallest stimulus—a certain bar, an old gas station—triggers memories of Cookie; her torment, her smell, her constant reminders that nobody wanted me. So many of the towns were locations where I came and went swiftly, pushed into a random family’s house then swept out again before it ever had the chance to feel like mine. My three other siblings have also not returned. Rosie’s been in Utah since she graduated from college and Norman and Cherie live near each other in Pennsylvania. Of all the places I’ve thought of settling, Suffolk County may be the last spot on earth I ever imagined myself calling home. But Camille is persistent. “Maria asked me yesterday: ‘Mom, what’s the longest Aunt Gi has ever lived anywhere?’ ” “But Camille, Long Island is not exactly—” “Long Island is home. I have the same bad memories you do, Gi. But the kids are growing—they want you around at their games, their plays . . . you’re our family. When we didn’t have anything else, we had each other.” Through all the turns and transitions my existence has taken . . . Camille, Frank, and their kids have been the only constant in my life. Even so, constant shifting has remained more comforting to me than consistency . . . which is why, when I run into Todd Ciaravino one afternoon in August 2006, I’m confronted with yet another situation that calls me to stretch out of my comfort zone. I’m between meetings, exiting a shoe store in the Time Warner Center in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. Just then, Todd walks by and meets my eyes. We take each other in for a moment before we break into smiles, both polished in suits. “What are you doing here?” I ask him. “I had a meeting upstairs.” We exchange a few niceties, and then cell phone numbers, and by the following month we’re back together as an item. Embracing what Camille has been encouraging me to do, I agree to look at properties in Suffolk County, taking plenty of time to explore the North Fork of Long Island. It’s much more low-key than the Hamptons, which sits just across the Peconic Bay, but with its rolling farmlands, peach orchards, and picturesque vineyards, I’m increasingly convinced the North Fork is a place I could see myself planting permanent roots. Todd’s with me in the fall of 2006 when I view a small cottage on the North Fork with a backyard view of a creek off the bay. The shoreline and blue sky remind me of the beach landscape in Saint James where my siblings and I frolicked as kids . . . and I know it’s meant to be mine when it dawns on me how aptly its little hamlet is named: New Suffolk.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Will?’ ‘Yes?’ I sensed some more probing question was coming. ‘Does Arthur and Harold still live in England?’ ‘Oh, I think so, yes.’ ‘He didn’t escape then?’ ‘It doesn’t look like it, my old duck.’ I spent a lackadaisical afternoon, sprawling in the window-seat half-reading the paper, then closing my eyes, as the sun came round. I drifted in and out of sleep, took off my shirt, woke to find the coarse stitching of the tapestry bolster had patterned my slightly sweating back. I thought about Arthur, and how minutely brief our affair had been, and difficult to understand. I saw him again licking my balls; or swallowing as he slowly sat down on my cock; or helpless beneath me, locking his dry heels behind my neck. I hated to think it was over—yet dawdled half-awake in a maudlin, jealous reverie. I imagined him servicing the scarred and despotic Tony as they rolled towards the West End in their black-windowed Cortina. So much had ended, so many things gone crooked and bad—and yet the high June afternoon lasted and lasted, grew stiller, more crystalline. There was no friendly darkness in it. I shifted and slept again. At about drinks time I began to want to do something. I wrapped up my trunks in a towel, flung them in my sports bag with my goggles and soap-box and an American ‘gay thriller’ I had been loaned by Nigel the pool attendant, and trotted off out. The pavements and gardens were exuding their summer smells, and as I approached the Tube station I walked against the current of people coming home, youngsters in pinstripes from the City fanning out from the gates, jackets here and there hooked over a shoulder, smart clippety-clop of old-fashioned City shoes. They were quite handsome, some of these boys, public-school types with peachy complexions and contemptuous eyes. Already they commanded substantial salaries, took long, overpriced lunches, worked out perhaps in private City gyms. In many ways they were like me; yet as they ambled home in the benign and ordered vastness of the evening, as I fleetingly caught their eye or felt them for a moment aware of me, they were an alien breed. And then I was a loafer who had hardly ever actively earned money, and they were the eager initiates, the coiners of the power and the compromise in which I had unthinkingly been raised. My disaffected mood persisted in the sweaty train. Goldie was one of the poorer accessions of the swimming-pool library.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  As if he knew what I was thinking he said, with a hint of pride, ‘I’m going to die, you know, quite soon.’ This didn’t seem at all unlikely, but when I none the less havered, he insisted that his ‘Egyptian fortune-teller’ had confirmed it. When he next left the country—for France, quite soon, and then to winter in the desert villages around Cairo—he wd never return. It was a childish & theatrical moment, difficult to respond to seriously, & yet, like occasional lines in melodrama, mordantly moving & true. ‘I don’t want to die,’ he added. I was beginning to see why he did not attract drinking companions, & wondering whether we too might not be moving on, when he invited us all to go & hear the negro band at the Savoy: ‘It’s the most wonderful music there is,’ he said. So we knocked off the rest of the champagne at giddy speed, & lurched out into the street: I assumed we wd walk, but our author’s pedestrian performance was as wayward as his sessile one: it combined the futile caution of the drunkard with a true instinct for elegance—if of a somewhat decadent kind. With each step he rippled upwards, from foot to head, whilst appearing somehow to steer & balance himself with low-down oscillations of his hands: again I was reminded of wall-paintings in Egyptian tombs—there was so linear a quality to him. We hailed a cab in Piccadilly Circus & as he slumped into the smoky compartment beside me he exhaled his new resolve: ‘We must have the most heavenly talk about Africa.’ Phil agreed to come with me to visit Ronald Staines, and since we were at my flat I dressed him myself. I forbade him underwear, and forced him into an old pair of fawn cotton trousers which, tight on me, were anatomically revealing on him. The central seam cut up deeply between his balls, and his little cock was espaliered across the top of his left thigh. A loose, boyish, blue Aertex shirt set this off beautifully, and as I followed him downstairs I was thrilled at my affront to his shyness, and could hardly wait for the strapping I would give him when we got back.

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

  Reply to Objection 3: These six denote the steps whereby we ascend by means of creatures to the contemplation of God. For the first step consists in the mere consideration of sensible objects; the second step consists in going forward from sensible to intelligible objects; the third step is to judge of sensible objects according to intelligible things; the fourth is the absolute consideration of the intelligible objects to which one has attained by means of sensibles; the fifth is the contemplation of those intelligible objects that are unattainable by means of sensibles, but which the reason is able to grasp; the sixth step is the consideration of such intelligible things as the reason can neither discover nor grasp, which pertain to the sublime contemplation of divine truth, wherein contemplation is ultimately perfected. Reply to Objection 4: The ultimate perfection of the human intellect is the divine truth: and other truths perfect the intellect in relation to the divine truth. Whether in the present state of life the contemplative life can reach to the vision of the Divine essence?Objection 1: It would seem that in the present state of life the contemplative life can reach to the vision of the Divine essence. For, as stated in Gn. 32:30, Jacob said: “I have seen God face to face, and my soul has been saved.” Now the vision of God’s face is the vision of the Divine essence. Therefore it would seem that in the present life one may come, by means of contemplation, to see God in His essence. Objection 2: Further, Gregory says (Moral. vi, 37) that “contemplative men withdraw within themselves in order to explore spiritual things, nor do they ever carry with them the shadows of things corporeal, or if these follow them they prudently drive them away: but being desirous of seeing the incomprehensible light, they suppress all the images of their limited comprehension, and through longing to reach what is above them, they overcome that which they are.” Now man is not hindered from seeing the Divine essence, which is the incomprehensible light, save by the necessity of turning to corporeal phantasms. Therefore it would seem that the contemplation of the present life can extend to the vision of the incomprehensible light in its essence. Objection 3: Further, Gregory says (Dial. ii, 35): “All creatures are small to the soul that sees its Creator: wherefore when the man of God,” the blessed Benedict, to wit, “saw a fiery globe in the tower and angels returning to heaven, without doubt he could only see such things by the light of God.” Now the blessed Benedict was still in this life. Therefore the contemplation of the present life can extend to the vision of the essence of God.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  As soon as he began to count in my life art ceased to be a luxury and became a resource, a form of succor. I have forced this image upon the world: there are today more portraits of that youth than of any illustrious man whatsoever, or of any queen. At first my desire was to have recorded in sculpture the successive beauties of a changing form; but later, art became a kind of magical operation, capable of evoking a countenance lost. Colossal effigies seemed to offer one means of expressing the true proportions which love gives to those we cherish; I wanted those images to be enormous, like a face seen at close range, tall and solemn figures, like visions and apparitions in a terrifying dream, and as overwhelming as the memory itself has remained. I demanded perfect execution, nay, perfection pure; in short, that god who every boy dying at twenty is for those who have loved him; but I sought also an exact resemblance, the familiar presence and each irregularity of a face dearer than beauty itself. How many discussions it cost to keep intact the heavy line of an eyebrow, that slightly swollen curve of the lip. ... I was counting desperately on the eternity of stone and the fidelity of bronze to perpetuate a body which was perishable, or already destroyed, but I also insisted that the marble, rubbed daily with a mixture of acid and oil, should take on the shimmer, and almost the softness, of youthful flesh. The face was unique, still I found it everywhere; I amalgamated divinities, sexes, and eternal attributes, the hardy Diana of the forests with the melancholy Bacchus, the vigorous Hermes of the palaestrae with the twofold god who sleeps, head on arm, like a fallen flower. I remarked how much a thoughtful young man resembles a virile Athena. My sculptors went slightly astray; the less able fell into the error of too soft a line, or too obvious; all, however, were more or less caught up in the dream. There are statues and paintings of the youth alive, reflecting that immense and changing landscape which extends from the fifteenth to the twentieth year: the serious profile of the obedient child; that statue where a sculptor of Corinth has ventured to retain the careless ease of a young boy with lounging posture and sloping shoulders, one hand on his hip, as if he were watching a game of dice at some street corner. There is that marble where Papias of Aphrodisias has outlined a body tenderly nude, with the delicate resilience of narcissus.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  All of you were wrong; Camille’s going to be fine . I block out everyone’s input except my teachers’, knowing my only hopes of ever rescuing Rosie lay in my understanding of how the system works and getting respect from the people who work in it. A thousand times a day I repeat this to myself: College degree. BY THE TIME I turn sixteen during junior year, I’ve gotten a job at Rickel Home Center a few miles away from Addie and Pete’s. Until Sheryl takes a job at the register next to mine, the work is so boring that to make the time pass I talk to the customers in a British accent. Sometimes I walk all the way there, and other times I catch the bus that takes me a third of the way, then I walk the rest. Sometimes when they can, Addie or Pete will drop me off or my friends Erin and Tracey will give me a lift, now that they both have their permits. Of course, friends with cars present the opportunity for more interaction with boys, because now we’re able to go places unsupervised. Addie reminds me to focus on my studies, and I tell her there’s no need to be concerned. I’ve started dating a boy named Eddie . . . but despite the appearances I create for his sake, I have no real interest in bonding with him. First, while he’s worried about soccer practice and trying to get me alone to make a move, I’m more concerned about my studies and plotting out my next conversation with Cookie to see how Rosie’s really doing. Plus, I know what troubles boys can bring—the same troubles Cookie’s always getting herself into. So with Eddie, I let on like I’m invested, while also doing my best to control my tendency to cut and run when he gets too close. There’s a much more important man tugging at my heart: Paul Accerbi, who, as of this autumn, no longer appears in the Suffolk County phone book. For months after I notice his listing missing, I contemplate what to do. Finally, I rip out the page where his name used to be and study it on the annual February Disney World quest. While hidden away in the top bunk of the mobile home, I stare obsessively at the place where his name used to be . . . then something new jumps out at me: There’s an Accerbi in Lindenhurst, whose names sound familiar: Frank and Julia. How is this just now coming to me? I recall Cherie and Camille talking about an aunt Julie and an uncle Frank and the willow tree we would sit under with them. But with no phone on the camper, I can’t call my sisters to verify the memory. Cherie and Camille used to tell me stories about different places we lived when I was little, and the names they’d given them all.

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

  Part One is about Karen, a child who takes on adult responsibilities at the breakup and continues in this caretaker role throughout her growing-up years. This experience shapes all of Karen’s adult relationships and her view of motherhood in unexpected ways. I compare her development to the life story of Gary, a young man who was raised by two parents who resolved to stay married despite their unhappiness with each other. Gary’s story addresses the question of when and whether people who are unhappy can or should stay together for the sake of their children. Part Two is about Larry, a boy who was raised amid scenes of domestic violence. When his mother left the marriage, seven-year-old Larry was enraged and sought to restore the marriage with the collusive help of his father. I compare Larry’s life to the experiences had by Carol, a young woman whose parents engaged in lifelong violence with zero intention of ever separating. Larry and Carol shed light on the perceptions of children and adolescents raised in violent families and how these attitudes affect their adult lives. Part Three is about Paula, a young child who suffered intense loneliness after divorce when her mother had to go to school and work fulltime. In adulthood, Paula is herself a single parent who is starting over after a wild adolescence and an impulsive early marriage. Her story enables me to explore the long-term effect of court-ordered visiting, joint custody, and other court policies that shape children’s lives and attitudes toward their parents. No person in our comparison group suffered an experience equivalent to Paula’s sudden loss of a loving protective environment, and so they are not included in this section. Part Four is about Billy, a child who was born with a congenital heart condition and who had special needs that prevented him from adapting to his parents’ new lives. Divorce is particularly challenging for such vulnerable children who are not able to handle change very well. In this section, I also explore the issue of who pays for college when obligatory child support stops at age eighteen. Part Five is about Lisa, who was raised in a family where every effort was made to keep the peace. She grew up in comfortable surroundings with the support of two loving parents and an affectionate stepmother. Nevertheless, when Lisa entered adulthood she encountered serious problems in trusting men. She struggled with feelings that stemmed from the long ago divorce. Compared to Betty, who was raised in a very happy intact family, Lisa is not sure that she can find a life partner, raise children, and trust in the institution of marriage.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  There was the Bubble House and the Happy House and the Glue Factory and the Brady Bunch House. I learned the Bubble House was our first foster home, where we all slept in the same room and our foster parents and their daughter, Susan, would lull us to sleep by turning on a globelike machine that would spin around and show bubbles on the blue walls of our room. The Glue Factory was where we lived the longest as a family in Saint James. But I couldn’t remember living in the Happy House, a place were Cherie and Camille seem to remember that we three girls were loved, cared for, and fed beyond anything else we’ve ever experienced. As we moved from place to place, they would reminisce about the Happy House and the Bubble House—“At the Happy House, the curtains were always open to let the light in,” Cherie would say, or “When I hear this song on the radio, I always turn it up because it reminds me of the Bubble House.” Since we never could figure out where the Happy House was, we all finally agreed that it must have been born from our own folklore. We settled on the fact that we learned how to keep a home at the Bubble House. But we’d also agreed that, at one point, there’d been an aunt Julie and an uncle Frank in our lives. There was something that made us believe they weren’t our true aunt and uncle, but people we’d met along the way. As soon as Pete pulls the motor home back into our driveway in Centereach, I run out of the camper to the yellow kitchen phone and call Camille. “Julia and Frank Accerbi—could they be the same people we called aunt and uncle?” “Regina, maybe . . . maybe these people are related to Paul. But I don’t know how we would have known them, and I wouldn’t believe whatever crazy story Cookie would come up with if we asked her. It doesn’t quite fit together.” But she didn’t rule it out . . . and I so badly needed to know if Paul had moved away or, God forbid, died, so I convince myself that they would know. For weeks, I rehearse draft after draft of what to write. On Easter, I select a note at random from a stack of the very best I’ve written. I address it to Julia and Frank Accerbi and include only my name and house number on the return address line—not the Petermans’ names, or their phone number. I don’t want any of the Accerbis letting the Petermans know that I’ve reached out to the man I believe is my biological father. April 3, 1983 Dear Mr. & Mrs. Accerbi, My name is Regina Marie Calcaterra. I am 16 years old and believe that Paul Accerbi is my father. I also believe that there is a possibility that you are related to him.