Longing

Passages

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

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• From The Folding Star (1994)

  A general restlessness kept me on the streets a lot by day, and I began to recognise stall-holders and groups of kids and certain afternoon walkers who kept regular hours. I aimed always to go past the Altidores' in the early evening, when the lights might first come on in the house and Luc be seen at an upstairs window towelling his hair. But so far it had never happened, and I would go on with slackening pulse, through further streets already impregnated with a mood of bafflement and anti-climax. That Thursday, after my lesson with Marcel, who was making progress and described the plot of Bloodbath 4 with a new determination, I went out, drifted round the shopping-streets, spent a while in the photography section of a bookshop browsing the fashionably retro albums of athletes and swimmers, and then guiltily slipped into the Golden Calf for a bottle of Silence. I felt fizzy and reckless when later on I turned into Long Street just as the lamps twinked on above, pink and mauve and flickering like a favourite vice. I was still some way from the house, but I had it casually in my sights and knew just how it fitted in the rhythm of frontages opposite, glassier and posher than its immediate neighbours, the house before it having an illuminated cross in an upper window. Luc's front door opened and two figures came out sideways on to the top of the steps and then Luc himself, taller and protective, emerged between them: the Three! I knew Sibylle's smart look at once, and the boy too, of course, snug and strong. She reached up and kissed Luc on the cheek. I saw as if an inch away his flared lips kiss the air beside her as she did so, and he and the boy slid an arm round each other and left them burningly there through a last brief reprise of their talk. I faltered. could I be seen in the uncertain light? I should go on with a quick wave and greeting, even, ideally, stop and be drawn into a loose embrace of conversation—introductions could be made, fast friendships charmingly inaugurated. But I stopped where I was, twenty yards off, pressed against the wall, watching their joking and agreements in the doorway with the hunger of a ghost: I felt like a nothing, a mere emanation of weathered bricks and mortar. Fatuously, I crouched to re-tie a lace, but looked up helplessly in the youngsters' direction, and saw the guests disengage themselves, come down the steps and turn away with a further sung-out goodbye. They strolled off for a few seconds and Luc called, "Hey, Patrick", and when the boy looked round made a nodding jump, like heading a ball, and they both grinned. Then the boy, Patrick, went out into the road and bent to unlock a car: the Mini, the mauve Mini.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  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. To my grandparents, the goal was to get out of Kentucky and give their kids a head start. The kids, in turn, were expected to do something with that head start. It didn’t quite work out that way. Before Lyndon Johnson and the Appalachian Regional Commission brought new roads to southeastern Kentucky, the primary road from Jackson to Ohio was U.S. Route 23.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  At the Corry life was going on full blast. I swam more joylessly than usual, hoping I might catch Phil, starved of him, longing to have and to hold him: I wanted the solidness of him in my arms, and for a moment excitedly mistook another swimmer for him as he lounged at the shallow end. He had trunks on just like Phil’s and when I surfaced grinning in front of him he gave me a bothered look before pushing off in a panicky, old-fashioned side-stroke. I felt keenly about the discipline of swimming, and then was suddenly bored by it, and by the taste of chlorinated water. When I hopped out I had a few words with Nigel. He was sprawling in those viewing seats erected long ago for matches and galas which never now took place. ‘Hullo, Will—good swim?’ ‘I’m not in the mood, I’m afraid, today. I can do it, you know, what’s the point?’ ‘Mm, still, good for you. How are you getting on with that book then? Good one, isn’t it?’ ‘I’m a bit disappointed by it, actually. You’ve lent me better.’ ‘Mm, but that Goldie, is it, I’d like to meet him. He can give me a taste of his truncheon any time.’ I shook my head sorrowingly. ‘He doesn’t exist, love. It’s just a silly book.’ ‘Get out,’ said Nigel, tutting and turning his head away. ‘I could show you something really sexy—and true,’ I said, in a sudden treacherous bid for his interest—he who didn’t interest me at all, handsome and idle though he was. ‘I’ve got some private diaries of a guy’ (Charles a guy? some affronted guardian spirit queried) ‘with amazing stuff in them. It’s even got things happening here—years ago …’ I had doubts and petered out. My true come-uppance not from a fascinated insistence I should tell more but from a deliberate lack of attention, as if to endorse my self-reproach. ‘You still going with that Phil?’ he wanted to know. ‘Yup.’ I squared my shoulders and tried to appear worthy. ‘He’s looking good.’ Nigel smiled at me slyly. ‘He was down here earlier on, splashing about, diving and that. Showing off. I wouldn’t mind a bit of that, I thought. Gave me a really fresh look too.’ ‘You little slut,’ I said, and flicked at him with my towel as I darted off. But I was reassured by how he had got it wrong, for though Phil was taken with his own body he almost stubbornly never tarted. His love was all bottled up and kept for me.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  There were corners of the club, removed from the dance floor, dead-ends of cellars, cryptlike areas, dimly lit, faintly damp, with a limey dampness quite distinguishable from the tropical humidity the weather and the dancers made. We ran into John and Jimmy, a sweet black and white couple who had been together for years, John a cuddly blond, Jimmy handsome to tears, with lingering, ironical eyes. We stood and shouted some banter, Jimmy as usual hugging his friend from behind: they would shuffle around for hours like that, coupled and domestic and yet giggling, party-going. They might have been the beginning of a conga, ready to sweep everyone away in silliness and fun, but their devotion to each other made them at the same time inaccessible. I knew they had something which I had never had. They felt Phil a bit, oohing as he looked bashful but knew he couldn’t object, and Jimmy lifted up his hand as if he’d won a fight and made him flex his biceps and triceps, and then in a little showery cadenza of laughs and nonsense they were on their way. We went into the section beyond the fishtank, with a comfy bench running along the walls, very low, with knee-high tables crowded with beer glasses. From where we sprawled the fishtank formed an unreliable window onto the dance floor, its water threaded by bubbles up one side, and the tiny fish, neurotically it seemed, twitching from one direction to another as the music shook the thick glass. The floor of the aquarium was at eye level, and laid out like a miniature landscape, with picturesque rocks tilting up out of the pinky-brown sand, and a little pink house like a French country railway station with gaping doors and windows which the fish never deigned to swim into. The subdued lighting made the surface gleam when one looked up to it, and gave the water an unnaturally thick appearance, like a liqueur. Through this entranced, slowing medium the dancers could be seen spinning, rocking and bouncing, freakishly fast and disconnected. ‘All right, darling?’ Phil nodded. ‘Bloody hot,’ he said, running his hand over his chest and stomach and then looking at it admiringly. It was one of those occasions when I couldn’t think of much to say to him: we lolled stickily together and slurped our lager. They kept the lager so chilled that the glasses were slippery with their own cold sweat. When Phil slid his hand through the slit side of my vest I gasped at the shock—like cold water thrown in horseplay in the showers, or the touch of hands under clothing in winter out of doors. A short way off I made out a couple talking about us in a way meant to be noticed, heads together, with long glances and point-weighing smiles and nods.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The dark boy, who wasn't plump but would never perhaps be thin, was as hoarsely sexy as possible: I flickered a look from moment to moment over his square full-mouthed head, like a Roman street-boy's, the soft black hairs on his upper lip—and one or two already on his broad-nippled chest—and down to the bow in the draw-string of his trunks, the string hanging and diverted across the neat side ways jut of his cock within the tight red fabric. Yet it was his scrawny friend, just beside me, who gave me again the feel of those lost months of self-discovery, the first possession of the rights of sex. The dark boy would always be sexy, even when he ate himself into middle age, and, who knew, into marriage and its infidelities; but the blond one—not blond even, but a sort of no-colour that took body in the wet—I saw as a common scrap irradiated by love and confidence. I remembered how the whole world changed, how you were suddenly inside the great luminous concourse of human happiness, and how you thought you would be there always—though now, fifteen years later, I found myself glancing myopically in from the limbo of baffled hopes and bad habits that was always ready and waiting just beyond. My boys didn't actually wash or strip, just lounged around and laughed. After ten minutes or so their unembarrassed possession of the place was tiring me and I had washed so frequently and industriously that I began to feel like the victim of some traumatic guilt, who must wash and wash till his skin is chafed away . . . Then at last the fair one had finished, and hurried off into the changing-room—I couldn't quite catch his remark. He had on knee-length trunks in phosphorescent orange, lime and mauve, nightmare colours from my own childhood that seemed to be fashionable all over again. His friend grinned in appreciation, in anticipation, but stayed behind. My heart stepped on the gas. By now I was simply lolling under my jet, as if to get the maximum benefit after several unusually demanding hours of exercise. When I looked up, the boy smiled at me. "Excuse me, sir," he said in English. And then, stumped as to how to continue, went on in Flemish, "could I borrow some of your shampoo, please sir?" Seeing that I understood and held out the rather precious phial of Coward & Rattigan's herbal haircare, he smiled broadly and came forward to receive it. If he had been one of my pupils I would have pointed out that what he borrowed he must expect in due course to repay.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I saw I was shy, too, of dancing with unknown girls. After the tinny carols in the streets, the automated mania of the shoppers, the limbo of Christmas, garish but dank, it was like reaching home to push open the heavy door of the bar, to hear the spring sweep it shut behind me, to move again in the slowed rotations of this other limbo, in its deep-sea gloom of copper and green. I was at the bar, settling and ordering, relishing the management's sullen refusal of all festive crap, before I heard a toot of recorders, like a pert echo of long-ago end-of-term concerts. I turned, and there in the corner was a group of hairy mutants, bodies in jeans and sloppy jerseys topped with heads of crumpled felt and black bristle, with holes for eyes, as if a finger had punched through bone. One, with an ambiguous long jaw and flopping ears, gave me a wave, that was followed by muffled giggles from the rest. I nodded back, hoping that would be it. A certain silly terror of masks. Of course I knew it was Gerard, I knew his wide hips as he came over, and the blond fuzz on the back of his hands. "I'd forgotten you were a donkey," I said. If there was sarcasm in his look it was entirely absorbed by his grotesque proboscis. "I'm a hare." He had two mouths: his real mouth and chin were left uncovered beneath the contraption, so that he could play, whereas the mouths of the bear and the monkey more troublingly coincided. "So when's your concert?" "It's tonight—aren't you coming? In the old Council Chamber." "Of course, I'd love to. Can you still get tickets?" "Totally sold out." I winced regretfully. "But I can probably get you in. Come early"—and he started on an account of how and where. It was obviously Kindness To Me day. I thought back, to rid myself of all this, to when we'd first met, just here—how I wanted to kiss him, how he dodged me but stayed with me, warm and breathy and avoiding. I thought he couldn't kiss anyone as he was. There was a ghastly moment as the others crowded round, like clumsy chimeras, their own embarrassments hidden under fur and whisker. The bear with the recorder, playing the thing he would normally be goaded to dance to, gave a few further tootlings. I stared them out with an unconvincing grin. Then they shambled away, plucking their heads off like fencers and showing their flushed young faces beneath.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I set down my empty glass and gave Cherif a crumpled, sour smile, as if he was to blame for my weaknesses. I picked up a paper someone had left, and skimmed through one or two articles that vaguely interested me, explaining them to him in French—the British Conservatives were "desperate for the return of Mrs Thatcher", the Flemish Minister of Culture looked for "a new morality in the arts". I wondered if it wouldn't have been better to have seen Cherif only once, and preserved the accidental sweetness of the first encounter, rather than pushing on into the stagnant shallows of the following days. But an hour later, when I had to go, would already be late for the Echevins, we had rediscovered each other, his arm was round my shoulder, his dick was stirring comically in his jeans, and I would have given anything for another drink, or just to have taken him off with me to my room. I wanted to be fucking him and kissing the shiny brown backs of his ears. Slightly pumped up with beer I had to go to the lavatory as soon as I arrived at the Echevins' and looked at myself in the mirror, pulling my face about into a respectable expression and tightening the knot of the blue silk tie which Edie had given me. I looked poor and improvised; the edges of my clothes were frayed and even my tie had a stain on it that I only now remembered, and which meant that I had no clean ties left. It may have been no bad thing to create a hard-up odds-and-ends impression on someone who was in a sense my employer, and I had always anyway loosely thought of myself as some kind of artist, who had a duty not to conform; but under my unhappy self-inspection I longed for a beautiful suit. Time was running faster than I realised. It was one of those lavatories with a flush which merely whirls the contents of the bowl around, removing selected items, and after a quick dry spasm regurgitates the rest to wallow reproachfully where it had been before. I stood cranking the not-yet-ready handle. The housekeeper had let me in and was still waiting for me when I emerged; she smiled sadly, but I felt from her too, as she led me up the narrow panelled staircase, a kind of disappointment.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  If you got to bed late there you only slept for an hour or two before container lorries bound for the port rumbled past the end of the street, making the windows rattle and the bed-springs distantly vibrate. You woke and found you needed a pee, and groped in the half-light from outside into the small cold bathroom, the floor a tangle of dirty underwear, the glass shelf cluttered with Matt's creams and conditioners, pep-pills and prophylactics. You stumbled on something as you made your way back and for a second or two Matt's snoring stopped; then you slid apologetically under the bedclothes and the snoring started again, and you lay there with just a shiver of longing to be back home. Then the alarm-clock started beeping, it was seven already, and Matt rolled over behind you and pushed his hard cock between your legs. I had been amazed on my first visit at the chaos in which he lived, the chairloads of clothes, the tumbled boots and kicked-off loafers, the old socks and pulp novels mixed up in the bedding. Dirty plates and glasses were rigorously taken to the grim little kitchen but, once there, amassed in the sink until a particular item was needed, when it would be gingerly extracted and run for a moment under the flaring and popping hot-water geyser. Much of the remaining space between, under and on top of bed, wardrobe, chairs, table and TV was taken up with Matt's computer stuff: the stacked boxes of components, disks, spare keyboards—as well as other electrical goods, video games and hundreds of blank tapes. Yet out of this unconscious shambles he emerged each day, each night, clean, beautiful, sweet-smelling, and giving off an air of masculine order. The house he was at the back of belonged to an elderly and reclusive woman, deaf and cat-loving. Matt, it appeared, was not allowed to use her front door or to go into her part of the building at all; so access to his rooms was through the back yard and a glassed-in porch full of half-dead plants. It was odd that we both lived hidden away behind old people whom we never saw; comforting too, as if it allowed us to be children again, free and disadvantaged. Matt in fact had no respect for the rules, and my first time at his place he worried me by swaggering down the hall and into his landlady's kitchen to find some brandy I had said I felt like at two or three in the morning.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  He has spent nearly his entire life in Appalachian Ken tucky; we went to lunch at a local fast-food restaurant, because in that corner of the world there isn’t much else to eat. As we talked, I noticed little quirks that few others would. He didn’t want to share his milk shake, which was a little out of character for a kid who ended every sentence with “please” or “thank you.” He finished his food quickly and then nervously looked from person to person. I could tell that he wanted to ask a question, so I wrapped my arm around his shoulder and asked if he needed anything. “Y—Yeah,” he started, refusing to make eye contact. And then, almost in a whisper: “I wonder if I could get a few more french fries?” He was hungry. In 2014, in the richest country on earth, he wanted a little extra to eat but felt uncomfortable asking. Lord help us. Just a few months after we saw each other last, Brian’s mom died unexpectedly. He hadn’t lived with her in years, so outsiders might imagine that her death was easier to bear. Those folks are wrong. People like Brian and me don’t lose contact with our parents because we don’t care; we lose contact with them to survive. We never stop loving, and we never lose hope that our loved ones will change. Rather, we are forced, either by wisdom or by the law, to take the path of self-preservation. What happens to Brian? He has no Mamaw or Papaw, at least not like mine, and though he’s lucky enough to have supportive family who will keep him out of foster care, his hope of a “normal life” evaporated long ago, if it ever existed. When we met, his mother had already permanently lost custody. In his short life, he has already experienced multiple instances of childhood trauma, and in a few years he will begin making decisions about employment and education that even children of wealth and privilege have trouble navigating. Any chance he has lies with the people around him—his family, me, my kin, the people like us, and the broad community of hillbillies. And if that chance is to materialize, we hillbillies must wake the hell up. Brian’s mom’s death was another shitty card in an already abysmal hand, but there are many cards left to deal: whether his community empowers him with a sense that he can control his own destiny or encourages him to take refuge in resentment at forces beyond his control; whether he can access a church that teaches him lessons of Christian love, family, and purpose; whether those people who do step up to positively influence Brian find emotional and spiritual support from their neighbors. I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth. We take an electric saw to the hide of those who insult our mother. We make young men consume cotton undergarments to protect a sister’s honor.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The solid walls of the Palatine Palace, which I occupied so little, but which I had just rebuilt, seemed to sway like a ship at sea; the curtains drawn back to admit the night air were like those of a high cabin aft, and the cries of the crowd were the sound of wind in the sails. The massive reef in the distance, perceptible in the dark, that gigantic base of my tomb so newly begun on the banks of the Tiber, suggested to me no regret at the moment, no terror nor vain meditation upon the brevity of life. Little by little the light changed. For two years and more the very passage of time had been marked in the progress of a young life perfecting itself, growing radiant, and mounting to its zenith: the grave voice accustoming itself to cry orders to pilots and to masters of the hunt; the lengthened stride of the runner; the limbs of the horseman more expertly mastering his mount. The schoolboy of Claudiopolis who had learned by heart long fragments of Homer was now enamored of voluptuous, abstruse poems, or infatuated with certain passages of Plato. My young shepherd was turning into a young prince. He was no longer a mere boy, eager to jump down from his horse at the halts to offer spring water cupped in his hands: the donor now knew the immense worth of his gifts. At the hunts organized in Tuscany, in Lucius' domains, it had pleased me to place this perfect visage in among the heavy and care-laden faces of high officials, or alongside the sharp Oriental profiles and the broad, hairy faces of barbarian huntsmen, thus obliging the beloved to maintain also the difficult role of friend. In Rome intrigues had been woven around that young head, and low devices used to secure his influence, or to supplant it. He had known enough to despise all that, or ignore it; absorption in his one thought endowed this youth of eighteen with a capacity for indifference which the wisest of men might envy. But the beautiful lips had taken on a bitter line already observed by the sculptors. Here I give the moralists occasion for easy triumph. My critics are ready to point out the consequences of aberration and excess in what befell me; it is the harder for me to refute them in that I fail to see what the error is, or where the excess lies. I try to review my crime, if it is one, in its true proportions. I tell myself that suicide is not rare, and that it is common to die at twenty; that the death of Antinous is a problem and a catastrophe for me alone. It is possible that such a disaster was inseparable from too exuberant joy, and from a plentitude of experience which I would have refused to forego either for myself or for my companion in danger.

• 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.”