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 Etched in Sand (2013)

  “Not your fault,” Norm said, and then he turned to me and said, “We’ll take turns and I’ll go first if you want. It won’t be the worst thing we’ve ever done.” “I’ll go first,” I said. “I want to get it over with.” Jason and Brian explained to me exactly where to go and what to do with the bucket in the morning. It seemed nutty to me that anyone with running water and working toilets would use the bucket system instead. At eight o’clock the single light bulb went out and everyone hushed. Then there was the click of a key in the doorknob lock, followed by the firm clink of a bolt lock sliding into place. The descending footsteps that followed were neither Becky’s slumping waddle nor Mrs. Callahan’s flat-footed slaps. They were firm, solid footsteps. The silent Mr. Callahan. I guess he knew we were there, after all, though by the look on his face at dinner, you’d think he was blind to everything but the plate in front of him. I lay in bed and listened to the TV in the room below us. Mork and Mindy was on. The last time I’d seen that show I was at the home of a friend from school. We sat in the living room with her mom, dad and twin sister. Everyone was flopped over the couch, feet up on the coffee table, a bowl of popcorn being passed from lap to lap. And we laughed. I thought then, just as I thought now, that when I grew up I’d have a family, a couch and a TV. We’d lie around watching Mork and Mindy together, and everyone would be happy and warm.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  It won’t be the worst thing we’ve ever done.” “I’ll go first,” I said. “I want to get it over with.” Jason and Brian explained to me exactly where to go and what to do with the bucket in the morning. It seemed nutty to me that anyone with running water and working toilets would use the bucket system instead. At eight o’clock the single light bulb went out and everyone hushed. Then there was the click of a key in the doorknob lock, followed by the firm clink of a bolt lock sliding into place. The descending footsteps that followed were neither Becky’s slumping waddle nor Mrs. Callahan’s flat-footed slaps. They were firm, solid footsteps. The silent Mr. Callahan. I guess he knew we were there, after all, though by the look on his face at dinner, you’d think he was blind to everything but the plate in front of him. I lay in bed and listened to the TV in the room below us. Mork and Mindy was on. The last time I’d seen that show I was at the home of a friend from school. We sat in the living room with her mom, dad and twin sister. Everyone was flopped over the couch, feet up on the coffee table, a bowl of popcorn being passed from lap to lap. And we laughed. I thought then, just as I thought now, that when I grew up I’d have a family, a couch and a TV. We’d lie around watching Mork and Mindy together, and everyone would be happy and warm. The next morning, I opened the closet door with one hand, pinching my nose shut with the other. While keeping my body as far away as possible, I reached in and grabbed the metal handle of the blue plastic bucket. Like a tight-rope walker, I went slow and steady to avoid sloshing. Out of the bunkroom, then down the stairs like a bride: foot out, feet together, foot out, feet together. Becky and Mrs. Callahan didn’t want the bucket carried through the kitchen so I went out the front door, through the junk car yard, around to the weedy side yard, past the stand-alone garage, past the corrugated metal junk shed (which Brian said was full of broken furniture), and into the dirt backyard to the poop hole, which was the size of a manhole cover and as deep as cellar stairs. I stood as far from the hole as possible, turned my face away so I wouldn’t have to see what I’d been carrying, and upended the bucket. A shovel stood, dug into the dirt nearby. I picked up the shovel, almost as tall as I, and shoveled in a few mounds of dirt. On the way back to the house, I stopped by the shed where the hose was. The bucket was rinsed clean before being returned to the bedroom.

• From The Songs of Bilitis (1894)

  Do not dress thyself, for fear lest the girdle redden the slender folds of thy hips. Remain naked like a little girl. Do not even rise, for fear lest thy fragile feet be injured in walking. Repose in the bed, O victim of Eros, and I will dress thy poor wound. For I would not see upon thy body other marks, Mnasidika, than the blemish of an over-long kiss, the scratch of a sharp nail, or the reddening bar of my embrace. LXVII THE DESPAIRING EMBRACE Love me, not with smiles, flutes, or plaited flowers, but with thy heart and thy tears, as I love thee with my breast and my lamentations. When thy breasts alternate with my breasts, when I feel thy life touching my life, when thy knees stand up behind me, then my panting mouth knows not how more to unite with thine. Clasp me as I clasp thee! See, the lamp has died out, we turn and twist in the night; but I press thy moving body and I hear thy perpetual plaint.... Moan! moan! moan! O woman! Eros leads us in sorrow. Thou wilt suffer less on the bed in bringing a child into the world than when giving birth to thy love. LXVIII THE HEART Breathless, I take her hand and apply it forcibly to the moist skin of my left breast. And I turn my head here and there and I move my lips without speaking. My excited heart, abrupt and hard, beats and beats in my breast as an imprisoned satyr would knock, imprisoned in a leathern bottle. She says to me: “Thy heart makes thee ill....” “O Mnasidika,” I respond, “the heart of a woman is not there. That is only a poor bird, a dove which stirs its feeble wings. The heart of a woman is more terrible. “Like a little myrtle berry, it burns with a red flame and under an abundant foam. It is there that I feel myself bitten by voracious Aphrodite.” LXIX WORDS IN THE NIGHT We rest, our eyes closed, the silence is deep about our couch. Ineffable Nights of summer! But she, believing me asleep, lays her warm hand upon my arm. She murmurs: “Bilitis, thou sleepest?” My heart throbs, but, without response, I respire regularly like a woman couched in dreams. Then she begins to speak: “Because thou hearest me not,” she says, “ah! how I love thee!” And she repeats my name: “Bilitis.... Bilitis....” And she touches me with the tips of her trembling fingers. “It is mine, this mouth! mine alone! Is there another so beautiful in the world? Ah! my happiness, my happiness! Mine are these naked arms, this neck and hair....” LXX ABSENCE She has gone out, she is far away, but I see her, for all things in this chamber are full of her, all are related to her, and I, like the rest.

• 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 Etched in Sand (2013)

  Where is the Happy House? “Can we go there?” “Well, maybe someday when you’re bigger we can find it again.” I want to find the Happy House now. Because my school day is shorter than Cherie’s and Camille’s, I have to stay in the school library until they’re ready to walk me home. That seems okay because I flip through books all afternoon, but it doesn’t work so well when my sisters start getting held up in detention all the time. They miss school to take care of Norman, and they’re not turning in their homework, and they said that it doesn’t help that the man who’s been sneaking in our house at night likes Mom more than his wife, who happens to be a teacher at our school. When they’re in detention and I stay too long at the library and can’t watch Norman, my sisters realize we’re all in danger of Mom’s beatings. They tell me I have to walk home alone, as long as I cross with the crossing guard and walk along the storefronts. The next fall, Mom meets a new man named Vito, who always wears a black suit and a thick belt around his waist that we’re not allowed to touch. Vito is nice to us, way nicer than Big Norman, but the two friends who are always with him are weird. They’re really quiet, and they’re always wearing sunglasses—even at night. I know this because when Vito sleeps in Mom’s room, his friends sit down in the car and wait for him so he always has a ride somewhere. Mom begins to stay out with Vito all the time, and we love to play house without her. When the snow melts from winter, we collect our change and bundle Norman up and take a long walk to the Saint James General Store, where we treat ourselves to apple, grape, and watermelon swirled candy sticks and candy necklaces. Then on the way to the local King Kullen supermarket we drop Norman off at home, securing him in a room by himself so we can go shopping with Mom’s food stamps. Camille and Cherie take two different carts, and I stand on the outside edge of Cherie’s with my feet on the bottom rail, adding up the cost of the food items as they’re placed in the cart to make sure we have enough food stamps to cover our groceries. When we bag our food at the cash register, my job is to hide an extra stash of bags in our cart. Then Cherie tells the cashier we have to go find our sister, and she wheels me back into the store to look for Camille, who takes the contents of her cart and stuffs it all in my bags when no one’s looking. Camille’s cart is always better—she grabs Fluffernutter, peanut butter, frozen jelly donuts, and lots of cake mixes. Then we zip out the door with our stash. We prefer to be left alone. We watch Sesame Street, The Electric Company,

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  As we went home and sank into unconsciousness gangs of these men, with lamps and blow-lamps, and long-handled ratchet spanners, moved out along the tunnels; and wagons, not made to carry passengers, freakishly functional, rolled slowly and clangorously forwards from sidings unknown to the commuter. Such lonely, invisible work must bring on strange thoughts; the men who walked through every tunnel of the labyrinth, tapping the rails, must feel such reassurance seeing the lights of others at last approaching, voices calling out their friendly, technical patter. The black was looking at his loosely cupped hands: he was very aloof, composed, with an air of massive, scarcely conscious competence—I felt more than respect, a kind of tenderness for him. I imagined his relief at getting home and taking his boots off and going to bed as the day brightened around the curtains and the noise of the streets built up outside. He turned his hands over and I saw the pale gold band of his wedding-ring. All the gates but one at the station were closed and I, with two or three others, scuttled out as if being granted an unusual concession. Then there were the ten minutes to walk home. The drink made it seem closer, so that next day I would not remember the walk at all. And the idea of Arthur, too, which I had suppressed to make it all the more exciting when I recalled it, must have driven me along at quite a lick. I was getting a taste for black names, West Indian names; they were a kind of time-travel, the words people whispered to their pillows, doodled on their copy-book margins, cried out in passion when my grandfather was young. I used to think these Edwardian names were the denial of romance: Archibald, Ernest, Lionel, Hubert were laughably stolid; they bespoke personalities unflecked by sex or malice. Yet only this year I had been with boys called just those staid things; and they were not staid boys. Nor was Arthur. His name was perhaps the least likely ever to have been young: it evoked for me the sunless complexion, unaired suiting, steel-rimmed glasses of a ledger clerk in a vanished age. Or had done so, before I found my beautiful, cocky, sluttish Arthur—an Arthur it was impossible to imagine old. His smooth face, with its huge black eyes and sexily weak chin, was always crossed by the light and shade of uncertainty, and met your gaze with the rootless self-confidence of youth.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Phil needed some slacks and falling fondly back now on my notion of him as my little soldier, I gave him my old army fatigues. He padded about in them, and rummaging in the pockets brought out some loose change, a spunk-stiffened hanky, and a folded white card. I looked at the card, which bore a national insurance number, and on the other side the name ‘Arthur Edison Hope’, and his address. 10 As I came up he was dithering on the doorstep and had a look, not uncommon with him, of bitten-back anxiety and determined self-control. He gripped my arm and said, ‘God, this is intolerable. I’ve just had a call.’ ‘Don’t worry, old girl, I’ll wait for you.’ I patted him on the shoulder and smiled with a quiet confidence that I didn’t altogether feel after this traumatic night. A gorgeous summer day was unfolding and as James went off flapping his car keys I stood at the gate and let it sink in. The steady rumble of far-off traffic, the thinning haze, the suited people hurrying past, all seemed invitations to some wearying and majestic happening. I almost seemed to see, above the houses across the street, an immense golden athlete stretching into the sky like the drop-curtain of a ballet or a gigantic banner at a Soviet rally, full of appalling promise. It was a relief to go indoors. James’s flat was quite nice—clean and roomy and safely sandwiched half-way up a house of geriatrics and absentee Greeks. The little cosmopolis of Notting Hill, its littered streets, its record exchanges, its international newsagents, late-night cinemas, late-night delis, was to hand. The elegant vacancy of the Park was admirably near; you could walk to the museums, to Knightsbridge even, and a little later in the year, to the Proms. And at the back, a block away, you were in Carnival country. Even so, the very convenience and accessibility of James’s house gave it a bleak and transitory feel. The shelf in the hallway was always stacked with post addressed to former tenants whom nobody knew—bills, circulars, mailing-shots aimed with desolate regularity at a population of migrants. In the small carpeted lift (which this morning I allowed myself to take) one would meet strangers who were just polite, incredibly well dressed, sometimes carrying tiny fancy dogs. James liked the insularity of his flat, liked having a place all to himself, but was clearly affected by this mood of transience, a sense of valuelessness despite the climbing prices and the mortgage. He could never bring himself to do much to it, and though he loved pictures seemed not to notice the half-furnished bareness of his own few rooms.

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

  PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Which then is better? To place it on earth where its security is doubtful, or in Heaven where it will be certainly preserved? What folly to leave it in this place whence you must soon depart, and not to send it before you thither, whither you are to go? Therefore place your substance there where your country is. CHRYSOSTOM. But forasmuch as not every earthly treasure is destroyed by rust or moth, or carried away by thieves, He therefore brings in another motive, For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. As much as to say; Though none of these former losses should befal you, you will yet sustain no small loss by attaching your affections to things beneath, and becoming a slave to them, and in falling from Heaven, and being unable to think of any lofty thing. JEROME. This must be understood not of money only, but of all our possessions. The god of a glutton is his belly; of a lover his lust; and so every man serves that to which he is in bondage; and has his heart there where his treasure is. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Otherwise; He now teaches the benefit of almsgiving. He who places his treasure on earth has nothing to look for in Heaven; for why should he look up to Heaven where he has nothing laid up for himself? Thus he doubly sins; first, because he gathers together things evil; secondly, because he has his heart in earth; and so on the contrary he does right in a twofold manner who lays up his treasure in Heaven. 6:22–2322. The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. 23. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! CHRYSOSTOM. Having spoken of the bringing the understanding into captivity because it was not easy to be understood of many, He transfers it to a sensible instance, saying, The light of thy body is thy eye. As though He had said, If you do not know what is meant by the loss of the understanding, learn a parable of the bodily members; for what the eye is to the body, that the understanding is to the soul. As by the loss of the eyes we lose much of the use of the other limbs, so when the understanding is corrupted, your life is filled with many evils.

• From The Songs of Bilitis (1894)

  This bed still warm, over which I pass my mouth, is impressed with the form of her body. On this soft pillow has lain her little head enveloped in her hair. There is the basin in which she has bathed, the comb which has penetrated the knots of her tangled hair. These slippers long for her naked feet. The pockets of gauze enclosed her breasts. But that which I dare not touch with my finger is the mirror in which she viewed her hot bruises and in which, perhaps, still exists the reflection of her moist lips. LXXI LOVE Alas! if I think of her, my throat becomes dry, my head droops, my breasts grow hard and pain me, I shiver and I weep as I walk. If I see her, my heart stops, my hands tremble, my feet grow cold, the crimson of fire mounts to my cheeks, my temples throb grievously. If I touch her, I become mad, my arms weaken, my knees swoon. I fall before her and lie like a woman about to die. Always, whenever she speaks to me, I feel myself wounded. Her love is torture and the passers-by hear my plaints.... Alas! How can I call her Well-Beloved? LXXII PURIFICATION Thou art there! Take off thy bandelets and thy clasps and thy tunic. Remove even thy sandals, even the ribbons of thy legs, even the band of thy breast. Wash the black from thine eyebrows and the red from thy lips. Efface the white of thy shoulders and uncurl thy hair in the water. For I would have thee all pure as thou wert born upon the bed at the feet of thy fecund mother and before thy proud father. So chaste that my hand in thy hand will make thee redden even to thy lips and one word of mine in thine ear will fill, with an excess of love, thy wandering eyes. LXXIII THE CRADLE OF MNASIDIKA My little child, so few years have I had only thee: I love thee, not as a lover but as though thou hadst come forth from my laboring entrails. When, stretched upon my knees, thy two frail arms about me, thou seekest my breast, thy mouth clinging, and press my nipples softly between thy palpitating lips: Then I dream that, at some time, I have truly nursed this delicate mouth, supple and moist, this vase of crimson myrrhine in which the happiness of Bilitis is mysteriously enclosed. Sleep. I will cradle thee with one hand upon my knee which rocks thee. Sleep so. I will sing for thee little mournful songs which bring sleep to the newly-born. LXXIV A PROMENADE BY THE SEA As we were walking on the seashore, without speaking, and enveloped to the chin in our robes of sombre wool, joyous young girls passed by. “Ah! it is Bilitis and Mnasidika! See, the pretty little squirrel we have caught: it is soft as a bird and timid as a rabbit.

• From Untrue (2018)

  When I was a young girl in Grand Rapids, Michigan, we played a game in our backyards and on the school playground as we sang a song called “The Farmer in the Dell.” We stood, a whole big group of us, holding hands in a circle, with one boy in the middle. “The farmer in the dell, the farmer in the dell, hi-ho the derry-o the farmer in the dell,” we sang at him. Then, as we sang, “The farmer takes a wife, the farmer takes a wife,” the boy who had been transformed into the farmer in the dell chose a girl to stand in the middle of the circle with him. She was thus transformed into the wife. Next we sang, “The wife takes a child, the wife takes a child,” and another of us was chosen. The child took a nurse. The nurse took a cow. The cow took a dog. The dog took a cat. The cat took a rat. And so on. Soon, several children stood within the diminished circle. The group inside might look like a collective, but it was clear that the farmer and his wife and the child were its conceptual center. We ourselves, the players, had been reorganized along the lines of a song, one about a farm, about agriculture. As we played this game, we rehearsed and repeated the social reorganization of our ancestors and the birth of the peculiar and novel family form that we lived in—pair-bonded, presumably monogamous parents and their offspring alone together. We reinforced for ourselves its naturalness, its righteousness, its normativity, every time we recited the words and acted them out. It was child’s play, literally, and it was an education. It is a measure of the power of the plough that every single one of us longed to be chosen, to stand within the warmth of the circle. The boys wanted to be the farmer. The girls wanted to be the farmer’s wife, the child, the pet, even the vermin, because we were all, in some deep sense, farmers’ daughters.

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

  It is abundantly clear, that the human heart is more intensely attracted to one object, in proportion as it is withdrawn from a multiplicity of desires. Therefore, the more a man is delivered from solicitude concerning temporal matters, the more perfectly he will be enabled to love God. Hence St. Augustine says (Lib. 83. Quaest.) that, the hope of gaining, or keeping, material wealth, is the poison of charity; that, as charity increases, cupidity diminishes; and that, when charity becomes perfect, cupidity ceases to exist. Hence, all the counsels which call man to perfection tend to withdraw his affections from temporal objects; so that, his soul is enabled the more freely to turn to God by contemplating Him, loving Him, and fulfilling His will. CHAPTER VII OF THE FIRST MEANS OF PERFECTION, VIZ.: THE RENUNCIATION OF EARTHLY POSSESSIONSTHE first among the material possessions to be renounced are those extrinsic goods that we call riches. Our Lord counselled us to relinquish them when He said, “If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in Heaven; and come, follow me” (Matt. 19:21). The utility of this counsel is evident. First, we have the evidence of a fact. For, when the young man who was inquiring about perfection heard the words of Christ, he went away sad. And “Behold,” says St. Jerome in his commentary on St. Matthew, “the cause of this sadness. He had many possessions, which, like thorns and briars, choked the seed of the Lord’s words.” St. Chrysostom, writing on the same passage, says that, “they who possess but little, and they that abound in riches, do not encounter the same obstacles; for the renunciation of wealth enkindles a more mighty fire and causes avarice to grow greater.” St. Augustine likewise says, in his epistle to Paulinus and Therasia, that, “When earthly things are inordinately loved, those that we already possess fetter us more closely than those that we desire; for why did this young man go away sad, save because he had great possessions? For, it is one thing not to be anxious to acquire the things that we lack, but quite another to be ready to divest ourselves of those that we possess. For the things that are not ours we can repudiate as extrinsic to ourselves, but our own possessions are dear to us as the limbs of our body.”

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

  ORIGEN. (t. xxxii. 19.) But may there not be a deeper meaning in the words, yet a little while &c. After a little while He was not with them. In what sense not with them? Not because He was not with them according to the flesh, in that He was taken from them, was brought before Pilate, was crucified, descended into hell: but because they all forsook Him, fulfilling His prophecy: All ye shall be offended because of Me this night. He was not with them, because He only dwells with those who are worthy of Him. But though they thus wandered from Jesus for a little while, it was only for a little while; they soon sought Him again. Peter wept bitterly after his denial of Jesus, and by his tears sought Him: and therefore it follows, Ye shall seek Me, and as I said unto the Jews, whither I go, ye cannot follow Me now. To seek Jesus, is to seek the Word, wisdom, righteousness, truth, all which is Christ. To His disciples therefore who wish to follow Him, not in a bodily sense, as the ignorant think, but in the way He ordains, Whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after Me, cannot be My disciple. Our Lord saith, Whither I go ye cannot follow Me now. For though they wished to follow the Word, and to confess Him, they were not yet strong enough to do so; The Spirit was not yet given to them, because that Jesus was not yet glorified. (supra c. 7) AUGUSTINE. (Tr. lxiv. 4) Or He means that they were not yet fit to follow Him to death for righteousness’ sake. For how could they, when they were not ripe for martyrdom? Or how could they follow our Lord to immortality, they who were to die, and not to rise again till the end of the world? Or how could they follow Him to the bosom of the Father, when none could partake of that felicity, but they whose love was perfected? When He told the Jews this, He did not add now. But the disciples, though they could not follow Him then, would be able to do so afterwards, and therefore He addsc, So now I say to you. ORIGEN. (t. xxxii. 19.) As if He said, I say it to you, but with the addition of now. The Jews, who He foresaw would die in their sins, would never be able to follow Him; but the disciples were unable only for a little time.

• From Untrue (2018)

  The pre-contact Wyandot and Tahitians were no noble savages, and their lifestyle was not some exemplary Eden. In an ecology that favored hunting and gathering, in a context where women were primary producers, cooperative breeding was in fact efficacious, and being generous—with one’s food, capacity for child-rearing, and sexuality—was in everyone’s individual best interest. Selflessness was, in a sense, selfish as it went the distance to ensure group cohesion, safety, and a degree of security, social and child support, and ease that present-day mothers, isolated in our suburban homes or apartments with bored children, can only dream of. And a lifestyle that anthropologists tell us was characterized by radical egalitarianism and “deliberate social intensity” meant that if men attempted to be violent, coercive, or even unreasonably possessive toward women, others would be there to see and to eventually intervene. A woman in a dense kin network could also always “vote with her feet,” to use anthropologist Sarah Hrdy’s phrase, and simply leave a partner she no longer wanted. In stark contrast, in cultures more intensely agrarian than the Wyandot and their aboriginal predecessors, a woman was likely to leave the support system of her own family to live with an unrelated man—her husband—and his kin. And live in a situation of more or less privacy with him and his kin network. Today, nearly 70 percent of agricultural and post-agricultural societies are patrilocal. Under the watchful eye of these strangers, far from the protections of parents and siblings and aunts and uncles, female sexuality was also reorganized, as women got a clear message: you’d better behave. With the notion of property in place, and in concert with these other shifts, it was a short leap in logic to the belief that women were the property of men, and that having sex with a married woman, or a married woman having sex outside her marriage, was an act of “trespass” against her husband. Isolated from their families of origin and invested alloparents, with higher fertility rates and more dependent children than their non-farming ancestors, women had every reason to conform to these beliefs and to yield to implicit and explicit rules about female propriety. And in contexts where couples broke from larger groups to live on their own, yet another layer of protection was stripped away, rendering women more dependent than ever on the goodwill and support of their male partners. Even worse, much of the time no one with her best interests in mind was there to see. Privacy cloaked male actions, freeing men of supervision and releasing them from direct accountability to a greater social unit.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  There I meditated on those men, of whom I knew nothing but from whom I sprang, and whose race would end with me. In Rome they were enlarging my mausoleum, since Decrianus had cleverly redrawn the plans; they are still at work upon it, even now. The idea for those circular galleries came from Egypt, and likewise the ramps descending to underground chambers; I had conceived of a colossal tomb to be reserved not for myself alone, or for my immediate successors, but as the eventual resting-place of future emperors for centuries to come; princes yet to be born have thus their places already marked in this palace of death. I saw also to the ornamentation of the cenotaph erected on the Field of Mars in memory of Antinous; a barge from Alexandria had discharged its loads of sphinxes and obelisks for this work. A new project long occupied me, and has not ceased to do so, namely, the construction of the Odeon, a model library provided with halls for courses and lectures to serve as a center of Greek culture in Rome. I made it less splendid than the new library at Ephesus, built three or four years before, and gave it less grace and elegance than the library of Athens, but I intend to make this foundation a close second to, if not the equal of, the Museum of Alexandria; its further development will rest with you. In working upon it I often think of the library established by Plotina in Trajan's Forum, with that noble inscription placed by her order over its door: Dispensary to the Soul. The Villa was near enough completion to have my collections transported to it, my musical instruments and the several thousand books purchased here and there in the course of my travels. I gave a series of banquets where everything was assembled with care, both the menu for the repasts and the somewhat restricted list of my guests. My goal was to have all in harmony with the calm beauty of these gardens and these halls, to have fruits as exquisite as the music, and the sequence of courses as perfect as the chasing on the silver plates. For the first time I took an interest in the choice of foods, giving orders that the oysters must come from Lucrinus and the crayfish be taken from the rivers of Gaul. My dislike of the combined pomposity and negligence which too often characterize an emperor's table led me to rule that all viands be shown to me before they were presented to any of my guests, even to the least of them.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Hymie the bullfrog was an ovarian spud generated in the high passage between two shores: for him the skyscrapers had been built, the wilderness cleared, the Indians massacred, the buffaloes exterminated; for him the twin cities had been joined by the Brooklyn Bridge, the caissons sunk, the cables strung from tower to tower; for him men sat upside down in the sky writing words in fire and smoke; for him the anesthetic was invented and the high forceps and the Big Bertha which could destroy what the eye could not see; for him the molecule was broken down and the atom revealed to be without substance; for him each night the stars were swept with telescopes and worlds coming to birth photographed in the act of gestation; for him the barriers of time and space were set at nought and all movement, be it the flight of birds or the revolution of the planets, expounded irrefutably and incontestably by the high priests of the depossessed cosmos. Then, as in the middle of the bridge, in the middle of a walk, in the middle always, whether of a book, a conversation, or making love, it was borne in on me again that I had never done what I wanted and out of not doing what I wanted to do there grew up inside me this creation which was nothing but an obsessional plant, a sort of coral growth, which was expropriating everything, including life itself, until life itself became this which was denied but which constantly asserted itself, making life and killing life at the same time. I could see it going on after death, like hair growing on a corpse, people saying “death” but the hair still testifying to life, and finally no death but this life of hair and nails, the body gone, the spirit quenched, but in the death something still alive, expropriating space, causing time, creating endless movement. Through love this might happen, or sorrow, or being born with a club foot; the cause nothing, the event everything. In the beginning was the Word . . . . Whatever this was, the Word , disease or creation, it was still running rampant; it would run on and on, outstrip time and space, outlast the angels, unseat God, unhook the universe. Any word contained all words—for him who had become detached through love or sorrow or whatever the cause. In every word the current ran back to the beginning which was lost and which would never be found again since there was neither beginning nor end but only that which expressed itself in beginning and end.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But among the ancient poets Antimachus especially won me: I liked his rich but abstruse style, his ample though highly concentrated phrases, like great bronze cups filled with a heavy wine. I preferred his account of Jason's expedition to the more romantic Argonautica by Apollonius: Antimachus understood better the mystery of voyages and horizons, and how ephemeral a shadow man throws on this abiding earth. He had wept passionately over the death of his wife, Lydia, and had given her name to a long poem made up of all manner of legends of grief and mourning. That Lydia, whom perhaps I should have taken no notice of as a living being, became a familiar figure for me, dearer than many a feminine face in my own existence. Such poems, though almost forgotten, were little by little restoring to me my faith in immortality. I revised my own works, the love poems, the occasional pieces, and the ode to the memory of Plotina. One day, perhaps, someone would wish to read all that. A group of obscene verses were matter for hesitation, but I ended, after all, by including them. Our best and most cultivated men write such things. They make a game of it; I should have preferred mine to be more than that, to reflect exactly the naked truth. But there as elsewhere the commonplace entraps us; I was beginning to understand that it takes more than audacity of mind to free us from banality, and that the poet triumphs over routines or imposes his thought upon words by efforts quite as long and persevering as those of my work of emperor. For my part I could aspire only to the rare good luck of the amateur: it would already be considerable if from all this rubble two or three verses were to survive. At about this time, however, I outlined a rather ambitious work, half in prose, half in verse, wherein I intended to include the curious facts observed in the course of my life, together with my meditations and certain dreams, mingling the serious and the ironic; all this would have been bound together by the merest thread, a sort of Satyricon, but harsher. In it I should have set forth a philosophy which had become my own, the Heraclitean idea of change and return. But I have put aside that project as far too vast. In that same year I held several conversations with the priestess who had formerly initiated me at Eleusis (and whose name must remain secret) in order to discuss and establish details of the cult of Antinous, one by one.

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

  But when I upped the ante in my letters to her, they stopped sending me anything at all. The Disney Studio must have had a kind of secret service that monitored Mousketeer Mail for inappropriate sentiments and declarations. When my name went off the mailing list, it probably went onto some other list. But Alice had taught me about coyness. I kept writing Annette and began to imagine a terrible accident in front of her house that would almost but not quite kill me, leaving me dependent on her care and sympathy, which in time would turn to admiration, love . . . As soon as she appeared on the show—Hi, I’m Annette!—Taylor would start moaning and Silver would lick the screen with his tongue. “Come here, baby,” he’d say, “I’ve got six inches of piping hot flesh just for you.” We all said things like that—It was a formality—then we shut up and watched the show. Our absorption was complete. We softened. We surrendered. We joined the club. Taylor forgot himself and sucked his thumb, and Silver and I let him get away with it. We watched the Mousketeers get all excited about wholesome projects and have wimpy adventures and talk about their feelings, and we didn’t laugh at them. We didn’t laugh at them when they said nice things about their parents, or when they were polite to each other, or when they said, “Hey, gang . . .” We watched every minute of it, our eyes glistening in the blue light, and we went on staring at the television after they had sung the anthem and faded away into commercials for toothpaste and candy. Then, blinking and awkward, we would rouse ourselves and talk dirty about Annette. Sometimes, when The Mickey Mouse Club was over, we went up to the roof. Silver’s apartment building overlooked California Avenue. Though the street was busy we chose our targets carefully. Most days we didn’t throw anything at all. But now and then someone would appear who had no chance of getting past us, like the man in the Thunderbird. Thunderbirds had been out for only a year now, since ‘55, and because they were new and there weren’t that many of them they were considered somewhat cooler than Corvettes. It was early evening. The Thunderbird was idling before a red light at the intersection, and from our perch behind the parapet we could hear the song on the radio—“Over the Mountains and across the Seas”—and hear too, just below the music, the full-throated purr of the engine. The black body glistened like obsidian. Blue smoke chugged from the twin exhausts. The top was rolled back. We could see the red leather upholstery and the blond man in the dinner jacket sitting in the driver’s seat. He was young and handsome and fresh. You could almost smell the Listerine on his breath, the Mennen on his cheeks. We were looking right down at him.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  106 Lecture 25: Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone sensitive, poetic, beautiful, and insecure (to the point of neurosis). The cousins have been in love since childhood, but they always misunderstand each other. Dai-yu dies of consumption on the day Bao-yu, having suffered a complete nervous breakdown, is tricked into marrying another cousin: the plump, healthy, and practical Bao-chai. Most of the novel’s story is hung on this love triangle. The story of the novel is, like Monkey, framed by a cosmic story about a stone brought to consciousness to repair the vault of heaven. The stone is later carried to earth by a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest. Ages later another Taoist comes upon the stone, on which is inscribed the story of the novel. Bao-yu (whose name means “Precious Jade”) is the incarnation of that stone. Dai-yu is also from heaven: a heavenly À ower which had been watered by the stone and which has vowed to repay its kindness with a “debt of tears.” Everything that happens in the novel is a story within a story, which throws its events into an ironic light. The frame becomes even more complicated. The story on the stone begins with Zhen Shi-yin, who dreams of a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest carrying a stone, which occurs at about the time that Bao-yu and Dai-yu are passing from heaven into “The Land of Illusion.” Zhen Shi-yin wakes up to treasure his little daughter, who is later kidnapped and reappears in the Jia compound as the concubine of an unattractive man; Zhen Shi-yin, meanwhile, loses everything else that he has. One day a Taoist priest shows up; by now Zhen Shi-yin understands the illusory nature of earthly life and goes off with the priest. The point of the frame is to remind us that everything that happens in the novel happens in “The Land of Illusion.” Bao-yu seems to accept this point at the novel’s end, when he disappears forever arm-in-arm with a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest. The Story of the Stone teaches the lessons of Buddhism and Taoism: detachment from the world and its desires. We have already encountered these lessons in Chuang Tzu, The Tale of Genji, and Monkey. This of¿ cial doctrine and reading, however, is constantly undermined by the attention the novelist gives to the details of everyday life, making the recurrent appearances of the

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

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

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  They sat in the corner of the bar, watching the mayor and all the politicians. And Tommy tried to keep the drunken Legion members from hanging all over him and telling him their war stories. The tall commander, who was now very drunk, came over asking Tommy and him if they wanted a ride back home in the Cadillac. Tommy said they were walking home, and they left the American Legion hall and the drunks in the bar, with Tommy pushing his wheelchair, walking back through the town where they had grown up, past the baseball field at Parkside School where they had played as kids, back to Hamilton Avenue, where they sat together in front of Peter Weber’s house almost all night, still not believing they were together again. I AM WATCHING the young couple walk along the beach. They are walking on the wet sand just where the waves wash up to the shore. The girl is holding his hand and she is laughing. Oh I want so badly to be that guy with her. I want to feel, I want to feel again, I want to walk with a woman, I want to be just like that guy who is walking with her along the beach. Please God, I say, I want it back so bad. I will give anything, anything, just to be inside a woman again. I think of approaching them. It would be so difficult. What could I say? “Excuse me, would you like to pull my chair across the sand? Or maybe you’d like to carry me over your shoulders and I could hold your hand laughing . . .” NO NO NO NO, that’s not right! That’s not fair! I want it back! They have taken it, they have robbed it, my penis will never get hard anymore. I didn’t even have time to learn how to enjoy it and now it is gone, it is dead, it is as numb as the rest of me. I watch the other women now. I see their long slim legs standing pretty. I start to get excited, my mind racing with fantasies, and then the hurt comes. . . . Oh God, I never dreamed that this could possibly happen, that this part of me that had made me feel so good when I was young, that this wonderful thing that no one ever seems to want to talk about . . . has gone, has suddenly disappeared. It has happened so fast, so quickly. What can I do, how can I ever get it back? Everyone says it is such an important thing, but nobody wants to talk about it. The Church says if you play with it, it is a sin. Now I can’t even roll on top of a basketball, I can’t do it in the bathtub or against the tree in the yard. It is over with. Gone. And it is gone for America.