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 Speak, Memory (1966)

  On dark rainy evenings I would load the lamp of my bicycle with magical lumps of calcium carbide, shield a match from the gusty wind and, having imprisoned a white flame in the glass, ride cautiously into the darkness. The circle of light cast by my lamp would pick out the damp, smooth shoulder of the road, between its central system of puddles and the long bordering grasses. Like a tottering ghost, the pale ray would weave across a clay bank at the turn as I began the downhill ride toward the river. Beyond the bridge the road sloped up again to meet the Rozhestveno—Luga highway, and just above that junction a footpath among dripping jasmin bushes ascended a steep escarpment. I had to dismount and push my bicycle. As I reached the top, my livid light flitted across the six-pillared white portico at the back of my uncle’s mute, shuttered manor—as mute and shuttered as it may be today, half a century later. There, in a corner of that arched shelter, from where she had been following the zigzags of my ascending light, Tamara would be waiting, perched on the broad parapet with her back to a pillar. I would put out my lamp and grope my way toward her. One is moved to speak more eloquently about these things, about many other things that one always hopes might survive captivity in the zoo of words—but the ancient limes crowding close to the house drown Mnemosyne’s monologue with their creaking and heaving in the restless night. Their sigh would subside. The rain pipe at one side of the porch, a small busybody of water, could be heard steadily bubbling. At times, some additional rustle, troubling the rhythm of the rain in the leaves, would cause Tamara to turn her head in the direction of an imagined footfall, and then, by a faint luminosity—now rising above the horizon of my memory despite all that rain—I could distinguish the outline of her face; but there was nothing and nobody to fear, and presently she would gently exhale the breath she had held for a moment and her eyes would close again. 2With the coming of winter our reckless romance was transplanted to grim St. Petersburg. We found ourselves horribly deprived of the sylvan security we had grown accustomed to. Hotels disreputable enough to admit us stood beyond the limits of our daring, and the great era of parked amours was still remote. The secrecy that had been so pleasurable in the country now became a burden, yet neither of us could face the notion of chaperoned meetings at her home or mine. Consequently, we were forced to wander a good deal about the town (she, in her little gray-furred coat, I, white-spatted and karakul-collared, with a knuckle-duster in my velvet-lined pocket), and this permanent quest for some kind of refuge produced an odd sense of hopelessness, which, in its turn, foreshadowed other, much later and lonelier, roamings.

• From The Hours (1998)

  I was on a panel in Boston, some awful thing about the future of theater, just a crew of pompous old dinosaurs they’d trucked in to give the graduate students something to jeer at, and afterward I was so blue I rented a car and drove out to Wellfleet. I hardly had any trouble finding it.” “I probably don’t want to know.” “No, it’s still there, and it looks pretty much the same. It’s been gussied up a little. New paint, you know, and somebody put in a lawn, which looks weird out in the woods, like wallto-wall carpet. But it’s still standing.” “What do you know,” Clarissa says. They sit quietly for a moment. It is somehow worse that the house still stands. It is worse that sun and then dark and sun again have entered and left those rooms every day, that rain has continued falling on that roof, that the whole thing could be visited again. Clarissa says, “I should go up there sometime. I’d like to stand on the dune.” “If that’s where you think you want your ashes scattered, yes, you should go back and confirm.” “No, you were right, I was being morbid. Summer brings it out in me. I have no idea where I’d want my ashes scattered.” Clarissa wants, suddenly, to show her whole life to Louis. She wants to tumble it out onto the floor at Louis’s feet, all the vivid, pointless moments that can’t be told as stories. She wants to sit with Louis and sift through it. “So,” she says. “Tell me some more about San Francisco.” “It’s a pretty little city with great restaurants and nothing going on. My students are mostly imbeciles. Really, I’m coming back to New York as soon as I can.” “Good. It’d be good to have you back here.” Clarissa touches Louis’s shoulder, and it seems that they will both rise, without speaking, go upstairs to the bedroom, and undress together. It seems they will go to the bedroom and undress not like lovers but like gladiators who’ve survived the arena, who find themselves bloody and harmed but miraculously alive when all the others have died. They will wince as they unstrap their breastplates and shin guards. They will look at each other with tenderness and reverence; they will gently embrace as New York clatters outside the casement window; as Richard sits in his chair listening to voices and Sally has her lunch uptown with Oliver St. Ives. Louis puts his glass down, lifts it, sets it down again. He taps his foot on the carpet, three times. “It’s a little complicated, though,” he says. “You see, I’ve fallen in love.” “Really?” “His name is Hunter. Hunter Craydon.” “Hunter Craydon. Well.” “He was a student of mine last year,” Louis says. Clarissa leans back, sighs impatiently.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Richard produces a novel that meditates exhaustively on a woman (a fifty-plus-page chapter on shopping for nail polish, which she decides against!) and old Louis W. is relegated to the chorus. Louis W. has one scene, a relatively short one, in which he whines about the paucity of love in the world. That’s what there is; that’s the reward, after more than a dozen years; after living with Richard in six different apartments, holding him, fucking him senseless; after thousands of meals together; after the trip to Italy and that hour under the tree. After all that, Louis appears, and will be remembered, as a sad man complaining about love. “Where are you staying?” Clarissa asks. “With James, at the roach motel.” “He’s still there?” “Some of his groceries are still there. I saw a box of farfalle I remember picking up at the store for him five years ago. He tried to deny that it was the same box, but it has a dent in one corner I remember perfectly.” Louis touches his nose with a fingertip (left side, right side). Clarissa turns to face him. “Look at you,” Clarissa says, and they embrace again. They hold each other for almost a full minute (his lips brush her left shoulder, and he shifts to brush his lips against her right shoulder, too). It is Clarissa who disengages. “Do you want something to drink?” she asks. “No. Yes. A glass of water?” Clarissa goes into the kitchen. How impenetrable she still is, how infuriatingly well behaved. Clarissa has been right here, Louis thinks, all this time. She’s been here in these rooms with her girlfriend (or partner, or whatever they call themselves), going to work and coming home again. She’s been having a day and then another, going to plays, going to parties. There is, he thinks, so little love in the world. Louis takes four steps into the living room. Here he is again, in the big cool room with the garden, the deep sofa, and good rugs. He blames Sally for the apartment. It’s Sally’s influence, Sally’s taste. Sally and Clarissa live in a perfect replica of an upper-class West Village apartment; you imagine somebody’s assistant striding through with a clipboard: French leather armchairs, check; Stickley table, check; linen-colored walls hung with botanical prints, check; bookshelves studded with small treasures acquired abroad, check. Even the eccentricities—the flea-market mirror frame covered in seashells, the scaly old South American chest painted with leering mermaids—feel calculated, as if the art director had looked it all over and said, “It isn’t convincing enough yet, we need more things to tell us who these people really are.” Clarissa returns with two glasses of water (carbonated, with ice and lemon), and at the sight of her Louis smells the air— pine and grass, slightly brackish water—of Wellfleet more than thirty years ago. His heart rises. She is older but—no point in denying it—she still has that rigorous glamour; that slightly butch, aristocratic sexiness.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  If Lenski happened to come tripping downstairs while, with an asthmatic pause every ten steps or so, she was working her way up (for the little hydraulic elevator of our house in St. Petersburg would constantly, and rather insultingly, refuse to function), Mademoiselle maintained that he had viciously bumped into her, pushed her, knocked her down, and we already could see him trampling her prostrate body. More and more frequently she would leave the table, and the dessert she would have missed was diplomatically sent up in her wake. From her remote room she would write a sixteen-page letter to my mother, who, upon hurrying upstairs, would find her dramatically packing her trunk. And then, one day, she was allowed to go on with her packing. 7She returned to Switzerland. World War One came, then the Revolution. In the early twenties, long after our correspondence had fizzled out, by a fluke move of life in exile I chanced to visit Lausanne with a college friend of mine, so I thought I might as well look up Mademoiselle, if she were still alive. She was. Stouter than ever, quite gray and almost totally deaf, she welcomed me with a tumultuous outburst of affection. Instead of the Château de Chillon picture, there was now one of a garish troika. She spoke as warmly of her life in Russia as if it were her own lost homeland. Indeed, I found in the neighborhood quite a colony of such old Swiss governesses. Huddled together in a constant seething of competitive reminiscences, they formed a small island in an environment that had grown alien to them. Mademoiselle’s bosom friend was now mummy-like Mlle Golay, my mother’s former governess, still prim and pessimistic at eighty-five; she had remained in our family long after my mother had married, and her return to Switzerland had preceded only by a couple of years that of Mademoiselle, with whom she had not been on speaking terms when both had been living under our roof. One is always at home in one’s past, which partly explains those pathetic ladies’ posthumous love for a remote and, to be perfectly frank, rather appalling country, which they never had really known and in which none of them had been very content.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Very lovely, very lonesome. But what am I doing in this stereoscopic dreamland? How did I get here? Somehow, the two sleighs have slipped away, leaving behind a passportless spy standing on the blue-white road in his New England snowboots and stormcoat. The vibration in my ears is no longer their receding bells, but only my old blood singing. All is still, spellbound, enthralled by the moon, fancy’s rear-vision mirror. The snow is real, though, and as I bend to it and scoop up a handful, sixty years crumble to glittering frost-dust between my fingers. 2A large, alabaster-based kerosene lamp is steered into the gloaming. Gently it floats and comes down; the hand of memory, now in a footman’s white glove, places it in the center of a round table. The flame is nicely adjusted, and a rosy, silk-flounced lamp shade, with inset glimpses of rococo winter sports, crowns the readjusted (cotton wool in Casimir’s ear) light. Revealed: a warm, bright, stylish (“Russian Empire”) drawing room in a snow-muffled house—soon to be termed le château—built by my mother’s grandfather, who, being afraid of fires, had the staircase fashioned of iron, so that when the house did get burned to the ground, sometime after the Soviet Revolution, those fine-wrought steps, with the sky shining through their openwork risers, remained standing, all alone but still leading up. Some more about that drawing room, please. The gleaming white moldings of the furniture, the embroidered roses of its upholstery. The white piano. The oval mirror. Hanging on taut cords, its pure brow inclined, it strives to retain the falling furniture and a slope of bright floor that keep slipping from its embrace. The chandelier pendants. These emit a delicate tinkling (things are being moved in the upstairs room where Mademoiselle will dwell). Colored pencils. Their detailed spectrum advertised on the box but never completely represented by those inside. We are sitting at a round table, my brother and I and Miss Robinson, who now and then looks at her watch: roads must be dreadful with all that snow; and anyway many professional hardships lie in wait for the vague French person who will replace her.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Sally lets Walter speak to the handsome young clerk with the slicked-back hair. She wanders meditatively among the shirts, looks at the tag on a cream-colored shirt with motherof-pearl buttons. It costs four hundred dollars. Is it pathetic, she wonders, or heroic to buy a fabulous, hideously expensive new shirt for your tentatively recovering lover. Is it both? Sally herself has never developed the knack for buying gifts for Clarissa. Even after all these years, she can’t be sure what Clarissa will like. There have been successes—the chocolate-colored cashmere scarf last Christmas, the antique lacquered box in which she keeps her letters—but there have been at least as many failures. There was the extravagant watch from Tiffany’s (too formal, it seems), the yellow sweater (was it the color or the neck?), the black leather handbag ( just wrong, impossible to say why). Clarissa refuses to admit it when a gift doesn’t please her, despite Sally’s exhortations. Every present, according to Clarissa, is perfect, exactly what she’d hoped for, and all the hapless giver can do is wait and see whether the watch will be deemed “too good for everyday,” or the sweater be worn once, to an obscure party, and never appear again. Sally begins to be angry with Clarissa, Walter Hardy, and Oliver St. Ives; with every optimistic, dishonest living being; but then she glances over at Walter in the process of buying his lover’s brilliant blue shirt, and is filled instead with longing. Clarissa is probably at home right now. Sally suddenly, urgently wants to get home. She says to Walter, “I’ve got to go. It’s later than I thought.” “I won’t be long,” Walter says. “I’m off. See you later.” “You like the shirt?” Sally fingers the fabric, which is supple and minutely grained, vaguely fleshly. “I love it,” she says. “It’s a wonderful shirt.” The clerk smiles gratefully, shyly, as if he were personally responsible for the shirt’s beauty. He is not aloof or condescending, as you might expect of a handsome boy working in a store like this. Where do they come from, these impeccable beauties who work as salesclerks? For what do they hope? “Yes,” Walter says. “It’s a great shirt, isn’t it?” “Goodbye.” “Hey. See you later.”

• From The Hours (1998)

  Clarissa rubs Louis’s back with the flat of her hand. What had Sally said? We never fight. It was at dinner somewhere, a year ago or longer. There had been some kind of fish, thick medallions in a puddle of bright yellow sauce (it seemed everything, just then, sat in a puddle of brightly colored sauce). We never fight. It’s true. They bicker, they sulk, but they never explode, never shout or weep, never break a dish. It has always seemed that they haven’t fought yet; that they’re still too new for all-out war; that whole unexplored continents lie ahead once they’ve worked their way through their initial negotiations and feel sufficiently certain in each other’s company to really let loose. What could she have been thinking? She and Sally will soon celebrate their eighteenth anniversary together. They are a couple that never fight. As she rubs Louis’s back, Clarissa thinks, Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am. “I’m sorry,” Louis says. “It’s all right. For god’s sake, look at all that’s happened.” “I feel like such an asshole.” He stands and walks to the French doors (seven steps). Through his tears he can see the moss in the low stone troughs, the bronze platter of clear water on which floats a single white feather. He can’t tell why he’s crying. He’s back in New York. He seems to be crying over this odd garden, Richard’s illness (why was Louis spared?), this room with Clarissa in it, everything. He seems to be crying over a Hunter who only resembles the actual one. This other Hunter has a fierce and tragic grandeur, true intelligence, a modest turn of mind. Louis weeps for him. Clarissa follows. “It’s all right,” she says again. “Stupid,” Louis murmurs. “Stupid.” A key turns in the front door. “It’s Julia,” Clarissa says. “Shit.” “Don’t worry. She’s seen men cry.” It’s her goddamn daughter. Louis straightens his shoulders, steps sideways from under Clarissa’s arm. He continues looking out at the garden, trying to bring his face under control. He thinks about moss. He thinks about fountains. He is suddenly, genuinely interested in moss and fountains. How strange, the voice says. Why is he thinking about things like that? “Hello,” says Julia, behind him. Not “hi.” She has always been a grave little girl, smart but peculiar, oversized, full of quirks and tics. “Hi, honey,” Clarissa says. “Do you remember Louis?” Louis turns to face her. Fine, let her see that he’s been crying. Fuck it. “Of course I do,” Julia says. She walks toward him, extending her hand.

• From The Hours (1998)

  If she were able to speak she would say something—she can’t tell what, exactly—about how he has had the courage to create, and how, perhaps more important, he has had the courage to love singularly, over the decades, against all reason. She would talk to him about how she herself, Clarissa, loved him in return, loved him enormously, but left him on a street corner over thirty years ago (and, really, what else could she have done?). She would confess to her desire for a relatively ordinary life (neither more nor less than what most people desire), and to how much she wanted him to come to her party and exhibit his devotion in front of her guests. She would ask his forgiveness for shying away, on what would prove to be the day of his death, from kissing him on the lips, and for telling herself she did so only for the sake of his health. Mrs. Woolf She tries to concentrate on the book in her lap. Soon she and Leonard will leave Hogarth House and move to London. It has been decided. Virginia has won. She struggles to concentrate. The beef scraps have been scraped away, the table swept, the dishes washed. She will go to the theater and concert halls. She will go to parties. She will haunt the streets, see everything, fill herself up with stories. ... life; London ... She will write and write. She will finish this book, then write another. She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts. She thinks, suddenly, of Vanessa’s kiss. The kiss was innocent—innocent enough—but it was also full of something not unlike what Virginia wants from London, from life; it was full of a love complex and ravenous, ancient, neither this nor that. It will serve as this afternoon’s manifestation of the central mystery itself, the elusive brightness that shines from the edges of certain dreams; the brightness which, when we awaken, is already fading from our minds, and which we rise in the hope of finding, perhaps today, this new day in which anything might happen, anything at all. She, Virginia, has kissed her sister, not quite innocently, behind Nelly’s broad, moody back, and now she is in a room with a book on her lap. She is a woman who will move to London. Clarissa Dalloway will have loved a woman, yes; another woman, when she was young. She and the woman will have had a kiss, one kiss, like the singular enchanted kisses in fairy tales, and Clarissa will carry the memory of that kiss, the soaring hope of it, all her life.

• From The Hours (1998)

  She rides the subway downtown, stops at the flower stand attached to the Korean market on the corner. It’s the usual array, carnations and mums, a scattering of gaunt lilies, freesia, daisies, bunches of hothouse tulips in white, yellow, and red, their petals going leathery at the tips. Zombie flowers, she thinks; just product, forced into being like chickens whose feet never touch ground from egg to slaughter. Sally stands frowning before the flowers on their graduated wooden platforms, sees herself and the flowers reflected in the mirror tiles at the back of the cooler (there she is, gray-haired, sharp-faced, sallow [how did she grow so old?], she’s got to get more sun, really), and thinks there is nothing in the world she wants for herself or Clarissa, not four-hundred-dollar shirts, not these pitiful flowers, not anything. She is about to leave empty-handed when she notices a single bouquet of yellow roses in a brown rubber bucket in the corner. They are just beginning to open. Their petals, at the base, are suffused with a deeper yellow, almost orange, a mango-colored blush that spreads upward and diffuses itself in hairline veins. They so convincingly resemble real flowers, grown from earth in a garden, that they seem to have gotten into the cooler by mistake. Sally buys them quickly, almost furtively, as if she fears the Korean woman who runs the stand will realize there’s been a mix-up and inform her, gravely, that these roses are not for sale. She walks along Tenth Street with the roses in her hand, feeling exultant, and when she enters the apartment she is slightly aroused. How long has it been since they’ve had sex? “Hey,” she calls. “Are you home?” “In here,” Clarissa answers, and Sally can tell from her voice that something’s wrong. Is she about to walk into one of those little ambushes that pepper their life together? Has she stepped, with her bouquet and her nascent desire, into a scene of domestic peevishness, the world gone gray and morbid because she has once again revealed her selfishness and left something undone, failed to clean something, forgotten some important call? Her joy fades; her lust evaporates. She walks into the living room with the roses. “What’s up?” she says to Clarissa, who is sitting on the sofa, just sitting there, as if she were in a doctor’s waiting room. She looks at Sally with a peculiar expression, more disoriented than stricken, as if she is not quite sure who she is, and Sally briefly experiences an intimation of the decline to come. If they both survive long enough, if they stay together (and how, after all this, could they part?), they will watch each other fade. “Nothing,” she says. “Are you all right?” “Hm? Oh, yes. I don’t know. Louis is in town. He’s come back.” “Bound to happen eventually.” “He stopped by, just rang the buzzer. We talked for a while, and then he started crying.” “Really?”

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  size does n't want to understand me, and is what he writes so poetically about the 'promise' simply not the case, and I beg you so urgently to make it plausible to him without further ado that I am now a thousand times less than six weeks ago able to say yes to him for life and that he should finally leave me in peace, he 's making himself look ridiculous . I can tell you, the best father, that I am otherwise bound to someone who loves me and whom I love, that it cannot be said at all. O papa! I could fill many pages about that, I'm talking about Herr Morten Schwarzkopf, who wants to become a doctor and, as soon as he's a doctor, wants to ask for my hand. I know it's customary to marry a merchant, but Morten belongs to the other group of distinguished gentlemen, the scholars. He's not rich, which is probably important for you and Mama, but I have to tell you that, dear Papa, young as I am, life must have taught some that wealth alone doesn't always make everyone happy. I remain with a thousand kisses Your obedient daughter Antonie . hp The ring is low gold and quite narrow, I see.' 'My dear Tony! Your letter got me right. Regarding his salary, I will inform you that, as was my duty, I did not fail to pay Mr Gr. to teach about your view of things in a fitting manner; however, the result was such that it genuinely shook me. You are a grown-up girl and find yourself in such a serious situation that I cannot hesitate to point out the consequences that a careless step on your part can have. Mr. Gr. for at my words he broke into despair, exclaiming that he loved you so much and could so little bear your loss that he was willing to take his own life if you persisted in your decision. Since I cannot take seriously what you write to me about another inclination, I ask you Mastering your excitement about the ring that was sent to you and seriously considering everything again. In my Christian conviction, dear daughter, it is a man's duty to respect the feelings of another, and we do not know whether you would not some day be held liable by a supreme judge for the fact that the man whose feelings you are stubborn and cold spurned, sinned against his own life. But I would like to remind you of one thing that I have often said to you orally, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to repeat it to you in writing.

• From The Hours (1998)

  She thinks suddenly of how frail men are; how full of terror. She thinks of Quentin, going into the house to wash the thrush’s death off his hands. It seems, at that moment, that she straddles an invisible line, one foot on this side, the other on that. On this side is stern, worried Leonard, the row of closed shops, the dark rise that leads back to Hogarth House, where Nelly waits impatiently, almost gleefully, for her chance at further grievances. On the other side is the train. On the other side is London, and all London implies about freedom, about kisses, about the possibilities of art and the sly dark glitter of madness. Mrs. Dalloway, she thinks, is a house on a hill where a party is about to begin; death is the city below, which Mrs. Dalloway loves and fears and which she wants, in some way, to walk into so deeply she will never find her way back again. Virginia says, “It’s time for us to move back to London. Don’t you think?” “I’m not at all sure,” he answers. “I’ve been better for a long while now. We can’t haunt the suburbs forever, can we?” “Let’s discuss it over dinner, shall we?” “All right, then.” “Do you want so much to live in London?” he asks. “I do,” she says. “I wish it were otherwise. I wish I were happy with the quiet life.” “As do I.” “Come along,” she says. She keeps the ticket in her bag. She will never mention to Leonard that she’d planned on fleeing, even for a few hours. As if he were the one in need of care and comfort—as if he were the one in danger—Virginia links her arm in his, and gives his elbow an affectionate squeeze. They start up the hill to Hogarth House, arm in arm, like any middle-aged couple going home. Mrs. Dalloway “More coffee?” Oliver says to Sally. “Thanks.” Sally hands her coffee cup to Oliver’s assistant, a surprisingly plain young man, white-blond, hollow-cheeked, who, although presented as an assistant, seems to be in charge of pouring coffee. Sally had expected an impeccable young stud, all jaw and biceps. This weedy, eager boy would look right at home behind the perfume counter in a department store. “So what do you think?” Oliver says. Sally watches her coffee being poured, to avoid looking at Oliver. When the cup has been set in front of her she glances at Walter Hardy, who betrays nothing. Walter has a talent, remarkable in its way, for looking utterly attentive and entirely blank, like a lizard that has crawled onto a sunny rock. “Interesting,” Sally says. “Yes,” Oliver answers. Sally nods judiciously, sips her coffee. “I wonder,” she says, “if it could actually get made.” “I think it’s time,” Oliver answers. “I think people are ready.” “Do you, really?”

• From Every Woman's Battle: Discovering God's Plan for Sexual and Emotional Fulfillment (2003)

  What began as an engagement relationship between God and His own in the Garden of Eden will finally be consummated at the wedding supper of the Lamb when Jesus Christ returns to claim His bride (the church). In the last line of this scripture, the angel said specifically to add that these are God’s “true words,” as if the angel somehow knew that this type of bridal relationship with the Almighty would be difficult for us to fathom. But His bridegroom love for us is very real. So how do we cultivate a bridal love for Jesus and enjoy this intimate relationship that He longs to have with us? By falling in love with Him and attempting to pursue Him as passionately as He has been pursuing us all along. FALLING HEAD OVER HEELS IN LOVE Christie, in her early twenties, began to hunger for a deeper, more meaningful time of fellowship with God. After praying for insight on how to satisfy this hunger, she decided to set one night apart each week to “date” Jesus. As bizarre as that may sound to you, Christie so looks forward to separating herself from work, school, and other friends to enjoy her Friday nights alone with Jesus. Christie explains: Sometimes I go to a park for a picnic and prayer night. Sometimes I read my Bible and write letters from God in my journal, including all the wisdom, correction, encouragement, and affirmation I sense Him giving to me. Sometimes I go to Barnes & Noble to drink coffee with the Lord and to read whatever book from the Christian Living section He guides me to. Sometimes I cook a wonderful meal and set the table for two, talking to God as if He is actually sitting there at my table with me because I know that He is. Sometimes I sense His love so strongly that I feel giddy! One night I even set the table for four and invited God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit to dine with me. I felt so overjoyed and affirmed by their presence. It felt like we were having a heavenly party! If my roommate walked in during one of these dinner parties, she would probably think of having me committed to a mental institution! I guess I would tell her I’m already committed—to God! I love my precious time with the Lord, and if I skip a single week, I miss Him and I know He misses me! WALKING AND TALKING WITH JESUS

• From The Hours (1998)

  These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody’s little display of genius. She refuses to stop enjoying Walter Hardy’s shameless shallowness, even if it drives Sally to distraction and has actually inspired Richard to wonder out loud if she, Clarissa, isn’t more than a little vain and foolish herself. “Good,” Clarissa says. “You know where we live, right? Five o’clock.” “Five o’clock.” “It needs to be early. The ceremony’s at eight, we’re having the party before instead of after. Richard can’t manage late nights.” “Right. Five o’clock. See you then.” Walter squeezes Clarissa’s hand and walks on with a swaggering two-step, a demonstration of hefty vitality. It’s a cruel joke, of a sort, inviting Walter to Richard’s party, but Walter, after all, is alive, just as Clarissa is, on a morning in June, and he’ll feel horribly snubbed if he finds out (and he seems to find everything out) Clarissa spoke to him the day of the party and deliberately failed to mention it. Wind worries the leaves, showing the brighter, grayer green of their undersides, and Clarissa wishes, suddenly and with surprising urgency, that Richard were here beside her, right now—not Richard as he’s become but the Richard of ten years ago; Richard the fearless, ceaseless talker; Richard the gadfly. She wants the argument that she and Richard would have had about Walter. Before Richard’s decline, Clarissa always fought with him. Richard actually worried over questions of good and evil, and he never, not in twenty years, fully abandoned the notion that Clarissa’s decision to live with Sally represents, if not some workaday manifestation of deep corruption, at least a weakness on her part that indicts (though Richard would never admit this) women in general, since he seems to have decided early on that Clarissa stands not only for herself but for the gifts and frailties of her entire sex. Richard has always been Clarissa’s most rigorous, infuriating companion, her best friend, and if Richard were still himself, untouched by illness, they could be together right now, arguing about Walter Hardy and the quest for eternal youth, about how gay men have taken to imitating the boys who tortured them in high school. The old Richard would be capable of talking for half an hour or more about the various possible interpretations of the inept copy of Botticelli’s Venus being drawn by a young black man with chalk on the concrete, and if that Richard had noticed the windblown plastic bag that billowed against the white sky, rippling like a jellyfish, he’d have carried on about chemicals and endless profits, the hand that takes.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Not all people were meant to be lovers, and they were not naı¨ve enough to try and force it beyond one stoned failure in the bed Louis would share, for the rest of the summer, only with Richard, on the nights Richard was not with Clarissa. How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she’d tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richard’s kiss on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with the rose-shaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something . . . larger and stranger than what they’ve got? It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself. Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That’s who I was. That’s who I am—a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you’ve made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port. Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it’s as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at a pond’s edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened into hers; his tongue (exciting and utterly familiar, she’d never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met it with her own. They’d kissed, and walked around the pond together. In another hour they’d have dinner, and considerable quantities of wine. Clarissa’s copy of The Golden Notebook lay on the chipped white nightstand of the attic bedroom where she still slept alone; where Richard had not yet begun to spend alternate nights. It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers; and even the sex, once she and Richard reached that point, was ardent but awkward, unsatisfying, more kindly than passionate.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  and Tony suddenly thought he was at one with Morten in a great, vague, foreboding and longing understanding of what "freedom" meant. Ninth Chapter 'It's strange that you can't get bored at the sea, Morten. Just lie on your back somewhere else for three or four hours without doing anything, without even thinking about it..." 'Yes, yes ... By the way, I must confess I used to be bored sometimes, Miss Tony; but that was a few weeks ago..." Autumn came, the first strong wind had blown up. Gray, thin and ragged clouds fluttered hastily across the sky. The murky, choppy sea was covered with foam far and wide. Great, mighty waves rushed in with an implacable and terrifying calm, bowed majestically in a dark green, metal-shined curve, and tumbled noisily over the sand. The season was completely over. The part of the beach that was otherwise populated by the crowd of bathers and where the pavilions had already been partially demolished lay almost deserted with a few basket chairs. But Tony and Morten camped in a distant area that afternoon: where the yellow clay walls began and where the waves threw their spray up at the »Gull Stone«. Morten had piled up a heap of sand for her: she was leaning against it with her back, her feet crossed in cruciform shoes and white stockings, in her soft gray autumn jacket with big buttons; Morten, facing her, lay on his side with his chin on his hand. Now and then a gull darted across the sea and uttered its bird of prey cry. They looked at the green, seaweed-streaked walls of the waves, Finally Morten made a movement as if waking himself up and asked: "Well, will you be leaving soon, Miss Tony?" 'No… why?' Tony said absently and without understanding. 'Yes, my God, it's the tenth of September... my holidays are almost over anyway... how long can it be! Are you looking forward to the company in town…? Tell me: they must be lovable gentlemen you are dancing with... No, I didn't want to ask that either! Now you must answer me one thing,' he said, adjusting his chin in his hand with sudden determination and looking at her. 'It's the question I've been saving for so long...you know? So! Who is Herr Grünlich?” Tony jumped and met his face quickly, then let her eyes dart around like someone being reminded of a distant dream. The feeling that she had experienced in the time after Herr Grünlich's courtship came to life in her: the feeling of personal importance. " You want to know that, Morten?" she asked seriously. 'Well then, I'll tell you. It was extremely embarrassing for me, you understand, that Thomas mentioned the name on the first afternoon; but since you've heard him once ... enough: Herr Grünlich, Bendix Grünlich, this is a business friend of my father's, a well-to-do businessman from Hamburg, who asked for my hand in the city ...

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  The “sate,” let us concede, gives duration and body to the kiss which the captain so comfortably “had,” but I could not help feeling, even at the age of eleven, that centaurian love-making was not without its special limitations. Moreover, Yuri and I both knew a boy who had tried it, but the girl’s horse had pushed his into a ditch. Exhausted by our adventures in the chaparral, we lay on the grass and discussed women. Our innocence seems to me now almost monstrous, in the light of various “sexual confessions” (to be found in Havelock Ellis and elsewhere), which involve tiny tots mating like mad. The slums of sex were unknown to us. Had we ever happened to hear about two normal lads idiotically masturbating in each other’s presence (as described so sympathetically, with all the smells, in modern American novels), the mere notion of such an act would have seemed to us as comic and impossible as sleeping with an amelus. Our ideal was Queen Guinevere, Isolda, a not quite merciless belle dame, another man’s wife, proud and docile, fashionable and fast, with slim ankles and narrow hands. The little girls in neat socks and pumps whom we and other little boys used to meet at dancing lessons or at Christmas Tree parties had all the enchantments, all the sweets and stars of the tree preserved in their flame-dotted iris, and they teased us, they glanced back, they delightfully participated in our vaguely festive dreams, but they belonged, those nymphets, to another class of creatures than the adolescent belles and largehatted vamps for whom we actually yearned. After having made me sign an oath of secrecy with blood, Yuri told me about the married lady in Warsaw with whom at twelve or thirteen he was secretly in love and whom a couple of years later he made love to. By comparison it would have sounded jejune, I feared, to tell him about my seaside playmates, but I cannot recall what substitute I invented to match his romance. Around that time, though, a real romantic adventure did come my way. I am now going to do something quite difficult, a kind of double somersault with a Welsh waggle (old acrobats will know what I mean), and I want complete silence, please.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Suppose a preacher in the pulpit, a professor at his desk, to stick still in the midst of his discourse; or let a composer (as is sometimes purposely done) make all his instruments stop at once; we await every instant the resumption of the performance, and, in this awaiting, perceive, more than in any other possible way, the empty time. To change the example, let, in a piece of polyphonic music—a figure, for instance, in which a tangle of melodies are under way—suddenly a single voice be heard, which sustains a long note, while all else is hushed. . . . This one note will appear very protracted—why? Because we expect to hear accompanying it the notes of the other instruments, but they fail to come." (Herbart: Psychol. als W., §115.)—Compare also Münsterberg, Beiträge, Heft 2, p. 41. [542] A night of pain will seem terribly long; we keep looking forward to a moment which never comes—the moment when it shall cease. But the odiousness of this experience is not named ennui or Langweile, like the odiousness of time that seems long from its emptiness. The more positive odiousness of the pain, rather, is what tinges our memory of the night. What we feel, as Prof. Lazarus says (op cit. p. 202), is the long time of the suffering, not the suffering of the long time per se. [543] On these variations of time-estimate, cf. Romanes, Consciousness of Time. in Mind, vol. III. p. 297; J. Sully, Illusions, pp. 245-261, 302-305; W. Wundt, Physiol. Psych., II. 287, 288; besides the essays quoted from Lazarus and Janet. In German, the successors of Herbart have treated of this subject: compare Volkmann's Lehrbuch d. Psych., § 89, and for references to other authors his note 3 to this section. Lindner (Lbh. d. empir. Psych.), as a parallel effect, instances Alexander the Great's life (thirty-three years), which seems to us as if it must be long, because it was so eventful. Similarly the English Commonwealth, etc. [544] Physiol Optik, p. 445. [545] Succession, time per se, is no force. Our talk about its devouring tooth, etc., is all elliptical. Its contents are what devour. The law of inertia is incompatible with time's being assumed as an efficient cause of anything. [546] Lehrbuch d. Psych., § 87. Compare also H. Lotze, Metaphysik, § 154. [547] The cause of the perceiving, not the object perceived. [548] "'No more' and 'not yet' are the proper time-feelings, and we are aware of time in no other way than through these feelings," says Volkmann (Psychol., § 87). This, which is not strictly true of our feeling of time per se, as an elementary bit of duration, is true of our feeling of date in its events. [549] We construct the miles just as we construct the years.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  But the difference is that a big thing was being made then and everyone was pushing and tormenting me, and that now everyone is keeping very quiet and taking it for granted that I say yes; because you must know, Ida, this engagement to Alois - I'll say Alois, because after all it's supposed to be - isn't anything festive or joyful, and it's really not about my happiness at all, it's about being able to have this second marriage, I will only make amends for my first marriage calmly and as a matter of course, because that is my duty to our name. That's what Mother thinks, and that's what Tom thinks..." "Oh, Tonychen! if you don't want him, and if he won't make you happy..." »Ida, I know life and I'm not a goose anymore and I have my eyes in my head. Mother…that may be, she wouldn't be too keen on it, because she glosses over questionable things and says Assez . But Tom, he wants it. You teach me Tom! Do you know how Tom thinks? He thinks, 'Everyone! Anyone who is not absolutely unworthy. Because this time it's not a question of a brilliant match, it's just a question of making up for the blemish from back then with a second marriage.' That's what he thinks. And as soon as Permaneder arrived Tom quietly made business inquiries about him, be sure of that, and when they said it was pretty cheap and safe then it was a done deal with him... Tom is a politician and knows what he wants. Who threw Christian out?... It's a harsh word, Ida, but that's the way it is. And why? Because he compromised the company and the family, and in his eyes I do the same, Ida, not with deeds and words, but with my very existence as a divorced woman. That wants he should stop, and he's right about that, and by God I don't love him any less for that, and I also hope that it's mutual. After all, all these years I've always longed to step out into life again, because I'm bored with Mother, God punish me if that's a sin, but I'm barely thirty and I feel young. It's different in life, Ida; you had gray hair by the time you were thirty, it runs in your family, and your uncle Prahl, who died of hiccups..." She pondered several more things that night, saying again and again: "After all, that's the way it's supposed to be," and then slept gently and deeply for five hours. Sixth Chapter Haze lay over the city, but Herr Longuet, the owner of a hired carriage on Johannisstrasse, who at eight o'clock personally drove up a covered company car on Mengstrasse that was open on all sides, said: "In a little hour the sun will be over." , so you could rest easy.

• From The Hours (1998)

  “Right. Five o’clock. See you then.” Walter squeezes Clarissa’s hand and walks on with a swaggering two-step, a demonstration of hefty vitality. It’s a cruel joke, of a sort, inviting Walter to Richard’s party, but Walter, after all, is alive, just as Clarissa is, on a morning in June, and he’ll feel horribly snubbed if he finds out (and he seems to find everything out) Clarissa spoke to him the day of the party and deliberately failed to mention it. Wind worries the leaves, showing the brighter, grayer green of their undersides, and Clarissa wishes, suddenly and with surprising urgency, that Richard were here beside her, right now—not Richard as he’s become but the Richard of ten years ago; Richard the fearless, ceaseless talker; Richard the gadfly. She wants the argument that she and Richard would have had about Walter. Before Richard’s decline, Clarissa always fought with him. Richard actually worried over questions of good and evil, and he never, not in twenty years, fully abandoned the notion that Clarissa’s decision to live with Sally represents, if not some workaday manifestation of deep corruption, at least a weakness on her part that indicts (though Richard would never admit this) women in general, since he seems to have decided early on that Clarissa stands not only for herself but for the gifts and frailties of her entire sex. Richard has always been Clarissa’s most rigorous, infuriating companion, her best friend, and if Richard were still himself, untouched by illness, they could be together right now, arguing about Walter Hardy and the quest for eternal youth, about how gay men have taken to imitating the boys who tortured them in high school. The old Richard would be capable of talking for half an hour or more about the various possible interpretations of the inept copy of Botticelli’s Venus being drawn by a young black man with chalk on the concrete, and if that Richard had noticed the windblown plastic bag that billowed against the white sky, rippling like a jellyfish, he’d have carried on about chemicals and endless profits, the hand that takes. He’d have wanted to talk about how the bag (say it had contained potato chips and overripe bananas; say it had been thoughtlessly discarded by a harassed, indigent mother as she left a store amid her gaggle of quarreling children) will blow into the Hudson and float all the way to the ocean, where eventually a sea turtle, a creature that could live a hundred years, will mistake it for a jellyfish, eat the bag, and die. It wouldn’t have been impossible for Richard to segue, somehow, from that subject directly to Sally; to inquire after her health and happiness with pointed formality. He had a habit of asking about Sally after one of his tirades, as if Sally were some sort of utterly banal safe haven; as if Sally herself (Sally the stoic, the tortured, the subtly wise) were harmless and insipid in the way of a house on a quiet street or a good, solid, reliable car. Richard will neither admit to nor recover from his dislike of her, never; he will never discard his private conviction that Clarissa has, at heart, become a society wife, and never mind the fact that she and Sally do not attempt to disguise their love for anyone’s sake, or that Sally is a devoted, intelligent woman, a producer of public television, for heaven’s sake—how much more hardworking and socially responsible, how much more dramatically underpaid, does she need to be? Never mind the good, flagrantly unprofitable books Clarissa insists on publishing alongside the pulpier items that pay her way. Never mind her politics, all her work with PWAs.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Clarissa Dalloway will have loved a woman, yes; another woman, when she was young. She and the woman will have had a kiss, one kiss, like the singular enchanted kisses in fairy tales, and Clarissa will carry the memory of that kiss, the soaring hope of it, all her life. She will never find a love like that which the lone kiss seemed to offer. Virginia, excited, rises from her chair and puts her book on the table. Leonard asks from his own chair, “Are you going to bed?” “No. It’s early, isn’t it?” He scowls at his watch. “It’s nearly half past ten,” he says. “I’m just restless. I’m not tired yet.” “I’d like you to go to bed at eleven,” he says. She nods. She will remain on good behavior, now that London’s been decided on. She leaves the parlor, crosses the foyer, and enters the darkened dining room. Long rectangles of moonlight mixed with street light fall through the window onto the tabletop, are swept away by windblown branches, reappear, and are swept away again. Virginia stands in the doorway, watching the shifting patterns as she would watch waves break on a beach. Yes, Clarissa will have loved a woman. Clarissa will have kissed a woman, only once. Clarissa will be bereaved, deeply lonely, but she will not die. She will be too much in love with life, with London. Virginia imagines someone else, yes, someone strong of body but frail-minded; someone with a touch of genius, of poetry, ground under by the wheels of the world, by war and government, by doctors; a someone who is, technically speaking, insane, because that person sees meaning everywhere, knows that trees are sentient beings and sparrows sing in Greek. Yes, someone like that. Clarissa, sane Clarissa—exultant, ordinary Clarissa—will go on, loving London, loving her life of ordinary pleasures, and someone else, a deranged poet, a visionary, will be the one to die. Mrs. Brown She finishes brushing her teeth. The dishes have been washed and put away, Richie is in bed, her husband is waiting. She rinses the brush under the tap, rinses her mouth, spits into the sink. Her husband will be on his side of the bed, looking up at the ceiling with his hands clasped behind his head. When she enters the room he will look at her as if he is surprised and happy to see her here, his wife, of all people, about to remove her robe, drape it over the chair, and climb into bed with him. That is his way—boyish surprise; a suave, slightly abashed glee; a deep and distracted innocence with sex coiled inside like a spring. She thinks sometimes, can’t help thinking, of those cans of peanuts sold in novelty shops, the ones with the paper snakes waiting to pop out when the lids are opened. There will be no reading tonight. She slips her toothbrush back into its slot in the porcelain holder.