Longing

Passages

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

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• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  When I finally got a chance at the bench I realised I felt strangely weary, and going in a rotation with three other guys I slightly knew, cut my ration each time from ten to eight lifts. After a couple of turns I saw that Bill was watching me. ‘I only made that eight, Will,’ he said, with a worried look. ‘Hi, Bill. Yes, I’m doing them in eights now.’ I watched him thinking and deciding not to censure what he obviously saw as an absurd infringement of tradition. ‘Well, everything going okay, Will? Too many people here, I think. Too many people. It’s getting ridiculous. Never used to be like this.’ I agreed that it was inconvenient, and suggested that the club was hungry for the money more membership must bring. ‘Very true, Will. But the interests of the members there are already have to be considered. It’s supposed to be democratically run, you know, this place.’ He looked around mournfully. ‘Seen young Phil lately?’ he asked with slight bashfulness. I hadn’t seen him here the previous evening, and I was left uncertain if it had been him in the cinema. ‘I haven’t, actually. Has he been neglecting his training?’ ‘He may have been coming in earlier,’ Bill assured himself. ‘There may be some other gym he goes to, too. I don’t know. He needs to keep in trim, though. Very nice little body, that.’ ‘Not so little,’ I suggested, remembering the beautiful hard heaviness in the dark. ‘What does he do, anyway?’ ‘He works in a hotel actually,’ Bill declared, proud to know this fact, which might be taken as the token of a fuller intimacy than was, evidently, the case. ‘How extraordinary,’ I said, my image of Phil as a military figure distorted by this notion, but settling into a new image of him, still in uniform however, marching along an upstairs corridor with a tray of coffee and sandwiches held at shoulder height. ‘Which one, do you know?’ ‘Not sure about that, Will,’ Bill admitted. ‘One of the big famous ones, I think.’ James had been swimming diligently while I was in the weights room and when I went down to the pool he was hanging by his elbows in the deep end, in spasmodic conversation with a person I hadn’t seen before. By a silly convention I always affected a censorious attitude towards men he might actually be getting somewhere with. I stopped by him at the end of my first length, pretended to adjust the strap of my goggles, and raising my eyebrows (an effort doubtless diminished by the goggles themselves) declared, ‘I don’t think much of yours, dear,’ before plunging on.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  These things are grievous to a man of understanding: Upbraiding concerning sojourning, and the reproach of a money-lender. The very fact that the Christian is a stranger and a pilgrim and a sojourner is the proof that comfort is the last thing that he can expect in life, and that an easy popularity is not for him. (ii) This idea of the Christian as a stranger in the world is deeply rooted in the literature of the early Church. TertulHan wrote: ‘The Christian knows that on earth he has a pilgrimage, but that he has his dignity in heaven’ (Apology, 1). ‘Nothing is of any importance to us in this world except to depart from it as quickly as possible’ (Apology, 41). ‘The Christian is a sojourner amongst corruptible things’ (The Letter to Diognetus, 6.18). ‘We have no fatherland on earth’ (Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, 3.8.1). ‘We are sojourners, unable to live happily exiled from our fatherland. We seek for a way to help us to end our sorrows and to return to our native country’ (Augustine, Concerning Christian Doctrine, 2.4). ‘We should consider, dearly beloved brethren, we should ever and anon reflect that we have renounced the world, and in the meantime are living here as guests and strangers. Let us greet the day which assigns each of us to our own home, which snatches us hence, and lifts us from the snares of the world, and restores us to Paradise and to the Kingdom. Who that has been placed in foreign lands would not hasten to return to his own country? Who that is hastening to return to his friends would not eagerly desire a prosperous gale, that he might the sooner embrace those dear to him. We regard Paradise as our country’ (Cyprian, Concerning Mortality, 26).

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

  Five days!..." 'You can't do that, dear little Anna. Everything is set and in order... They're expecting me in Amsterdam... I couldn't add a day, no matter how much I wanted to!" "And that's so terribly far away...!" »Amsterdam? Bah! not at all! And you can always think of each other, can't you? And I write! Look, I'll write as soon as I get there..." 'Remember...' she said, 'a year and a half ago? At the Schützenfest?...” He interrupted her happily... "God, yes, a year and a half!... I thought you were Italian... I bought a carnation and put it in my buttonhole... I still have it... I'm taking it to Amsterdam... What dust and heat it was in the meadow! ..." "Yes, you got me a glass of lemonade from the booth next door... I remember it like today! Everything smelled of fritters and people...” 'But it was nice! Didn't we just see by our eyes what was the matter with us?" “And you wanted to ride the carousel with me... but you couldn't; I had to sell! The woman would have scolded...” "No, it didn't work, Anna, I totally see that." She said softly, "And it's the only thing I refused you." He kissed her again, on the lips and the eyes. "Adieu, my dear, good, little Anna!... Yes, one must begin to say adieu!" "Oh, you're coming back tomorrow?" 'Yes, sure, about this time. And also the day after tomorrow, if I can somehow free myself... But now I want to tell you one thing, Anna... I'm going quite far away now, yes, it's quite far away, Amsterdam... and you're staying behind here. But don't throw yourself away, do you hear, Anna?... Because until now you have n't thrown yourself away, I tell you!« She cried into her apron, which she held in front of her face with her free hand. "And you?... And you?..." 'God knows, Anna, how things will go! You don't always stay young... you're a smart girl, you never said anything about marriage and things like that..." "No, protect!... that I ask this of you..." "One is carried, you see... If I'm alive, I'll take over the business, I'll play a game... yes, I'm open with you, on parting... And you too... it will be like that... I wish you all the best , my dear, good, little Anna! But don't throw yourself away, do you hear?... Because until now you have n't thrown yourself away, I tell you...!' It was warm in here. A damp scent of earth and flowers hung in the little shop. Outside, the winter sun was already beginning to set. A delicate, pure and pale sunset, as if painted on porcelain, adorned the sky across the river.

• From Dirty Pretty Things (2014)

  The Rose Have you ever loved a rose, and watched her slowly bloom; and as her petals would unfold, you grew drunk on her perfume. Have you ever seen her dance, her leaves all wet with dew; and quivered with a new romance— the wind, he loved her too. Have you ever longed for her, on nights that go on and on; for now, her face is all a blur, like a memory kept too long. Have you ever loved a rose, and bled against her thorns; and swear each night to let her go, then love her more by dawn. —Lang Leav Cake Sex is the cake and love the icing on top. Away from You I think of thoughts that cannot be, no hand can reach across this sea, the seasons change on distant shores, from frosty skies to sunshine blue, as summer’s touch undresses you— Reminding me of all the things I often wish, but cannot do. The Lighthouse The autumn sun smiled softly across the gentle waves that lapped against the old wooden pier. The lighthouse threw a morning shadow as a magpie’s note rang out from the swaying trees. Dawn’s light poured through the dusty wooden blinds and washed over the white linen sheets that lay crumpled and kicked off the bed. She lay naked, breathless and beautiful. Black hair tumbling across her pert breasts. “I love our house,” she sighs. He stares up at the powder blue ceiling, a little dreamy and wet. “I think this might be a good morning to make marshmallows,” he replies. Lust Lust is a lovely word and makes love so much more interesting. Lost Words A midnight scribble, a morning sigh, you watch the words, curl up and die. Madness lives inside your head, of poems lost, and pages dead. A mind possessed, by unmade books, unwritten lines on empty hooks. Lips Kisses dream of lips like yours. Airplanes She rode on airplanes and fell asleep in hotel beds. Dreaming of faraway places—writing poetry with her sunset eyes.

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

  You once stood in it for a few years, but now you can live to be seventy or eighty years old and you'll stay here and Lea Hear Gerhardt read to you. The thought makes me so sad, Tom, it's sitting here in my throat and pressing. Because I still feel so youthful, you know, and I long to get out into life again ... And finally: not only in the house, but also in the whole city I don't feel quite well, because you don't have to believe that I'm with you I'm blind for the circumstances, I'm no longer a goose and I have my eyes in my head. I'm a divorced woman and I get to feel it, that's very clear. Believe me, Tom, it always weighs heavily on my heart to have sullied our name through no fault of my own. You can do whatever you want, you can make money and be the first man in town, people will still say: 'Yes ... his sister is a divorced woman, by the way.' Julchen Möllendorpf, née Hagenström, doesn't greet me ... well, she's a goose! But that's how it goes with all families... And yet, me ca n't give up hope, Tom, that everything can still be made good! I'm still young... Aren't I pretty pretty? Mama can't give me much more, but it's still a reasonable piece of money. If I remarry? Frankly, Tom, it's my dearest wish! With that everything would be all right, the stain would be wiped out... Oh God, if I could play a game worthy of our name, settle down again -! Do you think it's completely out of the question?" 'Save, Tony! Oh, not at all! I never stopped counting on it. But above all, it seems to me that you need to get out a little, cheer yourself up, have a change..." "That's it!" she said eagerly. "Now I have to tell you a story." Thomas leaned back, very pleased with this suggestion. He was already on his second cigarette. Dawn began to advance. 'Well, while you were away I almost got a job, a companionship in Liverpool! Would you have found it outrageous?... But at least somewhat questionable?... Yes, yes, it probably would have been undignified. But I wanted so badly to get away... In short, it was shattered. I sent my photograph to the missis, and she had to give up my services because I was too pretty; there was a grown son in the house. 'You're too pretty,' she wrote... ha, I've never been so amused!' The two laughed heartily.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  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. Arthur was seventeen, and came from Stratford East. I had been out all that day, and when I was having dinner with my oldest friend James I nearly told him that I had this boy back home, but swallowed my words and glowed boozily with secret pleasure. James, besides, was a doctor, full of caution and common sense, and would have thought I was crazy to leave a virtual stranger in my home. In my stuffy, opinionated family, though, there was a stubborn tradition of trust, and I had perhaps absorbed from my mother the habit of testing servants and window-cleaners by exposing them to temptation. I took a slightly creepy pleasure in imagining Arthur in the flat alone, absorbing its alien richness, looking at the pictures, concentrating of course on Whitehaven’s photograph of me in my little swimming-trunks, the shadow across my eyes … I was unable to feel anxiety about those electrical goods which are the general currency of burglaries—and I doubted if the valuable discs (the Rattle Tristan among them) would be to Arthur’s taste. He liked dance-music that was hot and cool—the kind that whipped and crooned across the dance-floor of the Shaft, where I had met him the night before.

• From Dirty Pretty Things (2014)

  I dreamt of us last night, living in the little stone cottage by the sea, the one you promised me. Our love held together by wrinkled hands as we slowly walked across ever-sinking sands. Each languid step taking us closer toward our very last sunset. It wasn’t until I was fully awake that I truly woke up. I suddenly realized it’s no coincidence the two middle letters of life are if. For every action we make, there is a reaction. The outcome often beyond our control, fragile and fraught with ruinous consequences. Like a soap bubble made real by a gentle breath only to be taken by it. If you had stayed here, in my trembling arms, would our fingers not be pricked by the thorns of red roses? And what if our love could have stood up to the storm, standing strong, like our cottage by the sea? If only . . . [image file=image_rsrc2H4.jpg] Curious Girl She was a curious girl, who loved the smell of old books, chasing butterflies, and touching herself under the covers. Without You There is a quiet beauty in a miserable gray, with leaden skies and brooding hue, this gentle rain a reminder of you, tracing silent tears on a windowpane. From a changing tide to an empty beach, a broken wave writes a lonely line, a crashing metaphor captured in time, of a memory found on this forgotten shore. Your Smile Your smile is a beautifully written line I hope to write some day. Tongue-Tied Love I cannot speak the words, that haven’t already been said. A well-thumbed thesaurus, gathering dust, inside my head. It’s Complicated I am here, you are there, it really is perplexing. We cannot touch, in real time much, there’s nothing quite as vexing. Like sex fulfilled in bits and bytes, and endless late-night texting. Kindness Do you know what really turns me on? What I find incredibly sexy? Kindness. The Mermaid She came from the ocean, this wild girl from the sea, her hair flowing southward, she walked toward me. A west to east smile, with eyes steely gray, like a storm in the distance, rolling in from the bay. We kissed with the sunrise, made love when it set, a promise by moonlight, came dawn, my regret. He left for the ocean, this boy from the land, his spirit soars northward, his heart in her hands. [image file=image_rsrc2H5.jpg] The Kiss Crashing waves on an empty beach, the rhythm of our hearts, two drowning lovers lost at sea, my lips adrift in yours. The Muse Body framed with arms outstretched, wrists roped, and roughly bound. From a tiny mouth, and pretty lips, you utter not a sound. I paint with words, a canvas stretched, laid bare, upon the ground. [image file=image_rsrc2H6.jpg] Perfume Her perfume reminded me of freshly picked flowers and sticky candy floss, mixed with a gentle hint of debauchery. Stillness

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  “But I also think Dan’s going to be surprised at how much he misses his dad. I mean, Dan’s lived a pretty sheltered life. He has had his dad at almost every wrestling thing he’s ever done—had his dad taking him around, driving him everywhere, all that. This’ll be very different. And maybe that’s good.” At the LeClere farm, out on Monticello Road off Highway 13, the hundred or so head of cattle huddle together in the frigid night air and gather near one corner of the fence line, within bawling distance of the family house. It is a simple and unfussy farmhouse, probably a time zone removed from anything approaching pretense. Mary likes it, but the rooms were all made small, and the living room just isn’t big enough to do anything with. The kitchen she can work with. The chili is warm. On the ride to Troy Mills to get gas and hot cocoa before the run out to the property, Doug discusses the evolution of the North-Linn program. He has already been candid enough to admit that the head-coaching thing was eating up his marriage and had to go, but that doesn’t mean he is entirely happy with the way things are. In his heart, he longs to run his own program again. He has obvious respect for Bridgewater, one of whose first moves upon being named head coach was to officially make Doug and Larry Henderson assistants, so they could be thrown at least a few bucks for the time and effort they already were putting in. Doug’s good feelings for the coach make it easier to accept the fact that it is Bridgewater, not LeClere, who really calls the shots. Doug’s relationship with Henderson is clearly cooler and more distant; the two coach, but seldom together. Then again, it’s a small room. You stay in there long enough, over enough years, and somebody is bound to get on somebody’s nerves for something or other. As Doug and Dan look over scrapbooks and photo albums, Nick drifts over and stands near, and what’s amazing is the recall that all three LeCleres possess about tournaments and competitions that are years and years old. There is picture after picture of Dan on the medal stand, accepting a first-place award as a 5-year-old, now an 8-year-old, now 10. Doug and Nick and Dan are pulling last names out of the air, recalling wrestlers from years ago who have long since left the sport or moved out of Iowa altogether. This has been a family endeavor: Nick wrestled in those tournaments, and Chris, when his time came, and Michael, too—even the old man, at selected events from time to time. The family worries that the hardest part for Doug may come not when his kids leave North-Linn, but when his knees and his aching body finally won’t allow him on the mat anymore.

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

  Moreover, the accidental and all that is contrary to nature cannot be everlasting. But a state wherein the soul is separated from the body is surely per accidens and contrary to nature, if naturally and per se the soul has a longing for union with t,he body. Therefore the soul will not be forever separated from the body. Accordingly, since the soul’s substance is incorruptible, as was shown above, we conclude that the soul is to be reunited to the body. CHAPTER 152 SEPARATION OF THE BODY FROM THE SOUL BOTH NATURAL AND CONTRARY TO NATUREWe may have a suspicion that separation of the soul from the body is not per accidens but is in accord with nature. For man’s body is made up of contrary elements. Everything of this sort is naturally corruptible. Therefore the human body is naturally corruptible. But when the body corrupts the soul must survive as a separate entity if the soul is immortal, as in fact it is. Apparently, then, separation of the soul from the body is in accord with nature. In view of these considerations, we must take up the question, how this separation is according to nature, and how it is opposed to nature. We showed above that the rational soul exceeds the capacity of all corporeal matter in a measure impossible to other forms. This is demonstrated by its intellectual activity, which it exercises without the body. To the end that corporeal matter might be fittingly adapted to the soul, there had to be added to the body some disposition that would make it suitable matter for such a form. And in the same way that this form itself receives existence from God alone through creation, that disposition, transcending as it does corporeal nature, was conferred on the human body by God alone, for the purpose of preserving the body itself in a state of incorruption, so that it might match the soul’s perpetual existence. This disposition remained in man’s body as long as man’s soul cleaved to God. But when man’s soul turned from God by sin, the human body deservedly lost that supernatural disposition whereby it was unrebelliously subservient to the soul. And hence man incurred the necessity of dying. Accordingly, if we regard the nature of the body, death is natural. But if we regard the nature of the soul and the disposition with which the human body was supernaturally endowed in the beginning for the sake of the soul, death is per accidens and contrary to nature, inasmuch as union with the body is natural for the soul. CHAPTER 153

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Chaps did keep journals there—little Joe his childlike weekly jottings for his wife eventually to see, ‘Barmy’ Barnes his notebooks of visions and apocalypses—but they were licensed by their childishness and barminess; whereas I had been violently removed from my rightful lettered habitat, and as an invisible and inner protest refused to write a syllable. Now that I am home again I may write a few pages, merely to attest to what happened—and perhaps to feel my way towards recovery, to patch up my for ever damaged understanding with the world. One thing I notice already is that since leaving prison I have had long and logical dreams of being back in it, just as when I was in it I dreamt insistently and raptly of happy days long before and also of a day—now, as it might be—when I had been released, and various longed-for things would happen, or promise to happen. Dreams had a powerful and sapping hold on me there. I am the sort of sleeper who has always dreamt richly, so perhaps I should have been prepared for the futile mornings, sewing mail-bags, filling infinite time with that cruel simulacrum of work, but whelmed under in the world of last night’s voyagings, their mood of ripeness and reciprocation. These—and other waking wishes—had such supremacy over the prison’s abstract, cretinous routines that to tell the story of those months with any truthfulness would be to talk of dreams. When, after evening Association—at some infantile early hour—we were sent to our cells, I gained a kind of confidence from the certainty that another world was waiting, a certainty, if you like, of uncertainty, the only part of my life whose goings-on were subject to nobody’s control. The prisoner dreams of freedom: to dream is to be free.

• From Dirty Pretty Things (2014)

  Lost Love I found you, hidden by crooked fingers of gnarly wood and leafy green, a pale ghost, drifting like morning mist, through haunted trees and forest birdsong. You come to me in waning moonlight, your story told on icy skin, the pages pale, with purple kisses, walking barefoot and breathless, toward my heart. You found me, buried deep beneath this earthly blanket, of thorny twigs and weeping mud, two lovers torn now bound together, in joyful death we make our bed.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  " Since you have been constant for seven years," said the queen, " I must be no more precipitate in behev- mg you than you have been in declaring your love to me. Therefore, if you speak the truth, I wish to convince myself of it in a manner that shall leave no room for doubt ; and if I am satisfied with the result of the trial, I will belies^e you to be such towards me as you swear that you are ; and then, when I find you to be indeed what you say, you shall find me to be what you wish." Elisor besought her to put him to any proof she pleased, there being nothing so hard that would not ap- pear to him very easy, in the hope that he might be happy enough to convince her of the perfect love he bore her. He only waited, he said, to be honoured with her com- mands. " If you love me, Elisor, as much as you say," replied the queen, " I am sure that nothing will seem hard to you to obtain my good graces ; so I command you, by the desire you have of possessing them, and the fear of losing them, that to-morrow, without seeing me more, ^ ou quit the court and go to a place where for seven 16 242 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE [A'oz'e/ 24. years you shall hear nothing of me, nor I of you. You know well that you love me, since you have had seven j years' experience of the fact. When I shall have a similar seven years' experience, I shall believe what all your protestations would fail to assure me of.'' This cruel command made Elisor believe at first that her intention was to get rid of him ; but, upon second thoughts, he accepted the condition, hoping that the proof would do more for him than all the words he could utter. " If I have lived seven years without any hope," he said, " under the painful necessity of dissembling my love, now that it is known to you, and that I have some gleam of hope, I shall pass the other seven years with patience and calmness. But, madam, since in obeying the command you impose upon me I am deprived of all the joy I have ever had in the world, what hope do you give me that, at the end of seven years, you will own me for your faithful servant .-' " Drawing a ring off her finger, " Let us cut this ring in two," said the queen ; " I will keep one half and you the other, in order that I may recognize you by that token, in case length of time makes me forget your face."

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

  In order to establish this controversy on a solid basis, we must remark that holy men seek certain things for their own sake, and certain other things for the sake of their neighbours. For their own sake, they would prefer to adhere to Christ by contemplation, either in this world, in so far as human infirmity will permit them so to do, or in the next world, where contemplation is made perfect. For the sake of others, however, charity urges them at times to interrupt their much-loved contemplation, and to expose themselves to the stress of active life. Hence while by desire they enjoy the quiet of contemplation, for the sake of their neighbour’s salvation they patiently endure the toil of action. Thus St. Paul says (Phil. i. 23): “I am straitened between two: having a desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ... but to abide still in the flesh is needful for you.” St, Gregory says (Homil. XLII. part 1 super Ezech.): “One sole consolation remains to the soul enamoured of the heavenly Bridegroom, but not yet admitted to His presence. She delights in working for the salvation of her neighbour, and in enkindling in the souls of others the fire of Divine love.” This is the reason why the saints at times mingle with men, and seek the favour and friendship of the great. They are led to do so, not from desire of popularity or advancement, but in order to lead others to salvation. For as St. Augustine says (8 Confess.): “They who are well known are in a position to assist many in this work of their salvation; and they are followed by many.” The Saint adds: “The enemy is most surely defeated in him whom he has held most securely, and by whose example he holds many others.” Now many proud men are held by the reputation of nobility, and many others by that of authority. Hence the saints, inspired by charity, seek the friendship of those who are noble and powerful, in order, by their means, to become an instrument of salvation to many. Did they act thus for any other motive, their conduct would be reprehensible. St. Gregory says (Pastorale), “He who desires to be useful to others, gives an example to all, since the only begotten Son of God left the bosom of the Father for the salvation of all men.” With this preface, we shall be able, easily, to refute all the objections made by our opponents.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  1I came home on the last train. Opposite me sat a couple of London Transport maintenance men, one small, fifty, decrepit, the other a severely handsome black of about thirty-five. Heavy canvas bags were tilted against their boots, their overalls open above their vests in the stale heat of the Underground. They were about to start work! I looked at them with a kind of swimming, drunken wonder, amazed at the thought of their inverted lives, of how their occupation depended on our travel, but could only be pursued, I saw it now, when we were not travelling. 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.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  The woman clicked her tongue, You know better words than that, she said, but the rest of us were laughing again, and again the boy was pleased. The woman pulled out more food for him then, and the rest of us returned to our reading, though I was hardly reading at all, I was watching the boy with a fascination I didn’t understand. There was something electric about him, as he sat chewing his sandwich, looking out the window, a charm beyond mere loveliness. He was still for a while, lulled by food and by the heat, which had grown more intense as the afternoon wore on, but soon he was restless again, climbing up on the bench, then onto the narrow ledge of the armrest, grabbing with both of his hands one of the metal bars of the luggage rack. Get down, his grandmother said sharply, I’ve already told you, and the boy dropped his hands, not in surrender but to have them free for bargaining. But you don’t know what I’m going to do, he protested, his voice full of the injustice of it, I haven’t even tried yet. Just wait, just let me try, then see if it’s bad, and he made a particular gesture with his hands, curling his fingers slightly and holding them both palm up before him, a pleading gesture, and all at once and with a physical force I understood the source of my fascination with the boy, the reason I had been unable to look away. It was one of Mitko’s gestures, I realized, all of the boy’s gestures were ones I had seen Mitko use; the boy himself, his long limbs, his slenderness, the peculiar cast of his skin, might have been a small copy of the man, so that I felt I was watching Mitko as a boy, before he had become what he was now. Where had they learned it, I wondered, this repertoire of gestures that made a way of being a man, the talent for friendliness and charm that had always astonished me, with its certainty both of welcome and of the right to whatever it could grasp. The boy did pull himself up then, showing off his strength, and as his legs flailed in the air the woman grabbed one of them and pulled, which made the boy giggle at first, thinking it was a game. He dropped back down to the little ledge, leaning back against the wall, still smiling, and again brought his hands together in front of him, not pleading now but as if to say see, it was nothing so terrible, how silly you were to worry. But this time the woman snatched one of his hands and yanked it hard, pulling him forcibly into the seat.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  And she would add, looking down, and under her breath: ‘ ’Cause God don’t like it.’ ‘I sure don’t care what God don’t like, or you, either,’ Elizabeth’s heart replied. ‘I’m going away from here. He’s going to come and get me, and I’m going away from here.’ ‘He’ was her father, who never came. As the years passed, she replied only: ‘I’m going away from here.’ And it hung, this determination, like a heavy jewel between her breasts; it was written in fire on the dark sky of her mind. But, yes—there was something she had overlooked. Pride goeth before destruction; and a haughty spirit before a fall. She had not known this: she had not imagined that she could fall. She wondered, to-night, how she could give this knowledge to her son; if she could help him to endure what could now no longer be changed; if while life ran, he would forgive her—for her pride, her folly, and her bargaining with God! For, to-night, those years before her fall, in her aunt’s dark house—that house which smelled always of clothes kept too long in closets, and of old women; which was redolent of their gossip, and was pervaded, somehow, by the odour of the lemon her aunt took in her tea, and by the odour of frying fish, and of the still that someone kept in the basement—came before her, entire and overwhelming; and she remembered herself, entering any room in which her aunt might be sitting, responding to anything her aunt might say, standing before her, as rigid as metal and cancerous with hate and fear, in battle every hour of every day, a battle that she continued in her dreams. She knew now of what it was that she had so silently and so early accused her aunt: it was of tearing a bewildered child away from the arms of the father she loved. And she knew now why she had sometimes, so dimly and so unwillingly, felt that her father had betrayed her: it was because he had not overturned the earth to take his daughter away from a woman who did not love her, and whom she did not love. Yet she knew to-night how difficult it was to overturn the earth, for she had tried once, and she had failed. And she knew, too—and it made the tears that touched her mouth more bitter than the most bitter herb—that without the pride and bitterness she had so long carried in her heart against her aunt she could never have endured her life with her. And she thought of Richard. It was Richard who had taken her out of that house, and out of the South, and into the city of destruction. He had suddenly arrived—and from the moment he arrived until the moment of his death he had filled her life.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Inside, the Club is mildly derelict in mood, crowded at certain times, and then oddly deserted, like a school. In the entrance hall in the evening people are always going to and from meetings, or signing each other up for volleyball teams or fitness classes. In the hall the worlds of the hotel above, and the club below, meet. I would always take the downward stair, its handrail tingling with static electricity, and turn along the underground corridor to the gym, the weights room and the dowdy magnificence of the pool. It was a place I loved, a gloomy and functional underworld full of life, purpose and sexuality. Boys, from the age of seventeen, could go there to work on their bodies in the stagnant, aphrodisiac air of the weights room. As you got older, it grew dearer, but quite a few men of advanced years, members since youth and displaying the drooping relics of toned-up pectorals, still paid the price and tottered in to cast an appreciative eye at the showering youngsters. ‘With brother clubs in all the major cities of the world,’ their names and dates incised in marble beneath the founder’s bust in the hall, the large core of men who worked out daily were always supplemented by visitors needing a dip or a game of squash or to find a friend. More than once I had ended up in a bedroom of the hotel above with a man I had smiled at in the showers. The Corry proved the benefit of smiling in general. A sweet, dull man smiled at me there on my first day, talked to me, showed me what was what. I was still an undergraduate then, and a trifle nervous, anticipating, with confused dread and longing, scenes of grim machismo and institutionalised vice. Bill Hawkins, a pillar of the place, I subsequently discovered, fortyish, with the broad belt and sexless underbelly of the heavy weight-lifter, had simply extended camaraderie to a newcomer. ‘Hallo, Will,’ he said to me now as I entered the changing-room and he came back, grunting and staring from a monster workout. ‘Hi, Bill,’ I replied. ‘How’re you doing?’ It was our inevitable exchange, in which some vestige of a joke seemed to reside, our having the same name yet, by the difference of a letter, each being called something altogether different. ‘Haven’t seen you for a bit,’ he said. ‘No, I seem to have had quite a lot on,’ I hinted.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective, to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place. In those days, had the Lord Himself descended from Heaven with trumpets telling her to turn back, she could scarcely have heard Him, and could certainly not have heeded. She lived, in those days, in a fiery storm, of which Richard was the centre and the heart. And she fought only to reach him—only that; she was afraid of what might happen if they were kept from one another; for what might come after she had no thoughts or fears to spare. Her pretext for coming to New York was to take advantage of the greater opportunities the North offered coloured people; to study in a Northern school, and to find a better job than any she was likely to be offered in the South. Her aunt, who listened to this with no diminution of her habitual scorn, was yet unable to deny that from generation to generation, things, as she grudgingly put it, were bound to change—and neither could she quite take the position of seeming to stand in Elizabeth’s way. In the winter of 1920, as the year began, Elizabeth found herself in an ugly back room in Harlem in the home of her aunt’s relative, a woman whose respectability was immediately evident from the incense she burned in her rooms and the spiritualist séances she held every Saturday night. The house was still standing, not very far away; often she was forced to pass it. Without looking up, she was able to see the windows of the apartment in which she had lived, and the woman’s sign was in the window still: M ADAME W ILLIAMS , S PIRITUALIST . She found a job as chambermaid in the same hotel in which Richard worked as lift-boy. Richard said that they would marry as soon as he had saved some money. But since he was going to school at night and made very little money, their marriage, which she had thought of as taking place almost as soon as she arrived, was planned for a future that grew ever more remote.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  I have never felt that way, but I’m an old mom. I had nearly four decades to become myself before experimenting with my obliteration. Sometimes mothers find it alarming to think that what they are doing is so important and in that case it is better not to tell them. It makes them self-conscious and then they do everything less well…. When a mother has a capacity quite simply to be a mother we must never interfere. She will not be able to fight for her rights because she will not understand. As if mothers thought they were performing their ordinary devotions in the wild, then are stunned to look up, and see a peanut-crunching crowd across a moat. Shortly after returning to work after having Iggy, I ran into a superior in the cafeteria. He gallantly purchased me my “vegan comfort meal” and a Naked juice. He asked when my next book would be out; I told him it might take a minute, as I had just had a baby. This sparked a story for him about a colleague he’d once had, a Renaissance studies professor, who allegedly found her newborn so fascinating that for two whole years, her Renaissance research struck her as esoteric and boring. But then, after two years, her interest came back, he said. It came back, he repeated, with a wink. Over time, I have come to suspect that my affection for Bubbles may have less to do with its endorsement of the rule of negative gynecology, and more to do with its ridiculous title, which it shares with Michael Jackson’s pet chimpanzee. Michael doted on Bubbles. But Michael would also rotate the chimp out of service as it aged, and replace it with a new, younger Bubbles. (Cruelty of the Argo?) When I was growing up, my mother would sometimes tell me to switch the TV channel to a station with a male weatherman. They usually have the more accurate forecast, she’d say. The weather people are reading a script, I would say, rolling my eyes. It’s all the same forecast. It’s just a feeling, she would shrug. Alas, it isn’t just a feeling. Even if women are consulting the same satellites, or reading from the same script: their reports are suspect; the jig is up. In other words, the articulation of the reality of my sex is impossible in discourse, and for a structural, eidetic reason. My sex is removed, at least as the property of a subject, from the predicative mechanism that assures discursive coherence. Irigaray’s answer to this conundrum?: to destroy … [but] with nuptial tools…. The option left to me, she writes, was to have a fling with the philosophers.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  his only means of seeing her. At last, when she thought she had baffled his plans, she returned to the churches as before, and Love took care forthwith to make this known to the gentleman, who then resumed his habits of devotion. Fearing lest she should throw some other obstacle in his way, and that he should not have time to make known to her what he fell., one morning, when she was hearing mass in a little chapel, where she thought herself snugly concealed, he placed himself at the end of the altar, and turning to her at the moment when the priest was elevating the host, said, in a voice of deep feeling, " I swear to you, madam, by Him whom the priest holds in his hands, that you are the sole cause of my death. Though you deprive me of all opportunity to address you, yet you cannot be ignorant of the passion I entertain for you. My haggard eyes and death-like countenance must have sufficiently made known to you my condition." The lady pretended not to understand him, and replied, " God's name ought not to be taken in vain ; but the poets say that the gods laugh at the oaths and falsehoods of lovers, wherefore women who prize their honour ought neither to be credulous nor pitiful." So saying, she rose and went home. Those who have been in the like predicament will readily believe that the gentleman was sorely cast down at receiving such a reply. However, as he did not lack courage, he thought it better to have met with a rebuff than to have missed an opportunity of declaring his love. He persevered for three years, and lost not a moment in which he could solicit her by letters and by other means ; but during all that time she never made him any other reply, but shunned him as the wolf shuns the mastiff ; and that not by reason of any aversion she felt for him, but because she was afraid of exposing her He managed so adroitly that he was in the lady's room at the moment appointed. Photographed from Life. Copyright, 1902, by U. Trenor. Second daj.] Q UEEN OF NA VA RRE. 1 6 1 honour and reputation. The gentleman was so well aware that there lay the knot of the difficulty, that he pushed matters more briskly than ever ; till, after a world of trouble, refusals, and sufferings, the lady was touched by his constancy, took pity on him, and granted him what he had so long desired and waited for.