Love

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.

Page 104 of 184 · 20 per page

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Now prison had mortified Giannotto's flesh, but had nothing abated the generous spirit, which he derived from his noble birth, nor yet the entire affection he bore his mistress; and albeit he ardently desired that which Currado proffered him and saw himself in the latter's power, yet no whit did he dissemble of that which the greatness of his soul prompted him to say; wherefore he answered, 'Currado, neither lust of lordship nor greed of gain nor other cause whatever hath ever made me lay snares, traitor-wise, for thy life or thy good. I loved and love thy daughter and still shall love her, for that I hold her worthy of my love, and if I dealt with her less than honourably, in the opinion of the vulgar, my sin was one which still goeth hand in hand with youth and which an you would do away, it behoveth you first do away with youth. Moreover, it is an offence which, would the old but remember them of having been young and measure the defaults of others by their own and their own by those of others, would show less grievous than thou and many others make it; and as a friend, and not as an enemy, I committed it. This that thou profferest me I have still desired and had I thought it should be vouchsafed me, I had long since sought it; and so much the dearer will it now be to me, as my hope thereof was less. If, then, thou have not that intent which thy words denote, feed me not with vain hope; but restore me to prison and there torment me as thou wilt, for, so long as I love Spina, even so, for the love of her, shall I still love thee, whatsoever thou dost with me, and have thee in reverence.'

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  _Stephen’s strong but unhappy arms went round her, and suddenly stretching out her hand, she switched off the little lamp on the table, so that the room was lit only by firelight. They could not see each other’s faces very clearly any more, because there was only firelight. And Stephen spoke such words as a lover will speak when his heart is burdened to breaking; when his doubts must bow down and be swept away before the unruly flood of his pas- sion. There in that shadowy, firelit room, she spoke such words as lovers have spoken ever since the divine, sweet madness of God flung the thought of love into Creation. But Angela suddenly pushed her away: ‘Don’t, don’t —1 can’t bear it — it’s too much, Stephen. It hurts me — I can’t bear this thing — for you. It’s all wrong, I’m not worth it, anyhow it’s all wrong. Stephen, it’s making me — can’t you understand? It’s too much —’ She could not, she dared not explain. ‘ If you were a man—’ She stopped abruptly, and burst into uncontrollable weeping. And somehow this weeping was different from any that had gone before, so that Stephen trembled. There was something frightened and desolate about it; it was like the sobbing of a terrified child. The girl forgot her own desolation in her pity and the need that she felt to comfort. More strongly than ever before she felt the need to protect this woman, and to comfort. 200 THE WELL OF LONELINESS She said, grown suddenly passionless and gentle: * Tell me — try to tell me what’s wrong, beloved. Don’t be afraid of making me angry — we love each other, and that’s all that matters. Try to tell me what’s wrong, and then let me help you; only don’t cry like this — I can’t endure it.’ But Angela hid her face in her hands: ‘ No, no, it’s nothing; I’m only so tired. It’s been a fearful strain these last months. I’m just a weak, human creature, Stephen — sometimes I think we’ve been worse than mad. I must have been mad to have allowed you to love me like this — one day you'll despise and hate me. It’s my fault, but I was so terribly lonely that I let you come into my life, and now — oh, I can’t explain, you wouldn’t understand; how could you understand, Stephen? ’

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The spark in question was called Ruggieri da Jeroli, a man of noble birth, but of lewd life and blameworthy carriage, insomuch that he had left himself neither friend nor kinsman who wished him well or cared to see him and was defamed throughout all Salerno for thefts and other knaveries of the vilest; but of this the lady recked little, he pleasing her for otherwhat, and with the aid of a maid of hers, she wrought on such wise that they came together. After they had taken some delight, the lady proceeded to blame his past way of life and to pray him, for the love of her, to desist from these ill fashions; and to give him the means of doing this, she fell to succouring him, now with one sum of money and now with another. On this wise they abode together, using the utmost discretion, till it befell that a sick man was put into the doctor's hands, who had a gangrened leg, and Master Mazzeo, having examined the case, told the patient's kinsfolk that, except a decayed bone he had in his leg were taken out, needs must he have the whole limb cut off or die, and that, by taking out the bone, he might recover, but that he would not undertake him otherwise than for a dead man; to which those to whom the sick man pertained agreed and gave the latter into his hands for such. The doctor, judging that the patient might not brook the pain nor would suffer himself to be operated, without an opiate, and having appointed to set about the matter at evensong, let that morning distil a certain water of his composition, which being drunken by the sick man, should make him sleep so long as he deemed necessary for the performing of the operation upon him, and fetching it home, set it in his chamber, without telling any what it was.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Five minutes after Amber sent that first, fateful message, she got a reply from Hannah suggesting they Skype. They did, and ended up talking until four in the morning. “I told her everything,” Amber said now, gazing at Hannah affectionately. “About the fake MySpace profile, about getting caught by my parents, everything. It was crazy. I knew in, like, a split second that I didn’t want to talk to anybody else ever for the rest of my life. She was the first person to tell me my feelings were okay. And I realized: this is what a relationship is supposed to feel like. You’re supposed to feel appreciated and accepted and comfortable and able to say anything.” Hannah’s eyes welled up, and Amber pulled her close. “Why are you crying?” she asked. “Because you were so sad,” Hannah replied. “You needed someone to listen to you. I remember thinking, ‘This girl really needs someone to tell her it’s okay.’” Within a few weeks, Amber’s relationship with Jake fizzled, and they agreed to split up. While she was now free, she was only sixteen, and the new object of her affection lived in Canada. There was no way Amber could see Hannah in person—not, at least, without coming clean to her parents. YouTube is full of “coming out videos”—that phrase returns about twenty-one million results. There are poignant and funny videos, and some that are heartrending, as parents accept or reject their children live on-screen. There are videos of twins coming out together. There is a subgenre of “how to come out” videos, and another of songs people have written about coming out. Amber watched dozens of them, trying to get up her nerve to talk to her mother. She resolved to do it over winter break, but as Christmas turned to New Year’s, she continued to put off the conversation. Finally, just before school restarted, she invited her mother out to lunch, not something she typically did. It was a strategic choice: her mom wouldn’t make a scene, Amber figured, in a public place. They agreed to meet at a deli. Amber was so nervous that morning she was shaking: she still wonders how she drove there without crashing the car. Her mother was already at a table, looking stricken. “Are you pregnant?” she burst out, before Amber was even seated. Amber laughed, and said, “No, Mom,” thinking to herself, “The farthest thing from it.”

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  there were sometimes dead leaves-on the water. This last was a very intimate picture, full of detail, even to the red china dogs that stood one at each end of the high mantelpiece, and the grand- father clock that ticked loudly. Collins would sit by the fire with her shoes off. ‘ Me feet’s that swollen and painful,’ she would say. Then Stephen would go and cut rich bread and butter — the drawing-room kind, little bread and much butter -and would put on the kettle and brew tea for Collins, who liked it very strong and practically boiling, so that she could sip it from her saucer. In this picture it was Collins who talked about loving, and Stephen who gently but firmly rebuked her: * There, there, Collins, don’t be silly, you are a queer fish!’ And yet all the while she would be longing to tell her how wonderful it was, like honeysuckle blossom — something very sweet like that — or like fields smelling strongly of new-mown hay, in the sunshine. And perhaps she would tell her, just at the very end — just before this last picture faded. 4 In THEsE days Stephen clung more closely to her father, and this in a way was because of Collins. She could not have told you why it should be so, she only felt that it was. Sir Philip and his daughter would walk on the hill-sides, in and out of the black- thorn and young green bracken; they would walk hand in hand with a deep sense of friendship, with a deep sense of mutual understanding. Sir Philip knew all about wild flowers and berries, and the ways of young foxes and rabbits and such people. There were many rare birds, too, on the hills near Malvern, and these he would point out to Stephen. He taught her the simpler laws of nature, which, though simple, had always filled him with wonder: the law of the sap as it flowed through the branches, the law of the wind that came stirring the sap, the law of bird life and the building of nests, the law of the cuckoo’s varying call, which in June changed to ‘ Cuckoo-kook!’ He taught out THE WELL OF LONELINESS 21 of love for both subject and pupil, and while he thus taught he watched Stephen. Sometimes, when the child’s heart would feel full past bear- ing, she must tell him her problems in small, stumbling phrases. Tell him how much she longed to be different, longed to be some one like Nelson. She would say: ‘Do you think that I could be a man, sup- posing I thought very hard — or prayed, Father? ’ Then Sir Philip would smile and tease her a little, and would tell her that one day she would want pretty frocks, and his teasing was always excessively gentle, so that it hurt not at all.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The gentleman and his lady, hearing this, were well pleased, inasmuch as some means was found for his recoverance, albeit it irked them sore that the means in question should be that whereof they misdoubted them, to wit, that they should give Jeannette to their son to wife. Accordingly, the physician being gone, they went into the sick man and the lady bespoke him thus: 'Son mine, I could never have believed that thou wouldst keep from me any desire of thine, especially seeing thyself pine away for lack thereof; for that thou shouldst have been and shouldst be assured that there is nought I can for thy contentment, were it even less than seemly, which I would not do as for myself. But, since thou hast e'en done this, God the Lord hath been more pitiful over thee than thou thyself and that thou mayst not die of this sickness, hath shown me the cause of thine ill, which is no otherwhat than excess of love for some damsel or other, whoever she may be; and this, indeed, thou needest not have thought shame to discover, for that thine age requireth it, and wert thou not enamoured, I should hold thee of very little account. Wherefore, my son, dissemble not with me, but in all security discover to me thine every desire and put away from thee the melancholy and the thought-taking which be upon thee and from which proceedeth this thy sickness and take comfort and be assured that there is nothing of that which thou mayst impose on me for thy satisfaction but I will do it to the best of my power, as she who loveth thee more than her life. Banish shamefastness and fearfulness and tell me if I can do aught to further thy passion; and if thou find me not diligent therein or if I bring it not to effect for thee, account me the cruellest mother that ever bore son.'

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  She said she preferred reading all night and drinking bad wine. “Honestly, can you think of anything more inviting than fresh sheets and an open book turned face down on the night table? But if I can be famous and lonely with you, I’ll give it a whirl.” Because I admired Maria, I wanted to be like her—or like the image of me she cherished. She said that I liked everyone so much and entered into everything so readily that life became more exciting around me. “How dull my life seems when you’re away,” she’d complain. But what she considered my enthusiasm for everything was really nothing but my love for her. To woo her I would inject color and motion into accounts of insipid events and sluggish thoughts. Since she was so intellectual, I too led the life of the mind—but with conviction only when I was with her. Alone, back in my dormitory room, I’d become distracted by the small changes percolating through my body (an itch crystallizing on my knee, a cough scrabbling to get out of my chest, advancing and retreating armies of impatience and lassitude) and I’d toss aside Bergson’s Metaphysics or Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty, neither of which seemed likely to become an after-dinner story or a how-to book. My sense of guilt was too pressing to leave me the calm needed to contemplate the sense of beauty. With Maria I could take up such a question, perhaps, because my urge to keep her entertained led me to juggle with whatever I was handed by circumstance. The glamour of intellectual effort was on me. I pictured a dim study in a German town and could almost smell the hard, shaved face and touch the manicured, spatulate fingers of the great thinker as he sat in the glow penetrating the green glass shade of his desk lamp … But the second I was alone, this phantasm faded, the great thinker scratched his leg, longed to be somewhere he’d feel less tense, less empty. I liked to think I was a Buddhist disillusioned with the world, but I was caught in Maya’s strong silk cords. I never doubted the world could make me happy, if only it would give in. To make it relent, I was refining all the seducer’s skills—his ready sympathy, his tight focus on the prey, his anxiety to entertain, his ulterior mission to lead every conversation toward surrender and conquest. The seducer grows ardent only in pursuit. Left to his own devices he feels shabby, the half-mask cast aside and worthless at dawn, even though last night it had flattered the face it had concealed. In conversation I took my cue from every smile or flicker of exasperation I read in Maria’s face; alone, trying to reconstruct my warmth on the page, I’d turn stupid, lumpish.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  During spring vacation Maria wrote me a long letter in pencil. She used the simplified spellings the Chicago Tribune had introduced (“nite” for “night,” “thru” for “through”) and lots of abbreviations. Despite these eccentricities, her letter was as varied as her talk—observations on the Cold War alternating with praise of Jussi Björling as Des Grieux in Manon Lescaut , flattering concessions to my opinions (“Your dislike of Faulkner is making me reread him”) alternating with equally flattering rejections of my ideas (“You talk too much about happiness and not enough about fairness in your discussions of Communism. In fact your airy disregard of what’s fair I find shocking. It’s almost as though you are lacking a whole critical faculty”). Without transition she wrote, “I’m considering breaking off with Sam, I don’t think he’ll even notice, he hasn’t called me or written in two weeks. I think I’m a much better friend than lover, anyway, at least I show more of my feelings to you than to him.” That was when I fell in love with Maria. I’m a nominalist; I believe only in what’s named. Until then Sam had seemed so superior to me as to belong to another species. He had the lazy smile of someone many women had loved. If Maria had been less elegantly reserved, I might have hashed out with her all my feelings of inadequacy and ended by losing her. But Maria didn’t want to get to the bottom of anything but ideas. Her feelings were all impulsive and uncritical. I once told her I thought love was a hoax and I repeated something I’d read, that love hadn’t existed in the ancient world and had only come in with the troubadours. She found this notion so absurd she’d often mention it to other people as a hilarious example of my gullibility. For her love was the one simple, painful or blissful fact in a world of shifting speculations. For her, love was as simple as Des Grieux’s cry to Manon: “In your deep eye I read my destiny.” The wonder is that when she laughed at my theory of love no one ever defended me, since my theory is certainly arguable. But no one wanted to contradict Maria. She made her ideas—no, her very being—appear so likable no one wanted to be unlike her. Because she’d been to the University of Chicago and had been converted to its Aristotelianism, she stripped every argument down to its starkest tenets and frequently asked, “What’s your point? Can you put that in a nutshell?” That habit made her unpopular later among New York intellectuals, who seldom feel comfortable in a shell and prefer expanding to contracting their arguments. All those intellectuals who rely on their own prestige or invoke the authority of others filled her with contempt. Name-dropping, except by social climbers, struck her as silly; she forgave the social climbers, since she found them touching, almost novelistic in their pursuit of frivolously minor gods.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Our shoulders bumped as we walked along. I guess Sean wasn’t so tall after all; just my imagination had made him big. Bumping shoulders turned us into chums, and we stole little, embarrassed smiles at each other and looked at our feet. Falling in love is slightly embarrassing because love is a conspicuous and weighty thing. It is a marvel. I felt a bit like a hunter who’s captured a unicorn and parades it through the town streets, but the crowds were discreet enough not to stare. Marilyn Monroe had died and President Kennedy had been shot, and everyone talked and talked about them in those days as though they’d actually known them. People would argue about whether Marilyn had been “modest” or not, but the argument was only semantic trash, never a question of affection, because we were all friendly toward our martyrs. In the dry cleaner’s on my corner someone had hung up a woven portrait of Kennedy, but the artist had misjudged the perspective, so that his eyes crossed. It was a camp, but it expressed my reverence. It was the same way I felt toward Sean. I didn’t know him, but I felt a perfect right to have opinions about him; he’d become “my” Sean, just as she was “my” Marilyn. In his little apartment, so similar to mine if less crowded and cleaner, I kissed him. He said, “That’s nice.” His skin had a burnt-almond taste and smell; his skin seemed to be a tissue of the brain, so directly did it record his feelings. It began to color. He gently, so gently extricated himself from my embrace. Right away I felt fat again. “Hope you understand,” he said, “but I think we should wait until we know each other better.” The next night Sean made me spaghetti. As I watched him, I grew more porous as he became increasingly impermeable. He wore a blue apron over his crisply creased khakis; this dark suggestion of a skirt contrasted with his high buttocks in their military drab. I still hadn’t seen him naked. Since I was seated and he was standing, moving about, I thought about his body. I wondered if that expressive skin continued below his neck—whether his chest could blush, his loins pale. And I wondered what his penis looked like, how big it was.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  My own habit of looking for a personal reason someone might have for holding a particular view (“Her idealism, of course, reflects her Christian childhood”) seemed to Maria a sneaky way of stealing a march. She said my approach was as shoddy and as insidious as gossip and she ascribed it to my early and continued immersion in psychotherapy. Freud she despised as a thorough charlatan and she insisted that none of his views—that there is an unconscious, that sex is a key to motivation, that childhood shapes the adult personality—had ever been proved, nor were they susceptible to verification. She said these bizarre notions had merely been repeated so often that the cowed public had ended by accepting them. But she forgave me most of my follies, stroked my hair, and told me what a genius-dumpling I was with my chewed-away nails, bobbing head, and surprising bits of knowledge. Maria read constantly but remembered little. At least she wasn’t very handy at serving things up. When I read I squirreled away tidbits I hoped I’d be able to repeat. I read more and more just to entertain her. She thought I was brilliant, but my only brilliance was my ability to appreciate her. Not as a woman perhaps, for I dimly sensed there was a passionate woman hidden in this slim body, housing an appetite capable of rapture and even violence. I felt awed by this force, but I didn’t know how to make use of it. The rest of her I understood perfectly, with the best kind of devotion, the wide-awake kind. Nothing in Maria was wasted on me—that was the sole extent of my brilliance. That spring Maria and I went on long walks together through the grounds of the school, past a pool stocked with fat ornamental carp, up to the Edwardian mansion of the Founders (maintained in sealed-wax splendor), down a hill toward the artificial lake on which the girls’ school was floated. Then up along a wild tumbling brook to the Greek theater where plays were given in the summer. Now it was deserted. Behind the small amphitheater lay an atrium built around a rectangular pool, and there she told me shocking things—that she thought Jackson Pollock was a fraud, that she imagined we’d all be killed by the proletariat, that she considered the life of one African mine worker worth more than the Sistine Chapel.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The phone rang every night, Maeve calling from Chicago. She’d be in a bar, drunk, shouting above the jukebox, or she’d be at home, apparently sober, very jokey and man-to-man with me: “How you guys doing in the Big Apple? I’m thinking of packing my Thunderbird and tooling out that way myself. I know a fellow who works on Variety and has promised me a job, want to put Maria on?” “She’s not here I’m afraid. I don’t know. Fine. She’s fine. Yes, I’ll tell her.” Maria followed my end of the conversation, intent on every one of Maeve’s gambits. She’d turn red, eyes blazing, then shake her head sadly. After I’d hung up, Maria would say, “I must never see her again. I can’t. If I want to survive.” And she’d go back to her homework, learning to like her new life. On the street one day I confided to Maria I was dying to buy the new Grecian Guild magazine of boys in posing briefs but that I was too shy to ask for it from the Italian lady in the corner newspaper kiosk. Without a pause Maria detoured over to the lady and said, “I’ll have that nice new Grecian Guild , if you please,” paid for it, and handed it to me, then teased me for blushing. I sat in the bathroom late that night, admiring Bobby Phalen’s artfully oiled buttocks, which were growing leaner and narrower. Between Maria and me a new kind of intimacy developed, nurtured by her, even defined by her, for I wasn’t worldly enough to understand that a friendship can flourish only if watered by tact and pruned by diplomatic silences. With a friend we recognize bounds but within those bounds respond with candor; with a lover we expect limitless communion but resort to stratagems. Maria recognized the ways in which I feared sexual intimacy and firmly ended that possibility between us. But she didn’t cut the thread of courtship, of gallantry, even of romance that lent vitality to our love. We coined the notion of “passionate friendship” and we suspected that ours would last a lifetime. If our friendship was sustained by our past and tapped all the energies of family reciprocities, its tropism strained toward the future. At that time I was still too eager for love to appreciate friendship, but even so I imagined I’d spend my life with Maria, not with Mr. Right. When my mother told me she felt sorry for me, without a mate to console me or children to sustain me in my old age, I could only think, I have a mother and daughter: Maria . Maria bought me a coffeepot and showed me how to use it. When the toilet got stopped up, she called the plumber. I was afraid to call and didn’t mind peeing in the sink or running across the street to the toilet in the Hip Bagel.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  [image file=image_rsrc1C4.jpg] I didn’t know whether I liked Maria or I loved her. One day in her studio we sat around talking about our futures. The window was open a crack, and just outside a branch of bright yellow forsythia was preening. Maria was wearing an old, tan canvas hunting jacket that had belonged to her grandfather; she wore it over a beige turtleneck sweater. An empty Hills Brothers coffee can nestled sideways in another one which was upright on the ledge under the window. From where I sat I could look into the upper can. Its grooved interior seemed a distillery for changing watery light into sparkling eau de vie. Her black pants were bright with daubs of white paint and had fainter comet tails where her hand had smudged them. She’d penciled her plucked eyebrows in very black today, as black as the dots of her small nostrils. “I can’t believe you actually want to be famous,” she said. “Famous as what? A writer?” “I suppose,” I said, “or an actor, or a general, or—” “General!” She unnested the coffee cans and used the top one as an ashtray. “So you’d do anything, anything at all to be famous.” She looked me in the eye suddenly, as though to surprise the answer there. “But why?” “Freud says the writer writes for fame, money, and the love of beautiful women.” “Or men,” Maria added. My heart stopped. Was she enlarging the definition to include the goals of women writers or was she suggesting I wanted beautiful men? “Or men,” I conceded, “though Freud, I’m afraid, didn’t encourage women to be very ambitious.” “Who does? Certainly no one at this school. My theology professor at the University of Chicago was more interested in his women students than the painting instructors here are. I guess they believe the female spirit is earthbound and only the male is creative.” “Maybe they think the girls will all get married.” “Not me,” she said. I asked her why. She threw out one reason after another but none seemed to justify her indignation. When I teased her, as I’d heard other men do a hundred times, and told her she would surrender to the right man, tears of anger sprang to her eyes. Anger, I guess, or maybe she was hurt that I understood her so little. I took her hand and stroked it. I was sick I’d vexed her. “Good,” I said, “because I’m never going to marry either.” “Really?” she asked, smiling as she slowly pushed the tears away with the back of her other hand. “Will you be famous all alone?” “No, with you. You’ll have to be famous to encourage the next generation of women painters and socialists and to keep me company.”

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  She sketched me as I wrote. In the warm summer rain we walked through the night. We sat for hours in a booth at the back of a Chinese restaurant. I told her how I was convinced the Buddhists were right, that the self is an illusion, and yet as a writer and even as a person (in that order) I responded to the individuality of everyone I met. How could I reconcile my religious convictions with this artistic response? “I’ve got it!” she said, silencing me with her raised hand as she pursued a thought. At last she sipped cold tea and said, “But that’s just the way American life is anyway, because we all move around so much and keep losing touch. We have these smoldering encounters in which we tell everything to each other and pledge eternal love, and then a month or a year later we’ve drifted apart, we’re making new pledges and new confessions and—you see? American life is both Buddhist and intensely personal. It’s nothing but these searing, intimate huddles and then great drifting mists of evanescence that drown everything in obscurity. Write about America and you’ll reconcile these opposites.” I heard the doubt and reproach in the midst of her disquisition and wondered how I could assure her I’d never drift away or stop loving her. I knew we hadn’t yet quite found the form our love would take, doubtlessly because of the conventionality of my social imagination. I didn’t have the insider’s advantage of refashioning public forms to suit my private needs. Yet I did have an ecstatic apprehension of her, of what she meant to me. I’d never let her go. After school that spring I went to my father’s for three weeks before going on to Chicago for the long summer holiday. I was allowed to drive one of my father’s Cadillacs and accompany a debutante to a ball. My stepmother had found for me a sweet girl from a nouveau pauvre family. She was too poor to give a proper ball so she held a square dance in her grandmother’s barn with a genuine country caller and fiddler. At the bachelors’ cotillion, a catered event for two thousand guests, I shook hands with Everett Hunton, the real Everett Hunton from whom William had stolen his name—William’s “cousin” or “patron,” I couldn’t remember which. I mentioned William’s name and Everett, a thin, balding blond whose bony nose moved and even went white as a knuckle when he spoke, quickly cast his eyes up to beseech the cupid-heavy cupola for my complicitous silence. I drifted away, but half an hour later Everett was at my elbow, guiding me through a back door into a service elevator and, on a tower floor high above the city, into a room he’d rented for the night. There we undressed efficiently, wordlessly, and he screwed me without a flicker of affection crossing his intelligent, indifferent face.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Every night for weeks we got together, sometimes at my place, sometimes at his. We didn’t have sex very often, but Sean liked me to stay over. He liked to hug me in the bed at night. He liked my mind and would force me to give opinions, which wasn’t my way. I wanted to write fiction precisely because I could only see things dramatically, not politically or abstractly. I assumed he liked my sweetness, but once I became sarcastic with a book salesman who had never heard of Ronald Firbank. The salesman kept saying, over and over again, “Is that the suspense writer? He’s the suspense guy, right?” I said something nasty and haughty. On the street again Sean chortled and said he liked that; he even referred to the incident several times later. “Gosh, you can be an arrogant bastard, can’t you?” His admiration confused me. I thought it was so unfair that he would push me into being an angry man when I just wanted to be his tender sidekick. On a Saturday evening Sean tried to study, but after ten the heat in his apartment went off and we decided to go out for a walk. He had told me about the warehouse district south of Canal. I’d never been down there. By day it was crowded with trucks and workers and by night it was deserted, as best I could tell. But he loved it. He liked architecture and spoke about the cast-iron buildings. He knew what New York had looked like at the time of the Civil War, and as we strolled through block after block of dark, dirty unlit warehouses, he re-created the past. We walked down a rainy street lit by a single overhead lamp swaying on a high wire. Its light glimmered across the shiny hackles of the wet, black pavement. I was afraid of Sean and wanted to make light of him. I made fun of his piety before old buildings when I phoned Lou, but Lou just said, “Sounds like you’re falling in love.” I visited Maria and Boo-Boo in their garden apartment on the Upper West Side, but I was restless during dinner, couldn’t concentrate on the conversation, and kept pacing. Sounding rather strident to my own ears, I made fun of Sean, telling Maria that he lacked all sense of irony and thought Catullus’s poem on the death of Lesbia’s sparrow was serious , of all things. “Dumpling,” Maria said, “that’s the tenth time you’ve brought up that boy tonight. It sounds like you’ve got it bad. And the death of a bird is serious.” One night as we were lying in bed, Sean said that that afternoon he had used a public toilet and walked in on an orgy. “Oh, how awful,” I said. “What are they doing there?” he asked. “What do you mean?” “Of course I know they’re there for sex, but how can they do it? It’s really subhuman.” “Totally subhuman,” I said.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  7 Wondrously show Your [marvelous and amazing] lovingkindness, O Savior of those who take refuge at Your right hand From those who rise up against them. 8 Keep me [in Your affectionate care, protect me] as the a apple of Your eye; Hide me in the [protective] shadow of Your wings 9 From the wicked who despoil and deal violently with me, My deadly enemies who surround me. 10 They have closed their b unfeeling heart [to kindness and compassion]; With their mouths they speak proudly and make presumptuous claims. 11 They track us down and have now surrounded us in our steps; They set their eyes to force us to the ground, 12 He is like a lion eager to tear [his prey], And like a young lion lurking in hiding places. 13 Arise, O LORD , confront him, cast him down; Save my soul from the wicked with Your sword, 14 From men with Your hand, O LORD , From men of the world [these moths of the night] whose portion [of enjoyment] is in this life—idle and vain, And whose belly You fill with Your treasure; They are satisfied with children, And they leave what they have left [of wealth] to their children. 15 As for me, I shall see Your face in righteousness; I will be [fully] satisfied when I awake [to find myself] seeing Your likeness. Psalm 18 David Praises the LORD for Rescuing Him. To the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David, the servant of the LORD , who spoke the words of this song to the LORD on the day when the LORD rescued him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul. And he said: 1 “I LOVE You [fervently and devotedly], O LORD , my strength.” 2 The LORD is my rock, my fortress, and the One who rescues me; My God, my rock and strength in whom I trust and take refuge; My shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower—my stronghold. [Heb 2:13 ] 3 I call upon the LORD , who is worthy to be praised; And I am saved from my enemies. [Rev 5:12 ] 4 The cords of death surrounded me, And the streams of ungodliness and torrents of destruction terrified me. 5 The cords of Sheol (the nether world, the place of the dead) surrounded me; The snares of death confronted me. 6 In my distress [when I seemed surrounded] I called upon the LORD And cried to my God for help; He heard my voice from His temple, And my cry for help came before Him, into His very ears. 7 Then the earth shook and quaked, The foundations of the mountains trembled; They were shaken because He was indignant and angry. 8 Smoke went up from His nostrils, And fire from His mouth devoured; Coals were kindled by it. 9 He bowed the heavens also and came down; And thick darkness was under His feet.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  “That you’re crazy in love with me?” he said, sitting on the edge of the tub, soaping her back. “I’ve always known that.” “Then what?” He kissed her neck. “What have you discovered?” “That basically I’m uneducated. I never knew until I came here how much there is to learn. How many ideas there are.” He backed away from her. “I didn’t mean ...” Damn! He’d taken it personally. “Bru ... this has nothing to do with you. It’s just that sometimes, when I start thinking about all there is that I don’t know ... I get scared. That’s all I meant.” “Why don’t you start thinking of all you do know. I’ll bet you know more about life than any of your new friends.” “That’s probably true.” “Don’t you ever wonder what you’re doing here?” “All the time.” She stepped out of the tub and he watched as she rubbed herself down with a towel. “You still love me?” he asked. “Of course I still love you,” she told him. “Did you think I wouldn’t?” “I wasn’t sure, to tell the truth.” “Here, let me prove it ...” she said, sinking to her knees. A week later a package came from Vineyard Health. Six different kinds of vitamins and minerals with a personal note from the owner, someone named Star. 27 THOUGH PHILOSOPHY was a favorite topic, they were not above discussing Men and Sex. Maia was still a virgin. That might explain her fascination with Bru. Maybe she was more curious than meddlesome. When Maia decided it was time to take action, Paisley and her roommate, Debra, encouraged her. “Winter is long and hard up here,” Paisley said in her southern drawl. She was a big, rawboned girl from Charleston, with the kind of looks Abby would describe as handsome. “You might as well find a warm body to make the dreary nights more exciting.” Debra was Korean, educated at international schools, already a published poet. “If you consider YM being published. But I’m not Sylvia Plath. I don’t want to be Sylvia Plath. I mean, really, look how she wound up.” “Because of some guy,” Maia said. “Most people say it was her mother,” Debra said. “She didn’t stick her head in the oven over her mother,” Maia argued. “She might have,” Debra said. “She might have had some innate imbalance.” “They’re developing drugs for that,” Paisley said. “Soon none of us will be imbalanced. Unless we want to be.” “And creativity will go right down the tubes,” Debra said, which got them talking about the neurotic personality and creativity for the next hour. The warm body Maia found belonged to Wally, a guy she met in Justice, another coveted freshman elective. He was a virgin, too. They saw a lot of one another, spending hours analyzing their situation. Vix suggested maybe they were overanalyzing, maybe it would be better if they just went with their feelings. Maia accused Vix of being the least

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  It turned hot, and in place of the dampness and the cold, came days and nights that seemed almost breathless; days when the wounded must lie out in the sun, tormented by flies as they waited their turn to be lifted into the ambulances. And as though misfortunes attracted each other, as though indeed they were hunting in couples, Stephen’s face was struck by a splinter of shell, and her right cheek cut open rather badly. It was neatly stitched up by the little French doctor at the Poste de Secours, and when he had finished with his needle and dressings, he bowed very gravely: * Mademoiselle will carry an honourable scar as a mark of her courage,’ and he bowed yet again, so that in the end Stephen must also bow gravely. Fortunately, however, she could still do her job, which was all to the good for the short-handed Unit. 5 ON AN autumn afternoon of blue sky and sunshine, Stephen had the Croix de Guerre pinned on her breast by a white-haired and white-moustached general. First came the motherly Mrs. Claude Breakspeare, whose tunic looked much too tight for her bosom, then Stephen and one or two other members of that valiant and untiring Unit. The general kissed each one in turn on both cheeks, while overhead hovered a fleet of Aces; troops presented arms, veteran troops tried in battle, and having the set look of war in their eyes — for the French have a very nice taste in such matters. And presently Stephen’s bronze Croix de Guerre would carry three miniature stars on its ribbon, and each star would stand for a mention in despatches. That evening she and Mary walked over the fields to a little town not very far from their billets. They paused for a moment 336 THE WELL OF LONELINESS to watch the sunset, and-Mary stroked the new Croix de Guerre; then she looked straight up into Stephen’s eyes, her mouth shook, and Stephen saw that she was crying. After this they must walk hand in hand for a while. Why not? There was no one just then to see them. Mary said: ‘ All my life I’ve been waiting for something.’ ‘ What was it, my dear? °’ Stephen asked her gently. And Mary answered: ‘I’ve been waiting for you, and it’s seemed such a dreadful long time, Stephen.’ The barely healed wound across Stephen’s cheek flushed darkly, for what could she find to answer ? ‘For me?’ she stammered. Mary nodded gravely: ‘ Yes, for you. I’ve always been waiting for you; and after the war you’ll send me away.’ Then she sud- denly caught hold of Stephen’s sleeve: “ Let me come with you — don’t send me away, I want to be near you. . . . I can’t explain . . . but I only want to be near you, Stephen. Stephen —say you won’t send me away. .. .’

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  With this conception of the church is closely connected Paul’s profound and most fruitful idea of the family. He calls the relation of Christ to his church a great mystery (Eph. 5:32), and represents it as the archetype of the marriage relation, whereby one man and one woman become one flesh. He therefore bases the family on new and holy ground, and makes it a miniature of the church, or the household of God. Accordingly, husbands are to love their wives even as Christ loved the church, his bride, and gave himself up for her; wives are to obey their husbands as the church is subject to Christ, the head; parents are to love their children as Christ and the church love the individual Christians; children are to love their parents as individual Christians are to love Christ and the church. The full and general realization of this domestic ideal would be heaven on earth. But how few families come up to this standard.1161 Ephesians and the Writings of John. Paul emphasizes the person of Christ in Colossians, the person and agency of the Holy Spirit in Ephesians. For the Holy Spirit carries on the work of Christ in the church. Christians are sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise unto the day of redemption (Eph. 1:13; 4:30). The spirit of wisdom and revelation imparts the knowledge of Christ (1:17; 3:16). Christians should be filled with the Spirit (5:18), take the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, and pray in the Spirit at all seasons (6:17, 18). The pneumatology of Ephesians resembles that of John, as the christology of Colossians resembles the christology of John. It is the Spirit who takes out of the "fulness" of Christ, and shows it to the believer, who glorifies the Son and guides into the truth (John 14:17; 15:26; 16:13–15, etc.). Great prominence is given to the Spirit also in Romans, Galatians, Corinthians, and the Acts of the Apostles. John does not speak of the church and its outward organization (except in the Apocalypse), but he brings Christ in as close and vital a contact with the individual disciples as Paul with the whole body. Both teach the unity of the church as a fact, and as an aim to be realized more and more by the effort of Christians, and both put the centre of unity in the Holy Spirit. Encyclical Intent Ephesians was intended not only for the church at Ephesus, the metropolis of Asia Minor, but for all the leading churches of that district. Hence the omission of the words "in Ephesus" (Eph. 1:1) in some of the oldest and best MSS.1162 Hence, also, the absence of personal and local intelligence. The encyclical destination may be inferred also from the reference in Col. 4:16 to the Epistle to the church of Laodicea, which the Colossians were to procure and to read, and which is probably identical with our canonical Epistle to the Ephesians."1163

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  But if I can be famous and lonely with you, I’ll give it a whirl.” Because I admired Maria, I wanted to be like her—or like the image of me she cherished. She said that I liked everyone so much and entered into everything so readily that life became more exciting around me. “How dull my life seems when you’re away,” she’d complain. But what she considered my enthusiasm for everything was really nothing but my love for her. To woo her I would inject color and motion into accounts of insipid events and sluggish thoughts. Since she was so intellectual, I too led the life of the mind—but with conviction only when I was with her. Alone, back in my dormitory room, I’d become distracted by the small changes percolating through my body (an itch crystallizing on my knee, a cough scrabbling to get out of my chest, advancing and retreating armies of impatience and lassitude) and I’d toss aside Bergson’s Metaphysics or Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty , neither of which seemed likely to become an after-dinner story or a how-to book. My sense of guilt was too pressing to leave me the calm needed to contemplate the sense of beauty. With Maria I could take up such a question, perhaps, because my urge to keep her entertained led me to juggle with whatever I was handed by circumstance. The glamour of intellectual effort was on me. I pictured a dim study in a German town and could almost smell the hard, shaved face and touch the manicured, spatulate fingers of the great thinker as he sat in the glow penetrating the green glass shade of his desk lamp … But the second I was alone, this phantasm faded, the great thinker scratched his leg, longed to be somewhere he’d feel less tense, less empty. I liked to think I was a Buddhist disillusioned with the world, but I was caught in Maya’s strong silk cords. I never doubted the world could make me happy, if only it would give in. To make it relent, I was refining all the seducer’s skills—his ready sympathy, his tight focus on the prey, his anxiety to entertain, his ulterior mission to lead every conversation toward surrender and conquest. The seducer grows ardent only in pursuit. Left to his own devices he feels shabby, the half-mask cast aside and worthless at dawn, even though last night it had flattered the face it had concealed. In conversation I took my cue from every smile or flicker of exasperation I read in Maria’s face; alone, trying to reconstruct my warmth on the page, I’d turn stupid, lumpish. Maria laughed at herself, teased me, and liked it when I made jokes at my own expense. The sudden shift of perspective that the long shot of humor required became habitual to me, something I’ve kept, though with less satisfaction than the practice is supposed to bring .

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  That was when I fell in love with Maria. I’m a nominalist; I believe only in what’s named. Until then Sam had seemed so superior to me as to belong to another species. He had the lazy smile of someone many women had loved. If Maria had been less elegantly reserved, I might have hashed out with her all my feelings of inadequacy and ended by losing her. But Maria didn’t want to get to the bottom of anything but ideas. Her feelings were all impulsive and uncritical. I once told her I thought love was a hoax and I repeated something I’d read, that love hadn’t existed in the ancient world and had only come in with the troubadours. She found this notion so absurd she’d often mention it to other people as a hilarious example of my gullibility. For her love was the one simple, painful or blissful fact in a world of shifting speculations. For her, love was as simple as Des Grieux’s cry to Manon: “In your deep eye I read my destiny.” The wonder is that when she laughed at my theory of love no one ever defended me, since my theory is certainly arguable. But no one wanted to contradict Maria. She made her ideas—no, her very being—appear so likable no one wanted to be unlike her. Because she’d been to the University of Chicago and had been converted to its Aristotelianism, she stripped every argument down to its starkest tenets and frequently asked, “What’s your point? Can you put that in a nutshell?” That habit made her unpopular later among New York intellectuals, who seldom feel comfortable in a shell and prefer expanding to contracting their arguments. All those intellectuals who rely on their own prestige or invoke the authority of others filled her with contempt. Name-dropping, except by social climbers, struck her as silly; she forgave the social climbers, since she found them touching, almost novelistic in their pursuit of frivolously minor gods. But those people who thought eloquence could replace logic and considered the essay a transition toward the novel drove her wild with impatience; she’d brush her face with her hand as though rubbing away a cobweb. Not that she disliked make-believe; she read novels night after night, propped up in her single bed, the lamp beating back the darkness, her free hand blindly reaching for the glass of red wine.